Keeping Our Center ~ Day 177

(I continue to be very grateful to Bill Grimbol to his heartfelt contributions to these reflections. ~ Kaye)

Christine had just died. We both knew it was going to happen, and expected it, as much as one can grasp the full reality of Death – akin to holding mercury in your palm. She had formed a blockage following gastric bypass surgery, and her stomach literally exploded. Her doctor told us it would have been like driving a nail through her palm. (Yes, he really did say that…I swear on her grave.)

I came to let Justin know the news we both already knew, and for which we were still completely unprepared. He walked toward me across the parking lot adjacent to the Main House at the Buxton School. His lower lip trembled, and I reached out my arms for him. I wanted his need of me to fill my emptiness with purpose, but it did not.

He asked me when, and I told him the exact time she had passed. He asked if he could be with his friends. I surrendered and said yes, only because I knew this was indeed the day when he would begin a long and arduous leaving of home.

We wept briefly. We promised to talk soon, though even the thought of words made us mutually wish to gag. I stopped and waved. He ran into his girlfriend’s arms, and I went for a drive.  

I thought about him as a child, and just how bloated and raw was his mother’s love of him. How much he made her laugh, and caused her to weep with worry. I thought about her mandatory adventure days with him, when she freed him from school, and they would go off in search of comic books, and Transformer figures, and shells and leaves and rocks and feathers, and all things mundane and wild.

From the day he was born, I knew I could never come close to the love she felt for him. Yes, I adored him, but hers, her love was molten, like lava, and when it entered an ocean of Grace, it created only more land, more love, more hope. She had spun the web in which he was woven together by the Word, the sigh sounds of beloved and cherished and miraculous. It is no small matter that a child begins in the sacred womb of a woman and a mother. It is the matching imprint of alpha and omega on each of their souls.

I drove along the river just outside of Williamstown, swollen from Spring rains, and raging. I stopped on a bridge and stared for a long time. The water looked angry, badly bruised, and exuded a bitter rancid reek.

I knew my son was now damaged. He would survive, but his spirit would limp. I was overwhelmed by the absence of joy I saw on his face, the ripping away of innocence, and the thumbprint of loss. He was scarred. He was so clearly and brutally altered. As if the pain made his whole being spasm, like some massive compulsive tic. He felt gouged out. He seemed a carcass.

It was a real bittersweet moment. So full of an ending and an absence, yet also so saturated in my determination to help him heal. I was stretched to breaking with my commitment to restore his hope. I had no idea of how or where or when or the why of it, but I was deeply passionately convinced that the resurrection was mine alone to give him.

My relationship to him is still coated thickly in bittersweet. Our relationship remains tender and taut; gentle and brutal; full of coming and going away; tears of sorrow and joy; a knowing so full it can break your heart; and a wish, a rabidly raging wish, that he might be happy for a time or two or three.

I sighed. I drove back to the hotel. I went to the bar and had a large brandy. I stewed and hummed a dirge in heart and soul. I rocked to the bittersweet presence of a lost wife and stolen mother, of a Life forever altered and misshapen, deformed, yet still, well, lovely, nonetheless.

I calmed. I centered. I began to consider how the cure might begin tomorrow. This healing. This minor miracle. I was wise enough to know it would to have to be spawned by him. I would call to see how he was. I would expect no desire to see me or talk to me. I would assume his absence, as he grafted himself on the sacred safety of his friends. On to his adolescent and thereby sacred friends. I would wait for him to open the door a crack, and let me in. I would not barge, but shuffle shyly. Play it coy.

Waiting is the one pure bittersweet experience. My relationship to Justin has been one long waiting. I wait at the window, hoping to see his lumbering gate coming toward the door, but knowing those days will be few and far between, yet, still knowing they will come – now and then, like all the good and beautiful things which enable us to get up each morning.

I am waiting now. A good chunk of me always will be. I do wait with hope. I anticipate. I do not expect. It is rare for me to be this gracious, but my son deserves my very best, and I will try like Heaven to give it to him. 

Bill Grimbol