Susan M. Schultz
Elegy
—for Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard (June, 1946 – May 24, 2024)
1. One comes in order of remembrance, not as queen of memories but its pawn, setting out first on a board, intrepid, fragile. You were at the airport to give me The Tibetan Book of the Dead when I left for my mother’s dying. On day six of your death, I can’t find it.
2. To remember death as first principle seems unfair. Call up the midst, the in-between, everyday bardos of being losing itself to being other. Your Mānoa cottage fronted a frothy stream populated by orator frogs.
3. I remember when you died, not when you were born. You’re on track to appear again, unknown to us. There will be flowers and books and dental surgeries, just like before time, crazy wisdom where wind meets the stream’s song, dentist’s drill screeching like a myna.
4. Your desk was neat, yet you arranged it tirelessly. You were inclined to great drama, and to saying farewell to performance. How many times did you say farewell to your operas?
5. You might be born again, but who will recognize the bird or frog, the dragonfly or the snapping turtle?
6. You called me in the very early a.m. as Bryant and I crossed Kansas on a train. You’d taken our car to Kaimukī and parked it in a structure. When you returned, the engine started, so you rolled the windows down. Then the car failed. There was towing and there were ubers. We came home to a white Prius whose windows were black trash bags. A neighbor told me you and Lilith would stand on the sidewalk, staring at one another. You wouldn’t force her to do what she didn’t want to do. One and another stubborn kindness. Om mane peme hung.
7. You always came late to meetings. You were too busy writing haiku about them, I suspect. “why do they call it / ‘meeting,’ when we leave feeling / ragged miles apart?”
8. We invited the young man to tea. You asked him to come early, so you could be aunty. We told him not to be divisive; the community is so small. He said he’d stop. Months later, old posts got regurgitated: dead cigarette mouths, haole. Aversion to any who did not worship or agree with him.
9. There were always beads and incense. I wish I could have told you of the rhythmical beat of “invoice, entry, check”: the 34 Trump counts. We might have marched down a corridor to that mantra. Invoice. Entry. Check. Put it to music and sing it at a department meeting.
10. “Away from the toxic stew of colonial isolation,” straight into another, cloaked by constant construction and glitz. You kept referring to the murder of one of our students by her husband. A colonial symptom, you said, and you the doctor unable to prescribe a cure. That was murder and suicide, though the police called it double suicide. Under the Volcano explained the colonial darkness, you would say.
11. Hammer. My high school classmate was killed with a hammer by her boyfriend. He was so quickly forgiven; after all, he confessed to his priest. Book title: The Killing of Bonnie Garland, as if she were merely the object of that awful noun. I’d taken her place at a concert because she was afraid of going first. She played the flute. Sina, you loved the breath in poetry.
12. Several days before your death, I checked out Rushdie’s Knife. It came in large print. How it feels to have been attacked by someone wielding a knife. How it feels to survive. Hammer and knife killed you. I keep wanting to ask you (you!) what happened. Answer foreclosed. Police say there was an argument. If only the murderer survives, and that murderer is a performer, whom can you trust to tell the story, except the dead?
13. We intended to stage a performance of workplace violence (emotional). We’d make it funny, maybe wear masks (pre-COVID). We’d choreograph the paths of avoidance we took in the hall, then dance them to our colleagues. Walked paths would be dances would be poems.
14. “I need to talk to you about our beloved Sina,” wrote Selina. Facebook video put a yellow cat avatar over my face, which I got rid of with difficulty. Selina, who drove across Waiheke Island in a car bursting with us poets, belting out Barry Manilow. We laughed before she told me.
15. You were killed in a theater, where only you and the killer were actors. Spectators came later, but no one had the audio. This is the only secret left on earth. As it is in heaven, forgive us our trespasses.
16. If only you had simply died.
17. “Yes, the lessons do keep rolling in; I’ve noticed that too,” you wrote in your last message to me. If this life is a flash quiz, I’m failing it now, flailing to find answers. The wall’s gaps hide lizards and mongooses. But you’ve slipped past my line of sight, even through my fancy new glasses.
18. And then: “It’s nice to think of putting down stakes for good, to lay out books and my mother’s china in their proper homes.” [Pause] “...or less transitory homes, that is.” The prosody of a Signal message. Signal from somewhere the map on my phone can’t record.
