The Corridor of Despondency

I've come to view the portion of Interstate 85-N right around Petersburg through the switch to 95-N as "The Corridor of Despondency."

It's the very last leg of the trip between Danville and Richmond. I'm never at my best when coming home from Danville (where I go to visit God in the form of my parents*), but now that music crawls inside my cells and attempts a hostile takeover, that leg of the trip is ripe for intense reflection.

On the way home after Christmas, it was an Irish ballad about watching children grow into adults that did me in. It wasn't just the heartbeat length of my own children's childhoods that got me, but thoughts about the difficulties I have with my own parents and the hopes they undoubtedly had for our relationship when I was little...and the way that loops into lessons guarding against the same distance between myself and my own kids.

If that's too Delphic for your Tuesday morning coffee, chew on the brevity of life for a second. The fact that the tired conversations you have with your spouse, and the wranglings into and out of coats and boots, and the flushings and shoppings and washings of your every day add up far too quickly into a lifetime.

The last month I nursed Silas, who is my last baby, I alternated between trying to memorize an experience I would never have again with reading James Kugel's In the Valley of the Shadow. He was prompted to write it after the diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer led to a sudden halt to the background music of life-- the needle being lifted off the record player. He describes it as "the feeling of smallness, and the starkness that goes with it."

That state of mind led him into ruminations about "the Bible, Islam, cathedral architecture, 'Man Stands Powerless Before Elevator,' ancient Mesopotamia, Amazing Grace, and quite a bit more." (It's an astounding book and I highly recommend it.)

It's not cancer but car trips that bring out that smallness for me. The constraint of the seat belt and the block of time to sit turn the daily stream into a stream of consciousness that, because I'm not James Kugel, is more likely to light upon things like my family, my friends, my past, and my future.

This past weekend, though, cancer was actually the reason I was in the car. The reality of what I'd just witnessed along with my attempts to integrate everything I'd been feeling collided messily with Ben Folds' album Songs for Silverman. I listened to "Landed" and "Late" over and over again, numbly registering as I passed Southpark Mall that I'd once again entered the Bermuda Triangle of Reflection, and was crying at the wheel.

The details are not mine, but belong to my friend, who was/is watching her father succumb to his own aggressive cancer diagnosis. In the aftermath of my time with her, I'm still not sure what I'm going to take away beyond a lot of love and a little bit of laughter wrapped up in a whole heaping mess of soggy sorrow. God is in there somewhere, and everywhere, but it's hard to tease it out when you're this exhausted.

Or maybe just this inexperienced.

Gentle reader, beware that 85/95N junction. It has a way of crystallizing the floating bits inside your head into something requiring Kleenex.

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*Thanks to my friend N for this. If you have trying or difficult people in your life, try reframing time with them as visiting God in the form of (fill in the blank). It rocks.