…you, too, can be a quantum mechanic:

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Today is three weeks after I held my father’s hand as the life left his body when the nurse pushed in the morphine to stop his strong heart which kept beating long after his brain was dead.

Today is three hundred years after the birth of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of the United States with whom I most identify, a man both idealistic and earthy.

Today I strive to continue to tread the narrow path between rage and despair that is illuminated by both of my heroes.

A good friend who will remain anonymous unless they tell me differently recently wrote to me that grief is not a simple, linear process of “stages” as is so commonly expressed but instead a whirlpool where the different emotions that are incorrectly labeled as “stages” are swirled together in a maelstrom that while it defies the conventional wisdom of a “process” can indeed be overcome in the same way a hurricane is survived, by experiencing the feelings instead of rejecting them and bending to the storm instead of trying to stand straight and risk breaking.

Given my personality, I doubt I’ll experience the “bargaining” emotions that many feel after a deep loss, for whom do I have to “bargain” with in my scientific, practical mindset?

However, I do feel the rage and the despair that accompany a deep grief, emotions I first felt as a teenager when I recognized that I both understood many concepts and comprehended interactions between people far more deeply than the rednecks and druggies and bible-thumpers with whom I attended high school in northern Mississippi.

At the time I did not have the wisdom of experience to understand the origins of the rage and despair I felt, and I often wonder now after 25 years if I really have gained the wisdom of experience to truly understand the refusal by others to understand, to me an incomprehensible refusal that prompted my rage and despair.

The rage and despair I feel now is a mixture of the emotions prompted by a loss so deep that it is almost impossible to comprehend, much less to describe, along with what I see as the willful ignorance of others who stake out their partisan positions, repeating the talking points instead of thinking for themselves, choosing to reject the ideals and concepts they claim to believe in, regardless of if they are self-labeled as on the “left” or the “right” because they are all so frightened they are sacrificing freedoms on the altar of expediency.

I have refrained from posting my writings that I know are arising from the rage and the despair I have felt, and I am trying very hard now not to express in the most vulgar, vile terms the disgust I feel when reading what passes for “commentary” in blogworld, whether in posts or in the “hallelujah” comments I read from the worshiping acolytes that accumulate around the most damaged personality types that write weblogs, hate-brigades that spew vile vituperation upon anyone who has the temerity to disagree with the object of worship, the damaged personality that does the thinking for the self-selected minions since they have chosen to not think for themselves.

This tendency to prefer others to think instead of doing the hard work themselves existed long before the Internet, note that President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” Unfortunately for us all, the Internet has allowed many thoughts not worth even the glucose molecules to power them to flourish and take hold among the many who are too lazy to think and prefer to have others think FOR them.

My rage and despair may be accentuated by recent events in my life, but the fundamental origins have not changed in the quarter of a century since I first felt them.

We humans are cursed with memories that fade, and often those we wish to keep retreat faster than we wish. The veils of memory fall down over the images in our mind, slowly obscuring them into a sfumato that preserves the rough outlines while softening the details that were so sharp before.

In a cruel twist, memories that we do not want haunt us with a clarity that becomes more harshly edged as we seek the solace granted by forgetting.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
   -Michel de Montaigne

Memory of details, eidetic but not the “photographic” of legend, has served me well, a legacy of my father who also apparently had this talent according to what I have learned from his good friends.

Yet it can be as much a curse as a blessing if the veils of memory do not completely cover the pain.

At times, the veils of memory have rents that show clearly isolated details, the white walls, the labels on the electrical outlets “do not use for critical equipment” with the associated thought of what equipment in Intensive Care is not critical, the contour seen of a face familiar yet foreign because of the gauntness, the susurration heard as fluids are pumped out of a chest cavity, the harsh red-on-black numbers on a screen showing the blood pressure too low to sustain the brain, the face of my father, so familiar yet so unknown because I had so rarely seen him even sleeping before, much less unconscious and dying, a vigil on a Christmas night that I would not wish upon anyone.

These tears in the veils of my memory will not be covered by time, and there are other rips in the shroud equally enduring that prevent me from forgetting details, graven images that I will never reveal to anyone, no matter how close they are to me.

These tears in the veils of my memory prompt tears in my eyes that I cannot seem to shed.

I have deliberately turned my mind from these images so that I can take care of the business necessary to ensure my Mom has the financial security my Dad wished and planned for her to have, a plan that he did not have time to complete because of the sudden return of the cancer that plagued him.

I grieved for my Dad in early November when I was in France and was first told that they had found a recurrence of his cancer because I knew I would have to hold things together when the inevitable occurred. The inevitable occurred far sooner than I expected, although later than I feared, allowing me an all too brief three days with my Dad before we called the ambulance to take him to the hospital over his objections, after a third collapse in one day, a day when I tried to help him as much as I could while recognizing that no help any mortal source could give would have been sufficient.

Although I grieved for a month before I returned to the US and knew what was coming, and although I have forced myself to stay focused on what needs to be done to take care of my Mom, my Dad’s wife and the woman he loved for so many years, I have not yet finished grieving for my Dad and the time measured in years that I had hoped for us to have together in his retirement that he earned and so well deserved to have but never received.

Life is cruel sometimes.

For me, the veils of memory are not obscuring with seemingly comforting forgetfulness the images, sounds, and feelings of the last five days of my father’s life which I witnessed a full year after I had last visited, when he seemed healthy.

I do not know if this sharp remembrance is a blessing or a curse.