Last May, with two dear friends of mine, I had the privilege of touring Iceland, a country where trolls necessarily exist. I remember thinking that our landing there was probably not altogether dissimilar to when Leif Erikson landed in the New World, he with his longship and us with our rental Kia—we felt like very great explorers. Further, like Erikson, there are mysteries shrouding our exploits; just exactly what we got up to in the land of the trolls will most likely never be known on this side of eternity. There is one thing, however, I will share. It’s a fact that scratches at my mind every time someone asks about our travels. The closest country to Iceland, Greenland, is simultaneously more north, south, east, and west than its troll-harboring neighbor. Effectively, this means that regardless of where you are in Iceland, Greenland will stretch further on the map in every direction. Now, when I first heard this, I sort of wrote it off as one of those gimmicky facts one might find on a backwater internet article, probably titled something like, “10 Reasons Greenland is Better than Iceland!” However, on an excursion to the northernmost shores of the island, I saw what I assumed were clouds far off on the horizon. But with the air being as cold as it was and the sunlight as brilliant, the color in that landscape, I feel, was enhanced in ways I have yet to see anywhere else; I found even white to have more depth and complexity than I had ever prior known. There was this certain feeling of smallness that overtook me when I realized that what was set against the far-off waves were not clouds, but the ice cliffs of Greenland. So tall, they were, that where clouds began and they ended was not entirely clear. When I was eight years old, my dad had a stroke. When I think of that time now, the same feeling of smallness takes me.
As was the experience of many children during the 2008 financial crisis, when I was a child, playing was often done in spite of the context of the world. A common backdrop of my dinosaurs having their battles or the games of hide and seek I would play with my cousins were the concerned and sometimes argumentative voices of my parents. It’s funny how the mind of a child can drown out the yelling of adults with the roars of a Tyrannosaurus or the, “Here I come!”‘s initiating a game. But the day my dad had his stroke, there was no device of mine capable of silencing the cries of my parents. Around the middle of the day, my father stumbled into the house and drunkenly went up the stairs to his study. I remember thinking that it was strange for him to be home, as at the time, the financial crisis of 2008 was in full swing and he had been spending every waking hour working his new job as a crawl space salesman. However, seeing him at home during the day harkened back to an even earlier point in my youth when he had his own business and could hang around the house all he wanted. I still remember those times, the sun shining through the dining room windows and me watching him cook us lunch. I remember the smell of scrambled eggs, eggs which should only be cooked with, “A super-hot, like, as hot as possible pan,” according to the man who can’t cook anything besides scrambled eggs. From the yells of him and my mother, however, I soon figured that this was not one of those lazy and late lunch days. And come to think of it, there was no sun in the house either.
My father, stubborn as he is, did not want to go to the hospital. At the time, I didn’t understand what had happened, but I later came to learn that he had passed out in a crawl space and upon his waking, had driven himself home to “sleep it off.” When my mother found out—she could tell something was wrong as soon as he walked in the door—she began yelling that he needed to go to the hospital. This was answered with a resounding, “Too expensive!” from my father, who was now slurring his words. My family was very poor and the thought of all of those hospital bills discouraged him from the wonders of modern medicine. My mother, on the other hand, eight months pregnant, did not care about his complaints and loaded me, my younger brothers, and my cousin Seanna into the old minivan. My mother sat in the driver’ seat, we sat in the back, and the passenger seat remained open. She was visibly angry. We waited for my father.
“I’m not going to the hospital Maria!” he eventually yelled, bursting out the door. He proceeded to fall down the three large steps that led into the garage. Stubbornness and financial worries mean little when you fall down a flight of stairs. My cousin Seanna, looking at me, and then my father on the garage floor, and then me again, laughed nervously. I followed suit. My mother did not.
The events after that day are somewhat blended together in my mind. Weeks of hospital visits, sleeping in waiting rooms, and doctors giving bad news tend to do that when the general understanding is that things won’t get better. That said, I have two memories that stand out from the rest.
