December 3: Changed His Life, Love, Fear

[E. B. White] was thinking a lot about love.  He agonized about what it meant and how it had changed his life and how it might change it more in the future.  Change always frightened him, even when it was thrilling, and the uneasy blend of fear and excitement was almost overwhelming him now...

I think I am a lot like E. B. White.  White wasn't impulsive.  He didn't court adventure in his life.  He was a thinker.  When he fell in love, got married, became a father, he had to meditate on it.  Put it in terms that he understood.  He wrote about his complex feelings.  Often, he hid behind animal characters, like pet dogs and birds.  He seemed to understand the world better if he viewed it through the eyes of a winged or four-legged or eight-legged creature.


This week, I have been struggling to make sense of a loss.  Every time I step foot in the English Department, I'm overwhelmed by sadness.  I still see people crying in the halls, in offices.  It's as if this place has hit an iceberg and is taking on icy water.  I can almost hear a string quartet playing "Nearer My God to Thee."  This change isn't easy.  It's like floating in the middle of the Atlantic in a life raft, waiting for a rescue ship.

That may sound melodramatic, but that's the best analogy I can come up with tonight.  This afternoon, as I was working in the medical office, a man stepped through the office door.  He was a salesman from a drug company.  I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and I stopped what I was doing.  Froze.  I experienced a moment of disconnect from reality, because I actually thought my friend Ray was standing at the counter, looking at me.  In a very faint way, he resembled Ray.  And, for the briefest of moments, I felt like Ray was there with me.

Of course, this all has to do with my state of mind.  How my thoughts have been dwelling on Ray since Thanksgiving.  I was walking to my car last night, and I thought I heard Ray's laugh behind me.  I turned around and saw a crow sitting on top of a snow bank.  That's it.  I know I have to snap out of this blue funk.  Ray certainly wouldn't appreciate being the cause of so much grief and heartbreak.  He'd be telling jokes and stories, making people laugh.

Like E. B. White, I am uncomfortable with change.  All change.  Change through loss.  Change through love.  Change through fear.  I don't like change.  If I were White, I'd probably be writing this post in the voice of a goldfish named Eugene who'd recently lost his friend, another goldfish named Albert.  It's a way of making sense of a senseless situation.  I think all writers do this.  In the face of difficult or confusing emotions, writers turn to words.  Characters.  Stories.  Poems.  Essays.  It's a way to put the universe back into some kind of order.

The stars are realigning.  A new normal will soon be established.  I'd like to believe everything happens for a reason.  Something good will flower somehow after a long, bleak, cold winter.

Saint Marty holds onto that hope.

Don't abandon hope, all ye who enter here