*Part II of my sections from journals and random thoughts. Please start a paid subscription to read all of it. Thank you for supporting my writing.
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DAD CLOSE TO DEATH
But no more. My old man is weak. Tired. Profoundly exhausted. Spiritually exhausted. He’s been slowly disengaging more and more with people, places and things around him, growing closer to the light, to the Other Side than our side. Our side consists of paying property taxes and walking the dogs and my wedding plans and travel plans and my Substack, and my mom’s art lecture talks and dinner plans, etc; all the stuff of alive, warm-blooded, normal humans. But my father is no longer fully of that realm. He has not yet passed over to the other realm…he is simply caught somewhere in the middle. But closer to that other place.
ON LOSING A RELATIONSHIP VS A LOVED ONE’S DEATH
Yet both share one abiding truism: There is a deep cord inside you that is snipped. Something, some emotional umbilical cord, is savagely scissored. A thing internally is cut. And once the line is severed, there is no going back. Even if you eventually get back together with that person you broke up with, it’s never as the same couple in the same way as the same version you were before. Something meaningful has shifted. It’s like turning 25, or 30, or 40, or 50; you might do the same thing you did “back then,” but now you’re doing it at this new age, this new moment in your life journey. It may be “like” the original, but it isn’t the original; it’s a copy. It’s like memory: it isn’t the actual “occurrence” but rather a cognitive copy of the occurrence; and as time goes by it’s really more like a copy of a copy of a copy. Thus self-mythology arises. Self-storytelling. Emotional truth versus actual objective truth.
A MOMENT OF BEAUTY
I take a startling, slow breath and hold it. I look up, seeing the leafless trees, thick gray branches. I see the carefully trimmed back green hedges. The lupine. Purple and green against the pale blue of the sea in the distance. I hear the roaring soft whistle of the Amtrak Train. I see my life flash before my eyes like water entering a carafe, or like white wine being drunk from a goblet, or like a baby’s head, crowning during a birth.
I look out to the town below and I think:
There is such preciousness to it all. And I am alive, witnessing everything. Thank the Lord for my human moment, brief and dumb as it may be in the grand scheme of things.
Brief and sacred.