It’s filled with stars
As I drove home to lunch Friday afternoon, the sky was filled with mountains of billowing clouds, skimming the mountains below in a visual echo. The sky was darkening, threatening rain, and it seemed to match my mood which was also growing darker by the hour. Friday was a day of especially missing A. I make the distinction because I miss him constantly, but some days the pain is sharper than others. I think it was sharing the picture of the framed photo I had on my blog with my friend P, who agreed with me that it was a very good picture of a very fine man. In fact, I believe she used the word “yummy.” He was just her type. As he was mine. And P is exactly twice my age. That’s some broad appeal, pun intended.
As I’ve said before, the vibrancy of a man who savored life by habit and philosophy, a liveliness that shows even in photos, in his smile and the sparkle in his eyes, makes it hard to understand how he was chosen for death. That he was sicker than anyone knew and carried a time-bomb in his chest is equally hard to believe. He didn’t look like a dying man. He didn’t act like a dying man. So how is it he died? The answer is, “He just did.” Despite that being a wholly unsatisfactory answer, it is, in fact, the answer, and I really can’t imagine a different answer that would satisfy. I accept that I do not, and may not ever, understand why we had such a short time together. I acknowledge that I must accept the reality of the cycle of life, but am under no compulsion to like it. But some days I still think about the “Why?” and the “How is it possible?”
While most of us know, even if we don’t always practice it, not to take things for granted, like the people we love, a good job, our health, all of those rest on a bedrock assumption that we are alive to choose whether to take things for granted or not. Because we are born alive, and stay alive, I think every one of us possesses and accepts as truth an assumed, but unacknowledged, vital inertia: objects alive tend to stay alive. We may understand that we cannot take anything in our lives for granted, but I think we take life itself for granted unless we’ve been given stark and specific reasons to think otherwise, either in the death of those close to us or the too-close spectre of our own. That certainly has been true for me. And if I can take nothing, not even survival, for granted, then everything is up for grabs. I question everything, constantly, now, but am not yet to a place where that’s a good thing; it’s a mostly fearful thing right now. Maybe it will always be so.
With A’s passing, I feel like a chasm has opened in front of me, and I stand on the edge, peering in, as all the mysteries of the universe and my place in it swirl within it. All the big questions, questions I wasn’t at all prepared for, assaulting me at once and demanding answers I’m not sure I have. I am simultaneously frightened and intrigued at the thought that I might. Before, I would’ve told you I’m not afraid of big questions. But I see now that I prefer considering them one at a time, at my leisure, only in such depth as is comfortable, and with a safe distance between me and the question and any of its darker answers. It is all well and good for me to wax poetic, as I have in the past, about the metaphorical life-death-life cycle of all things. I was an English major; I can do metaphor. I find I’m not quite so adept at dealing with the actual.
Maybe no one really is. We just muddle through the best we can.
I find my self thinking often lately that I’m not as smart as I always thought I was, or, if I am, smart doesn’t really count for much when the big stuff hits you and knocks you flat. My own commentary of “sensible” self-talk sounds as hollow to my ears, and my heart, as anyone else’s advice. The rules are, there are no rules. And I’m not sure how to co-exist with chaos; neither am I sure that I have an option. The only option seems to be whether I coexist peacefully or not, whether I accept the reality or batter my soul fighting it. I will have to coexist regardless, but it’s a hell of a huge concept to try to make peace with, and I’m not anywhere close. I have this sense that the knowing I need to cope with these questions and the uncertainty this upheaval has brought to my life is a knowing that is felt, and has nothing to do with knowledge. It requires listening to a wisdom not found in my busy mind, and it requires faith that if I listen I will not be steered wrong. This is a tall order when faith is what I’m running short of these days.