Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is the author of Bearing the Unbearable, and founder of the MISSFoundation. She lives in Sedona, AZ, a place of special significance for Kissie and me.
presence
Time, and time again
The passage of time, the marking of it, has never been stranger than since you died. Dates, seasons and their associated import and memory, seem to be tattooed just under my skin – out of sight, but exerting themselves effortlessly into consciousness (or semi-consciousness) at the appointed time. Anniversaries of all sorts – doctor appointments, hospital stays, trips we took, last times we did this or that – especially that last year, are sentinels of significance that I appreciate and long for, even if they’re painful. When I look at the actual calendar and my record of events for confirmation, I think, “ah yes, no wonder I feel this way.”
As I mentally and emotionally move through the chronology of 2013, the turning over and remembering of its defining moments, I’m negotiating, as I must, the present-moment. It seems to me a kind of slipstream time, the present. A time oddly hidden from itself. More like a shadowed or cocooned time. Time that is pulled somehow, largely invisible, and without a sense of perceptible movement, but definitely evolving. A waiting, suspended kind of time the clock-driven world is impatient with, and sometimes I feel like I’m a step behind (or ahead) even while all appears to be moving at the expected and customary pace.
Because time has felt so surreal since your death, it helps me to think about the ancient Greek understanding of time. They defined time as either chronos – sequential, chronological time – or kairos – “a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action.” In short, kairos being a more conditional or subjective understanding of time, and chronos more objective and measurable. These past three years, this slipstream of time, feels more indeterminate and evolving, more kairos than chronos, even though intellectually I understand it is both. I feel less anxious when I consider the time I’m experiencing now as kairos time. It has a liminality I try to embrace, and it feels especially crucial. Most of all, you seem to exist here. We exist here.
If I Were a Bird
“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
-George Elliot
This quote is so you. When I read it on your party invitation, it took my breath away. And when you tossed those leaves for joy that early November day, no doubt was left, it was your favored season. You must be that bird – the way you’d flit through golden days with all your brilliant gusto – I seem to sense you more intently now. But it could be that I’m the bird, flying about this home of ours, and in every tree and cloud, seeking you.
Rest Area
Lying on the couch
awake since three
in the nursing home
with my dad
and all the other
saints of survival
I watch his skeletal
frame disappearing
into the pitch
dark bedroom.
Each shuffle step
a psalm of frailty.
Eighty-nine year old
bones still moving.
Still holding him up
in this weighted world.
On the drive home
I feel myself fading.
When I realize
that I can’t remember
the last few minutes
I pull off.
In the rest area
I sleep in the front seat
with the windows down.
The sun and wind flow in
along with the smell
of warm sweet grass.
When I wake
I am lost in the world
for a wonderful moment.
I climb out of the car
and slowly walk the perimeter
of the picnic area.
There are no people.
Just a lone semi
parked by the edge
of a corn field.
A driver named Winkle
may have been sleeping
in its cab for fifty years.
I find a curved hiking path
mowed into the waist high
“restored prairie”.
It’s surrounded by wildflowers
and tall, brown grasses.
Fifty yards out
there is a sculpture.
A boat with no skin,
only broken ribs.
A plaque explains that it is
symbolic of the Viking explorers.
It has been surrounded
with a fence so
no one will touch it
or get too close.
I watch the fall bloom
asters
hyssop
golden rod and more
rocking back and forth
on the moist wind
coming up from the south.
Monarchs go tumbling by
diving again and again
into the wind
fighting their way
across North America
on paper wings.
Off in the distance
the windmill giants are
waving their arms at something
beyond the horizon.
The earth is tilting.
I think of my father.
No longer able to kneel and pray.
He lies on his back in bed
and prays for the world.
He sleeps and prays.
He has fought
the wolves of loneliness.
He was wounded but now
they lie quietly by his side.
He lies quietly by their side.
When I am with him
(and even when I am not)
I feel his grace.
It gives welcome weight
to the ballast that’s needed
in this storm of days.
Back in the wild field
an old fence post holds
a twisted strand of wire.
It sings so softly with the wind
that it can hardly be heard.
It sounds like the ghost
of a drowned woman
calling from far
beneath the water.
I am in love
with these quiet things
that have nothing
to do with survival.
I stand in the field
listening to this sad music
and watch as a long
spine of clouds
slowly bends itself
over the ancient world.
– Kevin Lawler
********************************************
More poetry by Kevin Lawler can be found at Winding Road.
Shelter
Over the many years you were sick, from time to time, I would try to imagine what I would feel, how I would cope, if you died. It wasn’t a question of when, really, unless there was a setback and a new treatment protocol – a storm to weather. Then, that far off time would inch closer, only to retreat again until the next threat. Unfailingly, you lived for the day. More than anyone else, you taught me to seize it, and the people in it, with wholehearted exuberance. We were shelter – each to the other. I couldn’t possibly have imagined how I would feel, or deal. Your death is beyond precedent in my life, despite the deaths of many of our loved ones before it. And because there was, and continues to be, no cultural framework for learning about dying and grieving as skills, I find myself searching for some kind of community engaged in creating one.
Some friends and I were talking recently about the “club.” Like other clubs of similar ilk, the cancer club most notably, it’s one you never want to join. But there you are, and you gravitate to others who can relate most keenly because of the magnitude of the death they’ve experienced. A death that levels you. Shatters any semblance of life as you knew it. They know what you’re talking about as you all nod your heads about death having its way with you. And what life is like now.
This is the company I seek, and have been fortunate to find, especially when I’ve needed it most. Companions with whom I feel a strange and comfortable refuge and authenticity, even if I don’t know them well. It’s unorganized, impromptu, and feels rather “underground.” It’s balancing, and clarifying, and loving. Like you, it’s shelter.
The Presence of Absence
“There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled, one remains connected to the other person through it.
It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled, and thus helps us preserve – even in pain – the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past, not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This hit me like a ton of bricks when I first read it, about three months after Kissie’s death. I was unfamiliar with the author, a German theologian who died in 1945. His words were a thunderclap, and a resonating voice to the gaping emptiness that overwhelmed me, and that I was unable to articulate. I had read nothing to that point, and little since, that openly advised an enduring connection by the conscious acknowledgement of absence, and the effort to “leave it precisely unfilled.” It was counterintuitive, and yet it made perfect sense. My irreplaceable sister.
In the past fifteen months, I have learned just how hard it is to “leave it precisely unfilled.” Culturally, we do not consider absence a state to be cultivated, with the living or the dead. We’re encouraged from every corner to fill our emptiness with something. Physical, intellectual, and spiritual distractions, compensations, and comforts abound. A philosophy for remaining connected to our deceased loved ones by staying in the presence of their absence is eloquently subversive. So is the idea that the torment of our separation could be transformative.
A Map of Mourning 