more from Dear Popescu

another of my epistles to Cristian Popescu

Ah, brother. Oy. My father also suffered such a heart attack as that which took your father, and near the end of that same confusing decade. My father, too, was 54; even so, my father survived that raw spasm gripping his chest, and was thereby duly awakened to the fragility of our days, of his days in our beautifully troubled world, days which came to an end for him—so far as we could see—but five years later.

The farewell kisses you describe, those kisses pressed one final time upon the beloved’s cold brow, the sense that one must run hard into the walls of our rooms if they are to be bells resounding with a due and reverential tolling of our losses, the wish that his breath might one more time enter our lungs to animate our flagging souls—all these poignancies strike me as familiar, as my own, as very like this selfsame wound I bear that will not heal.