I have always been fascinated by how things work, and why they work the way they do. I have been a lover of theories and philosophies…of explanations and how tos, of behind the scenes and a peak behind the curtains. The experience and agony of pain and death? I am yet to fathom. I cannot condense my anguish, my sorrow, my reluctance to even wake up on some days or the temporary bursts of being cheered up until the inevitability of remembering washes over me. And thus, begins the thankless job of trying to forget.
Except at some point, I realized perhaps my job is not to forget, my job is to make sure that he is not forgotten, that I remember him as much and as fiercely as I can. That the love he chose and the things and people he in turn loved resonate and echo through time. I cry as I type, I’m used to tears now, I’ve cried more in the past year than in my entire life. Try as I might those tears cannot bring him back.
Sometimes when I sit, I entertain that the idea that God has a death appeals court. It weighs the amount of tears in some whimsical S.I. unit. In my mind they are called mutes, because where genuine tears flow, the heart has been mutilated. And so, they are monitored and kept track of, the mutes you have cried. A court angel official tallies and decides who can be invited to be whisked through the huge oak doors where the omnipresent divine presence of the Lord, who I imagine for no particular reason, will smile down at you so much so it feels like a toasty bear hug you won’t want to let go of.
I imagine God will say, “It is well my child for I hear your pain, I feel it, I acknowledge it, it reverberates through the heavens.” I imagine that as I look down to the floor that is made of velutinous pearly clouds, my eyes are flooded with tears and I can only whisper, “Lord my soul is bruised and weary, it aches daily. I miss the mundane and the exciting, I miss him heating up water for me to bath in the morning, the way he would endlessly praise a simple plate of food or wake up at 2am to download game of thrones and delete all the spoilers anyone might have posted in my phone. I wish I could get back the laughter for we used to laugh A LOT. Laughter was a way of life in our house. I miss the road trips and him chuckling that I’m ruining the song by singing over it. But above all Lord please may i have it all back, because there was so much more we hadn’t done.”
In reality, I’m rudely awakened. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the car in front of me hits a pothole, a lady sells bread by the corner, I’m expected to be a productive citizen of society in the next 30 minutes. The world embarks on its daily cycle. It is as if, on this day, in a past not so distant, my heart was not completely ripped out of my chest when I least expected it, in a way I could have never, in my wildest of dreams, envisioned.
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