The Ferryman
Someone has to wash the mugs.
Earlier this week, I went to a friend who had received terrible news. We had made a plan in advance for this news. She would tell me, and I would come. No uncertainty. She would call. I would come, no matter what.
She called. I sat with her all day. I didn’t leave her until she went off on a very sad errand that I was not needed for in the early evening. I went home, rejoining time where I left it that morning. An ordinary Monday had gone on all around me, passing through me.
I have borne witness many times in my life, to so many kinds of grief. When I was thirteen, my best friend’s father died and my parents brought her with them to pick me up from my weekend tutoring job. My mother whispered the news to me before I got in the car, there was no time to react. I was shocked. This was a man I knew and loved, a man whose house I had been in multiple times a week since I was three, and in that moment whatever I felt didn’t matter. My friend was right there, and her need was so much greater. Her world had rent in two, and I was merely picking my way across a rope bridge thrown hastily across.
I was not a very good companion in those hours, how could I be? But it hardly mattered. My friend just needed someone beside her. And I was. I was beside her in the minivan’s backseat, at the diner, at his graveside a week later. I was the only one who could approach her, she was wild-eyed and silent, staring at the box in the ground. Her own mother wouldn’t go near her. So I did. We were so young. “I’m sick of people hugging me,” she hissed, when I got her out of the post-funeral lunch at her house, when we walked to my house the way we had so many times, shoulder to shoulder, only that day in black turtlenecks and long skirts instead of t-shirts and jeans. She was broken, I couldn’t help, and I felt older than the earth as her grief and anger rang with every step we took.
As I have gotten older, I have been beside for all kinds of things. Cancer, chemo, sicknesses, grief, crises near and far. I listen, I stroke backs, I make tea, I set out food, I am in motion, I am still. I hear medication regimens, I organize, I remember in the moment so that others do not have to. I do some loads of laundry. I clean up. I make lists. I am adjacent. Necessary, irreplaceable, off to the side. It is not mine, the grief or illness or loss. Or if it is, it is someone else’s before it is mine. I for a few hours keep them going from here to there before it is my turn with the grief, and that is not a complaint. None of this is a complaint, or self-aggrandizement, or in any way meant to take away. It isn’t. It is, simply, what is.
Every time, it is not my story to tell, so I don’t tell it. But there has been an accumulation of those not-my-stories, and what is my story is the bearing witness. How it feels. What it is, to be the one who sees and arranges as best they can, to pass in and out of these times of need and trauma, scathed and standing, heart open and creaking for the pain that comes along with these brilliant shooting-star lives of ours.
When I was little, in my copy of d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, I was taken with the Underworld, the Hades and Persephone of it all. But the god I thought about most was Charon. The Ferryman. The one who takes souls across the Styx in his boat, a gondolier to ghosts, who takes the coins from the eyes of the departed as payment, and shows them where they are now, where they are going. He is always apart. Older than the first death, or else who would have piloted the first boat? Back and forth across the wide and quiet river between one thing and another.
I always wondered what it was like on that boat. Were there tears? Did he play music for them, or was it just the sound of the dark water lapping against the boat? Did he sing? Did he comfort them? Or was it all silence as each soul did what they needed to do?
And on the way back, did he sing then? Half of every round trip was taken alone, souls not usually needing return passage. Did he cry? Did he ever want to stop the boat, or take off down the river alone? Did he ever step on either shore?
I have traveled beside on the journeys of grief and pain, and I pilot the boat as best I can for as long as I can. It isn’t perfect. Nothing could be. This is the journey, this is the boat, and this is the Ferryman. If there is a price to be paid, in coins or tears, step right up. The Ferryman will collect.
What did he do with those coins? He must have had an awful lot. Maybe he dropped them into the water and watched them sink, golden and shining, before they were swallowed up by the bottomless river. Maybe he said a small prayer over each one as they tumbled from his hand.
Washing mugs is a prayer. A hand on a shoulder is a prayer. A boat cutting through the dark water is a prayer all its own.
May this journey bring you to better days, even if it takes a long time to get there. May this journey be easier, for a few hours, with a Ferryman at the helm.