In the dead of one night, while my mother was sleeping in my father’s hospital room, I wandered down to the cafeteria on the second floor of the hospital. It was empty and dark, and there was no moon to shine through the large windows that lay on the left side of the room. However, in this darkness, in this cold and uninviting space, there was a single ray of hope. That night, hope took the form of a solitary donut sitting on a platter that was illuminated by some unseen light from on high. Now, growing up, I was not a thief nor was I adventurous in any sense of the word, but hope was demanding me to take it in my hands. Also, there was just something so inviting about that donut. I inched toward it, looking here and there as I did, making sure I was truly the only inhabitant of the cafeteria. When I reached the donut, there were no thoughts or decisions. My body acted on its own. I reached out, creating an image not unlike The Creation of Adam, and took the donut in my small hands, grasping hope as never any man had. And as I stared in utter awe at its majesty, I was interrupted by a voice, the voice of a small woman with a thick Chinese accent yelling, “You touch you buy!” Hope, in this case, had turned out to be the forbidden fruit, and this woman, surely an angel set to guard that paradise, was now ejecting me from Eden.
The other vivid memory I have is when I prayed for my father. We were at the stage in his sickness where things were not getting better. He could no longer swallow any food and could say only a few select words. I remember sitting outside his door, against the opposite wall on the cold linoleum floor, hearing the doctors tell my mother that there was nothing to do for him anymore. I don’t remember what my mother said, but I do remember her face. It was a face I was becoming quite familiar with. Her eyebrows were slightly scrunched and there was a pain in her eyes. Nonetheless, she was calculating.
Later, while my mother was talking with my aunt in the lobby, I walked into my father’s room. It was nighttime and the blue lights from the machines mixed with the dim fluorescents, creating a surreal sort of space. My father’s hair—always spiked up—was down. I had never seen this before. I approached his bedside and saw that his eyes were half open and that his was mouth moving a bit. Even right next to the bed, I could scarcely hear him. I leaned in next to his mouth. “Conor, can you pray for me buddy?” he whispered. Now, I’ve tried to write of what happened next before, but I feel as though every time that I have, I’ve either blown things a bit out of proportion or have tried to imbue the situation with an almost false meaning or purpose. So, instead of that, I will simply say what happened. I laid my hands on my father’s neck. I prayed, “God, please heal my dad,” and my father looked at me and smiled. The next day, he walked out of the hospital with no traces of the stroke.
When I think of them now, these two memories seem almost opposed. Or perhaps a better way to put it, these memories don’t seem like they should fit together in the same space in my head—there is almost this sense that the capacity I have for remembering the stroke shouldn’t be able to hold these two stories at the same time. How is it that I remember something as inane as a stolen donut and something as important as my father’s healing with the same degree of clarity? Further, how is it that I know in my heart both memories are completely true? This is where, in the shadow of Greenland, that feeling of smallness overtakes me.
As I have thought about Greenland as well as the memories I have connected with my father’s stroke, something occurred to me. Perhaps that feeling of smallness is common to both situations because there is something quite incomprehensible about each of them. When I looked at Greenland from Iceland, for instance, I couldn’t conceive that there were other places in Iceland where I would see Greenland stretching out in a completely different direction. In the same way, when I think back to the memory of the donut and the memory of the prayer, the space between them seems almost too vast for me to comprehend their occurring within a couple of days of each other. For a while with Greenland, I simply ignored the fact, thinking that it was probably some trick of the maps, and focused more on what I immediately saw across the water. Similarly, with the memories of the stroke, I have often chosen to privilege the prayer and ignore the more childish story about the donut. When you cannot see every end of something, it sometimes feels better to look away. But one cannot forever ignore the vastness of Greenland when they can see it from almost any coast in Iceland. One cannot accept one story and deny another when they both are remembered equally clearly.
The connection of my memories of the stroke to my recent Iceland trip has served me a single purpose; perhaps the truth is like Greenland and people are like those onlookers in Iceland. We can tell its vastness, and even though we can’t fathom all ends of it, at different points, we can see it from different angles. These angles, however, do not change it as a whole. Regarding those memories of the stroke, I think that my trouble has been that I don’t know quite how to reconcile that moment when I was a child grabbing a donut with that other moment when I felt like an adult praying for healing. Truly, I am not sure that I ever will understand how these things can both be true. However, I do know that truth is bigger than what I can see, and if it wasn’t, it probably wouldn’t be very grand anyway. Part of Greenland’s beauty is that one cannot see it all from any one point in Iceland. Perhaps the beauty of truth is similar; one cannot see how it all works together from any one point in their life.