Scary Closet

Hey, God. It’s been over a year since I tried meeting you here. Maybe that’s just as well- I no longer have an audience I feel obligated to edit my words for. Though now that I’m here, I don’t know what to say. My thoughts used to feel so complete, tightly controlled, flowing together, cohesive when I wrote. Now all I can get out are broken fragments that don’t even make sense to me. Ironic, when contrasted with all the praise I get at work for my detailed but succinct call documentation. I can see the themes and connections in hundreds of others’ stories and distill them into a maximum three-paragraph-long call card that any reader can understand. So why does it take me ten minutes of staring at the floor, swallowing repeatedly, and conscious self-reminders to breathe to answer a standard question in counseling like, “What relationships do you have right now that can help support you through this?” ? It shouldn’t be that hard- I know the answer. It’s not even a discouraging answer; I am very blessed in my attachment network.

Dan described September with me as being “very busy”. He felt like I was constantly pulling him here, there, and to the next place to meet people, get things done, and do things. He expressed relief that I had slowed down lately. Snort. I told him I’m probably busier now that I was in September; I’ve just stopped dragging him with me to everything. Such a strange contradiction, to be so busy, so kinetic on the outside, yet feel so deathly quiet on the inside. It’s not a stillness in the sense of tranquility, balance, or peace; I just feel frozen. I’m poised with my hand on the door knob of a precariously packed closet that has far too many secret boxes. Conveniently compartmentalized and stuffed away “for later,” each box waits eagerly for the slightest crack in pressure to spring loose in an avalanche that will bury me. It’s the kind of B-grade horror movie you want to throw stale pop-corn at: “Don’t go in there, you fool! It’ll get you!!!” But the door knob has such a magnetic pull to my iron hand; the headlights of that truck are so hypnotically mesmerizing to my dilated eyes. I don’t believe in fate. I do believe in Freudian slips and subconscious desires. Sometimes I also believe in providence.

Creeeeak goes the door knob. FWOOOOP-PLOP-PLOP-PLOP-PLOP-PLOP-THUD goes the precariously packed closet stuff onto my head. Siiiiigh, goes the fool lying on the floor, “Well, now that I’m here…” I peruse the jumbled mass of once-organized items heaped nearest my buried head.

Aha. My unfinished scarf, the loose strings almost as tangled and convoluted as I’d left them back in the summer. Driving home from Lac Ste. Anne with Jen. I have just finished ten grueling days of bike-riding and “free-camping” through the most miserable rain and contrary winds I have ever subjected myself to, a week of emotionally intense interpersonal therapy training in Edmonton, and half a week of spiritually and emotionally confusing tent-city grunge living at the native Catholic pilgrimage site of Lac Ste. Anne. Jen wants to know how I feel about the whole thing. It’s a good thing Jen’s life is more confusing than mine. She takes it rather well when I give her the most honest summary I can come up with: “God, you dragged me through ten days of mud-sodden bike-riding over enormous gravel-roaded hills and “free-camping” through the most miserable rain and contrary winds I have ever experienced, dragged up all my old insecurities about having what it takes for counseling for another week after that, and then gave me half a week of forlorn tent-city wanderings and unanswered hopes in physical healing from diabetes so you can show me that I need to ask for help from other people more often?! I already knew that at home! Screw you, I’m never going on another pilgrimage again!” Some of the loose strings have gotten tangled around something else. I trace the knot with my finger, looking for a way to set the captive object free.

Shiny. The captive is a broken necklace. So many beautiful elements, but the chain links are weak and prone to separating when I pull too hard on the smooth stones that I find so comforting to rub with my thumb. I don’t have the tools or the patience to keep putting it back together. It needs to be made into something new. But that is another daunting task- one I haven’t built enough motivation or creativity to launch, so it too was put aside in the closet. Polished natural stone has always been my preference over the ostentatious glamour of cut gems. There’s more mystery in the depth of natural stone’s weight and swirling patterns of compression, an enigma only ever partially revealed by carving cross-sections. One of the beads is more of an oblong orb. Unwieldy and heavy, I actually don’t like it very much in its present shape. I’m tempted to smash it, to see new, sharper shapes and discover more hidden cross-sections. But I also worry about destroying it in my haste. Light gleams on some of the beads, and I gaze again at each one: so many memories strung together by the common theme of a relationship. Laying on a quilt in the summer, asking God why the hell he would finally reveal a man capable of being my match…when that man is an animist and therefore off limits for me. God told me to go forward anyway- the man’s faith wasn’t exactly what it appeared, and I could invite him “further up and deeper in”. Staring out the window at white winter, watching with horror a vision of myself, Dan, and God dancing together. Dan doesn’t see God; Dan keeps turning his back on God, trying to dance with me alone. I feel so awkward excluding God when God has greater claim on my affections and adventures, but I don’t know how to pull Dan back and make him see the Friendly Giant in the room who is so obvious to me. I give in and offer both hands to Dan alone, feeling God’s hurt the moment I do so. Walking through Nose Hill Park in the spring, hand in hand with Dan. I tentatively ask if he feels anything has changed in his spiritual life over the last year. Relief floods my heart when he responds that he now sees God as more personal, rather than just a great other. Walking through Nose Hill Park in the fall, hand in hand with Dan again. He reveals his fears about marriage in light of his parents’ unexpected divorce, and also his concerns about my condescending attitude towards his faith. Dan also wants me to explain why it upsets me that Dan is amused by his room-mate’s poster of two scantily-clan lesbians locked in an intimate embrace. Driving alone in my car on the Deerfoot, which is slick with ice and half-melted snow. Dan is in BC, visiting friends for a week. The time apart made two things very clear to me: first, I feel like a moon without a planet to orbit when he’s gone. Second, even when Dan’s around, I still feel like a dead, useless rock. Where is the sun that both earth and its moon should be orbiting? I’m driving too fast again, driving while crying again, and I mentally reprimand myself for always leaving these sorts of reflections for solitary car rides on the highway. I picture myself allowing my car to swerve just a touch too close to the snow piled along the curve of the road preceding a very solid-looking concrete overpass. Nope. Considered that last winter too, and I still can’t do it. I can’t hurt my family that way. Dang. Too much force on the knot- the necklace snaps in two and I swivel my head around to see where the second piece has fallen.

