Sunday, March 31, 2013

Una Vox Absentis

I miss my friend today. Mary Lou. Actually I never stopped missing her, but I feel the loss more acutely today than usual, because today is Easter, and this is the first Easter I have lent my voice to the St. Paul's choir since she died. (It would seem I can't even write as smoothly as usual today.)

I started going back to St. Paul's for choir last month sometime. I just missed singing with other people. And it was odd, walking in and not seeing her there. My gaze kept drawing to the place they put the urn during her funeral, under all that white linen. I had to shake my head to clear it. And every week since then, even though I know she's gone, I've opened the door to that beautiful church and felt my heart sink because part of me always expects her to be standing beside the piano, and she never is.

I'm not the only one who misses her. My friend Lynn confided to me today that she still leaves space for Mary Lou at the end of the choir stall, just like she always did. There's room to scoot down now, but she can't bring herself to do it. And I found myself standing in the robing room this morning staring at her name on a garment bag and blinking away tears. It was the same when I found her signature inked elegantly in blue on the inside cover of a hymnal, when I saw the notes she had written in the margin of a piece of sheet music.

The Episcopal church is very ritual-based. We follow a liturgical calendar, and it includes sections for prayers, hymns, homilies -- pretty much anything you need to structure a service. The things in each section are slightly different in terms of wording, melody, etc., and often you can pick which one you want to use during a particular week or season, but there are only so many choices. Things get recycled. You end up with a copy of, "Alleluia, Christ is Risen!" that your deceased friend used seven years ago, or you pull from the back of a pew the same Book of Common Prayer she used every Sunday, marked with tiny pieces of paper containing reminders for the Altar Guild. And these tiny things are the most bittersweet wine a person can drink. They are so painful. They twist right into your heart like little daggers. But they're sacred, and special, and too precious to get rid of.

Easter. There is a post-communion hymn we sing every Easter: "Alleluia, Alleluia, Give Thanks to the Risen Lord." It has a beautiful descant that Mary Lou used to sing in her beautiful, rich, echoing tenor, sending the notes soaring out of her throat and into the congregation and up, up, up to twist among the rafters. She had a voice that could stop you dead in your tracks, it was so stunning and powerful -- the kind of voice that could almost make you cry when you heard it, because it was full of so much intensity, so much emotion. Oh, I miss that voice. I miss that voice so much it hurts.



There was no Mary Lou to sing that descant today, so Lynn and I sang it together. Lynn is quite the exceptional singer in her own right, but even our two voices combined could not do justice to Mary Lou's memory. And we didn't sing the Surrexit after procession today either, which made me incredibly sad: we always did it when Mary Lou was alive. Joyously, boisterously, our voices lifting and falling and chasing one another in the round ... It wasn't the same without it today. It wasn't the same without her. This is grief, then: the awful, sinking knowledge that someone has changed your life for the better, but "better" will never be the same again.

In case you're interested, you must listen through the 3rd verse to hear the descant. And no, this is not St. Paul's LH.

P.S. -- I got the title of this post from Google Translate, so forgive my fake Latin if it's horrible.