Just a Day

Early this morning, just before walking over to a particularly challenging exam for which I've been studying for weeks, I opened my Facebook page to discovered that an internet friend had posted the following quote:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I posted a response, to the effect that that was an awful thing to say, and then forced it out of my mind so that I could focus and write steadily for the next three hours.

After lunch, there was a bit more Facebook discussion, which got a little testy and then, relieved to have put my school quarter behind me, I packed up and drove home.

I spent some time talking to the nurse in my doctor's office ~ not great news, but not terrible either.

I thought about how to respond to an email from someone asking how I am. Since we haven't talked in months, I had to conclude that any attempt at a genuine answer is now way beyond my capacity. A reminder that if we don't keep up with people, we lose them.

I stopped at the bookstore to purchase Kay Jamison's Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. A psychiatrist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder, she is an elegant and brilliant writer ~ but I've been told that this one is a very difficult read for survivors. I may set it aside for a few more months, but in the bookstore I did flip it open to a section on parents. The lifetime of guilt and sadness that awaits me ~ nothing I hadn't already figured out.

And all this time, I was thinking about that stupid quote on Facebook. When I got home, I read a few more of the comments that had been posted and realized that for the others in the dicussion, it was an intellectual exercise. They had found the quote provocative, while I found it repugnant and self-absorbed.

Last week I had dinner with a friend at school who casually remarked that she supposed that it might be suicidal for her to think of taking Greek from Professor So-and-So. I glanced at her and there was a brief flicker of recognition, and then she went on talking.

I wish it were a matter of intellectual debate. I wish it were a matter of casual slang. I wish I had not seen what I have seen, read what I have read, learned what I have learned. (And, given some of the descriptions of bodies and autopsies on the Parents of Suicides mailing list, I have gotten off easily.)

I wish I could be one of those people who sometimes say to me, Oh, we in our family came awfully close to having to deal with what you are faced with. There is an entire universe, filled with black holes and ricocheting meteorites, between "awfully close" and the reality.

Last week, I took one of those internet stress tests ~ you know the kind, that allocates points to life stress events. Under 150 is a good thing, 150-300 reflects increasing health risks, over 300 is not good. My score was 495 and I feel, on the whole, pretty balanced. As I said in response to that email that I didn't know what to do with, "One adapts."

In our case, to life lived in a very different world from the one inhabited by most of the people we encounter.

And not one in which suicide is something to be romanticized or joked about.

Meditation 1

Once I saw the freshly built dam of two beaver, a half moon with mud and slender branches, the leaves still fresh upon them; then, as I watched, the water shoved with its silver gloves and it broke, it left the world forever.



~Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writing (2004)

Listening to the Silence

A few days back I had a little poll posted on this blog. Nothing the least bit scientific about it; I don't even know how many people responded.

I was interested in the answers ~ and I tried to respond to each of the comments, to honor the bravery and candor with which people wrote ~ because for most of the past fourteen months, my experience has been of a profound silence on God's part. Whether God has been absent, I don't know. Some people believe that God is never absent. I don't know. Sometimes I think that I mistook my son's absence for God's. I don't know. Sometimes I think that God has been present in the people who have surrounded me with love and care, both in daily life and online. I don't know. What I do know is that the God I believe to be in all things seemed to have been in no things.

Apparently my experience is not an uncommon one, if my litle poll is any indication at all:

The biggest loss of your life - Did God seem:

Real 13 (18%)
Not so much 5 ( 6%)
Close by 9 (12%)
Far away, but still a reality 27 (37%)
Absent, gone, nowhere to be found 14 (19%)
Compassionate 9 (12%)
Uncaring 6 ( 8%)
Mixture of above 27 (37%)

It has been a little bit of a disjunction, to be in seminary and experience a vast and empty space where God might have been. For months I couldn't even talk about it, except with a very few trusted people. But now I think that it is a good thing to talk about. A friend, suffering a terrible loss, told me some days ago that she no longer believes in a God of compassion. There are not so many people to whom she can say that who can hear her without judgment, without rushing forward to "fix" her. I am very grateful to have a couple of such people in my life. And to have learned myself how much more important it is to listen than to talk.

