August 11: Grace and Personailty, Whitewash, Michael David Madonick, "Box Turtle," Adventures of Stickman

Ives did not pursue it then, but would find out later that Carmen, a figure of grace and personality, who was pure dulceria, would have one and then another and then a third debilitating operation, not upon her heart, as Ives had first thought, but upon her breasts and the surrounding lymph nodes.

Carmen Ramirez is an important character in Mr. Ives' Christmas.  She is the wife of Ives' best friend, and, throughout the novel, she remains a figure of supreme patience and understanding and love.  Devoted to her sometimes abusive husband.  Dedicated to her children.  At the end of her life, Carmen is elevated even more, becoming almost saint-like in her suffering and love.

My sister was transported home today.  The hospital bed was supposed to be delivered this afternoon, and the ambulance with my sister arrived about 4:30 p.m.  And now the long process of letting go begins.

I have difficulty when death sort of whitewashes a person's life.  It's natural for family and friends to overlook a loved one's faults and mistakes during the mourning process.  Death is painful, just as life is painful.  I love my sister, but she was not a perfect person.  We had some major disagreements over the years.  Times when we barely spoke to each other.  At points in our relationship, I broke her heart, and she broke mine.  That is the truth.

Yet, we never gave up on each other, even during those difficult times.  I loved her, and I hope she knew that I loved her.  Neither of us were saints.  We simply did the best we could.

Even though I work in the medical field, I intensely dislike hospitals and doctors.  My sister understood this fact about me.  I didn't visit her as much as I should have over the course of her illness.  I used every excuse I could.  Work.  Teaching.  Kids' school programs.  Dance recitals and competitions.  I was a shithead, frozen by my own fears and phobias.  I did the best I could, and now I know it wasn't good enough.  I can't whitewash that.

At this moment, I feel like the box turtle in Mike Madonick's poem below.  Carried into the heavens and then released.  The rocks are going to be hard and painful.

Just call me Marty tonight.  I am no saint.

Box Turtle

by:  Michael David Madonick

It may be that I've got the whole story wrong,
but I've heard that eagles in Argentina have learned,
after the rain forests were burned back, to
catch box turtles that survived the fires by
hiding deep in their rooms, and carry them
to rocky outcroppings, a hundred feet up, and
drop them like bad cartoons until their helmets
crack.  I suppose one should give credit where
credit is due, to the birds that never did such
things before the burning, or to the farmers themselves
who decided to set the trees down so their cattle could
graze more easily.  But I'm more likely to think
about the turtles, to whom altitude is as foreign as
speed, pulled aloft by the claws of some sharp-beaked
angel, its house entire raised like Dorothy's in the
tornado, or the deep heat of a fever, or the deus ex
machina of sporadic holocaust that God has cast us
to.  And then, when the wrench of feathers decides
it is right, RELEASE, an unbungeed free-fall, a
reckless unbraked downhill dive toward the inevitable,
the Diaspora of soup, the shell gone weak against
the stone.  Then, if there is anything left in listening for,
to wait, one might hear the angel come in for
its food.  The oratorious stall of feather that makes a backwash
of air so it can land delicately by the mess, the Humpty
Dumpty that the turtle has now become.  I suppose
one needs to give credit where credit is due--God,
Belief, no less apparent now than ever before.

Adventures of STICKMAN