That we could, as we do, live in the realm of eternal mirrors, working our way at the same time through unmowed grasses.

~ Czeslaw Milosz

It has been almost six months since my father’s passing. I still can’t grasp what happened, even though I know exactly what happened. All I can think of is the emptiness I feel.

I write to answer this question: How can one be whole again after such a loss?

Here is a working version of an excerpt about my father from the fictionalized memoir,  Europe Without a Name, I am plowing through right now.

 

My father the Saint

My father’s name was Jerzy, which is George in English, and he was the one who has slain the Dragon. Today people think dragons don’t exist, but back then, when my father was born, in 1937, many people still believed in dragons.

My father was named after Saint George the Dragon Slayer for courage and strength. For many years I had imagined my father the saint on a horse—the horse’s front legs up in the air, its nostrils wide open, its mane wild in the wind—and my father’s right arm raised, his hand grasping the long spear pointed directly at the dragon’s head. The dragon looks like a lizard, a snake, and a dinosaur at the same time, and with all the attributes assigned to those animals, it is the deadliest of all living creatures.  This fact makes my father the true and only hero in my life, until the day when I am told—I am in second grade when it happens—that the Catholic Church revoked Saint George’s sainthood.

“Why?” I ask dumbstruck.

“Why?! Because dragons don’t exist, stupid!” The person whose face escapes my memory is more convincing than I can bear.  I go to the bathroom, lock the door—the only door in the entire house with a lock—and cry.

I can’t believe the cruelty of the Catholic Church. I think of my father and I hope he doesn’t find out. For a while I entertain the thought of concealing the information from him but soon realize that I am unable to come up with a feasible plan.  I think of the consequences if he finds out and I imagine him sitting on the edge of the bathtub and crying like on the day when he came home too merry, with an enormous bouquet of blue lilacs for my mom.  He is apologizing to her, offering her the flowers, and after she leaves the kitchen—where all of it happened—dropping the flowers on the floor, covering his face, not wanting me to see, and going to the bathroom. He forgot to lock the door, even though it must have been his intention, to be alone, and I quietly sneak in. He is sitting on the edge of the bathtub; sobbing, his face still in his palms, and I embrace him.

“I love you, dad, don’t cry.”

Now when his sainthood was taken away from him, I sit in the bathroom and cry for him. I feel great emptiness in my heart, confusion in my head, and crying is not helping at all.

Who is he now? What about the courage and strength? How can he possibly go on with his life if everything that made him was suddenly taken away? Who will he be now? And most of all—can he still be the father to me he was before? And what about mom? Would she still love him without the courage and strength? And would he be able to love her the same way? Will he still be able to laugh and cry?

Many days went by while my father was getting used to being a common person, and even though he still performed the same tasks as before, when he was the saint in the house—preparing royal scrambled eggs for us on Sunday morning, taking us to the river for noble walks resulting in spectacular discoveries, and bringing splendid flowers for my mom—I couldn’t see him the same way as before. Something was lost and nothing was able to resurrect the angelic feelings I had before the Catholic Church decided on the change.

Although, I have to admit, I witnessed incidents that made me question the effectiveness and legitimacy of the downgrading St. George’s status. Perhaps it wasn’t as powerful as the Catholic Church wanted us to believe, I speculated with feelings swinging like a pendulum suspended between hope and guilt.

One of those incidents happened on a beautiful summer day. The water in the river was crystal clear, with tadpoles and shimmering rocks on the bottom. My parents, my baby sister, and I were having late lunch on the meadow next to our house. My sister and my dad were ankle deep in the water fishing for flat rocks; my mom was reading her Kobieta i Zycie, Woman and Life, magazine, and I was coloring in my favorite book. The book was very special, it was the first book that had all the colors already on the pages and they would become visible when touched with water. I had a small paining brush and a tiny container with water. There were no instructions on the colors, which meant that every surface, guarded by lines, was a surprise. The bunnies were white, brown, or gray, but you couldn’t guess it before the water touched the paper. The flowers were easier to guess, but not always. The daffodils, the lily of the valley, and forget-me-nots were easy, but the tulips were not, since they came in four colors—red, white, yellow, and purple. There was another difficulty – the more water you used the more dissolved became the color on the page. The secret lay in using as little water as possible, just to activate the pigment, but I could never manage that. For some reason I always used more water than needed, to the point of making the pages warp and turn into waves. Then I had to iron them to make them flat again.

