Really wasn't sure what to expect Saturday. Never buried anybody really close to me before.

(My close friend and mentor Lucia Berlin died a month ago. Earlier posts here and then here. And I wrote most of this yesterday, but couldn't quite bear to finish it. Found it much easier to blab relentlessly about Survivor instead.)

And my sadness had been wildly unpredictable so far. Shocked and despondent for two days, then completely numb. Suddenly sad again starting Sunday as yesterday's memorial and burial approached, back to numb by Thursday night.

I assembled it would be emotional, but I only counted on that happening once. I've been to plenty of sad funerals, though mostly sad for the friends and relatively really close to the deceased. I just figured it was one long bout of sadness. Nope.

So much joy. So many wonderful people convened from around the country and beyond--some really good friends, and some great people I'd let slip away or failed to connect with as much as I should have the first time. Can't tell you how many times I laughed. Or smiled. Ecstatically.

And then wham! another kick in the balls.

Laughting, sobbing, beaming, sagging, up and down all God-damned day. Worn out.

The video, in particular, was mini version of that brutal ride condensed into ten or fifteen minutes. I didn't know there would be a video. I wasn't prepared to see her again. Or hear her voice.

She made me laugh so hard. And amazed me again. The way sees through people. God.

What a surprise to experience her so intimately again. Some of my happiest moments in recent memory. Followed by wrenching pain.

It took me aback at first. We chatted every couple weeks by phone--daily whenever my relationship was a mess--but I'd only seen her once since she moved to LA (three?) years ago. The video was quite recent, yet she was far more full of life than the picture I'd been dragging around for awhile. She was always so weary on the phone, I guess--joyful and giggling once we got talking, but the pain was relentless for the past ten years, and she was drained, physically. Or so I thought. Didn't come across that way at all on the screen yesterday.

The worst part and the best part was the cemetary conversation. Almost didn't happen. During the gravesite ceremony, I was caught up in the moment, never got a chance to think about what I might need to do. All these people spoke about what she meant to them, each one vastly different, but all of them capturing different sides of her so perceptively. (Except for one, which didn't jibe with my Lucia at all. Puzzling. Sometimes we present very differently to different people, I guess.)

It was mostly a bunch of writers gathered, and mostly good ones, so you can imagine how powerful the recollections were. Or can you? Civilians tend to think writing is about facility words, and it is, but it's more about clarity of perception. Great writers are great seers--they see right through people, right through situations, they intuitively grasp which elements define the person or the encounter, and can transmit the power that make them so moving with a few telling details.

Naturally, Lucia surrounded herself with similarly perceptive people, and immediately after the video, one of her good friends and mine meandered up to the microphone and made that very point. More than anything, Lucia was a seer.

God. Scary sometimes. The first day I met her was my first day of grad school, and hers too. (She as a visiting professor, later asked to stay on as a permanent faculty member, because no one could bear the thought of losing her once her two years were over.) It was her first class, and she was more than a little nervous, and I was an hour late, sneaking in what I thought was the back door. I turned the handle carefully, eased the door open, slipped inside and discovered sixteen students staring at me in mild disbelief. Lucia turned around and graciously offered a seat without commenting on my tardiness. Before I could get my ass in a chair she was reaching for registration sheet, asking my name so she could check me off. I wasn't actually registered for the class. I had enrolled in the writing program late and her class was overbooked with a waiting list 25% beyond maximum enrollment. I was still hoping to get in. But there was another class I wanted to take almost as badly, which overlapped, and since I was actually registered for that one, I thought I'd attend the first hour of that, slip out at the break and see if I could still weasel into hers. I had planned to approach her quietly about it after class. Have a seat, she said--I was still standing there like a dumbass--I'm sure we can find room.

I plopped in a chair and then she said the strangest thing. "You're going to be trouble." What? I was, actually, but I thought I'd put on my best boy scout act. Parents always loved me at first, especially older women, always describing me as such a nice young man. I protested to Lucia in my finest suckup manner: I truly hadn't intended to disrupt her class; I thought I could just slip in quietly and approach her later. She just kept shaking her head and giggling harder. "You're just a little junior high school boy, aren't you?"

What! Yes, of course, but I was also 35 years old, a decade grayer than most of the class, and I had always managed to disguise my true nature on interviews and first meetings. And what the hell was she saying all this in front of the whole class for anyway!

I asked her later what gave me away, and why she would add me way beyond the official limit if she was convinced I was going to be a problem. The tardiness had nothing to do with it, she said. She could just tell. And she loved junior high boys.

I did drive her nuts in class. I hated most of the books we read, and I can't let a book or film off easy when it offends me. I ripped all those books she treasured a new asshole, and we eventually had to agree never to talk about that again. But it was the little junior high boy inside me she fell in love with.

(Of course I don't mean that romantically. But the sweetest thing about Lucia was the way she could fall in love with every one or thing that touched her heart. I wouldn't think twice about gushing how much I loved a book or movie or album, but it wasn't she told me Catcher in the Rye was the first book she ever fell in love with that I really began to understand my relationship to art. Or to my friends.)

Man, do I feel better today. I wrote the first half of this yesterday, and it felt as exhausting as the whole experience Saturday. I was just buffetted by all the things people stood up to say about her that afternoon. Up and down and up and down the whole freaking day. But focusing on that one sweet memory of Lucia, and I suddenly feel whole again.

I still haven't explained the conversation, but that one is going to have to wait.

. . . the better you feel.

I just watched most of the Survivor Reunion Show, and I'm liking most of these people again. I like them because, for the most part, they've owned up to how nasty they got out there, and they've forgiven each other.

And I can see how I get sucked into the nastiness as a viewer, too, watching them turn into ogres under that pressure and then disparaging them for it.

And then 2/3 of the way through the show, Dimples--who as gotten really good at interviewing these people; he ought to replace Matt Lauer or Charlie Gibson when he's done with this gig--asks Amy what she learned.

"The biggest thing I learned about myself was, the quicker you forgive the better you feel. Because I had so much anger and hate towards Twili. For awhile. And the second I just let that go, just completely let it go, realized it's a game, this and that, the whole world was lifted off my shoulders, the second I learned how to forgive."

As I'm transcribing, I'm fearing that it might sound preachy or cliche in print. You're just going to have to trust me that all through the reunion show, she has been the soul of authenticity and candor, and this is coming straight from the heart. And clearly she was angry and hateful toward Twila. And it's plain tonight that she did let that go. I have no doubt she felt that weight lift off her the moment she did. We've all been there, haven't we.

Hmmmmm. I've got a few boulders up on my shoulder this very moment I could probably step a lot lighter without. Why do I leave them up there?