grandpa.

He's in his mid-fifties, my father, but he is right now speaking with both the disenchantment of an adolescent and the paralysis of a man whom loss has thrust itself upon, as he tells us about the day when his own father fell from two stories up, his skull shattering, his pulse--miraculously still fighting for a life so suddenly and grotesquely slipping away.  It's been said that a tragedy, unexpected enough, traumatic enough, will stall a survivor's life, postponing normal growth, so that a fifteen year old mind lives in a thirty-two year old body.  I read that somewhere, sometime.  Now it's before me: I can feel the story of my grandpa's death in the pauses and breathes my father takes.  I can feel the breaking, the snapping in two, of a marriage as my grandma is cautioned she won't want to see the adulteration of her dead husband's face.  I can feel the earth give way and the ground-breaking shifting of change needle it's way into every pore of skin.  I can feel, too, sorrow for how my father remembers his father: I was never good enough for him.

I've mulled over this too much in the past year and a half of my life.  The process of moving and living overseas has heightened my fear of death tenfold.  I've feared the "someday", the day when the phone rings and they are lost to me, I to them.  I've feared depression and fear, and thus have been debilitated by both. 

Listening to the cracking of his voice, the story I had never heard, fear was there, yes.  But I am here, and I am called to be here, in this day, and to love myself and them for adapting to situations neither of us really wanted to be in.  I realize the gift of living abroad--that is, I do not take his morning falsetto, her tattered bookmark, or his discourses for granted anymore. 

I am not a tragedy survivor.