Look, No Really Look

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After great pain a formal feeling comes–
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

—   Emily Dickinson

All of us have, or will, feel it surround us; agony so terrible it literally shocks us into feeling nearly nothing, at least until we can process enough of it to begin to experience this most horrendous of pain. We call it shock: whoever designed this system did it to protect us.

Often, this shock renders us without words. “Speechless” is a cliché, even.

For me, however, each time the angel of death has blown through my world like Godzilla trampling his toddler-style rage through helpless Tokyo, shock has untied my tongue.

When Daddy died, we experienced utter shock. Beyond the shock typically experienced by those who mourn. The shock experienced witnessing the impossible: alien landings, or absently handing a teething baby a Rubik’s Cube®. When you realize the infant’s finally peacefully giggling and look down?

It’s not because she’s chewing on it. It’s because she’s solved it. That kind of shock.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been so dumbfounded; after all, he was sick for about a dozen years, and had made so many round-trips to Death’s Door they’d actually made him his own key, complete with a souvenir Grim Reaper key chain.

Nevertheless, dumbfounded we all were. We’d grown so accustomed to his rallies that when doctors called in the wee hours from the Intensive Care Units in hushed, careful voices, urging haste, we’d respond casually, and arrive long after breakfast, to greet Dad smiling and enjoying his own, baffling those same doctors who hours before had been clucking at our callous disregard.

Daddy died in a vegetative coma after a massive myocardial infarction brought on by congestive heart failure six years ago, one bleak February in Georgia. It all happened in less than the space of two weeks.

Honestly, though? As I stood next to his comatose body, it was plain as day: whatever my father had been was long gone from him. Still, I spoke to him, since technically, he was alive, and maybe some spark of his soul lingered – in him, near him – some part of him, perhaps, could hear me.

It had been, after all, years, since I’d spoken to him.

So behind a too-narrow curtain, in a dimly lit room full of echoes, cluttered with stainless steel and blinking lights, I spoke a small portion of the words I’d wanted to say to him since I’d learned to speak.

That I loved him, despite his random anger.
How sorry I was that I wasn’t a boy.
How I’d tried my whole life to make that up to him.
How I saw that everything I’d ever accomplished was really to please him: that he was, in fact, my hero.
That the only advice, nearly, I ever truly followed were the small but sage bits he’d doled out.

If he heard a word, after I was through weeping over his body?

He never said.

When I was just 21, my Uncle Robert died in our house of a consuming cancer that twisted his body into something small and shadowy and nothing more than a carrier of agony.

Uncle Robert’s will to live was all that dragged him stubbornly into those final, terrible last six weeks, as the pounds, then ounces, withered away, and it became clearer the morphine could do no more but kill him.

He was waiting for his brother, Richard, to come see him before he would let go.

When at last Richard arrived, I was furious – as were the rest of the members of the family – but I was the only one outspoken enough at last to ask: “Where have you BEEN?”

Richard, the charming, youngest, and most absent member of my mother’s clan, was ALWAYS forgiven, always let off the hook – something I was determined to see made right, this time.

He looked me directly in the eye, and after careful consideration, answered.

“I was afraid to watch my big brother die.”

All my anger, all my resentment, melted away in that moment, for who could not immediately understand such a sentiment? Even an arrogant would-be adult?

Moreover? He was the first “grownup” who was ever truly honest with me. And in that moment, I saw a fundamental truth of life: No one has their shit together. Not even the grownups.

Uncle Richard died this month, after he and I had been corresponding rather closely via Facebook, because he was still in Georgia, and I’m in California. He was still relatively young.

I did not attend the funeral. I know he’d understand.

A 42-year-old friend of mine here in California died suddenly in a motorcycle accident at the beginning of this month. I didn’t know him as well as some, but I liked him enormously, despite his propensity for making terrible decisions.

Last week, the day before his birthday, a friend of mine who’s so zealous about baseball he plays on two recreational adult leagues watched a teammate of his fall to the ground, and later, die, in hospital.

We haven’t talked about it. We probably won’t, ever. It’s just not the kind of thing we talk about; we’re not that sort of friends. We stay friends by avoiding such talk. Best to stick to subjects like the score of the game. Not tragedies at the game.

But I have something to say about it here.

At my father’s funeral, there was a pause to invite anyone inclined to say a few words to do so.

No one rose.

So I began to stand, and was immediately and vehemently discouraged by hisses and gestures from my very proper family; this was very understandable, since my father and I had a troubled relationship, and I am well-known for speaking my mind.

Nevertheless, I could not let my father’s life and memory go without some eulogy.

I can not remember for the life of me what I said, but I know I said it in less than three minutes, and I know there was applause.

I know I was in tears at the end.

I know, too, from that moment forth, I have never refrained from telling anyone I loved how I felt about them.

Even if I wasn’t sure if I’d get a “thanks,” or an “I know,” back. It’s always been worth the chance, because love is never wasted. The way loving words are never wasted.

Because what a shock it always is, the way your whole life can change, in just a few moments – or how someone you love can be simply gone, like that.

You can shout all you want, later – and if they can hear you then?

They’ll never say.

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BONUS feature:
After my dad died, I wrote several poems. You can read them here.
http://elizabethbushey.com/look/about-the-author-elizabeth-williams-bushey/for-my-father/