Going back to the incident that made me question the decision of the Catholic Church. As I was discovering the colorful world of my book, something happened in the river. I was jolted up with my sister scream. She was crying the biggest cry, the one that makes the entire face disappear and all that is left is just the wide open mouth that reveals the uvula pointing forward, flattened with the force of the air pushed with unstoppable force coming from the lungs.

“Oh, my God!” My mom throws her magazine on the blanket the moment we hear the scream and runs towards the river.

I see her summer dress fluttering around her thighs, I see my father holding my sister, I see my sister’s mouth. Next I hear many fast words exchange between my parents but I can’t understand anything – it seems as if the entire world disappeared in the black hole in my sister’s head.

We have to go home now. My mom decides. I look at my book. The two open pages are wet but now means now. I carry my book, forearms extended in front of me, open and blow on the pages all the way home. My sister stops crying before we even open the gate but it doesn’t change anything, mom is still upset. I know it because she doesn’t say anything until we enter the kitchen, and when we enter the kitchen she says something outrages by mistake.

She meant to say: “Put the stools under the table.” But instead she says: “Put the table under the cabinet.”

The three of us stay still looking at the table and only my sister’s enormous blue eyes roll up to look at me and then at our dad.  My mom leaves the kitchen.  We can hear her going downstairs and then out the front door.

My father is very calm but I know that he is giggling inside.  He approaches the table, asks us to move the stools, and then turns the table up side down.  My sister and I are excited, even though we have no idea what is happening.  My dad takes a screwdriver from his “little tools drawer” and unscrews the legs of the table.  Then he slides the top of the table under the cabinet and then arranges the unscrewed legs on top of it.

After a while my mom enters the kitchen with an impetus of a still angry person but the missing table puts her steps immediately into a halt.

“What now?” She looks at my sister and me.

We shrug our shoulders and try not to laugh.

“Where is the table?”

My sister and I turn slowly around and point under the cabinet. My mom looks at my dad and I can see that she is melting, trying very hard not to laugh, even though her eyes are already laughing.

“You asked us to put the table under the cabinet,” my father says smiling.  “So we did.”

My mom looks at my sister and me and we both nod to our dad’s statement.

“Very funny, very funny.” Now she only pretends to be angry with us. “Put it back together or there will be no dinner tonight.” She tries to be stern.

“Whatever you say, honey,” Dad says smiling.

“Whatever you say,” makes all four of us laugh, and this is the moment that makes me think that the Catholic Church is not as reliable as I believed.

My dad is the saint again because he is the one who made everything better. The air is light, our bodies are light, the laughs are light, and the summer is light.  My mom is laughing, my sister is laughing, my dad is laughing, and I am overwhelmed with the angelic feelings I have missed so much.

Image in this post is from: here

• I see a woman named Julia who after years of visiting the doctor’s office found out that she is finally pregnant, and with twins. Even though at this moment only her eyes are showing the change, her entire body is transformed into music, into a poem sung by a lover, into a crystal clear river flowing down the mountain straight into lowlands and an open sea. Her husband reaches for her hand and brings it slowly to his lips.
• I see a woman named Sandy hunched over her mother’s bed in a nursing home. Sandy’s mother has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past fifteen years. She is sliding her hand under her mother’s back to find the button that rolled down from her mother’s chest. Her mother smiles from behind her gray eyes and Sandy remembers the days at the lake.  She remembers her mother handing her another flat, smooth rock and showing her how to lean forward and to the side, how to throw the rock to make it skip on the surface of the water.
• I see a woman named Susan who has been living in an abusive marriage for the past ten years. She looks out the window above the tree line where cumulus clouds have formed a wide passage through the blue sky. She hears her husband scream but she already knows that this is not about her being childless, or about her not being taller and slimmer, or about her not having enough of something she could never name. Her husband’s voice fills her skin up all the way to where she has to let go. And for the first time she sees herself opening the front door and walking out.

Here is the video.

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2012/01/gravity-un-r-ve-de-demain/251424/

Image in this post is from: here

Here are two poems written in honor of my father.  Let them speak for me, for now:

Fathers

by Robert Schubert

We hear of them,
these boulders:
Soothing sentinels
softening the strife,
holding back the hillside of harm, hurt and hell,
marking the shores of seas and streams and
patrolling the paths that wander
through the mazes
that mark our minds and hearts.

Full weight presses earthward,
their shoulders support us as we sit and stand
listen and laugh,
love and lose.

