"Hi friends,
You might decide to not read this or save it until after hours or an appropriate time.
Saturday was the one month mark of Ritu’s passing. When Ritu died, I was jealous of her, and the next day I got a horoscope telling me not to be jealous of other people's accomplishments and to write thank you notes instead. So this is the note I wrote to her. I took it to Land's End on Saturday with the candle container of the candle I'd been burning for her for the last month and burned the letter in the candle container and set it off into the ocean.
Dear Ritu,
This is a thank you note, the intentions of which I hope will reach you in some form wherever you are.
I want to thank you for being who you were, as you were, and for entering my life. That is all. That is all that is needed for me to thank you and to be thankful to you.
I didn't know you that long or that well or that deeply, nevertheless your presence through your absence is deeply felt. And that, perhaps, is the value of having been alive, having lived.
Having touched my life by having been in it, I miss you. I miss your presence, I miss knowing that you are somewhere out there in a form I would recognise, a form in which I could say, "Ritu?" and you could say, "what?"
I will remember your face, your love of orchids, your love of orange, of Eddie Vedder's voice, your passion for the music that touched you, your tactile appreciation; you loved life more than I ever will and you touched it more deeply than I ever will.
I will also remember your pain and your struggle for compassion. I had very little good to say about you in the last month, but now that you're gone, it has all been placed into perspective. We all have our pain, we all have our struggle, and we all deal with and express them in our own individual ways that may be perceived differently by other people. I didn't understand your struggle, but now I recognise it for what it was, and that it was just yours, not for me to understand or solve or resolve or cure.
So thank you and godspeed. Go on your journey and always come as you are. In whatever time or place I meet you again, if I recognise you on some level, know that I will welcome you.
On behalf of Josefa, Barb, Cass, Wayne, Angela, Lorena, Zenaida, Jeptha, and anyone else who shares the sentiment but I don't know about, thank you. Take this burned candle, this incense, and this song for you and go. If we are to meet again, insha'allah, in this I believe."
Today was the month anniversary of Ritu's death. The day after we got the news, I drove Josefa home to Vallejo and there was a candle in a glass cylinder in the kitchen. I mentioned that I wanted to get one of those and burn it constantly for Ritu. On Monday, Josefa brought the candle in and said her mother gave it to me. I haven't been burning it constantly for obvious fire hazard reasons, but I've been burning it all day at work for the past month, which is in itself still a fire code violation, I shouldn't wonder. It finally burned out this past Thursday just before I left work.
So tonight, I wrote a thank you note to Ritu, took the glass cylinder and incense and went to Sea Cliff to burn the letter and the incense and throw the cylinder and the ashes into the ocean.
It took a long time to burn the letter because it wasn't catching and the long-tip lighter I was using was just about exhausted. I didn't burn the letter completely, there was a piece of it that I finally gave up on, and I shoved the lighter into the cylinder and chucked it all into the ocean. If Ritu wants to read it, she can burn the rest of it herself. Of course, it doesn't work that way and she probably won't get the part that didn't burn. I played a tune on shakuhachi until the incense burned out and left.
