The Weight

People keep asking how we are doing.  I keep telling them for the most part ok.  I'm not worried but there is a weight to knowing your daughter is scheduled for open heart surgery.  The following I wrote today to try to express a little bit what that is like.

The Weight

It’s never very far away…always lingering, loitering, lurking.  The smiles and laughter make a stoic attempt at framing a lighter, airier canvas but in the end, the jocular is replaced by the mundane and the weight returns.  This masquerade is just that, a melted plastic façade required by a world that flaunts faux normalcy.  The hardest part of carrying the weight is that I would actually trade the realness of it for that falseness, just to be rid of its omnipresence.  But I can’t.  I can lay it down, I can forcibly move my mind into other orbits and even allow myself to be pulled into other gravitational domains, but like a fettered ball and chain, the weight follows and will eventually dominate again with its unending heaviness.  I am tethered to it. Leashed.  Tied.  Sometimes I feel it will crush me, at others, I think I might be able to stand. 

I am simply trying to survive.

It comes at the worst times, when I am least prepared and people see it in my distant eyes and they ask “are you ok?”  I realize I dropped my mask.  “I’m fine” restores the comfortable expected for them, but I’m left with the weight.  In a private moment, I will let you see the weight.  It comes in tears.  It’s not pretty.  It isn’t what should be, but it is what is. 

How does a finite mind with an infinite soul cope with a forced contact with the eternal hope at the cost of immortality?

That is the weight.  What if the mortal must be replaced by the eternal?  What if the finite must be replaced by eternity?  That is the weight.  It is not worry, it is not fear.  It is the reality that what we hope for may come before we hoped for it.

It is knowing that hope is only necessary because of pain.

There is a comfort; a time where the weight is not forgotten but is allowed to be set aside, a place for the weary to find rest.  And when I rise from the place, the yoke fits well, it is balanced.  His burden does not add to the weight.  And when closeness allows you to see the weight don’t despair.  No, you can’t make it less and you can’t carry even the smallest fraction for me, but you can add to my strength, you can help me stand and walk forward.  You can hold my hand, whisper in my ear and remind me of hope.  Don’t try to explain the weight away.  I will see your falseness.  Don’t try to minimize the weight’s significance.  I will know it’s a lie. 

The weight is real regardless of your denial or lack of understanding.

Accept it with me, help me endure.  Bring me back to the place of rest, if only for a moment. 

Written by Aaron on Jan. 4, 2017

I'll close with the chorus to a Bebo Norman song:

Dream a little, dream for me, in hopes that I'll remain.

Cry a little, cry for me, so I can bear the pain.

Hurt a little, Hurt for me, my future is untold.

But my dreams are not the issue here, for they, the hammer holds.

The path before me seems unclear, but it, my Maker holds.