Monday, March 26, 2012

The Difference

I dream about them. My dad more so than R but, I've seen both of them.

Most of the time I just note them in passing. Duck-duck-duck-deceased family member-duck-duck--GOOSE!!

Maybe it's just because I tend to have elaborate, Busby Berkeley-type dreams. When you glimpse your dead father or daughter in a giant kickline composed of everyone you've ever met, it's hard to focus on gradations of bizarre.

Sometimes the dreams are slower and I have time to digest Dad or R's presence.

My recurrent dream is a house that looks ordinary from the outside but is full of wonders on the inside--secret, underground tunnels that lead to places I'd forgotten I loved, a private airport in the attic, a kitchen equipped with house elves. Sometimes I fly or breathe underwater. Once, I made out with Ira Glass. His giant glasses got all fogged up and he told me I was sooooo interesting. Yup...love me some Ira.

I think a lot of people probably dream about the unattainable (although I'm pretty sure I could have hit that if circumstance had brought me and Mr. Glass together at just the right time). And it feels amazing doesn't it? Not just the flying or deep sea exploration itself but, that inevitable moment of cognition when you think, "Holy shit! I can motherfucking fly!"

When I dream about Dad or R walking around whole and healthy it's indescribable. Yet, it's how I used to feel all of the time.

I've been running uphill for so long that I've forgotten what it feels like to coast along, believing that things will go according to plan, smiling in recognition at my fellow humans.

To be unencumbered.

To be free of the memory of beeping machines and disinfectant smells.

To not know what a doctor looks like when he or she is about to deliver the worst news possible.

To get riled up about money or academic achievement or anything other than disease and death.

To feel like I know something.

I listen to the news while I cook dinner and I hear people griping about government spending on entitlements and welfare abuse. I want some sort of magic mist to settle over America and make everyone feel lost and hopeless...together. How long would it take before we recognize that we have to lay aside judgment and find ways to help each other?

I wish I had some coherent solution but I just end up wanting to punch people in the face. Like, "Wake-up, asshole! You're not deserving. You're lucky." Like, "You didn't deserve that broken nose, did you? Well, there's a little taste of unlucky for you. Hope you have insurance. Hope some doctor who went to med school on the taxpayer dime is willing to help you." I wonder if I could get a grant for my little project...

I've known unlucky for almost 12 years now. And that's just a third of my life. And it's been mixed in with a healthy dose of lucky. Some people, too many people, start out unlucky and never manage to find the other side of it. I wonder what they dream about.

I can set Dad aside most of the time. Fifty-eight years of middle-class living. Hard work for sure but some results to go with it. If I could have a guarantee of 22 more years in my own home with my job and my family, I'd take it and count myself fortunate. But then I remember how he worked until he couldn't anymore because he was afraid of losing his insurance or losing access to his doctors if he went out on disability. On his last day at work he couldn't even climb the 4 stairs to get to his office. Two weeks later he was dead. He deserved better.

And R. What if she had survived NEC and open heart surgery? What if we were just wrapping up five years of oxygen tanks, feeding tubes, and 'round the clock medical care? How would we be able to work and take care of her? What would she deserve?

When I see them, whole and healthy in my dreams, it's like an out-of-body experience. Flying and breathing underwater and celebrity make-out sessions fade in the face of normal expectations fulfilled. Alive. Healthy. I am a world-killer.

I actually was a world-killer once. Maybe not the smartest or most beautiful or wealthiest but lucky enough that I didn't even recognize lucky. My world felt like something that would come when I whistled and would submit to my will. And, back then, I thought it was something that I had earned. Something that anyone could figure out if they just took the time or made the effort.

It's taken 12 years for me to realize that I was never that clever. Nobody is that clever.


So, now what?


14 comments:

  1. Ira's Glass (es), ha ~!

    *****

    I want some sort of magic mist to settle over America and make everyone feel lost and hopeless...together.

    {Though it might seem, not because I crave everyone miserable. Anything to usher some perspective. Please.}

    *****

    Some people, too many people, start out unlucky and never manage to find the other side of it. I wonder what they dream about.

    {yes}

    *****

    On his last day at work he couldn't even climb the 4 stairs to get to his office. Two weeks later he was dead.

    {The orange slices stay with me. And the PBR. Oh, God, if only...}

    *****

    My world felt like something that would come when I whistled and would submit to my will.

    {Remembering this girl. With a different name.}

    *****

    "Time itself becomes a destructive force, wearing down a man's ability to hold out and intensifying the suffering to an inhuman level." {Westermann}

    Dreaming, if at all, of one Thing,

    Cathy in Missouri

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    1. "I wish I had some coherent solution but I just end up wanting to punch people in the face. Like, "Wake-up, asshole! You're not deserving. You're lucky." Like, "You didn't deserve that broken nose, did you? Well, there's a little taste of unlucky for you. Hope you have insurance. Hope some doctor who went to med school on the taxpayer dime is willing to help you." I wonder if I could get a grant for my little project..."

