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Return to Earth / Ash Wednesday Group Writing
“Remember, man, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Or, in the torrential rains of this premature spring, mud. Clay. Rivers of filth. Clumsy clods. We fight our dull, earthen nature, presuming to overcome it, only to slip back into the mud and mire. And sometimes it seems the more we struggle to escape, the deeper we sink.
In movies, sometimes you’ll hear sublime music playing while watching something awful happen. Turns out that happens in real life, too. As the Baroque brass, orchestra, and antiphonal chorus reached its climax, my mother was busy having a stroke. A few minutes later, as we walked off-stage, I remarked, “Thank God that’s over.” Nor was I blaspheming to offer such thanks: I had every reason to thank God for the week being done. The week had been a grueling, disappointing one – among the worst conventional wisdom tells you to expect – as I knew it would be. And it was finally over. Or so I thought. Little did I know.
Music for me is never not a struggle against a body that won’t cooperate. Why I keep at the struggle is hard to say sometimes, since I’ve never perfected the illusion of not struggling, an illusion vital if you expect anyone to want to listen to you. Always the understudy, never the bride, so to speak. But it’s no one’s fault but mine, or God’s – if it’s anyone’s fault at all – that I can offer no assurance my bodily clay won’t work to suffocate me at the last minute, or even contain itself properly. Whatever progress I make in keeping the struggle for control inaudible is just not quite enough.
Our bodies don’t just have feet of clay, but hands and fingers of the slimy stuff, too, cloddish and clumsy, at times breaking everything they touch. The computer you needed for your job? You broke it. The piano the whole family relies on for its sanity? You broke it. You banished the music from your house just when the house needs it most. Go you!
Strength in my family is the strength of earth, seemingly indestructible under some loads, frangible and friable under others. My family’s Neanderthal features – the broad-nosed, burly men, the sturdy-looking, faintly mustachio’d women – funny, but we don’t look weak, do we? Of course we don’t. We never do. And we aren’t, until we are, crumbling and slumping like earth undermined. Like earth, without tensile strength. The stress does nothing, but the strain…
Mom was under strain when the stroke happened, although the doctors point out that even that sort of strain should not cause a stroke. Fortunately, in the past few months, I’d wrecked my own plans thoroughly enough that I could make myself completely at her disposal as the doctors struggled to save her life, limbs, and brain.
The coffee in the ICU break room is also muddy, and though I only helped myself to it once invited, I worry I’ve had more than my fair share. I remember realizing at some point – can’t remember when – I’d poured the last inch of coffee in the pot, and had no idea how to start a fresh one. A nurse hurrying by said not to worry, but that felt pretty low and slimy of me, depriving the ministering angels of their last gulp of ambrosial caffeine.
Still, there’s something comforting and calming about disasters that remind you that the worst is never really over, that things could always get even worse. There’s something freeing about emergencies dire enough to annihilate civilized people’s expectations that you rise above the mud and mire of bodily limitations. Everyone knows your home, for now, is among the slime and broken things, and no one judges you for not doing better – generally, they’re grateful enough if you’re doing anything. No-one expects you to balance competing interests anymore, just to get through the time… somehow. Perhaps this mire is simply my element. Or perhaps it’s how emergencies give you permission to stop caring about so much that in ordinary life you’re morally obligated to care about.
We are dust. We are mud. Sure, there’ll be plenty of time to be dust and mud in the grave, but even as we live, we have no right to expect we can rise above it, no matter what we do, or try.
Dinosaurs, those dragons of the prime, were in all likelihood less discordant beings than we are. Not struggling for self-transcendence to begin with, they could not fail at it. While it’s our lot to struggle, and fail, and be reminded, some of us more than others, of the clay – the dust now heavy from the outpouring of the storm – that weighs us down. One needn’t doubt God in the slightest to witness this.
Published in Group Writing
Sorry about your mom. I hope writting this helped.
And yet from the mud flowers do spring and new life comes forth. Maybe not the ones you intended, nor the ones you planted, but life is always creation from the mire. Though even the mighty works of Ozymandias were laid low in time, still the antique lands bore something of his mark.
Dinosaurs, those dragons of the prime, were in all likelihood less discordant beings than we are. Not struggling for self-transcendence to begin with, they could not fail at it.
The blessings of a small brain. This was beautifully written, MFR. I hope it all gets better for you and your family.
My family’s Neanderthal features –
Nobody’s buying this. We’ve seen pictures of you.
My neighbor had a stroke, and he is doing so well that it is hard to believe it ever happened.
Prayers sent your way, Midge.
