Diving In

You know how it is to go from alarm clock to cereal to locking the door to crossing the street to putting one foot in front of the other… all the while numb and bursting with emotion at the same time? This week a relation, the father of a teen very, very dear to me, had an accident. He survived, but he lost complete use of his body. I am sick with sadness imagining how every person he loves/ loves him is suffering now. Sick to numbness beyond imagination. How it would be to know I could never tickle my squealing children again? And he is stuck in Croatia, a world away from his family in Brazil, a world away from us. Our grief spans three continents, not solving one thing.

At home our world is busy with work and eating and dancing and bedtimes. Augusto and I are dealing in our own ways. He is ever the optimist, hoping for a treatment or act of God, holding on to his fears- and tears. I am the salty spring for us all- eyelids swollen daily as I can’t shake it. Don’t want to shake it, really, because even as it kills me to hold the image of this man’s elegant olive wrists gesturing in a story, this tangible memory makes him complete. And the beauty of the motion, now forever in the past, makes me believe we will all survive his accident, each holding on to some piece of him, carrying him. Carrying on.