HEART ACHE, HEART ANQUISH
It is a repeating theme, the extraordinary way things seem to change in the blink of an eye. This time it is not with Michael, but with my family. My sister and I had made plans three weeks in advance to visit at her place to sample her “best” brunch. We initially tried to include my mother as a surprise, but she asked too many questions so we ended up telling her about our plans and she was delighted to join us. So, it was settled – the date was set, the time was set, and when the day arrived, I drove to my mother’s home to pick her up.
“We have to take a detour,” my mother said upon my arrival. “Janice is at University Hospital – in the Shock Trauma unit. She was in a motor cycle accident last night. While she is going to live, she’s in critical condition.”
Just like that. Life comes in with intensity and pain, and my celebratory air upon arrival scatters like a flock of birds taking flight. I accept my mother’s news about her granddaughter – my niece – with an appropriate level of concern and, after calling my sister to let her know that we will be delayed, my mother and I go to the hospital. Again, the whole experience is surreal, but in a different way from the surreal experience I had at the AA meeting in White Plains. Here I feel like a time traveler just observing events. I am detached from the emotional expressions of sympathy shared between my mother and the relatives of Janice’s boyfriend who was also injured and in the Trauma unit.
My mother feels torn by the decision she has to make now. Should she keep our long-awaited date with my sister or should she stay. In the end, she decides to stay at the hospital – she would not enjoy herself – while I decide to go. I watch my mother walk painfully (she has chronic leg and feet cramps) back down the hospital hallway to the waiting room and my heart goes out to her. For her, it seems she had no choice but to stay and worry over the fate of her blood legacy and, for me, a choice to stay or leave. I wonder about our two, intertwined, fates – my mother’s decision to stay and keep vigil during a time of suffering and my decision to leave and frolic with my sister, niece, nephew, and great-niece.
Perhaps, my mother made the more relevant choice. Hurricane Katrina happened a few weeks later, devastating the Delta coast. The tragedy of the poor and resourceless was vast at the time and the shock waves from that disastrous storm continue to reverberate. Now I am torn in my heart. There is a sense of self-protection through detachment from all the visible suffering up against a cry in my being to do more. Then I open the Pagels’ book and find her narrative description of catastrophic events and circumstances that plagued the human condition over two thousand years ago eerily contemporary.
It is as if nothing changes. At first this recognition is further disheartening and then it is very clear to me - once again – that the so-called modern-day world order is controlled by Dantean8 negative states of being and powerful Miltonian9 adversarial cosmic influences. The only way out of this seeming hell on earth, it appears to me, is to detach from it and focus on God. But I am wary of this conclusion. I don’t completely accept the position to detach, because it feeds too well my neurotic avoidant pattern. But putting my focus on God, on Christ the Beloved, is very important. In my petitionary prayer that night I ask, “Beloved, come. Advise me. Teach me. Show me.”
The world is so different now and the reality I live in is no longer comfortably familiar. Perhaps, therein lies “the rub.” My reality in a chaotic world order should neither be comfortable nor accepting of the present status quo.
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