Inching Forward

Church was all right. It was more than all right. For whatever reason, I felt able to handle whatever was lobbed my way for the couple of hours I was there, and very interested in the various conversations in which I was involved.

(I did notice one really interesting thing, though.

Church seemed so BUSY. The service itself was full of energy (Pentecost, after all) but afterward, in the hallways and at the coffee hour -- people are just so BUSY. So many rapid-fire, half-baked conversations; so many interruptions. I don't know whether it's my two years of developing something of a contemplative stance in spiritual direction training, or my two years of (on occasion, anyway) thoughtful assessment in an academic environment, or my nine months of cautious adaptation to pain ~ but church felt hurried and jagged and wound up. I suppose that's another reason I've stayed away ~ an intuitive sense that the pace is just wrong for me right now.

An acquaintance/friend gave me an exquisite prayer shawl that she had made for me and been carting around for months, hoping I would show up one day. It is a lovely, lovely gift ~ but she thrust the box into my arms and disappeared.)

And then late this afternoon, Gregarious Son and I made the two-hour round trip to City South of Here, to figure out where he is supposed to go for the LSAT in another week. One of the things I most appreciate about my two surviving children is their ability to talk openly about our lives as we find them now. At one point I commented on how glad I am that he is signed up for the LSAT ~ whether or not he ever goes to law school, it's a start.

And he said, "We're going to pull through this, Mom."

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.

Mount Angel Abbey Revisited

Last fall, I posted about our visit to Mount Angel Abbey, which we more or less stumbled upon when we visited our daughter for her college's Parents' Week-End. We were in no shape to travel anywhere, but we felt that since she had somehow managed to return to college, we wanted to support her with our presence when other families might be enjoying themselves. We had, in fact, a very nice visit, and my encounter with the icon of Christ Pantocrator at the monastery probably kept me wobbling forward for another few months.

I had hoped to spend the night up there at the Abbey, my own private mini-retreat, while we were in Oregon last week, but the guesthouse was full and I concluded that I would have to find another time, another year. As it happened, though, a combination of desire and the time change propelled me out of bed and up to the Abbey for 6:30 a.m Lauds on Friday morning.

I had about half an hour to myself when I arrived, which I used to wander around both outside and in the chapel and then, finally, to settle down in front of "my" icon. Once again, I found the sense of peace and hopefulness that has been so elusive these past nine months. The sky was utterly blue, the chapel exuded a sense of the holy and the still, and the voices of the forty or so monks as they sang the psalms and prayers for half an hour offered a call to clarity for the day ahead.

My prayer in that chapel? ~ it's the only place I've found in which the turmoil and agitation of the past year subsides. Apparently I need to move to Oregon.

Paradox

The Garden of Gethesmane

The Resurrection

When we were in Oregon last week, we visited a place in Portland called The Grotto, a garden of plants and sculpture (that might have been a quiet place for meditation, had we not timed our visted to coincide with that of a wood-chipper going full blast for a couple of hours). I was quite taken by a series of sculptures by a Mary Lewis depicting Mysteries in the Life of Christ (apparently a devotional category with which I am unfamiliar, but perhaps a Catholic reader will enlighten us).

I'm posting images of the two which reflect the moment-by-moment back-and-forth in my own life, along with photos of one of the three sets of sculptures and their titles, so you can get an idea of the setting.

Five Things: Pain

I have been trying to get my mind around this for nearly nine months now. The fact that I have been unable to formulate even a vaguely articulate post should give you an idea of how mystified I am. It remains one of the great questions rippling away from a death by suicide:

How/Why?From whence? ~ so much pain? Enough that would cause a person to self-destruct?

I am told, by people who should know, that those who die by suicide do not comprehend the finality and completeness of their actions. That they would not leave notes seeking forgveness if they understood that they would not be here to receive that forgiveness. That they are so blinded by pain that their vision tunnels toward one goal: end the agony.

I have experienced my share of pain in this life. I have experienced losses beyond the norm for a middle class American woman of the 21st century. And having spent several years teaching in a Jewish school, I know many people whose losses rank among the worst in human history. I know about bodies, minds, dreams, being shattered beyond repair ~ as do most of us, sooner or later.

And yet, apparently, there is a realm of pain which I have not yet encountered, which most of us will never experience, no matter how many circles of hell we traverse in this life.

It is almost ~ and yet not ~ unendurable, to absorb the reality that a child whom I carried in my body, to whom I gave birth, and whose humor and kindnesss and creativity and intelligence I nurtured and treasured for 25 years, could have encountered such excruciating pain in this life, a life offered to him as pure gift.

And it seems odd, I know, that I should finally be writing this little post on the same day that I am elsewhere rejoicing over my daughter's college graduation, with photos of handsome and beautiful young celebrants and images of the natural beauty we found visiting her in Oregon. But the reality is that we do have to absorb them both ~ the joy and the horror ~ and carry them both with us. All the time.

In his essay The Things They Carried, in the book of the same title, Tim O'Brien lists the things that men carried with them through the jungles and paddies of Vietnam. All kinds of things. Me, too. In Oregon I carried a camera, and a pair of binoculars, and a cell phone, and crumpled up hotel receipts, and e-tickets, and memories of a graduation in Chicago two years earlier, and of a young man who would have looked proudly at his sister's Phi Bete key and chuckled, "Guess I should have put in a little more effort that last year ~ you beat me out!" ~ and I carried the knowledge that some of us conceal more pain than the rest of us imagine exists.

I have found some considerable help lately in a book in which the author talks about "lovingly allowing the other." It's what we try to do in spiritual direction, when we listen with attention and reverence to the story of another person's walk with God, and it has occurred to me that it is what I have to do with my son. The pain he encountered is outside my realm of experience, but I can, at least, lovingly allow his life, his otherness, to be, and honor him rather than to try to impose myself upon him.

