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.

How, I Wonder

For some reason, a particular encounter from last summer's CPE has come to mind repeatedly over the past few days.

It was a Sunday morning and I was on call in the hospital. Week-end daytime on calls were the easiest -- no overnight, just 8:00- 4:30, with a chapel service to lead on Sunday. I arrived full of energy and eager to preach my little sermon to whomever might show up for the service.

When I arrived, I was asked to meet with a family whose husband and father had himself arrived only hours later and would be dying sometime that day, after life support was removed. It took awhile to marshall the family members, and so I spent much of the day with them. The gentleman was about my age, a seemingly healthy and energetic man who had suffered a stroke while performing some household chores. His son, the age of my own boys, was in agony, and I spent most of my time with him. He had suffered several setbacks in his life in the previous weeks, and he clearly adored his father.

We made an unlikely pair, from an appearance standpoint. I looked pretty chaplain-y ~ which is to say: conservative pants, shoes, jacket ~ and he looked pretty ~ oh, I don't know ~ Goth, maybe? But we quickly developed a deep bond as we talked over a period of several hours, and when his father finally left us, he threw his arms around me and sobbed.

What I most remember, though, is the urgent question he asked me at some point:

How do you DO this?

I thought, and still think, that he meant to ask how I, as a chaplain, was able to stand situations such as his family's, day after day.

But now I also hear another question that he may have intended to ask as well: How do I do this? How do I live through these hours? How do I survive and go on after my father dies?

I wonder what I would say today.

I wonder what his own answer has turned out to be.

Five Things: Shock

I can talk only about what it has been like for me. My husband, my son, my daughter -- perhaps they would see things differently, perhaps they would be able to order them in some way. Perception , response -- no doubt even those earliest cave paintings in France tell us something about the variety of human perception and response. I have only my own story to share.

The shock. The suddenness of a loss that blots out your entire universe. I read a couple of weeks ago that only 20% of deaths in the United States today are completely unanticipated. I was surprised, since my personal experience has been so different. My 28-year-old mother and year-old brother killed in a car accident. My 48-year-old stepmother killed in a fall. My 49-year-old aunt dead almost instantly of a stroke or heart attack. My 24-year-old son, dead by suicide.

There is, of course, a sense of shock even when the death has been expected, even when its imminence has been the focus of life. That reality first became apparent to me when I was in law school and my husband's uncle died of cancer. He was at home, where his family had cared for him during the last weeks of his life, and his wife's response was one of such overwhelming anguish and agitation that I realized that even when you know what is going to happen, you can't quite accommodate it until it does. I saw the same thing over and over again during my CPE experience at Giant Famous Hospital last summer. Probably close to 75, maybe many more, of my patients died while I was actually there on the campus, usually with them. I can't think of a single survivor who wasn't visibly shaken, heartbroken, devastated ~ and it made no difference whether their loved ones had been in the hospital a matter of hours or a matter of months. The completeness of death startles and undoes us no matter the circumstances.

But a completely unexpected death brings its own set of horrors. The ground has shifted, the sky has turned dark, and the requirements of your life have been altered, all in a single second. You have to absorb information that you cannot find acceptable, you have to make telephone calls you will not remember making, you have to make decisions no one wants to make.

As far as I can piece together, in the first hour or so after learning of my son's death, which had happened the night before while while I was four hours from home at a retreat center, I talked by telephone to my husband who was at home and called to tell me, to my daughter's college advisor and then to my daughter in Oregon, to my brother and son en route to our house from the southern part of the state, to a detective in Chicago, to my spiritual director who was at home, to my son's girlfriend in Chicago, to our pastors who were at church, and to a good friend at home. Some of those calls I can remember, some I only know must have taken place because of information I seem to have acquired in the first hours. The only person I knew at the retreat center, where I had been for a little more than a day, was the Jesuit who was my director for the week I had planned there, and so I talked to him off and on through the late afternoon and early evening, as I waited for friends to come for me. He offered his office and computer, and so I sent a few emails to others to whom I am close, knowing that within another few hours I would be unable to manage anything of the sort.

I felt encased in some kind of impermeable shell, into which the faintest knowledge of an ominous reality had somehow seeped, a reality that was gathering the steam that would enable it to crash its way into every corner of our lives and explode that shell into thousands of pieces.

It feels as if that explosion is still reverberating. I guess it will always feel that way.