Redcurrant Garden
The Withering
Although he rarely talked about it, and when he did it was with a reluctant inconsistency, a never wearying grief often loomed about my father's mind. So it was perhaps unconsciously that a certain old folk song found its way to the tips of his fingers as he, seated by the piano, told me about her. As I listened I quietly reminded myself of the words that followed along with the piece that poured from the instrument: "one often sees that those take harm, who grow the most beautifully and promise the most". I watched the keys depress and recover as he began to tell the story.
It was in her last week of life that an old friend had come to visit her in the hospital. "It was foolish of her", he told me, with an anchor secured to what he really meant to say, which sunk back into him, heavily. "She had already been in the hospital for a long time". It was the same hospital where his mother had once worked, a fact which stood a somber witness to the lapse of time and health. For my father there had come a time, much too soon, when significance had shifted from orange wedges and drooping redcurrant twigs. Seeming trivial, the polishing of forks and the proper way to make jam out of berries looked pitiful in the fluorescent hospital light. What had been her life was a lovely detail in the presence of colossal death. An incomprehensible and utterly desperate sorrow gripped my father as he realized this on that day, and it would cling on.
My father as the oldest son at nineteen, his own father in a worse state, had been handed the responsibility of arrangements. That is why it was he who led the middle-aged lady in to see his mother that day. He stood by as he saw her chin drop, shamelessly, and her eyes widen, half with despair, half with macabre fascination for what she saw. In the hospital bed laid a tiny creature, bald from treatments that had done her more harm than good. The roundness of her cheeks had become peach pits and her skin was bark off a fallen tree. The eyes were filled with an unchallenged meekness and the mouth stood half open. The old friend excused herself, and stepped out in the hallway never to return.
Alone then, my father followed with his eyes the curve of her chin and the limp, yellow extensions that were her hands on top the cover. He felt at once - although he spoke in mild words of it to me - that a great guilt had shot through the world and that he was the only one who could perceive it. Injustice was being done, harsh and unworldly, to the sum of all the progress of humanity and goodness that had taken place in it. Dissolving before him was something essential, some abstraction of the heart. Tearing within him was a homeless guilt which had struck down on him. Taking his place beside her bed, one which he would rarely leave for the following week until her death, he pondered over the impotence of willingness to live, the unfathomable impact of letting live and where the good goes.
Looking at the picture that hangs above my grandfather's bed, and seeing a face that came to ingrain such an idea as that of simple joy of life on another, and probably more, I see the features of my father more clearly. At a closer look I can almost make out a likeness between my grandmother and myself. What at first was weighing on my shoulders is being lifted, because there is a dimension to this story that has passed my father by. I'm convinced that despite the joy in being, and the greater joy in the idea of continuing to be, and the ruthless death which cancels out even the most spirited delight in life, there is always to be drawn from a world old well an unshaken and undying ecstasy in life, and a hope for spring anew.
It was in her last week of life that an old friend had come to visit her in the hospital. "It was foolish of her", he told me, with an anchor secured to what he really meant to say, which sunk back into him, heavily. "She had already been in the hospital for a long time". It was the same hospital where his mother had once worked, a fact which stood a somber witness to the lapse of time and health. For my father there had come a time, much too soon, when significance had shifted from orange wedges and drooping redcurrant twigs. Seeming trivial, the polishing of forks and the proper way to make jam out of berries looked pitiful in the fluorescent hospital light. What had been her life was a lovely detail in the presence of colossal death. An incomprehensible and utterly desperate sorrow gripped my father as he realized this on that day, and it would cling on.
My father as the oldest son at nineteen, his own father in a worse state, had been handed the responsibility of arrangements. That is why it was he who led the middle-aged lady in to see his mother that day. He stood by as he saw her chin drop, shamelessly, and her eyes widen, half with despair, half with macabre fascination for what she saw. In the hospital bed laid a tiny creature, bald from treatments that had done her more harm than good. The roundness of her cheeks had become peach pits and her skin was bark off a fallen tree. The eyes were filled with an unchallenged meekness and the mouth stood half open. The old friend excused herself, and stepped out in the hallway never to return.
Alone then, my father followed with his eyes the curve of her chin and the limp, yellow extensions that were her hands on top the cover. He felt at once - although he spoke in mild words of it to me - that a great guilt had shot through the world and that he was the only one who could perceive it. Injustice was being done, harsh and unworldly, to the sum of all the progress of humanity and goodness that had taken place in it. Dissolving before him was something essential, some abstraction of the heart. Tearing within him was a homeless guilt which had struck down on him. Taking his place beside her bed, one which he would rarely leave for the following week until her death, he pondered over the impotence of willingness to live, the unfathomable impact of letting live and where the good goes.
Looking at the picture that hangs above my grandfather's bed, and seeing a face that came to ingrain such an idea as that of simple joy of life on another, and probably more, I see the features of my father more clearly. At a closer look I can almost make out a likeness between my grandmother and myself. What at first was weighing on my shoulders is being lifted, because there is a dimension to this story that has passed my father by. I'm convinced that despite the joy in being, and the greater joy in the idea of continuing to be, and the ruthless death which cancels out even the most spirited delight in life, there is always to be drawn from a world old well an unshaken and undying ecstasy in life, and a hope for spring anew.