      T - I will write you a check right the hell now if I get to add some names to the list.

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    2. @ Groves - I hear what you're saying. I don't really want lasting misery for anyone else. I just want them to get a taste that primes the pump of compassion and perspective. Best to you.

      @m - let me get in touch with a lawyer and work out the bugs on my plan. Then I'll build a widget or something to collect names.

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  2. Oh Tracy. I like your description of your Busby-Berkeley type dreams and surreal games of duck-duck-goose. I do love the elaborate ones, when I wake feeling all interested and intrigued. Yours sound much more interesting than mine, house elves and airports in the attic.

    I didn't know who Ira Glass was so I had to go and look him out, he looks pretty cute.

    I can't remember how I felt before all this, indescribable is precisely the right word. And how I long to feel vaguely competent, to care about something frivolous.

    Oh your Dad and the stairs. Oh my heart. He did deserve better. And I see I am not the only one who always thinks of him when she peels one orange slice away from another.

    When I imagine Georgina alive, I always imagine her as whole and healthy. But that is probably (definitely) a fiction. You don't win the jackpot twice on the same day. Chances are that it would have been tube feeding and oxygen canisters and who knows what else. And yes, what did she deserve?

    And today I just feel tired and hopeless. It won't last but for today I'm tired of running up hill. Tired of being encumbered. Just tired and sad. Tired of trying to figure it all out and then chastising myself for thinking that I could ever be that clever but equally unable to leave the figuring out bit alone. And yes, now what?

    Wish I could get you that grant. I'd start there.

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    1. Regarding the circumstances for R and Georgina, sometimes I feel like I have happiness complicated by grief rather than the other way around. When the what-ifs start adding up, I see that death may not have been the worst outcome for R. And then I start to worry about the wider implications of that notion--for other people, for other children.

      Whether it's temperament or circumstance or some combination of the two, I don't suppose we'll ever be able to step off of this ever-turning wheel completely.

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  3. Unencumbered - So often I wish I could sink into that word and never come out. I miss that feeling. Some days I miss it so much that I feel a little guilty about it. It's good, I think, not to be a world-killer, but it's not easy.

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    1. As usual, my post is sort of a thought-Frankenstein--a patchwork fully animated by some external source of energy. I don't think that I want to be a world-killer or that anybody should be one. It's a phrase that popped into my head when I started thinking about that seemingly unbridgeable gap between parents who have lost a child and parents who have all of their children present and healthy. If R and C had both survived and were perfectly healthy, I would have such a different blog. I'd be celebrating my achievement. I'd feel unstoppable. And, to some extent, that would be perfectly understandable--but, as you've noted, not necessarily better.

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  4. Yes, I used to feel that way, too - Life is good and it's because I made it that way. But then IT happened, and well, I now know enough to see how stupid I used to be. Life is not something to control, is unable to be controlled, although I wish it was.

    I also wish I saw Micah in my dreams, even just once, but I never do.

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    1. I think the biggest hurdle I've had to clear over the past four+ years is not thinking that everyone without an 'IT' is a complete moron (including the old version of me). I want to move past it but I just can't seem to.

      Also, here's hoping you see your boy sometime...

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  5. "I actually was a world-killer once. Maybe not the smartest or most beautiful or wealthiest but lucky enough that I didn't even recognize lucky. My world felt like something that would come when I whistled and would submit to my will. And, back then, I thought it was something that I had earned. Something that anyone could figure out if they just took the time or made the effort."

    For me this was one of the most difficult truths to digest. I could understand that babies died. But mine wasn't supposed to die. I was equally lucky and hard-worker.

    I've had my own steamy dreams about Ira Glass too, by the way.

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    1. Yup, the faith in hard work...so hard to let it go (or explain it to anyone without first-hand knowledge).

      And--back off, lady. Ira's mine!

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  6. "To be unencumbered".
    That's the line that struck me the most as well.
    Your dad did deserve better. That said, I am glad you see him in your dreams. I think I have dreamt of Hope once, and it was only a few weeks after she was born. I can't see her in this realm, but I wish I could see her elsewhere, even if it was only my dreams.
    Love to you.

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    1. Thanks for backing me up on Dad's experience. Maybe you'll see Hope someday when you can string more than 2 hours of sleep together at a time...

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  7. I am envious of those dreams. Somehow, even my subconscious can't muster up enough imagination to make Calla come true. But I get it, those holy-motherfucking-shit dreams where you feel like Rocky at the top of the stairs.

    It makes me so sad for your Dad that he had to endure that feeling of needing to work just to live. That, to put it scientifically, blows. Why can't we as a society afford people some dignity and compassion rather than forms and formalities?

    And I too struggle with thinking those not coming out from under a bus are not morons, too.
    Lots of love to you.
    xo

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