March blessings

March is fresh, the only one you’ll get out of 2019, the only March 2019 you’ll get in your whole life. Spring is near—it is crouched down hidden in thick tree limbs with yellow eyes glowing in the dark of winter waiting to —YES! SPRING— into the world once again in the blessed cycle of seasons.  Birth is painful and rebirth carries with it much of the pain in memories and lives lived and relived and waiting to be touched deeply where healing can swell and embrace the hurts and losses and regrets and let me tell you this spring, this one, the one just on the rim of our reality will be held in awe even as it devours me as earth devours the seeds lying dormant...I will hold it all in awe as I learn and relearn to marvel with great gratitude how we are all connected whether we see it or hear it or taste it or not the reality is there and it sounds like quiet cool trickles of spring water melting down the rocky hills and it smells like jasmine at night and lavender in the morning and looks like streaks of yellow and green and red and purple spilled out across the skies and feels like lambs’ wool and smells like pancakes and all these sensations and images are known to you because we are connected and when we love or walk alongside in whatever capacity we extend gifts whether sweet like caramel and chocolate or difficult but necessary like digging out cancer the gifts we extend are connections that will multiply into blessings we cannot imagine right now big and small but always there for the taking and receiving and giving back and this morning I marvel at my love for words and stories coursing deep in my hereditary veins and observed in my father’s life and my mother’s love of books and my sister and I wrote stories and made up songs and made books all our lives and of my greatest loves is the storyteller from the deepest south and her writing influenced a Chinese writer I have read before and now because of friendship shared in mutual love of story on stage and film who welcomed me into her family and realm of friends and love of stories and writing words on paper and extended a find of flash fiction which I now explore and read and just this morning that Chinese writer is being showcased and his great influence is my favorite writer and I am panting with anticipation to read his stories again and reenter her world of stories and what a great thing right here on the edge of falling off into more days ahead full to overflowing with overwhelming emotions extreme and calming and an answer to the prayer of my deepest longing to find the connections I often fear I have lost and now I remember I re*member we are all inextricably connected for better and worse and all the worse will be better because we take a moment to look at each other and our lives and our gifts with eyes of gratitude and hearts tender for the touching.

Five Years like yesterday

Turns out we’d both had a rough week. February 13 was the fourth anniversary of her younger brother’s death. He was 7 when he died; she was 12. She had been in denial, never speaking of it, never thinking of it, had put him and the grief out of her mind—he had been sick all of his life, diagnosed with a rare disease I can’t remember the name of, but she said it in two ways and even described it and all I heard was the debilitating way he had begun to diminish from his first birthday until he died at the age of 7. 

She said last year she was playing a concert on her 16th birthday, just days after the third anniversary of his death, when it all suddenly flooded to and through her without warning. It had just simply taken her over for the duration of the concert. She described how she just kept playing her instrument but was blinded by streams of tears and it didn’t let up the whole time. “I mean it was my sweet sixteen,” she said. “I was supposed to be happy and enjoying it but all I could think was how I didn’t deserve it. I was here and he wasn’t.”

But since then, over the last year, she has been able to talk about it a little bit with friends and now here in our Extended Essay meeting. Her mother rarely speaks of it but, immediately after he died, began studying to be, and now is, a social worker. Her father has never spoken about any of it. 

My week, too, had been hellish and all I could think of was getting home and decompressing with a four-day weekend—with only One Billion Rising to worry about. I needed to rest; I was spent and exhausted. I craved the solitude ahead and time stretching out through the next several days of just being. It had been all I could do to walk through the last few days and the charade of school work, planning, assessing, interacting, teaching.  Worst two days in years. Completely at the mercy of unrelenting grief.

I had forgotten we were scheduled for a meeting but fortunately she is a student in my last block class and she remembered. She is bright and has a glow about her I noticed right away when she first came to class August of last year as a sophomore. Ethereal, charming, with a fabulous imagination; she has already written a full length novel full of fantastical ideas—rather dark, as I recall, and more science fiction, aliens sort of thing. Her long, curly blond hair adds to her faerie like presence and I can easily see her living in Rivendell.

