The past:
The present:
The future:
How did it come to this?
Aragorn: Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.
Denethor: For death and glory?
Aragorn: FOR ROHAN. For your people.
Gimli: The sun is rising.
Gandalf: Look to my coming, on first light on the fifth day. Look to the east.
..
Denethor: THE HORN OF HELM HAMMERHAND WILL SOUND IN THE DEEP, ONE LAST TIME.
Fell deeds awake. Now for wrath. Now for Ruin. AND THE RED DAWN.
Darkness falls. I don’t know how to say it any other way.
Twilight approacheth. But even in the uttermost depths of the Dark Ages, The Sun Also Rises.
I have said this before on Docudharma. I have seen death. I have seen ruin.
When your mother and your lover die, nine months apart from each other, you feel severed.
But the sun also rises.
This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.
Thomas Covenant, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
My mother died at the age of 54. In the intervening time, she taught her sons honor. She taught her sons the meaning of integrity. She taught her sons the basic missing virtue, the basic missing virtue of honesty.
In her name, I persist. Her name was Sharon Ann Olson. Also nicknamed, Mount Saint Sharon, by me.
I share her fire.
In the ruin, the wreckage of lives, the sun also rises. Our predecessors wouldn’t have it any other way.
*f Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death an image of the splendor of the kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. But you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading trees until all the world is changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.
–Elrond
My mother was a preternatural figure. She was a figure of absolute compassion, and absolute rage. My mother was a lodestone. And my grief for her is bottomless.
For me, “moma’s boy” is a compliment, and people have no idea what they are referring to if they were to call me that.
I can only do my best, and be Feanor.
May you face your personal Doomsday Machine with grace, might, and acceptance.
19 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
I am made of fire.
But the sun also dies.
but a parent, yes.
I was walking towards the house,
iron stove.
Walking Stick,
King River, Arkansas,
ground covered with snow.
And I started to cry,
overcome for no reason.
The next day,
when I got back to town,
I had a message,
from Nana,
his plane had crashed.
A couple of Mennonite boys saw it,
And they were at the funeral,
Looking handsome and silent.
—
She says “If I leave before you, darling
Don’t you waste me in the ground”
I lay smiling like our sleeping children
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open, naked as we came
One will spread our ashes round the yard
and my father within a year. There is no way to describe the pain to this day. They are my fire, my spirit
life’s like an hourglass
glued to the table
no one can find the rewind button boy…
breathe
just breathe…..
my departed parents, but to all humanity, in particular all
those who suffered so we could be here. I always think in anthropological and historical time frames, it’s just my frame/s of reference developed over many years. We are the offspring of struggle and persistence. Our challenges have mostly been natural. To make self inflicted struggle is incomprehensible to me. I can’t help think of J.Q. Adams where he observed that Democracies always commit suicide.
I had a little taste of my own personal Doomsday Machine last Sunday morning. I collapsed in the bathroom and was taken by ambulance to emergency. Tests were good, and I hope it was just dehydration or something else fairly benign. This was first time in my life that I was hospitalized. I’ve visited family and others hundreds of times. But it’s different when it happens to you. I’m thrilled to be able to reflect upon it.