One Year

What if you had just one year left?

(No, this is not about the Stephen Levine book, which I own but haven't yet read.)

The other night, in considerable pain and very despondent about the pace of recovery from a broken ankle, I started poking around the internet, reading comments and blog posts by others who've been in a similar situation.  After awhile, I concluded: A year. It takes a full year to resume life as it was.  (I am walking a mile outdoors most days now, but it takes me 45 minutes,  requires an ankle brace and a walking stick, and it hurts.  I'm grateful to be outdoors and moving, and I know there's nothing for it but to do it, but I'm still easily discouraged.)

Last night I relayed this information to my friend Michelle, and noted the utter frustration of losing a year of active life at this point, when you can hope for only about 15 fifteen more really good ones before your body starts to disintegrate rather dramatically. One out of fifteen ~ that's a lot.

At the same time, it's occurred to me recently that I am living much of a life that was mostly a dream only a few years ago.  At some point toward the end of seminary, I wrote out something of a plan for the future.  Parts of it remain completely unrealized, but the call and ministry portion is in good order.  I do pastor a church, I do accompany people in spiritual direction and give retreats, and I do teach in a university about a semester a year. 

Add to the ankle and to the ministry life a discussion with my daughter the other night about what I think I would do it I were diagnosed with advanced cancer ~ a conversation generated by the plight of yet another acquaintance who is going the chemo and radiation route, as most people do, but about which I am extremely skeptical.

"The Grand Canyon," I said.  "I still haven't been to the Grand Canyon."

"Mom," she said, if that's at the top of your list, why aren't you going there?"

"It's a good thing it wasn't in the plan for this year," I said.  "I could never have done the hiking I want to do there.  But you're right -- maybe it's time to get organized for next year."

And so I've been thinking.  I probably have more than a year left, but still: with what would I like to fill the next twelve months, and in what ways would I like to empty them?

With my family?

In my home?

In the church?

In the way of spiritual direction and retreat work?

In teaching?

In writing?

And . . . the Grand Canyon? 

Ten Years?

Yep, I've been blogging for ten years.

And I think I've about exhausted what I have to say, at least for the time being.

During those ten years, one of my three children finished high school, they all finished college, one died, and two earned graduate degrees.

I've been to Iona and Paris, the Pacific Northwest (multiple times, thanks to a college student), canoeing in Canada, lobbying in Columbus and Washington, D.C., and up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer and broke my ankle.

I completed seminary and a certificate in spiritual direction, was ordained to ministry, taught some college classes, and have served two churches as pastor.

I'm, just back from a much needed week of silence and spiritual direction at Georgetown University, where I stayed in the Jesuit Community's residence, did a disappointingly small bit of exploration (that ankle!), dealt with a car breakdown, and read a lot of Brian Doyle.  (How have I not read all of his books before ???)

Mostly I stretched luxuriously into prayer as my cat stretches across the bed, sinking into a fleece blanket, retracting her claws, and closing her eyes.

 

At least twice on my retreat, deep into the contemplation of passages of scripture, I related to my spiritual director what seemed to me to be striking insights, and he told me to look into what the early church fathers had to say about them when I got home.

 

I have nothing original whatever to offer! ~ be it on the church, bereavement, ministry, parenting, suicide, prayer, or any of the other topics which have absorbed me this past decade.

 

I have concluded that I am in need of much more silence in my life, much more time for listening and reading and absorbing. 

 

So . . .  if you've been reading, thank you.  If you've been commenting, thank you even more.  I might return, someday ~ but for now, I think that my online presence will be a small and quiet one.

AMDG.





Image: Holy Trinity Church near the Georgetown University Campus.

What I Was Thinking About

 

So this past week I wasn't writing much.  A church newsletter article, a Powerpoint for the college class I teach, a sermon that I didn't much like (but other people seemed to ~ go figure), and a very few emails and FB posts.  Mostly what I did was use that space usually taken up with communicating  as many of my thoughts as possible to reflect on things I haven't thought about in a long time.