She has chosen to work with three stories that have trauma as the driving force of the narrative. How the narrative voice is shaped by this trauma; I can’t recall specifically the finer points. Each novel has a different style and a different trauma: death of a young sibling, death of a lover, death of a parent at an early age. Yet each of the first person narratives seems to play out the struggle with commonality in the distortion of the unreliability.  I asked her what drew her to such macabre, dark narratives?

That question led to the revelation of the 4th anniversary of her brother’s death yesterday as the same day as the 5th anniversary of Dad’s terminal diagnosis. We discussed how uncanny grief is and how it strikes without warning or seeming connectivity to the present and that no matter how much time passes, it doesn’t have any bearing on the actual strike whenever it chooses to violate the present.

As deep and profound as we got in this meeting, it only lasted 20 minutes. It was lovely to be able to speak of the most intensely painful thing each of us had ever experienced...that we both had this horrific anniversary the day before...how we had been each completely tsunamied by the intensity of emotion just yesterday, yet now we could speak of everything with clarity, completely transparent, unweighted, painless, only a day later.

She gathered her things to go and I gave her directives for following up with a written reflection in the software, and to upload the outline she’d shown me, and that I would be writing a summary also.  Then she stood there for a moment and we just were quiet for a brief second and she said, this was good.  I agreed. She added, this was kinda therapeutic. I nodded.  It’s nice, she said, to be able to talk about it all with someone who knows what it’s like. 

Likewise.

Tuesday's prayer (1221716)

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gratitude.  Yes.  Close my eyes and conjure.  Gratitude.  See the clearing beyond the row of palms along the freeway.  Yellows gold tans a drop of orange brown near white like corn husks and greens all shades... Gratitude.  Rain on the front windshield. Wipers suck.  Smear even in the hardest rain.  Doesn’t last long.  Windows back down.  Gratitude.

Be...
With...
Good good trip, all slights and almost misses notwithstanding
good
gratitude
almost right—close enough for Gratitude...
Now...then...Now...

Ambivalence.
Desire like craving.
Fear like deep sleep escape familiar stories comfort deadens desire.
Avoid it with certainty that nothing matters. Vanity...accusations of self pity.
Whatever.
Desire scares me.  Fear scares me. Deadening desire, escape, scares me.
Disappear into the characters I love with all my heart (and desire) ... scares me.
I live in the same decade of those who die young...just these last few weeks...
Bobby.  George Michaels.  Carrie Fisher.
If you’re gonna do it, do it now.  But it doesn’t matter. Nobody reads it.  Can’t finish it because nobody reads it.  So why is (she) afraid of it.  Nobody reads it.  Can’t sell hot chocolate to Eskimos.  Rather watch Bogey, Myrna Loy, Ray Burr, Barbie Hale, Bill Powell.... What difference does it make?

All I have are words.
Fear that I will spend my life into the words and it won’t matter.  The story won’t save me.  I will disappear.  Death comes ...

Too soon?  Too late?  Why am I caught in this quick sand of ... I’ve no word for it.

I’ve no word for it... it...  No word.

Reflection.
Recognition.
Resurrection?

Forgive me?
It’s not that I don’t believe...but that I fear.

Fear not...you say over and over and over.  How?

How do I fear not?
How do I do?
How do I believe it matters?
How do I move forward?

...I will lose again...

PROMISE ME
promise me...
Promise me you’ll come back.
Promise me all I have to do is look for you
promise me I’ll be there one day too
promise me
PROMISE ME
then keep your promise
keep your word
enable me to believe in the word again

I need the word.

