Eyes burn,
Throat

Ever since I read "A grief observed", there is so much I cannot get off my mind. To know that CS Lewis experienced the things I have experienced; To know that he could put into words the things I couldn't put into words. The things that I have been the most ashamed of; the things that have been the most painful to me; I was in a place, that I knew in my mind, no one had ever been before. I was experienceing things; I was going through a spiritual battle that had never been fought...And yet, here is this book, that chronicles the same battles, the same experiences, the same feelings, and offered me insight, that I couldn't gather in my own raw pain and emotion and honesty. I was deluded and arrogant.

   My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? When Christina died, when she was...gone,I fell to my knees beside her. Her lifeless hand in mine. I abandoned my Soul to the Lord. I collapsed to him, and to everything. All the strength and presence of mind I had mustered for my children,  her parents, and her friends, I laid it down before God, an offering of sacrifice and my pain, and my loss...And what escaped from my mouth in that cry was a poor reflection of what escaped from my spirit.There were no words or thoughts, but therewas something eternal in that choked sob of a scream that said "Lord, what now? I've fallen into this, Now I rely on you. Catch me. Sustain me."

   There was no answer.

   My God, My Father, I have spent my whole life worshiping, praying to, humbling myself before; trying to serve, trying to become less human and more Christian; to embrace him to do his will; the God that has mystified me in his patience to me and his love for me, The God that was there to pray to on those cold, lonely nights, when you're just a speck of life on an insignificant rock hurtling through infinite space and infinite cold, and all you can do is to be mystified as to why you are there. What is purpose and why in the world would you feel it if it wasn't real, and you know it's real, it's not some abberation of the mind that every man just happens to experience, it's not some trick of evolution, some sleight of hand of self-awaremess...But here. Here on this rock in space...The only rock with life on it and there you are the speck; so inconsequential, that time immortal passed before your presence and time immortal will pass after your presence ceases to exist and you have a purpose and DAMMIT what is it? That God. That God that we seek out for those answers. I threw everything to him with abandon. Because I had nothing left.

   And there was nothing there.

   There was nothing there. Jesus on the cross...What did he have left? "My God, my God, WHY have you forsaken me?"

   I can remember driving around, weeks afterwards, alone.And I would just lose it. And I would scream and I would cuss and I would cry and I would shake my fist at the sky and I would shout "GOD! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME? I have given up my wife. In faithfulness

There is this rock hurdling through space. One of a number of rocks between two infinite variables of rocks hurdling through space. This rock has been hurdling through space for at least 37 years as far as I can tell, and probably billions more besides. It will continue to hurdle through the infinite void and vacuum of space for at least the end of this article, if I happen to live this long, and probably billions of years besides. But, If I don't make it through the end of the article, as far as I know, the longevity of the current measurements of time I adhere to make no difference to me whatsoever. But I digress... (Who the Hell really says that?)

   An examination.

When water comes to life.

I love the Cloud Cult song, When water comes to life. The first time I heard it, I was a shamble of shaking emotions and tears. In fact, EVERY time I hear it, I am reduced to shaking, choking, sobbing, pathetic tears. And I like it. I love it. God, I love it. Here is one song that brings forth perception of the beauty and tragedy of death free from sentimentalism but full of love and pain and...real eternal concepts we can never understand as human beings.

   All you need to know,
Is you were born of water,
You were made of water,
You are living water, water, water...

We are living water.
We drink water. We live in water. Our planet, this hurtling rock through space, is water in approximately the same amount of water as our bodies are water. I am not pretending to be some authority, but hey. This rock...

The perfect combination of heat, light, radiation, the lack OF radiation, water, minerals, acids and caustics and blah blah blah...Remember the old sci-fi serials from the '50s and '60s? We were so enlightened with our probes and theories and speculations...Venus has an atmosphere of Ammonia. We're not talking Mr. Clean here. We're talking melt your freaking face off ammonia gas. But I digress...

