Don’t end up simply having visited this world.
It was late when we got there, to Mary Alice’s house. A visit that was years ago now, so the details don’t remain with me in deep clarity, but the sense I had of that space is still so strong–from out of a dark night we entered into color. It was the first time I had ever been in a house that was fully, completely, totally someone’s. It was somehow hard to tell where Mary Alice began and ended, the house was so much a part of her. I remember vivid color and art in unexpected places–not just on the walls, but on the furniture, floors, ceilings. It seemed absolutely magical to me, with nooks and crannies and lovely bits.
She was a painter, an artist, someone–it seemed to me–who lived life completely on her own terms. Years ago, when Emma was little, we would all meet up for wonderful afternoon garden parties in the village of Waterford, and Mary Alice would be there, her artist’s eye working, later creating paintings that captured the sense of the day, in this case, the very soul of Emma playing in the corner as the adults made hand-cranked lavender ice cream and ate risotto and chocolate tortoni out of martini glasses. May Alice had an uncanny way of capturing something clarifying about the people she painted, as she did here. My sisters, Gay and Rosemary, gifted me years ago with this painting she made of Emma, so perfectly capturing Emma’s way of being in the world, her look, that look I still recognize in her.
Mary Alice died today, less than a week after a brain aneurysm felled her. And so, a moment to wish her soul repose.
Gay saw Mary Alice recently at the farm, looking strong and reading Mary Oliver, this:
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
-Mary Oliver
From New and Selected Poems
May we all be married to amazement. May we not end up simply having visited this world. May we wish a peaceful journey to Mary Alice who is entering another dream.
