good friday

I woke up this morning with a strange, empty feeling. I watched the tiny cracks of light through the closed blinds move with the wind and clouds outside, listened to my quiet house, my quiet street, rolled onto my back and rested my hands on my hip bones, unwilling to make any move at all that would result in leaving the safety and stillness of my bed. Good Friday. All was dim, all was hushed. 

I eventually did. I leaned over and wheelbarrowed my hands and upper body to reach my phone that was charging nearby on the rug, hauled myself back into bed, and started reading emails and the terrible news, as is my wont, until it felt all wrong and I finally got up with vague thoughts about shaking off this darkness with various productive things that I should be doing before the children woke up and I had to begin my work day.

I went down the stairs and to the kitchen door, as I do every morning, behind which the cats were huddled and pressed, eagerly awaiting my approach. When I opened the door they fell forward out of it, as they do every morning, immediately meowing, looking up at me with wide desperate eyes, rubbing against my ankles and generally communicating their intolerably acute hunger for breakfast. I fed them. I drank a glass of water and made coffee. I watched the sky outside the tiny window. I could not commit to any of my productivity agenda items.

So I sat down at the kitchen table with my phone and opened Spotify and played John Prine. I had been avoiding that, I think, ever since I read he was in the ICU. Am I a huge fan? Not really. But so many of his songs were part of the tender soundtrack of many summers at my very special UU camp in Western North Carolina, a deeply formative place for me. I never learned the verses; I could only sing along to the choruses, but I always did so with a lot of heart. 

And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River, where paradise lay

It took about four seconds of hearing that song before the tears came. They came and came, with an intensity I haven't felt for awhile, the kind of grief wave that one can only submit to and ride until it has crashed on some other shore from the one you started out standing on. I rested my head and arms on the smooth wood of the kitchen table, clean because Gabriel wiped it down last night after dinner, aglow in the morning sun, and I cried. The tears weren't just for John Prine and his evocative story-songs, they were for my children who miss their friends, for my clients who are mourning and can't give and receive hugs of comfort, for doctors and nurses, for people who are alone, for my childhood, for cities living in fear, for all the parts of me I have sometimes wanted to push aside, for the smell and feel of a rhododendron forest in North Carolina. I cried for all the losses, every one of which is a feathery part of a vast root system whose taproot is my own deepest grief. Mike. Dad. Come back. Come back and hear this beautiful song.

Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.