I was never really planning on posting this anywhere. What began as a random typed-up reflection spiraled into an essay I thought was worth sharing. Here goes:
My mother became sick in the spring of 2014. I find it darkly funny how I remember insignificant details more so than the important bits, like how I actually came to survive that spring. What I remember are vague vignettes the way you remember the aftertaste of an old dream - blurry edges, soundbites, faded strips of scenery, some of it just out of reach, some of it scarily vivid.
I remember with clarity the assorted Pepperidge Farm cookies my grandmother and I shared on the drives to visit Mom, placed in pleated paper trays, and the fillings of raspberry or chocolate, and the way they crumbled dryly into my mouth. I remember most the taste of a vanilla one, with a topcoat of coarse sugar grains that melted slowly on my tongue and left behind a taste of butter. I remember passing a spacious lot with an abandoned gas station on the side of the road and how lonely it made me feel. I remember the dull countryside and how the sun seemed to me a deceptive traitor with its luminosity. I remember the narrow roads over hills and through trees, the car sliding along languid and drowsy.
I remember not being able to see her that first visit, the doctors telling us she wasn't feeling well but still being able to hear her screaming through the side door, "I believe in God" over and over and over, a scream that sounded like my mother's voice but not like my mother, as if a ghost had reign over her body. I remember plugging in earphones to try to drive that screamed phrase out of my head on the hour-long drive back home, then collapsing onto my bed to pray into my pillow even though I wasn't sure whether or not God existed and if he did exist, why he didn't hear me and if he did hear me, why he allowed me to go on without any reassuring words.
I wish I could pinpoint a specific moment where I figured out the key to mastering life when it is falling apart. During an impromptu therapy session two years ago, the therapist asked me, "How did you find the strength to get through all of this?" Emotionally, I responded, "I have no idea." Because I don't. Sometimes I return back to that moment where I said that I didn't have any idea, just to see if I have now discovered what it was that supplied my strength, as she put it. The truth is, I still don't know. But that 'not knowing' is part of the puzzle. The 'key', if there were to be one, is this: There is no specific moment where you figure it out. There is no key. Most importantly, there is no falling apart.
Despite the anguish and despair of that spring, I can remember specific things like the cookies, the gas station, the country, the screaming, and the praying. One might perceive the cookies to be 'good', the gas station and the country to be somewhere in-between, and the screaming and the praying to be 'bad'. We perceive things as 'good' and 'bad' because it is, at times, essential. We have laws and The Ten Commandments to lay out the distinctions. But what really is 'good' and 'bad' and can you really make distinctions? How do we benefit by categorizing our thoughts, memories, and ideas into angelic and evil, into black and white? Why is an Evangelical Christian from North Dakota brought up to viscerally hate non-Christians labeled a 'product of his circumstances' while a young boy who is beaten and abused and grows up to be a murderer not also a 'product of his circumstances'? What makes one person neutral and another person a monster?
A bee, for example, doesn't know good or bad. This is what he knows in his brief time on Earth: collect water, collect pollen, collect propolis. If something goes wrong, he reacts to fix it, or he doesn't, and moves on. 'Wrong' is not applicable to a bee. More than the water, pollen, and propolis, he knows he's alive.
Maybe a better example is a dog because they are indisputably sentient. He doesn't know good or bad either. This is what he knows: his owner, his food, his sleep. If something goes wrong, he moves on. 'Wrong' is not applicable to a dog. He may lose a limb or grow old or become blind, but there is no change in his disposition. If he loses a limb, that's the only thing he loses. Then, he hops.
I had a horrible day the other day and this is exactly why it was horrible: the food in my college cafeteria was less than satisfactory, the people around me seemed to be on a different plane than me, and a seemingly adorable puppy tried to attack me. This day, in retrospect, is funny to me. But why is it funny now when it was not on the day of? If, on days when things are not going as planned, I were to label them as simply 'difficult' rather than 'horrible', would the day become less 'horrible'? That old saying, "you get out what you put in", is literal in this sense because, in categorizing a day as 'horrible', it becomes horrible, not because the physical events of the day have changed, but because you have decided it is horrible. Can a day even be 'horrible'? Can a person be 'horrible'? Does nature know the word? On the contrary, nature's job is not to know, but rather to be. How can we label others as 'bad' when nature is universal while experience is not?
These are all man-made constructions designed to make sense of an insensible world.
This is not to say that you are a bee or a dog or that you even have the ability to pretend that nothing disastrous is happening in the world, or that you should. I'm not even sure that I am trying to say "don't worry, you'll get through it" because that is grossly oversimplifying things. However, in the whole scheme of my life, I do not look back at that spring as a fond memory, nor a traumatic one. It is just a memory, filed away with other 2014 memories. Life can never really fall apart because life is never really 'together' - life is just life and life is chaotic by nature. Moments become events which become days which become our lives. We are just beings collecting our own propolis trying, at the end of the day, to make the most of our lost limbs.
