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October 29, 2011
The business of dying
This floor is tilted, hold on to the walls, the lights go on and off, there is a worm in the system, it is infected and we might
crash.......... are we on schedule, what day is it..... we lost the track of time.... Time....I can never understand time...there is an open season on comprehension of time..... we are wasting it.... trying to grasp how far or how close we are....... Let's stay with the facts, lets stay with what we know, the clarity of seeing objects, good lighting and the necessity of repetition,.... the closeness , the intimacy of familiar, like.. life ...ah.. THAT IS ANOTHER ONE, no, lets just stay with Life in relation to Death.....
We could focus on entrance and exit... yes, however entrance could be only birth and Exit points at death. So the symbols change, how about life....in correlation to birth and Death...... we could call it the stay.... I mean staying within the parameters of Birth and death... inside the equation...within .....am I clear? !
You better get used to my morbid subject...... my father is dying and I need to get my head around it and the only way I can do that is by spelling the whole subject to myself here..... So you could go away... however I need to stay here and I need to know how to reason an understanding.for myself.
Well he has been distant.... no, he has been put.... Since the day my son was born...yes exactly on that day....I left him
not physically ....inside my head he was past and my son was the future and my duty was to go on... I cut most of the arteries, the ones that had survived our relationship....... through out the years... the anger and the frustration, the walls that we built together as we lost the sight of each other...... the man that he was... the son that I wanted to be....the hand that stretched and held for a while and then slipped away.
I was four or five when in the crowd of the Bazaar I lost him.........he found me picked me up and held me while I cried..and I remember the exact moment after the birth of my son when he lost me..... I did cry ..I could not explain why here I was moving on......he was staying.... I had his grandson's hand in mine and we walked away.....The rest was shorter stays...... quiet hellos and missed goodbyes...... across the telephone wire, the awkward silences.... I guess we were both new to this..........................................
There is finality to death. and life though persistent, is so very fragile.......Yes we will go through all the routines..... as properly as possible...... and we get to share our sorrow as private as it is......we are the social animal.... we smile we cry and grieve ...we accept and we object and yet we go on
Posted by Idinraha at October 29, 2011 04:29 PM
Comments
There is no comfort when faced with death...only acceptance, as your last line indicates. We can object all we want but nothing will stop the inevitable; the finality of it. Where do we go, once the body dies? An age-old question that can drive one mad if one thinks about it too much. It's like space, infinite and unfathomable. The cruel thing is our capacity to love. If we didn't love, then watching someone die wouldn't matter. It would just be routine. I want the afterlife to be filled with the people I love, but wanting and reality are separate things and hope is all we have...I am sorry about your father, whatever comfort sorrow may bring....
Posted by: jen at October 29, 2011 05:55 PM