Courage

First, I felt enormously better when by God's Grace I stopped fighting the very idea of the outrage of my being bereft of my Mom. Because I suddenly realized that in cold, bald fact, it *is* an outrage. That this amazing woman should undergo the tortures of her physical decline, and that she and I should be torn apart, is really, royally fucked up. It's not a sort of uniquely horrible injustice though. It's a universal injustice in this world. It is the torn flesh in the side of Christ writ large. The Original Faultline running through our souls is real and devastating and it's here and now, but it's also there and then ... in every way Original Sin rips apart our walk here. And oh I miss her ... and that bespeaks in itself the presence of Original Wrong that has become our lot.

But second and far more importantly is that I'm just so, so, so deeply impressed by Mom's guts, her sheer courage in the face of debilitaing and humiliating decline. Today I spent most of the day making arrangements for an obituary in The Tulsa World. We're on track for a similar obituary for the Dunklin Daily Democrat, the newspaper serving Southeast Missouri where my mother was born. And then I went through her desk and papers. Which reminded me of how much this lady's guts carried her through the remainder of her life.

The plaintive, heartbreaking appeals that became more and more insistent ... "Just help me ... help me." "You'll have to tell me what to do." This amazing strong, confident lady suddenly finds herself be gradually stripped of her abilities ... yet she has the courage, the guts, the humility to try to do the best she can and not simply give up. She was and is sheer courage.

Oh Im' feeling overwhelmed by sleepiness ... I"m going to hit the sack. Whew I keep falling asleep. Goodnight gang