The After Life

Last Friday night, I had the television tuned to channel 3.2, Antenna TV. It was on mostly for background noise as I paid bills, washed clothes and dishes, and other exciting first night of the weekend frivolity. As I did these things, Fred Sanford went to Elizabeth numerous times, Archie Bunker shared his rare moving moments mixed with frequent tirades of bigotry, and J. J. Evans did his Dyno-mite thing under the googly eyes of a young Janet Jackson. I don't know why, but the mere sound of the WKRP in Cincinnati theme song made me want to call home. It is the home where the impressionable years were spent learning discipline, honest work, and kindness. It's the place where food and bed and love lived. It's the place where the TV lived. I suppose the yearning had something to do with the way things from your childhood are things that stay with you into adulthood; the things you did, the people you loved, the discussions held on the dusty playgrounds and jokes told around lunchboxes, books you read, shows you watched. The theme song was a trigger, a way back trip to way back. For me, in this instance, the time was the early '80's; the place, home at grandma's.

It took 6 1/2 rings for her to answer, and when she did, she answered with a voice holding back pain. It was a voice of one trying to be cheerful when all they want to do is scream. It was a voice of one I knew and loved, yet somehow foreign. A meek voice. A timid voice. A cracked and pained voice. She said she hurt and the prescription painkillers weren't helping. I told her to lie down and try to rest. It had only been a few weeks since I had returned home from the Christmas holiday. She had only been home herself about a month from the rehab facility she had been in for a previous incident. Her steps were slow and deliberate, aided, and yet hampered, by the four legs of her walker. At one point, the pain in her back that shoots down her hip and into her leg overpowered her strong ability to be silent in suffering, that she sat down in a chair and cried. It was then that I almost did too, as I knew there was nothing I could do to make the pain disappear. It also reminded me that I am not ready to face this eventual and emotional loss.

Often times I am unprepared. I mean, I'm not totally unprepared. The bags are packed for the trip, but not put into the car. The clothes are washed and dried, but piled up on my bed, and it's bedtime. The glowing screen is showing funny posts about cats while the clock steadily advances toward the work hour and I'm half dressed, enthralled by the multiple tabs open. If I didn't know myself so well, I would call it being lazy, but I know that's not it. It's more of a stumbling. It's an attention deficiency. It's the butterfly, the squirrel, the shiny object. It's distraction.

It was 6:19am the next day; it was Saturday. I received a text from my brother saying that my grandmother had fallen at her home and had to be taken to the ER by ambulance. Of course, I didn't get that text until the second text was sent at 9:30am; the text that actually woke me up. It was words on a screen that brought to mind the realization of life with its frailties and lack of guarantees. Although the x-ray results were positive and her injuries were mild compared to what they could have been, those results were not guaranteed to be positive. It wasn't a given that she would be okay. Knowing that the opposing thought is just as much a part of the way things equal out; that its role in 'Life as We know It' is just as possible as its counterpart made it more than just something you've placed in a dark part of your mind, only bringing it to surface when situations move you to dig deep. It made it real.

I finally got to talk to her again on the phone this Friday night. She had spent two days in ICU for observation at a hospital in Tampa. She was not in ICU because her injuries warranted it, but because at her age of 92, it was determined that it was for her benefit. She could receive around the clock care and be more closely monitored, and they were more well equipped in case something did go wrong. After that, she spent two more days in a regular room. I had the phone number when she was in ICU. I had called, but was only able to talk to her son, my uncle, during her stay. I never had a number when she was in a regular room. She left the hospital this past Friday morning and by that afternoon, I had the number to her room at the same rehabilitation center she had been in for more than a month leading up to Thanksgiving. When she answered, I heard familiarity. It was not the voice I had heard the previous Friday. It wasn't the pained, foreign voice. It was a voice that knew what she had just gone through and was determined to face the intensive rehabilitation that was to get her back home again. We talked about what had happened and the things that would come after.

I'm unprepared to face this. I'm not ready and don't think I will ever be. I don't even believe that I have to be. I don't have to accept it to know that it is going to happen. I don't have to be okay with it to lessen the pain it will bring. It will happen no matter how much time I think I have to prepare. No amount of preparation will make you ready for your life after.

After what? After anything. I've had many lives in the after. School, marriage, children, divorce, jobs, relationships, choices, even death...through the space between beginning and end and back to a beginning again, there is an after life. Proof that life goes on is not only reflected in the hand-cleared section of bathroom mirror, wet with condensation from a long, hot shower. It's also in the face of a woman, chattering in her winter parka and pumping gas into her car next to me. It's in the voice of the teller behind 2-inch plexiglass at the bank, asking,"How else may I help you, Mr. Barefoot?" It's in the stance of the familiar face double riding to separate floors on the elevator at work. It's not personally universal; it universally personal. Each of us have our own after life, each different and all at once; each separate over our alloted span of time.

She'll be 93 in February.

I used to have someone who said they'd be there for me when that time came. I know that this person will still be there for me, but not with me. The help will come from the same source, but in a totally different way. That's the result of another after life. We're both living proof that life after does go on.

Like I said, she'll be 93 soon. Here's to hoping my after life gets to wait until after that time to begin anew.

