I don't know what to do

I don’t know what to do.

The line rings in my ears—sometimes it’s louder in my own voice, sometimes in my dad’s. The confusion in his searching gaze haunts me, jabs and tears at the flesh of my heart and the sting sears through my veins and aches in my throat.

I don’t know what to do.

How many times did he ask me what was wrong?  Why was he here?  And I would tell him a variation of how the doctors found cancer in his stomach and in his liver and filling his veins soon to take over his heart.  I told him how it was all preventing him from being able to sleep, from being able to get to the bathroom by himself and how Mama could no longer safely help him. So he was here where he could get help.

He would then say, “I don’t know what to do.”  Those sad, hazel colored eyes have haunted me for years, though.  I would hold his hand, palm-thumb curled—his right hand to my right hand, like arm wrestling with inevitable truth—and I would say, “Me neither.  I don’t know what to do either, Dad. I wish I did.”  Then we would sit together like that for eternity.

Later we were told that we (the so-called living) think in bigger pictures, more extended meaning, larger contexts.  One who is as ill as Dad, one who is dying, has a very simple and immediate world.  Answers should be simple and immediate.  (Like he would ask if everyone was out of the house—we were in the hospice wing of the hospital—is everyone out of the house? Are we alone now? ...  Yes! We’re alone...what word do you have for us, what insight, what treasure, what wisdom? ... No, he only wanted the opportunity to launch from the bed and outrun the orderlies to the bathroom for a little privacy to do his business.)

So how much worse did I make his confusion?  How much harder did I make his transition?  I apparently was as confused by his question as he must have been by my answer.  He would look at me with such concentration and determination to understand.  I languished in my determination to be honest and truthful.  Then he would nod and put his head back upon the pillow.

Sometimes I think no matter how much time passes, I will weep tears of grief.  Sometimes I think no matter how much time passes, I will feel pain in the memory of those last hours, days, weeks, months, years... a mere instant.  Sometimes I think no matter how much time passes, I will long with every fiber of my essence to have him back, everyone back, everyone right, everyone here, everyone whole, everyone now.

What is it about that statement that twists the knife in my soul?  I don’t know what to do.

This primordial drive to do something.  Even so long since the dying.  Even now.  It is all one moment.  I don’t know what to do.  We long to act.  Long to fix it.  Make it right.  Do something.  Engage.

The only thing I know to do is write.  Tell the story.  Express.  This helps me regain my sense of balance and being after the hopelessness of unknowing.

Is it really part of our nature, part of our original created essence, to need to do something?  Or is it indicative of how far we have strayed from our true nature?  Be still.  Know I am God.  These are two things we are told to do.  Be still.  Know I am God.  Psalm 46.  The whole psalm is about radical and violent change, and about a new heaven and new earth.  End to war.  God’s presence until then, God’s help in time of trouble.  Be still.  Know I am God.

It is only comforting, hopeful, when by some miracle you...I...do it.

seeing auntie bb again being with auntie bb now

i did not post this when i wrote it in june 2013...seemed too personal.  still is.  but now i am gathering stories from between death and resurrection.

061213

Her eyes were green—slightly darker than peridot, slightly darker than the pristine waters at Abaco...they were vibrant with life and I looked into them as if by looking and holding the gaze I would hold her in my life and in her living.  I wasn’t aware I was dreaming, I wasn’t really dreaming, but I was asleep, or rather, I was aware that this was a moment outside the time of wakeful passing.  I was aware that I had to look at her, look at her vibrant green eyes in all their clarity and reality, dimension and being; it was up to me, to my unbroken visual and visible bond in seeing her that would sustain her and sustain me and sustain all the relationship that we had known my entire life. If I looked away, she would be lost to me.  I made a mental note, too, of how the coloring of her eyelids matched that green of her eyes but not with the harshness of a teenager who might be experimenting, not with the cheap application of the shallow attempt to seduce, it was somehow a transfiguration, an appropriate compliment to her eyes, as if the color emanated from them like a prism throws light from the sun. There was a slight holding of my breath in that shadow of disbelief when gazing at someone loved and lost, having the perpetual body memory of embrace at the occasional physical meetings on holiday, that holding of breath in suspending the unmoving moment beyond time to absorb presence and recognize someone in soul while certain physicalities didn’t conform with certain memories.  In shared life she was darker in hair color, and makeup—her lids were always a subtle red earth tone.  Her eyes a fascinating gray like blue shadows over heather, the blue gray of distant appalachian mountains in mist.  Striking beauty, heads would literally turn in double take when we were out and about. Her age had always been about 25 years older and while she did not look at all like a photo of her in youth, this was her soul gazing back at me through that color of green I cannot describe and is fading, dulling, shifting in the attempt.  This “dream” did not have the timber of other dreams, it was not made of the same stuff.  It was real.  It felt like the clairvoyance I possessed when I was so young and prayed to have it pass.  Now I regret that prayer.  And now I have had this prayer answered.  She was there with me.  We shared our being, our connection, our selves beyond this material life but with the material that engages the senses.  This time she did not touch me.  When she was alive, I would dream of her and it would be the form of her I have always known and it would be her laugh and it would be our shared stories and it would be our walks along the beach and it would be her maternal embrace and it would be a visit that I always longed for and never had enough of and it would be her life without the hindrances of her commitments, and mine.  But this was only being.  This was only her face gazing back at mine, not looking like her but being her.  I want to believe...that this was an outstretched affirmation that she is ... still ... living beyond this quintessence of dust and pain and heartache and situation.  I feel her.  I long for her.  But not in the way I always had before in wishing I could figure out a way to travel to visit...but in a way that hopes beyond empirical doubts that there is more beyond this mortal coil and that we will BE in that space I glimpsed, that presence I felt, that connection I live in...