There were alone times the past few weeks, but this is the first in my space, the first time in the life I’ve built, the only place I truly settle. It permeates everything, that quiet. I could sit here, in just this spot, all day, without moving, doing nothing, and the world would go on around me. An overwhelming sense of relief washes over me and I don’t know whether to cry or just sit and be, because at last I can, because for this time it won’t matter which, and I won’t have to be too strong or too feeling or too anything. You forget how much peace there is in a void. In my forties life was full, to the brim, overflowing. My fifties are teaching me a hunger for fallow fields, for dark, for the quiet stir of nothing. I’m finding peace and patience are not hard lessons after all and silence is a gift, a space, full of possibility, empty of expectation.
I don’t cry in the silence, which frankly surprises me. Instead I write, not sure what will flow from my fingers, not sure if there are words yet for what I feel or all I don’t. My father died. He had colon cancer and yet I would insist his passing was sudden and unexpected. They seemed so sure he would survive the poisoning through pills and radiation. And maybe they have to be that sure. Perhaps they have to sell a slim chance at more life with the fervor of P.T. Barnum, and so they hide Vegas odds behind white coats and advanced degrees, specialties and best practices. You spin the wheel and the house wins, always, sooner or later, usually sooner. Of course, that’s probably the grief talking but it doesn’t make it any less true.
My father died of the congestive heart failure he lived with and the side effects of the treatment that was supposed to save him. The cancer didn’t kill him but the medicine did. Even his last days, nothing staying in or down, they kept up with the chemo, kept on with the radiation. Three more days to go, Mr. Cross. We wouldn’t want the cancer to come back in a couple of years. His last day, they took him to radiation so heavily sedated he never woke. In fact, he was never truly conscious again. He never recognized his wife or my brother and his wife, not even the little grandson he so delighted in. He never knew I was speeding down I-5 trying to get there in time, though even now God knows what I thought I’d be in time for. You don’t think life or death, at least I didn’t. All I knew is I had to get there and a 10-hour drive loomed before me as an impossible barrier.
After, of course, there are days spent in second-guessing, in what ifs and if onlys. We need to know we did everything we could have done. It gives us a kind-of absolution, the kind you need when someone dies unexpectedly and frankly, most of us die unexpectedly, even with a diagnosis of cancer or congestive heart failure or any of the myriad other death sentences which force us past if to when. If you are of a philosophical bent, then you might just say that birth is a death sentence and you’d be right. I would argue though, that no one seems much interested in philosophy and philosophers at times like this. Even if Socrates or Seneca would have found their way to our house of grieving, little comfort would have been found in their company. While most would have believed in an after-life and that my dad had led a good enough life to achieve it, Socratic questioning would have pointed out our failings of logic but would not once have soothed a sorrowful heart. Seneca’s “why not” when we railed against the unfairness of a good life cut down, “why him,” “why now,” frankly would have pissed us off and more than likely guaranteed that the famous Stoic would never have been admitted to the house again. The consolations of philosophy I suspect come only with time and healing comes, when it comes, one person at a time.
Another silence, two days later, as the house sleeps and the day, graced with Delta breezes and a marine layer from the Bay, stays dim and cool so the neighborhood sleeps too, later than they might have, burrowing deeper in covers against the chill, burrowing deeper into dreams against the vagaries of life. I sit, as quiet as my quiet house, and I still don’t know whether to cry or not, whether I have words or not, what I feel, if I feel. I write because that’s what I do, because I don’t know any other way to get a handle on things, thoughts feelings, especially feelings. My father is dead. My daddy is dead too. All the facets of this man who brought me into being, who walked with me in the garden, who cast me out as father’s sometimes do, have to so we will make our own way, our own lives, this man who loved me but could never find ways when I grew into womanhood to show it, all those faces and sides and pieces of him are gone., and I don’t know what to with that. Maybe I never will. Perhaps I learn in this silence that’s a gift, a space, full of possibility, empty of expectation. Maybe I can be that circle drawn by Shisui as his death poem, the essence of all things, void and enlightenment.
