Social Challenges

I would very much like to hear how others of you manage these things.

Example: My daughter and I attended a baby shower ~ which for me was pure agony, for a number of reasons beyond the usual. It seems to have meant a lot to the young mothers-to-be that we went, and I survived, but not without some damage.

Example: My husband and I are skipping a wedding this week-end. To do the whole thing would entail 24-plus hours away from home engaged in nonstop celebration. We have attended two weddings since Josh died, and I think we have sworn them off for awhile. But people are Not Happy with us.

Example: A conflict has emerged over a moms' week-end away and an 8-day retreat I have planned. I do need to spend time with my friends, but I also need this time away with a spiritual director who has particular gifts and training applicable to the situation in which I find myself. I think I am at a pretty critical turning point, and I would like to navigate something well rather than badly for a change.

How I see it: People have, of course, gone on with their own lives. I WANT my friends to enjoy each other and their children and grandchildren. I cannot expect them to know that, much as I want to see and talk with them, the usual, run-of-the-mill social events are painful for me and I do much better with one-on-one conversations over coffee. I have tried to hint at that, but apparently I need to wear a sign. Interestingly, I am doing much better these days at keeping up with friends who are not part of my usual "group," precisely because we do get together only occasionally and usually only in pairs.

More challenge: My husband, who was already an Introvert of the Highest Order, lost his son and father in one 18-month period. I am trying to be supportive of his needs as well as my own and our children's, and often we don't mesh. I read somewhere that a family in grief is a like a family in a pool or lake ~ when one person comes up for air, she looks around and see no one, because everyone is popping up on different timetables. It requires a whole new level of resiliency and commitment to stay in the water.

The kicker: I am no different from anyone else. I, too, find it difficult to remain attentive to and considerate of friends who have suffered big losses.

I wish that I were a brilliant conversationalist and moved with ease in the world, someone of whom people could say, "She's so strong and courageous!"

I wish that I lived all by myself in a cottage on the edge of the sea, someone whom only migrating birds would see, and of whom people could say, "Well, she just vanished."

Real life is a good deal more ~ um ~ mushy.

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."

Make Straight a Path Throught the Desert

Today is the day in the church year on which we read about John that Baptist, that seemingly deranged cousin of Jesus, he of the animal skin attire and the crunchy locust meals, out in the desert crying for the path of the Lord to be made straight, for valleys to be filled and mountains leveled.

I have always been mystified by John's obsession with the destruction of some of the most beautiful of our planet's geographical features. Year after year I have listened to this text and wondered: What would you do away with? The Pacific Crest Trail? The valleys in which the lochs of Scotland lie? The Tetons? What kind of a proclamation is this?

This year, I think, I am starting to get it, for the first time ever. I wonder whether I would ever have had a glimpse of what it means had I not been stumbling around in another dimension for the past fifteen months.

I have used so many geographical and geological metaphors to describe this journey, a journey that I would run from as fast as possible if that option were open to me. Relentless tsumani. Insurmountable mountain. Rock-strewn trail. Impenetrable wilderness. And, of course, desert. Endless, dry, empty, lonely desert.

None of them is a road back to the light. None of them is a road to hope.

It seems that they must all be navigated. There is no other sound option; we have to swim, climb, and walk through the terrain of grief, inhospitable as it is, or we will not reach that juncture at which it becomes not merely agonizing but transformative. We don't get to dispense with the wild craziness that makes the aftermath of loss so intolerable; we don't get to pretend that we're all right or that it never happened.

But ~ and this is what I think John the Baptist is talking about ~ we do have to find the way out. We have to reach, with our eyes open, the place where the swells of water become gentler, where the density of the forest begins to recede, where the desert seems to offer something other than parched wasteland.

I don't think God wants us to level the Alps. In fact, Jesus always found God in places like mountaintops, deserts, and valleys ~ the story is quite clear on that point. But what he found there is a transparency of vision that we so often lack. That most of us, I think, lack completely when we are plunged into the darkness that follows the death of a child.

And so the invitation, perhaps, is to go to the places he went but also to see as he did, with clarity and gratitude, rather than with eyes clouded by tears and a mind crumbling under a weight almost too great to bear.

