Between Everything and Nothing

Note: I’ll keep this short simply because the rest of the post is so long. To some degree, this is expanding on the free writing exercises Snake and I have been doing of late. But this is a little more drawn out, worked out and edited, although it’s probably still just a draft. If you’ve ever heard of creative non-fiction, this is an attempt at that (maybe even one I’ll submit to a publisher or a contest if I find one). This is a personal essay written in segments meant to give you small pieces at a time, but not the whole puzzle. I think when ever you’re writing about yourself, you never get the whole puzzle because it’s still being put together.

Note 2: I’d recommend giving a listen to God Says Nothing Back by the Wallflowers before you read this. You can hear it on You Tube with videos from different TV shows. I think hearing would help considering I had the tune in my head while writing most of this.

Note 3: I don't like the title, I am accepting submissions for a new one.

Lyrics from “God Says Nothing Back” – The Wallflowers

Seems like the world’s gone underground
Where no gods or heroes dare to go down
As teardrops from a hole in heaven come
Overhead like ravens dropping down like bombs

Through the morning silver-frosted glow
God says nothing back but I told you so
I told you so

The raindrops hit the windshield and tried to freeze before being shed away by the Ford Ranger’s wipers. In the middle, out of reach of both wipers, a small triangle formed with rippling tentacles of water not quite liquid and not quite ice – a balance maintained by the Ranger’s heater blasting on the window and the frigid air temperatures.
I am hunkered behind the wheel as I turn from the two-lane highway that cuts through a number of counties from northern Illinois all the way down to Peoria onto the road that leads home. Usually the road home has two lanes also, but not tonight. Two inches of fresh ice covered the two inches of snow dropped from the sky late the day before. No plows had made it out yet. A one-foot mountain range of snow and ice formed in the middle. The only real lane was the freshest set of tire’s tracks weaving back and forth across the road.
At 4 a.m. in December, the sky is neither dark nor light. It is the deepest blue. I am heading west, toward the storm. Above a bed of clouds is stacked from the top of the world to where the sky meets land.
At the crest of the last hill before home, a light bulb turned on behind the clouds. At first it was no more then a dull orange-yellow glow dulled behind the thick cumulonimbus. But that light sought the crevices in that wall like a prisoner seeks a key to his cell. When it burst through, there was only white as it hit the open sky and then reflected off the fields of snow.
It lasted only a split second, but that’s all I needed. My field of vision was exposed to everything and then as quickly nothing. White filled and conquered the spectrum, laying waste in an instant the entire scope of my world. Then gone with the norm restored accompanied with the worries of the storm just as swiftly.
Later curled up in bed with my mind being tickled to sleep, I heard my wife on the phone. She was talking to one of her parents and told them I saw lightning and that it made the night as “light as day.” I cringed. I wanted to run and tell them that that wasn’t even close. I’ve seen the light of day and this wasn’t it. This was a light beyond that, a light that filled everything all at once. But those aren’t the right words either. I am not sure there are any.


God bless the void of my daydreams
Head back in the snow making angel wings
As slow motion dancing lights at dawn
Sail beneath a burning yellow sun

I’m calling out from the deep ends of my bones
Time says nothing back but I told you so
I told you so

Eighty-nine years faded away and the voice of a petulant, over-dramatic teenager whined out, “I’m a goner. That’s it.”
Someone decades younger and less familiar with the proximity of death chided, “Oh, no your not.” And they were right. My grandmother, who at that point was 89, tensed up in the hospital bed in the emergency room with a bladder infection that resulted in her body not creating enough sodium. That in turn caused her some dizziness and mild dementia.
She wailed. It was the sound of her slightly polluted mind addressing her physical state and her mortality and maybe even gauging the authenticity of her existence. That last one I cannot confirm.
Each person took turns trying to calm her, but her wails continued. Her body shivered under the cotton blanket and even though I wasn’t viewing her face, I am sure salty tears were sliding down the many creases around her eyes.
Finally, I had enough and laid it out the best I could. I don’t remember what I said but I said it bluntly and as plainly as I could. I also directed it right at her almost as a parent ordering their child.
And she grew quiet.
Minutes later we were alone and her breathing was muffled by the hum of florescent lights and the tapping of soles on the sanitized white tiles of the hallway outside. We didn’t say a word.
I don’t remember where the conversation took place or even whom it was with, but I’ll never forget my uncle saying this about my grandfather, “He didn’t say much. But when he did, he was usually right.”
I’d like to think that was running through my head. People always said my grandfather and I were a lot alike. My grandmother was one who said it the most.
But that wasn’t it.
I was confronting the same mortality my grandma had cleverly avoided for eight decades.
I’ve lived with a subtle shake in my hands my entire life. When I say something with conviction or meaningful, my entire body joins in on the beat. My eyelids twitch. My face turns hot. I didn’t shake while I spoke to her, but I did after as everyone was quiet and gradually made reasons to leave the room.
In those few moments, I knew that shake would kill me. “I’m a goner. That’s it.” I didn’t know how or when. Maybe slowly as it gradually increases with age turning me into a drooling, spastic idiot. Or maybe I’ll break into a violent spasm some late night driving home causing me to veer into a tree.
All those possibilities ran through my head and felt real.
So in the echoing silence we waited with the ticks of unheard clocks running down.