And I think now that I have been, over the past weeks, experiencing something of a sea change. Perhaps God is simply very quiet, very cautious, very nonintrusive, where grief is so overwhelming.

I have read at least three books on prayer in which God has been likened to the fox in The Little Prince. One of them is Anthony Bloom's jewel of a book, Beginning to Pray. Here's a similar Anthony Bloom description, from a book I haven't read, called A Spiritual Journey Through the Parables, which I found in a quick google search:

"Have another look at the passage in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery where the fox describes how the little prince should learn to tame him - he must be very patient, sit a little way off and look at him out of the corner of his eye and say nothing, for words cause misunderstandings. And every day he will sit a little closer and they will become friends. Put 'God' in the place of the fox and you will see loving, chaste shyness, a diffidence which offers but does not prostitute itself: God does not accept a glib, smooth relationship, nor does He impose His presence - He offers it, but it can only be received on the same terms, those of a humble, loving heart, when two timidly, shyly seeking people reach to each other because of a deep mutual respect and because both recognize the holiness and the extraordinary beauty of reciprocal love."

I think maybe it is something like that.

In Common

I would hardly put myself in the C.S. Lewis category (thanks, though, Cynthia), but it does seem that the experience of what Lisa so aptly terms "crushing" loss does generate universal responses.

Probably the best book I have read, several times over, in the past thirteen (Oh God, soon to be fourteen) months is Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son. It was recommended by several people, and given to me by others. My Greek professor (yes, a friendship had developed out of my interminable struggles with that miserable language) said that she had thought to give it to me a year ago but felt it was too soon. By that time, I had already devoured it. Those of us who read incessantly tend to find what we need, sooner or later.

It's not a book applicable only to those who have lost young adult children, but neither is it for the faint of heart. Wolterstorff, an emeritus professor of theological philosophy at Yale, lost a 25-year-old son to a mountain climbing accident, and does not gloss over either the concrete, bodily details of death and burial or the desperate questions of heart and faith that follow such a tragedy. The vignettes are poignant and honest and brutal; in fact, I think that the book served as a model for this blog.

Sadly, I have had occasion to recommend it to the priest who is my spiritual director, as a consequence of three sudden deaths in his parish a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned last night that he had followed my suggestion to purchase several copies to have on hand, which caused me to return to the book for another perusal, after several months away from it. In light of what I had just written, I found this passage arresting:

"Don't say it's really not so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it's not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. .... To comfort me, you have to come close.

I know: People do sometimes think things are more awful than they really are. ... But no one thinks death is more awful than it is. It's those who think it's not so bad that need correcting."*

I recall a similar passage in C.S. Lewis as well, which I believe I have also quoted here. (Found it ~ in my other blog, here. Not quite the same, but always worth reading.) It seems that the experience of feeling oneself not heard, of sensing one's feelings being glossed over or ignored, of seeing that others are afraid to stare death in the face as you have been compelled to do, is a common one, and one that demands a forceful protest.

Interestingly, one of my most vivid memories from an early reading of Lament for a Son is of a passage in which Wolterstorff learns of a friend's son's death by suicide. He thinks that that must be easier, to discover that your child did not want to live, and discovers that he is wrong. I myself had thought that it would be easier to lose a child who died doing something he loved, and I was wrong as well. There is no easier. And we all, even those of us who are here in the midst of it, struggle to be present to the rest of us.





* Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1987) pp. 34-35.

Links

I'm reposting this entry from last May, adding another book, and changing the Five Things Posts to Six.