 

When I was a girl, a teenager, one of the lives I imagined for myself was as the owner of a few horses.  I grew up out in the country, on the 25 or so hillside acres that my family and my grandparents owned.  About five of those acres consisted of an overgrown meadow along the road, on the other side of the creek below our house.  One year my dad had it mowed so that we could play baseball down there, but for most of my life it sustained itself somewhere between the range of grassland and young forest.

 

I kind of thought that someday I would take over those five acres and build a stable and a riding ring and maybe create a couple of riding trails through the woods.

 

I wasn't much of a rider.  I learned during my four summers of camp, and I rode most afternoons during my middle school years with the nuns; they had a few horses and a neighboring lady, the mom of one of my classmates, took us out on trail rides.  But skilled or not, like so many adolescent girls, I fell in love with horses, and had old horseshoes, once worn by some of my favorites, hanging from my bedroom wall. 

 

I was never interested in horse shows; I just liked the freedom of a ride over the fields and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go. Toward the end of my senior year spring at my second boarding school, a group of us who had been friends for all of those years discovered that we all knew how to ride, and that one of our day student classmates had parents who ran a stable.  And so as one of our last and best flings, we signed up for the school's cabin up on a mountain and rode the horses up there for the week-end.

 

I was surprised, two-plus decades later when my daughter took riding lessons for a couple of years, to discover that I could bridle and saddle and brush down a horse as if I'd never taken a break. 

 

I don't know why I've been remembering horseback riding all week.  I haven't given it a thought for years. But as the days opened up, I found my thoughts turning repeatedly to that dream of a small barn in the overgrown field, and early morning rides on a horse of my own.  I  was pretty sure that I would become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist, but I thought that I would have that horse to keep me grounded and in touch with the outdoors.

 

I've been teaching my college religion students about symbol and myth, and so I decided to google horse symbolism.  I found this:

 

The horse spirit animal symbolizes personal drive, passion and appetite for freedom. Among all the spirit animals, it is one that shows a strong motivation that carries one through life. The meaning of the horse varies depending on whether this animal spirit guide is represented as wild, tamed, moving freely or constrained.

 

I found that to be an intriguing description for this juncture in my life.  I'm not sure why, not yet. I certainly don't want to be in charge of a horse!  But it's interesting to me that these memories and once-intense longings have surfaced.

Out and About ~ Oops!

The first time I ever made an eight-day silent retreat, I started to get restless around the fourth day. 

 

"Isn't it about time for a movie night?" I asked my director.  "Couldn't we all get together for some popcorn and a film and some conversation?"

 

She was a humorless woman, and she gave me a horrified look as she said, "No!"

 

"Just kidding," I said.

 

This morning I forgot all about my internet sabbatical, and posted a few things on FB.  I've noticed many posts, on FB and in blogs, on which I've wanted to comment, but I've restrained myself.  Such a habit, though!  Open laptop and start talking!

 

Going back to my bunker now.

60 and Wistful

My 37th birthday cake and its creators at 5, 5, and 2.

Wistful.  I guess that would be the word.

 

It could have all been so different.

 

I think I subconsciously imagined that, after blogging self-indulgently for ten days, I would have some insight into where I've  been and where I'm going. 

 

But, alas, I do not.

 

I guess sixty is no different from any other day ~ LOL!  Some unbloggable stuff going on, which is clarifying, but hardly at a stage of resolution.  And the resolution will not necessarily be to my liking.  A wedding Saturday night ~ the daughter of friends ~ our first attempt in four years ~ in which the pain of all-that-will-never-be bored its relentless hole right through my fairly well-honed capacity for dissociation. (Just pretend this isn't happening and you aren't here.)  I'm still feeling the after-effects. 

 

On the plus side: My Lovely Daughter took me to see The Lion King on Friday night ~ such an incredibly creative show! ~ and my church celebrated after worship yesterday with a potluck.  More cakes at dinner last night and then at a gathering of friends. 

