| I find strange the things my mind latches onto in moments of loss - the things that affect me most in times like this. For instance, I can't stop thinking about the fact that the last thing my grandfather ever said to me was "Seth (my cousin) looks just like you." I don't mean to fill it with undue significance, but it just is more significant. I can't remember anything else we said in that conversation, though that is largely due to the obstruction of his oxygen mask. When my mom's father passed away, I was far enough removed (having been in Taiwan at the time) that all I experienced were these filtered moments. The fragments that my family remembered, the things that lodged in their minds, were the things I was told and the only things I knew about his passing. I wrote a poem at the time in part trying to encapsulate that experience - the disjointed nature of loss. We may want those moments to run smoothly, seamlessly, like the emotional climax of some film or novel. But real life is not so accommodating. What we get is the frantic, clipped chaos of loss and are left with only pieces and shadows out of which we stitch together our memories. Another thing i remember clearing about that poem, that loss, and loss in general, is how disorienting it is to have the fabric of your reality torn asunder, but to see nothing change. One of the weaker passages of that poem had tried to bring out my shock at realizing that the flowers hadn't changed color, that the world failed to recognize that something important had happened. This time around, I have experienced this in a way that recalls David's morning of his illegitimate son. In the story, David fasts and prays and mourns and cries out to God to save the child of his sin with Bathsheba. Yet, when his retainers come in and tell him that the child has, as God promised, died, David gets up and asks for a bath, a shave, and breakfast. Those around him were horrified that he could be so callous, but David replies with something to the effect of, "I've mourned his passing, and now that he is gone there's nothing more I can do for him." And (having just looked up the passage to refresh my memory) he poignantly says, "I can go to him, but he will not return to me." That still sounds a little callous, and i don't mean to say that is how i now feel. But there is a similarity. When i first was told that they were taking him off life support - that the machine breathing for him would cease to do so and that he would slowly suffocate in morphine induced sleep - it hurt. Terribly. And i was racked most the next day.Yet, when I found out late last night that he was really and truly gone, i was unaccountably calm. Perhaps it was like the difference between saying goodbye to someone at the checkin gate and seeing the plane depart. They are only really gone once the plane takes off, but it isn't experienced that way. Perhaps it was because he was already gone in most senses of the term. Perhaps it just hasn't hit me yet. |
