It has been ten months since my father died.

He has become a collective with my mother, he is now “they,” as in, “they’ve both died within the past three years,” or “why are they dead, it doesn’t make sense.”

They were both the youngest of their respective sibling groups, and both of them the first of their siblings to die.

Stupidly, I think about conveyor belts.  How they ‘stepped’ onto the conveyor belt when they were born, and were moved along the belt throughout their lives.  You sort of expect people to drop off the end of the conveyor belt in the same order in which they embarked on their journey.  You arrive first, you leave first.  

You don’t expect people to suddenly tumble off the side.

You sit with many stupid, stupid thoughts in grief.  

*

For example:

(stay with me, it will circle back around, I promise.)

When I was in Sierra Leone, more than 10 years ago, the staff at the Ebola Treatment Units would dig huge, deep holes on the edges of the complex, and that’s where they would burn the garbage.

Everything went in the trash pits.  Food, plastic, paper, medical waste, biohazard, empty kerosene containers full of used sharps, whatever.  Into the pit.  They’d pour gasoline over it, and toss in a match.  WHOOSH.  Conflagration.

(One time, trying to prepare for the rainy season, they built a wooden shelter over the garbage pit, a shelter like you see at county parks, covering the picnic areas.  The intent was to prevent the garbage pit from flooding before it could be burned.

And then they next time they burned the garbage, they poured so much gasoline on the trash that when it exploded into flame, it caught the shelter roof on fire and the whole thing burned to the ground.

But I digress.)

A coworker and I were out at our holding center, miles away from the main ETU.  Staff had just dug a new garbage pit, far outside the red zone, next to an enormous avocado tree.  It was completely empty, too new for any garbage to have been dumped.  And it was a DEEP pit.

We stood at the edge, silently looking down at it.

After I moment, I said, “I wonder how deep that is.”

My coworker, who was well over six feet tall, replied, “Let’s find out.”

And he jumped down into the pit.

*

Spoiler alert — it was much more than six feet deep.

(When Sierra Leoneans decide to dig a pit, they dig a Big Fucking Pit.)

It took us a while to figure out how to get him out of there — it involved him running as fast as he could across the bottom and then starting to scramble up the side where I stood, and then I would grab his arm and throw myself backwards onto the red dirt at the edge, maximizing his momentum to both remove him from the pit AND prevent myself from falling in there with him.

But first I took a picture.

He’s at the bottom of this huge hole in the ground, laughing in the sunlight, us both having realized how dumb this was, regretting nothing.

*

Grief is a Sierra Leoneon garbage pit.

Incidentally, it is surprising how functional you can be while sitting at the bottom of that proverbial hole in the ground.

Wake up in the morning, take a shower, make coffee, eat breakfast, answer e-mails, still sitting in the pit.

Go to work, talk to other humans, have Teams meetings, teach classes, still sitting in the pit.

Fly to Austin, quit your job at 35,000 feet, visit family, still in the pit.

Fly back to Seattle, sign on for a temp job in Alaska while at 35,000 feet, drive home, still in the pit.

Fly home from Alaska four months later, crawl into bed, and stay there for a month.

Still in the pit.

*

Conveyor belts, holes in the ground of the red red dirt of west Africa.

These are stupid thoughts.

But how else do you conceptualize what is happening to you, what has happened to a world that suddenly jerked to a stop five and a half years ago and has only now, slowly, started to rotate again?

*

We can’t see the bell curve.

We are so far out on the Z axis, so far inside our own heads and hearts, that we can’t see the gentle and inevitable rise, peak, and fall of the line of our lives, of our lived experiences, the plotting of the X and Y coordinates in the background.

I sometimes think I can see very little save in retrospect.  The irony of living facing forward, but only seeing truth in the rearview mirror.

But there is inevitability in this world, there is chaos but also routine, disruption balanced by pattern.  If there is nothing else that grounds me, it is that time passes, that for the agony of one moment, there will be another that follows where there is ease.

I’m still in the pit.  I’ll probably spend the rest of my life here.

But the pit itself has changed.  It isn’t 9 feet deep anymore.  It isn’t even six feet deep.  Were my coworker in this pit now, he could likely just step out, easily, with me holding his hand for balance.

And someday it will be the faintest depression in the red dirt, something you would miss if you weren’t looking for it, the tiniest inverted bell curve resting in the earth, memories of garbage and fire and laughter and sunlight smoothed over with time, the flattened end of the line steadfast on its endless path to forever.