 

On the down side:  Having paid no attention to the combination of day and date, I am spending the evening with a family connected to a church in my Presbytery who lost a husband and father to suicide ten days ago. 

 

Here's what I wrote on our Day 10.  How well I remember those weeks and then months, curled up in bed with my dog and my computer, hoping that I would die soon.  That's why I'm going to see them tonight, even though I goofed on the date.

 

I looked up ~ of course! the etymology of wistful.  It seems to have something to do with silence and wishing. 

 

Umm~hmm.

 

Wistful it is.


 

54-60/60

It seems that there's little to say about the last six years ~ during which I've filled page after page online and in private journals.

Only two words, really.

Suicide.

Ordination.

The birds and the hikes are still out there.  I had breast cancer and that was pretty awful but, in the grand scheme of things, not all that important.  I became a spiritual director and I get to hear wonderful stories of longing and prayer and confusion and discernment. Our surviving children are doing well. 

A couple of weeks ago I became one of the founding board members of the Northern Ohio Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  During our largely organizational meeting, we talked briefly about the extent to which loss to suicide defines our lives.

I suppose that, at the five year mark, it doesn't really define my life anymore. It night seem that way more than is the case, because I read and write a lot about it, and I do some suicide prevention work and some with survivors.  But it's become a reality that I've sort of absorbed into my skin.  Enough so that now I need to become more alert to how surprised and shocked others can be when the topic comes up.

No, the thing that defines me is: I have three children and one of them is not here.  I miss him so much that I live each day, no matter how satisfying or productive or filled with love, around a crater of loss.    His death, the fact of it, the gone-ness of him, the mystery of where he is now, define almost everything I do in ministry, every way I think about theology, every twist and turn in my cycle of despair and hope.

I wish I could say that ordination to ministry defines my life.  At one time I thought that it would.  But my experience has been so different from others' and so overshadowed by the death of my son that I find myself mostly wondering  . . .     .  It would be preferable, I suppose, for a pastor to say that her Christian experience has overshadowed her experience of death.  But  I can't make that one up. 

Had you asked me, six years ago, as I was preparing to go to seminary, to imagine my life six years hence, I could not possibly have predicted the reality.  I'm in a reading group trying to get together to discuss Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss.  These words of his apply, I think:

"When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life.  I lived not with God, nor with his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities -- a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism -- nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself.  I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to.  Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe."

 

In some way, perhaps, it is a matter of grace that I have known so much of God's absence these past five years.  God's presence in the midst of so much suffering ~ my own and, so much more terrible, my child's ~ is, I think, not something I can comprehend.  Maybe that is the work of however many years are left to me. 

48-54/60

2004 Thanksgiving in Chicago

Phew!  All three kids made it to college and stayed there until diplomas were in hand.  Those years meant trips to Chicago and New Orleans and Oregon for us, studies and travel in Europe for the boys, camp counseling in North Carolina for two of our three, and a trip to Iona and France for us.  Two days in Chartres a block from the Cathedral!

A major life transition for me, as I switched from law to teaching history and literature in a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school.  Immersion into an entirely new-to-me culture. There are several Orthodox neighborhoods in the Cleveland area, including some close to ours, but I knew nothing of life there ~ the religious observances, the focus on Torah, the food and celebrations, the academic expectations, the family lives.  Six years in and out of a different world on a daily basis.

Several worlds, in fact.  This was also the period in which I made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I've written about that year so often here that I won't elaborate further today, except to say this:

I was 52 that year.  I can't put my finger on any explanation for my being so open to new experience and deep prayer in that particular year, but in retrospect the whole experience was a powerful confirmation of how profoundly one's approach to life can change, or be changed, at any time.  As I sit here writing on my laptop in my comfortable living room in Ohio in 2013, I think of Ignatius in Spain in the early 1520s, beginning to formulate what would become his little guide to prayer for those who would accompany others as he was beginning to do.  Had he not been slammed by that cannonball and had I not bumped into a wise elder of his Jesuit order nearly 500 years later, would I have become a spiritual director?  become a pastor?  survived Josh's death? 

