Down To Your Grave...

Time Is...

Dripping (Redux)

I can still remember the sound of Ellie trying to suck in air between fits of crying. The inward gasps were worse than the screams that echoed through the house, not because of any particular sound they made, but because I could feel the exhaustion in her lungs, in her flexing arms and legs and fingers and toes. I remember thinking that I was just as spent as she was and wished with selfish sympathy that she would stop for me. Stop for Dad. But she wouldn’t. She was six months old and, though it seems like a lie now or at very least a reckless memory, she had never stayed up to cry in her life. But she was sick then and What to Expect the First Year pointed us to a general explanation: the flu. I was contented with the diagnosis but Brooke was not convinced. She held onto our baby with the same prayerful grace that she held onto her father with just before he died. I hovered around mother and child trying in an uncomfortable effort to say I understood, to say that I was there in case it was serious. But after an hour or two of awkward fatherness, I went to bed. I know Brooke has forgiven me for falling asleep through Ellie’s cries, but I wonder sometimes how she feels about a father that slept through those helpless inward gasps.

*

Two years before Ellie got sick, Brooke’s father died. I had only had a year to avoid Marvin Heath’s steely eyes before I lost the chance to find out what was behind them. The Multiple Myeloma cancer ate his bones from the inside out, but he ultimately died of kidney failure and starvation. The man my new wife loved even more than her husband wasted away to an empty chrysalis, and I know for a time she was left with nothing. I did not know how to be there for her. I did not even know where there was.

We all hovered for days before it actually happened. I was on the outside looking in. My tears weren’t Heath tears and I did not want to pretend I understood, even if I did. I was scared to mourn as Marvin’s wife mourned, as his children mourned. His bread of life. I did not want to intrude on something that was uniquely theirs. My feelings became transient and I found myself crying when I was alone. Not crying out of loss or pain. Just crying. Perhaps I should have intruded. I should have let them know I feared and mourned and understood in some small way. Or perhaps they found some unifying solace in their distaste for my distance. I won’t ever know now. The time is past and the subject is as welcome as a gravestone in a flowerbed.

That was the first and only time I have ever been around death. It is a process like the melting of an icicle. The memory goes, the body withers, the mind drips drips drips until there is nothing left to hang onto. One day, expectedly but quite arbitrarily, what is left crashes to the ground and it’s over. I spent the majority of the only year I knew Marvin Heath standing in the hallway outside his bedroom while his family watched him die within. He is the white walls of a dimly lit hall in my memory. He is gone. And all I hear are the echoes of dripping.

*

It has been two months since Ellie kept her mother awake and I slept two doors away. After having taken her to see a pediatrician, Brooke rushed Ellie to the emergency room while I was at school. When I came home six hours later, there was a note on the cupboard. Come to the hospital as soon as you get home. Brooke. I tried to concentrate on simply pushing the air in and out of my lungs, pushing the echoes out of my head, as I drove the fifteen miles to the hospital. I got there in time to hear the doctor say the word serious twice. Ellie has a serious bone infection called Osteomyelitis. It helps that you caught it early. It’s a serious condition. It is an unfair word for a doctor to use. It cuts. It cuts whatever tendons or muscles hold your heart in your chest. Does it mean long term illness? Does it mean paralysis? Does it mean amputation? I looked at Ellie’s little legs and tried not to imagine their absence. Ellie was not crying anymore and Brooke was holding her in that way again. That watchful, prayerful, terrified way again. And I knew what serious meant. It meant eating from the inside out. It meant melting and withering. It meant drips.

Time in the hospital was marked by blood tests and beeps. Ellie gained strength and we finally took her home with just an IV in her arm and a six-week treatment to show for her scare. She has been up and down since then, mostly up, and the word serious has disappeared. But there are still nights when I look at her fragile baby body lying in her crib and I am forced to consider what death might mean. What will it be like when I’m on the inside? When there are no white walls to hide behind? I can sense it at times. It flattens me out. It is an ice storm. It freezes then shatters my heart and my lungs. Will I be left with nothing like Brooke was two years ago?

I think on the times when Ellie is laughing. When mom and dad and baby are dancing with our home wrapped around us, dancing in each other’s arms like leaves in a whirlwind and baby squeals with angelic bliss and mom starts crying, smiling and crying like her very essence might burst with joy and anguished ecstasy. I will not be left with nothing. I will have this. And I finally understand that prayerful grace that Brooke holds Ellie with. That same embrace that she gave her father. It is her dance. Her moment. She was not left with nothing.

Ellie is sleeping and there’s an echo in my head. No dripping. Just the sound of my baby breathing.

