Heavy Rain

My parents were well past the halfway mark to heaven during their life’s last stage four years ago, when the morning sky over the Caloosa River went from gray to almost black and a thunder clap accompanied the first few raindrops that fell. They were heavy, warm, big drops that would have soaked me in seconds had I not stood under the balcony’s overhang.

The rain then began to fall like the torrent from an overturned bucket from the sky. This was a rain that the overhang could not stop. I was drenched.

Instantly I thought of how my two sisters and I had tried to arrest our parents’ drenching. First we deployed the overhang of modern medicine – concierge doctors – then specialists and visiting nurses under our round the clock on-scene command and control of these efforts. Initially this protection worked as did the overhang from that morning’s rain. But just as the winter deluge overwhelmed and drenched me, I saw that modern medicine and my parents’ ability to endure suffering at some point would no longer protect them from being inundated, sodden and eventually drowned.

Getting caught in that warm, wet, December downpour on that day of that terrible winter full of parental health crises and suffering that made no sense was a helpful thing to have happen. It taught me to accept life’s thunderstorms, not to dread them. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when I’d find myself without my London Fog trench coat. This new understanding would act as a rain coat and galoshes. It prepared me for the bouts of intense stormy weather that came during the next six months, arming me with the knowledge that no matter how hard it seemed, it couldn’t rain forever. At some point, I knew, my parents’ suffering would come to an end.

Buckets of Rain

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