4th Day Poem challenge

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March caves in
caves into my annual calendar
like a florida sinkhole
having given one precious life
takes another
or year
or more
so much promise
pollinating all that is natural
with promise of Easter’s supernatural
hope in life hereafter
beyond the sinkhole
beyond the depth of fear
and the warmth
left on the sofa cushion
a minute only after rising

gratitude grows, cracks the seed of grief
Resurrection morning following on the cusp
of dead and buried

unending tribute to Dad through cycles of grief, joy, gratitude...and hope

I remember the feel of the bark on the tree against my palms and against my cheek, the tricky slickness of the bottoms of my mary janes against the skirting of the trunk and roots.  I was five.  I could feel wisps of hair from the loose bun falling around my face and lilting across  my eyes as I blew kisses toward the camera at Dad’s beckoning. It was a pretty day and I felt pretty in my dress with the white top and dark blue skirt (were there polka dots?) And lacy socks and mary jane’s.  I felt pretty being photographed like a model and hanging out with my dad.  He was thin and his hair was still black, waved back with a beautiful hairline I see now when I look at photos.  He was cool.  He could sing beautifully.  He could take beautiful photographs.  He could tell wonderful stories.  He could write words to move you to tears or laughter.  He could take the big rabbit out of its cage behind Granny’s house and let me pet it.  He could drive fast through the mountains.  He could make up really good stories about people in restaurants eating at nearby tables. He could work all night. He could win writing, advertising and marketing awards. He could sell anything. He could only write when he had a deadline and a paycheck.  He could be gone for long stretches of time.  He could hurt my feelings faster than anyone.  He could make things that didn’t make sense make sense.  He could explain why people were the way they were.  He could pray with his eyes open. He could help millions of people get through national disasters or a political crisis.  He could negotiate the release of prisoners or a change in policy.  He could get splinters out of my finger.  He could pick out the best puppies.  He could bake a chicken that had cinnamon as a main seasoning ingredient.  He could order the best steaks.  He could help me map out a better plot sequence.  He could decorate a house—perfect compositions of wall hangings and furniture.  He could make things sound better.  Or worse.  He could move and uproot his family every two to three years.  He could make up the best words like disgustipating. He could make me feel like the most special and important person in the universe.  He could make me feel suffocated.  He could make me angry.  He could make me laugh.  He could make me cry.  He could NOT beat me at racquet ball once I turned 12.  Otherwise, he could do anything.  Except prevent vascular disease from taking over his life. He can still make me miss him and love him and forgive him for being human like the rest of us.  He can still be the best dad ever.  He can still speak to me.  He can still make me laugh and cry.  He can still make me feel special and loved.  He can still make me wish he were here to eat Calabash shrimp at the beach, or drink cherry ibc colas, or watch tennis.  He can still be here with me, for me, in my memory and in my ways.  I hope he can forgive me for not knowing a lot of things I wish I’d known...about how and how much he loved me...about misunderstandings that seem to linger...about how really really far death can separate you...about how impossible it is to know the story when it wasn’t told...  I put all of this into a pretty box of joy without sides, wrapped in paper of unlimited gratitude, and ribboned in swirls of grieving that will hopefully one day be untied...to find us all there—all the family for generations—together inside (and out) once again...

how weird was that? just streamed it all of a sudden...  and i might post it but I’d have to name it something like unending tribute to dad through cycles of grief and joy and gratitude...and hope...

i hope you have a great father's day and will celebrate your dad in a special way.  i'm grabbing moon pies and cherry ibc colas and going to the beach...

 

Insidious Subtle Paradise Mis*Taken

What if they’re right
Oedipus had no choice—I mean,
he had choices and made them (not knowing)
knowing full well the warning of the Oracle
not knowing well the implications, correlations beyond his imagination

that’s how they get you (whoever you are)
those who know but do not tell
and wait for you to learn as well
Experience can be the cruelest teacher
ready with bamboo stick to strike the unconscious one

and strike she does in traumatic swings
the unrelenting force of the blind spot revealed in hindsight (maybe)

the Oracle backs up, hands in the air
I tried to warn you, she says
but the grin flashes pointed opportunistic teeth of steel

but what if Oedipus had it easy

what if worse the boy were girl
who somehow in primordial mist mistook her emotional alignment
for providence (called her “my mother”)
and role as protector somehow not so maybe rightly friendship
(“mother?”)
wrongly understood and denied—no sexual predilection
but emotional gender somehow exchanged
beyond her imagination
(like a weed in a sidewalk crack
I will find a place to belong)
how could she have known one
defied the other
invited and accused
allured and rejected
told one thing seeing another
given life and death
a choice
beyond imagination
beyond control
flashing teeth and bamboo rattle
snakes around my memory

