Tower

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Right now it is after midnight...
The house is mostly quiet,
the background rumble of the clothes in the dryer....
and the crime documentary playing softly across the room from me.
Thats all I can hear...
Everyone asleep...
everyone but me.

I laid down for a few minutes....
but quickly realized sleep was not ready to come.

My mind is overflowing....
So.
Many.
Thoughts.

A lot of the things floating around in my head tonight....and yesterday, and last week....
I refuse to speak out loud.
Many of them...I try to drown out with prayer..... silence them before they take me over....sometimes it works.... but they always come back.
And to be honest....a lot of my prayers end in angry cries.....

One thing seems to stack upon the next....
and the tower grows higher, and higher still....
Until something small, a feather....
taps it ever so slightly....and the pieces fall into my lap...
tear soaked and messy.

Each morning I wipe my lap clean...brush the mess onto the floor as I get up.
Throughout the day, I step over the pile of stress.....One foot over the other....
and by the end of the day the pile has moved its way back into my head.....
Rinse and repeat...
Every.
Day.

Parklen has been wading his way through his days too...
He has ups and downs...
He feels sad, and happy and scared....
He feels good and bad and tired and angry...
He cries...

We've been talking in our quiet moments...
He asks me if I think he is going to die...
I say, "I don't....."
He wakes up at night with nightmares...
He asks me before bed, "What if I don't wake up?"

He lived in much worse health for many years.
He is not nearly as sick as he was before...
Its just simple fact...
He isn't.

But I think that he feels something coming..
And I think that feeling good for quite some time...
has just made how he feels now, scary.

About a year after his transplant, I asked Parklen if he remembered what it was like to be so sick....
He barely could...
Through conversations about surgeries and treatments and hospital scares....Parklen would often say, "I kind of remember that...."
and I counted that as a blessing...
But It seems like him not remembering the terrible portions of his life...have made this time...seem worse than it is.  If only he knew how sick he was before...but I suppose Im thankful he doesn't...and I pray he never gets the chance to re-learn.

I cannot convince him that it is going to be ok.
The only answer that Parklen will accept when it comes to his worries is this;
"I don't know what is going to happen, but God does....and the only thing I can say for sure, is that I will be by your side no matter what....and we will do this together."

And so I pray again....
That God will lift me up...
though I feel so broken...
That he will piece me back together...
and reinforce what once was there....
So that I can be strong for Parklen...
So I can help to give him a life that feels better for him...





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