i do not drink coffee. i have never tasted it. i never quite thought i was old enough to drink it - so i never started. there are a lot of things in my life that i never thought i was old enough to do. like be the one that makes all of the decisions. or the one that is in charge of where, how, when, why and who.
yet i find myself old enough. it is up to me and often i feel ill equipped to handle it. does anyone else ever feel this way? what did i do to prepare for this part of my life except live the previous part? is that really enough?
g'ma wants to know if i think her living will is appropriately documented. let me think about that . . . hmmm, g'ma, who i love to the moon and back, wants me, the granddaughter, to tell her if her dying wish is appropriate. i think it is. but who am i to say?
four of my very closest friends are battling major life issues and they each one turn to me and ask what i would do, or share their story, or ask if what they are doing is right, correct, fair, good, reasonable.
god grant me the words to say or the sense to keep my mouth shut!
yet i find myself old enough. it is up to me and often i feel ill equipped to handle it. does anyone else ever feel this way? what did i do to prepare for this part of my life except live the previous part? is that really enough?
g'ma wants to know if i think her living will is appropriately documented. let me think about that . . . hmmm, g'ma, who i love to the moon and back, wants me, the granddaughter, to tell her if her dying wish is appropriate. i think it is. but who am i to say?
four of my very closest friends are battling major life issues and they each one turn to me and ask what i would do, or share their story, or ask if what they are doing is right, correct, fair, good, reasonable.
god grant me the words to say or the sense to keep my mouth shut!
I speak to the dead, you know.
ReplyDeleteNot in any overly-dramatic, prime-time kind of way. I'm not a spiritual or religious man by any stretch of the imagination. Haven't been for years.
The Old Man had the bad grace to die ten days before my wedding. I think he just didn't want to be bothered getting all dressed up in a suit in the middle of summer.
For him, retirement was an unwelcome abstraction in his life. Forced upon him while I was a sophomore in High School, he found myriad ways to keep himself occupied, and it was a rare thing to not see him in motion.
That's how he died, actually. At the age of 89. Tripping over the door-jamb, carrying a box of something or other into the garage. The concrete floor kissed his forehead and the snap of his neck switched off the lights immediately.
I couldn't have wished better for him. At the time when his body was truly beginning to betray him, he checked out before enjoying some of the more frightening horrors of old age.
With his death, my life acquired a new meaning. The oldest of my two brothers summed it up best when he set his empty beer bottle down on the table at the brewery after the funeral and scanned us with one wizened eye. "It's just us, now," he said.
And with that pronouncement came the profound understanding that the last of the Rites of Passage had come and gone for The Green Boys. There was no more patriarch to the clan. We, each of us, was a book to be authored by our own hands - no longer a footnote in an older story.
It also came with the realization that the forward to our lives had been written by a pen pressed deeply into the vellum of our very nature. The Old Man's scrawl was all over us. Every practical joke, every ounce of inquisitive nature, every brush of the soil through our hands was put there by the hands of the man who raised us. There are some things we simply cannot help but be, but there are others that are waiting to be discovered.
The Old Man loved blackberry brandy. He couldn't drink it later in life, thanks to the cruel allergy he developed. But he can tolerate it fine, now.
I buy a small bottle, and when I'm in Wichita, He and I share a drink, and I speak.
I tell him thank you for every breath he used to teach me one of life's countless little lessons. I assure him that everything's fine. And that, no matter what happens, everything *will* be fine.
I leave the bottle there, up against the headstone. Perhaps the caretaker appreciates the annual present. There are only a couple of swallows missing, after all.
Before I leave I tell The Old Man thank you a final time. For giving me this life to live.
And then, I go out and own it. Every happy, sad, ugly and wonderful minute of it.
You always have healing words and a healing heart.. like your grandmother.. you know it is a known fact ... some DNA skips a generation:)
ReplyDeleteAnd I would personally be glad to buy you a coffee pot... nothing like staying the night with a bestie with no JAVA LOL! XOXOXOXOXOX
ReplyDelete