Still waters rising in my mind
Black and deep, smoke behind my eyes
Last night I could not sleep at all
I hallucinated that you were in my arms

To be in your heart I failed my own
Love says nothing back but I told you so
I told you so

“Kiss me three times,” he said as delirium and exhaustion washed over his mind and body. His voice at that point only a whisper even when meant to be a shout.
She rushed to his side from across the living room.
She knelt beside him where he lay upon the couch and planted three smooches on his lips as she had every morning, year after year, before he left for work.
Just after Thanksgiving they had took him to the doctor with what felt like flu, but one that he just couldn’t shake without antibiotics. The doctor ran his tests and made his observations. “A month,” the doctor said. “that is all you have left.”
For the next month, he convalesced on the couch, an IV drip hanging from his arms as cancer ate slowly way on each of his cells.
Just after the New Year, he called his wife over to him to say goodbye.
“Are the kids alright,” he said to her although his eyes were distant like he was saying them to everyone and no one at the same time.
“Of course, they’re fine.” She said too terrified for what came next to feel the relief of his pain.
Then he clapped his hands so loud it surprised her. The last couple days he hadn’t had the strength to lift his head or any of his other limbs. But the clap was powerful and purposeful.
“Okay then.” He turned his head away staring far away. “Open those gates.”
And he was gone.
The pastor at my uncle’s funeral relayed this story in his sermon. He called it a blessing from the lord that he provided my uncle that ‘vision’ or ‘hallucination’ to usher him into the afterlife.
I have never been quite so dejected by word choice. It made my uncle’s dying moments convoluted and false. It was just a picture he saw as he greeted the great white light. God gave him the gift by manipulating some enzymes in his brain of a short movie before he passed.
“If it wasn’t real,” I wanted to scream even though I was only 13. “What is?”


Still here re-climbing every rung
Someone saw something
Someone speak up
Back over the rotted bridge I cross
Open up these graves, let these bodies talk

Buried under leaves blood red and gold
Death says nothing back but I told you so
I told you so

The bronze shells stacked haphazardly in my hands were empty with faint burn marks from where the powder exploded out. Of the twenty-one fired, eight were found.
“We try to find as many as possible for the families,” the gray-haired, uniform-clad veteran said.
I probably thanked him and walked away. It was a warm fall day and the leaves of the trees in the cemetery were painted with every harvest color and sealed with sunshine.
I’ve thought about that moment a million times in the seven years since.
Those eight empty shells were vitally symbolic of what I’ve considered to be the worst weekend during one of the hardest times of my life.
My grandfather’s corpse was an empty shell. My life was an empty shell. Each of his children and grandchildren got one and I thought all of them would one day just be empty shells.
Part of me held onto that feeling for all these years.
Until a few minutes ago when I was folding freshly dried sheets and a loud clap sounded in my mind. Behind the thick, somber clouds of my grandfather’s funeral an orange-yellow glow restlessly waited to burst out white.
I had been thinking about that weekend all wrong. I lingered on the quiet, lonely drive home from college listening to Green Day, and how dark the house seemed while I sat alone at our family’s kitchen table and how the prickling pain of a migraine distracted my mourning as the veterans fired their rounds off.
“He didn’t say much…” Maybe my uncle said that to someone at the visitation. I wish I could remember the when and where.
I wasn’t listening when the shells rolled into my hands. I was too wrapped up in my grief and the recoil of the brutal headache. But he made sure that I got one of those shells and that it stayed with me. It was his reminder for when I was ready to listen, to see.
For right now when another memory squirmed out from behind the clouds of time.
I remember an old friend stopping by when I was sitting alone the night I came home from college and how she wrapped her arms around me. She whispered in my ear something just for me.
Nine months later we started to date. Several years later we married.
Those shells weren’t symbols of the vessels we leave behind but of that space between everything and nothing and the kind of blinding charge we put into that time before we’re gone.
“When he did, he was usually right.”