Families disintegrate. 

Parents die.  Children may or may not do their best to keep the ties close, but the geographic and emotional center is gone. 

It is the way of the world.

Sometimes, new geographic and emotional centers have been forming, even before the old ones passed away.  Children marry and have their own children.  For a while, the family expands.  Like a cell dividing, it separates but the molecule remains. 

Until death comes.

Life goes on as it must.  It has always been this way; it seems likely that it always will be. 

The Great Hand of Nature turns the kaleidoscope and shuffles the elements; new beauty arises. 

Yes, someone close to me is dying.  I am struggling to accept it.

Somebody sent me an email that warned me that muslin was out to get me, well not me in particular, us Americans.  Now hold on a minute, I thought to myself.

I know muslin’s not really nice material like silk or anything, but I can’t see that that’s any reason to intend the people of this country harm.  I suppose it could be upset that it never gets to go to the prom, or for that matter, get dressed up for any reason.  But really, I just find this hard to believe.  Muslin is such a nice, serviceable cloth; I’ve always liked it.  Some of it is really soft and comfortable.

The email said that muslin wanted to kill Christians who didn’t convert, and as a formerly Christian country that obviously isn’t converting fast enough, we should all be afraid. I tried to see a connection, but all I could come up with was this:  I don’t know about Protestants, but Catholic priests wear a lot of shiny satiny stuff when they get dressed up for church.  Muslin must think we’ve gotten too uppity.

Well, before I got too freaked out, I thought I’d do a little investigating, so I went to dictionary.com to see what I could find out about this new enemy of ours, and I discovered something interesting.  Way back when, muslin was actually a luxurious cloth.  It originated in a city called Mosul in northern Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq.  It used to mean cloth of silk and gold.   It got its more modern meaning, “everyday cotton fabric,” from the US back in 1872.

OK, that sheds a little light.  Maybe muslin is mad because the US didn’t recognize its true worth and value.  Maybe it feels belittled.  I feel kind of sorry for it. 

Now I don’t know what to do.  It’s a crazy world out there.  Maybe I’d better go check my closets.  I like cotton stuff, but there might be a shirt in there right now, plotting an attack.  

Hey, we were friends once.  Maybe I could put it on and we could go out for a drink—something that wouldn’t stain, of course.  I wouldn’t want to be totally insensitive.

The email was sprung on me, an unexpected, unpleasant surprise.  It was from my brother.  His ex-boss, whom he considered also a friend – good man, devoted to his family, always upbeat and in good spirits – had died in a scuba accident.  He had retired 11 weeks ago.

I sat back in my chair, my heart hurting, tears coming. 

My reaction surprised me.  Yes, the death was tragic.  And yes, it was clearly sudden.  And yes, my brother had ended his email by saying the news was affecting him more than he thought it would, and he asked for prayers.

But why was I sobbing.  Why did I get up from my computer and start wandering through my house, wiping my hands across my face, massaging my forehead with my fingertips?

I heard myself speaking aloud, asking a question:  What are we doing?  We being Eddie and me.  What we are doing being delaying his retirement.  What if that happened to him?

I could hear the faint voice of my Buddhist training.  We live in the eternal present.  The length of time is irrelevant.  Every now moment is infinite, boundless.   11 minutes, 11 weeks, 11 years, 11 decades—it makes no difference in the eternal present.

I believe this.

And yet I feel grief-stricken.

What if Eddie’s eternal present never gets to retirement?  What if mine doesn’t? 

What if I spend my life preparing, lining things up, fulfilling requirements that I made up in my mind and then took to be existentially true?

Ah, this is an old argument.  In “Advice to My Son,” poet Peter Meinke says the trick is to live each day as if it is your last and yet plan for the future.  Plant flowers—and vegetables.  Serve bread with the wine.  But, he ends:

“… son, / always serve wine.” (li 22, 23)

Every so often, I must be reminded of the fiction of long life.  So I can practice—in Buddhist terminology—as if my hair were on fire. 

Practice what?

Serving the wine.   And drinking it.   And maybe sometimes pouring it on my head.   And grieving.

Meinke, Peter.  “Advice to My Son.”  Literature: The Human Experience.  9^th ed.  Eds. Peter Abcarian and Marvin Klotz.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martins.  2006.   174-75.

The lights went out.  A sharp spurt of fear shot from my stomach to my heart.  My heart responded by pounding.  Thud.  Thud.

Why was I afraid?  Was this not still my house, with doors and windows closed and locked, with solid roof overhead?

But so dark!  No LED glow from the bedside clock, no soft reflection from the kitchen night light, no comforting red bar telling me the phone was in its live cradle.

And so silent, too.  No TV-DVR hum, no refrigerator rattle, no soft purr from the ceiling fan.

So dark, so quiet.

“Too quiet,” said a voice in my head, from a thousand movies—usually just before something horrible happened.

Is that where this fear comes from?  The primal alert system that is triggered when things go too quiet in the dark, coupled with the tribal lore of the terror that can be unleashed only when the visual and auditory barriers erected and constantly maintained by modern life, fail?

Beside me, my husband snored.  Why was that?

Why do women wake and not men, our protectors?  Is it because we can never forget our own vulnerability?  Is it because fear has been trained into us?

Every religion in the world praises the light and shuns the dark.  Is it because we remember the darkness of the womb?  But the womb was a safe place where we were nourished and protected.  It was the light that heralded separation, pain and loss.

I have heard that in the time before patriarchy, darkness was revered.  All life comes from darkness.  In darkness, I return to the unknown, the potential, where anything is possible.  Maybe that’s what scares me.  Who—or what—I might be when I am stripped of everything I use to distract myself.

When the power gores off, whose power is it?  Am I not the same person I was a minute ago?  With the same intelligence, the same strength, the same will?  If there is a power failure, why should it be mine? 

The lights came on.