Historical Setting, 629 C.E. Creek House in the Vosges Mts.
A precious generation of our own lives is lost when an illness robs us of old age. Ana argues her wish to keep the cat when Hannah offers to relieve her mother of the stress of caring for Inky. Apparently, Hannah thinks this cat was dumped on her mother at a time when Ana’s own need was what should be central. Maybe Hannah expected her mother to sit on a bench all day and do nothing.
“Hannah, the circumstances of our own family left you with no grandparents in our household, so how would you know aging is not simply a bad health condition, but it is like all other stages of life? It comes in many different ways to different people.”
“So,” Hannah asks, “you are saying that all the old ladies who claim they need cats may not be practicing witchcraft?”
“Do I need to say that?”
“What is it you are trying to tell me, Momma?”
“I’m telling you watch and learn, dear child. When you find your golden tresses are white, and your fingers too stiff to manage the blade or even wind a spindle, or perhaps it will be your eyes that dim, or perhaps no affliction will come to you except your children will think you too old to feed a cat, then you will remember sitting and staring at nothing is not the only option for the aged. True it may be that standing up from the bench is slower, and staring isn’t at nothing, rather at things never noticed before. And a cat that chooses the warmth of your lap is a lovely gift. It’s purring song is more of touch than hearing. Beautiful is the cat.”
That hidden eight-legged sea monster, cancer, creeps through Ana’s body. No one knows how or when it will rise up and swallow a whole ship with a beloved soul. All of these physicians, Vizsla, Hannah and Ana herself, all know the tragic pattern in this. What is the experience of it: Terror? Courage? Ignorance?
Maybe we have all of them.
Dear God, we journey across a calm and beautiful sea ever toward the horizon, never knowing an ending, just a continuing. Help us to unwind the terrors and the fears into a simpler splaying of monster parts: here a fang and there a claw. May we let them pass, and escape from fears one by one. Give us courage, not born in ignorance, but in love, beauty, peace, whatever we can find of your hand always reaching to out us.
(Continues Tuesday, October 1)
Lazarus Ink 