Missing Ben

I won’t need many words with which to adequately express myself on this question but-while on the way home tonight- I passed by the eastern gate of the cemetary wherein my son Ben lies. It was already by then well after dark, the gates closed and locked. I could do nothing more than drive by, turn my head in his direction and feel this awful pain in my gut which still afflicts me very much even several to many hours later at the time of this writing.

Were I to attempt a description of this feeling, this pain, I’d ask first that you try imagining the physicality of an enormous void, a vast, overwhelming emptiness. Now place yourself within that void, that emptiness-almost desert like with neither hope nor manifestation of refuge though mirages certainly do abound. Soon you’ll realize just how doomed you indeed are to drift indefinately toward an uncertain destination with assurance only that such wanderings will remain a frequent traveling companion.

The rabbis say that our sleep is 1/64th of death. In like manner, one could argue that sympathy is 1/64th of empathy though I admit here that such arithmetic does elude me. However verbose and hyperbolic I may often seem while writing of Ben’s quasi-tangible, permanent absence, it is really nothing more than the sounds of my silly head trying to translate the beats of my heart.

How very much I do miss Ben!