By Mary Cristy

A View from the Hills

Memorials. Parades. Visits to Military cemeteries. Flowers on graves. Other flowers grow only in the gardens of the heart. Intangible, invisible blossoms that repose in the consciousness like silent prayer. Cherished memories of those who no longer dwell among us on the physical plane - yet are held within the fibre of our beings where they continue to exist, eternally vital, eternally remembered, eternally loved.

On Memorial Day, we may speak their names, acknowledge the anguish with which we’ve lived since they have gone, reveal the fears we harbor about our own mortality, pay homage to young and old alike, weep for the dead and those who live to mourn.

In ceremonies throughout the land, and beyond, orators will stand amid parades on flag-draped platforms to talk of valor and sacrafice, and hope for the gift of eloquence to touch a responsive chord in their listeners.

But, words are, after all, mere vibrations on the air, and when all the voices grow quiet, after all the marching bands with their stirring oom pah pahs, have grown tired and straggled away, the grievers stand alone in the silence.

After Southern General Lee relinquished his sword to General Grant at Appomatox there was a stillness.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of the year l9l8 the prayed-for, fought-for, hard-won peace, came as Germany surrendered, to the Allies - and silence fell again.

The unrestrained jubilation that follows a peace declaration is followed in turn by this unearthly quiet in which the dead make their prescence felt and grief becomes palpable. An eerie time of quiet, after which desperation, acceptance, resignation must be struggled for over a period of weeks, months, and sometimes years; during which the finality of a loss evolves from a nightmarish, numbing sense of unreality, to an icy awakening to fact- the fact that death is real and will come to all of us.

In time, if we live long enough, and grow wise enough, this seems no longer veracity fraught with dread, but the natural progression of events, mitigated by the hope, if not the certainty, that we may enfold and be enfolded in the arms of those we love, at another time, in another place.

When my husband, Cris, was a young man, contemporaries wrote of him, “He eats in dreams the custards of the day,” because Cris wrote poems that were published in anthologies and read over the radio. The one I liked best said:

If ever I search for the wealth, to be found at the rainbow’s end, I’ll not look for gold or for beauty, but a fold around Friendship’s bend. My name I’ll not want so great, only I’ll ask for a part, in the play of the play of Life, and my name embossed on a heart.”

Perhaps that’s an answer to the silence and the pain. Perhaps the meaning of life is as lacking in complexity as a young man’s dreams-and the heart of a friend in whose breast we have kindled an abiding love, will beat steadily for us, and so confer upon us a measure of immortality on Earth, as we accept the transition from this world to the next, and hold fast to the glowing hope that we shall find each other again in Heaven.

Cristy, a Los Altos Hills resident, has been writing for the Town Crier for more than 40 years. Her column is published the first week of the month.