Positively Glorious!

So I’m walking down the street last night. It’s dark, and I’m walking fast because I’m meeting my fair Jessica at a restaurant and want to be there before her, because I don’t mind waiting for her, but I know she doesn’t like waiting for me.

So, I’m walking faster than usual.

It was a beautiful night, actually. Pretty warm. I had my favorite brown leather “not used for a motorcycle anymore because I sold that to Jessie’s father” jacket and a new pair of  “original, hard as freakin cardboard because I’m not buying any of that ‘about to break down pre-washed’ crap” Levi jeans.

So there I am, hair down and flowing, all 6+ foot of me, striding down the hill thinking “I can’t wait to get to the restaurant and read my book until Jessie shows up.”

But that’s not what other people were thinking, I guess. Continue Reading »

I’ve never really had a problem with waiting.

I know that many people hate to wait for things– appointments, people, Christmas, whatever. That’s the reason that, as much as I can, I try to be early when I meet with people. I’m afraid that people don’t want to wait for me. At the same time, I sometimes wish people would show up late for meetings with me– even an hour late, I’m okay with that. Waiting, to me, is something of a gift.

The beauty of waiting is that often you have nothing else to do but wait. You usually can’t run some errand or take care of a bit of work or start a new project. You can’t really do anything but wait. That’s probably why many people hate waiting, and why I love it. Waiting is a break, a pause, a space. Waiting is an opening of time where the stretch of experience is expanded, however briefly, into a period of silence, and in that silence there is nothing to do but be.

Waiting is like God saying “Hey, why don’t you take a minute and relax. Chill out and stare off into space. No guilt, there’s nothing else you can do. So hang out and breath.” I love waiting.

Except when I’m waiting for something that might, or might not, be just really, really, horribly bad.

Then waiting pretty much sucks.
Continue Reading »

When I was 25, it was a very good year. There were, beautiful girls wearing… nurses uniforms and… telling me to wake up…

“Wake up. Wake up, John.”

Groggy, I opened my eyes to a white and pink room that smelled of a combination of death and the avoidance of death. A few days later, I left the hospital to 30 days convalescence leave and barely another year as a member of the “US Military” club before I would become a member of the much less exiting “US Veteran” club.

The “disabled” branch.

Mere moments later, with the top of my stomach wrapped around my esophagus, I was out of the military.

Off to college I went, assuming– like some blind, stupid fucking idiot– that I would live a long and completely normal life. Continue Reading »

… check. Throttle ignition lock? Check. And we’re descending into Despair in 4… 3… 2…

This is one of those things that sucks to write about, not because it’s hard to write but because the very act of writing it– while it helps me to formulate my thoughts and feelings– proves that it’s true.

And I really really wish that none of this was true.

There’s an onion that I’m peeling in life, lately, with layers upon layers of complicated realities. All of those realities involve a level of despair that I have carried with me for my entire adult life.

This is one of those damn “series” posts, because it’s just too much to write about at once.

Continue Reading »

Long-time readers will know that I’m a fan of Wordle, the web site that let’s you make word clouds of strings of text. I have a lot of them¹ because they present words outside the context of narrative, which is both disjointed and jarring, while at the same time being fascinating and beautiful. I decided to make a couple based on the writings I did during my Grief series to see how they would look.

There’s nothing really to describe, these graphic visualizations are up to the interpretation of the viewer. The words are places randomly and the size of the words is a function of their frequency of use, so there’s much left up to the viewer to decide upon.

The first is a word cloud of the entire series of posts. The second is a word cloud of just the final poem “Sunday.” The final one is the most poignant for me, since the word “space” appears more prominent than even “grief.” It’s interesting that both of these words and it was space away from my mother that I sought more than anything when she was still alive, and space within grief that allowed me to realize what was lost when she died. Continue Reading »

1. although you wouldn’t know it, since the recent destruction of my blog server screwed up all of my images links [↩]

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
The lost need nothing.
They are ashes and dust, pictures and memories.
They are mistakes and regrets.

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
Grief is a space in our living. It is a vessel.
It is a room, empty of all else.
It is a space in the soul, a space we need to breathe.

Grief is not for the lost, it is a space for the left behind.
Grief is a space for us to sit and cry, and to laugh out loud.
It is a space for us to think, a space to remember, a space to learn.
But most of all, it is a space to fill.

Grief is not for the lost, it is a space to fill.
It is a bowl into which we mix the ingredients of a soul.
Regret, mistakes, sadness, pain, anger. Love.
It is a bowl into which we pour ourselves, out of ourselves.

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
And into this grief, we pour ourselves, out of ourselves
So that we may see ourselves, within ourselves
and so we may have the space, within ourselves, to love.

Saturday.

What is Saturday?

Saturday is a placeholder. Saturday is a schedule. Saturday is an opening in a schedule.

Saturday is a funeral. Continue Reading »

You step off the plane into a winter of anger and regret. It’s cold in the town of your youth. Much colder than you remember. It’s more grey than you remember. In fact, there’s very little that’s the same as you remember.

The town of your youth is exactly the same.

Your cousin picks you up at the airport and you decide that the innocuous questions that she asks you are just that. You decide that she’s not a spy, sent behind enemy lines to steal tactical information. You decide to believe that she’s just your cousin, and she’s asking questions that anyone would ask. But you know you’re wrong. Even if her questions are innocent, the information will be carried back to the enemy.

No. Stop.

The answers will be taken to your family.

This is not a battle between members of your family. There are no sides. There are no lines. It is not a battle, but the battlefield after a battle that your mother fought with life. There is one death, there are a lot of wounded people who desperately need care, but the battle is over. Continue Reading »

You take the day off on Thursday.

You tell yourself that it’s because you have to prepare yourself for 7 hours in the middle seat of a plane. You tell yourself this, but mostly it’s just because you’re suffocating and need some space to breath. You feel like you’ve been at full throttle for weeks, though it’s only been a few days, and your eyes burn as if you’ve been awake for the entire time.

You wake to the last bits of evening snow melting on the ground in painfully brisk air. Strangely, the sun is shining this morning. The sky, having shrugged off it’s robe of clouds and dread, sports an azure skin that can almost be mistaken for summer, though it’s barely spring, and barely warm enough to leave your scarf behind.

You sit in the silence of the mourning and stare at the back yard for a few moments. One minute, two, fifteen, thirty. Looking out at the lawn you so carefully prepped for winter, the new patio you and your wife built with your own hands. You see tiny, tentative buds on the maple tree that your father-in-law carried on a plane all the way from his backyard because he thought you might like a maple. The first moments of spring hint at their awakening before your eyes, and they become increasingly difficult to see as tears swim before the images.

Crying, you realize what mourning is for. Continue Reading »

You are starting to understand why people need time off to grieve, because the exhaustion you feel this morning is more than you could have imagined. It’s a dark heaviness that pulls you down to a space just a bit beneath the floor. A dark place where bones lay.

Another morning of images. The gray sky, eggs on toast, coffee, a blue robe. Snatches of moments driven by a quiet lover as she tends to everything. You stare at a spot on a piece of paper trying to remember what street you lived on when your mother said that joke and you laughed, connecting for one brief moment. Trying to remember a snapshot of time surrounded by years of isolation and anger.

The sunshine sits beside you and she says something about the homemade bread being a bit hard this time and you start to cry again. We did the best we could on that bread, you think, it’s not perfect, but we did the best we could– we did the best we knew how.

You’re sobbing now, but there are no tears this time– black-hearted people don’t deserve the relief that spills out in tears. There’s just the dark sullenness of a heart made of coal.

A hard heart that hated it’s baker. Continue Reading »