On Mother's Day night, we went to see The Soloist, the movie about the brilliantly talented cellist, Nathaniel Ayers, whose schizophrenia revealed itself during his sojourn as a young man at Julliard and propelled him into a life on the streets. I leaned against my other son later that night and said, "That was a surprisingly good choice for this evening." All through the movie I wondered, Why? Why so much pain? Why is one man Yo-Yo Ma, and another Nathaniel Ayers? Why is one so able to embrace and share his gifts, and another so trapped by such harsh limitations?

I don't know why. But it is so.

Lovingly allowing the other. The only possibility for the rest of us.

Stages -- We Are All Different

I would never presume to speak for another woman's experience of this dreadful journey. But it seems that I am in a new place, albeit still considerably warped from life as I knew and loved it. Well. That life is over. And some sort of new construction is in process.

Mother's Day was rough. Thank God for my two wonderful children who are still in this world, and for their honesty and compassion in the face of such hurt. I do not have many people who can absorb my candid self-expression, but they seem able to, and able to share a little of their own pain.

Yesterday I spend nearly three hours talking over a possible internhip position for next year with a senior pastor at a downtown church. He was stunned, of course, when I told him about our year, and seemed surprised that I am capable of lucid conversation. And then we went on to have a terrific time.

That interlude caused me to think back to last fall. We had to do some things -- the first week with the funeral and all the associated planning and events, a week-end trip south for my niece's wedding, a week-end trip west to visit The Lovely Daughter on Parents' Week-end, and those horrific two days in Chicago to empty our son's apartment. Otherwise, though, my life was lived pretty much in my bed. Phone, computer, dog, me. Sleep, cry, stare at ceiling. When I did venture out of my room, I was surrounded by family or close friends. People who knew, people to whom I had to explain nothing.

I see that now I am in a different place. I am taking breaks from grief. Last night a few of us stayed after class for an hour, engaged in an intense and animated discussion with our professor. I'm pretty sure I was the only one whose thoughts were elsewhere every few minutes, but I also enjoyed myself and was grateful for the chance to focus on debates and conundrums which I find that I still care about. Afterward, I realized that I was recovering from Mother's Day by returning to my regular life, altered as it is.

So. Who knows how I'll feel in another hour? But I am pretty much able to get through lots of days now in some kind of fashion that sort of works.

Mothers' Day: Mothers Holding Hands

Whether you mother a living child or one who is with God, you stand in equality with all mothers. Hold your children in your heart today as you reflect upon your child's life. Happy Mothers Day. Peace.

Mommy (OM) in Minnesota

We are all visitors to this world; some of us walk a long journey, others just a simple second. Our impact and the true depths of our lives is not based on how many breaths we take or how old we live to be. Our lives are measured in how we have touched one another. Our children, dead and alive, have touched us deeply. Their lives mattered. Their lives have meaning and value, regardless of whether they lived on this earth or

how long they lived on this earth.

Michelle in Pennsylvania

Honoring Mothers' Day for all those who mourn the death of their precious children. Not even death can break the bond of mother and child. Love is eternal.

Caitsmom in the U.S.

My thoughts tonight keep taking me to a quote from Timepiece by Richard Paul Evans: "If ever I am to comfort someone, I will not try to palliate their suffering through foolish reasoning. I will just embrace them and tell them I am heartfelt sorry for their loss."

To all of you, wherever you may be, if I could I would embrace you. I am heartfelt sorry for the losses that have brought us together. But, I am also thankful to have found such comfort and support. Happy Mother's Day.

Natalie on the East Coast

As a mother of three boys, two of whom are alive today, I am grateful to God for the joy and challenges of being a mother. Our son Jacob only lived for one hour after he was born. His twin brother Jackson is now 14 and 6 feet tall. Jacob is somehow present in our family and yet not. I trust he is in the loving presence of God. My faith helps me treasure the past, present and future as mother.

Cynthia

I am wishing you (and all mothers) a Happy Mother's Day; though that may sound especially trite right now, I do mean it from the deepest place in my heart.I was looking at my blog posting from last year's Mother's Day, and it was interesting to read, a year later.

Much has changed, and much is the same. I survived this year, and Katie didn't come back.This may always be a tough holiday, but I am so happy to be a mother, and especially grateful to be the mother of both of my children, David and Katie. Katie is still my precious daughter, even though she doesn't live here anymore. After her passing, I found a letter that she had written to me, two years and one day before she died. She was perfectly healthy at the time she wrote it. The letter is precious to me, and I carry it in my purse with our family photos. It says (with her spelling just as it is in the letter):

"Dear Mom,I want you to know that I love you all the time. Every single second of life and death. I'm thinking of you always. You will always be my mother. You come and help me when I'm hurt, you help with my arts and crafts, you supervize me with the hot glue gun, you kiss my ouie's better, you prepare meals for the family every night (unless we go out to dinner), your smile brightens every day of my life, you cook very well, you always help me with my homwork, when I have a tummyach you give me tums, and if that doesn't work you give me a banana or rice from the Brat diet, and you love all of the family with all of your heart.

I LOVE you Mommy!

Love,Kathryn Emilie Gerstenberger"

This Mother's Day, I share this letter with you, in the hopes that Katie's words will comfort you, too. She is right: we will always be our child's mother, "every single second of life and death." Thank you, Katie, for a beautiful Mother's Day gift.

Karen in Washington State

I find that I am entirely without words. All that love, it will always be yours.

Love is stronger than death.

GG in Ohio