I have, of course, no idea at all what I am talking about. I was moved to write this post by the words of this father, who lost his nine-year-old son to a malignant tumor several years ago, and who I found via my friend and fellow traveler Karen, mother of beautiful Katie. He is much farther along the road to gratitude than I am. But as I skimmed his essay again, I couldn't help but notice how many allusions he makes to things which have appeared in my own thoughts and writings: the suffering of other parents, the Holocaust, the omnipotence or lack thereof of God, the compassion ~ or not ~ of God, what prayer is and isn't. And even the Wizard of Oz.

Oh, for that elusive pair of ruby slippers.

We have to find clarity without them.

And so: Advent.



(Cross-Posted from Advent blog.)

Thanksgiving Tinged with Sorrow

Karen says it better than I ever could: Such gratitude for those of us who have found each other through our sadness:

Karen's Quilt.

Thoughts on Suicide

I am a member of a circle of moms who have been conversing online for years, and the subject of suicide is one of our topics right now, due to some experiences in addition to my own family's. With some editing to avoid personal exposure, here's some of what I have to say these days:

I don't believe that suicide is a choice, I don't believe in using terminology like "commit suicide," and I find that I probably no longer believe in assisted suicide. That's not to say that I believe in heroic and unwarranted lifesaving methods when a person is close to death, and having observed such situations many times during my CPE experience summer before last, I am in complete sympathy with those who suffer end-of-life indignities and with their desire to put a stop to them. But humanely removing life support systems is quite different from actively ending a life, even if sometimes only in the motivation involved.

I have had plenty of hours (14 months x 24/7) to think about it and I am convinced that suicide is a complication of mental illness. Even a person who seems to have died as he or she lived -- perhaps selfishly and insisting upon control - was suffering from something. Ending one's bodily existence and all of one's connections to people on earth is too extreme a move for me to think of it as anything other than a consequence of serious illness. I doubt that it is even possible for a suicidal person to understand the consequences of his or her actions, to him or herself even moreso than to others. Sometimes I think that our son was selfish for not seeking help somewhere along the way, but then I realize that that behavior is part of the illnesses of depression and of personality disorders. The sufferer has no way of knowing that what s/he is experiencing is out of the ordinary, and most of us have no way of knowing that another person's secret thoughts and terrors are far different and beyond our own.

As far as the methods by which someone dies by suicide: they are all assaults on the human body. Most likely a person is not thinking at all in the way the rest of us do, or perhaps even the way she or she does most of the time, and is not making choices that are designed either to cause or to ease pain for the surviviors. I have gained considerable insight in the last year into how thin the line is between ordinary rationality and something else, into how easy it is to move into a dangerous frame of mind, and into how quickly a person can take an action that is irreversible and produces devastating shock waves that will ripple outward for generations. Our son was was one the kindest, most generous, and most gentle people I have ever encountered; he, more than perhaps anyone, would be horrified by the outcomes, in all aspects, of his death.

I don't mind discussing this subject at all, BTW. I find I am far more comfortable with it than I was before my son died, probably because it is always the foremost thing in my mind and because I have learned so much about it that it is no longer taboo for me. People sometimes tell me that they appreciate my forthrightness and transparency, but those are simply products of my refusal to deny or hide sad experience.

A Different Kind of Holiday

I am up and about to leave for seminary ~ a 2.5 hour drive ~ and my 10:00 am class.

In the dream I was having when the alarm went off, our family and Katie's family and Joey's family and Sarah's family were in a cabin in the snowy Colorado Rockies, having a loud and joyful Christmas Dinner together at 7:00 am because we all had to leave for the airport by 8:00 am to fly to Florida.

All of us. ALL of our children were with us.

Breakfast Part II

I've been mulling over another part of the breakfast conversation.

My friend said, more than once, "All you can really do in this life is choose whether to be happy." Or something to that effect.

I don't believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. Happiness is a nice side effect, and one that probably a majority of Americans experience much of the time.

Of course, a lot depends upon how you define happiness. But I think it's safe to say that in a world filled with wars, violence, starvation, deprivation, and disease, an awful lot of people do not find happiness in any conventional sense of the word.

