Distant music
T sends me this poem after I visit my grandparents’ gravesites with mom:
Voices
Ideal and beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.
And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life —
like distant music that dies off in the night.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
Here is a clip of mom at her father’s gravesite – it’s uncanny how much she is beginning to look like her mother (and she said old people all look alike – they don’t). We were looking for her Aunt Dolly’s tombstone but couldn’t find it. My grandfather is buried right next to his parents, who both died before I was born: