Mom came home with a dead turtle. A cleaned and varnished carapace.  Barbara had taken her for an outing to the Native American Trading Post on Redwood Road, a favorite haunt.  I myself have enjoyed browsing there, bringing back southwest-themed pottery, woven wool blankets, and the heavy sense of vast peoples’ loss and pain.  On this particular day, Mom struggled to choose an object of interest, bringing home the turtle shell.  She placed it on the dining room table.  Sarah’s headstone has been ordered, the spot marked by a temporary plaque, and I am still pissed (as in the American angry, not the British drunk).  The stone will be a burgundy marble.  Pissed, and attempting to carry a heavy unwieldly sense of loss and pain.  Guilt compelled me to invite Mom and Dad on a walk, not having done so since Dad collapsed a month ago and lost all ability to walk.  I aided him in his struggle to stand enough to transfer his weight to his walker and then to the seat of his power wheelchair, taking nary a step, his entire mortal energies consumed, burned up, in a hunching stationary pivot.  I threw a towel under his bare bottom and tucked a blanket under every inch of buttocks and legs to shield his nakedness from the wider world.  Now I can boast that my dad took a walk in the nude around the block.  Back at home, he received the driver license division supervisor with his usual cheer.  A DLD letter had arrived advising Dad to appear in person to renew his driver license.  I called the DLD office and explained that Dad did not need to renew his driver license, and could not have come to the office even had he needed a driver license, but that nonetheless he would appreciate an official Utah ID card, and what could they do to help.  The supervisor and a clerk came to the house with their computers and cameras and cords and got the job done.  “Don’t tell anyone,” they enjoined.  “People will take advantage—everyone will want us to come to their house just because they don’t feel like coming in.”  We assured them their secret was safe with us.  That evening, Mom sat by Dad’s hospital bed where he lay, undressed for the hassle of clothing twisting around his torso and obstructing the urinal and generally keeping him uncomfortable and frustrated and awake.  Sleeping naked is simply easier.  They held hands in the glow of Hyrum’s homemade wooden night light as Dad began his long gravelly prayer.  “Dear Father,” he began as usual.  Then my faith-filled mystic of a father surprised me.  I have heard him tell dozens of stories of having heard and felt and seen the voice of his Lord instructing him on whom to bless and how.  Now, he plied his God: “Father, it is strange: You tell us to pray. And You promise to answer.  But You don’t answer.”  He went on a long while, praying anyway for the family’s needs, but I did not stay to listen—what was the point?  This is the day of Dad’s endurance.  Enduring a collapsing body.  Enduring a dementing mind.  Enduring the aloofness of his Invisible Divine.  My own faith urges upon me a mythology of God’s ever-active love and nurturing, a faith that They undergird and protect and teach and strengthen in all moments of endless time, all moments, though Their reality is inscrutable and undiscernible and vague.  Ultimately, I choose to believe They exist and care—infinitely—because the alternative is insuperably sad.    And I do not want to be always pissed off.  The dead turtle watches over us stolidly from the dining room table.

(Pictured: Hyrum’s little wooden lamp named Joia (gem or jewel, in Portuguese), which Dad uses for a night light in his downstairs hospital bed office/bedroom.)