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.

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

yellow marble...untitled...writer's block...

What is it? She asked, turning the small yellow object in her hand.
Enjoy the downtime, he’d said.  That was three months ago and still her muse was silent.  Not just her muse but her will.  Her interest.  Her passion lay dead on the floor.
I think it was once a marble.
The yellow...thing...did now seem to possibly fit that identification but still it was misshapen for a marble.  But yes, perhaps it was glass.
What am I to do with it?
Let go of the future.  You cannot make or be held to a promise that is so dependent on other variables outside your control.  They will all come to know that.
Besides, she added in her own skepticism, they have no doubt already forgotten.  I have already become a joke, a part of their story.  Remember that one teacher we had junior year...?
The silence screamed like fingernails on a chalkboard.  There were no real thoughts.  No dialogue.  No characters pulsing with a life beyond this ticking clock. The dead heart beat still pounding out the passing of glorious and open minutes with no sound and no life and no impulse.  Just fear.  And rustling of leaves so green and voluptuous in this season of afternoon storms and searing sun.
You must lose weight.  And get 8 hours of sleep.  This will keep your memory working and your brain will get younger.
I want to lose wait, she quips silently back to the flat LED screen whose prophet is bald and wearing all black.
Seriously, what is this thing? She rubs it between her fingers and the tiny sphere’s odd pocks and markings are rough among the smoother surfaces.  It is as if someone had blown a length of thick glass and while it was still warm, wrapped it into a ball.
You know what it is.
I know what it was intended to be.  A kind of story device.
A beginning.
A place to start.
A ticking of the clock with something.  Anything.
The threat of passing wakefulness empty of any story has shut you down. 
The anniversary of her death approaches and she would say what to you today?
No, those are your words of futility.  Your expectation weighs down the future like an anchor dropped through the glass bottom boat.
My words exactly.  You are sinking.
We are all sinking.
But I can’t hear you speak.  I find no voices only passing motors and whispers of all the green.  Green upon green of mindless joy and vibrancy.  Mindless pleasure itself growing and plump with the fullness of their intended being while I sit here in this stifling heat and wonder where my next meal will come from.  My next story.  This story.  Two stories that lie flat.  Unbreathing. Unmoving.  And I ungrieving look on. 
A marble.  This imagined thing that did not lead anywhere.  I could thump it with my thumbnail across the empty room in my head and it would hit no wall because it does not exist.  This yellow marble flawed by the glassblower who isn’t even a character and I have nothing to offer the blank page.  The marble has failed.
She pops it in her mouth to keep from speaking.