The cold comes as always
Unannounced, without warning
Yet otherwise expected
As we whirl about bright star.
Those frozen fingers find us
And eventually take us home
But even in such passage
Those remaining remember our warmth
And breathe our memory into spring.
Recently I had a horrible dream in which someone died by his own hand. I was so shaken by it. Shaken in the dream, that is. So shaken that I woke up crying because I was so devastated in the dream. The situation and person in the dream weren’t even close to being directly related to my actual life. It was as if I were experiencing the entire situation from someone else’s perspective: as if I were another person.
The effects of that dream lingered throughout the next day though. Death, it seems, hovered about me and whispered of his coming. Not to be macabre or in any way depressing, but death has lain heavily upon my thoughts of late. That dream was little more than my subconscious opening up the torrent of pent-up thoughts I had chosen to box away in the sordid collection that is my subconscious.
And then the weekend came, and I found myself foundering in an emotional fugue. My heart was lost in a multitude of emotions, and I was unable to feel any of them completely. I tried to write and found myself unable to string together more than a few lines of coherent thought.
I was adrift.
Tonight, however, I was in desperate need to open up wounds both fresh and old so I could visit the specter who lingered about me and speak to his presence. I went to the actual pen and paper, and I wrote freely. I allowed the words to flow without thought to their meaning or import. Five and a half pages later I was able to take a breath and relax a bit. My heart is still a shamble but at least I have words to help me get my bearings.
Following is an edited (for grammar and continuity) version of what flowed freely from my mind. Though the thoughts themselves are borne upon pain, I believe there is always so much positive to be gained in an honest sharing of one’s soul. Fair warning: There is a bit of adult language.
To just write my thoughts as they come, a jumbled mass at this point. I have at times become lost to a mishmash of emotions, not knowing if I feel laughter, anger, elation, sadness, or some emptiness overcoming me at one time or another. Or all at once. It’s been somewhat emotionally debilitating.
Helplessness. I can’t even describe how helpless I feel when considering my place in this process I see my family experiencing. As I observe my mother so gracefully go through the doctors appointments and now the process of setting up hospice for my dad.
Since October, when he was first diagnosed with the big “C” she has been ever hopeful and positive and bright. To see the resignation now settle upon her is heartbreaking.
And I can do nothing to help her, to take away any of it from her. I know she would not wish for either of her children to take that pain from her or for her, but my sister and I have the ability to bear much. After all, we did learn from her. Perhaps not the weight of the world, but we carry much that would easily break most others.
Mortality weighs heavily upon me. My thoughts are drenched in the mist of death’s embrace. All that lives must die. It is the only inevitability.
We are all dying. No matter how much we lie to ourselves otherwise. From our first breath, mortality; death stalks us. He finds us at different times in our journeys. Some meet him not long after birth, while others at a ripe old age. But we all come to face him and walk our final walk in his presence. Whether we have lived a good and proper life or one full of hate, disdain, regret, or nothingness.
We waste time fretting small things that don’t mean shit, especially not at the end of that line of thread, when the last grain of sand has fallen, when the clock ticks its last tock.
When death comes for us will our lives have mattered? Will the deeds of which we are defined, our memory left in those remaining, will our lives be anything of value to even one person?
I pray disjointed prayers for those I love. I pray I make a positive impact on each person I meet. In some way I hope to leave a good impression and to some way lessen each persons load. God grants us only so many days, so many breaths, but we waste so many of them.
We continually search for imaginary happiness in public perceptions, things. We look at others and compare what we have (or lack) to those things we believe others have, thinking those people are happy in those things. We waste time, our greatest gift, trying to get shit to fill an emptiness within us, an emptiness so easily filled with the love of family, friends, faith, and the wonderful experiences we ought be sharing with those in our lives.
I have a great many regrets in my life, a great many things I wish I could do over, but I also recognize the wonderful blessing I have, many of which came from some seemingly horrible experiences and choices from my past.