 

Probably not.

 

Here's what I think about life from the vantage point of sixty:

 

Very strange.

42-48/60

All three kids are actually in this photo, along with my last stepmother.  Josh is in the foreground ~ canoe trip in the backcountry of Algonquin (Ontario).  (I had told my dad after a couple of trips that we needed to schedule in days off for relaxation!)

 

 

Getting closer to that birthday . . .

Like all families, we had our difficulties.  During my forties, as my kids moved through elementary and middle school and into high school, there were some bumps in the road.  OK, more like craters and mountains.  We had some triumphs with our careers and our children's lives ~ Josh was able to live in France for a year, for instance ~ and we also experienced some real disasters.

I have no idea why some kids glide into adulthood and others careen forward and backward and sideways.  No idea at all.  I do know that the latter path is  hard on parents and siblings.

 

A friend of mine spoke to me in desperation one day.  One of her children was in serious trouble; a colleague's son had just been admitted to an Ivy League University.  Another colleague, congratulating the other mother, had exclaimed, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree!"

"What kind of tree does that make me?" my friend queried sadly.

"A gorgeous one,"  I said.  "There is no telling or predicting this s--t."

Here's what I finally concluded.  Some parents are luckier than others.

So profound.

Some parents get to engage in what on the surface seems to be a nonstop sequence of applause for prizes captured, championships won, scholarships granted.  (Even for those parents, the surface is often merely just that ~ a glimmering sheen concealing family traumas and dramas.)  Others are dealt the early morning calls from the police station, the unexpected pregnancies, the new jangle of acronymns ~  AA, NA, etc. ~ the afternoons in trauma centers or the mornings in chemo rooms, the string of failing grades, the endless sequence of 504 meetings.

We got a hefty dose of both sorts of categories.

Eventually I came to believe that sometimes we are offered opportunities to learn more ways of loving deeply than are usually available. 

I think my song for those years might be Hotel California ~ "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

36-42/60

Camping trip in the Adirondack Mountains.

Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I've been considering that statement as I've contemplated this time period in my life.  Is it true?  Perhaps so.  As I think about the families I have known, and try to imagine families the world over living in varying frameworks of wealth and poverty, peace and warfare, support and isolation, it seems that what happy families share is a conviction that all members are loved and supported and valued, in whatever ways culture moderates and circumstances permit.

My own family was a happy one in an unremarkable American suburban kind of way. I was at home with the kids until I turned forty and then, with all of them in elementary school, returned to the practice of law.   

The kids stayed in Montessori school and we continued to spend time in St. Augustine and Chautauqua.  We went camping, we went canoeing, and they did the usual kid things with the four children next door:  lemonade stands and original (!)  dramas and community soccer teams and afternoons at the park and the pool.  We were very active in the Methodist church and then we weren't, and I began my gradual migration toward the Presbyterian church down the road.  We had a group of close friends with whom we spent lots of time and celebrated holidays.

The one significant challenge ~ and one not handled well by me, I'm afraid ~ was the constant business travel demanded of my husband.  He was gone every month for at least a week and, as the children got older, twice a month for ten days at a time.  It was extremely hard on me to be a single parent so much of the time and part of a couple the rest.  If I had it to do over again, I would approach the whole situation more thoughtfully and generously, and would insist on improved communication.

I don't know what you do about back-up in times like that.  On one occasion a friend stopped by on a winter day when the kids and I were all sick.  She made a grocery run for me after discovering that we had run out of several things, and that taking everyone out seemed an insurmountable task to me.  Days like that were rough, and I didn't like to ask for help ~ all of my friends were also caring for rambunctious young families without benefit of nearby grandparents or siblings. 

But I was not a single parent in the sense of having to provide financially for our family, and I was very grateful for that.   On the whole, our days were very, very good.

