UPDATE 87 - The King's College Choristers

What I write here often feels repetitive. Jenny is gone and I miss her, and I keep writing about the ways that I notice how she is missing and how it hurts. At first, writing seemed to help - just knowing I could post something and that someone might be reading it felt comforting. But lately - like anything new - the initial charm has waned, and I am left feeling that there is no way to make it better - even if I write the same things over and over - even if I write the perfect message - even if I keep writing forever.

With this in my soul, I write today.

I have been listening to Jenny's CD - Return to Titanic - and it occurs to me that the soprano voices are those of boys. The King's College Choristers, it turns out (as I saw with my own eyes) is a men's and boys-only choir - something made even clearer by an odd interaction I had with them.

When we attended Maunday Thursday services at the King's College Chapel in Cambridge, by happenstance I was the last member of the regular congregation to receive communion. And I remember, as I waited for my own wafer and the cup, how my left knee did not quite fit on the padded stool - and how I made due with my right knee on the pad and the other knee set awkwardly upon the stone stairs - thinking it would be for just another moment.

But then the wine ran out, and as the hasty ceremony to consecrate more dragged on I began to notice (in addition to my aching knee) the choir standing in the aisle ready to take our places with the sacraments - a very quiet almost tense few moments within an already quiet service, vaguely imbued with coughing from the audience and the murmurs of the clerics fussing with rituals and wine and bread.

Finally, the bread and the cup were re-prepared and served. And for a brief time after I lingered there until on stiff legs I passed through the waiting singers in their white robes. Little could I have known for certain if any had actually sung on Jenny's CD. It has no doubt been a few years since the CD was recorded. But the possibility of it existed. And as such it was clear to me in the moment as the choir parted for me that I might be walking past some of the very same voices who sang from Jenny's own CD player at her own burial at what will be her very own place for eternity so very very far away across the deep and wide and eternal sea.