It's Ungrokkable

Six-year-old me standing in a field

Two weeks. That's how long it's been since my dad hasn't been here where I can touch and see him and kiss his whiskered cheek and I don't like it AT ALL.

As my dad would say- I just can't "grok it." How is this even possible? It is forcing my brain to grapple with the deeply un-understandable and mysterious. I believe by faith that he has followed my mother into a different world, a different kingdom, a different everything- and that he still exists. In fact, him dying drives that faith home even deeper and harder, because I saw it. I saw him there, and then not there. I think anyone who has sat in the presence of a soul leaving the body knows exactly what I am speaking of, and if you are still a die-hard materialist after witnessing that, I fully admit I have no idea what it is like to be you (but it's okay, I'll still love you). One moment there is a complete human, and then next moment there is a deflated tent where the poles have collapsed and no one is in it. There is no doubt. That person is gone, and it is every bit as shocking as Bilbo Baggins putting on The Ring at his eleventy-first birthday party and disappearing into thin air. The movies are wrong. Nobody looks like they are sleeping when they are dead. My dad went from sleeping in his body to not in it at all in a split second and the transformation was unmistakable.

When my sister brought my mother's ashes over to the care home where my dad was staying, she carried them in the beautiful rosewood box inside a paper shopping bag, in case he expressed a desire to see it, but hidden so he wouldn't see if he didn't want to. She opened the door and my mom's friend and fellow dementia-sufferer, Linda, was sitting in her wheelchair at the kitchen table. What a gift Linda was- her sweet smile, beautiful eyes shining with love, happy to sit next to my mom and hold her hand for many months. When my sister walked in Linda looked up in surprise and said "How did you do that? How did you bring her back here?" Clearly she saw my mom. What was going on? My brain can't "grok" that either. It makes my head feel cloudy. The brain wants to understand and put things into neat understandable categories. But to even try here is an exercise in nonsense and I think that is why if you decided to explain it away to me in either scientific or spiritual terms I would instinctively like to punch you in the nose (metaphorically, but emphatically).

Perhaps this is why in the last few days I have not much wanted to do anything in the online world. I have wanted to hold real books, read Psalms from a real Bible, smell leaf-mold, feel my dog's silky black fur and listen to the funny snorts he makes at all times due to a deviated septum. I want real things that anchor me into place where I am in this world within this body I am existing in right now. Crackly leaves, smooth wood, cacophony of bird song. Hugging arms, love, embrace. I need security and tangibility in the midst of such un-grok-ability. 

I was born, I grew, I became a teenager, I became an adult, but none of those things felt like this, like Noah's flood scouring and completely remaking the world, rocking the foundations and transforming mountains and valleys. Dazed animals and people wandering out of an ark on a mountaintop to something totally unfamiliar. A scoured, devastated landscape, wiped clean, where they are expected to make a new life. Culture after culture around the world tells this story, this flood, this re-making, upending-- the survivors trying, impossibly, to grok it. 

My bedrock just subducted under another continental plate, the ones who brought me into this world have gone out of it, and I cannot recognize this new landscape I see in front of me. I think there will be good things there, and I have my own compassionate Shepherd to lead me. I feel him. I know perhaps more than ever the reality of his presence and love with me. But he is with me AND I am still me, here, totally bewildered, crying a lot, exhausted, washed up on a beach in a storm, and also soothed listening to the waves and thankful for warm, dry sand to rest on.