People are foolish enough to fear many things: spiders, snakes, mice, even the dark. People are idiots. As an older gentleman, I’ve came to realize that there’s no reason to fear any of those things. Spiders, snakes, and mice are simply nothing more than pests which you can squish. Darkness can be defeated simply by making a light. People aren’t anything to fear; they can be killed. There’s only one thing in this world which is truly worth fearing, and that’s simply the extreme volume of silence.
Silence can break even the strongest of men, I’ve learned, from personal experience. I used to be a strong man, and I used to live in the world of men, but in less than the space of a week, that all changed. On Monday, my dearest mother fell and broke her hip. She was rushed into surgery, and her heart couldn’t withstand the anesthesia. She passed out of this world while the doctors and surgeons were attempting to pin the pieces back together.
As my heart was reeling from this sudden shock, I got a second call Tuesday evening. My wife, of twenty-five years, had gotten sick while recovering in rehab and was rushed to the hospital. The doctors called me with grave news, “Sir, we need to install a central line into your wife’s femoral artery. An IV in the arm won’t be big enough for the amount of medication we need to pump into her. She’s extremely sick and may not make it through the night.” Worried sick, I stayed awake all night and prayed for her health and recovery.
Wednesday morning, I got the call – but not THE CALL. It was a different “The Call”, informing me that my Uncle passed away around the time the sun started to rise. He’d been an alcoholic and had drank himself basically to death, with his liver and kidneys failing him in the end. I hadn’t even realized that he was even that sick, nor did I realize he’d even been hospitalized several days previously, again.
As my mind was reeling from this double whammy of shocks, my phone rang once again. Thinking it was nothing more than yet another person calling to inform me of my Uncle’s death for the umpteenth time, I picked it up without much thought. “Sir, this is Blanky Blank Hospital. We hate to inform you, your wife just passed away at 11:28 this morning. We’re so sorry for your loss, if there’s any… blankity blanky blank…” Numb, I simply thanked her for letting me know, and I hung up the phone.
My mother. My uncle. My wife. All gone in the space of two days. My mind was reeling and I couldn’t think. It took me hours to pull together my thoughts to the point where I remembered to inform my own daughter. Due to some argument she’d had with her mother, she’d became estranged with us about a year previously, but now was the time to let bygones be bygones. Truly, I don’t even know exactly what was said between her mother and her, but whatever it was had offended my daughter to the point where she closed off all her social accounts, and change her phone number. When she moved to a new home, she refused to even give us our address. I was forced to dig through my dead mother’s contact list to find a number to call her at. Of course, nobody answered, and I was forced to leave a message.
The next morning, while I was at the undertakers, sorting out all the arrangements for my wife’s funeral, my daughter called me back and left a message for me. When I got home, this is what I heard on my answering machine. “We got the message. We’re not going to be at the funeral. We’d appreciate it if you’d never contact us again after this. Thank you.”
THANK YOU??!!
My daughter leaves me a message basically saying she was completely severing all ties with the family. She wasn’t going to come to her mother’s funeral, and she didn’t want any of us to contact her ever again?! Who? What? Where? WHAT THE HELL?!! Too numb to even cry, all I can do is sit dazed in my recliner and slowly scratch my dog’s head.
Thursday simply disappears in a haze. I honestly have no idea what happened to that day. I suppose it existed, but I couldn’t swear to it. All I know is the next thing I’m aware of, I’m getting another damn call on that hateful phone. “Steve, I don’t know how to tell you, but your brother was just killed in a car accident. The stress of these past few days was too much on him and he went out drinking. A deer jumped out in front of his car while he was on the way home, he swerved to miss it, ran off the bank and into a tree. He’s gone… Blabby blab blab…”
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On the day of my mother’s funeral? This couldn’t be real! How much does God expect one poor soul to endure? Dazed and numb, the next several days simply passed by in a dull white blur. Somehow, I made it past the funerals. I managed to pull the pieces of myself together long enough to stand up and deliver a few words of remembrance at my wife’s funeral. I didn’t break into pieces, as each trip to the cemetery left more and more of my heart behind.