Life is so short. So precious. So fleeting. So full of heartaches, heartbreaks, heart fluttering, heart warming, heart filling, and plain old heart. Life is meant to be lived to the fullest. This means different things to different people.
We all have dreams. We all have had moments in life when we knew our hearts, our hearts spoke to us freely, there was no inhibition between what our hearts knew us to be and what we knew ourselves to be. But along the way many of us were forced by our own hands, and at the guidance of other hands, to conform to the reality of the mundane.
And many of us have regrets regarding those concessions. Better we regret early in life and make amends. Amends to family, to friends, to God. To ourselves.
I hope to lessen the regrets in my heart. This is a long process. And hard.
My dad is dying.
My mother is hurting.
My sister is my best friend, and she is the strongest person I know. That is saying a lot. I know some strong fucking people! But none that have borne what she has and are still standing. So here I am, sucked into emotions I have no idea how to express.
Trying to steer clear of being numb. I’d rather experience all these emotions at once than none at all.
I’d rather know the love I recall from my youth and all the pain that might follow (and has) than not ever have the pain at all. Even pain and heartache have their blessings.
I have wept in brief, minute snippets, but the day-to-day banalities of life creep in and distract my already divided thoughts. I don’t know my thoughts regarding how I ought feel.
Marco and I were never really close. I love him more than he knows. I feel his regret regarding me. I feel it when I look into his eyes. I know if he could do it over he would be more involved. He would tell me he loves me as I was growing up. I know it, but that time is gone.
But he was good role model in other ways. I learned thing he didn’t even realize he was teaching me. And many of his mistakes became reminders for me to not make as I raise my own children.
I wish things had been different between us, but I can’t change it. Neither can he. That time is gone.
All we have is NOW. That’s it. All any of us have is now. That’s all we ever will have. We have to stop gambling on the uncertain future. No days are promised any of us.
Too many of us live as if we have so much time. We defer so much. We hold onto things instead of our relationships. Your things are worth nothing to you when you are departing this life.
When death comes we are not taking anything with us. We leave it all behind. It might be great for family to leave a bunch of shit for them, but all the better to leave them with great memories of love and laughter.
I don’t subscribe to a belief in fate. We make of our lives what we make of them. Much is shaped by circumstances, but even those can be overcome. Especially when we align ourselves with the idea of living our lives and not just letting life make something of itself. Life is just life. Good happens to good and bad alike. So too does bad happen to bad and good alike.
It’s up to each of us, individually, to make good of our brief time above ground.
We make our own fate. Life is beautiful. Always. I refuse to see it otherwise. I have seen it as a horrible thing before and I cannot go there again. My outlook is forever changed and to that end I hope to continue to lessen my own regrets. Still working on that shit.
I love you, Ma.
I love you, Katrina,
I love you, Marco.
And I have far fewer regrets than even I could have imagined.
It has been a long time since I have published anything on this blog. I have been quite remiss in my writing in general, but specifically here. This is the place I tend to put more of myself into my words, the place I share more of who I am. The following is exceptionally personal. I have felt myself slipping into some internal abyss, a place of my own creation. I have felt despair trying to take hold and pull me into a perceived helplessness. I know better, but the call is sometimes hard to ignore.
I had hoped to write something so very profound and touching and meaningful, but my mind it seems has got the best of me. I am lost to emotion and feeling, and light depression has found me this day and has refused to let me go.
This man I am today would be unrecognizable to the boy I had been years ago. That boy was full of love and hope and care for others. He was full of despair too, but he hid that well. I suppose I have continued to become better at the hiding part. But I have become something else as well. The tackling of some less-savory parts of my self of yesteryear has opened me to a monster I do not like. The pain I sought to escape has been loosed upon others through the cracks within my own heart.
I am at times a burden upon my own psyche, but only when I stop to think about where I’ve been, where I am, and where I may be headed. I do not like myself in this current state. I always feel as though I ought be far better. I always feel a monster. I always feel others’ pain and take it as a personal assault upon my heart.
I break my own heart far too often.
