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I stood up in church yesterday afternoon and announced that I don't know why the gentle have to suffer. I said that my mother is afraid to go shopping on Christmas Eve for fear that she might see an "angel tree" with names still left on it, and that the worst moment came when she had her head in her hands, sobbing, while I had one hand on her back and the other over my face, also sobbing. The nurse that had stayed behind after the doctor delivered the news was squatting on the floor, holding one of my mother's hands, and she was crying and praying with us.
And then I sat while others at the service lifted up their lamentations. A man suffered from manic depression. A woman had been diagnosed with tinnitus and missed more than anything the silence she used to enjoy at her home deep in the woods. Another woman agonized over the choices she had made, and still makes every day, in caring for her disabled son because she can never be sure that has made, or is making, all the right ones. Others had lost their loved ones. Then the pastor read Psalm 88, which contains some of the most eloquent images of despair that I've ever heard.
All the while the grackle that had somehow made its way into the church flitted back and forth through the sanctuary. It would light in the Christmas tree or in the wreaths, explore the woodwork behind the altar, tap against the stained glass, flap against the rafters high overhead. The pastor had opened a window in hopes the bird might find its way out, but instead a cool breeze flowed in with the sounds of the city.
There is a vast amount of sorrow, pain, and unfairness in this world and I do not know why some seem to get more than their share.
I don't know why thus far this year, twenty-two homeless people have died on the streets of my city, unnamed and unloved, or why hundreds more sleep in doorways, alleys, or in tents in the woods with only blankets and Sterno to keep them warm.
I don't know why, every day at the hospital where my boyfriend works, there is a constant parade of people -- women, children, and men alike - who have been raped, people receiving the news that their insides have been rotted out by this disease or that, and people who have been on the receiving end of every sort of violence imaginable -- including, just this month, a man who was scalped.
Among others.
But most of all, I do not know and cannot understand why the gentle suffer. I don't know why my mother suffers. I don't know why the diabetes took her sight when she loved nothing more than to walk and look at the flowers and trees -- or why it set up an infection that claimed her left eardrum and with it her balance when she loved to climb the hills of the orchards and pick apples in the fall. She never asked for much and what little she had has been taken a bit at a time.
It's the same with my father, whose diabetes has claimed his legs and his kidneys, and who went off to war decades ago a simple and rather stupid man and who came back scarred and damaged beyond any words he ever knew.
My parents aren't perfect. Far from it, in fact, but they were never cruel and they did their best and raised me as best they knew how. They're not perfect but I can't fault them for that, not when there are so many things I can thank them for. From my father, for example, I got my love of the sight and sound of crows. Carrion birds that they are, they're always a signal of evil afoot in the movies and on TV, but when my father was growing up he hunted crows and learned to walk silently in the forest because of that. Moving silently in the woods was a skill that kept him alive in the jungles of Vietnam later on. From my mother I received a vast measure of compassion and empathy -- this woman who fears the sight of an angel tree with names still on it, knowing that means there's a child out there who won't get a present on Christmas morning; this woman who sets out food for her cats, and for the possums and raccoons who make their way to her back porch because she can't abide the thought of an animal going hungry; this woman who went without lunch for days once when she was still well enough to work -- because she had spent a good chunk of that week's paycheck to help a little girl, a stranger, buy a bottle of perfume for her grandmother.
These are people who went without food so that my brother and I would not have to and who now buy food for the homeless, who once adopted a cat without eyes from the shelter just because it looked so pitiful, and it was my mother who comforted me when I learned that I have HIV.
I'll never know why they suffer.
The latest bad news is kidney failure, and my mother was adamant about not being fitted for dialysis before Christmas. She set up the fitting for the dialysis accoutrements for early January, but honestly, she may not make it til then. She's been having headaches almost constantly here lately, and she's so weak. I had to help her decorate for Christmas that grim mausoleum of a house where she and my father live, and that was one of the most disturbingly Gothic experiences I've ever had. She would do a little, then sit and rest, do a little and rest, do a little and rest. Meanwhile I hung garlands and arranged mounds of fake Christmas greenery, dug no fewer than thirty-three fake poinsettia arrangements out of a closet, put up the wreaths, and in the end I took the wrapped presents and arranged them under the tree that my sister-in-law had decorated a couple of days before just because my mother was too weak to do it and my father had not yet been released from his latest trip to the hospital.
