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I carried my sleepy
son to his bed

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and left his sleepy self
to the digest of the night.

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I went to my room, thinking
I would read and reflect

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on the night's strange
and wonderful events.

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And then at early
morning, I would

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start my mother's procession.

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My wife's same route, from
house to funeral parlor,

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and from there to the grave.

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I always kept a stack of books
on the night table, books

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I chose randomly, and whose
pages I read in no order

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and in small bites.

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For this reason, I read
very little fiction,

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enjoying poetry and aphoristic
writings by artists,

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especially.

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It was to the French painter
Ingres I turned to that night,

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thinking to find a sweet
passage to ease me from images

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of death and pirated souls.

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"A true line," it read, "is
closer to God than any church."

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It was a noble thought
designed to assure artists

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of their value or to make them
feel inadequate and forever

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striving.

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I repeated the
sentence a few times,

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and then shut my eyes for the
next few hours before daylight.

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Somehow, the artist's
words made me

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more melancholy
than the fantastic

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events on the pirate ship, more
sad than my mother's death,

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which already seems so long
ago, before there were mothers.

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Those words made me wonder why
I ever wanted to be an artist.

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Why I ever wanted to live,
though I never thought

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I wanted to die.

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I tried very hard
to quiet myself,

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to keep my thoughts
calm, but I could not.

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I wondered how my son was faring
after such a powerful night.

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So I went down to his
room, but he was not

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in his bed, which was perfectly
made as if the housekeeper had

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come and trimmed the sheets
and flattened out the blankets.

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I went from room to room,
went up to the attic,

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and down to the basement,
searching and searching

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for my boy.

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I went to my mother's room,
but he was not there either.

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Or, oddly enough, was she.

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I would think about her later.

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For the moment however, I was
not concerned about the mother,

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knowing that wherever her
body was, mattered little, now

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that her soul was
on its adventures.

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I had not yet started
to grieve her death.

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So busy was I in the
events of the night.

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But I knew that I had an
eternity before me to grieve.

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I went out to my studio, sure
that my son had gone there,

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where he had often
come with his mother

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to visit me at my work,
where he felt safe

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among the stacks of
drawings and tubes of paint.

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Safe in the place where
for all my regrets

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of not being the artist
I had dreamed of being,

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I had been most happy.

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He liked my happiness, my
boy, as had his mother.

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It made them feel safe,
when nothing else was safe.

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"Imagine," I started
to say, "imagine

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that my mother had so little
control over her life,

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as to have her husband die
on the phone in mid-sentence.

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And imagine how little
she had to say over things

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that she herself had died
in mid-read, so to speak.

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So little control over
our life, and none

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in death and its aftermath.

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No voice to say
where your soul went,

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as if it went anywhere at all.

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Granted it had not been
plucked from your last breath,

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and stowed aboard a
pirate ship for trading.

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"Don't give it a thought."

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My mother answered
once, when as a boy

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I asked where we
went when we died.

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I did not give it a
thought for a long time,

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having erased the
question from my view

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until after my wife died.

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But soon after, I wondered
whether the dead ever

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missed the living, or whether
they entered a new world

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where nothing of the
past lived, and when

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no one who had lived in
it mattered any longer.

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My mother dreamed
of an eternity spent

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in a library, where she could
read all the books of all

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the world in all the languages.

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"How many millions of
books there would be,

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mom," I said, awed
by such a project.

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"Yes," she said.

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But one day, in just
another day of eternity,

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she would have read
every book ever written.

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And then, where would she be?

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The studio except for
the feeling of stale dust

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and emptiness was as
much as I had left it,

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except that the
paintings looked tired,

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sagging on their stretchers.

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Paintings need to be seen
or they languish, wither

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and die on the vine.

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My unfinished Poussin
was leaning, languishing

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against a windowless
wall, though I

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was sure I had left
it on the easel

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when I went out to visit
the ship at Angkor.

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I would have loved to
have finished that canvas.

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And this time, I hoped
I would have the courage

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to paint my wife's face where
the shepherdesses were supposed

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to be.

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The courage to leave
for however long it

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lasted, a trace of my heart.

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My son was not in
the studio, even

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though the morning sunlight
now flooded the large sad room.

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What I mean is that
although it was light,

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he had still not appeared.

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Whatever that meant,
I was worried now

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because I missed
him so much, and I

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was frightened of a life
where I would always miss him.

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"I'll miss you too, of course,"
I said guiltily to my wife,

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in case she had read my thoughts
from somewhere in the universe.

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"And I'll miss you too as
well," I said to my mother,

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not wanting her to
feel left unloved.

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But, of course, missing a
son is different from missing

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all others, who return
to you in various guises.

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But unlike sparrows, sons
do not return in the spring.

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In the middle of my
musings, the door opened,

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and my son came in with
a beautiful young woman.

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He was tall now with
a faint red mustache,

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and he walked with
a seaman's gait,

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as if to study himself against
the rolling deck of the world.

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He had his arms about the
beautiful woman's waist.

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He was full of smiles for him--
she was full of smiles for him.

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And she held-- and he
held her like a man,

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confident that he is loved.

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I was happy for him, and
wished my mother could see him,

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a young man in love.

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"Dad," he said in a sigh, as a
low sigh of evocation, memory,

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and longing.

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Then he slowly looked
about the studio,

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even above at the beams under
the high open ceiling, looked

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about as if searching for
me on our old life there.

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But I was nowhere to be found.

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Thank you.

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]

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