it’s all terrible, and some of it’s funny; part 1.
My father died when I was seventeen.
My father died when I was senior in high school.
While my peers were deciding the direction of their future by finally picking a college, I was trying to figure out how to properly function without one of the two most influential people in my life.
I had known for fifteen months that this was coming. It isn’t like I couldn’t remember the day the surgeons came out to tell us what they had found. Some cells had mutated. They set up shop in my dad’s brain, and this was no benign mass of non-conformist cells (probably ages 18-25) intent on being internally and quietly proud of their uniqueness. They weren’t just hanging out until they found something better to do…they had plans. Not plans to do a puzzle and have tea and then maybe go out with their friends tomorrow night (if they’re feeling up for it)…no. Sinister plans. They wanted to set cars on fire and tip stuff over…you know, figuratively. But what they literally wanted to do was kill my dad.
I remembered when he woke up and I realized he no longer remembered my name. He couldn’t talk to me. He couldn’t respond to my “I love you”, even though he wanted to. He couldn’t walk, feed himself, read, or write. My father, who had single-handedly taken care of my family for 20+ years had been turned into an infant over night.
It got better. Eventually he re-learned how to say a few phrases, learned to walk short distances with a cane, and became slightly more independent as time passed. He was able to effectively make stupid jokes every now and then by hiding my dinner plate when I walked away from the table or putting on a funny wig, but i missed the banter. It was hard, and I selfishly mourned the loss of my dad before he was even gone.
Still, aware as I was about the fact that my dad was going to die, and it was going to happen quickly, to actually see someone stop living right before your eyes is so unbelievably unsettling and terrifying and infinitely sad that I’m not sure I could do it again in my lifetime while still retaining any small part of my sanity. People have always told me that death is natural and normal and that I have to get used to the notion that everyone and everything is going to die, but I don’t think you realize how unnatural it is until you actually watch it happen.
It shook places so deep inside of me that I wasn’t even aware of their existence. I still feel the aftershocks. The only thing I could do was to ask myself repeatedly, “How do I go on being after this?”
I knew everything else had to keep moving forward, but did that mean I had to?
I didn’t know then, and I’m not sure that I know now after almost four years, but that doesn’t mean i haven’t given it a valiant effort.
We will begin with a series of disastrous hair cuts.
the thief
you are thief of beauty. a greedy hoarder of the divine, with an unquenchable thirst for the infinite.
before you made your presence known, i could see it in everything. in the water and in the trees; in the lines in my mother’s face. at dawn and at dusk. at the mixing of the natural and the unnatural.
you have wrung these things dry of wonder. you have opened them up not to more mystery, but to solution. you have drunk the extract and you are thoroughly intoxicated.
it is in your hands and the way they hold, grasp, caress, create.
it is in your lips when they speak, kiss, comfort, silence.
it is in the way your body moves, and in it’s stillness keeps on moving.
you have it, and all of it is undeniably yours. but how, really, can you be a thief?
for i gave you these things,
and i should not ask for them back.