The Presbyterian Church teaches that our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. The Catholic Church, that it is to know and love God. My friend St. Ignatius, that it is to praise, reverence, and serve God, or (in more contemporary language), to live with God forever.

Thus those of you who are not religious and from time to time dismiss faith as a crutch or a false source of comfort might see that the purpose of our lives, as stated in major Christian creeds and confessions, is often at odds with comfort.

I can assure you that is not much of an opiate to be told, in the face of the loss of a child, that glorifying God is the chief end of your life.

But as I see it, to say that the point of life is "to be happy" renders our existence virtually pointless, while the alternative, "to know God," offers us dignity and significance. If all that is available to me in the face of the death of my child is "to choose happiness" ~ well, that seems to me to represent the epitome of triviality. However, if knowledge of God ~ which would also mean knowledge of love, knowledge of ways to remain present to those I care for, knowledge of my life having some purpose ~ remains a possibility, then there is a point to life.

I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying we should seek out misery for ourselves, or view life as a grim narrative of pointless toil or senseless suffering.

But the hard reality is that to know God in the context of Christianity is to know sorrow.

It might seem, then, that it would only make sense to choose the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of knowledge of God.

But really ~ if the choice were placed in the stark relief drawn by the worst kind of scenario, would you choose trivia over dignity and value? And perhaps it is in choosing the latter that genuine happiness lies.

Someday.




Cross-posted at Search the Sea.

Breakfast Break

A good friend and I spent some coffee shop time together yesterday morning.

She asked me if I had found any bit of happiness yet, and was herself unhappy with my answer. We talked about it for quite awhile.

I really like and trust this friend. But she has two daughters who have children, a son just married, and another son (a former boyfriend of The Lovely Daughter!) to be married next summer. And two other wonderful girls. And so I do not expect her, between stints as Mother-of-the-Groom, to have any idea what my life and thoughts are like.

But her (admittedly gentle) exhortations reminded me of something my fellow friend and blogger Joan Calvin said recently, in commenting on the penchant family and friends have for insisting that someone suffering from a serious illness will feel better if she has a positive attitude.

"It will be easier for the family and friends," she notes.

Just added to my little pile of Wisdom Notes:

If someone honors you with a frank revelation of her struggles, try to accept her words as the gift they are, and refrain from telling her how she could be doing it better than she is. She probably isn't burdening too many people with her reality.

(Chuckle: Unless she blogs.)

Balancing Act Continued

Summer Hebrew was an intensive eight week course: six months of Hebrew packed into two. I have no aptitude for ancient languages, but I do have a certain degree of compulsiveness and a surprising capacity for work, and so I did well.

Toward the end of the final week, I sat outside at a picnic table for awhile talking with my professor and his wife, as I often did when I returned from my early evening walk. "You seem much calmer than you did at the beginning of the summer," his wife observed.

"Well, that's partly because I finally figured out how to study and learn the material," I said, "and partly because I have come to a new place in my grief. For a long time," I continued, "you resist it, because you cannot imagine that anyone could possibly tolerate this much pain and survive. And then you realize that people do, in fact, live like this, and you begin to understand that (as a friend so wisely wrote), while the weight of the burden does not ease, you can shift it in ways that make it possible to carry."

It was clear from their expressions that they had no idea what I was talking about. I'm getting used to that.

Today we received a note from a former roommate of our son's, a delightful and creative man from Paris. It's probably been six months since I found the language for telling such startling and horrific news in the form of a letter to someone so young, and he first apologized for his delay in responding. He has been in Shanghai for the past year and one-half, he said, and his mother had left some mail, including my letter, in a pile on the hall table for him. Then he added some lovely memories about our son and expressed his desire to stay in touch.

And I thought, OK, whatever: This is not my life.

I guess that sometimes we carry things around and sometimes we just pretend that we don't.

The Long and Winding Road

A couple of days ago, the wonderful women at RevGals hosted a discussion on the challenges inherent in a minister's trying to help a parishoner who is grieving the death of her child. It's a good conversation and I highly recommend it.

I left only one comment; like many readers here, I could have monopolized the site, but I thought that listening would be the better part of valor.

