10-26-05 Split personalities

I tried so hard last night to create a fractal of the emotional split my family seems to be plagued with. I couldn't get it.
What I came up with was:

Bird of Paradise - for Zen Kathy

(pretty close, huh?)

And Buddah


I'm taking that as a sign that peace is looking for us even though we cannot see it just now.

Dad has been in the hospital for one week. He has had this bizarre fever for 5 weeks.
He has been X-rayed, sonogrammed, CAT scanned, cultured, worked up and filled with antibiotics of varying types. Nothing has changed. Nothing!

Our family is torn between desperate humor and trepadacious terror. The doctors and nurses all freely exclaim that my father is an anomoly. No one has seen such a thing as this.

Aside from this, my father is a healthy man. He works hard and lives well and loves deeply. He wants more than anything to be home with his family. He wants to play with his grandsons and spend time outside and drive to the store on Saturdays to buy a lottery ticket.
He wants to be normal again. None of us can understand why he's not.

Yesterday they did a biopsy of the "thing" in his lung. The theory is that he has inhaled something and that his body is empathically fighting that thing. Maybe today we'll find out it was a piece of a pecan shell he inhaled while mowing the yard. We'd like very much for it to be something we can joke about.

In the interim we pray. What if it isn't something we can joke about? What if he won't ever get better?
So much fear.

These songs have been haunting my days:

*****
"Goodbye, Michelle, my little one.
You gave me love and helped me find the sun.
And every time that I was down
you would always come around
and get my feet back on the ground.
Goodbye, Michelle, it's hard to die
when all the bird are singing in the sky,
Now that the spring is in the air.
With the flowers ev'rywhere.
I whish that we could both be there.
We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.
But the stars we could reach
were just starfishs on the beach"
*****

*****
"Looking back over the years
And whatever else that appears
I remember I cried when my father died
Never wishing to hide the tears
And at sixty-five years old
My mother, God rest her soul
Couldn't understand why the only man
She had ever loved had been taken
Leaving her to start
With a heart so badly broken
Despite encouragement from me
No words were ever spoken
And when she passed away
I cried and cried all day
Alone again, naturally"
*****

*****
"And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little boy blue and the man in the moon.
"When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when,
But we'll get together then.
You know we'll have a good time then."
*****

Dad would be ashamed. He'd want me to listen to Jimmy Buffett or something more amusing.
Fine then:


"These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes,
Nothing remains quite the same.
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands,
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
If we weren't crazy we'd all go insane.""