If any woman in my family fails to look like Frida Kahlo, it’s because deliberate steps were taken ;-P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm6JxP870P0
Yes, we can all get stuck in the mud and grit of life. And we are, after all, dying from the moment we are born. We have the capacity to suffer and experience pain of all kinds; but we all are also able to see the beauty in a single blossom, a drifting leaf, a ray of sunlight. The difficulty is learning to embrace all of it. So very hard to do, especially when we feel our pain and suffering are extreme. But the beauty is still there, underneath all of it. Thanks, Midge.
Midge. This is one of the most terrifying and powerful and poignant posts on Ricochet. Ever.
It takes guts. Courage.
I’ve got nuthin’, but my wishes for comfort and peace – and my flat-footed wish that you have access to a little Xanax when the bass drum rolls off its pedestal and starts heading for the edge of the stage.
She was gorgeous! She just needed a little Nair is all.
Just fantastic, Midge. You struck a lot of resonant notes — a beautiful chord that I can’t quite place yet.
More writing, please.
Excellent! A great capstone to the theme this month–thank you for this contribution!
This conversation is part of a Group Writing series with the theme “Earth”, planned for the whole month of February. If you follow this link, there’s more information about Group Writing. The schedule is updated to include links to the other conversations for the month as they are posted. Please sign up for the March topic, Endings.
Oh, man, but this is grim.
I much rather not think about it, and just get on with working ever-harder at all the good stuff.
Tomorrow we have a funeral for a brilliant 63 year-old man who was fit and healthy but was felled by a very rapid brain tumor. Mortality should make us ever-more-eager to not waste what time we have.
May G_d bless Ms. Midge’s Mama, and Ms. Midge and all her family as they seek to provide aid and comfort to the lady as she recovers and regains capabilities lost to the stroke. Lord G_d, Holy Spirit, provide your breath of healing and comfort. Amen.
I spent the past two years haunting local medical facilities with first Mama and then Dad. Get one of the nurses to show you how to make coffee the way they like it in the unit where you are. Then be good about keeping the coffee going. Nurses are pretty well fueled by coffee. Also, be aware that the night nurses make really strong coffee. Good, powerful coffee.
We were very fortunate this Ash Wednesday to be able to attend Mass with my daughter, son in law and one of our grandbabies, since they live so far away from us. And I’m fortunate to have this post to read. It beautifully catches the thing I’ve been thinking and feeling all day.
Midget Faded Rattlesnake, I’m sorry about your mom. I will pray for her tonight.
Also, I agree with RightAngles “Nobody’s buying this. We’ve seen pictures of you.”
I read this post yesterday but didn’t have much to say other than, “Oh dear!” and “Praying for you” so I didn’t think I should comment, but this morning I changed my mind.
Oh dear! Praying for you and some sunshine, or at least for the rain to relent…
“About suffering they were never wrong
The Old Masters. How well they understood
Its human position, how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along…..”
Auden, from Musée des Beaux Arts (…from memory)
Your line about the beautiful music playing while awful things happen made me think of this poem. A few lines later, the “torturer’s horse/scratches its innocent behind on a tree”.
And also, “In the midst of life we are in death” St Paul says somewhere.
I wish you a happy issue out of this adversity.
Nicely written. I liked the way you connect our daily events with the dust that we shall be. Was your mom’s passing recent? It’s not clear if you’re dwelling on an event in the past or something more recent. Either way, eternal rest for her, and I’m sure she’s up there praying for you.
She had a devastating stroke, and could have died, but perhaps I did not make it clear enough in the writing above that she didn’t. I’ve posted some updates about her recovery in the Divine Help thread, and it slipped my mind to make it clearer here, I’m afraid. A massive dose of clot-busting drug, itself quite dangerous but worth the risk in the circumstances, was administered to her in time.
Recovery is dicey, not because of the stroke itself, actually (which is quite a miracle!), but because of co-morbid conditions.
I’ll be honest:
We’re immensely grateful for the lifesaving care Mom got, but in some ways, the burden of our earthy nature might be easier if the choice were just between life and death rather than between so many impairments! I wrote these musings on the fly, summarizing fleeting thoughts I’d been having while driving to and fro acting as Mom’s agent in several matters. It was the weight of our earthly clay while we are still living which had impressed itself on my mind.
“Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: / There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Still quiring to the bright-eyed cherubins; / Such harmony is in immortal souls; / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
Lorenzo, Merchant of Venice, Act V, i
Can you believe that my son and I were studying this section of the play today? So appropriate it’s scary…
Amen to this. And my prayers for your mom’s speedy recovery.