I woke up screaming. That’s the way it seems to be these nights. Squatting there on my bed, right in the middle, as if he had a proprietary interest in the location, perched a black wolf. He sat upright and alert, haunches gathered under his rump, forelegs straight and frontal, nose directing all his attention to me and my unseemly response to his presence. While he faced me he evidenced little interest in my own actual being-ness. It wasn’t lost on me that he manifested as black—a luxuriant ebony coat that cloaked him in all the warmth a canid could ever imagine and divulge to the workings of my primate psyche—the same aspect of beauty at play as when I chose to raise purebred black Andalusian horses, eschewing all other equine possibilities. Black is always most beautiful when it incarnates as living creature.
Wolf sat silent, naught to say—no howl curling in his gut gathering to ply the night air. He merely captured my gaze and pirouetted in place lifting alternating front paws in a lithe little dance, eloquent in expression. “I am beauty,” he suggested. “thanking you for taking note of all that I am and was and might ever have become.” Then like all waking dreams he absorbed into that overwhelming darkness that makes of reality a soft blanket.
“Larry is dead,” my lips formed the words but let them hang unuttered. His son and mine, Kurt had been dreading the leave-taking of his sort-of-estranged father for a while. His last report from bedside Seattle, a sharing from his sister Ruth, described a paternal gathering to depart. A morphine drip mercifully soothed the transition, but it was sure to come—and soon. A good son, he had been reaching for his dad every way that such things are possible. Always Larry vowed to do better, to write, phone, text, all the ways intelligent technology ameliorates saying to beloved persons the things that need to be said—and soon. But those things failed to morph from promises to completions. “Whose fault?” The question ruffled like cirrus clouds riding the air between Cascades and Shenandoas—never asked; never answered.
I pulled covers over head and dived back into sleep, only to surface again after 9:00, teeth clenched, determined to face the day. Sure enough, iPhone declared that a text from Kurt waited: “Dad passed away last night,” was the core of a text that spoke from the pit of his grief, that demon who drops in for a friendly visit to suggest that not enough was ever done—and now never can be—and whose fault is that anyway? “I can’t talk,” Kurt’s letters spell, “just need some time alone.”
Kurt, short for Conrad, is very much an authentic American male. He shares all the agony of sons who lose fathers and wonder how life will proceed without them being there even a continent away. Responding to what he must be suffering, I text:
Take solace in your silence. It is yours alone. But be consoled by knowing that as long as you walk the fragrant earth, he breathes. Half of you is him. Move nobly into your days. They are gifts from those who braved their own fraught journeys to tear open a path to guide your steps. This you will do as the noble counselor that you are. When you wonder if you disappointed him, know that the last question falling from his lips was, “Did he disappoint you?”
morethanenoughtruth 