I am a product of so much pain and internal conflict. I am my own worst enemy. I am too feeling. I am empathetic to a fault. Though I most times suppress it, the emotions always catch me and overcome me and tear at my overburdened heart. I am lost to them even now, even as I write, even as I pour out these confusing and confounding words. I am overcome.
I so very much hate being alone, and that fact has led me to make many a poor decision. I have had to learn to like myself at times when I was want to curse my name and existence. Still I hate being alone. Still I find myself making decisions based on physical comfort when my heart screamed warnings upon warnings upon warnings. And I see that I have become no better than any other man who has lost himself in his desires and the simple pleasure of the flesh.
I despise hypocrisy, and I see my own in the mirror of my heart. For I have wanted love and lately have made of it a plaything. I have been the heartbreaker of my life for so long that I had begun to excuse myself for the breaking of others’ as well. Hypocrite.
“Don’t become jaded, Wayne.” The words spoken to me by a very good friend and wife of a very respected retired officer. She said those words to me several years ago. My own heart had been trampled and I felt so much pain that I was unable to hide it. I always tried to not fall into the trap of holding accountable the people I meet for the actions of those who might have hurt me dearly in the past. But I had become jaded and conflicted.
But I still believe in love. I am still capable of love. I still want love. I have just lost my way, and I am seeking my way back to that path. I hope to see it when it presents itself and to be open to it as well. And I am truly sorry to any I have hurt while I have been so lost in the wilderness of a broken heart.
On the evening of September 13, 2016, I became a first-time grandfather. I am still somewhat in a state of disbelief. But I am so very hopeful and happy as well. It is a bit surreal, even now, two days later.
I have loved my children as best any father can: love in the sense of dedication and purpose and the desire for their well-being. But the amount of hope I hold for my grandson seems so very different.
I understand I am less responsible for him than I ever had been for my older children and even less so for my younger ones (my six-year-old boy is now an uncle!). But that means little to nothing in the grand scheme of my mind. In my mind I still hold a great amount of power over this young child, a great deal of potential influence. If I so choose.
Grandfathers have that power. I should know. My own grandfather was such a great influence on me, though I am only in my later years realizing it.
His influence was likely greater than most because he was the premier male role model in my life for my earliest years, and even into my teens he was the only truly active one. But even had the case been different I think he still wielded enough influence to make me realize his importance at this stage of my life.
My grandfather adored me and my sister, and he made sure we knew how proud he was of us at every instance. I have a better understanding of his faults now that I have had a chance as an adult of learning from my mother his human frailties and his demons, but the memories I have of him still are not tarnished. As an adult I know that not one of us is perfect, but children and maybe even more so grandchildren, tend to open our eyes to the distant possibility of near-perfection, at least in some small degree.
I saw and felt such when I looked upon my grandson and held him for the first time yesterday. The future is so very uncertain, but the possibility of its perfection, of its beauty, of its potential, is contained in the beautiful innocence of a newborn. Parents are very connected to the child and their innocence, but grandparents may be a bit wiser and understand the innocence of those children and how it ought not be so readily influenced by the experiences of the world.
Perhaps that is why grandparents are so prone to seemingly spoil grandchildren while at the same time delivering life lessons without the harsh penalties parents sometimes afford children in similar circumstances. Perhaps. My speculation is new and without the benefit of any grand parenting. Perhaps I am simply beginning to grasp better the idea of a grand parent’s love versus a parent’s love. Perhaps I am only now understanding the wisdom of that bond.
With all that has gone before me in these past few years, with all I have experienced, with all I currently find myself steeped in, I am so very overcome with a sense of dedication to all to whom I feel and profess love. All.
God has seen fit to open my eyes to much recently. He has guided me through pitfalls of self-loathing, anger, and denial of self. He has shown me the power of His Love in my life and how it might affect so many I hold as family and friend alike. And His Love for me I am want to share with so many. This experience is but another example of emotive love, higher Love, and His peace. Thank God for the many hardships, heartaches, and disappointments I suffered early in my life. They have helped to make me oh so very appreciative of blessings I had not seen along the way. And now I notice the great many blessings almost each and every day.