This ROCK. Full of WATER. Right here, at this EXACT altitude from this EXACT sun. With this EXACT composition. Is full of the most impossible thing in the Universe itself that defies all laws of physics that govern said Universe...Life.

I have been over this ground before...The second law of thermodynamics. Entropy.

Entropy. Homogeny. The equalizing of all things.

Turn on your heat on a cold winter day. Open your door. Will the heat not work harder? Will it not expend more energy?Of course it will. Because that air right outside your door that is cold starts to entrope (verbed that, entropy) with the heat inside your house until you will say " For FUCKS sake, I an't afford this. I get it. There is more cold outside than I can afford to heat..."

But there is not so MUCH cold outside. Just an entire Universe at three degrees above absolute zero pressing down from the North of the planet and forcing it's way into your home. Perhaps you should have invested in a larger unit?

Recovery

I have been sick.

   I cannot begin to articulate the places I have been the last six months. The entire time I have stressed and assured those around me that I was really OK, I was so far from it. I was lost. Destroyed and really teetering on the verge of insanity in so many ways.

   I can hardly begin the labour of putting it into words. I will try...I'm still not entirely sure why. If for no other reason just because putting it into words helps me to reflect and to see where I am and where I have been, and hopefully, give me some indicators of where I am headed.

   Since I don't know how or where to start, or exactly what to say, I'll just start from the beginning, as best as I   am able. First let me say, I have never, besides our children, loved anything or anyone the way I love Christina. I say love, because I am still deeply in love with her, and although I realize no one knows what the future holds, I always WILL love her. Just like with my children, Christina holds an unfathomably deep place in my heart. Her absence from this Earth can't change that. I am fond of that place. When she died, and people would tell me it gets easier with time, that would anger me and frustrate me so badly. I guess what I understood them to really be saying is that I would forget what she means to me, or that I would love her less, and sometimes think whistfully about her occasionally.

   In a way, it is more than that we were two people that met and fell in love; I know it sounds so cliche', but I always really felt that God brought us together. In fact, in spite of it all, I still do. Never would I have thought it possible for two people to mesh so completely with each other from the moment they met. I know some have to role their eyes, for Christina's sake if nothing else, and some must think, "Oh, what pitiful stuff" and I know the melancholy sounds as from the remembrances of some slipping old man. But the simple fact is, for those that REALLY knew us, we were always madly in love with each other, and the desire of our hearts were for each others company above all else. If one was close to God, the other would strive to be there; and one would fall away, the other would grow colder, not by design, but simply because we were kindred, and the sin of one was inextricable from the other. If you could never understand how Adam could take that proferred fruit from Eve, I could. As much as he feared God, he was tied to Eve so much more closely. God was what he feared and did not understand; Eve, though...He knew her smell. He buried his nose in her hair, and when she held him, he could feel his rib calling to knit within him once again. One flesh they were, and as one flesh they would fall. 

   Except that, even though it HAD been that way between us, it was becoming not that way, the last year of our marriage. I was on the road SO much, and my faith was cooling, to say the least. Christina's constant miscarriages, and the fact that I had spent two years imploring God to find me an income and insurance so that I could be with my family again had taken it's toll. The dark holes of lime kilns and the cold and impenetrable passes of boilers became cozy and familiar to me, and laying in bed trying to wrestle a few hours of sleep from the daylight before I had to enter back into that myopic and surreal world had done little to help me to see the spiritual side of things. God's answer never came through. The only answer I got were a few more soul crushing miscarriages and the bravest woman I knew try to keep her sanity and faith through it all. And she never broke. 

   Then October happened. Its a previous post, and I will not revisit that, the darkest of times I have had. Needless to say, my grip on reality, or at least my metaphysical grip, was beginning to slip. (OK for perspective, I traveled across much of the Southeast with our dead frozen Son. I would work all day, like nothing was wrong, then at night I would pull him from the hotel freezer and bawl for hours.) And then, as a result of that last fateful miscarriage, my beautiful,most precious wife, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, was torn from my arms and this Earth with no warning or ceremony whatsoever.

