Whole lotta love & loss

Consider yourself warned:  I've been trying to write this post for most of my life.  


(If that is a bit too dramatic for you, then at least believe that I've been wrestling with it all summer.)


So here's a question:

Do you ever look back and see distinct eras in your life? Do you think:

I wish I'd known that chapter of my life was closing.  If I'd known, I would have cherished that time, savored that good-bye, lingered just a bit longer and soaked it all up before leaving.


Lately I am being slowly and surely pushed into another stage of life, one that I understand intellectually, if not emotionally.  A chapter is ending, folks, and although I am aware, I am not necessarily any more equipped to face this change with grace than if I were walking in blindly.  It is, apparently, my lot in life to mourn things preemptively and then still get smacked completely out of orbit when the dreaded event finally occurs. 

The Year of our Lord 2012--a la Maggie--is riddled with milestones:  I turned 35, my dear papa turned 80, my baby sister turns 30 this month. 

I found to my surprise, in the months leading up to my birthday, that some part of me was extremely reluctant to accept this new thirty-five-ness.  I considered this for a while, pondering it and turning it over like a pebble in my hand.  Why?  I am not particularly worried about aging, truly, or at least I never used to be, so what was wrong with me this year? 

What's wrong is that I celebrated my 30th only a few short months ago.  Now, 25--that's been a while, I'll grant you, but 30?--no way.  It is simply not possible that five years have already gone by.  If this is how time has started to pass, then we are all in big trouble.  I might blink too many times and end up 105 years old and the only person I know left alive. 

And then, my friends started losing parents.  Right and left, willy-nilly, a universe gone suddenly mad and vengeful:  six deaths in eight months.

2012 is claiming its pound of flesh, by God. 

Each time, I have found myself without words, blindly stumbling through the stash of exquisitely inadequate phrases I learned as a pastor's kid at funerals long ago: 

I'm so very sorry for your loss. 
My heart and my thoughts are with you. 
If I can help with anything, please let me know. 
If you ever need to talk, or a shoulder to cry on, I'm here. 

Each friend and parent are unique, of course, and each loss has its own sharp edges and hidden, deadly quicksand.  Each time, I retreat to my safe space with Jason, cats, chickens, garden, our shady green yard and the river nearby, constant in its silvery flow.

I come home guilty with a secret and overwhelming relief:  it isn't my parent that is gone--the child in me is still safe, still loved unconditionally, still a part of a familiar, well-ordered world.

And now we are at the crux of this post, this life-long never-ending post:

Dad was very sick over the winter, hospitalized twice, and the bad news started to pile up in layers as we watched him sleep in the hospital bed:  infections, kidneys, heart.  If I live a thousand years, I will not forget my dad sitting at the dinner table, newly home with his IV-bruised hands, so fundamently exhausted that his head hung down chin to chest, bowed and cowed like no big, strong dad of mine should ever be. Tuning in and out of the conversation, a bit bewildered, shaky, skin thin and papery, eyes occasionally losing their fire entirely.  This was bone-deep.

I've been trying since I was a teenager to be prepared for my dad to turn eighty.  And now I find that I've wasted all of this time in preparation for something that it is not possible to emotionally anticipate.

I am the oldest in a second family; my parents have always been older than my friends' folks, and that has largely been just fine.  We've had running jokes about AARP, Modern Maturity, and senior discounts at restaurants, and all the while strangers are shocked to learn that my parents are the age they are.  We keep them young--my little sister and I laugh and roll our eyes, and we will continue to do so.  There are no certainties here.  We may well celebrate Dad's 95th in fifteen years, and I will look back at this post and shake my head at the self-imposed drama, yet again.

But with every friend's loss, my faith is shaken.  When is it time to shrug off other pressing responsibilities and fly away home?  When do you drop everything and go?  How can I make the most of the closing pages of this particular chapter, the one in which I walk around the earth with my family healthy, lucid, and intact? 

While I was growing up, my parents suffered the loss of one of my older sisters, and a vivid lesson that I learned from the aftermath is that the death of a child is unnatural and the grieving almost unsurpassed.  The implication was then, and is now, that losing a parent is...natural...and therefore somehow more tolerable, a fact that I've tried to comprehend ever since. 

As a witness to my friends' grief over these last months, it seems to me that the only generalization that we can attribute to any death is that it is always unique and intensely personal to those left behind, and I know, even as I write this, that there are no ready answers to the questions that have seemed so monumental to me this year.  I have been wrong:  this is a new chapter, a blank page yet to be written, and I know that this, truly, is where adulthood begins.

****

I remember:

We were on the road, six hours through the country side, heading to the town where all of my dad's earliest stories were written, and where my own began.  The news had come that my dad's mother was dying, and we were trying to get there in time to say good-bye. 

We stopped for gas (and candy--this is my memory, after all) and for my dad to use the pay phone to call the nurse's station for an update on Grandma.   When we returned to the car, Dad was back in the driver's seat, and he was crying.  He had never done that before.

He said:  I'm an orphan now--and certain substantial and permanent parts of my universe shifted and tumbled out of place.  For the first time, I understood that he was someone's little boy, that he could be my dad and that boy at the same time...that he had been all along. 

And I know now, that it is okay to be that bewildered child still in my heart, that being an adult means inwardly balancing that child with the outer grown-up...and allowing both to do the best they can.


Outside of my window, after months of dryness, things are green again, and they are starting to grow.