Oh, G

While Jesus was winding his way down the dungeon corridors, plowing through every evil enemy that Satan could throw at him, unlocking every cell door to set every prisoner free...I was running deeper and deeper into the dark. There in Gethsemane Jesus chased down every last soul. And the billion papercuts on his heart would not stop until he had reached the final one. And I was running deeper and deeper into the dark. I imagine that the first cell door that he opened freed my brother Damion. I imagine that he carried little Ellie on his shoulders, out of the reach of the hissing snakes of Satan's servants. And I imagine that I kept running. And when he checked on PeterJamesandJohn one last time before going back into the garden for one last hour of hell, he told them, "All are rescued, except one. Wait for me if you can. This may take awhile." And wearied and broken he hurdled himself back down the dungeon corridors. And after eons of tortured searching at last he found me. And I cowered in the corner of a tiny secret passage at the very end of the deepest tunnel. And he reached out his hand. And I tucked mine into my armpits. And he took me by the ear and said, "Garred. Love." And he groaned, "It is finished," and finally restedsleptdied. And this is the mystery of a salvation that has already been executed, that will one day be discovered by me. Garred. Love.

Mom in tsunami: I saw my daughter floating away

This was a brief video story on CNN.com. The headline made me sick and I'm not sure why I opened the link. I can't get the child's last words out of my head. I hope this mother's faith is larger than mine is. I would not survive the night.

Taitasi Fitiao was holding her six-year-old daughter's hand when a tsunami
wave crashed onto their coastal village in American Samoa.
"I held her hand.
The wave got us and that's when her hand just left mine and I could hear her
say, 'Mom, please.' And then I saw her, I saw her floating away. And I knew
right then that she was gone, she was taken from us."

You can read the rest of the article here.

Cradle (redux)

The first story I ever remember writing was about a boy who became an astronaut and then turned into a star. The first short story I wrote in high school was about an old man fishing in a pond trying to catch the bobbing reflections of the night sky. And the first personal essay I wrote in college was about a spiritual epiphany I had while following the Milky Way on a dusty Ecuadorian road.

If I ever publish a book, you can bet the nighttime expanse will be prominently featured.

I don't know what it is about the heavens that so distracts my subconscience. I mean rarely do I purposely think about the stars and the blackness in between, but it seems that every time I put pen to paper my thoughts automatically reach upwards. I suppose it's akin to coastal people writing and thinking about water. As I consider it, many of my fondest childhood memories come from the back seat of our family car. On long drives home from who-knows-where I would lay in the back seat and stare out the window into the heavens until I fell asleep (or pretended to fall asleep so that my mother would carry me into the house). It was as if the arm of our Milky Way somehow held and rocked me in the darkness.

I remember the first time I noticed that my Cradling Galaxy was missing from the sky. It was the Fourth of July. My parents had divorced several years earlier and I was just starting to notice the strangeness of their relationship. Deep inside my stomach swelled a murky green storm as I watched my father try to light a firework, fail, get advice from my mother, mutter something under his breath, and hand the unlit menace over to her in an overly macho way. It was, quite remarkably, the first time I realized that they didn't love each other. I was 8 or 9.

That night I slept on the lawn with my older brothers and sister. They fell asleep almost immediately and I was left to shoulder what I believed to be an infinitely unfair and lonesome burden. For in my mind, I believed that I was the only one, youngest though I was, to come to this loveless realization. And it was too cruel and the storm was too green for me to ever share the news. I was 8 years old. And I was scared. I was 28-year-old scared. I was 87-year-old scared. I was 3-month-old scared. And as my eyes instinctively looked upwards, I cried. My starry mothering arm had melted away into a big-city sky. There were a few mocking stars. And the sound of my sobs. I was alone. I 8-year-old cried.

Oh Ellie, please don't ever turn 8. But you will. You will probably turn 8 when you're just 5 or 6. You will turn 8 before I know what to do. My baby bear cub, my angel, please remember this: God is Love. And that forever.

Testing. Testing. Is this thing still on?

Joseph Tellier

He laid his head on the mahogany and took a deap breath in. From this angle he could see the heavy layer of dust that covered the floor, broken only by the game trail plotted by his own feet. The bed. The refrigerator. The couch. The bed. His red pulse slowly began to pool in his view, stage right. He could feel his eye twitch against the dust, and immediately thought how superfluous it would be to blink now. How pointless. But against his mighty reason, he did.

He knew he had made a mistake. He raised his hand to feel the wound in his chest, noticed an orange peel by the foot of his bed, thought of a story he had once heard about Christmas, and died.

grey girl

I took a little piece of brown bark and folded a boat.

We pushed off into the stream, bobbed over the lake, and drifted into the ocean.

You took the ribbon out of your hair and stood there on the bough like you were naked.

You, my sadly happy Edith Piaf.

Lately...

Some of you have been wondering what I've been up to lately. Well, the truth is I'm really into a lot of diverse activities these days. I like to mix it up. I just need variety, you know?

YES WE CAN!

Thank you, Mr. Obama.

Mount Fuji

in you,

the symmetrical,

sensuously

serene

lives

of the Japanese.

Finally