rain is the one
I don’t seek painful experiences; but pain, and its companion-echo, anguish, find me.
I suppose that, as often as not, this is due to unskillful navigation in the waters of life, whose shoals and reefs demand the best of a master sailor: hard to starboar–! Oh. Get out yer hammers and yer cotton caulking, lads; we’re shippin’ water!
As often as not, no matter of seamanship would have spared me…
… 1984. Olaf Berg, my summer-father, a second father like a treasured second home, returns from his dream vacation - to visit his ancestral homeland of Norway, cruising in and out of fjords, from Bergen north to Harstad. He sends as souvenir a small red-haired troll. I think I have it still. He returns with his wife from a slate-blue ocean to his green one, his ocean of grain in little Souris, North Dakota, and feeling ill, suspecting travel, discovers cancer of the liver (legacy perhaps of a life spent spraying crops with pesticides). I see him next at his wife’s sister’s home, my grandmother Patience, my mother’s mother. He has just returned from his last visit to the Mayo Clinic of Minnesota, one of the best hospitals in the nation, where tests only comfirmed what was already known, and the word was not “Hope”, but “Sorry.”
Olaf, whose gentle smile and great heart cared for the living, and graced every day of my life with them, was absent, in a shell, a broken shell, a wasted form with only weeks or days to live. His eyes did not see. He did not speak. And I, fourteen years on this planet, found nothing I could say, not a word, not “Hope” or even “Sorry”", and…
… and if I could erase what I have seen, perhaps I would do so. One who had given me so much love and guidance, attention for another’s son from he who had no sons nor daughters, had nothing left to give nor to receive on this world and, helpless, we watched him go, saw him already departed, and only the rotting, unmaking flesh left behind. It took no more than a minute to receive all that the moment had to teach; and in that moment, when his great ship foundered and sunk beneath the waves, my small hull was staved in, too.
A few weeks later: my mother in the kitchen of our apartment. We lived there the year my year-round father, my real father who is still alive, took sabbatical and the lowered pay had us packed together in that little space, moved away from friends and old schools, moved into close companionship, into everyone’s unknown. I was sitting at the table. There was a phone call then, I think. The smell of my mother’s fresh-made granola. A word - one syllable - my name. Then, “Olaf has passed away.” Some few tears: all that fourteen years could manage and endure; then dried: the water taken in followed gravity to some deeper, hidden store.
This death rises from my memory with a dull yet lasting ache. It wasn’t the first departure in my life, but certainly the closest to the heart up to that point. And were it the only loss I weathered I would count myself a freak of nature, or emotionally blind maybe, to lessons that are everywhere around me; losses as numerous as their graceful complements, the joys and openings and perfect sailing weather, that are equally at the corner of every glance and available to any heart.
So. I don’t choose pains. But neither do I reject them. Here is what I find: these losses make me human; the loves make me divine. Losses make me human. Love makes me divine.
I see the ones around me who are not strong enough, or not supported enough, or without tools enough - like the 14-year-old me - to completely embrace a loss. Pain that is not accepted creates a scar on a person’s spirit, makes their inner muscles clench in protection against a hostile world. A loss only asks you to be broken open. If you refuse, you as a seed cannot crack, the light and heat can’t find the deepest parts of you, your compassion will not be fertilized, and your flower will not bloom. If you say “I will not look”… oh, sweet heart, but you have already seen! You can’t _un_look, my love. Olaf passed terribly, at the loving hand of the Destroyer, his passing showed everyone what it is to be alive, what it is to be shown the doorway, what it is to depart.
Some losses are so terrible. Those who witness them, especially those of tender hearts - there are so many of tender heart - need all the support and compassion they can find, to allow the rending to take place, and survive, and look out from their newly opened eyes at those around them, to say “Ah, my people! It is beautiful, and damned…” and with that softened, human heart, accept more fully the love that pours about, in the water of tears, tears of losses and of enormous joys.
I found a picture. It was from a time when I was still married, living in a cloudy Brazilian dream, my son a lad of 3, one unborn sibling lost to grief and violence, and one sister still to be, a year away. In that picture, the boy wears boots three times too big for him. Little blond mop, little tree-hopper. There I am, my fine fair hair already thinning, the vines of maracuj