No One to Blame

28 years ago I was 5 and it was just landing that my father would not. He would not come down from the sky. What had landed on the ground was no longer him, so not him I was not allowed to see.

I have few memories of those days, but I remember it was hard not seeing what was no longer him. How did we KNOW he was dead if we didn't see?

But those on the ground saw him get in the plane. And they saw what became of the plane.

I think in those first few days, my fantastical child's imagination wrestled with my burgeoning intellectual pride. Was it then I began a chorus in my head to remind myself he wasn't coming back? I remember forgetting, realizing again, unrationalizing with unlikely stories, coaching myself back to reality.

Anger helped me hold on to the truth. Someone to blame which could fix this terrible situation, letting me not forget the situation was terrible. Revenge, someone paying a price. It was many years before I understood no price could repay it, wished the man who walked away from the crash had found peace.

It was even later I understood the price he was paying, which nothing could lift, and learned a facet of grief I carry just for him.

It's funny to think now of grieving this death myself, but once again it is here. Did I get bored with my own process and decide to visit everyone else's grief in the matter? It seems since I began to desire a husband I have experienced this tragedy through my mother's experience. A healthy young mother suddenly set to raise her baby girls alone. A man who never wanted to leave, gone all the same.

Since our mother died, I have been in my sister's grief. Her father dead before she could remember him, her formative years deprived of his love, and then our mother gone right before her high school graduation. Before her prom, not to mention her wedding, her own babies.

And of course the man who landed his plane after taking my father's tail off. What has become of him? I've looked, futilely. I'd understand if he were hiding, or hiding from me.

There is no one to blame. Sometimes people leave and their will has nothing to do with it. You cannot count on anything. No one of us experiences the same shade of grief, no one of us escapes her cloaking shadow.

I let this event bring me truth, and I followed it everywhere.

I've ended up in a tiny mountain town and things are feeling eerie. That fantastical part of my mind is roused again, thinking of what might have been. This is a place my father might have moved our family, given a hundred reasons that are continually revealing themselves to me. I meet people I would have been in high school with and feel we have known each other that long.

Was there a life laid out for me that I missed? One where I grew up in peace, learning and unfolding under praise and kindness?

I grieved the soma of this for the two years before coming here, so now it is a gentle tenderness, this grief. I realigned myself with safety, then took a hard and painful adjustment, woke up in paradise.

If I had grown up here, it wouldn't be like this. I wouldn't be like this, the town wouldn't feel like this, to the person I would be. Maybe I would no longer be here, maybe I would be greater, grown on a stable foundation, maybe I would be smaller, offered early the truth of contentment.

Instead I fought for, won, relaxed around, peacefully hold my own contentment. One I know persists beyond circumstance. Now I offer a gentle path to others, contentment, if you'll only look slowly and peacefully beyond that curtain, where the sunbeam strikes. If you're only willing to be blinded by it completely.

All I know now is I can look me in the eyes and say "this is the life I promised you." That's what it is—what all of it is—life.