TheBanyanTree: In the Beginning

[B Drummond]

Somewhere on the breeze wafts the aroma of the chinaberry
in bloom, its violet flowers emitting the sticky sweet intoxication
that turns the head and makes one breathe in deeply. And when 
your olfactories detect it you crane your neck to find its source 
in the riot of green that has, it seems, exploded overnight into spring 
all around you.

Clover blooms along the roadside. Birds take to collecting 
anything they can pick up with beak or scratch loose from plants 
or discarded items, or buildings, and become prodigious builders of 
nests.  Mornings find them singing their own glorious version of 
Appalachian Spring.  

But such a beautiful change from winter to the present is not without
blemish.  For lurking in the shadows of the sweetgum now
fully in leaf, hiding under shade of the willow's drooping branches,
is a memory that can steal the bright sunshine from my spring sky, 
take its pale blue and make it gray.

And in my mind it returns at the most inopportune of times and reminds 
me that spring, as much as I love it, now is tainted.

His 8-year-long battle ended in the month of May. Its second day.
His life ebbed like the retreating cold nights of late April
until he lay prone on the bed that always seemed a prison to him after
Alzheimer's stole the better part of his mind. His mind befuddled about 
place and time in its outer regions, while in its core, its profundity,
he knew that he knew he was home, with all of his family at his side, 
save his firstborn. And in its core knew that he had to conserve his 
life's last moments until said daughter made her way across the North
American continent and entered his confused surroundings again.

With lungs full of fluid, pneumonia's fever raging in his still strong
frame, he, like us, must have counted the seconds from Friday morning 
until she came in on Saturday night, late. In the grips of a coma for 
several days, one squeeze remained in his hand to acknowledge her 
entering the room, piercing the fog that was coma, his dying mind, and 
the nebula that was, for him, life's last fight.

Just as they said, "Your father's death will probably be from pneumonia
indirectly, from Alzheimer's stealing his ability to swallow."

Peristaltic function in digestive tract gone for months, he wore a 
colostomy bag at his side, the tube inserted high in his intestinal 
tract. When they opened him up to insert that tube, his will escaped 
from the wound. Thus began his long surrender to eternity. Some of what 
he should have swallowed ended up in his lungs.  Infection set in. 

Just as they said it finally came to pass.

His strong heart and lungs kept him alive beyond all expectations those
final hours.  Hospice workers stood watch with us in incredulity.  He 
waited and conserved each heartbeat, each breath, each moment this
side of eternity.

With us by his side, watching, waiting, hoping, suddenly from what was
nearly three days of coma he responded as if a private in the 
army to a call to attention.  His eyes sprung wide open, looking 
straight ahead, and when I moved as close as possible and looked into 
my father's eyes I knew that he stared past me and into eternity. I 
like to think he heard his name called,

"Marvee,

come up here for awhile."


And then he left us,

in the beginning of May.



   bd
    ---

"In the beginning, God made heaven and earth . . ."  Genesis 1:1