“Do you still have your Faith,” he asked me point blank.
I paused long enough to figure out how I was going to lie to him.
“The Catholic Church is not what it was,” I said.
It was the lie I knew he would believe because he felt the same way.
My son is impossibly pragmatic and realistic about life. The answer to most conflict that gives me anxiety is a shrug and an infuriatingly simple answer. The path of his life is a straight line from where he is now to his destination. Sometimes he knows where that is and sometimes he doesn’t. To him, there are no detours, only roads on which he is currently driving.
I’m not like that, but I’m learning how to be by watching him.
He doesn’t quite understand that he is a detour in the life I had planned out for myself. Perhaps because I never told him and never will.
He has given me the most wonderful, exciting, challenging and scenic detour my life could have ever taken. Without him grabbing the wheel and violently veering me off course, I doubt I would have had the guts to have seen or done as much as I have. Without him, the detour would have not been part of the journey. He still steers me down a rocky, off-road path at times.
I’m hoping I know when it’s safe to ditch the car and set out on foot. But for now, I’m glad my son is riding shotgun with me, even though he may be unaware he is.
I received a text from my dad late Friday night:
I will be going for aortic aneurysm surgery Mon Feb 14. At 77 this could be serious. Prayer would be welcome. DAD
My first reaction was sadness mixed with anxiety. I had not seen him for twenty-eight years and I hoped the last words to me would not be that text. Then, as my head started working around, I began to think he was manipulating me. I wondered what he expected from me, what he thought my obligation to him was. Why was he telling me this?
I felt guilty that I would not pray, though I wish him a successful surgery and speedy recovery. I would text him back Saturday morning, saying I would pray in abundance for him. That might ease his mind thinking that he would not die with me losing my Faith. In his mind, that would be his greatest failure.
It is late afternoon on Monday. My phone has not yet rung.
“You will be the first to notice that love is fading: The first to notice the shift in your lover’s eyes or the restlessness in their arms when they hold you.” Jane Devin
I was ok reading her blog post until I got to that sentence. It shook me as I realized with terror that others I loved once may also have the “gift” that was passed on to me from my childhood. I had worked so hard to mask who I am and what I was thinking from those around me. I had practiced the art of being absent so that when they got too close to my soul, being gone was characteristic; no big deal.
And then I felt the chilling terror of possibility that I was not even who I told myself I was.
That was worse.
I looked up briefly from my toast and his eyes caught mine.
I had agreed to meet him for breakfast on that last Sunday morning at a diner on University Avenue. I can’t recall the name of the place or where it was exactly, just the smell and the way the table butted up against the window looking out at the busy street outside.
I have not seen his eyes for twenty-nine years but I remember them looking sad and lost. He did not know where he was going or how I felt about him leaving. I think he was scared I thought of him as a failure for being kicked out of his house and away from his life without a fight.
I didn’t. Truth is, I felt nothing.
I often think back to that moment and remember it in flashes, like someone waking from a dream, grasping at the wisps, trying to figure out if it really happened. And then they were gone.
When you left, did you take any of me with you or did you leave it all behind, like worn socks and crumpled old newspapers?
I often wonder when people leave and never look back, how much of me — if anything — they take with them. I find myself puzzled at how people who are no longer part of my life can find themselves nestled in the dark corners of my mind.
Am I in theirs as well?
The pursuit of happiness demands that you pay her in large sums of rationality.
Every minute of every day, I have intense thoughts and feelings running through my head. I have an urgent need to write them down in a blog, in a journal; somewhere they won’t get lost.
And I look back at the word count and realize that what felt like an entire chapter or a book is only a few hundred words. They will be even less when a good editor takes a red pen to them.
Can you measure the volume of thought in words? Why is it that what makes my head feel like it is exploding hardly makes a dent when written down?
Someone said to me just yesterday, “But you’ve found your niche.”
No, not really. What I have done is gathered a whole bunch of stones and started stacking them up. Over time, they have become a nifty little wall. The mortar between the stones is how I glue all these skills, abilities and attributes into something that kinda resembles a career.
But at the end of the day, it is just a lot of stones — some big, some little — cobbled together to form a wall that looks like a work of art or even a planned enterprise.
But it really isn’t. Just some random stones that looked like they might need a home.
The truth is never a caricature of the facts.
But it is the caricature that is easier to believe, easier to see, easier to sell.
Believing a truth takes faith and trust.
I love Christmas. Whenever it gets to the day after Thanksgiving, I say a small prayer of thanks that I lived one to see one more Christmas and vow that if this is my last Christmas, I will be my best one yet. And when I pack up Christmas right after New Year’s Day, I say another prayer asking that I see another. One year I know the answer will be no.
I have never told another living soul about this. It is weird.
Or so I thought until I saw this trailer for Footnote (you have to watch on their site. Sorry, no embed.) Watch from the beginning, but especially at 1:06. BTW, if you are awake tonight at 3:00am EST, watch.
I think that the perfect way to die is quietly, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, sitting on the sofa looking at the Christmas tree all lit up, with a cup of coffee, my dog laying her head in my lap and “Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg playing on the radio.