Wonder in the Hard to Cry Years

A Stream of Consciousness:

Today I woke up with two tears, one in each eye, slowly slipping from the outside corners, down each of my cheeks as if in a race with one another. They are left-over tears from the night before, rare tears, because crying is harder than it used to be. It’s strange how that happens- you never believed your partner when he said he couldn’t cry anymore because he cried out all his tears as a child, all the tears he was supposed to have spread out over his lifespan were already gone by the time he was 12. But now you understand in your own way, sort of, how it can become harder to cry. A drying out occurs when you are being imprinted by repeated crises in your life, so much so that you almost, but not quite, feel like you won’t know who you are anymore if there isn’t something like that again, looming on the horizon, ready to stack itself in the order of here-comes-the-next-disturbance-jolt of the past years. And it’s a little scary, this distorted normalcy, yet you’re oddly afraid to be the person before or after it all. But the two tears, leftover from the night before, suspended there while you dreamt of weird, disturbing manifestations of things you’re not supposed to go through mixed with mundane every day snapshots, then squeeze out as you awaken, and you think of what they’re leftover from: Last night after you spoke to your son over a video screen, the background purposely-security-blurred around him, while he showed you the two pieces of paper. One with a sketch of a truck, with all the details of time to spend on it, also reminiscent of the little boy who couldn’t wait to show you the quick 2 minute truck drawing, and a fat, sticky crayon still in hand, while he lifts it to show you, because the excitement is too urgent to even leave a crayon on the table. So he lifts the crayon and paper in his fist, on his favorite “Trash-Truck-Tuesdays” Tuesday, waiting for your wonted response, and then you snap back into the present, and wonder what happened to that little boy, who is right there, doing the same thing with years spanning between fresh innocence and life altering nows. And the other piece of paper has squished, penciled lines of bible study verses, lacking his usual misspellings because he can copy them, and they’re written with precision in a way that resourcefully uses one piece of paper like its got the value of a $100 bill, line after line, using every space of white possible, yet the written lines lean a little on the page as if they might fall off- if it’s held in a precarious way. He holds them up in front of the screen, and sometimes they blur, but come back into focus, and he was so proud to show me, he barely said hello first. And the deep-red mama heart breaks, and loves, in these moments of helpless hope, so much so that you forget for a brief moment the weight of the chained pain, and the reality you hate. The both/and, and more emotions of it all, the images on repeat, haunting your everyday days, since that first, awful call in a hot summer June. And you look at his mullet, smiling at who can indeed, pull one off so well, so handsome- this flesh of a boy-man who’s mine and not mine, and glimpses of his life’s forced reckoning. You wonder about intentions, perhaps only there because of the dreaded “what happened” you want to slap back into some blackhole of how-can-this-be, hindered by the accountability shadow yet to be met, swirling blame. And you search for deep, strange hope about intentions, and possibilities. And you try to rid yourself of the imbedded images of him with his mouthed words to you in the formal, wood-panel place, at the mercy of the robed one, and the fettered jangle of his movement now. Chains, waisted, but not wasted. Escorted away, his head turning toward you, the restrained lift of his waving hand, as high as it can possibly go, lifting the other along with it, and reading his lipped, “Bye, Mom.” Forever immured as if the healthy red of your heart changes to a spot of bruised black-purple. The chains ring in your ears in nightmares that you wake up to live instead of that fading relief to wake up from. And then suddenly, you hear the soft plop-landing of one tear on the pillow that pulls you away from last night’s memory, and the other tear, a little slower to fall, whooshes by your ear in all of its nearby loudness, but it doesn’t drop to the pillow, instead it rolls down your neck, like it’s being guided by the peach fuzz on your skin, one hair passing it on to another, and then it absorbs itself into the pillow on the other side, adding to pillow-tear-history. And you still can’t believe this is his life, or yours. And you think of Wounded Ones. Survivors. Her. You. And for a moment, you remember the grief you were supposed to carry- about your dad’s death in its “the second year is the hardest” warning, which never came to be because of the trauma that interrupted it, and maybe that’s a good thing, but you’d rather have that than this, and people think that’s why you’re still grieving, which is just living, and you ponder the essence of the dad-ghost, its clingy memory, and how palpable but ethereal it is in synchronicity, and you go about your day, knowing each one of those welcomed hauntings will have a little less of its essence each time, as time goes by. And you never thought you’d say it, but you’re glad he isn’t here to know this new pain. And so, I clocked into the hospital app for my on-call shift at 7am, and later while in-house, I taught nursing students about the role of a hospital chaplain. I’ve been a co-director fill-in with another colleague while the boss lady is out, and I spoke with a 44 year old mother about how to talk to her two young children concerning her malignant brain tumor she’s still processing the shock of, which was surgically removed from her head just hours ago. And I wonder about her pillow tears. A chaplain’s day. I listened to the Ezra Klein podcast on the way home from work about what the fuck Israel is supposed to do, except that’s not what it’s titled. How it challenged me, and catered to my love-of-learning-brain, or perhaps my I-must-know-more-about-this brain which feels so wrong in the global pain of what’s real. And you hate war some more, and you hate guns some more, and you hate injustice. And you hate that things take time. And you hate those guns again. And you hate that born ones can do terribles, here and there, mine and theirs. And you hate that you are living an exception to the rule, an existence you feel too few can fathom. And you think about your two born ones, how they are their own, and you’re “not that powerful” said the therapist, and it’s not anything like the childhood you had that you sometimes go to in reminiscence, because its comfortable there, almost not even possible that it was what it was, because it’s so distinctly peculiar and protected. And dad-ghost recollections are there again. And you realize that some things shift in ways that define before and afters, and never-to-go-backs. And then you run under the 5:45 afternoon-hanging-on-early-November sun that won’t be there in a week, because of obsolete clock changing ridiculousness, and you sigh at the too-absurdly-early darkness inviting the seasonal depression you dread to come this weekend. But while you do, you hear the rhythm of your trail runners crunch the graveled path and smooth-slap the set pavement, each a type of grounding, not including the cement you try to avoid, on your usual 5K route, and you see the never-to-be-anywhere-copied, swirling-cloud-orange sunsets that exclusively materialize here, and it’s unusually warm, but becoming usual, and the magpie is there to the side, your favorite of birds. He turn-bounces on the ground, watching you run by. And when you’re home and your heart rate returns to normal, you walk by your home office desk with piles of mail even though you’ve signed up for every paperless notification, and you wonder about such puzzlements, how piles that aren’t supposed to be, are. And you hold bewilderment about how one born’s hand can be cuffed in steel- the same hand that held a colorful crayon. And guarded hope surrounds you. And you smile at your other-born’s brilliance, and the profoundness of their existence, grateful for their closeness. And you recognize the tenderness in each of them, despite a vast contrariety, and hope to squeeze out more tears because of what mamas go through. You send that one “Born” song to him in your heart…And then you feel the feeling you love of putting on clean, dry, cotton socks, just to experience an ounce of simple-good, and you shove aside the imposing desk paper piles, and write about this odd life, and ponder the existential-dread-why’s, this bizarre hope, mixed with daily numb-doings, preposterousness, even small joys, the grief upon grief, in all of its gut-wrenching, heart-aching, cracked-open humanness, all there, all real, or apparently so; a wonder in these hard-to-cry years, under the magpie’s sky…