As I Lie

My slumber was disrupted by the ringing of the phone on my nightstand. Was it the ring of a text notification or was it the ring of someone stranded on the side of the road needing help? Was it the ring of a family member or dear friend with news to make me bolt out of bed or just news to make me lie back down, heart beating and now longing to drop back into deep sleep? My eyes tried to adjust to the backlit screen in a dark room lit only by the opposing reds in glow; the soft reds of a lava lamp vs. the stark reds of the numbers on two alarm clocks. When your phone rings in the middle of the day, there's usually no cause for alarm like your phone ringing in the middle of the night. I hoped it wasn't news concerning my grandmother who had not too long ago been admitted to a rehabilitation center following a bout with cellulitis. Although she is now home, the chance of it being news about her was quite possible. I hoped it wasn't news about my brother with his numerous health issues. Even though my eyes hadn't clearly seen the screen, my ears finally recognized that this was merely the sound of a text; my eyes cleared up enough to tell me it was a text with a subject that could wait until the morning for a reply.

Now I am awake. I lie here in an oddly warm bed; a bed made warm by the thermal heat that my body creates and emanates. Perhaps it's due to the freshly clean sheets not long from the dryer, but more than that, it's probably due to the fact that I finally gave in to common sense and turned the heat up. I admit it; I'm a cheapskate. It costs so much to run the house heat that I put it off until I can't stand it any longer. And with kids in the house, it's often earlier than that. Tonight is cold. We're supposed to get down below freezing and well, that's reason enough to go ahead and turn up the heat.

As I lie here in this warm bed, thinking about how it could be made warmer with extra body heat (just sayin'), the screen of the phone goes dark and the soft lighting of my room fades to black as I close my eyes. My ears attune to the night sounds; there's a distant baying of dogs, an echo of alternating yips and yaps to sound the midnight alarm. Closer still is the rustle of the remaining leaves that cling in desperation to the Mother Tree, resisting the wind and the eminent end; the last dance as they tumble across the lawn. There's a scritch-scratch of claws extended from paws as a cat or six run across the trailer's metallic roof. And then there's the clock on the wall all the way in the kitchen, the one that steadily falls behind in its time keeping, that's ticking in its loud ticking way, loud enough to be heard in my bedroom, seventy feet away.

As I lie here, the sun is well beyond the halfway point of rising yet again. It's shining on another part of the world, perhaps in a place where slumber is not disrupted by the ringing of a telephone, but by rocket fire or a splintering of wood as a door is kicked in and terror brings more than just bad dreams. I can relax in my one-way mirrored, bubble wrap blanket of relative comfort, safety, and freedom from those atrocities of humankind that are so much greater than mere disruptions. I know that the same sun that set will be the same one that rises in less than six hours. Whether or not I will be alive to see it rise is not something I can guarantee nor do I have the power of control over. I just assume and use the power I do have; the power of hope and personal persuasion to tell myself that I will.

As I lie here, thoughts arise as monoliths jutting up on the horizon of my consciousness. These thoughts arrive like uninvited guests who fail to recognize when they've overextended their ungiven welcome; the ones who rummage through your medicine cabinet and drawers, not necessarily stealing anything, but nevertheless passively intruding upon the sanctity of personal property; the ones who never give, but take, take, take.

Our lives are a series of humbling learning experiences. Sometimes the learning is an easy task; a mindless and elementary lesson of a simplistic nature. Often times though, the lessons learned are blatantly coarse, tough skinned, soul eroding spectres that haunt your dreams and steal your hope. It's this second level of lessons learned; it's these hard ones that I could use less of. But, seeing as the hard lessons are not solitary, stand alone entities, and they must go hand in hand with the easy ones and actually work with each other to teach the complete lesson, there's no chance of having one without the other.

I feel like major change is on the way. I don't want it. I don't like it. But it's a fact that this change is closer to my future than it is to my past. I've suffered the loss of love several times over, and come to think of it, probably even more than I've lost a loved one to death itself. Weird. No one is immune to loss, especially a loss of a loved one. One of my worries is my brother, who, let's be honest, is not in the peak of health. His weight, combined with diabetes and pulmonary issues, pretty much guarantees a life made harder than if he didn't have a weight problem. You know what I remember about my childhood with my older brother? Not much of a damn thing. Sure, I have pictures and I have stories told to me about this happening and that occurring, but it is fuzzy, just about like all my memories of my childhood. I remember what I remember. I'm occasionally asked, "Remember when...?" and my answer is usually, "Nope." And that sucks.

Another of my worries is my grandmother. She will be ninety-three years old in February and the visit I made over Christmas made me realize just how fragile life is. Seeing her in pain merely walking around the house hit me hard. The woman who used to chase me with a strop when I needed discipline is now using a walker. The woman who drove a church van full of kids to school whenever she was called upon can't even get behind the wheel of her own van. And even though I've known her all of my life, and I spent fifteen years under her wing, growing from a timid young boy, through my awkward, yet rebellious teen years, and nearly double those years to the timid, awkward, still rebellious (but against other, more important things) man typing these words, I feel like it hasn't been long enough; that I haven't spent enough time just being there. The irony of the juxtaposition of the one being cared for and the one now needing care is saddening. It literally breaks my heart.

540. That's the number of miles that lie between myself and where her and my brother live. According to Google Maps, it should only take 7 hours and 46 minutes to drive that distance, but I know it takes much longer than that. I've made that trip numerous times, and even though the travel time varies, making it in under 9 hours is a feat in itself. Perhaps if it was just me, and there was no Atlanta between us. It occurs to me that those miles may just as well turn to years when needing to be there becomes the focus...

So, as I lie here in my bed; this warm bed, on this cold night; this night turned into the early hours of the last day of the year, with two of my loved ones asleep in their beds and thoughts of all my other loved ones running through my head, I try to think of something profound to say. It's late, I'm tired, but, thankfully feeling over my bout with the flu. I have nothing.

"Nothing stays. Hold on while you can. Try to remember. And above all, love."