Gone

Last week, I went to the nursing home to see my cousin. I’d had a strong feeling the previous evening that I should visit her, but my book group was meeting that night to discuss Paris Trout, a book I’d selected. So I didn’t feel I could skip the discussion. Plus I wanted to see my friends; I’d missed our September meeting because I’d been in the hospital recovering from surgery.

So I waited until the next day and drove to the nursing home during my lunch hour. But when I signed in and told the receptionist whom I was there to see, she looked at her roster and frowned. “She’s gone.” Then, seeing the shocked look on my face, she added, “To another facility, I mean.”

As it turned out, Anna was indeed gone, and not just to another facility. To another dimension. In fact, she’d crossed over just after midnight. Which meant that if I had followed the prompting I’d received the day before, I might have been there with my cousin at the nearby hospice during her final hours on earth. But now it was too late. Anna was gone.

Fast forward one week to today. A rainy Thursday afternoon. I was writing an article about science education in a rural community in western Nebraska. It was a part of the country I’d driven through at night. Alone on a dark two-lane road with no streetlights, my husband and I had pulled over more than once, turned off the engine, and gazed in wonder at the big October sky, full of stars. More stars than I’d ever seen before. When the teacher I interviewed for my article told me her school was starting a new science program called “Cosmic Connections,” complete with telescopes and star parties, I couldn’t help but think that rural Nebraska was the perfect place to learn from the night sky.

The idea of discovering hidden treasure in your own back yard—or, in the sky directly above it—prompted me to pull a favorite book off the shelf and re-read an observation made by writer Paul Gruchow: “The schools in which I was educated were by most standards first-rate. But they were, as our schools generally are, largely indifferent to the place and to the culture in which they operated. Among my science courses I took two full years of biology, but I never learned that the beautiful meadow at the bottom of my family’s pasture was remnant virgin prairie. We did not spend, so far as I can remember, a single hour on prairies—the landscape in which were immersed.”

Gruchow’s book, Grass Roots: The Universe of Home, had done for me years ago what Dorothy’s trip to Oz had done for her, opening my eyes to just how little I understood or appreciated the beauty and mystery of familiar places. Wendell Berry’s essays had had a similar effect, but I’d had a chance to meet him and tell him so when I was in my twenties. I’d never met Paul Gruchow. I’d never told him how much I loved his book. So I decided I’d look him up online and send him an e-mail. I thought he might appreciate knowing.

But it was too late. A drug overdose in 2004 after years of depression and several suicide attempts. He too was gone, like Anna, and not just to a new address.

We don’t know the worth of water until the well runs dry. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Youth is wasted on the young.

Loss, it seems, is inescapable—in many ways, as familiar as the sky overhead and the grass beneath our feet. So familiar, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the mystery and even beauty of it, to learn from it. Baby teeth tucked under pillows. Bodies tucked under earth. Leaves drifting from trees. Nothing gold can stay. A lesson in the wind: Now or never.

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