I’d made the seals into metaphor, made them my seals. Somehow I thought that because I had given form to my experience and thus, in a way, let go of it, I wouldn’t be confronted with the lifeless body again. Arrogance! Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it.
But there, half-covered by sand, lay another seal, also already eyeless. Make all the meaning you want, Death says, shape it how you will. Open the limits of your thinking or feeling, make room for me, accommodate how you will, nothing touches the plain truth of me.
Hold your grief, release it, come to terms or don’t—nothing touches the fact of the lifeless body.
A week later, walking the same stretch of marsh and harbor, I began to imagine what it would be like to scatter Wally’s ashes there, in that shining expanse, or in the higher wind-harried space of dunes around the gleaming lighthouse. I cried harder than I had for weeks, thinking of letting go this portion of the evidence of him. Whatever I think ashes are, the notion of flinging them into the blue and white emptiness of that place made me weep all the way from the depths of myself, sobbing from the bottom of my lungs, from some place inside the body light never reaches.
And out on the shore that day, the seals were swimming—the first I’d seen alive and unthreatened for weeks, and the last I would see that season. They were watching me and the dogs, floating there in their untouchable pack, beautiful faces looking back at me from the other world, which I was not allowed to reach.