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Thursday, December 31, 2009

answerless dreams of heaven

Liz, the boys, and I suffered an indescribable loss this Christmas. This is in honor of our nameless Little One who has gone on before us:



There was no dream; no semblance of an eternal whisper giving comfort. It was not oddly fine the way it was last year when the furnace quit in the middle of the night while twenty-below winds tore across the prairies, tank farms, and churchyards to batter the framing and beams with ice and snow; or two  years ago when Luke was new and the tornado sirens howled: We huddled in the bathtub with our flashlights, ate peanut butter on bread until the all-clear.
Something wasn’t right. It was as simple as that. So you brought to the gathering a short, brilliant poem; a three-color painting that couldn’t be made more perfect in a generation than it was twelve weeks after the paints were mixed. You were a bright, barbican-thin little life of joyous panic, spent in the span between Halloween and Christmas, fall and winter. You were a new song, and you are loved still — so much — in this house.
You did not need what this house had to give. You would give no quarter to the world with its dirt, scrapes, tears, and uninformed smiles. Yet, your brothers miss you. Yet, in my dreams, I am your father, and I am afraid for you: I cry out with all my dust-bordered lungs can give, and chase after you in the snow-covered night. My legs cannot stay beneath me in the ice and the wind and the bitter cold; you fly further and faster than my feet will carry me. There is no bringing you back.
I don’t know why these things happen. Lightning struck the neighborhood’s oldest Maple in our front yard last year. It carved off bark in a thin figure-eight down the trunk. We spent a year watching it die in shades of green and gold. It spent the summer giving the yard autumn leaves. Your brothers danced on the stump. I don’t know why these things happen. I shake wordlessly; I stare at the expectant eyes of your mother and your brothers and pray that peace will pass through me into them, and set the storm aside.
In other dreams, heaven comes to earth in winter. Christ introduces us, wordlessly, smiling, then folds his hands behind him and leaves us in soft shadows and silver veins of moonlight in the night. I am the most tired father I could ever be. I lay down in the snow by the river. I unzip my coat, take off my hat, and weep one last time. You drift by, waving, smiling.