When the storm subsides

I've been neglectful of my blogging for some time now. I realize this and I wish it were different. According to the blog, if you look at the dates, it's been nearly 10 days. It's actually been longer. What I mean by that is that the "Anticipation" entry wasn't one that I came up with new. I had written most of that back in June and saved it as a draft. When I realized that I hadn't posted for a bit, I pulled it out, proof read it, updated it with a few details and posted it.

The Lemur story was also a fast "I'm still here" post added quickly when a little funny moment happened. I've developed, like I've heard other bloggers mention, a "I need to blog that" impulse that's constantly on the look for good blogging material. That knee jerk instinct came in handy on that day. But it's actually been nearly a month since I properly flexed my blogging muscles.

It's taken me a good 10 days or so to even work through this post. To make sense of the avalanche of marbles bouncing around inside my brain.

I have been fairly pre-occupied for about the past month now. Many things kind of making me feel overwhelmed and just like my efforts would be better spent in action rather than reflection. And more for others than for myself.

Most recently, of course, there was the tragedy in the south. So hard to get my head around it all. I was just glad when the trucks started to roll into New Orleans. I felt like suddenly I could exhale and I didn't even realize that I had been standing in front of the T.V. holding my breath for 4 days. It's all the more disconcerting for me because the Tsunami still feels like it happened so recently.

I feel like screaming out into the cosmos, demanding the establishment of a moratorium only allowing 1 catastrophic disaster per rolling 12 month cycle, if at all. In both of those unimaginable events the sea snuck up and grabbed a populous unaware. In a more superstitious time one might think that we have offended the elements and they were angrily trying to even the score.

Standing in my living room, overcome with powerlessness, it felt like everyone who could help was just standing there watching the city flail and drown, limply holding a life preserver that they refused to throw. No one had the courage to jump into the lions mouth. To the point that reports of the people who did want to help were telling T.V. crews of how they were prevented from doing so by those in authority. It just seemed like the world had gone crazy.

And then this Sunday I realized the date. Even 4 years later we're still mending and healing from the profound injury to that great American city.

Times like these always provoke a lot of "why" questions. People asking why and looking for governments or people or agencies to blame. Those with a more spiritual bent even shaking an angry fist at God. The irony of the "why" question is that the answer to a question of "why" is one of logic and analysis, but the question comes from the well of emotion.

So no answer, no matter how correct, will satiate the source. The wound will always bleed through the dressing. The question itself is almost asked in defiance. It's an angry outburst thrown into the face of the swirling chaos, whose paradox seems meant to humble the universe so the emptiness of the pain has all the justification it needs. If that makes any sense.

In the end, the answer to the why is that there is no answer, and that can be more satisfying than any other feeble response. "Why? Because." It just is. The confusion becomes universal. We're all in this together.

During this past few weeks I was also effected on a more personal level. My wife found a lump in her breast. It was a chilling discovery.

She couldn't even bring herself to tell me for the first few days that she knew. She had made an appointment with the doctor, had gotten a mammogram and made an appointment with a surgeon for a biopsy assessment before she worked up the courage to tell me. She was worried that I would get too freaked out. She still hasn't told many people, including some family, for the same reason.

When she told me, the world changed with her words. Everything's else suddenly became much smaller and less important. I was saddened that I had argued with her over insignificant things in those days, not realizing that she had this burden she was carrying alone.

So we held each other and cried late that night. Hoping for the best, but plagued by the thoughts of "what if". The mind can go down that path so easily.

Through a friend, she heard about a group in Omaha that does nothing but state of the art breast cancer screening and treatment. It was run by a woman, which always seems to be a plus, and the woman running the center had lost a sister to breast cancer. So for her this was not just a career or occupation, this center was not simply clever marketing, it was her crusade.

The doctor was sensitive and attentive when my wife described her symptoms, and also to her fears and concerns and thoughts on everything that was happening. This doctor must hear this same sort of story a thousand times a day, but she never gave the impression to me that she was anything less than 100 percent interested in everything my wife had to say.

The problem was that even though there was nothing of concern showing on the mammogram and initial tests, there was still the lump. Very undeniable to anyone who examined her. And her father, who died of cancer, was initially told that the painful lump behind his jaw that would eventually take his life was nothing. Even later, when one side of his face began to be paralyzed, he was diagnosed with a palsy. They didn't realize cancer until it was too late.

So no reassurance seemed enough exorcise the specter of "what if". We spent several evenings between appointments in the quiet and the dark, after the kids were long in bed, dancing with that specter. Our hearts wanted to be confident but the tears continually broke their own levy and we were stranded, swirling in our own poisoned waters of doubt, also waiting for days for rescue that never seemed to come.

Finally, though, it was through this doctor that we were at last able to take comfort in the diagnosis that this wasn't cancer. Slowly but deliberately our relief began to gain it's footing. We could exhale again---again.

In addition to all this was my father's 70th birthday party. My present to him was a slide show video I made on the computer from photos that my mother had collected together for this purpose, photos encompassing his whole life. I had been working on it intently for several weeks.

When I was doing wedding videos a while back, I would work with the images of people I didn't know for hours, too. In the solitude of my office, through the intimacy of watching these strangers over and over in their actions on this special day, along with building their story from the anarchy of hours of video clips, I would begin to feel a closeness to them.

Later, an awkward thing would happen. When I saw them in person around town, like in the store or some public place, I would have an unconscious impulse to want to go up and greet a familiar face. But then quickly, luckily, that impulse was halted when my brain wisely reminded me that these people probably didn't even remember or know who I was.

Unexpectedly, this same intensity of experience was there while I was working with the pictures of my father. Even though he is my dad and we have been very close all my life, I began to rediscover him. Through the lens of this video project I was not seeing him as a child to his father, but as a man looking at another man. It was amazing shift in perspective. I was able to view him with the freshness of an outsider considering all that my father had lived.

My dad isn't a man of stature. He doesn't control the conversation or become the center of attention at a party (other than his birthday, of course). He's never climbed the corporate ladder very high, and in fact has had to deal with his own bouts of downsizing. He has quiet hobbies like wood carving and can spend hours milling through a one room antique store. But through this video the droplets of his life came together to form a profound body of water. Looking on him as a man to another man, I was impressed with what I saw. I liked this other man, and his life became like an ocean vista, stretching from the horizon right to my toes on the beach at the waters edge.

This helped me see myself in a new light, too. It helped me consider my own not-too-impressive resume of person history as something that I was overlooking, just like this placid basin of my father's life experiences of which I was only now beginning to realize the significance of it's depth. I had sailed across it's surface my whole life, held aloft and safe, and now it felt that all this time there were miles underneath me, holding me up, that I had never given their due consideration.

This latest stand-down with mortality of the past few weeks has given me a gift. I've been forced to take stock, and I actually liked the package that was presented. It hasn't all been easy, or even pleasant at times. But I remember the good things and treasure the joys. Then I can say that I not only enjoy my life, but I really like it too.