Free Pieces of You by J F Elferdink Page A

trying to describe love using a one-year-old child’s vocabulary but, nevertheless, I am trying :
     
    In my vision Mark suddenly appeared, not just with me but in me; and not just physically inside my body but as much a part of me as my own body, making me almost cry out with the joy of it. The sensation was far more intense than even the most passionate love-making.
    The only expression which comes to mind is a biblical description of marriage: ‘the two shall become one’ but I had been married three times and had never experienced the potency of Mark’s presence in that dream . E ven that phrase does not succeed in capturing the essence of what was far beyond a sexual encounter.
    Although physically pleasurable, it was much more than the conjoining of a man and a woman’s bodies; it was the sharing of the totality of two beings in such a way that they were indivisible.
    The dream’s physical sensations were temporary and to relive the pleasure would be no more possible than reliving the pain of childbirth. I was wholly convinced that the assurance of oneness with Mark would remain. During the dream we had entered into a pact between our spirits.
    I couldn’t wait to share my vision with Mark; I decided to borrow the money and make arrangements to fly to Switzerland. 
     
     

16
MARK’S SECOND STOP
     
    Rooted to the hospital bed, Mark wished with all his being that he could make contact with Martin. He could never tire of studying his son; drinking in all the little details of his body and facial features, even the tear stains.
    Mark suspected that his own parents had gazed at him in much the same way when the Navy had flown them to his bedside at the Naval Hospital in Okinawa.
    He remembered nothing of his first weeks in the hospital and retained only fragmentary memories from most of his parents’ visit. The nurses had later told him that his mother spent her time sitting beside his bed for the greater part of every day, just as Martin seemed to be doing forty years later.
    His parents hadn’t been allowed to visit him at all during the first three weeks of his recovery . A shortage of antibiotics at the makeshift base clinic where he had been operated upon made him a high risk for infection . Even after he had been transferred to Okinawa, an infection had initially threatened Mark’s life.
    After their visit, his mother had written to him that when his dad, a relatively unemotional man, had first seen him all taped up and with tubes everywhere, he had cried like a baby. That was a scene Mark had never been able to envision; it was so unlike the dad he knew and loved.
     
    Remembering, Mark wondered how he had made it through those dark days after his parents returned to Chicago.
    He was certain that without the friends he had met in the hospital, including Peggy, the pretty nurse who several years later became his wife , he would have given up his fight to live.
    What he recalled from that time was wrenching agony offset only by visions that were so revolting that the return of pain was almost a relief.
    The friends from that period were friends still. Even Peggy had remained a friend after their divorce.
    In spite of the bond of shared horror, or maybe because of it, they never shared war stories. Mark had extended that rule to his family. No one knew what he had done, or had been through, in Vietnam. Maybe that was why it felt like some of the weight of the world was lifted when he had unloaded those memories onto Bob.
    Now, Mark dearly wanted to share some of his stories with Martin; he no longer feared being exposed and wanted his son to really know him, to understand both the good and the ugly in his d ad.
    Mark was certain that this would change the father-son relationship; maybe they’d become more like best friends. Even if some of the revelations came as a shock to Martin, he knew that his son had become a man under his watch and would always love him.
    Some day he might share all but the worst of