Snippets and Stories: (R) Parental Love

There is nothing more tragic, than when a parent outlives their child.

She holds up the picture, and tells me that she's cried herself out. That she had no tears left to shed, though moisture gathers in her grey-blue eyes. But she hasn't the strength to cry anymore.

She thinks of him every day, misses him even more.

And when her son's wife sends her an old answering machine recording, she shakes her head and tells me that she couldn't listen to the audio file, not now.

I don't have the words to comfort her, and so I hold her hand, and listen to the man's voice as it flows through the gadget.

"Uh, hello, this is..."

To hear the voice of one who you know to have passed. It's not like the clips of a documentary, nor some recorded speech of a one political figure or another.

It's much more personal than that. It's a man who I see all in large frames, hanging in the hallway. A few more are on her dresser, or in little frames around the kitchen. Still more are behind opaque plastic slides held by magnet to the refrigerator.

We move back to her bedroom and I help her into bed. She bids me goodnight, kisses me on the forehead, and turns so that she faces away from the door and towards the windows overlooking the patio.

She says no more and I leave, but I can hear her mournful sighs, and the grief so poignant in the quiet, quiet night.

As I straighten up the living room, I pause at the ipad. Throwing a guilty look over my shoulder I pick it up.

The screen lights up and I unlock it to see the mp3 file there as she had left it.

I hit the small arrow and a voice comes through.

Closing my eyes I see the man in the photos come to life. A man around 40, a cyclist and beloved librarian. So very beloved, for what comes around goes around. A colorful, loving, life.

And the words of another elderly lady drifts through my mind's eye, an eye that can still see her misty yet pristine blue eyes as she turns to me and tells me, "God took him away too early."

My thoughts are pulled away as the man's voice talks about his day. He gives a small status update about how he was, what they would be doing later that day, if the owner of the answering machine was still planning on going to such and such event.

He makes me smile, because of how casual his message is as he unwittingly shares a slice of his life with me. His voice is perforated with "uh"s and "um"s as was common in a comfortable impromptu conversation one oft leaves to friends. He's clearly not a perfected speaker, but it adds to his character.

As I listen to him talk, a soft, bittersweet, and nostalgic warmth spreads from the Heart, even as it thumps heavily in its bone cage within my chest.

The message ends with him and his wife bidding farewells, his slow and calm as he had been throughout its entirety, and her's a much more lively farewell full of merriment with carefree undertones.

As I crawl into bed, I tell myself it is okay, that things will be alright, though never ignoring the weight that burdens on my Heart.

There are some things, that no matter how much you want to, no matter how much you try to, you just can't fix.

I was told never to give up, to stay determined, to keep persisting. But sometimes it's hard to remember, and even harder to hold onto.