Their polished soft sides soothe us,
while the rough undersides rile us with reminders of reality.

And while death took the flesh and blood of your father,
the boulder remains:
A giant, gentle sentinel
standing sturdy, ready
should your spirit call.

 

The Loss

by Mike Clark

The loss
of a parent
who knew how
to hold his wife’s hand
tenderly
teaches the lesson
that all of us
are searching a hand
to hold.
In parting,
we reach out
to the other
close to us
in this life
to comprehend
the precious instant
in what matters.

As a six year old boy, Marek witnesses his mother’s death. He learns that the people who killed his mother were the Russians. Later on, throughout his adult life, he searches for ways to revenge what happened to him and his family. Finally he finds the way: He joins the mujahideen in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He feels that by joining the mujahideen he will find justice.  Will he?

Veni, vidi, vici!

for my students, Fall 2011

by Danuta Hinc

When my students were in the preliminary stages, meaning, “familiarizing themselves” with Assignment #5 (writing instructions for experts and non-experts), one of my students from the A. James Clark School of Engineering, questioned the requirements of that assignment.

“Professor Hinc,” he asked in his baritone voice, “the assignment calls for 400 to 750 words.”

“Yes, it does indeed” I said, knowing that what will follow will be another, already familiar to me, tirade of precise explanations in which graphs, charts, drawings, and a mind-boggling calculus equations will be used as supporting points.

“Well, I think that we don’t really need that many words to write instructions,” he said to the perfect silence of the other twenty-one students in the class, whose faces were now turned towards him.

“Really?” I said, waiting for the calculus equations and seeing all the faces in the room turn to look at me.

At this point everyone in the room understood that my engineering student and I were engaged in a match and that the outcome was of the great interest to all in the room.

“Yes.  I can pretty much explain anything under 400 words.”  All the faces turned towards the baritone voice.

“Are you sure?” I said not knowing what to say.

“I am pretty sure,” he said.

“Well, in this case, we need to conduct an experiment.” All the faces turned towards me.

“Experiment?” The baritone voice clearly liked that word.  “What experiment?” he asked.

“You will see,” I said, trying to be as mysterious as I could.  I think even my eyebrows moved up slightly.  “We will conduct an experiment in the beginning of the next class, on Wednesday.”

“Okay …” The baritone voice was cheerful and confused at the same time.

***

“An experiment?  Why did I say that?  Now I have to come up with an experiment,” I was thinking coming up the stairs to my office.  “I can’t believe the things I say sometimes! Why do I have to make it difficult on myself?” I remember that “regret” was the first word that followed the questions.  The second word was “Jesus!” This is the one that comes to my mind habitually.

On the evening of that day I paced my house—admiring the autumn colors of the woods I see through the enormous windows in my living room, visiting the refrigerator in hope of finding something that needed to be purchased immediately, checking the dryer wishing to find clothes that needed to be folded—and nothing came to my mind.

To my disappointment, I realized that I was on an impossible quest to surprise my students, to engage them in something fabulously interesting, to challenge them, to make them happy, and—most importantly—to prove the baritone voice from the engineering school wrong.

I struggled way past my bed time and finally gave up.  I turned the lights off. A voice in my head said: “It’s okay.  It’s good to know when to give up.”  I took a deep breath and said to that voice: “I am not giving up, I am just going to sleep, you idiot!”

I was feeling myself dissolving into the warmth of my bed, drifting away into the place where my body, my thoughts, the air, and even the walls and the ceiling of the bedroom become one.  On the precipice of a dream a saw the walls of my room disconnect and float as geometrical shapes—a small square with an opening for a window, a gigantic rectangle for the ceiling, two trapeziums that supporting the cathedral ceiling, and a rhombus from nowhere that decided to join the other shapes.  They floated above my head in different patterns as if revealing all the different combinations of connections that exist within those shapes.

And that was the very moment when I realized that the dance of the geometrical shapes was the experiment I needed.  For a moment I was surprised how unimpressed I was to finally have it and then I realized the reason: I knew I had to get up and write it down because otherwise I won’t remember anything when I wake up in the morning.  “Jesus!” came to my mind.

***

The next morning I opened a Power Point, went straight into Shapes and chose Basic Shapes.  I arranged different shapes into a picture you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/6sbtye7

I would like to say that on Wednesday all my students were eager and excited in anticipation of the experiment, but the truth is that I was the only person exited because I was the only person who remembered about the experiment.  My students’ seemed slightly bewildered when they heard the word “experiment,” but when the baritone voice said, “Oh, yes, the experiment,” everyone seemed to remember our Monday’s match.

