Hard to Believe

"Awe", Watercolor pencil on handmade Italian paper, 6"x8", 2023

Dear Gorgeous,

It's hard to believe—our anniversary—18 years and 2 weeks.

It's hard to believe—3 years and a month since I last felt your heartbeat resonate inside me the way perhaps only a lover might or a parent. Its steady beat like waves gently, insistently coming to shore and then abruptly gone. Like the ocean vanishing. Unbelievable.

It's hard to believe that within 6 weeks of each other, 10 years ago, I lost Mom and then Dad and then unaccountably, 7 years after, you. Like being caught in some sort of chaotic storm, you all disappeared. You three who always held me up. Now, I'm the castaway and I'm the anchor even while inside, I feel like the orphan paddling the waves the way Mom used to dog paddle the pool. Yet, my swimming strokes are becoming smoother with hard earned understanding and empathy, now able to deal with or fix just about anything that comes my way, except of course the unfixable, the unbelievable; through daily manifesting your mother's favorite prayer "... serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference...".

There is so much that is hard to believe, impossible to accept, that daily I think about the nature of faith. 

It's hard to believe for instance that I made it through a pandemic without the three of you. Or that it seems like the world as we knew it—as Mom and Dad, my grandparents, my teachers, the Church, actually all of the systems I grew up in and loved, the world as they presented to us—that world is collapsing in on itself rapidly. It's one of those things that seems unfixable—like cancer and dementia and chronic blood disorders and death.

It's had to believe: you were so strong, healthy, smart. I mean you bicycled across the g-d damn country and skied as if you could fly. You were never out of breath, until you were. Why you, why not others? That incomprehensible dilemma has seriously taken a toll on my health, my "self care". Why bother if it assures nothing? But I do. I paddle back up through those waves believing some day it will get easier and if not well, at least I know I was paying attention to life.

That's really the hard part of believing—the "why" part of keeping going. I heard a Kate Bowler podcast this morning "Wounded Healers" on caretaking of one's intimate partner. In the interview, the wife, Katherine Wolf, who had survived a catastrophic stroke which left her under the constant care of her husband, talked about how humiliating and frustrating it could be. She shared that she had argued with God, then corrected herself and said that she argued with herself. "Wouldn't her husband and her baby be better off without her? Wouldn't she be better dead?" And then faith came to her and whispered "God does not make mistakes". She heard. Her life is not a mistake. Our lives are not mistakes.

Gorgeous, I've been doing a lot of reading (nothing new there) on life itself. It's my question, my ocean, my dog paddle. What is life, how does it start, what's the spark, where does it go when it stops, why does it stop? Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, and "Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined" by Stephen Fry: each on the components that make up life; how this planet despite what has been thrown at it, continues sustaining life; and how amazing it is that each living thing on this planet exists at all. I also just saw "Oppenheimer" which seemed to warn something as well—how humanity pursuing the "better good" twisted life's building blocks to unravel existence itself. Prometheus—myth meets science.

I'm learning a lot that I didn't know: how science keeps unpeeling existence; how myths are not that far off base; how the unbelievable becomes reality; and that life itself is the meaning. That we are the miracle. Though in the end, none of these gives me answers as to why you are gone, where you have gone, or why I am here without you. Yet, even as each molecule of my being longs to be entangled by yours now scattered across the universe, even in that desire, I know that I need to celebrate that you were, we were, I still am. In the end, I realize that the only thing I can do is accept—that this part of my life is about accepting the unacceptable, about fixing those things that can be fixed, that I can, that I am, that every living thing and every living soul on this precious living planet has a purpose which is to live wide-eyed and awestruck with every moment. To take it ALL in. To fully embrace the unbelievable: from the sorrow, the pain, right on through the mundane, and the impossibly beautiful, to bliss. I've been blessed to be loved by you and even when so tested, that our love was deeply fulfilled. To know that.

Peace Village, July 2023

"I Am Here", Watercolor pencil on handmade Italian paper, 6"x8", 2023

This month, I'm buoyed by belief in the Unbelievable, who seems to keep reaching out and saying "I am here".  This beautiful NPR interview of Rain Wilson (yes the actor who created the nerdy, selfish character Dwayne in The Office) seems to capture it best here when asked about proof of God:

How do I know that I love my family? Like, if I went in to a scientist and said, "Prove to me that I love," and they'd say, "Well, we're going to do some brain scans and an MRI and a CT scan, and we're going to look at what parts of your brain light up and ..." — but that's not love. That's not love. And I will never believe that love is simply a chemical, neurological response in order to, you know, continue the species propagating itself. My experience of love is far deeper and more profound than that. So that's the first step in knowing that there is a creative force in the universe, is knowing that there is love. I also know that there is beauty. I also know that there is art and there is music. And all of these things that are ineffable and transcendent and transport my spirits are footprints. They're handholds on the path to finding the great mystery.

So Gorgeous, I turn to believing what you knew right up to that last breath of yours—the one that carried you somewhere that it hasn't been my time to follow yet, "What A Wonderful World". I'm holding on to that. And when the waves get too chaotic, when everything is too hard to believe,  the trick I've learned is, as the BK's say, the trick is to remember and we are there.