I was struck by a couple of things. First, the genuine desire of the pastors to be of help. I have seen little of my own pastors in the past several months. I can acknowledge some of the responsibility for that; I have not been much in evidence myself. But I have reached out to others for help instead, in large part I think because I see our pastors as fixers rather than listeners ~ and I think I see them that way with good reason. I treasure them as gifted leaders of our church, as friends in ministry with whom I have worked for years on multiple projects, as committed parents and community leaders, as tremendous supporters of my own move toward ministry, but . . . . People have a way of diappearing, and that includes the best of them.

A friend of mine wrote a recent blog entry about the long and lonely months devoted to her battle against breast cancer. Her main point: it takes a l-o-n-g time, and, while friends are present and encouraging and helpful in the early weeks, they don't realize that you still need them many months later. She reserves her most profund gratitude for those who were still there to accompany her to chemo or lend a hand with her daughter or play a game of Scrabble with her long after the rest had disappeared.

I am surely as guilty as the rest. Most especially now. I think often these days of what I would like to do differently in the future, as a neighbor, a friend, a pastor. I think of the other things that impinge upon our time and how we set priorities. I think of how important it is to read between the lines, hear between the words. I think about anticipating the struggles people might be facing, and what I might offer in advance. I think about understanding the reclusiveness that so often marks grief, and how to intrude upon it in a generous way.

Right this moment, for instance. It is a magnificent morning outside. I am studying Hebrew and working in the garden and house -- memorization being one of those things that must be accomplished in small doses over long periods of time. I would love it if someone pulled into the drive this morning and sat on the porch with me for half an hour. I would love it if , rather than the usual "You are so strong, so wise, so articulate, so blah blah blah whatever," someone said to me something more along the lines of "Do you want to talk about the parts you don't talk about?" I would love it if someone called to say, instead of "We hope you'll join us tonight," something like, "I know you probably won't come, but maybe I'll come by here in a few days instead."

I would love it if there were more people who understood that their task is not to provide comfort ~ because there is only occasional and very little comfort to be had ~ but to offer presence. I think that that dichotomy is perhaps at the root of so much absence: that presence without comfort is the best you can sometimes do. You cannot comfort a woman whose cancer threatens the possibility of seeing her daughter graduate from middle school (a joyful event that my friend has just witnessed). You cannot comfort a woman whose child is dead. It's that simple.

What can you do? Anything at all? Well, yes. You can put aside your own fears, the ones along the lines of, If this could happen to her beautiful child, it could happen to mine. You can clamp your mouth shut every time you are tempted to make something akin to a pronouncement, one of the multiple variations on God is with you, and instead ask, or wait to see, what her experience of God is these days. You can put a lid on the shock or dismay or sadness you may feel in response to what comes out of her mouth, and try to create a little island of safety for her in a universe that has revealed treachery and instability. You can honor her experience by hearing and seeing and enduring it with her.

That would be, actually, doing quite a lot.

Reaching Out

Last night we hosted a little gathering to celebrate the college graduations of a fabulous foursome ~the Lovely Daughter and three of her friends from Montessori days. All of the girls, as well as all of their brothers and sisters, attended a small Montessori school through the eighth grade, forming friendships that have weathered the years and graduating in tiny classes of children who knew each other almost as siblings. I think there were 13 students in the Lovely Daughter's graduating class, and 15 in her brothers' class two years earlier. Small but cohesive groups, as Chicago Son's funeral sadly demonstrated, when young people who had met long ago over the pink tower showed up from New York, Oregon, and Toronto, along with teachers who had known them since they were three years old.

It has been such a delight to watch our girls grow into the wonderful young women they have become, and even more of a pleasure to see their friendships sustain and strengthen them through three different high schools and five different colleges. They are so appreciative of each other's gifts and differences, and they have so much fun together. And they have offered us as well the gift of friendship with a terrific group of parents, all of them (us) just quirky enough to seek out something of an alternative education for our kids and stick with it for as long as it was available.

Last night ~ sitting out in the yard as darkness fell and candles were lit, eating grilled chicken and strawberries and ice cream, all with people who have been friends to all of our children throughout their educational adventures ~ was a good first try for us, the very first attempt we have made to host anything at all in our home since Chicago Son died. I missed him every second, but I know he would have approved the laughter and memories of days gone by.

There Are Moments

Two back story items:

I belong to a liberal, progressive church ~ but we are diverse and not all identical in our theology or politics by any means. (I personally am pretty far over on the liberal and progressive end of the spectrum.) In fact, one of the cool things about our church is that we are not all on the same page and yet we worship together and talk together and confront issues together without rancor, something the PC(USA) as a whole sometimes struggles with.

I grew up in a farming community and my family was in the grain business for most of the last century, which means that corn and soybeans were staples (again (sigh) no pun intended) of dinnertime conversation in my childhood.

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I went to church today so that I could be present, insofar as I was able, to the celebration of the 20th anniversary of our senior pastor's ordination (15 of those years with us). It was a little TOO celebratory for my present frame of mind, but I was glad that I went. Lots of energy, humor, appreciation, and genuine joy.

Then I went to the grocery. The first person I ran into was a woman whom I see maybe once or twice a year, and have not seen since Chicago Son died. She was at the store with her younger daughter, who attended the same high school as my own Lovely Daughter and sang in the music program as well.

As I've said, I sometimes avoid people in public places if I haven't yet talked with them about Chicago Son. But I wasn't in an avoidance mood today, which was a good thing, because this woman and I practically ran into one another.

I have never seen someone move so fast to get out of my way. Our grocery is a very sociable place and it often takes a long time to get out of there, because of the many conversations among friends who haven't seen one another in awhile. But wow ~ this woman said "hello," moved on, and visibly looked into the space beyond me as we encountered one another a few times over in our travels down the aisles. No expression of condolences, no conversations about our daughters' college adventures, no mention of it finally being warm enough for the local pool (where at one time in our lives we whiled away many an afternoon).

I understand -- sort of -- the awkwardness, but this friend is a SOCIAL WORKER.

OK, enough said. My next encounter was with an older lady from church, who has, to my recollection (which we all know is not the best) said nothing to me about Chicago Son. We had exchanged pleasantries about the celebration this morning and started to look over the produce when she stopped and said, "You know."

OK, I thought, I'm OK; I'll be fine with whatever she says.

"You know, I get a lot of medical newsletters," she continued. "And I get one from a Dr. So-and-So. And he says that our increased use of soy in so many products is contributing to the increased prevalence of homosexuality among young people today."

I must have looked just a little astonished, because she went on to elaborate for a minute or two. I decided to try some humor, which I doubted that she would understand, but ~

"Well, um, you know, soybeans paid for my education!" I said brightly.

"But ~ " she tried to continue.

I decided that I needed something from another aisle.

There are encounters in which I would give anything at all, even more than usual, for the company of Chicago Son and his wit.

Steps Forward Steps Backward

Last night we went to a baby shower for the soon-to-be first grandchild of good friends. It was a lovely party -- all of our friends were there, the young couple was beaming, the food was spectacular, and the hosts have been working steadily on their yard for years and have completely transformed it.

We lasted about an hour. It's really, really hard -- everything smacked of middle-aged couples enjoying the fruits of 25 years of labor (no pun intended) -- beautiful home and gardens, children grown and producing their own, everyone our age relaxed and comfortable because the few small children toddling around were the responsibility of the next generation.

I had imagined that we might be planning a wedding in our family this summer, and instead I had to mail off a death certificate before we went to the party. I thought our hour-long drop-by was a pretty good effort, but I'm sure we'll hear about it eventually.

This morning I'm doing the reading in church. It will be the first time in a year that I have stood before a congregation. When the office administrator sent me the reading earlier this week, it was the dry bones passage from Ezekiel. I looked at it in astonishment and thought, "I can't read this." So I tried it out loud a couple of times and thought, again, I need to call and ask them to find someone else. And then I thought, No, I need to just do it. I need to just stand there and read a passage about bones coming to life. Even though they don't.

Then a second email came; new passage: the expected description of Pentecost from Acts. I tried that a couple of times. The list of geographical names makes it almost worse, I thought. But this one I can do. It's a celebratory Sunday for the conclusion of a major church project in which I have not participated, but I can survive that, too.

