• Grief’s highs and lows

S. could roll a perfect joint, not too fat, tight and sleek like a little rocket. Decades of practice made perfect. She smoked grass for fifty years, beginning as a roadie with the Bob Seger band and ending in the living room with her old man — that’d be me, still in the living room, more like the half-dead room.

I have tried to contact her a thousand times since she left the living room and the planet four years and two months ago. Every day I try — 1,503 days. I pray in my own way, jagged cries soaked with 80-proof liquor. Sometimes I’m so drunk I figure maybe she’s tokin’ with Jesus. I don’t pray to God. I pray to S. I know S. I don’t know God, only what I read in the Bible and Christian literature, which as far as I can tell are second, third and fourth-hand accounts written by scribes two thousand years ago based on information and reports that were all hearsay — which cynics today would call fake news.

So I’m not surprised when my prayers to God go unanswered. But S. is a different story. I know she would “get back to me” if she could. But in 1,503 days of praying, I have never received a sign, a signal or an inkling of an answer, and if she was somehow aware in an unknown sphere somewhere she would contact me. But nothing. This makes me wonder. The voluminous Christian news says she’s somewhere, my evidence points to nowhere.

So I sit in the half-dead room rolling my own joint, aesthetically unpleasing, and the highs turn to lows and the gin brings me all the way down and I go to bed in the bed she died in and sleep the small death.

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