day twelve: and he takes and he takes and he takes

Good friends of ours had a pretty wild overnight in the emergency room with their little boy last week, who had complications from the flu. One hour he was healthy, the next he was violently ill. Thankfully he's well now, but hearing their story reminds me of the fine line between the sick world and the healthy world. It's like the spiritual and the corporeal. When we and people we love are well, maybe we think about what it would be like if that changed.

My thought pattern for, say, how life could go on if I lost my husband:

I want a piece of gum
What's new on the NYT.com
I need to go to the ATM
What if my husband has a tumor on his head from using his cell phone too much, and he dies young and I'm alone and how could I ever marry again or want someone else to see me naked
I want another piece of gum

+

But when it really happens that someone you love gets sick, things feel slow, your body gets achy. When I found out my dad got bladder cancer last November, I listened to the saddest song I had on my iPod, a Sufjan Stevens song about a friend who dies of bone cancer of all things--because I knew I had to cry and wanted to do it good.

On one the hardest days of my twenties, I started to play this song, called Kasmir Pulaski Day, walking home form work, and when it got to the very end, when he talks about the way God gives and takes, and how that's a good and bad thing at the same time really, right then I walked in my door went to my room and wrapped myself in the curtains like a ghost blanket, like I was a kid. "And he takes and he takes and he takes".

My though pattern when it was really happening:

I'm crying.
I want to cry more.
There's a cell that split in my dad's body and if they don't stop it, it can split a million more times and cover him like that guy in Pirates in the Caribbean is covered in conch shells and starfish.
Maybe I should get sick, too so he's not alone.
My mind is rational enough to know I'm being totally irrational.
God, it feels really good to cry.

And I was in the sick world with my parents for a good while. I canceled plans with friends, read statistics, every website, couldn't sleep. And then one day I got this bright pocket where I thought about people that lost parents and kept living healthy lives. And then I went through the grief of what could happen all over again. Then I found a few more air pockets, and then, like I was holding my breath in a bath with my fists really tight together, I imagined myself coming out of the water, letting my bath hands out like jazz hands or something ridiculous. And I knew then that being in the healthy world is this thing given to us every morning like oatmeal or coffee. That health itself is a secret routine.