I feel, all the time, as if I am living two lives. It's like walking down the middle of a road, one foot coming down on each side of the center line. To the right is normal life, in which everything looks and functions as it always did, and no one has any idea that the view from the left is completely altered and the road feels like quicksand.

Or maybe some of them do, in a small way. I encountered a new hazard at the party last night: people we haven't seen since the funeral, or before. They greet me with that hangdog look, but they don't say anything. It would be so much easier if people would just shake hands and say "I was so sorry to hear about your son" or "I've been thinking about you ever since last summer."

I know it's hard to get it right. Do you say something or do you pretend nothing has happened? Are you risking a response in the form of a torrent of tears, or in the form of an offended silence?

I can't think of any other way to do this. I treat myself gently, but each next thing poses a major existential dilemma.

What I would really like is to move to a small cottage with a cat on a barrier island far, far away.

Calibrating? Muddling?

A fairly new acquaintance says to me, "I don't know how you've managed to come back to seminary this year. When my mother died, I took a quarter off. A child? I don't think I could have done that."

A good, longtime friend says to me, "I don't know how you're doing what you do."

What do those statements mean? Do people think I don't love my son enough? Do they think I'm in denial?

I don't think either of those things are true.

I am rather cheerfully pushing my cart through the grocery, thinking that while I feel like shit, I feel relatively ok. Better than a lot of days. Then some piano music wafts through the air. I have no idea whether I have heard it before, whether it is glancing off some subconscious memory. But I want to let the cart go, sink to my knees, and wail a long and piercing cry. I don't, of course. I keep pushing the cart, and wonder how many people we see in our daily lives out there in the world who are silently keening.

Three women in the coffee shop. One of us lost her father a year ago; after she cared for him for months, he died in her arms. One of us lost her son seven-plus months ago. One of us is accompanying her husband through his chemotherapeutic battle against a particularly virulent form of cancer. We are laughing and beginning to plan a college graduation party for four young ladies we know and love.

What does that mean? Strength? Resistance? Oblivion?

I think that mostly it means that I love the women I know.

Oh, and the wisdom thing I've been muttering about? I think I get it. What you learn from this kind of suffering is that you know nothing. I mean: really nothing. If you have reached the age of 50, you are probably already aware that you have never known or understood nearly as much as you may have once thought you did. But this kind of loss clarifies it anew: we know NOTHING.

That, I think, is wisdom.

Lisa, My Friend

In response to your comment in the previous post:

Clearly it is you and not I who should be doing the preaching.

I am going to quiet down here for the rest of the Easter season because I am going to be pondering your words.

Love you.

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.

**********

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.

**********

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

The Orthodox Know How to Do This

No social events for a year? Yeah, I wish that were our rule.

When I taught in an Orthodox Jewish school and one of the teachers couldn't go to any social events, including a wedding, for an entire year after her father died, the practice seemed a bit extreme to me. When I talked to one of the administrators last year after his wife's death, it seemed about right for him as an adult, but awfully hard on his son, a former student of mine, who was not going to have much contact with friends outside of school for the end of his junior and most of his senior year.

Now that I am in this place, a year seems barely enough time. Every invitation is fraught with complications. I know that friends do not understand how it is that an informal Saturday night gathering can seem burdensome, or how we can decide to skip the celebrations of major milestones in the lives of others. How I wish we had an official rule, one that marked at least this first year as off limits, as a time of encasement in a cocoon of grief not to be invaded by either the trivial or the momentous.

They Swam Away

You should go over to the sidebar, click on A Slow Read, and take a look at the entry about the Midmar Mile.

It reminded me of a piece on NPR several years ago in which a woman reviewed her career as a swim meet mom. During the early years, she said, the moms all sat on the edges of their seats, and each one knew her child's rankings and times to the second. As the years passed, the friendships became much more important than the competition, and the moms visibly relaxed, finding much more to talk about than ribbons and medals, and re-discovering the things that are really important in life.

Now: a new stage. When some children have become ill or been seriously injured, and some children have died, the recognition of what is important shifts again. When there are mothers who look at the water and see only the swimmers who once were, the water changes color for everyone.

The Abode of Grief: Fewer Hours, Condensed Time

I used to live long, wide, and spacious days.