It is a great blessing and honor and privilege to be a grandfather. One I intend to not let go to waste.
I am different than I was before, and still I am the same.
We are not static beings. We hold within us variances and modes and compartments. We share bits and pieces of ourselves, and we sometimes become lost to those parts of us revered by others or more comfortable to our base whims. We put on a show, and sometimes we become the show. Sometimes the show defines us.
No man is an island. Those who try to be one usually fall short of anything even resembling a fulfilled life. I had not sought to be anything other than happy, but my life did not turn out as I had hoped. Mistakes are not the end of life. They are an important part of it. Life lessons and experiences are so much more potent when made from mistakes, from heartache and heartbreak.
I am come full circle with much wisdom in the journey. I am the boy of yesterday, wide eyed and full of wonder. And I am the man of the present, made of knowledge of the world and forged of pain and suffering. Love is so much more potent and demanding of my being than ever it had been before, but it is no less inviting. It is no less impactful.
I feel deeply because of the relationships I have nurtured. I love my brothers and sisters who serve causes and ideals others so easily take for granted and find such false fault. But such love is Agape (Gr) and only part of the heart and soul. The love of brothers is great, but the love of home and family is what keeps us centered and human. It is what makes us whole.
I welcome that awakening. I have missed that part of myself. I had nearly forgotten he existed. And I now recall a self of many years ago, a young man without the pains and losses of my present self, and I see the future as a bright and wonderful place no matter what hardships might come to pass.
Love is a wonderful thing. The hardest of men feel it most deeply. The hardest of men fight for it most fervently.
If an angel should cross your path and shine a light upon it, do not take such a thing lightly. Angels are rare in dealings with men. Angels are blessings. An angel upon Earth is precious and to be cherished.
If you should find an angel upon your path of life be sure to cherish, adore, and love her.
Before she wandered in he was a rudderless vessel
Caught in currents great and small
Running hither and yon
With sails to catch only changing winds.
Before she found him he had given up hope
And had lost sight of being saved
For the blank vastness of the future
Was an ominous storm upon a vast ocean.
Before she saved him he had only been lured to deep waters
By treacherous siren songs and murmuring waters
Deep and wide and full of hidden dangers
Formed in emptiness and filled with nothingness.
After she rescued him he saw stars in the clear night sky
He rested on shores of soft sand and warm breezes
And he healed fully and barely noticed
The soft scars of earthly traps from whence she had pulled him.
It is not an easy thing for some men to ponder the intricacies and convoluted appearance of love. It is left to the fairer of the species such matters of the heart. But that is not to say we don’t think on it. Some of us are simply better at expressing such pondering and putting into words our thoughts upon the matter.
As I have found myself lately in a most pensive mood, I have been attempting to get back into writing and working on some of the larger projects I had started a little while ago. I recently worked on my very first screenplay and am working on polishing that up for a possible project (who knows, maybe?). But my mind lately has been stuck on love. And Love.
To wit, I wrote the following earlier:
That muse who has found her way into my psyche has opened the floodgates of the whimsies of the teenage boy I was, the young man who saw love unfiltered and through yet-to-be-spoiled eyes and with an undamaged heart. My mind comes back to love of the human variety and that borne of the eternal and Godly-manifested. The rush of purely positive emotion is enough to make me lose my breath, cause my heart to skip a beat, and blur my vision in tears. For such feelings are not to be taken lightly. Those men who find love of this nature are lucky beyond measure, and the stout and proud warriors in this category know this. Their love is profound, and me finding this again at this time in my life is an amazing thing. I am changed back to youth in certain aspects though tempered with the knowledge of today’s self that love has even more meaning, even more importance. This love is something I am so very loathe to lose again. It is something I understand to be so very worth fighting for in even the worst of circumstances…
That love might find a misspent heart, for many ‘tis is but a dream.
Some travel the course of their lives in search of it,
Finding only that which their cold hearts allow them to see.
Others stumble blindly upon it to only fall painfully upon their pride,
Failing to recognize the gift Fate has placed before them.
