Presencing the Abscence Altar
Disassembling my family.
I think about my song lyric, “Beside the river, under a dead tree,” referencing my father who died when I was 24 or 25 – I can’t remember which. At the center of the altar is a dried oleander twig with curling leaves, apparently windswept – or appearing so. From that twig, wilted blooms and leaves fly. Springing around the twig, green shoots of desert willow with the tight knobs of furled blossoms.
I remove each bloom, thinking of words and conversations. Are they less significant or more as a result of our no longer speaking? My mother, in the midst of dementia decline, is too alarmed by phone calls to receive them any longer. My sister, with whom she lives, is not talking with me. Nor is my second sister. Both angry. I think they’re angry.
Do those angry words fly?
Am I the one who is not reaching out to them? I sent a belated birthday package to one and a meager text message to the other. No response from the package. A recitation of who’s doing what from the other.
Tight little buds of unspoken words.
I wish I knew how to lasso them. A one-handed trick and a reluctant and hog-tied calf on the other side. But that’s not the way this works. We must each cast and receive for relationship to spring up.
I remove the leaves – slender desert willow leaves curled and shapely, escaping from their anchor with a snip of scissors – I remove them and move on to the little stems of buds.
Do they yet remember what they had planned to do today, or did that end when I snipped them from the tree? We’re each, my sisters and I, growing in our own soil, independent of the others. Separated, yet living. How is that possible?
All that remains is the dead twig. Since 1993, my mom has lived her life as a satellite to this twig – my father. For over thirty years, she has spoken about him, remembered him, and longed for him. She eschewed the comfort of spouses, some of whom, admittedly, had no softness to offer, to remember when Dad was her everything. I have lived my entire adult life with my dead father at the center of what used to be and which, barring what actually happened, should have been. According to my mom.
When I remove the twig …
This exercise is part of the Morning Altars Teacher Training by Day Schildkret.