Pilgrimmage Sunday

Chicago Marathon Week-End!  Who knew?

 

Our primary mission for the week-end involved ashes.  We had planned to be up and out early, as this particular activity requires great discretion, but the marathon schedule moved us even further upward and earlier.  We were probably the only people trying to EXIT downtown at 6:15 a.m. 

 

We spent most of the day in Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago.  Josh's friend joined us again, and helped us find the apartments in which Josh had lived at various points in his college career.  We visited the Point on the lakefront, the Medici bakery from which I have purchased so many croissant-and-juice breakfasts, the quads and dorms, the Midway and the Masaryk Monument, and the 57th Street Bookstore.

 

I found as we wandered the campus and its environs that I was filled with gratitude that Josh had been able to attend such a beautiful and incredible university.  I loved imagining him walking the same paths and streets that we covered; I even loved remembering his 2:00 a.m. calls from the library as he headed back to the Shoreland, an ancient dorm on the lakefront ~ not the safest walk on campus.  I recalled many of our visits, including my last overnight in one of his apartments when I went to visit McCormick Seminary during his senior year. 

 

 

It was a long day, capped off with an evening downtown and dinner at a fabulous restaurant with RevGal Teri, who is beautiful and brilliant and gracious in every way.

 

 

 

 

And all day and all evening I kept thinking, despite having poured out those ashes early in the morning: If I just keep wishing hard enough, surely he will come walking down the street toward me, smiling and laughing and loving Chicago.





 

Pilgrimmage Saturday

I didn't know what to expect.  My husband and I last went to Chicago five Octobers ago, for the purpose of emptying Josh's apartment and bringing his belongings home.  It was a horrible, horrible day, one on which my feet felt like lead as we surveyed the rooms that had remained untouched since the night he had died and met with the detective who had handled his "case" to extract what details we could.  My husband and a good friend (a VERY good friend) dismantled furniture as Josh's girlfriend and I sat and talked, trying to discern meaning in his belongings and from the events of the previous months.

 

And so I didn't know what to expect as Marissa and I drove west.  Would I make a U-turn as soon as the Chicago skyline came into view?  Would we check into our hotel, the same one in which Josh and his dad had stayed when he came to college (I was in Columbus, delivering his twin brother to Ohio State), and be overwhelmed by sadness at the thought of all the hopes and dreams crushed only five years later?

 

I felt as if I were constantly checking my emotional pulse, but it remained steady and strong.

 

A little last minute investigation had indicated that only one of Josh's close group of friends remains in Chicago, and he agreed to meet us for dinner downtown.  As we all talked, I began to relax and to realize that the week-end might offer the prospect of a small increment of healing.  It was wonderful to hear stories we'd never heard, to fill in some of the blanks of his college life, and to confirm that he had found joy and mischief and friendship in those years.

 

It was especially wonderful to spend time with a young man able to recall the past and to talk easily about it.  We wondered afterward if he had perhaps also been in need of conversation about his friend who had left us all so suddenly and so completely without warning.

 

Very few people mention my son Josh to me.  A couple of months ago, I broke down in the local garden center when I ran into a mom from Montessori middle school days who mentioned that she has a picture of him on her bulletin board and so sees him smiling every day. 

 

If you have occasion to share a memory or a story with a bereaved parent, go ahead and give it a try.  We miss them so much.

Pilgrimmage - Preparation

I did not want Josh to go to the University of Chicago. 

 

I wanted him to go to Carleton, Grinnell, or Davidson.  A small liberal arts college in a bucolic setting, not a huge university in a city.  And he was admitted to all three ~ outstanding schools, every one of them.  I was beside myself with delight as I anticipated his future.

 

But Chicago drew him like a magnet.

 

We went up there for the Admitted Students' Week-end in April, which did not help my cause.  I went to presentations for parents; he stayed in a dorm and hung around campus and went downtown with his hosts. My hopes crumbled further with each hour of his indoctrination into the culture of the College.

 

The Gothic architecture hung heavy and loomed oppressively over the sunny spring days.  He was enthralled.  I noted that there is an island in a little lake at Carleton.  "How could you not go to a college where there's an island?"  He pointed out a pathetic little mess of grass in the middle of a small fountain in one of the quads and said, "Chicago has an island!"  As we wandered the campus on Sunday afternoon, I mentioned that it was empty of students.  "A beautiful day, and no one is outside."  When I met with one of the financial aid officers, she told me that no doubt they were in the libraries.  "I've worked at several schools, and I've never seen anything like the way the students here study."

 

I came to love it, too, of course. We all did.   Sometimes we visited as a family; sometimes I went alone.  Together Josh and I enjoyed the architecture of Hyde Park, the Indiana Dunes, the city at Thanksgiving, Grant Park in the summer.  One year he and I walked the seven miles along the lakefront from Hyde Park to downtown on the day after Thanksgiving.