Since Josh's death, it's difficult for me not to look back at our lives from under the shadow of that catastrophe and wonder what we missed, what we might have done differently.  I ponder all the choices we made and wonder, Should we have done it the other way instead?  Should we have done this and not that?  Public school instead of private?  Life in the country instead of life in the city?  Day camp instead of sleepover camp?    Was there something staring us in the face that we completely overlooked?  But when I look back at those times for what they were, I can only conclude that the answers to all of those questions is, No. We were attentive and engaged and loving parents, our kids were funny and lively and into all kinds of things, and there was nothing we enjoyed more than time as a family.

We might not have had quite so many pets at one time, though!

30-36/60

Deliriously . . .

Outrageously . . .

Sublimely . . .

Happy.

Three absolutely perfect, beautiful, funny, delightful, blonde children.

Florida every winter.

Chautauqua every summer.

 

Other places, too.  (The photo was taken in Arizona.)

The pink tower (Montessori preschool).

Dogs, cats, guinea pig, and birds to come.

 

Really,  I didn't get very far along the road of having a mother.  But I got to be a mother.  The only outcome from early loss that might be termed a blessing:   you don't take much for granted when it comes your way again.  But it's a double-edged sword, because you are always so excruciatingly aware that life turns on a dime.

*****

Last night I spent some time with an elementary school classmate.  We concluded that we have not seen one another in 43 years.  She got married while we were still in high school, became a hairdresser, and lives within a couple of miles of the house in which she grew up.  My life has taken a few more twists and turns.  But we have, each of us, lost a twin son in his twenties.  It took us about a second to agree that a close and loving family was the only  thing each of us had really wanted out of life. 


 

24-30/60

Halfway there!  What's left, today, of the end of my third decade?

Not my legal career, although it was my major focus during those years.

Birds, yes ~ although not with the intensity in which I invested most of my free time in those years in which I became completely enthralled with all things avian.  My husband and I did some backpacking in that time period, and became intent on birding as an alternative to endless groaning about sore muscles and blistered feet.  My friend Cindy, in Alaska this week, reported seeing a varied thrush, something I remember from our week in the backcountry of Glacier National Park.  We went to southwestern Arizona almost entirely for the birding,  we covered our own Great Lakes region extensively, and we had a lot of fun birding with my grandparents in Florida each spring. 

RELIGION ~ there it is.  I think I was 29 when I impulsively announced one morning that we should find a church, which we accomplished by watching a few services on local cable tv, so that we wouldn't have to visit in person without some sense of what we were getting into.  Within a couple of months I was baptized, confirmed, and attending church every Sunday.  I basically had no idea what any of the words I'd said to get there really meant, and I had no idea what belonging to a church community meant, either.  (Remember, almost all my experience of religion was in boarding schools, and more academic than anything else.)  Considering the developments of the next three decades, this little glitch in my history makes me extremely laid back about any kind of way someone wants to come into the church.  I am kind of obnoxiously traditional about certain aspects of church life, but as far as barriers to entrance or participation ~ no, I really can't promote any of those.

Which reminds me:  there's been an article making the rounds the past week or so about how churches desiring to attract young people shouldn't go out of their way to become all cool and hip.  Indeed.  I know that everyone finds his or her own way in but: at 29, a person divided between high heels in a  downtown legal office and muddy boots out in the birding field,  a person whose musical tastes were also evenly divided between rock 'n roll and the Cleveland Orchestra, there was no way I would have walked into a church unless it looked like this, with music and preaching to match:

This is in fact, an old photo of our UMC Church of the Savior in Cleveland Heights. 

 

I wasn't looking for a cozy, intimate family church.  I wasn't looking for potluck dinners ~ I didn't actually know about potluck dinners (although it turned out that we were to go to plenty of them). I did want to find some people interested in the same social justice issues that I was interested in, and my personal history told me that they might be found in a church. 

 

But mostly, I was on the trail of the mystery of God.  I just didn't know it yet.

18-24/60

Let me spare us all the boredom of a lengthy recitation of my very young adult adventures.

College.  Law school.  Marriage.  Not in that order.

