Monday Moanin’
By David Smith
September 19, 2005
Greetings from before the dawn,
I am running in the dark. The only sound is my shoes striking the pavement, my breathing, the swish of my reflector vest against my shirt. Directly behind me is a full moon, adding a silver light in between the trees that hang over the road. Otherwise it is dark. Dark-dark.
I am plodding along, not yet fully warmed up. In the dark I cannot judge my speed, a disorienting feeling that I try to ignore. I am not really paying attention anyway, because I am thinking about something else. I’m thinking about a different darkness.
This Friday marks two years since my Dad died. It was a morning just like this one, straddling two seasons, when I stood at a hospital window and watched the sun come up and trade fall temperatures for summer. It was just like this morning, except it seemed like it would stay dark forever.
Up ahead I see a line of mailboxes that suddenly moves from the side of the road and bolts across the pavement. A group of deer, or perhaps ostrich, for all I can tell in the dark, making a last minute decision to cross in front of the lone runner.
I remember waiting in the hospital hallway, feeling the day coming on, pressing my head against the glass of the window and urging the sun to brighten. In the pale light outside the window, a half dozen stories from the ground, a ladybug fluttered by.
I am trotting in the dim grayness, occasionally made paler by the streetlights. As I move through my little town, I hear an alarm clock going off through an open window. Somewhere in the dark a lawn sprinkler spurts and sputters, as if it is angry about being awakened this early to irrigate pointlessly into the misty, dew soaked lawn.
I don’t think of my Dad every day, but often enough that I am aware of him being gone. I don’t dwell on the time surrounding his death, but every once in a while, something reminds me. Like a morning like this.
I circle through town and make my way out into the farmland. I am heading back west now and I see the moon is setting in a violet-blue horizon. A haze along the trees matches the fog in the low places. All is periwinkle for just a short while before the sun crests the other horizon behind me.
I think of the time when my Dad passed away as a healing time for my family, since he was ill for a long time. But that did not spare us any of the grieving. That was the dark part, the part you really don’t want anyone to go through. With all of the support, having family and friends to lean on, faith to draw on, and memories to hold on to, it can be a hard, dark time.
The road splits the cornfields. The morning has brightened enough that I can make out rows of birds on the power lines. I hadn’t noticed the sun vault over the tree line behind me, but I can feel its warmth on my back. The farmland flattens out and now I can see more than two miles down the road.
We celebrated my Dad’s life, made toasts to his health, shared the stories with other people who came to console us. We laughed and cried and vowed to make a positive experience of it all, and all the while knowing that there would be a darkness we would have to outlast.
I run past farmhouses, tractors gleaming with dew parked in the driveways. One house has a life size wooden statue of a grizzly bear on the front porch. I am really glad I didn’t run into it in the dark a little while ago.
The months have flown by; all manner of life has taken place since my Dad died. Less and less talk about heartache, more and more the days filled up with all the things we do while we are living. Maybe that is why somehow I didn’t realize I had come out of the dark grief. There was no defining moment, no sudden relief.
Ahead of me is my shadow, stretched forty feet down the centerline, dodging in front of my footsteps. I run faster, the shadow does too. I am old enough to know better than to try to overpower it, so I close my eyes and breathe in the fresh smells. I open my eyes and take in the beauty of the morning.
This week a family from our church entered into this darkness of grief, when a wife and mother, too young to consider such things, passed away. It seems like I should know what to say at this time, give some comfort, tell them that the dark time will pass, but I am at a loss.
A rooster crows, the rural counterpoint to the alarm clock I heard a few miles back in town. There is a dog running in the cornfield next to me, a small dog by the sound of its bark. I don’t know what it is chasing, but if enthusiasm counts for anything, he’ll catch it.
I offered my condolences, took in their brave faces, with the everything-will-be-all-right smiles. But their eyes held grief, eyes that looked into the time ahead without the woman they loved, and saw darkness. I can’t tell them that the darkness will fade, and that the pain will lessen. They will see it on their own, with time, through faith and prayer and with the help of friends and the hand of God. But they will not know it from me telling them, even if now were the time.
I have been out here for just over two hours and I feel like I have been running for two years. I have picked up the pace now, my body finally working as well as it can, given my advanced age. I cut south for a mile to run toward home, the sun is peeking through six-foot high cornstalks beside me.
Now I turn east again, turn toward the sun. The darkness has faded into the west. My shadow is still with me, that remnant of darkness, but it is behind me now. I can choose to look back at it, or I can look toward the light.
I run toward the sun, toward the light.
Hope this finds you with your shadows behind you,
David
Copyright © 2005 David Smith