Prologue: The Last Dance

Where to even begin…

The past couple weeks have been such an absolute hurricane, I don’t even know where to start. I have been over my head due to a personal emergency for which I was not at all prepared. Like hurricanes, the issue seemed distant and concerning but not looming and dire but then it gathered energy and windspeed and velocity… and then it made landfall.

The week before last, I rushed out of my house for a drive to Philadelphia and then a last-minute flight. I got home yesterday. The period in between was so unexpected, so intense and agonizing, I don’t even know how I feel about it. I can describe what happened. I can imagine how someone who experienced them would feel. I can’t tell you how I feel… or even that I feel much at all.

I worry that I am feeling some emotions too little and others not at all. I worry that what I tell myself is an adeptness at compartmentalizing and a healthy resilience might be less that and more a practiced facility at sublimating the emotion of trauma as a means of coping.

I can’t say that I’m doing well or okay or badly per se… because I don’t actually know how I’m doing at all.

The personal emergency I ran toward has not been remedied as much as it has been pulled out of a steep dive. I did that. I pulled a metaphorical plane out of an agonizing, terrible spiral. I made that happen. But then I got on an actual plane myself and flew back to the east coast. I left. I did that too.

I got on a plane, put my carry-on in the overhead, and settled comfortably into Seat 1B. I had a glass of orange juice before takeoff. I listened to some music until we reached cruising altitude. I ate a decent omelet in flight.

A week prior, I had been on a plane headed in the opposite direction toward a situation that would have all but assuredly ended badly had I not just so happened to arrive when I did - accidentally. I had been the right person at the right time. And that had entirely been an accident. I helped put something on a better course - and then I turned over the controls to others - and then I left.

I felt intensely uncomfortable by the time I landed.

I felt like I had done too little.

I thought about turning around and flying back today or tomorrow or later this week. Ultimately, that would not help. I was there when I was meant to be there. I am home because that moment has passed.

While those words are easy to say, they are harder to digest… believe… feel.

I am ill at ease.

It has taken a lot of self-talk and phone calls to friends to manage that down somewhat. I am laboring under some hard, complicated feelings. Chief among them are guilt and helplessness.

People close to me have been exceedingly supportive, exceedingly kind. I’ve gotten all of this praise for having helped steady a plane so to speak. Yet, all I really feel is a pained angst that the plane was never going to land without a loss no matter what I or anyone else did. It could only be helped to touch down gently… and I didn’t even do that really. I merely put it on a path toward that being the outcome… and then I let go and left it to others.

I think the totality of the past two weeks – the emotional experience of it - is beyond my ability to write about well. I think it is too big. I think there is just too much. I worry that even trying will flatten the emotions and strip away their ferocity. I worry most of all that I will not do justice to a person who so very much deserves the best of me… the best I have to offer… my best work. Writing of importance. Words meaningful and enduring which long lingers in the minds of readers and thus makes immortal something so terribly mortal.

I worry I will be disappointed by whatever I write here. I worry it won’t satisfy a sense of obligation to succeed at the telling of something. I worry that the harder I try to craft something perfect, the longer it will take; the lower the likelihood it sees the light of day; and the worse it will be even if it does.

All I can do is try my best. So, I shall.

I want to tell you about the emotional inferno of the past two weeks.

It started with a phone call:

A friend with late-stage terminal cancer was home alone with only his elderly mother there. Someone needed to get there to help. Could I make it out to California?

I left the next day.

[I will pick this up in the first installment of The Last Dance to be published by tomorrow and then followed by others as quickly as I can manage.]