I enter the room because the door is closed, you are lying on your side with the covers around you, your face is wan and gray, there is a terrible deep emptiness inside your eyes within which I sense a pleading energy that cannot say its name.. Everything in me seizes but I know I must bear this darkness once again.. It is so familiar to me, the inertia, the paralysis, the dead feelings fallen into a deep ocean, falling falling falling into the most complete void of resounding emptiness… I ask you if this living death is what you wish for the rest of your life, but then later I think of these words from Al Anon, we become irritable and unreasonable by TRYING TO FORCE SOLUTIONS.. as I remember the first step.. powerless over the effects of alcoholism and over the lives and choices of others..
I leave the bunch of blood red lillies close to your bed while we talk but the power of the darkness in your eyes is so frightening to me, magnetising in its power and I know to preserve my own self I cannot look you in the eyes, right now, later there will be a time for this.
We talk of Mum, I share the photo I posted earlier of her taken on (what I seem to remember) may have been her 91st birthday.. This brings you alive a little bit.. All I can do is ask a lot of questions and try my best to summon some response from you, but the darkness of that big pool of ‘muck’ swirling is so familiar to me and it seems to have you paralysed while you focus all of its intensity on me.. There will be times I cry but then I get combative.. You agree with me the drugs are not working.. .I talk of fighting and of the sword we need to use to cut ourselves free from what is not part of our truth, not good for us. But you remind me, this sword is something you cannot access. So should I be fighting for you? I am so confused. Am I letting you down? But when I get all charged up you tell me I am just being me but this lively me is the one that you did not like, that you wanted to be different, that you rejected, that you led me to believe is a ‘nuisance’, ‘too much’, ‘bad’ not good and compliant like you But this lively me is me and its hungry for life, for love for so much more than this.. It Is sick of living in death and decay..
I bear with the tension and banked up intensity for as long as I can.. I manage to get the nurses to locate a vase and I prepare the lillies, shedding the lower leaves and cutting the stems then carrying them into the room, one sign of life.. But now I sense it is time for me to go. One and a half hours with the reptile that lives inside your eyes is becoming so much.. its a pool of dark inertia..and I am famished. This is not an alive life IT IS NOT WHERE I WANT TO LIVE. AND YOU TOLD ME TODAY YOU CHOSE THIS RATHER THAN LIFE. SO I HAVE TO ACCEPT IT.. I HAVE TO ‘HAND IT OVER’ AND ACCEPT IT.
Emerging From The Dark Night 