I have taken it upon myself to embrace Joseph's death with this edict: the dying give us the nod: Live!
Now freed from the confines of the illness that had laid siege to his body, Joseph is free to live in us all. All that is miraculous carries forth.
That incredible man was never bereft of his mind and his guts, even when each breath was a gurgle and his skin gave way everywhere to weeping, still his heart beat strong. He did not want to let go, ever the patriarch and the rock, that tough bastard just wouldn't let go. But they were there, his loved ones, some of all of us who have been made so strong by him, and they carried him across. The assured him and let him go. Maybe even in that he was teaching us all how to be strong, how to do things creatively, how to make things work best and with a flair and signature. Send me to death, and make it really delicious. He gives me that knowing smile from beyond the pale now. He gave me that smile and I'll always have it and it will take me as far as I want to go. That is what a patriarch does, gives you the tools and the impetus to use them.
So in that vein I go forward with a bit of a new lease on each day. I have appetite and a great field of food to the horizon. There is consuming and consummation en masse before me. And I have but to breath and focus and toil and rejoice and see and marvel and pinpoint and feel and felicitate and fornicate and make proverbs of all my silliest thoughts, be my king and own jester, succeed and overpower and gracefully stroke the long bangs from my daughters' faces such that they may see and have balls galore too. Joseph taught me to be a marksmen. "Every shot, you've got to put your mind and your heart and your cock into it." He was talking cameras, and everything else, and I got it so well. And thus I'm in love with all this living.
The last time we left him in Kauai I took one last look back. I wanted to seal it in as the last. We were leaving down the balcony and he was heading back in the door to his Sulawesi kit-house marvel. The afternoon sun was on him and he stood as the golden lion there, the perpetual Ram, Aries king, saying warmly good-by with his eyes. In his left hand he held the door handle, a terrific sculpted reptile in that dark, heavy jungle wood. His right hand was held up in a fist, "Stay strong, stay soulful," that fist said to me, and that was all I needed to hear, I heard it through those blue eyes and that smile, just the same as when he was condoning your actions when you had done something really right: got the shot, had the kid, built the house, something really right, by your own hand. That golden fist and that smile and the pacific aqua eyes, and he knew he was giving me all the power I would ever need to go on without him in the world, without him now in such a way that the fist is everywhere, the eternal smile and all the strength that confers. I promise you, Christ didn't not look down woefully from the cross like in all those paintings. He looked down with the blue eyes of Joseph, whipped a hand right out from the nail and gave the soul brother fist of gold and the parishioners had hosannas forever thanks to that. That's a hell of a way to say goodbye, it assures you he'll always be there. And he is, I assure you. I run ten miles tomorrow, easily, in honor of it.
m e e n O
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