Friday, October 12, 2012

Tears



It is a little more than two weeks past six months since my life was no longer mine. On April Fools my mother was struck down by a moment eruption of a tiny vain deep in the brain. 

The call came early. My mother never called me in the morning. But the voice on the other end was not my mother, but my father and my father never called. “Your mother had a stroke,” he said. This was not the script we wrote. The call that had been expected since his heart attack a couple years back would be of his passing, not one of my mother’s failing. He was supposedly the weak one and she the caretaker. And now I was the caretaker of both by some odd reversal of nature. It never should be that the child becomes parent to the parents.

These six months have been ones of suffering for them, who lived so long, perhaps beyond a reasonable age. But the will to keep on keeping on is strong within us, even when our bodies have begun to desert our souls and hope is only that the suffering might end.

The world that surrounds us can be sympathetic, but is inefficient and slow moving. The gears of bureaucracy move slower than the fingers of beckoning death. And while you wait for these instruments of government and care to turn and click on you see all the trappings of their lives dissolve away, until finally and mercifully they too slip off in the night


BRIDE

She comes all winter warmth
Swathed in clinging frost
And diaphanous gloom.
Her smile of frozen teeth
And her eyes of icy ponds
Send shivers through the room.

We think of death as skeletal,
Cowled with cloak of black
Hunched like some old farmer
Over his scythe and sack
To cut and carry us to our doom,
But no, death is not the groom.

Death comes dressed in marriage veil,
In a snow white bridal gown
With a long icicle train.
Our final vows are sealed by one
Who doesn’t steal, but stills our heart
With a lover’s kiss that ends all pain.


On September 23 my mother felt that kiss and her soul went to The Father, shedding the ravaged body and leaving dad alone.

He wanted to be there to the end, holding her hand as he had for those days before, telling her he loved her so she knew as if she didn’t all ready. But fate and failing lungs carried him from her in the end and he could not be there then. I held her hand that afternoon and told her everything on earth was done and in place and she should not worry anymore and said goodnight. And on that good night she died within the quarter hour before the clock struck eleven.

And he came back to the room they shared during the week after he found her gone and he was too frail to attend at her final resting, to see her body off, to gather up like flowers the regrets and love of long time friends and relatives.

This past Monday dad seemed strong as if he would continue on for many more days and months. Then yesterday all that changed into a gurgle in his throat and a weakness in his body. I could hardly believe it was the same man I had sat next to in the day room the other day as I stood with my wife beside his bed today. He seemed to have shrunk, his breath a gasp and rattle, his eyes wandering up as if seeking escape. He tried to talk, but I could not understand what he was trying to say. He was grasping at the cover over him and I did not know what he was reaching for.

Then at one point as I leaned over trying to hear I did hear what may have been his last distinct words. He said, “Thank you,” which were words my father never seemed to find in his vocabulary before. 

And last evening, October 11, 2012 my father died within the quarter hour before 11:00, within the same time as his wife, the love of his life, the woman they told me he was reaching out for yesterday, had passed. She called for him and he went.

It has been just over six months and in all that time I didn’t cry. There was too much to do for tears. It is 3:38 AM on the 12th of October and now the tears have been coming, in bursts and fits and waterfalls all the last few hours. Now the six months of tears have burst through the dam and flood me.

All is gone now. Willy and Milly have passed beyond the scope of this world. Their house is sold, now the possession of another. All their worldly goods are gone as well. There is nothing left of them except the memories and the feelings they left with others. That is enough, is it not? 

This ordeal has drawn me closer to The Lord and it has taught me many things. Three weeks ago I prayed intently about these things and these passings were God’s mercy both to my parents and to me. 

Take from my parents whatever they left within your hearts, but also see the truth of where our treasure must be for as Job said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”




WHERE THE RAINBOWS END


We begin this journey of life
Down a road we do not yet know.
We see the blossoms of the moment,
Costumed in dancing colors
That entice us like the bees,
To their perfumed petal traps
And we lust to gain their beauty,
 To glisten like the rose after a rain.

