November 2010
18 posts
A pause in everything: sitting in some hospital room, on the verge of a fear impossible to admit. Dad’s overtired, overstressed, from all the good he’s put into making sure everything gets done right. Bammy’s there, too, and it’s bittersweet to see her when she’s seeing you like this. I perch next to you on the bed, wanting badly physical contact to ease the effort of...
Animals, when separated from their parents too early, show certain common characteristics: oral fixation, separation anxiety, get-up-in-your-face attention seeking. I think the same applies to people; it explains more than it doesn’t.
I’m astonished by how she’s me, she’s mom, the similarities in her innate, unthinking patterns. The first I notice is the constant giving, a successful attempt to make happiness in the form of good mornin lattes, food made delicious with love and fresh ingredients. Then comes the constant desire for physical contact, “Snuggle me, bud”. This is where it comes from,...
There’s an intensity of feeling when something precious is hurting. A visceral swoop from stomach to mind of something like regret, a mix of an intense longing for things to be better and a stationary sorrow for the current state.
A week after you died, I got a gift. I couldn’t remember what you had looked like, sounded like, anything but the weak outlines of memory from before things got hard. But a week after you died, I woke up and you were there, right in front of me, a panacea of waking dreams. I’ll admit it, I lay there refusing to leave this place where you were for 2 hours, hoping against hope that...
Why is it that we hold our hurt so close to our hearts? Why do some people draw us out from under ourselves and others cause us to tuck deeper in, pretending a connection that we can’t trust enough to lean on? I wonder sometimes how much it has to do with how much our suffering resembles theirs, but that can’t be it – we lean on friends who’ve been “there”, but can’t make...
We went up on top of long mountain to let you go. We set loose the rose petals and the ashes that are all that’s left of you and the cedar box that seemed so much more appropriate. As we looked out across that view that you had seen so many times sick and well, all I could see was you reconning heaven, if it exists. No more of this pain and separate finally from this restrictive physical...
The ways we share ourselves is so simply complex. A taste of the pain is enough to share in the absent suffering, tempered by humor and anger directed toward “those that don’t get it”. We share snippets, enough to see the pain but not drown in it. We tell stories of hospital food, stupid bosses, hallucinating parents, and then lose ourselves in the relief of vitally inappropriate humor.
I’m on the couch for another barely slept night. Look at the tree, with its false familiarity, brilliant colored lights twinkling between ornamented memories, talk yourself down so you can lay down, tensely perched and prone, held in place by a blanket you can pretend is comforting, staring up into the needles of the douglass fir until it starts to blurr, slip off into the slippery edge into...
Behold the synergy of a family full of caregivers. In the emergency room again for the fever that won’t quit, all of you ready to move mountains to make things better and aware that there are no mountains to be moved. The easiest joys are the small things that you can wrap yourself in concentration over, tasks that help and take you out of this stupidly mechanical, hyperorganized and...
sometimes I like how much it hurts to miss you, and binge on the feeling that something huge has been torn out of the very heart of me. it feels like it honors you to sit in this suffering, even if I’m the only one that feels this way.
