Impotence

Dictionary.com, because I'm too lazy to get out a book...and looking around, I see that I don't actually own a dictionary hmph ... Dictionary.com defines Impotence as such:

im⋅po⋅tence

  /ˈɪmpətəns/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [im-puh-tuhns] –noun

1.	the condition or quality of being impotent; weakness.

2.	chronic inability to attain or sustain an erection for the performance of a sexual act.

3.	sterility, esp. in the male.

Generally, the idea of impotence, as I've perceived it at least, is the inability of a man to, well, be a man. Not just being unable to create life, but being unable to protect, to care for his wife, to provide for his family, you know, to be a man. ( save the commentary on gender stereotypes for another day)


Knowing your son is gone and never even having the opportunity to do something, to protect him, to save him... well, that is beyond impotence. It is far beyond being a man. It is the indescribable feeling of being snatched up by a piece of your soul and feeling it's thin substance pinched between two awful claws of fate, leaving you dangling in the wind as that piece, that small but important piece, rips away, and all you can do is fall.

Waking up back on the ground, the change isn't always obvious. I mean, you constantly feel the absence, but the things around you, your interactions, seem roughly the same. But then there's the impotence, the kind that there is no procedure to reverse.

Watching the wife you cannot comfort, knowing her pain, but not really knowing her pain...standing in a doorway, watching her in her pajamas, moving with grace and beauty and heartache and pain.

You want to hold her, to help her, to take away her despair... and all you can do is stand because what comfort can you truly offer?


complete and utter impotence.