On Vicissitude

Interesting word, "vicissitude." Indo-European roots, or so I'm told.

An instant of change. An accident happens. A diagnosis happens. An argument happens. A rupture happens, as in a relationship. You are one thing one moment (or so you think), and in the next moment you are something or someone entirely different. The world has gone askew, upside down, inside out, completely and devastatingly unknowable.

Vicissitude has entered my life primarily through loss. My healthy teen-aged son is given a cancer diagnosis (then another, and another, and yet another). My rock-solid father is struck down with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). A close relative turns on me, leaving me scrambling to understand the complex emotional world I thought I already understood and what part I've played in a relationship disaster I never saw coming.

To me, these are losses, perhaps losses of innocence or of believing (naively) that I was a part of the "perfect" family: well-educated, close-knit, bound for glory. How does one get through such things? Isn't it too simplistic to say "God"?

And yet I believe in God. And God has been there for me in surprising ways. Still, God also has been absent, unfelt, distant, seemingly disinterested in events that are of enormous import to me.

Agreeing to live life fully and with lightness, or humor, while dark clouds of unknowables hover overhead -- the fact that what you base today on will change, maybe even before tomorrow -- is how I've gotten through. Although, in truth, I'm not on the other side of anything yet. I don't think life allows you to be through with vicissitude.