nonsensical text

Thursday, November 15, 2012

midpoint

Fifteen years ago in two days time (this coming Saturday), my baby boy, Caleb, was born. He never breathed outside of me. We had his funeral soon after - closed casket, not wanting to make this harder on others than it need to be. For a brief time before the funeral, we had a private viewing. My mother, my in-laws, and us, that’s what it was supposed to be. I guess I took longer saying good-bye than I expected. Perhaps I also forgot to take into account that my father was always a little early when he came to things. Perhaps, due to our complicated relationship, I didn’t really have the opportunity to know it in the first place. He was immediate family, so the funeral directors let him in. He didn’t know he was going to see his grandson face to face for the first and only time. He didn’t know my baby would be so similar in size and appearance to the way I looked in the incubator after being born prematurely so many years before. I didn’t mean to watch my father’s heart break, even a little. I know it did.

One year and two days ago, my father passed away. He struggled with oral cancer for a comparatively short period of time. The end was not easy, but it was faster than it could have been. I feel blessed to have been with him along with all of his children. Many past hurts were laid to rest before his passing – another blessing. His funeral was in the same funeral home, the reception afterward in the same church that holds Caleb’s graveyard.

 It occurred to me today that I was at the midpoint, equidistant from both dates. Perhaps I am also at a point equidistant from the innocence of Caleb and the brokenness of innocence-lost my father had lived to attain. As I stand on this point in time, I strive to see I am not on a line at all, but a circle. What appear (on my flat-map perspective of life) to be endpoints join together on the opposite side of the globe, the side we call eternity.