this time it was different

on monuments and memories and returning and worshipping

thusiastērion.

There are little altars everywhere.

The kitchen table, the wall of family photos,

the crystals holding together a stack of books,

the windowsill is flush with plants and candles,

and more crystals.

The hollowed-out sea anemones the girls collected in the tide pools -

the ones we carefully held in our palms all the way back from the beach.

If held too tightly, we learned, they’d dissolve into sand.

All of them, carefully placed, make tiny altars to our family.

To what we’ve built, what’s been brought down, what has turned to sand,

and what we remake with it all each day.

I think these altars, all of them everywhere,

are where the disparate ends of Fonz and I meet over and over again.

We’re so different, and on some days, in too many ways,

except these altars.

You can find us both in the sacred rooms in which we worship

at the feet of our lives,

to what is important.

What I mean to say is we both pray to the only thing that matters.

In the early days of his diagnosis, I became a preacher.

I’d stand between him and the TV, giving sermons to save my life.

To save his.

I ranted and raved about mountain tops and walking through fire.

I promised to be his sherpa, and that I was.

And, on some days, still am.

I prayed more than I ever have, prostrate in the living room.

That hallowed ground where Legos are built

and then brought back down and put away;

remaking worlds with new parts over and over again.

I walked into the trees behind our house,

looking back into the eyes of the knots left behind,

where wind and time had taken branches off.

Those phantom limbs still remain.

If altars were breadcrumbs, I could trace the entire path of this life

back to where we are now.

What with all the doorways we’ve walked through together.

The third floor, where we lost ourselves and were found again.

He still goes monthly, but I haven’t been there in at least six.

Until today.

It’s clear that without me, he has new rituals.

I follow his lead. Go all the way right here. Left there.

We write things onto cardboard coffee cup sleeves.

I thank Sam on mine, the nurse who made the unbearable, bearable.

I watched him do it with my own two eyes.

Fonz writes his own in large letters for whomever may pass by.

He props it up against the little box where others have left their coffee sleeve offerings on the first floor.

It’s breathtaking.

We run into a friend from the gym and she looks at us both with the kindest eyes you’ve ever seen.

My whole body is in tears.

A tiny altar that holds only tears is also called an ocean.

We walk out the back door into a little oasis

lined with maple trees covered in golden leaves,

while we wait for a prescription to be filled.

We sit on a bench together,

and in the falling light,

I can see all the altars we carry on our skin.

On days like this, I am almost entirely made up of them.

It’s all so heartbreaking, it’s all so beautiful,

this business of being alive.

The luminescence and the layers.

Each altar holding up something about sacrifice, surrender, and the sacred.

Each one holding on for dear life

to something,

each one also working so hard to let go.