Blasted Life

In case my voice is unintelligible or you just don't feel like watching a video, here it is all typed up:

I've noticed that I keep making the same types of home movies. They all feature the typical highlights and happy moments with family...but often with some melancholy undertones. I figured that I was just trying to do what we're all doing when we make home movies: trying to capture the good times so that we'll be able to reflect on them later. But the moment that I realized the truth behind why I'm so desperate to record our lives, my heart seized up with a pang of something terrible clicking unwittingly into place. Some realizations are so painful that it seems like only an idiot would think to entertain them. As someone raised inside the LDS faith, for as long as I can remember, I've felt a responsibility to do my part in ensuring that my family stays together forever. Even though my views have become secular as an adult, this feeling of responsibility has not changed. These pictures and movies are my meager attempts at thwarting mortality and even time itself all while knowing that this can't be done. Not really. But maybe that's okay.

Sometimes  I get so scared that I have to remind myself to breathe. When I tell you what I'm afraid of, you'll think it's ridiculous but please hear me anyway. I'm scared that heaven is real. Because I've seen it and even now it looks back at me through the thick warped glass of time--always inviting me in; always from the other side of the same endless glass. I'm scared to think that heaven is a truly necessary place that each person has to find a way to make for themselves...because I don't know if I can. It's like I can see the pieces needed to build it but assembling and holding them in place indefinitely is too big a burden for this lone, scattered mind. I'm scared that my disorganized attempts at creating my own solace will come crumbling down the moment that I face real loss. I'm so scared. I want...no. I need for Heaven..and Meaning...and God, Love, Purpose, Beauty and Justice to all be objective things that exist independent of individual perspective. Like proud thick pillars that are ever vigilant to do the work of keeping humanity propped up instead of the other way around. I need the Love I feel for my family to be a physical manifestation that will wrap us all in its warm golden glow and cocoon us from time and suffering.

But. While there's no doubt that Love is very much real, its domain is the realm of the subjective, making what I need from it impossible. And it breaks my heart. Because Love feels so much bigger than that. It feels like it should easily overcome physical possibility and help us transcend time. Regardless, what I can do is record a few snippets of our lives and see that those recordings are protected for at least a while--maybe long enough that someday our great-great-grand kids could see this...and hear how I loved them one hundred years before they took their first breath.

And who knows? Maybe all these attempts to reason everything out have only muddled my ability to see the truth and after I die, some part of my consciousness will continue to exist.  Maybe, if I've outlived her, I'll be greeted by my mom and my soul will get to collapse into her arms just the way it happens in my dreams. I hope so. But I try not to look for what I hope to find and instead to just...look. And not presume to know the answers to questions I'm not even sure are the right ones to ask. For whatever reason, my adult mind has been unable to weave the supernatural aspects inherent in the beautiful ideology of my childhood into the fabric of my reality.

Even so, I will never let go of you people that I love so much. I will take you, roll you up tightly, and bury you so deeply in my heart that on that quiet night when death comes for you, she will never find you here.  Instead she'll find the force of all your lives shining in my chest so brightly as to chase off the dark of night and her along with it. I will do this and I will not give a care to the impossibility that I know it to be. But. Just in case, I'll also make this video.