confusion, anger, uncertainty ...?

My younger son, at 18, is "angry," according to my wife. She suggested I keep an eye skinned.

I suppose "angry" is as good a word as any, although it hardly covers the bases or reaches the limits of the swirling, gnashing, untamed edges of things.

My son is upset based on the fact that his cousin recently died in a car crash and now his grandmother, my wife's mother, has been given three months to live. Giving his grandmother three months to live is a little like a pregnant woman being told that the baby will arrive on June 22 ... the words compute, but the reality arrives on a schedule that no one can name or control. A cancerous tumor on the lung of a woman in her late 80's, a woman who is ready to die and yet whose death raises up fear and anger and confusion in others.

No no one knows.

Death is coming and there is no rushing or changing it. And the wait, the uncertainty of what at some point will become a fact ... well, it's like rug burn ... singeing in some pervasive, nagging, inescapable way.

My son is "angry" and there are those who might point out the "attachments" that give the anger force. Nifty ... and so what? The force of facts outstrips all of wondrous reasoning and analysis, however true.

My son is angry, perhaps, because his assumptions are thrown into a cocked hat. Assumptions about the life around him, the people he loves, the background against which and in which he leads his life. For different reasons, my wife is much the same. For different reasons, and no doubt to a lesser extent, I am much the same. If I could take the confusion and anger from my son or wife, I would do it in a nanosecond, but I cannot. It simply cannot be done.

Everyone, it seems, is like the fish flopping on a pier, desperate to recalibrate what cannot be calibrated in the first place ... to get back to 'normal,' to return to a time of unspoken assumption and refreshing waters.

Like spiritual persuasions dangling death as a means of wooing adherents, death carries with it a sting of sorts ... as if it were extraordinary or frightening or angry-making. Within and without, everyone talks or mourns or weeps or is, like my son, angry or whatever the hell it is.

Time will patch things up. The Band-Aids of 'healing' and 'closure' will raise their idiotic heads. Well, whatever gets you through the night. It is hard to care so much when the night cares so little.

But it makes me wonder why I am so reluctant to examine what is clearly so much a fact: Death, so-called, is part of life. If you hate death, then there is no way to love life ... not that either death or life gives much of a shit whether you pay attention or not. But hard as it may be, still I think it would be good to live a life that did not scurry in an effort to elude or camouflage life, that ran childishly about expounding explanations and beliefs ...

A time of anger for my son, perhaps. A time of readjustment, perhaps. A time of getting things straight... always.