Golden Oldies.

Ay Dios Mio

Sheesh. This is certainly an odd week.

It sounds cold hearted to say, so please don't misread me...its not as though I am immune to death. I am sad, listless and almost without hope, but still...odd.

Death is odd.

When thinking about the short span of human life, the all-important blip appearing somewhere within the vast expanse of time, all I can really come up with is...odd. Odd that I am a thinking, feeling human being with all my loves and trials and jokes and tragedies, the things that encompass my days, the moods that wax and wane, the people which whom I share all of these changes...it seems odd that one thing--namely, something as insignificant as DEATH, which is, really, little more than the stopping of breath, the lurched reaction of tissue and muscle and bone to some change within the harmony of normal bodily functioning--has the power to end it all . This one thing, this one change, signals the end of all the things I have ever known and ushers in beyond my will the beginning of all things unknown. If that even makes sense at all.

Since Mike died it feels as though my once sunny days (read: ignorant days) are now obstructed by the presence of something dark and ominous lurking just beyond the periphery. Like in a horror film where the children are playing and laughing or the adults are cooking dinner or making love only the be interrupted by a presence, a sudden shift in atmosphere or music or lighting that signals to the audience that something terrible is about to occur.

And now this?

But I was never all that happy anyways. It's just that now that I have discovered death, not as something distant and able to be ignored, but as something always and irrepressibly with me, I have validation for my constant worry, for the fluttering in my stomach when I think of a future beyond career, marriage, retirement.

I don't want it to end there for him. I want to be there in that moment to be an intervening force, to stop time and rush back to that elusive place "before it was too late". I would put out my hand and save. SAVE. I would stop it before it happened. Before the tears. Before the grief, the suspicion. Before the inevitable regret. Or if I couldn't stop it, maybe I could postpone it, get some explanation, some words that might comfort. And I would carry them off to his mother and father and place the comfort in their laps and say See? See here? There is hope. It is not over, it is not sad...

The worst thing is knowing beyond a doubt that what's done is done.

Or, if you believe John Donne..."death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for though art not so...death, thou hast died."

The death of death. Resurrection? In order to end "death", there must be a death? In order for others to live, some must die? In order for one son to live, another must die?

How must Mary have felt, to know that the death of her son would be life to many? It seems...odd.

Again, it has been an odd week.

Peace of Christ be with you.