Joshua Edward Ditch

We live in a world now that does not sit comfortably with mystery. We have come to believe that anything can be understood if we can reduce it to its component parts. Our experience repeatedly teaches us otherwise. You can take a clock apart down to its last cog and still understand nothing about time, why joy passes in an instant but grief stretches out before us to the borders of the sky.
My nephew, Joshua, died and I don't understand why. I understand how, but I don't understand why. I accept it because I know that understanding why is not necessary to my loving him.
Arthur Koestler told us there was a ghost in the machine. So, we take apart the machine and we find no ghost. But when the machine is assembled, it spins all manner of magic. It climbs to the top of the refrigerator, curls up, and falls asleep. It learns to unlock the door at three o'clock in the morning and totters from streetlight to streetlight down the block until its exhausted father finds it and brings it home. It grows. It fights with its sister. It suffers and shines. One day it leaves, then it comes back home, then it leaves once more. It sings and cooks us dinner. It loves and it loses love and it sets out to find love again. And in all of this it never occurs to us to analyze, to figure, to count on our fingers. It is always the ghost we know, not the machine.
Josh had multiple sclerosis. When I was at his mom's Saturday night, going through the closet of what had once been his room, I found his MRIs, taken when he was diagnosed three years ago. I am a nurse, but I don't know how to read an MRI. I have a close friend, though, who also has MS and from looking at her films with her I learned to recognize the lesions of the disease. I held Josh's MRIs up to the bedroom light, film after film, until I saw them, tiny patches of white in the surrounding grey fields of the brain.
The day Josh was diagnosed he called me. I couldn't stop pacing the room as we talked. My voice was shaking. His, however, was steady and calm, measured. He asked if he could come over.
We sat on the sofa and he showed me the materials the doctor had given him. He told me what she had said and he asked me a few questions. His grandmother had had the disease and he had grown up seeing what it can do.
Last weekend, while I was helping clean out his apartment, I came across a folder in his room marked "Medical Receipts." Inside was a single piece of paper, a drawing of a samurai warrior in a chef's coat. There was more of his grandmother about Josh than her disease. Captured, maybe, but not imprisoned.
Josh was a chef. He was not a cook, he was a chef. A chef is a person who
understands what a metaphor food is for life. I don't know of any other common human experience that carries as much meaning as the preperation and sharing of food. Food is family and comfort, generosity and power. It is religion and warmth and sex and identity. When Christ gave his most profound and personal message to his disciples, he did it with food.
When I searched through Josh's computer, I found pictures of servings he must have created, beautiful displays of form and color. There was a picture of what I took to be sushi, laid out on white porcelain and garnished with both the precision and abandon of a deKooning painting. Josh understood that cuisine is literally art we consume, that it becomes part of us and brings with it some measure of the feeling it is created with. A meal created with delight and pride, presented with beauty and shared among friends becomes a vehicle for that connection we all hunger for. Most of us search, successfully or not, for a conduit to give form and structure to the rising spirit in us to create. Josh found his.
Josh died traumatically, under circumstances for which he was in some part responsible. Does one event define a man's life? The local media might have you believe so. But Joshua is not one minute and fifteen seconds on the evening news. He is not a zip-lock bag of personal belongings, catalogued on a printed form and signed for at the medical examiner's office.
He is eight years old, lying with me on the living room floor, listening while I read to him from The Red Book of Fairy Tales. He is buoyant laughter at Fridays in Waterford Lakes. He is three years old and James Edward's Pooh Bear. He is singing to the Kings of Leon with Katrina in the car. He is his father's wedding band, always there on his right hand, and his grandfather's B-24, breaking through clouds, frozen in ink on his own skin. He is stopping by his sister's to pick up his meds and telling his nieces about the new girl he's met. He is blackened swordfish and tuna with mango coulis. He is Joshie and his mother's son with a heart more tender and deep than even he can fathom. He is
tiny patches of white.
And he is a careless, irreversible choice made in the first hour of a Friday morning.
Is he anyone of these more than the others? Is he all of them added
together? Is he all of them added together and something beyond them we can
never comprehend?
Poets speak for us. Listen to William Butler Yeats:

0 chestnut- tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
0 body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Joshua Edward Ditch- Age 30, passed away on Friday, September 25, 2009. He was born in Orlando. He was a chef.

He is survived by his mother, Marta Ditch, sister Jennifer Wellons, uncle, Alan Hill, brother-in-law, Tom Wellons.

Funeral services will be held at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 in the Newcomer Funeral Home chapel, 895 S. Goldenrod Road, Orlando. Interment will follow in Greenwood Cemetery. Visitation will be in the funeral home on Tuesday, September 29, 2009, from 7:00 - 9:00 PM.