Amazing how pain can distort and color the lenses with which you see life.
Over the past few weeks I’ve grown more and more combative, fearful, irrational, in my dealings with Roxanne. It seems to be becoming something palpable. It seems to be a shape, a something I can almost feel and taste in me. It is my bilious reaction to feeling hurt.
Not hurt by Roxanne – mind you!, but being hurt by … things I don’t seem to have a way of changing. Being stuck with this discomfort has started in me something like the creation of a pearl. But rather than smoothing and dulling, I’ve been growing a sharp thing that is angular and barbed, tearing at everything it touches.
Seeing this … thing, this way of mine of dealing with pain, in such a generic and broad way, is quite unwelcome. In some way I feel like an animal with one paw caught in a trap, willing to maul anything that gets close enough, and more and more willing to gnaw my limb off to make a fruitless escape.
Fortunately, I have someone like Roxanne who, through what I can only believe is her great grasp of Loving, can stand my lashing out long enough to tell me that I’m not … me. One moment felt like I was embattled from all sides, the next I saw it was me attacking on all fronts. And yes, I know this is true, I can see and feel it in me – the pain, the convulsions of anger.
Being up against something that I cannot change on the outside leaves me only one thing that remains mobile and malleable: me.
It will be up to me to feel clearly to the root of what I am allowing to hurt me. To understand what hurts, and why, and then to re-arrange myself so that I can surrender to the experience I’ve found myself in. In acceptance of what IS, I hope will disarm that which has brought me such an infectious bout of hurt.
I do not want to face my father’s mortality, or rather, my father’s mortality has found me and sat firmly on my shoulders. My discontent with that has found voice in my becoming embattled on all fronts. Worst of all, by being hurt and acting out in anger, I’ve brought pain to those I love so dearly.
There is only one, simple, stomach turning step to be taken: I can learn to accept my father’s mortality. I can lean to understand mortality as being natural – even healthy – strange as it might be to call insipid morbidity salubrious. But it, death, is our natural consequence and as such death can legitimately be the last healthful act of a life on earth. No reason to rail against that any more than being angry at the rain will return it to the clouds.
I hope I can learn this lesson – the consequence of doing so will become immediately obvious, the shape and taste of pain won’t be hard to miss inside me.
For this chance to grow, along with so many other things, I am indebted to my father, and to my wife – both of who have shown their love and steadfastness under duress far more than reason might demand. To them and for them, I am deeply grateful.