Oedipus had it easy

between death and resurrection october 4

100414  Emotional bombs keep exploding at the sight of things I’d forgotten.  Why do I weep?  Does it matter? I weep.   Dad, dead now only five months.  Like yesterday and forever alive but I can’t reach him or talk to him or roll my eyes when he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.  Except for that one time just before we had to move him to hospice, I got home from a visit, they live three hours away, and I called him to say I’d arrived home safely and we chatted about how wonderful the weekend was (as we always do) and then in childlike fun we exchanged all kinds of goodbyes—his voice, my dad’s of all my life so familiar so right so him, but in light-heartedness so rare for a man so serious—we played with, exchanged, all the different words for bubye...see you later alligator, tata for now, ciao, ciao bella, so long, see you next time, it’s been real, sianara, toodloo, adios amigos, bubye...and it went on for awhile and I was giggling and he chuckling, so great to hear joy in his voice, and mama was in the background saying, “Jerry!  Hang up the phone now!”  Dad and I were gloriously stuck in some delightful spin of timeless, spaceless connection that of course now is weighted down with all the grief of time violently chiseling away at such precious moments of being and connection, forever here separated by a violent, traumatic death that quickly followed that call.  It keeps roaring back at me like the relentless ocean waves storming onto the beaches of my memory and I can’t swim there any more.

Now Mama stands in her new, smaller, more cost efficient “garden apartment” sorting through for the third time in as many months, what she treasures.  This last time she sorted without me and so I picked up boxes labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” (my friend and I and others are having a garage sale next month).  This morning, back at my house, I opened one box she’d filled and in it, carefully wrapped, are the blue delft plates she so dearly loves from Holland they bought when they traveled there, permanent fixtures in every kitchen since, emblems of my youth and the certainty of a loving, mostly stable family and there they are in a box labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” and the whole world again crashes down on my heart and soul and it’s like the earth opens and swallows me into the shards of no longer being. And I hear echoing mama’s voice last weekend as she stands in her new, smaller, more efficient “garden apartment” say, “I just don’t really care about any of it any more.  I’m over it.  I look at things I’ve loved for so long and I’m just over it. Is that horrible?”  I don’t remember what I answered (didn’t know she meant my childhood, our whole lives together, surely she didn’t mean that exactly) probably responded that it might just be the numbness of so much grief and loss happening all at once that this is kind of a defense mechanism.  I’ll keep everything for you, Mama.  Maybe one day soon you’ll want it back.

Then again maybe not.

As keeper of the treasure I feel the weight of all who have gone before more profoundly than ever.  I have furniture and wall hangings and treasures with rich, variegated stories, swords and knives from all over the world, figurines and plates and, plateware, a window from Mama Ruth’s house, Chinese praying Jesus from Mema’s house, quilts from grands I never met, a village carved from a single piece of mahogany three feet long, and I can’t let go of any of it because I want my Dad back.

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.

Before I Knew It

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Long journeys into night
as a child I hunkered down in the floor board
curled into the bucket where feet should go
a box of kleenex, tote umbrella, empty paper cup
pushed further under the seat like secrets
my cheek on the scratchy carpet
same color as my hamster
but if you wiggled just right it was comfortable
and warm.  The hum pulled me to sleep.

Later, half awake, cooler air revived me just enough
to feel
softer embrace in the bucket of Dad’s arms
he carried me through the dim light of home again home again
jiggity jog
he laid me to rest like a most precious treasure
in my own bed
I briefly expanded between the cooler brighter sheets
and softest feather pillow that held the shape of my head
from the night before
and off to sleep before I knew it

before I knew it
now I awake from the dream of his presence
gone before I knew it