Perhaps its getting off the subject, or perhaps not, but I hate my parents' house and my mother and I have a fight every year about having to decorate it for Christmas. We even fought this year, but only half-heartedly and only for tradition's sake. I hate their house because nobody has ever been happy there -- not the family that built it, three generations living there in increasing misery until the woman who inherited it sold it to us for less than half its worth because there were just too many bad memories for her there. And now, not us. In the family fight leading up to us buying the house, the two brothers of that other family, who hated each other, waged war over the house. One laid traps inside it, deliberately stocked the fridge and freezers with food just before the power got cut off, piled the rooms high with garbage, and poisoned the well. Meanwhile, over the course of the house's history three people have died there, no fewer than three people have seen the ghost of a woman in the front yard, objects roam around the house by themselves, books leap from shelves, something walks alone at night on the kitchen's stone floor, and on most any night you can step outside and hear grumbling, gibbering, eerie laughter, or the occasional scream from the woods that press in so close around it that the house is forever dark inside.
Imagine having to decorate such a house for Christmas, to attempt to force a mean and gloomy house to be happy for the occasion -- to paint a pretty face on a rotting corpse. I finally explained all of that to my mother and I suppose that was why we really didn't have our hearts in it when we fought over decorating the place this year. She understood me at last and that was nice because I kept wondering as I brought out the presents if these will be the last that she ever wraps. She knows that I like the foil wrapping paper.
What am I to understand now, though? I thought I came close at the Christmas service at my church, the one set aside for people who hurt the most at this time of year. At the very least, I concluded that when you are watching someone you love die and you are helpless to do the least little thing about it, at least you can try to live your life in such a way that the people who have loved you will be honored. Don't -- never -- waste your days. As I watch my mother's body shut down, and endure as my father's mind wastes away, as it is doing now, I will try to remember that. And sooner or later, I'll be rid of that house and the drifting miasma of pain that fills it. In time, in fact, the weight of it all will slide off my shoulders and I'll be left with nothing more than two grave plots to visit, and lessons taught, determination to do something more and be something better than I am now.
And I will be left with the questions.
Why do the gentle suffer?
And then I sat while others at the service lifted up their lamentations. A man suffered from manic depression. A woman had been diagnosed with tinnitus and missed more than anything the silence she used to enjoy at her home deep in the woods. Another woman agonized over the choices she had made, and still makes every day, in caring for her disabled son because she can never be sure that has made, or is making, all the right ones. Others had lost their loved ones. Then the pastor read Psalm 88, which contains some of the most eloquent images of despair that I've ever heard.
All the while the grackle that had somehow made its way into the church flitted back and forth through the sanctuary. It would light in the Christmas tree or in the wreaths, explore the woodwork behind the altar, tap against the stained glass, flap against the rafters high overhead. The pastor had opened a window in hopes the bird might find its way out, but instead a cool breeze flowed in with the sounds of the city.
There is a vast amount of sorrow, pain, and unfairness in this world and I do not know why some seem to get more than their share.
I don't know why thus far this year, twenty-two homeless people have died on the streets of my city, unnamed and unloved, or why hundreds more sleep in doorways, alleys, or in tents in the woods with only blankets and Sterno to keep them warm.
I don't know why, every day at the hospital where my boyfriend works, there is a constant parade of people -- women, children, and men alike - who have been raped, people receiving the news that their insides have been rotted out by this disease or that, and people who have been on the receiving end of every sort of violence imaginable -- including, just this month, a man who was scalped.
Among others.
But most of all, I do not know and cannot understand why the gentle suffer. I don't know why my mother suffers. I don't know why the diabetes took her sight when she loved nothing more than to walk and look at the flowers and trees -- or why it set up an infection that claimed her left eardrum and with it her balance when she loved to climb the hills of the orchards and pick apples in the fall. She never asked for much and what little she had has been taken a bit at a time.
It's the same with my father, whose diabetes has claimed his legs and his kidneys, and who went off to war decades ago a simple and rather stupid man and who came back scarred and damaged beyond any words he ever knew.
