I remembered that I had to photocopy - scan actually - some cartoons from the New Yorkers I brought along with me from home. I do this. Then I feel like I'm ready. So I open my email inbox, but I'm not ready. Not for this.
My dad's old, but he's doing okay. My father-in-law is living with congestive heart disease. He's hanging on. When we're around them this phrase, "Are you ready to die?" hangs in the air. My dad says yes, but he's willing to live a few more. Five, he said in my last phone call with him. He thought he'd be okay if he could live five more years. That would make him 95.
I want to be brave when someone, my own child maybe, asks me "Are you ready to die?" I want to say "yes" I'm ready. But like my father-in-law who's fighting it right to the end, I know I'm not. Not now. I'm no more ready now than he is. I have things I want to do.
At least you and I can hope to live long enough to have someone ask us that question, but you never imagine the question: Are you ready for someone you love to die? Are you ready to lose a child? a daughter? a son? a sister? a wife? You don't get asked this question because the answer is obvious.
So when I opened my email and read the urgent and private message, that was the nature of the situation, for someone I know. Of course it would be crass to say that I was grateful to read that it wasn't my child, but I thought about what it would feel like if it was my child who'd been in that accident. Another phrase that people throw around at times like these is "There but for the grace of God ..." but I didn't feel that either. And there's not much point in saying why that's a distasteful sentiment to express.
We are spirits first and bodies second. Moments like this, like this physical clicking of the mouse, the dropping of the stomach as you read, these moments derail us because what we're doing and feeling is so concrete and immediate. We are clicking. We are reading. We are feeling our stomach drop. We are breathing more heavily than we did a moment earlier.
But all of these physical signs are triggered by the deep spiritual recognition of the moment. Of that sharp truth that is immanent and fast. Faster than we read the words, faster than the mind registers who, or wonders how, or why, the spirit surges to the truth.
I didn't know the boy well. I spoke with him in the hall a few times. I know his older brother better. In that small town "how's it going" way I spoke with him last Thursday afternoon, at the Farm Service. There he stopped me outside the store and we talked about where he was working now, and what he'd rather be doing. He would have talked longer to me, his last year's high school English teacher, but I said I had to go. So he walked to his truck and I rode off on my bike.
Was there any anticipation of today in those moments? Why was I blind to it? I was caught up in my physical world. In the new jacket I'd just bought. In getting home for supper. But he wanted to talk. Did that need have anything to do with today? Was he already in some way getting ready for today? If he was, what was I doing, wanting to drive home rather than stand and talk?
A day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day. It is all, in the light and dark of the eternal, just a blur. How can we live at the mercy of these drifting days, together and apart, separated by the rising and falling and turning around of the sun and moon? Really we are dumb and mute in the face of it all, the real movements of souls and spirits. Not until one of us is taken too soon, do we feel that motion, that reminder that there are earthquakes of all kinds.
Ride report
in: -6'C wind 25 ks NE
out: got a ride home from Franklin; we drank a toast to Dante
No comments:
Post a Comment