The newest: Surviving Ben's Suicide: A Woman's Journey of Self-Discovery. Written fifteen years after the event, this book chronicles a woman's journey toward coming to terms with the death by suicide of her college boyfriend. She reflects on how difficult it was for her to find anything helpful for a "significant other" ~ someone who loves deeply but is not an "official" part of the family. I will always think of my son's girlfriend as part of our family, but I am sure that she has experiences similar to some of those depicted in this book. What I particularly love about this book is the author's insistence on the importance of memory in shaping how we live our lives ~ an antidote to the silence that surrounds suicide in particular and death in general.

Information about the other sidebar links: Every Child Is Precious. I think it's an essay with some valuable information for those who care for or those who simply care about bereaved parents and siblings.

A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's classic work, written after the death of his beloved wife (a story which many know through the movie Shadowlands). It's often been noted that A Grief Observed is a far superior book to his previous, more intellectual work The Problem of Pain, in that he makes no attempt to hide the raw agony experienced when it seems that God simply slams the door on God's way out.

Fierce Good-bye is a website devoted to the experience of suicide survivors. A couple of the pastoral care essays(offered from a variety of faith traditions) are excellent.

Lament for a Son is another classic, a series of short vignettes written by a father whose son died in a mountain-climbing accident. It was the first book several people either recommended or outright bought for me. He doesn't mince words and he addresses both the concrete realities we seldom think about unless we are forced to and the mystery of the baffling world of the bereaved family of a young adult child and brother.

My Son . . . My Son is a book that was given to me by the professor (and now friend of mine) who runs the program in which I am earning a certificate in spiritual direction. The mother who wrote it is a mental health professional who wondered, when she decided to go back to work, whether anyone would want anything to do with a counselor whose own son had died by suicide. Exactly what I wonder, I said, when she handed me the book. Who would ever see me as a pastor or spiritual director now? My friend looked at me and said, I know that's what you're thinking. That's why I'm giving you this book.

No Time To Say Good-Bye is a practical book. It covers a lot of ground and empasizes the importance of support groups. One of the Amazon reviews says that some of the descriptions of suicide are harrowing. I suppose one reaches a point where that becomes a relative term.

I've already linked to some of the Ron Rolheiser columns. He's written a number of them on suicide and so, collected together, they can be a bit repetitive and overwhelming, but his insight into the grief of survivors and the loving God in whom we hope, when we can, is uniquely helpful, at least in my view.

Today's Find: Dual Thinking

I am in the local college library studying for my Hebrew final and reading and playing online when I need a break. I need many breaks.

From Zorba the Greek, found in Love is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft:

Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die, tell me?

Scholar: I don't know.

Zorba: What's the use of all your damn books? If they don't tell you that, what the hell do they tell you?

Scholar: They tell me about the agony of [those] who can't answer questions like yours.

Here or Not

Sometimes, when you are living this intensely and this painfully, it's difficult to figure out whether you are present to your life or whether you've inadvertently slipped away for awhile.

And so for some pondering, today I'm stealing this from The Mercy Blog:

I would love to make you love Scripture, and go there for yourself, to find both your own inner experience named, and some outer validation of the same.

Only when the two come together, inner and outer authority, do we have true spiritual wisdom.

We have for too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.

I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, is, in fact a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!”

I offer these reflections to again unite what should never have been separated: Sacred Scripture and Christian spirituality…

This marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment! It’s for divine transformation, theosis, not intellectual or “small self” cosiness.

The genius of the biblical revelation is that we will come to God through what I’m going to call the “actual,” the here and now, or quite simply what is…

God is always given, incarnate in every moment and present to those who know how to be present themselves.

Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life. That’s opposed to God holding out for the pure, the spiritual, the right idea or the ideal anything. This is why Jesus stands religion on its head!

That is why I say it is our experiences that transform us if we are willing to experience our experiences all the way through.

“God comes disguised as our Life” (a wonderful line I learned from my dear friend and colleague, Paula D’Arcy).

~ Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden pp. 5, 7, 15-17

Beyond Bars

"The outside world," says Karen, in a comment below, "can be such a harsh place."

