The gentlest spirits cast the longest shadows. For Janet, three years on.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

It's a day to deal with death. Perhaps not capital-D Death, the Reaper in full form, but with the fallout: the grief, the loss, the void . . . and the shadows cast.

I've written about one lost on this day already; one lost yesterday four years past. There was another one on this day, too, a dear friend who walked on three years ago. Some knew her by her online name elsewhere, bleeding heart, but I knew her, in the end, as Janet. She was one of those ethereally beautiful woman, one who, if I had to choose a single descriptor, I would have said was the very embodiment of gentleness. I have no doubt that she could be fierce when required, but it was not her essence.

Three years ago, I learned that she was gravely ill on the very same day that her spirit transcended her bonds here. I had written then, briefly, of my wish for her, and I chose an image I had captured that same day, one of the winter willows above the pond, their upper branches spangled with ice in the fading light.

For this day, I thought I knew the image I would choose: those same winter willows, but the lower branches this time, glowing gold in the fading light, arced downward to weep over the ice that is all that remains of the pond now.

Ice. The name of my horse, now also gone, for whom she offered her own prayers when it looked as though we might lose him near four years ago. That horse is inextricably intertwined in my memories with certain people, and Janet is one; at the time, I saw her free in body and spirit alike, no longer in any pain, riding the light on the back of a white horse named Ice. 

We lost him on August 6th of this year, a belated casualty of the abuse and neglect he had suffered before he found us. And on that summer's evening, as twilight fell, I saw in my mind's eye Janet, wearing her beautifully flowing clothes, walking softly in the fading light beneath the aspens, stopping to look at a leaf here, a shadow there . . . and then looking up to see a white horse named Ice waiting for her at the edge of the trees. I saw her walk up to him, hand out, recognition in both their eyes, and I saw him put his muzzle into her hand — a feat for a horse abused in life by a bit and terrified of such contact. And I saw them walk together, before the image turned to smoke.

Did they find each other? I will never know, at least on this side of things, how such things work. I only know how vividly I saw it, unsummoned and unbidden, in my mind.

And when I looked at the photos I took this evening, the weeping boughs were beautiful in the light . . . but the panoramic shot was the one that spoke her name. It was the trees, and the light, and the silvery winter sky . . . but it was also the long, strong shadows cast upon the ground. And I realized that there was a reason, because Janet's legacy is not the tears, but the shadows, not the loss, but the great marks made by her life lived so gently upon the earth, the sheltering shadows cast by her beautiful spirit.

What she left to Wings and me were long and influential shadows indeed: another friend in her husband, a renewed belief in the human spirit, and a vision of her with my beloved horse, both well and happy now in their own plane of existence. The last seems to hold out hope for a future beyond the one we see.

And perhaps another lesson, too? The essential truth that the gentlest spirits cast the longest, most influential shadows? In that, she reminds me a bit of my oldest sister, now gone nearly a quarter of a century.

All I know, three years on, is that I owe her a debt of gratitude for her presence in my life, and for the love that her spirit still sends across the world like a shadow lengthening in the waning light.



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