He could feel his legs tremble as he walked into the room.  He didn’t want to see what he knew would be waiting for him; his father weak, disabled, pale and fragile.  His mother was sitting next to him holding his hand.  She gently rocked back and forth as she stared lovingly at his face.  All of the strength of this once vital hulking man was gone and now he was nothing more than a wounded deer on the side of the road.  The world would zoom past and he would die.  He looked at his mother and she turned to him and smiled a deep and warm smile that struck a chord in his chest.  She was different.  Her nervous energy was gone or maybe it seemed to have finally found its purpose.  She was calm and beautiful.  She beckoned him closer but he couldn’t.  He was in the presence of something, something that held him in awe and also frightened him at the same time.  The room seemed to be filled with it, glowing with it and it had a weight that reminded him of the ocean.

“I have been waiting for this moment for 48 years” she said quietly to seemingly neither of us.  “He spent his whole life being strong, working hard, trying to do what was right, trying to take care of me and you and all the rest of it, that he never really let me love him.”  She turned to me, “Perhaps he felt love was weakness or wouldn’t allow him to face the day with strength….I don’t know.  I just knew it was my job to love him no matter what and some day, some day he would let me love him.”  She smiled her eyes aglow like sunlight – like home.  “Today is that day Charlie, today is that day.”

His mother spent the rest of the day whispering to him, singing quiet songs to him, holding his face in her hands….he was her beloved.  He never understood that word until that moment standing in the doorway.

His father died that night but it was not his death that kept him awake in the days to come because when he died he seemed content, full, at peace.  What kept him awake night after night was the thought,  what was it that kept him in the doorway that day?  What kept him from meeting his mother’s gaze, what kept him frightened of what clearly would not harm him?  As he walked out of the hospital exhausted and alone he dropped his keys as he went to open his car.  When he went to pick them up his legs began to tremble again and he slid to the ground like a drunk.  He looked out on the city as it lay sleeping and saw for the first time that he was still in the doorway…..always standing in the doorway.

Months later he had a dream.  He was at the hospital and his father was there sitting next to his mother, they both were staring lovingly at the bed.  His father beckoned him to enter but he could not move,  he was paralyzed.  He looked closely at the man in the bed and began to weep as he realized it was himself lying there.  He heard a voice calm and true that simply said, “My beloved….my beloved.”  He woke up in a cloud of tears, put on his clothes, opened the door of his apartment – stood quietly for a long moment – and walked out.   He drove out to the sea and bought a coffee at a bait and tackle shop.  As he sat watching the sunrise the small doors in his heart began to open and open and open.   This time when once again that gentle kind voice came to him wrapped in warmth and light and whispered, “My beloved”….he stepped out of the doorway and he was home.

Posted by Trent on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 11:17 am.