And yet others of us begin to falsely think ourselves cursed,
Believing Love has been lost due to ill choices made.
But Love makes fools of prideful men
While making believers of the faithful,
For if we hold to faith and honor and goodness
Love returns and nourishes and heals and raises us to light.
God does not forsake us, and His Love is the basis of all love.
If a man should hold to his love of God and God’s love of man,
The pure and righteous love of a woman is something he is duty bound to cherish,
For that love is divine.
From time to time even the best of us fall prey to our own weaknesses, our own fallacies regarding life in general and our individual lives in very specific terms. It is no great thing for some to escape such trappings, yet for others there seems to be little else more debilitating. So too have I found myself lacking of late, slipping into the doldrums and trappings of the mundane.
We are meant for greatness if greatness is what we believe ourselves capable. And we are definitely that. Capable.
So there is definitely no time like the present to own greatness. It does not come to the silent, the still, the patient; it is captured by the wary and watchful and eager participant. We ought be that person as often as we are capable, and we are capable so long as breath fills our lungs and so long as we keep our minds sharp and focused on the goals we set before us.
No time like the present, my friends, to get out there and experience the life you dream of.
For me, that is the pursuit of some artistic goals. Writing being one I had let slip far behind until some recent years. However, lately I seem to have fallen back into the mundane and predictable life of the clock-punching drone (sort of–my work is definitely not mindless and entails a bit of excitement, not to mention the great people I work with, but it is not the stuff of my poet side). So I have made myself this promise. Each night as I sit before my blank screen preparing to write a bit more on the next novel in my Argent series, if I am unable to get started I will write at least one poem.
To get things started, I will share one I wrote not too long ago:
My Heart
My heart, this simplistic thing, at odds with my mind,
A convoluted mass of thoughts and derivations.
The two do battle, yet my heart wins most times.
I wonder at those things lost to me
And those looming on the horizon:
Shall I ever be made of the misplaced youth
I sometimes look upon in pain and despair,
Or might I mature enough to capture the purse
Of the great warrior poet who comes to me in dreams?
Will love be an ephemeral thing
Or shall it come to me anew,
And might I find it in places not yet seen
Or in plain sight before me?
©Wayne A Delk
I began my law enforcement career at the tender age of 27. Not quite so tender, but not the green age of 21 (the bare minimum). I had been a teacher for four years prior to joining the ranks of the thin blue line. And I was worried about being able to learn the job. I had not been around guns of any kind growing up in Atlanta in a gun-free home. I was worried about being able to shoot well. Not just well, actually. I wanted to excel. At everything. But especially shooting. Not sure if that’s a testosterone thing or a competitive thing or what. But I wanted to kick ass, take names, all while chewing gum and blowing bubbles.
So it came as no surprise to me that I had a natural knack for it. The first day my class got to fire our handguns on the firing line I did exceptionally well. I remember Instructor Sullivan commenting something along the lines of, “Those people who haven’t shot before are generally easier to teach. They haven’t developed any bad habits yet.” So there I was, minding my own business, when I became that guy. The student in the class to prove the instructor’s point.
I went on to get the Firearms Award for my class. (Though I lost the Academic Award–still haven’t gotten over that one.) That stuck with me for the length of my 18-year-long career in law enforcement. I had accomplished something so very important. Shooting is one of the lowest occurring tasks we perform during our day-to-day duties, but it is one of the two highest in liability (driving being the other). It is important to train long, hard, and correctly. And to be able to shoot well in a training environment is very important, for when the real shooting begins and bullets are coming back at you, well let’s just say performance sometimes decreases a little (a lot).
So now I work at the academy, as a firearms instructor, the manager of the Weapons Training Unit (Range Master, even!), a qualified expert if you will, and I am reminded of lessons taught me when I came through the academy. I remember not the specifics of what was said to me while I was learning to shoot, but I do recall some of the actual thought processes I was made to endure and suffer and relate to those officers who had come before me and had prevailed in combat and those who had not and had paid the ultimate sacrifice.