I would often be outdoors and walking three or four miles by 6:00 a.m. I worked hard all day and well into the evening. I was a teacher, I was a graduate student, I was a church committee chair. I was often asked to do things that required advance preparation. (Will you make this quick presentation on Sunday? a friend would ask. I know it doesn't take you any time at all. Look how easy that last one was. And my eyebrows would go up. Those two minutes? At least two hours of advance writing and revising and practice. But it looked so easy, he would say. That's how it's supposed to look.)

And I had three children in college, all of whom filled my thoughts and dreams and hopes, every day, every night. When they were small I would call home three, four times a day, just to find out what they were up to. When they were in college I would glance at my watch and think, it's noon in Chicago and 1:00 in Columbus and 9:00 a.m. in Oregon. Is he in class, is he at work, is she even awake?

And I had energy for myself, and energy for God. Lots of energy for reading and writing and breakfasts with friends. Lots of space in my life for prayer and journaling. Time seemed so full and yet so expansive.

Now. Now it is nearly 9:00 am and I am just getting up. I was awake three hours ago but I knew that would make for too many hours in the day and so I went back to sleep. I will be up late into the night because I won't be able to sleep then.

Now I have to pace myself carefully. I am doing things: going to class, studying, writing papers, working with a couple of people, planning for the future. Each takes so much energy and requires so much recovery time. I forget what I've focused on within five minutes of reading or hearing it. I look at notes and say to myself: We had an entire lecture on that? I lose everything, little things and really important things. I stumble across them later and can't imagine how they landed in the place they did. I write papers and have no idea whether they bear any resemblance to what is expected. I make schedules for accomplishing things and then I stare into space.

I am still writing thank-you notes. The cost of each one is so high. Only a few lines, but each reminds me of something else ~ a relationship, an occasion in the past, someone else entirely whose claim on my time is perhaps more urgent. I did not know, before, that when I received an acknowledgment from someone for flowers or words offered in a time of sorrow, that the note itself might represent a morning's work. Or a week's.

People send me emails and cards and books and little packages. Some of the things written by certain people fill my thoughts for hours, for days. They become little prayers, flickering sources of connection to other people, to the universe, to God.

I think about my lost son all of the time, as I have for 25 years. My brain tissue has grooves worn in it, and I cannot stop thinking of someone just because he is not here at all. But his absence fills every crevice of my life and makes impossible demands on my imagination. I keep waiting for time to go backward so that we can pick up where we left off.

I think about my other children and my son's girlfriend all the time, too. I want to wrap my arms around them all and take care of them forever and in a way that will enable them to heal. What does that even mean? I have a long scar smack down the middle of my stomach, from the car accident when I was seven. (No scans in those days to reveal ruptured spleens, which I turned out not to have.) It was a distraction during my bikini days, it stretched to accomodate a twin pregnancy, and then another one, and now it looks as crumpled and faded as you might expect. I don't notice it. But this jagged scar, the one which all these young people have to carry into adult life? How much time before it fades? There is nothing clean and precise about it; all those jagged edges seem more like tentacles than boundaries.

I have been writing this piece off and on for a couple of days. Not an original thought in it. And yet, like everything else, it has sapped hours and energy. I had not realized that time and energy were so closely entertwined, and not in any way that makes sense.

(Image: Picasso's Blue Nude.)

Blank Mind

Gregarious Son and I had dinner tonight with good, good friends. The son and Chicago Son were best friends for most of their growing up years. His mom is one of my very best friends. His dad has faced serious, almost impossible, health challenges for 15 years. The kind that remind you every day that there is nothing remotely fair about life.

In the kitchen, my friend and I talked about the day we learned that Chicago Son had died. I was on retreat, four hours from home. She says that I called and, seeing my name on the caller ID, she answered with delight. We had been meaning to get together for weeks. I said, "Are you alone?" and she immediately knew something was terribly wrong. He husband was out back, and so she said, "Just tell me," and I did.

"You were competely calm and articulate," she said. "And you asked me to go over to your house to be with your husband, and I said that I would go as soon as I got hold of my son. And then you just started screaming."

I don't remember that call at all.