The Cheat and the Nook

The Cheat and the Nook

You gave me a cheat sheet. 

You gave me Elijah. 

In the darkest most still moment of my despair.

It has been oxygen...

I know it.

What a strange realization;

To feel a blending of horror and gratitude. 

To have this small bit of grace.

These days time feels stretched out long and rolling; not like my early grief that slammed me as  waves on a beach. Now I 100 yards out, neck deep, and the force of the whole ocean body quietly lifts me and sways me up and down; forward and back. A rhythm less difficult, but much more powerful. I am buoyed by the "cheats" you have given me. Your words and wisdom pinging in my heart, sustaining and informing, comforting and encouraging. Promising. You have shown me how this all works for you and me and us all....

I see other heads in the water too now, not just my own. I see them navigating the current, just like me, helpless and hapless and trying to manage the surf. Perhaps they've found their own cheats. Maybe for them it is Jesus, or a lover; perhaps it is a baby or a friend or a dog or a drink.

Anyway, now since you've given me my small box of treasures and planted a spark of you within my very heart, I am beginning to make my own sense of how to survive and live on.  Now, on occasion, I am finding a small clearing of the pain, a breaking in the clouds, a quiet moment in  the din of grief. It comes suddenly or not so suddenly. It comes.. It came last Monday, at dawn as I was waking up, came the waking up.

I surprising moment of feeling ok.

Able.

Hopeful.

Willing to live.

It comes like a friend bringing me the gift of a snake, or welcome tears from someone who loved you too. It comes like a young man in the door of your room, hanging on to the door jam and sobbing. It comes real and true. And welcome.

I am learning to sit in this nook and be. I sit in the gift of it. It is the thinnest layer of new skin growing over my wound. A soft easing of pain and the ability for me to put my weight back on my leg again. Monday I was gifted this opening and I sat in it most of the day. I watched the light of the heavens break through as my soul opened a little bit, too. Some hopes flooded back in along with new ideas and dreams.

I drank of it. Then with the dark it faded away and was gone by Tuesday morning.

I could remember the hope but not feel it.

Things closed again.

I wrote in my phone reminder "Find the Nook" so that I might make my way back to it again from time to time.

So that I might not only be ruled just by longing and sadness.

I don't think I will ever understand why you were taken from me or how a person survives the horror of burying a boy. Daily I still see the image of you shooting yourself; its a movie I can not turn off, no matter how much I try. I still wake up every few moments to the terror of it, and to the quiet betrayal of those I love turning away from the thing in me that they do not want to see. I am still cloaked in necessary solitude. They turn from me because they are drowning in their own waters, too.

But now I have my nook.

You and Elijah give it to me.

So did Jesus, and David Whyte and Phoebe and God and the Universe. You gave me my cheats and set my broken bones and bound my wound with a golden shroud of foresight of who I am and who you are, and what we are all about.....all us souls bobbing out here in the waters.

 

                                                                                                  Love,

                                                                                                         Mom

The check

 The check came from your closed-out college fund. 

  

       

.

Another door closing,

Another driving me forward, against my will,

As I watch you in my rear view mirror

Getting smaller and smaller and smaller until someday you disappear.

Of course I know this is not the truth of it for you and I, not really. You are not shrinking in the mirror for me.

But  I hear the clanking turn of another gear as life moves on for everyone else. And one day soon you will only be a memory to them all, a spot in the fucking cemetery. 

And everyone that loves you, or did love you, or should have loved you more, or could have loved you blink you gone.

And that, as they say, will be that.

The thought of this makes my eyes bleed red

 the veins in my neck swell 

and I want to tear at everyone

and everything until all life is shredded.

I want to rage and hate

And pull in the sky. 

Maybe I need the rage again

  Maybe I invite it.

Another red towel waved in front of the bull.

An excuse to go crazy and let it all pour forth again on the world

To roll my eyes and bellow at the NOTHING.

It is a bloody, messy business. No wonder people back away, who could blame them? I am an inconsolable mess as I cast my rage on the mountain, because it is the only thing to do that seems to truly measure how hard this is. I whip my head left and right and look for where to charge.

I can never get mad at you baby, or at God. I just don't feel it. Easier to blame Chaos. Fate. People for being so stupid. This fucked up world. Irrational rage. After all a red towel is all it takes to set the bull in motion.

All of this is just descriptive.

 I guess I write it down to get it out of my head or to create a story of it someone else might read and understand, and walk a mile with me.

 Or because writing is Holy to me.

 It brings the deep quiet breath

 As the bull either wanders back out to pasture

Or dies for the audience.

What I am coming to know of you, of course, is quite a different story. You are certainly not shrinking into the rear view mirror as I clean out closets, cash college fund checks or brush away colored leaves and tiny flowers that have turned to dust on your desk top. 

That is not the truth of this horror at all. 

You are here.

You are.

Not exactly as you were, a tall, beautifully-made boy-man.

Golden and sound and splendidly imperfect.

Instead you are a swirling field of energy that moves around and in me all day, every day.

Ancient

Powerful

Mirthful

Busy

Timeless

Completely restored

Tuned to a mystical cord I can barely perceive, but I hear you, nonetheless Baby.