The thick of it

When you’re there, in the thick of it, it’s not that there’s no motion–
just constraint.
It’s not that you’re broken–
just stalled.

You’re not frozen, just stationary.
Not inanimate, just still.

I was, too, if only for today. Head bent, nose buried, feet leaden…rutted.

But however badly you’re stuck, all you need is an inch. And tonight it was a Facebook note, by a Friend I barely knew.

She wrote that she doesn’t have much time. She said, “In short, I want to tell you all I love you.”

I’ve read it twice and still can’t make them fit, still don’t know which should contain which–

this lament or this gratitude.

The right words

It was not a natural death.

That was the phrase she kept using, how she chose to index it in her memory. And how could I blame her?

Mom didn’t speak again for a long time, and not once did she look at me. Her thoughts were outside the passenger window, where she could watch them from a distance.

I’d never known anything to upset my mom to the point that she met it with silence. But still, I pressed.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Soft, almost animalistic, came a little noise of apprehension.

I was relentless. “Please?”

A room for grief

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

About a year ago, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away. I never met him. The things I knew about him were largely impersonal: he was, at various points in his life, a detective, a pilot, and a farmer in Lebanon. He never saw a single game in my father’s professional soccer career. He owned hundreds of acres of beautiful land, and a beautiful house in Beirut where most of my father’s siblings (eight in total) still live. For most of their adult lives, many of those siblings took advantage of him.

That’s all I know. I’ve seen pictures, although none recent. I’ve seen my dad’s stern expression in an old, crackly photo of a familiar face, the same unwillingness – or maybe just inability – to smile before a lens. Until last year, in those rare moments when the subject would come up, I’d heard my dad say every time, “Your grandpa is a very good man.”

I don’t know how my father reacted to his father’s death, because he’s never actually talked about it. I came home from a few months in England last year, right around Christmas, and heard the news from my mom. My grandpa had died about a month before that. No one had wanted to upset me.

My thoughts on this kind of intimate secrecy aside, I worried about my dad. He hadn’t seen his father in over a decade, and now he would never see him again. But more than that, I had a small (but big enough) understanding of his grief.

My grandpa wasn’t the first parent my dad had lost. His mother passed away four or five years ago, when I was still living at home and in high school. The news reached me in much the same way: indirectly, through my mom. But I did get a chance to hear about my grandma from my dad’s lips, too.