Grandma's Spotted Lungs

No one is surprised -- to a degree, we've all been expecting that phone call for years now, ever since she had that chest scan after her nasty wreck almost 10 years ago. There were spots on her lungs. The doctor told her about them, about what they likely meant, and she chose to wrangle a different truth from his words.

She knew it, we knew it. She shut her eyes tight and never spoke of it again. Things like that don't go away on their own.

Expecting the prolonged death sentence of a loved one is one thing, but being prepared for its announcement is quite another. In that respect, it caught us all off-guard today: Ant fell apart while waiting tables at work; I went 95% autopilot and forced myself to inch closer to next week's deadlines, just in case something even more terrible happens unexpectedly next week; mom filled her experienced role as the bearer of bad news phone calls, because at this point in her church office career, she's done it enough to barely have to think about it. Haven't heard from Jen yet, but since the woman practically raised her, I don't expect her reaction to be pretty. Aunt Tammy wasn't even able to go to my uncle's funeral when he died years ago, because she was so hysterical. Though I'm not looking forward to facing my Aunt's expression of anxious grief at the doctor's office on Monday, where we'll learn how much time we have left with Grandma, I need to be able to look my Aunt in the eyes and handle the raw pain she releases, because it is reality.

That's what everyone feels like when they're reminded of how fragile the most important things in their lives are; when they have to face, yet again, the fact that their strongest bonds have never physically been more than bridges built with toothpicks. That's how everyone feels when death gets too close to our homes -- even if some don't express it so honestly, we all feel the chill that stays in the corners when the wise bastard leaves in the middle of the night with one of our own.

I've never been able to lose it at work, or fall into kicking-and-screaming hysteria on the way to a funeral. I've never been able to let grief sweep me away like it's supposed to, wailing and pulling hair, unable to understand the point of tomorrow after the mortality of today. It always feels so terrible, such an unhealthy a thing to keep inside of me, like a smothered sneeze or a swallowed ice cube, but multiplied by a thousand and spontaneously recurring for years afterward. The honest, raw release of grief is instead reserved to those who truly seem to need it -- at least, that's what I've always thought, that's how I've always rationalized it; I must not need it if I cannot do it; it's better to stand if I'm capable, to protect the ones who must fall to pieces.

I don't think I believe my own explanation anymore, though. Not this time. This one is too close. It's going to hurt in an audible and visceral way, and I am not going to know how to handle it when I hear in my head what she told me the last five times I hugged her goodbye -- when I remember how serious, how terribly heartbroken she looked, every time she said it, not knowing if it would be the last chance she ever got to tell me she loved me.

"Next time, please, please don't wait so long to come back."

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Sometimes I wonder what it was like to be my dad when he was growing up. Sometimes I convince myself that something terrible must've happened to him, perhaps multiple terrible somethings, for him to be as afraid of everything as he is today. To be as blind to his internal contradictions as he always has been.

He shared a story with us today, something that happened when he was close to my age. He owned and operated his father's ice plant back then, and one of the guys working for him was apparently very much against eating pork. One day, they were sitting around a fire, and the guy was going off on a rant about how terrible pork was. Pork is unfit for human consumption, he proclaimed, as he roasted a hot sausage link over the fire. My dad and the other employees got a kick out of it.

I asked him if anyone'd had the nerve to break it to the guy that he was about to eat pork for dinner. No, he told me, We figured we'd just let him figure that one out himself.

Papercut

Sometimes I feel so close to home, I can barely stand it. The loveliest tangled roots made of familial habits I've been honing since birth; the sticky gumbo breeze wafting downwind from an open screened window above the kitchen sink; the drunken awe of watching cigarette smoke fall to the ground, drowning in humidity.

Other times, I feel like I've been gone for six months already. I feel broken roots and habits with no history; I do not crave gumbo; I have forgotten what it's like to enjoy cigarette smoke. There are times when I'm happy about this; excited and eager to set sail, full-speed ahead, into the mountain skyline that looms in my future. There are times when I'm not happy about it at all, though; I feel the loss of home's proximity like a hole in my heart, an injury I can't recall getting -- that terrible nausea of emptiness wraps around me like a starched white shirt and a belt that's too tight. At those times I am connected to nothing and no one, drifting like an off-course satellite gone dark; there is so much to communicate but my processor is dead, the linkup is off-line, and neither are coming back.

I think I'm going to write a lot of words about loneliness in the next few months, but not in a way that only longs for certain important human beings. It's a lonely that ties geography to family, familiarity, comfort, in a way that the people alone can't quench. The word could be "homesick," but it seems so much deeper than that connotation -- "homesick" sounds like a papercut; this feels more like an amputation. Maybe I just never understood that word because I've never left home before, or not in such a permanent way as I will in three months.

I don't think I'm scared. I think I'm just walking into the punch.