Sorrow

Five years ago today. It was both yesterday and a thousand lifetimes ago. I suppose I was fortunate to have known my wife’s death was at hand, but I was not prepared for it when it came. How does one prepare for the impact such an event has on one’s life? The shock was far beyond my ability to have expected it. Suddenly, her life ended. How long is a “lifetime?” It is both elastic and inflexible. As I have learned, grief is never-ending, but it is survivable.

Earlier this week, I learned of another death. A man who, along with his wife, was active in our church died suddenly, without warning. I can only imagine the shock of such an utterly unexpected tragedy. My wife’s illness had already emptied me of the emotional “high” I had always associated with the Christmas season, but this man’s wife—a remarkably selfless person and a good friend of mi novia—had no warning that Christmas time probably will forevermore be a time of grief. Ach! No matter the certainty of death, it surprises us and takes our breath away. Goodbyes are never sweet sorrow, Shakespeare’s words notwithstanding.

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I awoke, soaked in sweat, from a disturbing dream sometime before midnight. My memory of the dream has all but disappeared, but I remember fragments. At some point, I was thrashing about in a huge body of water—possibly an ocean—trying to reach the visible but distant shore. The surface of the water was relatively smooth, but I expected sharks to surface and attack me at any moment. I was afraid, but not in a panic. I wondered how painful the attack would be. Another fragment: a vacationing neighbor couple had left some cable television equipment for me to pick up while they were gone. Just in case, I rang the doorbell before I entered. The door was answered by a Black woman who knew nothing of the agreement but did not question its legitimacy. She and her husband/ boyfriend offered to help me with the equipment, but none of us knew what I was to pick up. Yet another piece: I offered to give a couple a ride, but after we were in the car, I realized I had no idea where we were, nor where we were going. I could not make the maps on either of two old smart-phones work. We stopped at a bar to ask for directions to a car dealership where I had left an old sports car to be refurbished, but none of us knew which dealership. Our search then involved climbing steep cliffs and crossing railroad tracks. All the while, during all these dream segments, I was extremely worried about…something. The dream must have taken place in pieces; sometime during the night, I got up and put a towel down on the bed to insulate me from the cold, wet sheets. This has happened before.

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You are a product of my mind. You exist as I perceive you only because I perceive you. And I exist as a product of your mind. It’s not just you and me, though. It’s everyone. We’re all interpretations of someone else’s perceptions. For that reason, I think the possibility exists that none of us are real; we’re just expressions of the way we are imagined in the fictional minds of nonexistent beings. Vapor, in other words. Not even vapor, actually—vapor has considerably more substance. More weight. More mass. More…reality.  The same is true, by the way, of everything else. Bottles of pills. Boxes of Kleenex. Scissors. Coffee cups. Paper clips. Paper plates. Papier-mâché. Wall-paper. Trees. Yes, even trees. And their roots do not exist until we start digging around the base of their trunks, which also exist only in what I’ll call our “vaporous universe.” Perhaps we’re the products of the hallucinations of a tiny being; something smaller than one tenth the width of a proton. This miniscule being dreams big! Big, as in spaceships and planets. Ponder that.

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Given the size of the audience for this blog, it is reasonable to consider the words I record here as pieces of a long, disjointed soliloquy. I write to provide an insubstantial, almost fragile, structure for my thoughts. With or without that delicate framework, the ideas that spill from my fingers would bleed into one another. Thus, therefore, ergo…