Somehow, I made it past the deaths of my mother, uncle, wife, and brother. I made it past the “death” of my daughter – that was the only way I could process her actions and live with them, without raging out and rushing off and trying to find her, just to murder her. My father had passed away several years ago, and my brother’s live in tramp was nothing more than a pill popping dopeheaded booze hound. I’d never wanted to have any contact with her, and I sure as hell didn’t want any with her now.
And that left me facing the scariest thing which any man can ever have the misfortune to encounter in existence – silence. Pure, unadulterated silence.
I’d always been a private man, content to sit at home and live a simple life. It was my wife who liked to keep up with people, things, and events, and she was the one who was my bridge to the rest of the world. With her gone, as well as the rest of the people who I normally reached out to for my daily contact, I was left sitting at home, all alone, listening to the silence grow.
Sure, a television, radio, or tablet, could help slow down the growth of the silence, by providing a background noise – a temporary distraction from its ever-growing presence – but they do nothing to muffle the extreme loudness which silence makes late at night, when one is trying to go to sleep.
Left alone, in the dark, one can hear the silence which settles and lingers so heavily in the heart. The silence of one’s wife’s missing breathing on your arm. The silence of nightmares and dreams, which grow so loud, they wake one with their heart beating and thumping so hard that it feels as if you’ll be dying soon yourself. The silence of a dog’s mournful whimper, as he shares in his owner’s broken heart over the missing beauty which used to snuggle so warmly on the other side of the bed. It’s a silence that grows ever heavier and ever thicker, as time passes and neighbors and friends slowly stop coming by and return to their normal lives which doesn’t revolve around those outside their own closed orbit.
The silence of the midnight darkness causes time to slow to a crawl. Days slowly turn into weeks. Weeks into months. Months into years. Years into an eternity – and this eternal cycle repeats itself ever day from the hour of midnight until the hour until the rooster crows to greet the dawn. Heavier and heavier this true silence of alone grows, until it darkens the heart and swallows the soul in pure misery and forlorn loneliness.
It’s been a series of endless eternities since everything I’d call “my life” has ended. The silence has overtaken my soul, and there’s only darkness left in my future. Life is bleak, lonesome, and miserable, and I, who thought I was once a strong man, have now become nothing more than a coward who fears the silence of eternal loneness even moreso than I fear the call of the grave.
If it wasn’t for my Shadow, and me needing to take care of my little boy, I doubt I would’ve had the will to continue on this long. My daughter abandoned me. My family is all dead. Without the single, unwavering love which my little pup gives me, I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I have.
But…
A dog – no matter how loved, or loving – can not take the place of other people in our heart. I love my Shadow, but he can’t hold me. He can’t talk to me. He can’t give me advice, or whisper in my ears, “It’s all going to be alright.” He can’t help me overcome my natural social awkwardness and encourage me to leave my home and go out to meet new people. He loves me. He whimpers at night with me, and snuggles tightly by my side. He loans me his ears, so I can scratch them endlessly, when my fingers need something to do to release the nervous tension inside, but he can’t take the place of the ones who I lost in my heart.
Something has to change, and I don’t know what it’ll be. I just know something has to change – and if I didn’t have my little one depending on me, that something would probably involve a gun. I don’t know if I’d use it on myself, or use it to hunt down the demon which is wearing my daughter’s memory, or if I’d just use it on this damned world until the police put me down. I’m tired. I fear even another moment of the silence that is my life, and it has to change.
Lord help me, I don’t know how, but make this silence disappear from my life, somehow. Anyhow! I can’t bare to continue on for another fifty years like this!! Either take me and my Shadow now, or… Or, I don’t know what…
Just take away this silence! PLEASE!!