The Good Fortune Harvest
One door opens and another closes – this is Zen – don’t try to figure out the timing, because there can be excessively long periods between rhythms. Lou killed himself two years later. Locked himself in the garage with a running car and anxiously awaited the end of his grief. Our Father died a year to the date of Lou’s death. Imagine, had Lou waited just one more year, he might have sensed the door swinging the other way.
Mom gets holiday cards from Teréz every season. They are filled with “God willing” and “God bless” and “God only knows” prefixes. It saddens me to think that there are those who find solace in believing that there is a higher plan which includes the death of a little child as a means to its end. What happened to que será, será, what will be, will be?
The loss of Omar and Lou in our lives cast a pall on our family’s spirit, but the pain seemed to have been blunted by our concerted resilience. And by our belief that both Lou and Omar had gone to heaven on the express train. They were in a better place. As long as we were a family, enmeshed, none of us questioned our faith.
The fork in the road came when the unanswerable question arose of where my Father was ending up after he died. Hell was out of the question, because he wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. And heaven seemed unlikely because he wasn’t a good man. He was what you would call complex. Where do complex people go when they die? I asked our religious leader. His answer, “Who can know? Would you believe in a god you understood?”
Our religion provided us with many unsatisfactory answers such as this one. Yet our familial psyche was trapped, subjugated by our dear Father and this very same Religious doctrine. The first acted as our Ego, the other our Superego. And Freud would have had a field day trying to pan out our Id, which had been anesthetized by the overwhelming power of the first two. Even a seasoned psychoanalyst would be hard pressed to explain why or how none of us broke away through our own volition. Until, of course, it snapped under its own strain.
All of a sudden, I feel a strong need to lie down. The long drive and the willies about being here, seeing these people whose history and mine collided then tore apart without a hint of insight, all of it is sapping my strength.
I stroll over to my mother’s room trying to shake these feelings. The furniture is the same in here, but the sheets are new. Flowers in bold colors. I lay down and am swept up in the unique smell of my mother – sweet perfume and cigarettes. The sheets, the pillows, her clothes, everything smells the same way and always has.
I get up and open the window to let some fresh air in. Outside stand six very large oak trees, forming a crest around the back yard. Each one is named. Jack, Lou, Frank, Andy, Laura, and Constance. Their canopy has grown vast and far reaching and casts a heavy shadow over the entire back yard. They were gifts from my grandparents when we first moved in this house. There are six of them, they stood six feet tall on arrival, and I was six months old. Any connection is lost on me.
I head back to my room to lie down. My old bed is still firm.