Chase was telling me about the Thai soccer team that got rescued after days of being trapped in that cave. They had to sedate all the children with xanax and ketamine because they had to travel through six miles of dark underwater cave to get out. There was another couple of adults they found that needed rescuing as well not nearly that far, maybe they only had to travel a few meters. But it was pitch black the water, and they panicked when they were aided out- they ripped off their gear and headed for wherever their body told them surface was. Our bodies don’t often know. They ran away from the very thing that was saving them because of their fear of death and instinct to live. They had to sedate them too. I thought of 17 children in football uniforms being dragged unconsciously through 6 miles of pitch black underwater cave tunnels. I never cried from the thought of death until then. I thought of the couple tearing off their breathing masks underwater out of fear and panic. I thought of what unimaginable fear one would reflexively feel in the darkness under the earth surrounded by water. And I cried then too because of the terrifying things we can experience, that people do experience in this life, the things they can see or know or do. And at the end of it all is the same thing we all face. The most extreme of pitch darkness. It doesn’t seem fair that I don’t remember choosing to be here, but I’ll have to die. We go clawing and fighting into the depths only to be sedated and dragged into them anyway.
And it makes me think of my Aunt Rosie and Uncle Ken, I’ve never seen a couple so in love, all the way into their old age they flirted and gazed at each other longingly until the day Uncle Ken died quietly in his sleep. There are worse ways to go than for your lover to wake up next to you and finding they are alone. She got married right away after this nearly. Ken was in the Air Force- the man she remarried was his best friend from his Air Force days. I wonder if he’d loved her all that time. I found out a couple years later that she attempted suicide, for the guilt she felt for moving on. The sadness in our blood, my mom warns me, be careful. She says it like it is alive, like something is creeping in our DNA, trying to eradicate us. It hasn’t entirely failed.
And I think of the love but also the tragedies the two of them faced together — the war that he saw and the tin medals he got and the children she birthed and in the end her nephew shot himself in the head for his mother to find. The end for him but no one else. The end for his mom. So it goes. They had to sedate her too when she went to his funeral. Dragged through endless darkness underwater. I don’t think I even went but I pictured it so vividly in my head, nothing ever scared me so much. Having to sedate someone to stop them from screaming their grief, which is terror. Grief, which is fear, C.S. Lewis says. I keep on swallowing.
And I wonder if tragedy has to affect us like a shockwave, or a ripple. The center cannot hold it all alone. I wish I could take some of the weight. I haven’t heard from that side of the family since then. I still remember what he last said to me and I’m constantly running back and shouting my response in my dreams and my head, my hello, my greeting, my apology.
SydneyLaura.com 