Supernova

The last years before my father's stroke, he burned so brightly we could hardly look at him. He expanded, increased velocity, heated up, inflamed the landscape. He lost his radar for how he affected others, in his zeal to share all the things that were churning through him.

He was always a spiritual being and he read deeply on Christianity and spirit. Never a fundamentalist, nor a biblical literalist, he was nevertheless full of love and energy for the message of Christ. Eager to see God when this life was over.

His invisible stroke a year ago, disappeared the man we knew. He morphed into a new form, one absent of spiritual questing and intellectual curiosity. A man who always had at least five books going at once now does not read. He read his last book, a Christmas present from my sister, Treasure Island, in January. Then he watched the movie. And he was done.

I try to offer him his beloved poetry and opera, offer to acquire any artistic/cultural thing he might enjoy. He tells me he's 'content.' I ask him what that means and he says, 'a simple existence.' And when I ask him what that means, he says, 'I cannot express it.'

I pray this means he's reached nirvana, a state of zen. The state of grace the religions promise, but which we never really see on earth. He's been stripped of most of the human things: the trouble-making, the provocative. Sometimes he has a day when he's playful. My mother insists he's improving.

But sometimes to me he is the living dead, so far from the man I've been close to my whole life that I don't know him. Just a nursing home patient I help to take care of. I cart him to doctors. Sometimes out to dinner. I wonder when to start pushing for a wheelchair, as I pushed for the walker. He quit falling when he got that.

Every day I have to remember to say goodbye. In my memories, there's a huge population of those I've said goodbye to. All my childhood homes have been torn down. My grandparents gone. Uncles gone. What I have is today. Just today.