How did that happen, that the regular world became the outside world? So fast . . .

Last Monday, I heard an interview on Talk of the Nation with two law professors who've written a book entitled Beyond Bars. It offers advice on how to take up life again after having been released from prison, and the discussion with the authors and the callers was fascinating. One of the major topics of conversation had to do with the difficulty of finding employment; in this day of the internet, it is virtually impossible for someone to dispense with even an expunged record. One heartbreaking story: a gentleman who, finding most doors to employment barred, started his own business, eventually employing 50 people. When the bank where he maintained a large line of credit asked him to apply for a SBA loan, the requisite criminal records check finished him off ~ his bank withdrew its longstanding loan, and he was forced to close.

It was one of the smaller issues that caught my attention, however. There was some talk about the need for former prisoners to re-learn the simple means by which common societal interaction is eased: how to walk, how to make small talk. In a hostile environment, one learns to walk defensively or aggressively, depending on the context, and to avoid eye contact. And small talk, needed for job interviews and most employment situations, is entirely avoided.

I listened intently.

"I'm just like 'them,' " I thought. In what I have come to refer to as the parallel universe which I now inhabit, certain skills are now elusive. I am fine -- usually -- when the conversation is serious and focused, but I have lost most capacity for the fluff that eases our way through life. I now often avoid groups of friends because I realize that the most inappropriate things come out of my mouth ~ they think we are talking about a baby shower, and I think we are talking about the death of a child; they think we are talking about home renovation and I think we are talking about rooms that echo with the sound of a voice now gone. I can speak in seminary classes, I can do spiritual direction, I can write sermons ~ I can engage in interactions in which the topics are weighty ones upon which lives depend ~ but I can barely manage a wedding reception.

(Or perhaps I am simply struggling, in an atmosphere which seems far more dense than previously, with some of the same issues pertaining to ministry that I found so disconcerting last summer. I recall writing about an encounter when, on a brief break from CPE in which I wanted nothing more than a walk and an opportunity to think about anything other than what goes on in Giant Famous Hospital, a neighbor on the street asked me why there is suffering. Now, with my combined persona of soon-to-be-minister and bereaved mother, people decide that wedding receptions are good places in which to address matters pertaining to both.)

At any rate, I am going to be looking at Beyond Bars for insight in the same way in which I look at books more obviously centered on theology and spirituality. Because grief is its own prison, and I am guessing that "their' experiences have much to tell me about my own.

There is, of course, no 'they,' which is why I place the word in quotation marks. Even the people whom I now think of as "them," the people with what appear to me to be lives of normality, have their own hidden sorrows. And I need to find the same degree of patience and insight toward them as I long for for myself.

Bodily Grief

I might ask about this in a few other places, too, but it occurs to me that it seems that a number of people read this blog who might have some insight.

I am in almost constant physical pain, and have been since September. It moves around. For the first several months, it was my lower back, which most of the time felt that it was going to snap in two. Off and on, it's the muscles in my thighs; the pain often wakes me up early in the morning. Once I get up, it dissipates quickly. For the last week it has been my neck and shoulders. I thought that perhaps I had pinched a nerve, but as the week came to an end, I had to acknowledge that it was probably Hebrew: three hours a day, three days a week, sitting in uncomfortable chairs and trying to remain alert to unintelligible lectures. I've been fine for the last couple of days -- except, again, in my sleep. I think I must be dreaming about Hebrew and God only knows what else, as I awaken several times in the night needing to become fully conscious in order to figure out a way to roll over without experiencing agony down my neck and across my shoulders.

Maybe I need to pull out the Jon Kabat-Zinn books? A chiropractor is out of the question - I have a friend who is a physical therapist and he has communicated way too much about patients of his who had been seriously injured by chiropractors for me to feel positive about that option. The Lovely Daughter thinks I need to find a Chinese medicine practitioner. Yesterday I picked up a flyer advertising a woman who is offering yoga classes in her home, wondering whether she might do private ones in mine - but the classes she officially offers are for young mothers, designed to fit her schedule and theirs, so it's likely that any offhand comments she makes about her own life would more than offset any physical good she might do me.

