A time for somber reflection and corporate lament at North Way’s Oakland Campus.
Years. Years now. It has been so long since he has reached out his hand around my shoulder, as he used to.
Always less certain is the time that passed since I have felt that old sensation. There is a feeling that lingered through the years apart from him, but now it is gone. It has been.
It has been so long.
I drove to this collapsing cabin because of what it meant to us. It is settling into the hill it was built on, becoming landscape itself, yet the memories still remain. They are bittersweet, but the sugar must be melting with the rain. I feel hardly anything but pain these days.
The pond offers no respite from the density of emotion that strains at my heart. Grief threatens to pull my chest right out of my chest. It is heavier now than it has been. Why does the mass of it grow?
Downhill from the moss and slats of the old cabin, downhill from the spring that feeds this tiny mountain puddle, lie rocks that usher in a cold stream of the freshest, clearest water. The pond wards off green growth and stink with its small size and its fresh source. Thick mountain laurel shades the far bank where the dam of earth releases a trickle into the impenetrable undergrowth. The near side of the water was once carpeted with a seasonally-tended yard, but no one will care for it now. The thick, tall grass is sprouting little copses of bush and towering weeds.
I sit on one boulder overlooking the water. I should lay back, relax, and sunbathe with the rocks, but I cannot. I should feel the comfort of their warmth radiating up through me, but I cannot. He tarries here still and will not reach out his hand to hold me. He has no body to hold mine, but his presence remains and brushes against me at intervals that forbid any kind of relaxation. My sensitive skin shivers against the ghost of love.
The water whispers to me. It calls as if I were on top of the Golden Gate, but I am inches above the half-shaded surface on a sun-warmed rock. Still, it invites me in.
I step down onto and kneel upon a flat stone inches below the water. The winter chill never leaves mountain springs. My knees and shins brace against the wet cold. The leather of my sandals glisten, and the capillaries of my shorts dampen just above the waterline.
The water warms, just enough, around my goose-bumps. This grief I know is a degree more inviting as I acquaint myself with its frigid welcome. A certain comfort comes from resting just here. But that is not why I came. I shuffle to the edge and give way to a stunted dive into the pool. I suppose I must.
The chill that my knees came to accept my whole body cannot. The weight in my chest is gone with the wind, and I do all I can to catch my breath in the crushing density of the cold. It threatens to take me.
But I am man still and hold desperately to the will that ushered me forward thus far. With his hand gone and no longer leading me step by step, I have had to guide myself. And so I will my body to the depths of the center of the water and force my head under.
The sorrow that pulled me in with its false warmth and familiarity now surrounds me. It leeches all of my life with the cold of the mountain’s heart. It combs through every strand of my hair as I lurch up for a breath. The resistant viscosity of my world is trying to take what little is left of me. Maybe it already has.
But the surface breaks and a breath of oxygen inflames the sputtering pilot light that held onto a life of life in the central man, in my heart of hearts.
That single breath which punctuates my drowning vitalizes what I had forgotten was hidden deep within me for these last years, since the day I was born, again. It has always been there, I suppose, though it has waxed and waned and waned and waned.
Hope.
Every breath breathed with my head bobbing just above the surface of sorrow is another gasp of hope. The grief that invades every inch of skin below the neck stays below the neck. It cannot get in. Hope fills my lungs. Life remains.
On the sunken rock once more, I pause for a moment reflecting in the water. The death I willfully buried myself in seemed to be everywhere without respite. Sorrow felt like the bedfellow of life, so intimately related. But now I cannot even get my hands around it. It spills out of my closed fists as I lift them up out of the water.
I buried myself alive in the waters, but life would not forsake me. I unwittingly reaffirm my new life with each breath.
I thought sorrow would stay with me the rest of my days. I now see how it slips from my person and always seeks the low places.
I lift my head and take a breath high above the sorrow. Breath is hope. Hope engenders faith. Faith finds love. Love conquers loss.
Hope, faith, and love are really real, not this current pain. Every breath holds obstinately onto the truth.