The ability to shoot a pistol well is a really good thing. It is definitely important. More important, I think, is the understanding of what that skill actually entails. The becoming of a sheepdog is part skill and part mindset. The proper melding of the two is pivotal in the creation of the consummate warrior. It is a difficult thing to attempt to explain to anyone who hasn’t made the mental decision and preparation to take a life in defense of an innocent life or his own.
To dream of a society without evil is the dream of the sheep. To dream of the fight against ever-present Evil and to prepare relentlessly for said fight is the dream of the sheepdog. Sharpen your physical skills as often as you can through practice, and maintain your mental edge through daily thought processes. Stay frosty, sheepdogs. In all ways, stay frosty.
Have you ever had a really strange dream that woke you and then stayed with you all day?
I’m sure some of you have. It’s a weird thing, I suppose, but not anything so very out of the ordinary. Yet for those in my line of work, some dreams are telling regarding what fears we suppress. I guess dreams are telling for everyone else in this regard, but when part of your job is the constant possibility of using deadly force in the course of your duties those dreams can have a really telling and potentially chilling effect on the dreamer.
I awoke in the early morning hours of November 11, 2015, having had one such dream. Or perhaps it was a strange series of dreams that morphed into the one which awoke me. And of course it involved the use of deadly force, but it was not in the performance of police duties. It was simply to stop some who were in the act of killing others. But it was so very real and surreal. It embodied several fears that have affected me in many different ways throughout my career. And these fears don’t necessarily affect in a negative way.
Taking the life of any person is not something I relish. I have a distinct understanding of my duties and my commitment to them is unwavering. That said, I am in no rush to take the life of anyone. However, I am ready and willing to use whatever force necessary to prevent anyone from causing such harm to me, my brothers, or anyone else in the public that might severely injure or kill. I have trained for this my entire career and have known the righteous warrior within me for much of my adult life. But such knowledge and training does not negate my humanity.
Public safety is one of those professions that exposes its workers to all manner of injury, mayhem, and death. We do get to see the worst in people and the worst of humanity. We get to see the ugly side of the world in which we all live, though many refuse to accept as reality. And that, I suppose, is a good thing. Good in that those willing and able to work to keep such abject Evil at bay do so on a regular basis. But we still remain human. We still are affected. We still must face the demons we daily push into our subconscious.
Sometimes those demons come to us in nightmares. I’m pretty sure every cop has had the really messed up dream in which the service weapon would not fire. Or it fired and the round just sort of fell out of the gun, useless. Or every pull of the trigger was a simple click on a dead primer. Or the trigger would not pull to the rear. Or all of the above and then some. And sometimes we dream of the instances our guns work just fine, but it is the situation we must use them that is the disturbing part of the dream.
Children always have gotten me in my work. I do not like visiting pain on children. I do not relish being a part of the pain any child must bear. And I have prayed I would not ever have to use deadly force on a child, any child, for any reason. So of course I had a nightmare about children in deadly force encounters. Of course.
There were a few dreams that morphed into one another. But the one that got me and awoke me was a doozy. I won’t get into the vivid details (and if you’ve read any of my fiction you are well aware I can be quite vivid in my description of violence, gun or otherwise), but I will give a little info on the overall feel. Active shooter type situation. People being shot at random. No law enforcement yet on scene. I am there off duty. Hunkered down and hiding a few unknown children behind me. Of course my pistol is in hand and I am sighting in on one of the two shooters. I am preparing to take quick and speedy action to stop the killing.
But the shooters are a husband and wife team and they have their two children in front of them. They are crouched behind their children using them as shields. Head shots. Both of them down. Then the two children pick up the guns to start shooting again. Of course I am left with but one choice. Remember, I dream vivid details. It’s not pretty, but I do my duty. I stop their killing.
And I wake up nearly in tears. Yeah, we’re all cold, heartless creatures I suppose. I mean, who dreams about shooting parents and their kids? Nobody but us cops, right?
God bless, warriors.
Wayne A Delk 