My parents aren't perfect. Far from it, in fact, but they were never cruel and they did their best and raised me as best they knew how. They're not perfect but I can't fault them for that, not when there are so many things I can thank them for. From my father, for example, I got my love of the sight and sound of crows. Carrion birds that they are, they're always a signal of evil afoot in the movies and on TV, but when my father was growing up he hunted crows and learned to walk silently in the forest because of that. Moving silently in the woods was a skill that kept him alive in the jungles of Vietnam later on. From my mother I received a vast measure of compassion and empathy -- this woman who fears the sight of an angel tree with names still on it, knowing that means there's a child out there who won't get a present on Christmas morning; this woman who sets out food for her cats, and for the possums and raccoons who make their way to her back porch because she can't abide the thought of an animal going hungry; this woman who went without lunch for days once when she was still well enough to work -- because she had spent a good chunk of that week's paycheck to help a little girl, a stranger, buy a bottle of perfume for her grandmother.
These are people who went without food so that my brother and I would not have to and who now buy food for the homeless, who once adopted a cat without eyes from the shelter just because it looked so pitiful, and it was my mother who comforted me when I learned that I have HIV.
I'll never know why they suffer.
The latest bad news is kidney failure, and my mother was adamant about not being fitted for dialysis before Christmas. She set up the fitting for the dialysis accoutrements for early January, but honestly, she may not make it til then. She's been having headaches almost constantly here lately, and she's so weak. I had to help her decorate for Christmas that grim mausoleum of a house where she and my father live, and that was one of the most disturbingly Gothic experiences I've ever had. She would do a little, then sit and rest, do a little and rest, do a little and rest. Meanwhile I hung garlands and arranged mounds of fake Christmas greenery, dug no fewer than thirty-three fake poinsettia arrangements out of a closet, put up the wreaths, and in the end I took the wrapped presents and arranged them under the tree that my sister-in-law had decorated a couple of days before just because my mother was too weak to do it and my father had not yet been released from his latest trip to the hospital.
Perhaps its getting off the subject, or perhaps not, but I hate my parents' house and my mother and I have a fight every year about having to decorate it for Christmas. We even fought this year, but only half-heartedly and only for tradition's sake. I hate their house because nobody has ever been happy there -- not the family that built it, three generations living there in increasing misery until the woman who inherited it sold it to us for less than half its worth because there were just too many bad memories for her there. And now, not us. In the family fight leading up to us buying the house, the two brothers of that other family, who hated each other, waged war over the house. One laid traps inside it, deliberately stocked the fridge and freezers with food just before the power got cut off, piled the rooms high with garbage, and poisoned the well. Meanwhile, over the course of the house's history three people have died there, no fewer than three people have seen the ghost of a woman in the front yard, objects roam around the house by themselves, books leap from shelves, something walks alone at night on the kitchen's stone floor, and on most any night you can step outside and hear grumbling, gibbering, eerie laughter, or the occasional scream from the woods that press in so close around it that the house is forever dark inside.
Imagine having to decorate such a house for Christmas, to attempt to force a mean and gloomy house to be happy for the occasion -- to paint a pretty face on a rotting corpse. I finally explained all of that to my mother and I suppose that was why we really didn't have our hearts in it when we fought over decorating the place this year. She understood me at last and that was nice because I kept wondering as I brought out the presents if these will be the last that she ever wraps. She knows that I like the foil wrapping paper.
What am I to understand now, though? I thought I came close at the Christmas service at my church, the one set aside for people who hurt the most at this time of year. At the very least, I concluded that when you are watching someone you love die and you are helpless to do the least little thing about it, at least you can try to live your life in such a way that the people who have loved you will be honored. Don't -- never -- waste your days. As I watch my mother's body shut down, and endure as my father's mind wastes away, as it is doing now, I will try to remember that. And sooner or later, I'll be rid of that house and the drifting miasma of pain that fills it. In time, in fact, the weight of it all will slide off my shoulders and I'll be left with nothing more than two grave plots to visit, and lessons taught, determination to do something more and be something better than I am now.
And I will be left with the questions.
Why do the gentle suffer?
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