Disaster Plan

We were at Northeast Park, crossing the wooden bridge over the little creek, when we spotted a deer. It let us gawk for a while, then moved on. We continued up the trail. My daughter running up ahead disappeared behind a bush – we heard some running, bushes cracking – then a scream.

The deer had run into my daughter – and luckily, only left a hoofprint bruise on her shoulder, hardly harming her.

The whole incident, as they do, only took a few seconds, and there was no way to prevent it, other than to have my kid roped to my body at all times.

Freak accidents – I particularly detest them. We work so hard to avoid disaster – car seats, arch supports, vitamins, looking both ways when we cross the road. A woman blithely pushes her child in a stroller down a sidewalk, and a car spins out of control and crashes into them. A snake bites a woman in her garden and she doesn’t reach her phone to call for help in time. A boy gulps too much water at the pool and dies several hours later at home on his bed of drowning. Even living in an impenetrable bubble or cement cocoon I have a feeling would be susceptible to an earthquake, a volcano, a knawed cord cutting off the oxygen tank…

There’s part of me that still thinks I can outwit fate. If I can interpret the signs, see what’s coming around the corner, I can jump out of harm’s way in time… dodge the bullet…

There’s part of me that gives a little “Whew!” when I hear about someone else’s disaster – “Wasn’t me!”- and subconsciously I file away on my list of Dangerous Activities whatever it was – like “Don’t walk child in stroller on sidewalk between 5 and 5:15 on Wednesdays” and “Don’t let child swallow water while living in Florida” – even though I logically know that these mishaps are not lessons, but accidents. True accidents don’t teach us safety lessons. They have no point or purpose. All we can learn from them is that we are all, at all times, susceptible and endangered. Life ends in death, and we have little control over determining the hows and whens of the termination.

After my father died, this reality felt to me like a hungry dog, invisibly breathing down my neck, about to snap its jaws on me and my loved ones at any moment. I lived in constant fear. I had no warnings my dad would die. I had dinner with him, and he went to bed and died. It was the first time I had seen him in a year and a half. It was the last time I saw him ever.

It’s only years later that I can understand that giving up the need to prevent disaster is the only way to live fearlessly. All the gurus find this freedom and peace – giving up the desire to control life and avoid pain. But it’s not something you read about in a self-help book and gulp down in one swallow. Finding a way to let go of the illusion that you can grab onto the carpet so it’s not pulled out from under you is one of the hardest things a person can do. That carpet is a security blanket. That carpet is the ground on which many of us walk. Even when you know that illusion is false, it can feel good to believe in it.

I know for myself that when it comes to grief and loss, I experience some anger. It feels like a joke, a setup – here’s this gorgeous world, here’s these lovely people, here’s a beloved, here’s a child – now, guess what? It’s all temporary. It all disappears. One by one it goes away. Then you go away.

The rabbit disappears and doesn’t show up again. Great trick. Some people have stories about how the rabbit gets resurrected, and then they argue about whether it really happened or not (and then they invent Easter).

And then there’s the argument that if everything were eternal, nothing would have any meaning. To which I initially replied, Bullcrap. (I think the first time I read this was in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a fun novel that deals with eternity and a wierd Irish guy.)

But I’ve started to discover that relationships and lives and other things don’t derive their meaning from their longevity – from lasting. Nothing lasts; to define worth by time amounts seems an odd valuation system.

And when I think of a child’s life, it is not worth less if it ends sooner rather than later. Or a father’s. Or that of a marriage. Or a business venture. Or the time of owning a house. The import of a love, a moment, an experience, may be affected by the time it spans – but that is not the sole factor.

When I spend all of my mental and emotional energy focusing on ’saving’ myself, my children, my relationships from ending, I abandon the actual living of life, the spending of the time together. And then – what am I saving?

The only way I have been able to comfort myself about the inevitability of loss is to let go of it, and drink in what exists now.

I still sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it, to take it, to make it through. I still miss my father, terribly, and feel robbed of his presence in my life. I still want never to have to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t like it.

I’ll never forget this one night when I was 17 years old. My first love called me long distance and broke up with me. I was inconsolably weeping. The rest of the house was asleep, but my father, night owl that he was, was up. He gave me a hug and said, “It’s not the end of the world.”

I was furious. Who cared about the end of the world? I didn’t – it was the end of my heart.

Poor Dad. Weeping adolescent. What do you say? And when he died, I wanted so badly to tell him – Yes dad, not the end of the whole world, but you dying is definitely the end of mine.

Seventeen years later, I want to tell him – Dad, I know what you mean. Things come and go, including you and I. It just takes so long, Dad, to get used to it – life being so cruel and beautiful at the same time.

No, no way to stop it. We can choose to try to – or choose to accept it. Choose to dive into life and accept that we will die, over and over again.

I scribble up my disaster plans, my strategies for escape, and then rip them up again, over and over.

I’m not getting out of it alive.