The Weight, by Riley Breckenridge

You thought the weight would lift once he moved on, but it hasn’t.

The weight of helplessness you felt through his entire battle with that evil, unrelenting, indiscriminate disease. The weight of compassion you felt while you watched him suffer through invasive surgeries, through every moment of every day and night for months while, slowly, he lost the things he loved most. The weight of seeing your family physically and emotionally exhausted. The weight of feeling so powerless and small in a world that was showing you that it would bowl you over and move right the fuck along without you, just like it was doing to him. The weight of knowing that the weight you felt was barely even a fraction of the weight he was probably carrying around for that sixteen months. Because even though you wanted to fight it for him, it was his battle, after all.

That weight hasn’t lifted. It has only shifted, like a heavy bag you’re carrying through a crowded airport. Then, your right hand. Now, your left. The weight’s definitely still there, but now it’s even more complex than you thought it was before (even as early as a paragraph ago), and as you try to make sense of exactly what that weight is and how it’s distributed, you can feel it slowly taking your breath away, gradually weakening your grip on its handle, and as you struggle with it and your palms get sweatier, it becomes even harder to hang onto it. You’re telling yourself that it’d be a lot easier to just drop it, to leave it somewhere, but you know you can’t. You know that even if you were to leave it somewhere for a while, someone would probably find a way to bring it back to you, because what’s in that bag is yours.

It reminds you of that story about the Dalai Lama that you read in Going On Being. The story in which he tells an elderly monk that the demanding set of practices required for enlightenment is actually intended for younger monks and so, probably unattainable for him. Discouraged, the elderly monk commits suicide in the hope that he will be reborn into a younger body. Later, an American psychiatrist asks the Dalai Lama how he dealt with the regret and sadness that must have followed his friend’s death and how he got that regret and sadness to “go away” (a very Western way of coping with loss). The Dalai Lama replied, “It didn’t go away. It’s still there.” Rather than “fixing” his pain, he chose to “feel” it; to “accept” it, rather than “heal” it.

Making sense of that is easy. Executing that…is not.

You can feel that weight, and you’re trying to keep your balance as you carry that bag and weave your way through the crowded airport without bumping into the droves of impatient folks who are carrying their own bags as they hurry to get wherever the hell they’re trying to end up. You’re trying to focus on some of the faces as they whiz past you, searching for a little commiseration, hoping to catch a glimpse of a face as tired as yours, but you don’t find a damn thing because it’s all a blur. It’s been that way for months now. Faces float past like light trails, and you follow them until you feel your eyeballs hit the edge of your peripheral vision, and reset to center to try to focus, and hit the edge and reset, and hit the edge and reset…over and over, just like they did when you used to try to focus on a single row of orange trees in the groves alongside the highway as you rode home from baseball practice in the passenger seat of Dad’s car as a kid. Back when all of this seemed an impossibility.

As if carrying the weight wasn’t enough, it’s that everything seems to remind you that it’s still there. It’s not just the pictures, or the things he left behind, or the sound of a baseball game on the TV in the other room, or the smell of his clothes. It’s the indelible memory of seeing something that seemed as steady and as unfailing as gravity, a lifelong constant, fail right in front of your eyes. He “was” and now he just “isn’t”. And even though you watched the transition from one to the other, it still doesn’t make sense.

“Keep searching and you will find it,” he wrote in the old birthday card that sits on your desk at home. You found it after he’d gone, and it was almost as if he’d guided you back to it. He’d carried this weight before, shifted it back and forth for years, and lived a beautiful life in spite of it. You’re sure he saw in your eyes how much you wanted to help him carry it.

But you couldn’t, not really. That was his weight. And now this is yours. You can only hope that you will carry yours with as much dignity and grace as he carried his. Even in his most difficult moments, he never lost hope; a hope that wasn’t being sold in exchange for currency or souls. A hope that no matter how heavy and unmanageable the weight might seem, and no matter how long a walk we have to take to get to wherever it is we’re going, we’ll make it.

And when we get there, we’ll be glad we brought our bags.

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