by LW for my father
Remembering how, in the bathroom off the friend’s dying-room, our eyes met over folded towels, Anna and I, and the cumulated griefs and grievances grew from a spark of a smile into gulps of uncontainable laughing, I can’t be sure that we embraced. In my recollection we rolled on that linoleum and pounded our knees and muffled our mouths in vain attempt to stifle the sacrilege, made good by the grateful relief of release in her eyes. It was in that quickened moment the Friend, again, was found, as he would wish.
And, years later, following the burying of my father’s body, another opportunity of adversity found another tiny, bereft family… my own.
Our brave and decent man undertook his dying during the winter holiday vacation, an aspect of his modest nature seeming desirous not to disrupt too many lives, not to invoke too much attention, not to leave footprints in a zen landscape for others to need to erase or follow.
The insightful eulogy, an eloquence delivered by the revered uncle I had thought lost to us, revealed brotherly witness to qualities of my father’s character unrealized to me, the kind of transeunt observation that is too-often shared only on such belated, transient occasion, but whose integrity can rekindle, these years past, enduring communion.
A day in the week following the funeral found my sweet, round mother and my lengthening son packed tight into our foreign compact whose minimal cabin space was surfeited with gifts for the ingenuous nieces, whose tenderness of years, and of grief, had informed our adult congregation. They had, with their gentle parents preceded our departure by some days. An Irish lap-rug, gifted against the cold, kept kind company as we set out to bring the remnants of Christmas from Arizona to their home in Nevada.
We were to attempt the unforeseen mythic challenge of Tehachepee Pass.
By late afternoon, the car began a dance with an unremitting torrent of frozen air. A snowy dusk could barely reveal that inconsolable battery of sleek, alien users-of-the-wind that stand sentinel along those hills and mill their electric wares for the basin below. By nightfall, the bleak necessity to escape the storm was relieved by the appearance of a fluid, neon beacon floating through the hail: “The Ranc Motel.” (The absence of that last letter from the intended “Ranch” should have indicated something about cockroaches, but then, there was room at the inn, and beggars… can’t..)
Our narrow room, attempting a milky, opaque blue-green reminiscent of institutional experience, was made colder by the obligatory lightbulb-with-chain and an oil wall-heater that was, by our untechnical reckoning, out of oil. The single, king-sized bed lay in stubborn opposition to the Color TV and toilet but showed compassionate preference for the nightstand where the new widow ensconced the bouquet of young, red roses that she had salvaged from the many benedictory blossoms whose fragrance would feed her husband along his way.
Before retiring, we made a great American mistake of seeking weather-solace from that implacable tube, and found ourselves observing an Emergency Evacuation Report on the state of affairs at Tehachepee Pass, a precarious perch, as was evidenced by explicit visuals of various roofs being lifted from various structures in our immediate vicinity… one of them a milky, opaque blue-green, as I recall.
As our flimsy sanctuary continued its promiscuous tango with whatever considerable forces were conspiring to make us realize something, the weary son, feverish since aternoon, decided to sleep it all away, a wise and admirable choice which his grandmother presently endeavored to emulate.
On finishing the ritual toiletry, I befell the good fortune to meet my mother’s misted eyes and, through our combined focus, an augmented alchemy, and expansion of vision occured…
We witnessed, as absolute as angels, the collective circumstance, the entire pathos: the beautiful bony boy, curled cold around his fetal knees…the ample mound of mother in her woolen cap and rosy nose, her small, gloved ghost finger, severed in a distant childhood, falling limp under her cherry cheek.. the too-tight curl of the daughter’s hand on the incongruous toothbrush.. the anguished travel-and-hail-battered bloom hanging their heads by the sorrowing bed.. the crack appearing in our suffering minds and in the milky, opaque, blue-green wall clapping time with our suffered ceiling…
And, in a thickening moment, before IT could…. we blew…. and the deep well of laughter revived our way, as he would wish, to a generous night we had forgotten how to know in a frightened, fragmented culture of seperation and longing: the three of us, lying together, in the warm fragrance of familiar, familial scent, the human bouquet contained and comforted under that singular, blessed blanket… all that night… the three of us, lying together, in a trust of dreams and makings and remembrances that made us: four.
Ultimately the purpose of the book is to encourage readers in their practices and to encourage them to share their stories with others if they are comfortable in doing so. We’re looking to expand this story base and create a community that will be able to help many others who are dealing with loss, grief, crisis, pain, anxiety or sorrow in the future. May this record become a living journal for the entire body of labyrinth readers both now and in the future. We only hope to encourage this practice of conveying good intentions in any context for the benefit of all beings.
