Saturday, March 7, 2009

The Desperate Pursuit of Something to Complete

Thunder and lighting swept in during the night, birthing a Saturday gloomy, chilly and wet. Like a new convert drifting back into a bar, it was a difficult backslide away from the springlike days just ended. As dreary as it has been, the shivering rain made it easier to spend the morning at the church in a visioning retreat. Reaching deeply and squinting forward, the group of us did good work. Hospital visits followed -- one, where a stroke was ruled out, and the other where heart problems aren't the concern after all.

And then John finally died. "Finally" here is not toned with dismissal or impatience. This was a dear and beloved man who man whose body, in old age, simply wore out. Death, in his case, fit that pastoral but still somehow cerebral assessment of "blessing." Under hospice care for a week, John had lingered, languished, and slowly, ever-so-slowly dissolved into death. His family, constantly at his side, holding his hands, slipping ice chips between his lips, calling his name and trying to adjust their minds to the inevitable, were tired. It was, in that biblical sense of the word, "time."

Vision, illness, death. Rain. I came home and dismantled the pipes beneath the bathroom sink. Running slow -- if perceptively at all -- for quite some time, they undoubtedly needed attention. But just now I had some desperate attention I needed to pay to something I could I could take a wrench and a pipe snake to -- something that had a good reason for stinking and making a mess apart from simply "that's the way life goes." And once the pieces were miraculously back together it felt good, if only for a moment, to watch the hot water swirl in the bowl and then simply go away.

Plumbing is not my long suit, but it was nice, for a change, to see something fixed. It will clog up again, I know; but for the moment I did something I can check off. The hospitals will still be there tomorrow, filled with loved ones impaled on ambiguous symptoms. Visioning is always about planting seeds of trees in whose shade we will never likely sit. And tomorrow we will plan a memorial service for John -- only the beginning of an indefinite process of reweaving the fabric of life absent his thread. But at least I know how to remove the trap beneath the sink.

It's raining, and it's Saturday, and somewhere in the tangled intersection of grief and hope, I'm wondering if the neighbors have any sink problems I can tackle.

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