As I write this, I realize how likely it is that my feeling of being utterly trapped is contributing to the particular pain I experience. Perhaps Full Catastrophe Living is indeed the place to start. A had always thought of the word "full" in the title as modifying "catastrophe," but maybe it modifies both nouns. Living in the face of full catastrophe? Living fully regardless?

The Desert's Secrets

The Desert's Secrets

(Alessandro Pronzato)

In the desert the most urgent thing is---to wait. The desert does not take kindly to those who tackle it at breakneck speed, subjecting it to their plans and deadlines. It soon takes its revenge and makes them pay dearly for their presumption. Instead, the desert welcomes those who shed their sandals of speed and walk slowly in their bare feet, letting them be caressed and burnt by the sand. If you have no ambition to conquer the desert, if you do not think you are in charge, if you can calmly wait for things to be done, then the desert will not consider you an intruder and will reveal its secrets to you.

Source: Meditations on the Sand

(from today's inwardoutward.org)

(image here)

I May Have Figured It Out

No, not death ~ I haven't figured that one out.

But I think I've realized why I have had such a visceral reaction against The Shack, which many generous people in real life and online have recommended to me.

The Shack presents a generous God who cares for all of the people of the world, who lovingly acknowledges the depth both of social sin and individual sin, who exudes forgiveness in situations we would find challenging beyond the possible, and who gently reminds us that we are the creatures and not the Creator. So far, so good.

But in The Shack, as in real life, the child is GONE. She is not coming back. She will never live the life her parents dreamed of for her, she will never marry the young man they would have loved, she will never have the children who would have brought her such joy and made her parents delirious with ecstasy. Her mother will never touch her hair again; her father will never kick a soccer ball down the beach with her again. Her many good gifts will never again be shared with the world. The doctor, the architect, the teacher she might have been ~ she will never be. All of those things which made her uniquely the child she was and the adult she would have become, all of them are gone.

Just gone.

I know that my Musical Friend finds comfort in her vision of the life to come, a vision in which she and her husband will be reunited. She relies in part on the words of her sister, who lost a teenage son and says that when they are together again, none of this will matter.

I find that my own feelings are quite the opposite.

This is the life I want back for my child. This one.

The Shack just rubs my face in the thick, dark reality that it is not to be.

Cross-posted at Search the Sea.

Just How It Is

Long telephone converstion with Musical Friend this morning, initiated by me because I owe her some money. Some of our friends started a book club this month, and I asked her how it had gone. I was at a bereavement support group instead. Turns out she didn't go either. "No one wants to read the books I'm reading," she said.

At the moment she's reading The Year of Magical Thinking, and I urged her to suggest it to the group. "Maybe it will help them understand, " I said.

We talked about how hard it is to endure conversations in which the most ordinary fragments feel like the twisting of a knife. She has a father-daughter event ahead of her; her son will escort her daughter, and her husband's absence will be all the more painful as she watches the other men and their pride in the young ladies. I reflected on holiday conversations with friends concerned about children driving home. Children who are alive. And of course, we agreed, you can hardly expect people not to live their lives.

I have the weather channel on as I type, and a photo of the White House just appeared, along with commentary on how cold Inauguration Day will be. My heart sank. It was so difficult to watch the Election Night celebration in Grant Park, a place we had been several times with Chicago Son. It has been hard to see photos of the Obama family in Hyde Park. I had managed to block out the Inauguration, and now I see how challenging those images will be, all of them reminding me of a Presidents' Day week-end family trip to DC many years ago when a blizzard was followed by temperatures topping out in the teens. I see Chicago Son bundled up against the cold outside the White House, in line at the Washington Monument, posing for pictures before the Lincoln Memorial.

I hope that I can find a way to enjoy some of the week ahead. But mostly I just want it over.