We watch the sun rise upon the distance city,
Turning the towers of glass to gold,
Shimmering like a river of riches
And our eyes serve us our breakfast of “wants”
Sprinkled with the sweet sugar of excess.
We glutton for the fat of the land.
Our stressed hearts beat faster
As the grasp of our hands
Fills our veins with the empty
Calories of success.

We ignore the storms of warning
That dare darken our skies and the path
To our ever bigger car and grander house.
We fill our rooms with knick-knacks
To gorge our obese egos
And we ignore the dust specks of reality
That swirls about the air to settle
Lightly upon our treasures
As if in echo of some ancient tome.
Not Home Sweet Home,
But ashes to ashes and
Dust to dust.

We do not see the light for the shimmer.
Our eyes are always to the rainbow,
An illusion of sun and water,
A trick of diffusion
And a lure to delusion.
We cannot own the colors,
But can we the Pot of Gold at its end?

But where the rainbow ends
Lies the mire of despair and truth.
When we reach the distance touchdown point
The rainbow fades away
With all we ever gathered
And we are left naked before the eyes of God.



Wednesday, October 3, 2012

A Wanderer At Journey's End

Death is all around me. It is like a heavy fog that will not lift. It covers me like a blanket at night and a cloak during the day.

Last Friday we buried the body of my mother and yesterday, October 2 on his 94th birthday, my dad entered Hospice Care for his last journey.

And last night at 11:54 PM another journey came to an end. Hobo Joe died.

I do not know what his original name was nor how old he was. He had belonged to someone at sometime. He was neutered and housebroken and for a large cat genteel with people. A Snowshoe Cat we believe, my daughter said he had Siamese in him because of the shape of his head, and he had those large white feet. If so, it was an apt breed for we first saw him in the storms of 2010, those blizzards that hit that year and buried us in feet of snow.

He came wandering into our yard every day a-sudden during that chill time. He would look at you and vocalize, but then hurry off into the brush. Our own cat, Brad, a Houdini of a cat, escaped the house for a while and the two of them were often somewhat distant companions hunched against the winter background. We finally corralled Brad and now this large black cat was alone again.

All that winter and that spring he haunted our yard at times. We put food out for him, but he was caution to any approach. Until one May evening, just when my daughter arrived home from work. It was a pleasant warm late afternoon and my wife, Lois, was working on the bushes before the house when the cat appeared in the drive. Lois sat down upon the stoop and called to him and he looked over. Eventually he ambled close and let her stroke his head and he didn't flee when my daughter pulled in and came up the walk. Laurel, who is a VetTech used to working with cats scruffed him and carried him into our home. We placed him in the bathroom with a cat bed and he settle upon it and slept.

This lost wanderer had a new home and a new name, Hobo Joe.

He quickly adapted to the family. He was the biggest cat and not mean, but assertive. None of the others were about to give this stranger any trouble.

One summer night not long after, my son came home carrying a scruffy, scared, starving kitten he had rescued from the parking lot where he worked. He named the kitten, barely weaned, Kerouac. For what ever reason, Hobo Joe took this kitten under his wing. It was if they were father and son and they forever bonded.

I have been stoic through these harsh few months and days, but I almost lost it this morning when Hobo  managed to walk feebly down our hallway toward the kitchen, as he always did when I got up. He lay down halfway to rest. He suddenly flopped over and I had thought he was gone, but when I touched him, he got back onto his haunches in that positions cats often take. It was then that Kerouac came over and began to groom him.

Somewhat later I placed him on a little carrier bed and took him into the living room to be with me. Kerouac came over and lay down a few feet away as if in vigil for his adopted father. That is when I took the photo at the top of this post, Hobo Joe laying halfway between Kerouac and the light at the end of the tunnel of his life.

I had to go and tend to my own father in the afternoon and expected Hobo would be gone when I returned, but he was still alive. I was with them last night until the end.

Hobo Joe was one of my favorites. He was one of the three that always greeted me when I awoke in the morning, the same three who would be waiting at the door every time Lois and/or I would come home from somewhere, our little welcoming committee of Mark, Kerouac and Hobo Joe. Now it is diminished by one.

I will miss him, he was with us such a short time.  Rest in piece, your hobo days are done.