If you’ve been reading this blog in the last few days, you know that I’m dealing with many mixed emotions regarding my daughter’s imminent departure for medical school. I’ve known this was her plan for quite some time. Children grow up. They move out and away. And, hopefully, they find happiness and love.
Yet, my mind was playing a trick on me. I didn’t really accept that my daughter was leaving until I stopped by her apartment tonight and saw her living room floor filled with packed boxes. Shit got real for me then. The best analogy I can come up with is reading about Pearl Harbor your whole life and then visiting the Arizona Memorial in Honolulu. Gazing down into the water at the Arizona, which still contains the bodies of over 900 sailors and Marines, changes you. You walk away with the weight of that moment in history sitting on your shoulders.
With wonder last night, I realized that my little girl (while she was always be my little girl) is a young woman now, independent, smart, and full of hope. She knows what she wants, and she’s chasing it like a kid chasing an ice cream truck on a hot summer day.
Sharon Olds writes about wonder . . .
Wonder
by: Sharon Olds
When she calls to tell me my father is dying
today or tomorrow, I walk down the hall
and feel that my mouth has fallen open
and my eyes are staring. The planet of his head
swam above my crib, I did not understand it.
His body came toward me in the lake over the agates,
the hair of his chest lifting like root-hairs—
I saw it and I did not understand it.
He lay behind beveled-glass doors, beside
the cut-crystal decanter, its future
shards in upright bound sheaves.
He sat by his pool, not meeting our eyes,
his irises made of some boiled-down, viscous
satiny matter, undiscovered.
When he sickened, he began to turn to us,
when he sank down, he shined. I lowered my
mouth to the glistening tureen of his face
and he titled himself toward me, a dazzling
meteor dropping down into the crib,
and now he is going to die. I walk down the
hall, face to face with it,
as if it were a great heat.
I feel like one of the shepherd children
when the star came down onto the roof.
But I am used to it, I stand in familiar
astonishment. If I had dared to imagine
trading, I might have wished to trade
places with anyone raised on love,
but how would anyone raised on love
bear this death?
It’s a sobering little poem. A grown child confronting the imminent death of a parent. Most every person alive on this planet has faced or will face this experience. It’s inevitable. The only thing more inevitable than death is Republican stupidity.
These kinds of huge, life-altering events fill me with wonder. No poem or novel or prayer or essay or blog post can prepare you for it. When my sister Sally died, I walked around in a state of wonder and sadness for weeks. The cacophony of emotions was deafening in my head—each one beautiful and terrible at the same time.
I’m probably not explaining myself all that well. You see, grief can be ugly and debilitating. However, the experience of deep grief also means that you’ve experienced deep love. That’s something to celebrate, and it uplifts and carries you through the darkness. And that is wonder.
I’m on the cusp of grief right now. I’m also on the cusp of joy for my daughter. Those two emotions are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist. At the moment, grief is in the driver’s seat for me. Ask me in a couple weeks, and I may have a different answer for you.
That’s my current reality, and like all realities, it’s complicated. Nobody promised me sunshine and roses every day. In fact, nobody promised that I’d be around today or tomorrow or next week. It’s about embracing life fully, in all its beautiful ugliness, with every breath you take.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about a memory from his daughter’s childhood. It’s based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Good Humor Ice Cream Truck: Freewrite on this topic for five minutes. In your freewrite, try to describe your childhood memories of summer evenings using all five of your senses. What did the cooling asphalt smell like? How did it feel on your tongue to lick the wooden Strawberry Shortcake stick? Write a poem that allows the reader to experience your youthful memories,
Good Humor
by: Martin Achatz
My young daughter, body tan, sleek
as an otter, chased that sound
through our neighborhood on steamy
July days, dollar bills wadded
like used Kleenexes in her fist,
the music box chimes cutting
the stagnant air, windless trees,
as if a flock of arctic terns was
blown off course into our summer
and was now singing laments for
missing glaciers and ice and sea.
I see her now, disappearing around
the corner, auburn hair flashing
like a fox tail in the sun, and I know
she won’t slow down until she finds
that penguin nesting ground where
night never ends and a vanilla
moon rides in her hand, waning
under the shadow of her hungry tongue.