Labor Day weekend Shabbat and I have just returned from Cedars Sinai, where my father is on life support and John is in a different hospital in a different county, sitting with his own 90 year old father, who is also in critical condition. I allowed myself recently to be dramatically devastated by the loss of words and pictures due to hard drive corruptions and lost diaries. I wept at the loss of my own stupid trivial blather and now I am on the precipice of one of life’s inevitable and shattering losses. God saw my bullshit and said, “I’ll show you loss baby.” To which Spuds would roll his eyes, and snarl, “Yeah Mom. It’s always about you.”I stood by my Pop today and instead of telling him to surrender into the light or offering other spiritual admonitions which, if he weren’t completely incoherent would disgust him profoundly, we remembered the paradox of elegance and flamboyance, and crankiness and compassion that is my dad, who lives as I write this, but well might not be alive when I finish. And if he is, we will have gotten through another hour. I do not know if the “hour by hour” basis on which we are evaluating our prospects will shift to “minute to minute” or back to “day by day”. I do not know God’s plan. Mine is to drink in every second on this planet of having a living father, who loves me fiercely and who I love fiercely in return.
Shabbat Shalom.
2 comments:
May light perpetual surround Al and those who love him, this side, the other, now and forever.
I remember asking my mom in intensive care if she wanted to "go", and she looked at me with half the brain she had left and said, "are you crazy?"
Love from the north.
As I type this, a Corgi looks at me upside down from the floor. I wonder what the dog knows about the perpetual light, and if we are better off being as scripture assures us, "a little less than the angels." This is our curse and blessing, the gift of knowledge and the expulsion from Eden. Stay steady, and realize that here you reach your own core in these hours where no platitude, no verse, no bedside manner may touch you and yours, but still it is a place you are called to go, and wait, and in whatever way you can pray and be with your father and Aliki. xxx me
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