19. Yesterday morning a signal, perhaps. Lilith and I were climbing the hill toward the chapel at the cemetery when I turned toward the Ko`olau to see a double rainbow. I stopped to watch. The rainbow didn’t drift with the wind, it simply dissolved. Signal to sign, virtual to symbolic presence. There’s presence in your death; I hear you whispering mantras to our animals, blessing them.
20. I hadn’t written you back. I write you back. I cannot write you back. “What happened, Sina?” I’d ask. Interlocutor silent. Not a failure of the net, but of the breath I imagine on your side of it. You were such a spider, weaving out and weaving in. Nets hold bodies, but not their breath.
21. “The revelation that poetry was alive and riding on the breath, line by line, in a direct link to one’s heart,” she ascribed to Charles Olson, whose heart had nothing on hers. Her poem’s breath was slash, oblique, an enjambed line within the line itself. She read as if seated on the back of a gently bucking horse.
22. Radiance of these mountains in the early a.m. Orange yellow cast over green, under blue, and into white. Buddhist shawl sun slung around cliff’s neck. Trees like fuzz on a head resuming its production of hair. After chemo. After radiation. I brought Sangha to the hospital with me; your nurse asked, “where did you get him?” Adoptive mothers, both, we rolled our eyes.
23. We get our lives, don’t we? As in, we acquire them without asking, or acquire them again in adoption. What we don’t get are life plots, tangles, figures of speech, surprises (that seem less so later). The shock of your dying will stop kicking me in the heart space, but don’t plan on closure, dear Sina. It’s all detour now.
24. You were our MC when we remembered the university’s dead, too often buried outside of print or email or any notice at all. We performed memory before the Chancellor (who cried), members of the counseling center (in case someone freaked out), students whose peer had died by suicide, colleagues who’d “passed on,” as they say. I prefer the Victorian grave marker, “she fell asleep” on such and such a day. The ground a comforter. Karl Marx and George Eliot whispering to each other from their firm London mattress. The ocean will be your comforter.
25. We set up electronic candles, the better not to burn down the Center for Hawaiian Studies theater space. We posted photos of the dead. We told stories about them. We pushed them, their names, up grief’s brown hill. Mostly, they fell back to us, undeveloped images still yearning for our company. Syntax is memory machine. Pull the weed whacker string, hear its whine. A man wearing a monkish uniform will cut back the grass. Grief’s an act of editing.
26. Police say there was an argument between you and her that “escalated.” In the media narrative, you are someone’s victim and someone’s aunt or sister. The real secret was your presence. “She’s a mirror to others,” another author said to me. How the kiss of billiard balls turns to aversion. How your reflectiveness told us who we are but left you out.
27. “Kali yuga on a stick” is how you described our politics. “The present age, full of sin,” Wiki tells me. The stick lent humor, as if sin were a puppet, bouncing happily on a portable stage, making children scream with delight. Yes, it’s farce all right, this lurching toward apocalypse. All orange wigs and logical fallacy. Stick it to them.
28. My meds block my tears. They’ve built themselves a balloon inside my chest that expands when I release my breath. My lungs want out, or at least what’s inside them, prisoner of the Emotional Repression Complex that knocks in code on my ribs. Let me bargain for my tears. Big Pharma, goddamn you, my cheeks call out for refreshment.
29. Oh Sina, truth teller, wise woman, purveyor of explosive laughter (which you offered to us without terms), colleague who never got to a meeting on time, ethical overlord, pull your trademark scarf tight and gird your loins for the bardo. Seven days in, the lay of the land is coming more clear. I hope you have mountains there, and that they walk like Dogen’s.
30. “farewell, Expectations and False Hope!” you wrote on Buddha’s birthday. “on second thought, don’t fare well. fare badly. fall / & break your wily neck”-- farewell, dear Sina.
Susan M. Schultz, having retired from the University of Hawai`i, now walks Lilith and takes photographs on O`ahu and the Big Island. She is author of many books of poetic prose, including Dementia Blog, and She’s Welcome to Her Disease: Dementia Blog, Vol.2, (Singing Horse Press), as well as several volumes of Memory Cards. Her most recent books are I Want to Write an Honest Sentence, (Talisman), Meditations: December. 2019-December. 2020 (Wet Cement), Lilith Walks (BlazeVox),and I and Eucalyptus (Lavender Ink), recently translated as _Io ed eucalipto_ by Pina Piccolo and Maria Luiza Vezzali. For over 22 years she edited and published Tinfish Press. She is a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. She and Sina were colleagues for over 20 years.
