Letters from Earth - Prelude

It’s not easy to recall moments of suffering.  For instance, I cannot remember the moment when my father was admitted to the hospital.  I cannot recall how the news was broken to me that he might not survive.  Our brains are amazing organs, we do not remember because our bodies do something peculiar in moments of sorrow – we forget.  We file away in some secret compartment the things that scared us, like our father being chained to the bed like a dog so that he would not rip the sutures from his heart, or his rasping breath as he grasped my hand weakly and pled for more painkillers—because the man I knew as my father, the man that was a military officer, the man who overcame civil war, the death of his parents and brother—if this was his last moment, I would remember that man in his strength, in his ability to overcome. We forget the events that brought us sudden pain or anguish, and remember the good things; remember the strength of a man walking again for the first time, or opening his eyes from the surgery bed. 

In a similar way, Jonah called his mother's illness a “good experience.”  It took the family by surprise, the first attack - it was a miracle she even survived, but it switched something in Jonah.  In the following months, he gave up everything: he did not go to school, nor did he take a job; he instead stayed and lived and breathed with his mother, every last breath.  He walked with her and talked with her, ate with her, saw her in her weakest moments which were simultaneously her moments of greatest strength.  He was there for her to rest upon, and he would carry her, like she carried him at the beginning of his life.  They often lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, talking softly, lightly about matters the rest of humanity found so heavy, and then other days they talked about nothing.  Several times, under the weight of silence, he felt like she was already gone, his hand suddenly wanting to move closer to hers, like this was the last moment, this was the moment that I had prepared myself for… and then when she breathed again, he too breathed.  They would walk together, arm in arm under the shadow of trees that turned from green to bare.  On these walks, she treasured her last moments with her son on this earth; she looked at him and wondered how it was that such a man came from her body.  She had always thought this, but it was in those last months that the pair was able to communicate (not so much in words, but merely in their being together), their gratitude for each other and the quiet expanse of their love.  But the love had always been.  From an early age, it was her smile that had become his own. 

It was this that I found most interesting when I first spoke to him.  The teacher pushed play and we sat there, watching the film in the dark when I looked up at Jonah to my right, and he looked down at me.  I felt completely safe.  The expression was not a smile, it was not a frown, it was not angry, nor was it peaceful.  Bored.  But full, not of light - maybe full of nothing, maybe full of black which is the absence of light, or white, which is not a color at all.  Yes, he was full of white.  It was in this moment I knew he was the kind of friend, brother and son that stayed with you, in whatever way he could.  He was six years my junior, but I felt his loyalty.  

Loyalty and sadness.  What the hell does it mean to be "full of white?"  Nothing.  That's what writers say when we can't figure it out, we use metaphor.  But now I know what it was.  Underneath his armor of rules, I saw great sadness.   

We were speaking now, and suddenly, Jonah smiled from his insides in a way that a passerby, too busy or moving too fast, cannot detect.  It was quiet and dark like Neruda's un-bloomed plant, weaving softly in this world, but deeply in the unseen.  It was when he told me about his mother that I realized this joy was an inheritance given to him.  The last moment he spoke to her, she had said with a small laugh, I am scared.  The sound echoed all his fears.  So they sat together, terrified, together, in that small sterile room.  All was white when she fell into a coma.  It was the last time he held her hand.

Except, today she is still with him, in his dreams.  A portion of her spirit lies in a hidden square of his subconscious.  In these dreams they walk together, talk together like they did in her last days.  Only in these dreams, she is young and quietly vivacious, she is the woman that his father fell in love with.  Scholars have dissected the meaning of dreams and why we have them, and none have come to a satisfactory conclusion.  Some have said that dreams reveal our deepest desires, and others that they release subconscious energy.  I like to think that our dreams occur in a world separate from ours; and in our subconscious state, we can escape to a place untouched by this earth except by what we bring to it.  The event that revealed Jonah’s spirit to me was in his telling of this story: that in such a world, in his deepest subconscious, both what he brings and what he is given is the spirit of his mother, cleansed of her aged and ill body and in its place walks the angel, l'ange, she is and had always been.

Chapter I

This is not a love story.  Jonah is barely twenty, and has long been, under the terms of his code, betrothed before his god and irreligion.  But in order to understand the story of my father and my family, you must understand a little bit about Jonah and his.  They say every comedy begins with some sort of tragedy.  We have to go up from somewhere.  So there you have it, we have begun at death.