Here is the experiment:

I asked my students to pair up.  I asked them to sit back to back.  Half of the room faced the wall on the right and half of the room faced the wall on the left.  I gave the students facing the right wall a sheet of paper with the picture I prepared for the experiment.  The students facing the wall on the left were given a blank piece of paper (of the same size).  Then I asked the students with the picture to give instructions to the students with the blank paper to draw the picture they were holding.  The students with the blank paper were not allowed to see the picture; they had to draw it only on the basis of the instructions given by the students holding the picture.

After about 10 or 15 minutes everyone was done.  The results varied.  Some of the drawings were very close to the original, some of them were not, but all of them revealed one simple truth: giving instructions is not easy!  Or is it?

“How many words do you think you needed to instruct your partner?” I asked the baritone voice (he was the one giving instructions in his pair).

He smiled the smile of integrity. “Way more than 750,” he said, still smiling.

I didn’t need to say anything. I felt victorious!

“Professor Hinc,” called the baritone voice. “I would like to show you our drawing.”

“Yes,” I said walking towards his desk.

He put the drawing made by his partner on the original to reveal that the drawing was very precise.  The two pictures aligned perfectly.

“How did you do it?” I asked.  “It’s almost impossible!”

I turned to the class and showed them the drawing aligned with the original.  I asked if anyone else had such perfect results.  No one did.

“How did you do it?” I turned to the baritone.

“I gave him all the instructions in inches,” he said and smiled the victorious smile.

This story was originally published in “The Professional,” a newsletter of the Professional Writing Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

~Bertrand Russell

by Khaled Tantawi, student, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

“Go home, we will run the country for you,” has been the tone of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, the ruling military junta in Egypt. They are doing what they want as opposed to what the people, and specifically the revolutionaries, really want.

We wanted them to restore the security in Egypt–legislate a ban of all those who cooperated with the Mubarak regime from participating in the Egyptian political scene, liberate the Media, and let us reap the fruits of the Revolution. However, thousands of civilians were brought to military trials, while Mubarak is staying in his luxurious hospital.  Actually, we are not even sure if he is there at all.  We are also not sure if he is on a civil trial.

This is what the Supreme Council of Armed Forces accomplished so far:

(1) Arrested women and forced them to have humiliating virginity tests.

(2) Censored media imposing lack of transparency.

(3) Insisted on having parliamentary elections first as opposed to having a new constitution first.

(4) Announced they will be staying for 6 months and now it has been over 9 months.

We have been under a military rule since the 1952 coup d’etat and we are dying to have a civil country.

The truth is: The members of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces are loyalists to the previous regime and ousted president.  Even though the truth is wildly known, many had faith again all odds, because it’s scary to fight the Armed Forces.

But now, those who oppose the Supreme Council are growing in numbers.  People have been staying in Tahrir Square for almost a week, calling for the Supreme Council to step down. People demand to have a transitional civil government and a free country. The Armed Forces tried to force people to leave the Tahrir Square and many people were killed and thousands were injured. The Armed Forces used tear gas and the same brutality that has been used by the previous regime.

No one knows what’s going on in Egypt. I blame the ruling military junta for this. We are so over with their slogan, “Go home, we will run this country for you.” They lost our trust.

And now that the anniversary of the January 25th Revolution is approaching, it’s really sad to see what the truth is.  The Supreme Council of Armed Forces tricked and betrayed the people of Egypt. They have actually convinced them that they were pro-revolution, and they said they supported it.  They kept reminding people how they never shot people during the protests like the Libyan and Syrian Armies did.

Bottom-line: We had a peaceful revolution, but it seems like peaceful revolutions don’t work nowadays.  Today in Egypt, many people are ready to die to have this country as they want it to be.

To Kill the Other
Danuta Hinc
Tate Publishing
127 E. Trade Center Terrace, Mustang, OK 73064
9781617390197, $18.99, www.tatepublishing.com

No one is born a murderer of thousands. “To Kill the Other” takes a spin on how a terrorist is formed. Telling the story of Taher, a man who is transformed from a simple kid into a ruthless individual joining in on his group’s plans of mass murder. A fascinating and well written story, “To Kill the Other” is a highly recommended pick, not to be missed.

 John 14:1-4 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.”