uTopianTurtleTop

Got back a few hours ago from a week in Michigan. Good trip. Dad is hanging in through a 2nd round of chemotherapy. Lots of family and friends around, a party of some sort almost every night.

Not enough sleep last night, to bed soon. Sad to leave, good to be back. The 2nd day there I was moving a woodpile for Dad. He was deciding which pieces to keep and which to pitch. "Keep that one, I may want to use that for a project some day." The hopefulness of the statement struck me real -- it really was just one in an endless series of housekeeping projects, and I remembered: Live until you can't. The on-goingness of life.

My great-grandparents built the cottage 90 years ago. Shortly after we finished the woodpile project, someone let the back screen door slam shut, a sound I've heard all my life, and the exactitude of the sound pierced me and I teared up. The sound brought back dead grandparents and aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents and more aunts and uncles I never knew who passed their summers there before me. Where are they now? Where we're all going, some sooner, some later.


My last day there we went to a memorial service for the family friend who killed himself last November. A cousin of the mother of the deceased conducted the service and gave the sermon. The mother's cousin is also a friend of my parents' and I'd met him a number of times. Dr. L. is a professor of something related to Chinese studies and college provost at various institutions, a real sweet man who went to high school with my mom and is probably retired now. I had not known that he was an ordained minister. His sermon discussed suicide obliquely, in a quiet, deeply felt, understated manner. I can only paraphrase.

"The church, being a very human institution, has at various times attempted to ordain whom God will allow into his house, but the preponderance of the evidence is clear: as Paul wrote in the epistle to the Romans, 'Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.' "

And he went on to describe how Jesus was a healer who cast demons out of people when saw that they were sick, "and he didn't burden them with theological discourses on the nature of evil." Dr. L. said that the archaic imagery of demons can help us come to grips with mental illness, which really does make a sufferer feel as though they were being possessed by something outside of themselves.

My sister, who had been a good friend of the deceased's, cried, and seeing her cry made me cry. My dad, perhaps thinking of his own funeral to come, teared up.

It was beautiful ceremony. We had seen the parents at a restaurant our first night in Michigan, stopping from the airport on the way home. They were driving from the same airport picking up their daughter and her family, who were coming to pass the week ahead of the service. It was nice to see them all.

Before the service my dad had told me that R., the deceased, had sent him a basket of food upon hearing that he had cancer, just a few weeks before his own demise.

Lots more to the trip, but that's all for now. "The ongoingness of life" was the phrase that kept coming to me all week, and while my parents' home remains my home, my life now is centered here and this is my home as well. Great to be there, sad to leave, and good to be back.

Heartbreak and loss are inevitable, and it's only because we love that our hearts ever break.