Arriving Now

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the concept of “Now!” and how time moved forward, how each moment would never come again.  

I revisited this revelation regularly, probably to while away other cruelties known as junior high, then I somehow set it aside. Maybe I was leaning too long and hard into my future: graduating high school, college, work, independence. I’m not sure how “Now!” got off my radar, but it was long enough for the “never again” part to open like a deep crevasse, yawning in wait, for when, decades later, my dad would be dying, unfathomably, of lymphoma.  

My family gathered to sing him home, in his own bed, mobilities and faculties fading by the hour, though a youngish body doesn’t succumb easily or evenly. And in that time, I found myself stricken but impatient, listing out again and again the work and life stacking up while I was waking and checking and sleeping and talking and caring in the ways we do for a loved one who can no longer do the daily and familiar for themselves. I found it next to impossible to just be there, to just watch or ask or listen, without the compulsion to “do” or “fix.” I had no idea how to mindfully sit with myself and with him, to not walk down the hall, away from those few remaining moments of lucid response, to not confuse the impulse of my “later” with the only thing we really had: jagged bits of right now.  

For all my weird preocupation, I was still shocked to learn that there is a very harsh “now” that has on one side of it a life shared and on the other side, much less.  

Forever.  

I’d like to say that today, years later, I carry that awareness like a smooth stone in my pocket, but the truth is that it takes practice to want to curl my thoughts around it, to pick it up and feel the weight of it—not of loss but of the singularity of now—any moment of the day.   

A friend of mine is tumbling unstoppably toward this moment with a loved one, even as I write this. When? they ask. How? We can't know.  

But, I wonder, if we're lucky, can we just keep pace, without rushing ahead or lagging behind? To just be free of expectation, feeling full well that “now” will lose what it held before—and gain and lose and so on? 

Is this what gives suffering its proper shape?  

I’ll be here trying, starting now.