 

On the home front: My first stepmother died in a bizarre accident the summer before I started college, and my father re-married the next summer, adding two more stepsisters and eventually a half-brother to the mix.  I've never really known any of them.  My first set of step-siblings quickly made their way back to Florida and Georgia, and we've only seen one another a couple of times in the last forty years.

 

I had incredible summer internships.  Not.  Let's see . . . I cleaned hotel rooms in Cincinnati, waited tables at Chautauqua, made G.I. Joe flashlights in Pawtucket, worked as a drugstore cashier in Providence, and waited on some more tables in Cleveland.  When I was ready to leave for school, the hotel housekeeping manager told me she'd make me a floor manager if I stayed, and the drugstore manager told me she'd put me in charge of the cosmetics department.  I'm serious.  No one EVER asked me if I wanted to manage a restaurant or a toy factory.  I guess we see where my innate gifts lie.

I really have only one comment.  When I see the effort that goes into the college decision process and the planning of a wedding today, I often think: The real milestones in life come when you least expect them.  Wherever you go to college, it will be fine.  Whether you get married in a Plaza Hotel extravaganza or in a small chapel in the woods will have virtually no bearing on whether you are still married thirty or sixty years later.  Or whether you want to be.  And while it's cool to have a flashy volunteer internship, it's also cool to pay your own rent, at least for the summer.

It's good to earn those diplomas.  It's good to make commitments even when you have no idea what you're doing.  It's good to work hard and it's good to celebrate.  But those things are barely the beginning.  At least in my case. 

 

Young people today are often so accomplished and sophisticated. 

 

I so wasn't.

12-18/60

Eight days to go . . .

The basics: These were the girls' boarding school years.  Grades 7-9 with the Ursuline nuns in Ohio and grades 10-12 at Northfield, one of the schools founded by evangelist D.L. Moody in Massachusetts.  No stereotyping allowed! Those were the places in which I gained a grounding in religion that was open-minded, progressive, and scholarly.  The Catholics were just blossoming forth from Vatican II and the Protestants were heavily influenced by Tillich and the social justice movement.  Once I got to Northfield, I seldom went home anymore; I spent my spring breaks in Florida with my grandparents and my summers doing a mother's helper gig for a family on Cape Cod.  Those were influential but impressively unproductive years; I was a terrible student and my extra-curricular activities were unbloggable.

Key phrase: "You are wasting your potential."

Best memories:  Oh, most of those are unbloggable, too.  But there was the music at Northfield, which had an incredible choral program.  Even those of us who otherwise did little more than tunelessly hum Beatles' and Joni Mitchell songs had to participate. 

 

Spring 1970 Sacred Concert, dedicated to Kent State.  Many of us would probably agree that singing the David Stanley York arrangement of "Once to Every Man and Nation" was one of the defining moments of our lives.  It's completely different from the jaunty version found in most hymnals and was powerfully appropriate to that period in our national history.

And, amazingly, I've finally found a recording online ~ from a Presbyterian church in Dayton, of all places.  You have to scroll about two-thirds of the way down the page to 9.5.10 and then click on the title.  I would suggest turning the volume way up and imagining the young voices of 1200 idealistic high school students accompanied by an orchestra on a sunny spring day in western Massachusetts at the height of the Vietnam War.

A little reflection: One of the things one asks at 60 is how on earth she got to be who and where she is.  I did not, at the age of sixteen that afternoon at Northfield, believe for one minute that there was a God standing within the shadow keeping watch above anyone at all. 

 

But everything was in place, wasn't it?  Immersion in the beauty of creation, from rural Ohio to the Atlantic coastline to the foothills of the Berkshires;  a family's terrible suffering; a demanding religious and musical education ~ and a relentlessly skeptical but still hopeful mind and heart. 

 

No WONDER.

 

One could possibly even believe that God engineered all of this.

