The Waiting Days

Yesterday David and I went again to Uncle Ed’s house and saw again the empty chair that he sat in all day long and struggled so to rise from, crippled as he was with the bad hips even before you got to the arthritis and the gout.As David studied his box of crucial documents, I just stood, looking at everything:His many photos.His water glass there by the chair.His cane that he would so lightly toss to me before he slowly, painstaking lifted those burdened legs, one and then the other to fold himself into my car.We picked up his paper and fetched in his mail.We took his address book and pulled the door shut and left the dust motes swirling minutely in the air.The ancient Jews in the day after their deliverance: I keep thinking of them. “Now what?" I keep thinking, just as they must have thought, dazed by the empty space all around them."Now what?" I keep saying to myself, as the followers of Jesus must have also said the day after his execution, when it turned out he hadn't thrown over his captors and come off the cross swinging at all but had died like all the others - of strangulation, they say, when the method is crucifixion; when the victim grows so weak he can no longer push off with the feet and the pressure on the pectoral muscles cuts off the airway.Dark thoughts in these waiting days.I roused myself finally and called the newspaper to cancel his subscription. I called ElderCare and stopped the service that would pick up his laundry Tuesdays and return it Fridays, so clean it made your nostrils sting to sniff it.I called the two ladies who had sent him Easter cards, one signed in such a spidery hand she must have been in her 90s too.I spoke to his faraway blood nephews. I worked out a date and time for the service, so we could get the one great minister from the church his near nephews grew up in. (Ed was their uncle really, the uncle by marriage of David and his three brothers.) I wrote the obit in which I did not name myself.We drove straight north from his house to be at a place that calms me every time. We will go home in the morning for church and then it will be Easter and maybe I'll feel a little better.

For now I feel like the speaker in this poem, W.S. Merwin’s "How It Happens." Though he has written it with no punctuation, it's easy to tell it's a dialogue. Maybe he wrote it without punctuation to suggest that this conversation is an inner one. I know the inner conversation is mainly what I'm having right now. Read this piece of bleak beauty by our poet laureate now.

The sky said I am watchingto see what youcan make out of nothingI was looking up and I saidI thought youwere supposed to be doing thatthe sky said manyare clinging to thatI am giving you a chanceI was looking up and I saidI am the only chance I havethen the sky did not answerand here we arewith our names for the daysthe vast days that do not listen to us

Lift Me

When I was young and under the influence of the nuns, I was told to keep silence on this day, at least from noon until 3 when tradition says Jesus suffered that death-by-strangulation that crucifixion is. I couldn't do it then or for many years after, even though I knew how silence concentrates the mind.  I always thought the Jews had the better idea at the Seder, having the youngest ask that great starting-point of a question, “How is this night different from all other nights?”  which kind of translates to “Who are we and how did we get to this place?” This is a question I ask myself every morning on waking from the kind of deep sleep I always sleep, so all-forgetting I sometime wake and calmly think  'Soon some kind person will come and lift me from this crib!'  For Christians today is  Good Friday . I remember the Good Friday they played "We Are the World" on practically every radio station all over the country at exactly the same hour. I was driving through beautiful western Connecticut calling on newspapers to sell them my column. I had just had my last baby and knew he was my last felt..... I don't know, released into the rest of my life somehow. I spent much of yesterday driving too and just at sunset when I finally stopped the car and sat looking around, three deer crossed the field front of me and it was as if I had been waiting all day for them; as if seeing them proved that there really is this other reality just around the corner and out of our everyday sight, which is pretty much the idea communicated in most of the world's religions.    Here for you now accordingly ,  "We are the World," written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, as it was sung at the funeral  of poor Michael not quite two years ago now.  Note the ecumenical symbols above the singers’ heads.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ToznKNe6U&feature=related]And to really walk down memory lane, treat yourself to the original version here below. And remember this week to keep holy the Sabbath, whatever form a Sabbath day has for you.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy1gp3F5NhY]