NOTHING:
Monday, it was time to take my mom from a pedestrian bridge in our last talk to a church. It was a journey yielding nothing…

Over the weekend while following like Jason & the Argonauts a YouTube golden fleece, I stumbled upon a football game film from my mom’s senior, fall 1958. Fairfield High vs. Jones Valley. I just knew this was a sign from God or the gods that my quest on my personal Argo of helping my mom remember was all systems go. We’d find that old church building & somewhere in the fogbank of recollection, there’d be my dad.

Systems failed, the skeleton warriors of King Aeetes arrived. I was certain that the columned facade would unearth memories. The steps my parents ran down as newlyweds on June 10, 1961. Nothing. My mom asked me who the previous pastors were. I named them, including my dad who served as an interim pastor. He had to find a replacement on June 17, 1962, Father’s Day, the day I made him a father. Nothing. She asked how many attended now. I told her the doors were shuttered around 2010. On the final Sunday, the final benediction was delivered by my dad. Nothing.

We went out into the sunshine of the courtyard. For 45 minutes we sat there. An occasional reference to the weather, mostly silence, mostly nothing.

Today, all the nothingness disturbed my sleep so that I woke up at a time I’m normally finishing my second 20 ounce coffee. All day, all the nothing led me back to the bridge.

Led by the fact that my dad might mean nothing to what remains of my mom. Selfishly led that this will be the third year mom won’t remember my birthday as I drift, becoming less & less her son & more & more her brother. Asking God what’s the purpose in all the nothing. And why?

And I remembered a boy & the bridge in late summer ‘69 or ‘70. A boy watching the football Tigers practicing & for the first time offering an honest prayer, no negotiations, just get his dad a job back in Fairfield so he could become a Tiger. God said no.

God said no & I‘d trade 2008-2013 in full & a part of 2001 for a retroactive yes. There are people I met & wished I hadn’t, jobs that sucked the life out of me & I’d take a yes on those too.

But then, there’s a wife that meant that better or worse vow, two boys, two daughter-in-laws, two granddaughters that are worth the no. There are two schools, their cafeterias, their gymnasiums, the people that inhabited one, the people that inhabit the other & both forever inhabiting me. Worth the no.

I thought about that as I sat in my office. Redemption. Condemnation. Now. Then. About the beauty that exists in the apparent, the imagined desolate nothingness of God’s no in spite of wanting to fall off the planet & hide.

I know I’m not the only child feeling this pain of watching a parent slowly cease to exist. It’s not easy. Prayer is not easy. What to pray is not easy. Showing up at the nursing home isn’t easy. Finding the faintest light in the darkest night isn’t easy.

Still, through it all, if God’s no got me here, despite the peaks & valleys, the full & the nothing, then versus now, the why? I’ll take where I am. I’ll take now. In full or in nothing…