Here are the James Russell Lowell lyrics as adapted if you want to listen and read what you're hearing:

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
 

By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;
 

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Truth forever on the scaffold, and forever on the throne;

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

 

 

 

 

 

6-12/60

Horses in the pasture at camp ~ looks the same 50 years later.

Nine days till 60!  Looking back at ages 6-12:

The basics:  Stark realities:  My mother and baby brother were killed in a car accident when I was seven and my surviving brother was four; the two of us were badly injured.   Two and one-half years later we acquired our first step-mother, who brought two of her children from Florida and left two there with their father. (When I speak of my brothers, I mean the stepbrother who was my age, my biological brother 2.5 years younger, and the stepbrother 2.5 years younger than my own brother.) 

One word:  Bewildered.

 

Best memories:  Gwynn Valley Camp in NC, where I spent the summers I turned ten and eleven.  (All of my children would eventually become campers there, and two of them staffers.)  It was a long 500 miles from home and in those days, camp sessions were four and eight weeks long.  It separated me from my stepmother, gave me back some childhood and some sense of accomplishment, and saved my life in many ways.  Other best memories:  The trips my grandmother and I made to Williamsburg and out west: Salt Lake, Yellowstone, the Tetons.  The beginnings of my passion for travel.  And the monarch butterflies my grandmother "raised" on her back porch.

 

Biggest fears:  Other than the deep end of the pool, a fear which I conquered when I finally learned to swim at camp, I don't recall being afraid of much.  (My brothers and I really did spend long hours in fields and creeks hunting down innocent snakes, some of which we killed and some of which we saved for awhile in jars before letting them go.  And we spent a lot of time high in trees and riding our bikes a considerable distance from home.)  As I look back on those years, I realize that I was a little survivor.  It's a trait that would serve me well fifty years later.  I've never lost the sense that the universe is as treacherous and chaotic a place as it is mystifyingly lovely,  and that survival skills are good ones to keep handy.  I learned most of mine when I was seven and eight and nine.

 

Best book:  TKM, which I read for the first time under the covers with a flashlight in fifth grade.  Although our ages differed, the three of us older kids were remarkably like Scout, Jem, and Dill, and my father remarkably like Atticus.  

 

Music:  The Beatles, the beginning of the major soundtrack of  my life.

 

Quote:  Mary Oliver's entire "Love Sorrow" poem from her book Red Bird. This has become one of my favorites in the past few years, but I see now that it serves as a narrative for my childhood.

 

 

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.


 

0-6/60

My mom and me.

I've realized this morning that it's ten days until the big 6-0.  I had hoped to host a big bash in our newly restored back yard but, alas, the promised six-week garage-deck-patio project is now at 14 weeks  and counting.  I'm guessing at least six to go, so maybe we'll party next year instead.   Therefore, in a burst of total narcissism, I'm going to celebrate here, six years at a time.  Don't apologize if you get bored!  Actually, just don't read.

Years 0 ~ 6

The basics:  Ohio country life with my parents, my two brothers (the second was born the year I turned six), and my extended family all nearby.  The second half of kindergarten and first grade in Florida, where my parents were planning to move.

 

One word:  Idyllic.

 

Best memories:  The ocean and the palm trees in Florida, and in Ohio the fields, the trees, the creek, the butterflies, my cat Tomasina and her kitten Butterball ~ whose designated role in life was to became My Cat ~ our great dane Jody, and my paternal grandmother next door, who would drop everything for us at any time of the day or night.

 

Biggest fears:  Snakes.  Big ole' long blacksnakes stretched across the road at home, and coral snakes in Florida.  Honestly, I am so scared of snakes (which my brothers and I later spent years catching), you'd think they were every last one of them cobras prepared to leap out of nowhere and kill me instantly.

 

Music:  Perry Como and also  the Lawrence Welk show, which we watched on Sunday evenings after dinner at my maternal grandparents' house in town.  My plan was to become a blond, curly-haired singer named Peggy on Lawrence Welk.  My hair is neither blond nor curly, I can't sing a note, and obviously I have the wrong name  ~ but that was nevertheless my fondest dream.   

