A Still Life…A Life Still

Where have you been? ask my friends who haven’t seen me out on the usual social runways in recent months.  And I want to say, I’ve been in the family way, meaning I’m in the business of family ministrations; but then I remember the words usually mean barefoot and pregnant, which, in my ripe middle years, I certainly am not.  I lay those words down.  Oh, just busy with lots of things.

And then I pick them up again.  Okay, not with child.  But something akin to it.  There is a great symmetry between birth and death, of course.  A woman in the family way spends months pulsing in wait.  Tending, loving, emotionally nursing; utterly out of control of what is happening.  The life within comes with its own timing, comes when it will. What is needed is attention and strength, tenderness, and patience without will.

And so it is to tend the dying.

Early Saturday morning, I received the summons to the home of my father-in-law.  I  dressed quickly, grabbed a couple of bananas and a clean T-shirt and headed out to hunt down my husband, threading the Charleston streets on his morning run.  Sitting with Lawrence, surrounded by his family, we listened to his labored breathing (yes, labored, as a woman labors in the last hours before birth).  We touched what remained of his flesh, stretched over the honest architecture of bone, eyes distant, pulse receding like the tide.

We waited.  We browsed through family photo albums and I marveled at my husband in tiny incarnations.  We sat in the cradle of the afternoon, and pillowed his silence with our familiar voices.  And in that gentle rock of time and conversation, he took a breath so quiet, we hardly knew it was his last.

A baby’s first job is the hungry suck of air.  And our last job is the flutter and gasp of letting it out. I don’t know which is harder, though they both require lungs full of courage, and, no matter how you see it, faith.  At ninety-five, Lawrence had taken in enough of all that is good, and he had loved it; and then he had the courage to let it go.  In one last sough we hardly heard.  He returned to where he had started, but this time, blanketed by the presence of those he had fathered and loved.

I have never been a mother, delivered a child, held the flesh of my flesh.  But now, I am in the family way, nonetheless.  I am tending the going out of those before me, holding their hands, as I can, while they step backwards toward dependence, as they return toward  stillness; as they summon courage for breathing out.  It is another way of carrying life.  I am content to dwell at the threshold with those I love, finding the pulse in relinquishment.  Because I want, in this life, to  be present for everything:  the circle, the fullness, the emptying, the return.

Lawrence Adams Walker
January 16, 1916 – March 5, 2011

~ by Susan on 03/07/2011.

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