Been thinking about impermanence lately. Here today. Gone tomorrow. It is as if there was nothing in between, when someone or something loved is here, then gone, dies. But of course there was something in between. That's why that scene in Brokeback Mountain is so powerful. A lover stands in a closet and smells the remnant of his loss on a shirt that will never be worn again. He WAS here. Then memory supplies the rest, although as time passes, memory becomes less powerful and the urge to stay with the pain necessarily diminishes.
The lessening of pain is a matter of survival.
I happened to hear this morning on the radio about a young man lost to his family. Andrew Olmstead. He died in Iraq a 
week or so ago.
And what remains of him, besides his family, his belongings, and memory of him is a blog that he wrote. A friend logged his final entry after his death. Andrew talks about many things. About war, about his life, about what he left behind, about how he valued it, about the ambiguity of having been here and then having died. His blog, presumably, will always be out there, with words written when the idea of death was anxiety, not reality. Andrew Olmstead is alive in that blog. Even if memory fades, perhaps someone, in some thirty years will come upon it in some futuristic version of the net. And learn of our time, and of one individual within it.
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