Her Guardian

Her Guardian

I had never experienced the pain and sorrow of losing a parent during my childhood. My heart had never been broken into so many pieces the way my husband’s has. He lost his mother when he was 13 to a genetic deficiency that she possessed and he inherited. When our daughter was born, she was monitored with regular blood screens for this immune deficiency and was diagnosed before she was six months old to have inherited the same deficiency from her dad. This has bonded my daughter and her father in ways that I will never fathom. In early 2007, my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer, possibly a secondary consequence of his immune deficiency. He was only 36 at the time. The diagnoses brought into my life something I had never experienced before other than with grandparents, the reality of death. I was unemotional and strong for their sake until the thought occurred that my daughter might lose her father. A favorite song from my high school days had entertained me with its musical component but had not spoken to my heart with its words until that moment occurred. Today, I can’t listen to the song without welling up with tears at the thought of my fatherless daughter.

“Silent Lucidity,” written by Chris DeGarmo, tells a story of a young child dreaming of an adult that he/she was close to that has died. I conclude that it is a child being spoken to because of the tone and language used in the first couple of lines: “Hush now, don't you cry/Wipe away the teardrop from your eye.” (DeGarmo, ll. 1-2) In the first stanza, the speaker reassures the child that “It was all a bad dream/Spinning in you head.” (DeGarmo, ll. 4-5) The speaker puts the child at ease suggesting that the child is dreaming and the pain is not real, “Your mind tricked you to feel the pain/Of someone close to you leaving the game of life.” (DeGarmo, ll. 6-7) Throughout the song, there is a rhyme scheme at the end of each line, but the pattern changes within the stanzas and includes internal rhyme.

I know that my husband has as much love for Brianna, my daughter, as any father could have. I can picture him watching over her and comforting her from beyond the grave as this poem/lyric/song talks about. The author introduces in the second stanza the notion that by dreaming, the child can be reunited again with their lost parent. In order to accomplish this, the child has to learn how to overcome their fears and use their imagination. The author paints the image of this magical place “It’s a place where you will learn/To face your fears, retrace the years/And ride the whims of your mind/Commanding in another world/Suddenly you hear and see/This magic new dimension.” (DeGarmo, ll. 15-20)

The third stanza, or chorus, of the story is a simplified retelling