Handkerchief of the Lord

I was on the way to services with my girls and we called to leave a message for my mother. “That was your mommy?” my two-year old asked. “Yes,” I told her. “But your daddy is dead?” she asked.

What followed was the longest exchange we’ve had yet about death and my father. (It’s hard enough to explain morning fog.) Much of what I drew upon comes from poems, the best place I know for answers about life and death, body and spirit.

She knows that I see my father everywhere now. She knows that his body is gone. She knows that I carry some of his spirit inside of me. And since she asked specifically, she also knows that his hair is still growing.

Though I stopped myself from taking her on a tour through section six of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” that's where I went in my mind...


A child said, "What is the grass?" fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff
woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say, "Whose?"

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them
the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken
soon out of their mothers' laps;
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out
of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to
arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward-nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.