There it is. And there’s the thing that went THUD when it hit my head. It’s a bottle of LIFE juice. I grasp the partially empty bottle with mingled irritation and admiration. It is a tall, slender bottle with a trendy, simple label; reminiscent of all the elegance of red wine, without the glass material for the bottle or the disappointing dry, bitter taste that so inappropriately accompanies a liquid so richly coloured. Marketed as a wonder drink for healing, LIFE juice contains nearly all the most anti-carcinogenic ingredients touted by the research Nolan has delved into. Once you get past the mild sea-weed taste, the juice has a fairly enjoyable mixed berries flavour. The only draw-back is that the bottle is too tall to fit vertically, or even diagonally, into any refrigerator I’ve ever encountered. And it’s not helping the one person we most wanted it to. It’s such a dark red, I note idly, still holding the bottle. Red like blood, like pretty packaging used for parcels at Christmas, like grape juice served in little plastic shot glasses at Evangelical church Communion services, like my sleep-deprived eyes, like the powerful chemo drug they’re injecting into my mother’s veins to slow the cancer down. Slow, but not stop, the doctors said. Lieomyosarcoma. A rapidly reproducing cancer that spreads through muscles not controlled by conscious thought- i.e. lungs, the digestive tract, the abdomen, kidneys, etc. Rare, it affects less than 1% of all cancer patients. There are no documented cases of survival. Christian friends from church and beyond keep telling us she is going to live anyway, Jesus will heal her, keep praying, they’re praying. My conscious prayers mainly consist of simple things: “Please God, let her keep down a ½ cup of fruit smoothie today. I put the LIFE juice in it! She hasn’t had anything but a few sips of ginger-ale stay down for three days…” These prayers are answered with “yes” and “no” about equally as often. Well, maybe 50% is pretty good. I mean, maybe people who don’t have this much prayer are only successful keeping telescopic quantities of food down 20% of the time. Seriously, God, what the hell is this? I know you’re capable of better than random chance. Why are you willing to fix the stupid, unnecessary odometer on my car for me even when I don’t speak to you for weeks, but you won’t heal my warm, kind, faithful, loving mother when everyone we know is praying for her?! Priorities!!! Death isn’t the end. She’d be happy in heaven. She could see the Tree of Life where Jono made tick marks for his height and Jesus’ so he could finally find out for sure which is shorter. If mom dies, the last shreds of Chasey’s faith in a just or good God will be annihilated. Nolan’s probably right- this is totally going to be an Elijah + God versus the 450 Baal prophets + 400 Asherah prophets. When mom gets better miraculously, Chasey, maybe Tachae and Jeana, and who knows all else will see the glory and love of God and be changed. How long can I continue working full-time in the helping services while also trying to provide relief care for my mother every other evening and successfully focus on my on-line counseling course starting in the new year before my empathy pool dries up into a puddle? I wonder if anyone ever goes swimming in the River of Life the way the native people go swimming in the blessed holy waters of Lac Ste. Anne. I hope so. I don’t enjoy skating much and if there are any rivers of life left in my soul, they’ve frozen solid like the ones on Mars. I push the bottle aside.

Another shiny glint. Ah, a lighter for camping. Probably one of the ones drowned on my pilgrimage. I wonder if it still lights. Click. Ouch. Damn it, why does anyone ever use those things? Well, now I know it still works... Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation (Hebrews 11:1-2). I still believe you’re good, God. I see you in who my mother is, in her loving care for others despite her own suffering. But I don’t understand what you’re doing, and I’m having a hard time taking Valerie’s commission to praise you for the health our mother still has. In some ways, I feel like going to pre-bereavement counseling demonstrates despair. I know you’re capable of healing my mother if you want to. But I also know from personal experience that sometimes you choose not to heal, and sometimes people we want to believe mis-prophesy, and I need to be prepared if you’re planning to take the heart out of our family. I need to know if there's enough lighter fluid left for that potential darkness.