Going Private

Desert Year is going private sometime in the next few days, as I try to extract and revise some of it for publication in another form.

If you are one of the folks who comes by and you want to continue to have access to it, let me know and I'll add you to the list.

gannetgirlatsbcglobaldotnet

If You're Still Here . . .

and I guess you are, because I got a lovely note from someone this morning telling me so . . .

1) Please visit my Advent blog, if you haven't already, here.

2) As I responded to the person who was kind enough to write, I have finally begun to imagine a framework for a book of some/a little/most/? of this material, so I was thinking about going private while I figure that out. But if this meets a need, I can leave it open.

3) If you have any suggestions, the comments are open.

End of the Year

When I opened this blog, I entitled it Desert Year, not Years.

Did I know, intuitively, that a year would be long enough? Did I hope for some kind of transformation; did I hope that in a year the desert would bloom again?

It's been a good place for me, this blog. Sometimes it's seemed like one long wail ~ against the loss of my beautiful child, against the disappearance of God, against the end of life as I knew it. Sometimes it's been a place in which to digest the trauma of suicide; to come to terms with one of, ironically, life's heaviest and loneliest experiences. Sometimes it's been a place of profoundly moving friendship, as other mothers have generously shared their own sorrows.

But I think it's run its course. I am, surprisingly to me, in a new place, something that's happened in just the last few days. In some ways a harder place ~ I think that I have found my way through an exterior shell of anger and pain and I am going to be left with a deep and pervasive sense of loss. There is not going to be anything to protect me from the reality that my beloved son is truly gone.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a talk by a 60-year-old man, and he mentioned having called his mother over the week-end. Such a casual remark is like a sharp stab into a tender spot for me; when I am 91, there will not be a 60-year-old Josh to give me a call. (Dear God, if I live to be 91, I will have spent 35 years without him, which is ten more than the short 25 we had. I am not hoping for 91.) Those are the moments, and they occur multiple times every day, with which I am going to have to contend without the protective veneer of the past fifteen-plus months.

But God is present to me again, in a way God has not been, and the air has cleared enough for me to recognize that the face of God has been present to me, albeit unrecognized by my grief-stricken heart, in the gifts of my family, of countless friends ~ some of whom I have known for years irl and some for only weeks online, and many in between ~ and most especially through the remarkable men who have persisted as my spiritual directors in incredibly patient and nonintrusive constancy.

I found the following a couple of days ago and posted it on my Advent blog, but I think it serves as a good ending to this one. Of course, total silence is beyond me, and I hope you'll still visit Search the Sea, where the journey will continue, sometimes no doubt loudly, but I think usually quite differently. This blog will stay up for awhile, at least until I decide what I want to do about it.

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The 14th century Dominican mystic, John Tauler, explains the gift of Zechariah's silence like this: “God cannot leave things empty; that would be to contradict his own nature and justice. Therefore, you must be silent. Then the Word of this birth can be spoken in you and you will be able to hear him. But be certain of this: if you try to speak then He must be silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than in being silent and listening. So if you come out of yourself completely, God will wholly enter in; to the degree you come out, to that degree will he enter, neither more nor less.”

Suicide Sadness

When I check my stat counter, I usually find that at least one or two people have come to this blog via searches along the lines of "surviving child's suicide."

Two young men in circles connected to friends of mine have died by suicide in the past week. I doubt that I would have known about either death had it occurred two years ago, but now I am one of the people who people know, as in "I know a woman . . . ," and so I hear about them.

I am dumbfounded by how many young people die by suicide. I had no idea.

Per a request that came to me, I left a message on the funeral home condolence website for one of the young men. It has not been printed online. Was it too raw? I wonder. I commented on what a wonderful person the young man seems to have been, given the memories posted by those who knew him; I offered a listening ear; and I was honest (quite briefly) about what lies ahead. There are, of course, several messages which contain those dreaded words, those "I can't imagine" words. Interesting, if I am correct, that the website censors are more comfortable with words that push away rather than words that acknowledge.

Both young men were Catholic and apparently there have been issues in both cases in addressing the manner of death in funeral services. I am at a loss. We found nothing but openness and offers of help in our Presby church, and I have found 100% the same from my Catholic friends. In fact, some months after our son died, one of my Presby seminary friends commented that I must have found myself wary of discussing my son's death with the Catholics in my life, and I was very surprised. By that time, practically the only people outside my immediate family with whom I was discussing it in detail were Catholic priests.

I am also dumbfounded by how few in the clergy community seem to know how crucial open conversation is to the process of healing or, perhaps, how to initiate or withstand it such engagement. I suppose it is the withstanding that seems so daunting, and so the initiating does not happen.

Apparently there is a website now via which one can end ones' Facebook career via virtual suicide. I learned that from a longstanding blogging friend; from another, commenting on the former's information, I learned about a concert she had attended in which a piece of narration used the simile "falling like winter suicides." I got into a Facebook debate myself a few weeks ago about a writer's use of the word suicide which many people had found . . . meaningful in various ways. I thought their arguments were preposterous. One of them responded with words to the effect that my own language was flat rather than provocative.

Perhaps that is a consequence of a very real acquaintance with suicide. It is no longer (if, indeed it ever was) merely a source for a provocative pushing of the the limits of language and imagination. It is a horror which flattens all which follows.

I was wrong about the condolence guestbook. As I was writing this last night, my note was published. It, and this post, became the source of a lengthy conversation, as Gregarious Son wandered in while I was writing and asked what I was doing.

He shrugged as I read the condolence note to him. "What you said is true," he said.

It's difficult even to remember what life was like before I knew some true things about suicide.

Mourning

My blogging friend Ruth has just lost her mother, and has shared this Dietrich Bonhoeffer quotation from her pastor's funeral homily. I am thinking that from now on it will go into every condolence note I send.


"Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try and find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first; but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God does not fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain."

Just Wondering . . .

Whether any of this stuff is worth trying to publish . . .

I'm thinking that this blog has about run its course. I said I'd write it for a calendar year, which ends in two and-one half months, but it's been more than a year that I've been writing about loss, and in December I'll probably move whatever I have to say over to my Advent blog anyway . . .

And now . . . I have to get on with the business of discernment about The Future, and I get it: I will have to live everything through this filter of horrifying, heartrending loss, but that doesn't mean that I can't live it, whatever "it" is, and that it will be without meaning or value.

Whatever "it" is will be different than anything I could have ever imagined when I began seminary two years ago, if only because my vantage point is so radically altered.

Truthfully, I have no idea what to do next.

PS ~ Subsequent and perhaps mysteriously related thought: I have just realized that after 13.5 months my ability to remember things from one minute to the next is more or less back.

I think maybe I like it better the other way.

Gardening Blind

Some days ago, Stratoz posted an entry in which he reflected, in response to a story he had just read, on what it would be like to garden without eyesight. He teaches horticulture at a school for kids who have been challenged beyond the usual, and from what I can tell, he is both a gifted gardener and an insightful teacher. So when he muses about what would be missing if one who could not see were to plant a garden, I pay attention. Here's part of his entry:

"Blind gardening, can you imagine? I try. I imagine the difficulties. The struggle. How much of gardening for me is a visual joy? With that gone...

I end up pondering the state of my spirit if I was to lose my vision. Would I become deflated and bitter? What would happen to those things for which I have a passion?"

I thought about this quite a bit after I read it. I'm not much of a gardener, and the tactile aspect has no impact on me. I don't have a sense of smell (really ~ I have never smelled anything), so it's not as if I could plant a garden and enjoy its scents wafting through the air. I don't actually have any concept of scent.

Michelle responded with an entry about her mother, another lover of gardens who lost her sight:

"She continued to garden . . . . Though she had a marvelous sense of color -- she could match colors by memory -- she drifted toward more heavily scented garden choices as her sight dimmed. I remember driving her on an expedition to find new plants for a garden outside her bedroom, holding up various specimens for her to smell."

As I suspected: the sense of smell can substitute, at least to some extent. If one has a sense of smell, that is.

Grief, I have concluded, is like gardening blind. It requires that you reassemble your life with pieces missing and in the absence of the vision needed to accomplish the task. I could plant a tulip garden next fall without bulbs for yellow tulips, but that's because I can imagine the space in question with red and pink and white and black tulips. I can imagine the differing colors and heights and blooming dates, and I can create a garden with that information.

Can I recreate a life? With one of the main pieces missing? You've perhaps noticed I've switched from the word sight to the word vision. It isn't just the piece, the person, missing. It's the entire vision. The entire understanding of what life is.

This is more akin to gardening having never seen anything at all, having no concept of color, no concept of shape or size beyond what can be discovered with the hands.

Because when a child is gone, you are starting all over. In some other universe, some universe in which that child does not exist. It's as if I were suddenly blinded and went out to my garden only to discover that the soil had been transformed into kernels of corn, the hose gushed forth jelly, the seeds and bulbs had the consistency of oatmeal ~ and I was advised that the catalog showed flowers in silver and gold and gray. How would I ever put all that together?

Think about it. Think about trying to plant oatmeal in corn kernels and spraying it with jelly in the hope that an arrangement of gray and gold and silver would emerge in a way that would somehow be pleasing to the eye.

That's sort of what it's like, to reconstruct a life in another universe. Blind gardening with no sense of smell.

Settling In

I'm back at seminary. We are on a quarter system and my first class was yesterday.

Last night, my friends at home gathered after a Taize service, around an altar lit only by candles, to mark the year since Musical Friend's husband died. My husband described it as "terrible, somber, the family much less controlled than they had been at the funeral." That initial shock creates such a protective veneer, seared away a year later. And I had not really thought ahead to what it would be like for my husband, just as I had not thought ahead a couple of weeks ago to what it would be like for me to go into a funeral home. I keep forgetting that we are not who we were.

I have already written in other places that I had read that the sixth to eighth months are bad, really bad, as the shock finally wears off and the real reality sets in. Now, on the outside, we look functional. I go to class, I take notes, I laugh with friends over lunch. I have moments off and on all day when something reminds me of that real reality and I stop breathing and wonder whether I can get to the next minute, but I do. I had a meltdown during an exam a couple of weeks ago as I looked at the questions and the words swam off the page and I realized that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing -- but I was able to compose myself in a few minutes out of the room and return to fill a bluebook with -- something. Yesterday there was a moment in class when the professor said something, something meant to be encouraging and inspiring, and I wanted to flatten myself into the floor and melt away. Intention and effect so seldom merge these days.

Gal wonders whether the word trauma is too dramatic. Oh ~ no. I responded in her comments that if this were physical, we would be covered in bruises, our joints would be swollen, our bones cracked, our blood sometimes seeping through our skin. It only sounds like a melodramatic word because on the outside we look like ordinary people living ordinary lives.

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Last week-end, two of my friends, in two different contexts and conversations, referred to blogging as navel-gazing. I decided both times that it probably wasn't the moment to reveal that I have been blogging away for ~ I think it's five years this month.

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But I do hope I don't sound whiny. Grief is a self-absorbed process, but I am merely trying to record it as I experience it. I'm not under any illusion that I am the only one.

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I think I'll cross post at Search the Sea. I haven't actually navel-gazed there for a few days.

Five Months

Tonight I looked over much of what I have written here and on Search the Sea and I thought, Yes, this is pretty accurate. I think that this is what I would have to say if I ever lost a child.