   All the things that happened in that hospital I don't know if I'll ever be able to revisit, at least not out loud. I CAN say there was a spiritual battle there. And I am not entirely sure, or at least at the time, wasn't entirely sure who won it. 

   But it is not what happened there that broke me. It's what didn't happen.

I took communion last night.

For the second time in three months I took communion.

   Exactly what I did not want to happen, happened. As stood there, praising God, seeking him with my heart, the Holy spirit passed through the room. I could feel the presence of the Spirit come close to me. I could feel the terrible dread and fear as some far sense of Holiness, so foreign to me, passed near me. I was terrified. Like a wretched thing, my soul inside of me cringed and scrambled to make fast it's escape. My body visibly shook. I had cold chills and started to feel a little sick.

   I left the service with the dreadful sense of just how dreadful and rotten and just evil that I am. I slept with it. I awoke with it. Somewhere throughout the day, as I made busy, the sense of it faded somewhat.

   I have a tooth broken below my gums. This happened the year Esther was born; it predates her. So that makes it seven years ago. I had a horrible abcess. God it hurt SO bad. I didn't have the time or money to get it taken care of. I took boiling hot water and poured it on the tooth. Then I'd take ice cold water and pour it over the tooth. I did this over and over until the tooth shattered, the infection was drawn out, and the nerve died. It was the single most excruciating pain I have ever been in. But it worked, and that corruption was taken from me and I was healed-sort of. Like four towers of some forgotten ruin, the four corners of the shattered tooth protruded my gum. Like a setting with a missing gem. They stayed razor sharp and white, and in a weird way I liked them. I would always cut my tongue on them, and I liked the taste of the blood. And the tooth was like a trophy to my perserverance of pain. I assumed eventually those four little pinnacles would wear away, and the gum would heal over the entire thing.

   Just in the past couple of months, the whole thing, all four corners have turned black with corruption. Now it aches me, and I know it is a matter of time before I will have to go in for some tooth surgery. Even though I prevailed against the corruption at a terrible price, the root of it was still deep within me, no matter how small. That little bit of evil festered and spread until now, in a mouth of teeth, it gets my attention fully.

   My little bit of corruption. I liked to scrape myself on you. But in the end, you turned on me, and now you rule with your ruin.

   Thats a weird analogy. But the little corruptions that existed in me, my God did they fester and explode when Christina died. I have heard so many testimonies of people that stood solid in adverstiy with Jesus. I am not one of those. My little corruptions were my undoing.

Part 2

I think I can write again. What is weird is I often want to, but when I approach it; or even dive headlong into it, I freeze. Not freeze, exactly. I lose it. On the inside, my thought process will only go so far, then my mind falls into a sort of catatonia of self preservation. I cannot cross certain thresh holds, I imagine; there are houses into which I am not privy to enter.

   I have been dreaming of Christina nightly. Sometimes the dreams are very familiar, as if she is with us. In one dream she had to go, and it was very upsetting. Even now, saying that, I can feel my will and ability to write starting to dissolve. My limbs feel weak. Most of the time, I dream about her in flashes and images, wondering why, why, why. I awake and tell myself it is good that I am dreaming. When my sister Jeny's baby died, I had the most horribly dream about eight months after he died. I dreamed I was in a darkened surgical theater, filled with the towering and looming figures of robed doctors. They would appear out of the darkness in angular movements and threatening trajectories, only to melt again into the shadow. A general murmur, ominous and inhuman, undertoned the and entwined with the suffocating darkness. The darkness was a dusty silver grainy like an old movie darkness. Then there was a spotlight in the middle of the theater. There, one doctor held Drew tight in his arms, and turned and walked quickly away. Drew grinned at me, incessantly. I called his name. He disappeared into the crowd of lurching figures. I awoke screaming. I woke Christina up. I told her about my dream while she held me and rocked me. She told me that the mind will dream when it is trying to deal with things on the subconscious level. That made sense to me. I never had that nightmare again. It scarred me, though. I sleep in constant fear of when my subconscious will start to try to deal with those last few days in the hospital.