Ordinary Grief

At night, if I am asleep, my dreams are this evolving nightmare that began as me needing to keep up with my Dad’s medications & have blossomed into a sci-fi monstrosity wherein his chest cavity is a kind of bottomless pit into which I must urgently throw things. I awaken & am disoriented & then sleep & find myself in the same dream, & repeat, until somewhere in the small hours I just lay there with my arms folded looking into the darkness of the ceiling, waiting for the dull insinuation of morning light to smudge the window blinds. I think of my Dad. When I do, it’s as if I have to rewind from the same spot every time-- his body lying in the funeral home for us to positively identify. Then backwards through time, his body still in his room, then his body in a coma, then him again, actually Dad, glinting through the broken vessel in fleck & shine. I have to put him back together, body & soul, to hear his voice again, to feel him there. I wonder if it will always be like this, or if some day, I’ll be able to retrieve him at random, outside of time, no longer hostage to the crepuscular advance of death upon him, nor tethered to polished plastic machines that bleated life into his lungs & bloodied his nostrils. Can I see his life without detouring through the prism of his death? Or is that the filter stuck upon the lens, the grammar into which the thrust must be made to fit? 

Absence is cold fact, & I am wondering if I need to stare at it, directly, to find in what it limns some light. I would cast my gaze elsewhere, but the world seems only to permit its beauty by dint of what it is constantly taking from us, from itself. I know that death is what strikes flint to the fire of living, what charges its light, blossoms it into towering flame. But afterwards, the embers dulled & lightened, charred & spent, the fire’s story is altered irrevocably. It is rewritten in charcoal, & down to the serif, the curve in letter & word where seemed to pulse something like the urgent vitality, the tale is read through its end, sieved, its light eeked out of its shadow, while sky skeins & greys & dead leaves scrape about & the wind blows & we, we say, move along. 

I hear life intoned in the somber stillness of the vacant body. I do not speak that language. I wonder where it goes. I know that he is gone, but I want to remember his life without the insurmountable obstacle of his death. To peer past, pierce obsidian, cleave light & wonder. I was once a boy & could not fathom. & now, I fathom, well & full, & feel still stricken & sleepless & spent. 

He would ask often when I called if I was bragging or complaining. I am complaining. But in such an ordinary way.