Prisms

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

                                                                                      Psalm 34:18

Light is stark.  Light is bold.  Light is basic.  Painful to look at directly, however, when it travels through a prism it is transformed into the elements it is created from.  Colorful and complicated. 

I am here, nearly a month after my father’s death.  I see it as a straightforward occurrence, although a painful one.  Why am I still suffering?  Why am I still angry?  Why do I want to hide from everyone else in my life that cares?

I don’t think this answer is an easy one.  I’ve gotten very good at tossing feelings around in my head, trying to have them make sense.  Trying to bring them back into the one.  This time, however, I know the “one” is shattered.  The light has gone through the prism and the display of color is both breathtaking and fearful.

I’ve tried to understand the events both preceding and following the death.  Only with my father still here, there was a nexus, someone whom we could all revolve around.  He was the last thing that held us together in any semblance of a family.  He gathered our light and split it in his absence.  I am left with anger.  Some from his death and most from his life.  He wasn’t a good guy or a bad guy.  Like most of us, he had elements of both.  Very kind at times but incredibly indifferent at times when he was very needed.  He left behind a fractured “family” for lack of a better word. 

This is so hard to write.  I’ve been trying to get these feelings on paper for a while, and I’ve found that different emotions come to the surface each time I try to write.  Grieving isn’t a static process.  It is an evolution.  I’m not just grieving my father though.  With him gone there is half of my family I will most likely never see again.

I’m angry because the last days of his life were painful and dictated by one member of my family who lived across the country.  I have some doubts that he was taken care of properly.  Two months after he was placed in a nursing home, mobile and coherent, he was incoherent and dead.  I called him, not being able to visit often.  When I did visit, I saw a man not being treated with dignity.  His room was dirty, he was left in old bandages (blood seeping through) and dressed in a dirty johnny mid-day.  The reports I heard from other family members were heart-breaking.  Why didn’t I do anything?  I tried, but because I was a visitor and not the power of attorney or medical proxy, no one would listen to me.  I was reassured by my sibling (the one across the country) that the nursing home was telling them about the great progress he was making.  I wonder how many times he made it out of that lonely room in the two months he suffered there.

There are many other things that I am furious about.  Family members I had held in high regard showed their true colors through this time and I don’t believe I will ever contact them again.  This is the refraction of my family.  Father is gone and the light is refracted.  Each has its own color.  Each going out into space, never to be joined again.

I am an orphan now.  I’ve felt like one for a long time.  I had two parents and 5 siblings.  Only one sibling has been there for me over the past few years where we’ve suffered many tragedies.  One of my siblings recently asked me why I hated them.  I don’t.  I am indifferent.  It is too painful to engage with them, so I don’t.  Really, this is why I don’t engage with most of my remaining family members.  It is like touching a hot stove.  I got tired of being burned, so I stopped trying.  This is my mother’s legacy, but that story is for another time.  We are now scattered to the wind.

Very importantly, light illuminates.  Understanding each color separately helps us to understand the whole.  Looking separately at each color also keeps us from having to look directly at the whole and understand it with less pain.  I guess I keep writing as an exercise in understanding that whole and how it has affected me.  I mourn the loss of the family I have pretended to have but understanding helps me to appreciate the better one I have before me.  I don’t want to be a prism in my own family.  I want it to stay pure, each color its own, but still a part of the whole.  The story of my former family is the greatest guide in helping me keep my own solid, bold, and basic.