WordFlix

Never give up

By HD Silversmith

Wow.  What a week it's been.

It was the first week of the new school year at a state university whose system has been ravaged by budget cuts and will be further decimated a year from now (that's the word coming down from on high). The campus at which I teach is particularly hard hit, for various reasons. 

Meeting huge classes, turning away weeping, frustrated students, and wondering how in hell I am to teach effectively in such an environment ... that was pretty much what I did all week.

Oh yeah -- and go to meetings.  Grim meetings.

Still, as I watched the televised memorial (last night) and funeral (this morning) for Teddy Kennedy, I was reminded: never, never, never give up (Winston Churchill).  Do the best you can with what you have where you are (Teddy Roosevelt). To whom much is given much is expected (John Kennedy).  It's all true.  Live in hope, live in expectation, and work your ass off (um, that's just me).  It's the only way that one can truly make a difference in one's own life and the lives of others.

(Can you tell I'm an Irish-American of a certain generation?  And Catholic by birth as well, though not necessarily by practice any longer?)

Fathers Day

Typepad's Question of the Day:

Your father: great dad...or greatest dad? And why?
Submitted by Michael Sippey.

I learned from my mother how to be afraid,
how to fear my father’s footsteps
in the yard beyond my bedroom window,
first muffled by the fallen leaves through which he shambled,
then stilled as he paused
to piss, suddenly, in the ivy.
I learned from my mother how to listen for the sound of a zipper,
and for my father’s blurry, one-sided chats with the family dog,
out there in the night;
for the wisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssht of his urine stream
as it hit the ivy leaves.
I learned to wait for the drip … drip … drop as that wine-and-beer geyser
(would he ever finish?)
spent itself on a summer evening,
and for the pause after,
and for the soft rustling of his pants,
and for the sound of my own breath harsh in my ears
(Tooloudtooloudtooloudhellhearitouthereinthedark).
I learned from my mother how to stay very still and do nothing
as she did.
(“Everything will be all right,” she’d promise.
If it will be all right, Mama, why are you crying?)
She did nothing
as the front door to the house opened
and closed,
as those footsteps from the yard came down the hall,
(my father stumbling a bit from wall to wall)
to my room,
for another one-sided exchange, in which I would once again
not speak,
not tell,
not utter a sound
not even a whimper
(It was the dog at the door, Daddy, scratching to get in).

Grief

"Dark of the invisible moon.  The nights now only slightly less black.  By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

For me these are perhaps the loveliest lines in McCarthy's understated, jarring novel. 

The book chronicles the death of one world and traces the road through a blasted, post-apocalyptic existence which has struggled into a drear kind of half-life after an unspecified nuclear event, the specifics of which are already so beside the point as the novel begins that we as readers don't even care about them. 

Its horror lies in the untidy incompleteness of human extinction:  isolated bands of people, stripped of civilization, commit atrocities to survive a life no longer worth surviving, like Things that Wouldn't Die.

Its single note of ... hope? redemption? (no, those words miss the mark ...) provisional possibility? (better ...) lies in the relationship between the man and the boy (for that's how they're called in the book) and the chance, however unlikely, of that becoming an inheritance that might be handed from man to boy, from boy to others. Perhaps.  Or not. Because the odds are slim and there are no assurances of anything.  No promises. None.

Mostly, however, I read the book as an elegy for a world (ours) presented as irretrievably disappeared and for the ways of thinking and being in that world that are vanishing (have already vanished, in the novel) and for which the nameless, stripped-down, barely-there narrator mourns. It is he who is the grieving mother with the lamp, witness to incalculable loss.

Mourning. Grief. I have loss on my mind and in my heart today.  Last night I learned that an uncle in his 90s had died peacefully in his sleep earlier that evening at the family house, not of illness or anything other than a long life well and usefully lived.  (Really, it's the antithesis of McCarthy's novel.)  Three of my uncle's six adult children happened to have been visiting, and the other three are on their way to the house now (probably already arrived), along with their own children, to gather and be together there. The place has been in my father's family since the early 20th century;  it's been a gathering place to hundreds and hundreds of family and guests over the span of its existence and my uncle's life, and it's seen its share of joy and grief.

My uncle's death is a fortunate one:  we should all be so lucky to live so fully as he, so long, and to die at home with family, in our sleep, without illness or trauma.  And so yes, I am happy for the manner of his death, but I still I grieve the fact of it.  My parents' generation is passing.  My own parents were both dead by 1987.  With each death of their siblings and their sibling's spouses, my parents die over again. With each of the deaths in that generation, the proximity to my own mortality increases incrementally.

My cousins range in age from late 40s to their early 60s and I heard the pain of loss in their voices when I spoke to two of them this morning.  Pain and, yes, disbelief -- because no matter how old one's parent is, nothing prepares you for their death.  Not for the fact of it, even if you know it's coming.  My aunt died 13 years ago, and so my uncle's death leaves my six cousins -- all with half- or fully grown children of their own -- strangely orphaned, even as they themselves are aging.

I'm lighting a lamp for Tom and for all the family because today it feels as if a sun has, indeed, been banished.