 

Quote (This is kind of like a yearbook!): "My work is to love the world" ~ Mary Oliver.

TEN

 

 

Ten years, ten months, ten days . . . what would you do if that's what was left to you?

 

It's an old question, I know.  I'm feeling the urgency of it these days.

 

Looking ahead: I'll be sixty in a few weeks.  I figure that gives me ten years of energy at the level to which I've become accustomed.  Not anything approaching the energy I possessed five years ago, but still.  Enough.  Ten years in which to pastor a church and/or accomplish some other things which matter to me.  Ten years before I will perhaps want to make completely different choices about how to spend my days than I do now.

 

(And yes, I'm presuming health, which is nothing more than a fragile hope.  I have a routine colonoscopy scheduled in a couple of weeks.  Once one of those routine tests alters your life for year or more, as a mammogram did for me, you no longer view them with quite the equanimity you once did.  But let's pretend.)

 

Looking back, the last two months have been fuller than I would have liked (and probably account for how sick I've been the last few days).  The usual church stuff plus some difficult conflicts.  Three funerals, a new member, two people having and still facing major surgeries.  (And while I've never had a pastor come to visit me in the hospital, excepting after the birth of my boys nearly twenty-nine years ago, when my people go, I usually do as well.)  Extensive preparations for two major events, one of which I was unable to attend, due to one of the aforesaid funerals.  Three days of advocacy in Washington.  And some unbloggable stuff, some kind of difficult and some filled with promise -- or not.

 

I really am not at all sure how to approach these next ten years.  I feel very . . . scattered.  It's in the nature of parish ministry that one does many things, different things, sequentially and also often simultaneously.    I'm not sure that I want to live that way.  I look at some of the intensity with which others in my boat approach writing, or suicide prevention work, or bereavement work, and I think: Yes, I should be a more single-minded and focused person. 

 

Then I live with that sort of focus for a bit, and I miss the rest.  I loved being in Washington.  I loved the return to my driven lawyer self.  I loved the sense of community.  I loved being with 200 people who could talk about gruesome details of death by suicide without flinching.  (I guess that sounds weird.  But so often I have to sensor my reality . . . ). And yet, while I was there, I was planning worship for the next two Sundays in my head, I was texting with a parishioner with respect to one of those surgeries,  I was the grateful recipient of thanks for some liturgy I had prepared, and I was starting to plan a rather unusual retreat for myself for next winter -- a retreat I might actually need to make right now.  I seem to migrate toward the varied in spite of myself.

 

There is an actual thought forming itself as I write.  Hard to believe, I know.

 

More later.

 

 

 

 

 

Intensity

I swear, I did not know this about myself.  I am, like, the least insightful person on the planet.

Today, in two separate conversations, it was brought home to me that my life has been lived a bit on the, shall we say, intense side.

"You didn't lose your mother in your fifties, and not to an illness. You lost your mother AND your brother, when you were seven, in an instant."

How many times have other women said to me, "I don't see how I could have finished school, college, law school, without my mother"? 

I've just said, "Um hmm."  It's not unusual to me; it's my life.

"You didn't have one baby the first time; you had two."

How many times have other women who have had twins later in the sequence of childbearing said to me, "This is completely different; I had no idea"?

I had a bit of a sense of that, because when Marissa was born it seemed that she was the easiest baby in the world; as if I could just tuck her into my pocket and go. Just one small baby.  Four or five hours of consecutive sleep, every night in a row.

"You lost a child, and he didn't just die; he died of suicide."

It has been only in the past couple of months that a friend whose son died shortly before Josh did has lost a friend to suicide and said, "I had no idea what you were talking about.  This is completely different."

That I did know.

And this afternoon, as we talked this all over, my son said to me, "Mom, you live at a VERY high level of intensity.  You have a lot of things you care about doing, and you insist upon doing them all well."

Hmmmm.

Maybe it's time to move to a secluded little adobe house in a desert somewhere.  I could spend a couple of years watching roadrunners be intense.