Crack House Door
It looks like the door to a crack house. It's got an iron bar barring it closed, the wood of the door splintered and aged, cracks and graffiti on the wall, cigarette butts and broken glass on the sidewalk. The iron bar, the iron bar makes this door look impenetrable. I want to kick down that door, kick it open. On this side of it are crack houses, addictions, poverty, grief, misery. On this side of it are all the things I feel powerless to change, the greed, the corruption, the morally bankrupt and ruined world my children will inherit. It's likely that if I do kick down that door, or find a blowtorch or bolt cutter to cut off the iron rod, I’d step into rank darkness with stained mattresses and rats and smells I don't want to think about.
But what if I'm wrong—what if it's the door out of this horrible alleyway, not the door in to more of the same? I have such, such an urge right now to run, just run and run and run, hearing my feet echo on the concrete pavement of these endless alleyways, but if I run that's all I'll ever find, more broken glass and graffiti and barred doors.
How do I find my way through?
I stop.
I pause.
I breathe.
I put my hands on the iron bar.
A strange, strange image appears in my mind—disconnecting my father from life support and putting my head on his chest to listen to his heart stop beating. Thump, thumpity, thumpity, thump. Thump thump… thump… thump... But, here I am, with my hands on this iron bar over the doorway. Is that the needful thing—to be attentive, to listen to the slowing heartbeat of a dying world? This iron bar locking me out—my rage, my desire to escape, to run away, starts to feel now like more like grief and care—how am I now holding this iron bar with the same tenderness I felt when I put my father's cool hand on my belly to feel his unborn grandchild that he couldn't actually feel and would never meet?
I remember that night of vigil, listening to my father's artificially maintained heartbeat, my own silent breathing, and my imagining of my unborn son's heartbeat inside me. I remember that profound feeling of the mystery of death and life in the shadows of a hospital room in the small hours of the night.
Is this it—the capacity to grieve and hope at the same time? Please, iron bar over this ramshackle doorway, please make some sense of this for me.
The iron bar warms in my hands. It seems to thrum with some kind of aliveness. Then, it melts away, slips through my fingers and disappears. There is nothing blocking the way to opening this door now.
But I am afraid to open it.
I push, ever so gently. It doesn't give at first. I push a little more firmly and I feel a bit of give. Slowly, the door creaks open a crack. I do not see light coming through the crack, and I am disappointed. That would have been too easy, wouldn't it, to step through to a healed paradise on the other side of the door? But there is no light and I cannot yet see what's on the other side. So, I push it harder, until it groans fully open, with creaks of protest.
I do not see light, but nor do I see rats and stained mattresses. There is a darkness there, but not a rancid, dangerous darkness. More like the darkness of a deep forest on a moonless night when you have to put your hands out in front of you to feel your way. And so I do—I put my hands out in front of me and I ever so carefully step forward into the darkness, knowing it isn't like any darkness I've known before—it's not a darkness of terror or grief or loneliness. It's a darkness that demands the attentiveness of a bat flying at night, the night owl, the alertness of the creatures that want to live through this night, and the heart-openness of listening to a heartbeat falling silent.
(Photo Credit: Oleksandra Bardash on Unsplash)