Recently

Sometimes, it seems like your life can drastically change from one moment to another.  Like somebody has flipped a switch from one position to its opposite.  Final.  Complete.  You were *this*, but suddenly you are *that* instead.

I have been having a chain of these events during the past two months.  Instead of the gradual shaping that life does on all of us, the water over the stone, the windstorm shaping the dunes, things lately have been all dynamite and sinkholes opening up.  I have yet to figure out the extent of it all.

For one thing, I lost my Roux.  She had what they decided were several small strokes, and finally, I sat in the back corner of the teacher's portion of the school cafeteria and made a decision to let her go.  I have not been able to go back into that space since that day.  I lost something more than just her.  Some part of my heart just snapped off and quit.  I am not sure I am going to be able to get it back.

And then there's the friend I treasured who has thrown me away.  Looking back over the past few months, I guess it's been coming for awhile. There's no comfort in that.  All it means is that I've been stupid a very long time.  I'm hung between pain at the loss and sheer anger at once again being the one to whom it mattered more.  I can't get over the fact that I never seem to learn.  

After that, I sat in a very large room and graded papers for eight straight days.  This may not sound like much to you, but it becomes a form of meditation.  The focus required strips away everything non-essential.  The breaks that are taken allow only certain key concepts to float up from under the weariness of the job.  During this time, I came to a very significant realization about some things.  An opportunity came to me during this same time to make some changes.  I took it.  I am still not sure what the outcome of it will be, but that still small voice in my heart told me that if I didn't even try to take this, then something like a total ossification of my soul was going to take place.  

And then I came home.  My parents came down the day I got back to have dinner, and in that way they have, they told me that my father's doctor had ordered a heart cath for Thursday, two days away.  They hadn't told me about it because...and sing along because you know the chorus....they didn't want to distress me with it.

 So Thursday came, and we went through all the same motions I did not so very long ago when another big part of my own life changed, the sign in.  The cath lab waiting rooms are small, private, as opposed to the larger room for the ICU/CCU/Outpatient surgery.  I am always grateful for a small waiting room.  I cannot stand to look around and see all the faces filled with misery and fear.  It presses down on me like a stone on my chest, and I can't breathe because of it.  Mom busied herself with preparations for something she was working on at the church.  I took a deck of cards, found a battered brown coffee table, and played solitaire over and over.  I lost much more than I won, but the movement helped me block out the interminable creeping of time.

The doctor finally came to see us, and the news was not good.  A surgeon would have to look at the results and make a recommendation.  The cardiologist had exhausted all the means at his disposal, and the blockages and damage were severe.  Basically, Dad could have died at any moment with any exertion.  And someone shifted the gears on the machine of my life again.

When the cardiovascular surgeon came to see us later that afternoon, he brought unexpected hope.  Bypass surgery was possible.  It will be complicated, but at least there was an option.  Another shifting of the gears.

Now we're all waiting.  Thursday will be the day.  We'll see who we all are at the end of it.