 

And I'm happy to report that it wasn't all about studying.  Last night as I tried to make arrangements to get together with any of his friends who might still be there, one of them related these episodes from the summer of 2006:

 

"During the summer when we lived together, Josh, his girlfriend, and I would regularly grab lunch on the Midway right next to the Masaryk Statue.  It was conveniently between my job, the museum, and the Press [where Josh worked] .  I remember us all just lying out there in the sun.

-----

Earlier this year my mom asked me whatever happened to this split bunk bed I'd brought from our cabin in MN down to Hyde Park - its story always makes me laugh and think of Josh.  You see, this bed was peculiar in that aside from being half of a bunk bed it was designed with this enormous and heavy wood-composite slab to support the mattress with no box spring or wooden slats.  The rest of it was some kind of heavy walnut.  It was sturdy.

 

Well, it went from me to V, but after he moved out and Josh moved into Madison Park, Josh inherited it.  That was rather a quiet neighborhood and toward the end of the summer it almost seemed a challenge.  I don't recall how we convinced each other, but we decided it'd be a good idea to throw a dance party at 2 AM blasting The Strokes and Regina Spektor.  And by dance party, I mean just the two of us singing at the top of our lungs and jumping around.  Anyway, at one point Josh was jumping up and down on this beast of a bed when the whole thing split apart. Of course no one was hurt, but the whole thing makes me laugh thinking of it.  The rest of the time we lived there, Josh would sleep inside the bed frame on the floor.  Whenever I'd wake him up, I remember he'd pop up from his nest between the frame."

 

I have not been back for five years, almost to the day.  But my daughter and I are headed there this afternoon. 

 

Pilgrimmage.

 

Chautauqua and Chicago

How do you return to sacred places tainted by sadness?

 

I've stood hundreds of times at the spot pictured above ~ but not in the last five years.  I scattered some ashes into the lake a bit to the right (south?) some winters ago, but that was the last time. We've tried to wander through Chautauqua twice since then, and found ourselves making a speedy departure both times.  "I just think of the three of us running all over the place every summer," said my surviving son after our first aborted attempt.  "It's too hard."

 

This year, I find myself re-posting Chautauqua links on FB (where I found this photo), and longing to be there.  I've listened to an entire week's worth of worship tapes from last summer; I wanted to hear Barbara Brown Taylor's sermon series, but that meant listening to the music and readings and prayers and announcements as well.  It was like being there: I could feel the breeze through the Ampitheatre and hear the pileated woodpecker in the trees behind our seats; I could remember the summers I listened to sermons as I pushed a stroller along the back, and the summers we all sang "Holy, Holy, Holy," always the Sunday opening hymn, with our arms around each other; and I could recall myself telling the kids, "Someday you'll be back here with your own children, and you'll be grateful for this Sunday summer tradition."

 

Well, no, not as it turns out.

 

The other place which seems impossible to me is Chicago, where Josh went to college and began what looked to be such a promising grown-up life.  I was headed there last fall, but the plans fell through.  My daughter has promised to accompany me this year.  I had imagined myself visiting grandchildren in Chicago someday, and looked forward to family vacations on Lake Michigan.

 

Well, no, not as it turns out.

 

These are places I have loved so very much.  The spirituality of place is deeply ingrained in me ~ but I cannot figure our how to return to these most beloved of places and survive intact in any kind of way.  On the other hand, I don't want to forgo forever the experience of these streets and paths and plazas and lakes, so haunted by memory and yet still so filled with exuberant joy.

 

It took me four years to return to our family's favorite Italian restaurant, which is only a short walk from our home.  But in doing so I have walled off a portion of my heart. 

 

Is there a way to go back without erecting barriers in a criss-cross pattern throughout my entire interior being?


 

 

Chicago

As long as I have posted a picture of Chicago taken from the Sears Tower  . . . no, I'm not in Chicago this week-end.  The weather and the colors have been so beautiful that I am quite morose about having chosen many months ago what was obviously the perfect week-end and now not being able to go.

Except that it wasn't the perfect week-end at all.  The one person I most wanted to see has family and work crises of her own, and the last thing she needs right now is the burden of my presence.

At some point I have got to go there, and get the First Return Trip behind me.  Two weeks ago we went out to eat at what used to be our favorite family restaurant in Cleveland's Little Italy.  The first time I'd been there in four-plus years.  It turned out not to be impossible.

I'm not at all sure that Chicago is in the same category. Infinitely more difficult.  But maybe in December . . .    .

Chicago

This is actually a note for Mary Potts, whose blog went private after she was hacked by a person of unsavory character, and for anyone else I know in Chicago and environs who might want to meet up.  I am starting to planning my October week-end, my first journey back in four years.  Mostly to Hyde Park, probably downtown,  and maybe to Elmhurst.  Mary, where are you???