This was not the intended first published piece of 2017.

I have written other works of art centered around my reflective learnings of 2016. I wrote the inspired words and set them aside. I learned this technique awhile back. Write with passion. Write with emotion. Write whatever comes forth then set it aside. Forget about the infused emotional, thoughtful, and provoking life I left on the screen. Let their fire dim. Let their virtuosity wane. Let logic overrule. Let the pain and anguish of their meaning flicker out like the last flame of a well-burnt candle.

Then and only then return to the scene. Shift through the ashes. Search out the treasures. Breathe in the remnants of what remains. Ask the only question that matters. Are the words still true? Publish, if yes. Revamp, if no.

My confliction causes me to break away, if only for tonight, from this writing ritual.

Prepared I knew. We are not a family of jesters. Sure, we joke and laugh at the appropriate times. Yet, we are planners and thinkers. He had been preparing my mother. And, my mother had been preparing us. So I knew. I was prepared.  I was aware. The signs came with each fleeting day.  I expected the call more than once. I knew what steps to take in order to be available. I held back tears with each new revelation. The diagnosis was clearer with each update. Not through what was said, but by what was withheld.

The urgency came. The call was made. The words were spoken. He’s passed away she spoke. There it is. The confliction of heart, mind, and spirit. I feel it. I cannot fully name it, but I sense it. The heart aches because his temporal presence has left. The mind is grateful the pain and confusion he experienced in his final days are over. The spirit rejoices because his soul now rests where no more harm can come to him in the form of “treatment”. I feel it all and I feel none of it. The medical attempts to save him reduced his quality of life in the final weeks, if not months, so I pray his mother and my grandmother greets him upon his arrival as her memory consoles me now.

I feel it all and I feel none of it. The medical attempts to save him reduced his quality of life in the final weeks, if not months, so I pray his mother and my grandmother greets him upon his arrival as her memory consoles me now.

For this is how I learned to express what is sometimes inexpressible. I am a stoic soul with a complex heart. It is here the emotions intersect with the logic to usher in the therapy mere condolences cannot bring. Here my gift allows me to sit in my Father’s lap. In a place, my stoic soul with a complex heart – can experience the caress that does not bend and does not break. For this was not the intended published first piece of 2017, but it was needed.

You will be missed, but not forgotten.

The  “Day 5: Conflicted Mourning” (text) by EYHCS published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

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