Stay Alive

I had expected the revolt to be louder after the news came; instead, it seemed to enter and slip straight into our reality, too definite to be left unconsidered, too nebulous to yet be named. They say that the process of grief has five stages, and the first is denial. Is this denial, or is this merely the absence of grief, the calm before the storm, the announcement of something still part of the distant future without its unrelenting consequences sinking in?

Tuesday I stopped by a former client's house for a signature, and she told me that the children still cry when a storm comes. They remember the tornado that took their barn down three years ago, and time has softened the memory but it remains. She said that this past summer her husband was in the barn and a freak twister came down the cornfield on the hill and moved the barn wall—a brand new solid thing—ten feet. Then it stopped. If it hadn't, they aren't sure if he would still be alive. She said that they felt the force of the twister coming, that when it touched down their hair started to stand on end and they could feel it pulling towards itself; all around them the storm had gone and the farm was unearthly silent, but for the rush of the wind tearing a path towards their barn. They never made it to the basement.

Coffee cannot seem burnt and bitter enough these days. I have a cold, and trouble savouring things.

For a long time chocolate and beer was all I could taste.

When Kitten watched Garden of Words she spoke most of the beautiful shoes. Yesterday I saw her in a crowd, and she wore open-toed wedge sandals, bright ones, with brown and mauve stripes. Their gaiety lied about the circumstances.

Is gaiety always a lie about the circumstances?

Last month I finished reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, and in it she spoke with a kind of appalled interest of bird-headed dwarfs, children who are born and grow, but stay infant-sized in their development and frail, children whose mothers could tuck them into their oversized purses like small dogs. She mentioned other genetic conditions, but the bird-headed dwarfs left their imprint. On page fifty-three of the book she wrote, "I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir, you have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? Your maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky—crack it at one blow, split it at the next—and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT'S with the bird-headed dwarfs?"

I should feel that way about Mom. I should feel that way about a lot of things. And sometimes I do, but this time not so much; this time it feels less like screaming and more like silence, more like that small quiet room people call acceptance. Or perhaps it's only the stillness before the strike of the tornado. Until that point comes, is there any way to know?

Of course, nothing is set in absolutes, or even in definite prediction. Maybe that's the softening element in all of this, that we don't really know anything: we have a pathology report and statistics and the jarring reminder that life isn't what we decide it will be. Apart from that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

More than one person has told me that faith is consolation, that the situation is in God's hands and that all will be well, but C. S. Lewis said better words: "They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. .... How do they know she is 'at rest?' .... 'Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine."

And then there is Job. Job, who lost all he had, who in one day found the entirety of his vast domain burnt, slaughtered, crushed, stolen, and poisoned. There is no safety anywhere at all, not even in God. God as protection from anguish and loss is a lie. God as guard round about our lives is a lie. Life happens as it will happen, or as it is made to happen, and the cry of  "Of course he's not safe, but he's good," means something entirely other than "I'm not afraid," or "It won't be unbearable," or "He wouldn't do that to me [or allow that to happen to me, or whatever else might be said]."

The breaking will happen, one way or another. It always does. We start out struggling and fight our way in varying degrees through an existence weighted against our survival, and some of us come out the worse for wear than others. I can foresee so little, but when the shattering happens, give me no promises of a benevolent God. Tell me nothing of how safe He is, or how reasonable, or how great the rewards He gives. He is not reasonable, and He is not benevolent, not by my standards, and talk of gifts in the yawning vacuum of loss is like trying to placate a child abandoned by his parents with Smarties. I will not defend Him to myself on my terms, I will not make up a plausible excuse for the allowance of anguish. "But who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?" If God and nightmares can be defined in one breath, how can there be any good in the world at all? When faced with hell, we need something bigger.

This Time Last Year

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein."  

Mark 10:15, KJV

The soul is healed by being with children.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is something so compelling about the small ones.