Grief

     Six brawny men and two eighteen-wheelers arrived today at eight.  By noon the four-thousand square-foot clinic was gutted and its body parts stowed like the shanks and entrails of cattle at a slaughterhouse.  The floors were littered with debris, and although it was mostly shreds of paper and cellophane that I kicked around in the shocking stillness after the trucks departed, it seemed more like bits of bone and sinewy tendon that had been shed in the execution of the move-out.
     All the life was taken out of the clinic in those few hours.  I walked about in a fog, carrying a black Hefty bag and filling it with exsanguinated KOH and Hibiclens bottles, dislocated printer parts, ligamentous telephone cords, boxes that had been excoriated from their original contents.  Those boxes used to hold antibiotics, IV tubing, spirometry mouthpieces, EKG leads, IUD's, Coban, Kerlex, syringes, medicine--the apparatus of healing.
     Alone with the clean-up, I had time to think.
     But I couldn't think.  I was like a sleepwalker, going back and forth from the clinic to the dumpsters, to the clinic, to the dumpsters, flattening cardboard, gathering paper clips, peeling tape off walls, sweeping, wiping, checking, rechecking.  I hosed out the garbage cans.  I tore up signs.  I watched as the space inside these walls seemed to expand and then merge into a great void.
     It seemed to me that without things in the building, there could be no thoughts.  My mind was blank.  Without the people and things which had afforded me the possibility of being someone, I was no longer a differentiated human being.
     Is this why God created the world: to have things in order to manifest his thoughts?  To have people who could reflect, by way of being, aspects of the divine?  This is that old philosophical question about objective reality.  Without things or beings to manifest the divine, would God exist?  Without people, is there God?  If a tree falls in the forest, and no one observes it, has it fallen?
     When I returned home, there was a drizzle of rain so delicate it wasn't falling, but stayed suspended in the air.  My face and hair got misted as I stood in my driveway.
     Then I walked to the garden, unlatched the gate, opened the chicken coop.  Every evening when I come home, I let the chickens out to free-range until dark.  This week, I've been hoeing a spring garden into being.  There are so many weeds strangling the earth that it seems an impossible undertaking.  But if I clear three square yards a day, in a month I'll have a garden plot that's ninety square yards--enough for vegetables all summer.  It's satisfying to hoe, despite the blisters.  It's cathartic to yank out the gangly roots of bahia, to rip open the seams of centipede grass, and to unearth so much rattlesnake root that I can eat the white tubers to stave off thirst.
     Tonight I stayed in the garden long past when the chickens went inside to roost.
     I stayed through the arrival of the mosquitoes, and past when they departed.  It got so dark I couldn't see what I was doing.  Rain began to fall in earnest, but still I didn't go inside.  I hoed with resoluteness.  I hoed as though something momentous depended on it.  I hoed without thinking any thoughts.  I hoed and hoed, until my shoulders ached.