June 12, 2008

Retired early last night, maybe exhaustion from the bike ride, and woke to see two calls from my sister. No messages. Must be about my father. Is he dead? Has he crossed some new boundary of disintegration? Has he rallied back into perfect clarity? In any case, my anxiety is hard to account for, seeing how I can do nothing immediately about any of it. I suppose I don’t want her to face alone whatever new thing, or whatever old thing, she’s facing. It is dark and a few birds are singing. I’ll wait until there’s a little light. It’s a simple truth that I don’t know how to react to my father’s dying. Most of my reactions now are to the tribulations it’s putting my sister through. Because of that, and because of what must be his own bewilderment and agony, I wish it were a brief process, a briefer one than it’s been.

6 AM. Made the call. It was nothing. Maybe the happy news that dad is, for the most part, happy and completely disengaged with the world. It was observed that he was taking surprisingly well to complete dependence, and he said, "I have beautiful women bathing me."

Bathroom reading is Ned Rorem’s diaries. He’s wrong about everything he pauses to judge, though he may be so on purpose, to demonstrate that equal conviction goes into prejudice and to wisdom, so why bother to distinguish the two? He says that "bitterness is my glue," and that is exactly right, the gut-fear that something may be high and true and eternal, that the shrugging cavalier cynicism of the beautiful, moderately talented youth may have been a dead end after all. Nevertheless, I read him, page after page, every several years, thinking what glory might have been if that style were connected to something more important than name-dropping and sneering at the general folly of his betters.

I suppose I would name-drop if I knew anybody whose name is drop-able.

My sister sends a connection to the blog of Michael Minor, my– what is it? Second cousin?–cousin Diane’s oldest boy. He’s dying of cancer in Cleveland Clinic. A handsome boy. I remember how his mother longed for him before he was born. I held him under Walter and Marian’s Christmas tree long ago. Father’s situation is understandable. Part of life. When the young are afflicted, even terribly, like that, it too is understandable when they recover and it becomes One of Life’s Lessons. But when they suffer and there is no hope and they die with their young friends and lovers watching them, it cannot be endured. Not even God–especially not God–has the right to cruelty, toward any end whatever. That which is cruel is not God, nor is cruelty different for God than it is for us, nor is cruelty mitigated by our ignorance of ultimate ends. If the salvation of the world depended on Michael Minor’s dying of cancer, then the world would need to be remade some other way, by some other power ready for the task. Is it any wonder that I am a Gnostic?

But the argument is that God does not cause these things. They are accidents inherent in a material and organic world. I do in fact accept that argument. I do not, however, always remember it.

I shall tend the garden and simmer down in the heat of actual day.

Evening. I kept exploring the material online relevant to my cousin Michael. I sent him messages. I gave money to. . . to something which bore his name. Then I did something which surprised me. I was so overcome with grief at reading the things that people said about him, that I began to pray. That is not unusual, but usually when I pray I lay out, quite reasonably, all the ways in which my request is just, or overdue, or not too harmful, as though God were a loan officer at the bank considering all the assets and deficits. Sometimes I do something quite different. I howl like a wounded animal. This was one of those second times. I heard myself sobbing please. . . please. . . please. . . outside of reason, outside of argument or justice or any plan that might uphold the world. Please, do this for me. I want it with a passion that cannot be expressed except with this sobbing, this howling. Please. Please. Please. I have not considered. I have not measured. I have cried out. My heart is broken. My voice is an animal’s voice. Please. Please. It would be wrong to pray this way for my father, but it is not wrong to do so for a young man struck down, and so I did, and at the end of it–though I don’t know what effect it might have; Michael may be dead even as I write–I had the unaccustomed conviction that I had done something absolutely righteous, absolutely pure.

Except now I can hardly move from my chair.

Yes, I know how God wants to be approached. I forget that too, sometimes. I am good at it, too. If I would just keep mindfulness from day to weary day.