My Mother, My Brother, Me

Fifty-five years is a long time not to have lived.

I've been pondering for days: what to write, about a mother and brother who barely had a chance? 

About growing up with half your family missing?

About what it might have been like to have had a mother with whom to share all of life's events, the big ones and the small ones?

I think that what I most regret this year is that: I don't know who they were.

My brother Dud never got to become who he was.  Today, had he lived, he would be almost 56.  What would he have loved as a boy?  Where would he have gone to school?  Would he have married and had a family?  What would have been his profession, his passions?  Would we be close friends, as my brother David and I are?

And my mother? I have a few things -- some pictures, one letter, and a fragment of another, some jewelry.  I have a few clear memories, and so I know that we, her children, were dear to her, and that she was kind and gracious and friendly.

What I have realized that I don't know at all is this: What did she care about, out there in the world?   What were her passions?  What might she have discovered and pursued, had she gone back to college when her children were grown?   Would she have become a determined advocate and fund-raiser for any causes?  A writer?  A world traveler?

And what about us, her children and grandchildren?  What would have been her priorities for us, in high school and college?  Have would she had responded to our mis-steps and failures?  Would we talk on the phone every day?  Would she have shown up and made pots of soup and changed sheets and vacuumed the house during those miserable pregnancies of mine?  Would she have been here for births and a death, for cancer and a broken ankle?  Would she have come to recitals and plays and games and graduations?

Would we have grown up in Florida?  That, I think, was the plan.  My parents had built a house for us in Vero Beach the Spring Before, and then we went back to Ohio.  When we returned to Florida the next year, would it have been for good? 

Who might I be, had I grown up in Florida instead of Ohio, at home instead of at boarding school,  with a mother instead of not?

But most of all, I just want to know:  What would she have to say? About anything at all?


Image: Vero Beach FL, May 1960 ~ a few months before they were killed in an automobile collision.

Family

I posted this as a Throwback Thursday photo on FB this week, and thought I'd add something here.

 

My sister Kathy and I think that this was probably an Easter 1963 photo, which would mean that it was taken a month or two after her parents divorced and her mom and my dad, a widower for two years, got married.  Her mother and two youngest brothers moved to Ohio, leaving her and one other younger brother in Florida with their dad.

 

If we're right, then: across the page we kids are 7, 9, 4, and 9. Plus two turtles and one basset hound.

 

A friend from those days commented on FB: "Fun times!"

 

Really, not so much.

 

We kids did forge a great alliance, eventually.  But I think that that spring we were stunned and reeling in  shock to find our families thus reconfigured.

Hair Washing Memories

 

(My boys on a similar trip a few years later.)

 

Many summers ago, my father, my two sons, who were about fifteen, and I spent a week canoeing in the backcountry of Ontario's Algonquin Park.  One acquires a layer of uncomfortable grunge on such expeditions, and so I planned to clean off in the water about midway through the trip.

 

 

(A portion of Algonquin.  I think that on this trip about which I am writing we were up in the square jutting north off the map.)

 

 

We camped on a small peninsula jutting into one of the hundreds of lakes marking Algonquin and, as the sun began to set, I eased a canoe into the water and paddled to a nearby stretch of rock for some privacy.  I lathered myself up as completely as I could while remaining dry, and then slipped into the frigid water.  My goal was to rinse hair and body as thoroughly and speedily as possible so that I could clamber back onto the rock and dry off before I was frozen into a pillar of ice, never to look back.

 

Afterward, there would have been fleece clothing and a campfire, packs hoisted into the trees to discourage bears, and a night curled up in a tent.  A routine evening, its memory merged with others.  But I do recall clearly the beauty of that cold bath in a remote lake as the sky lit up with streaks of evening sunlight.

 

That interlude was what I thought about this morning as I engaged in the arduous task of wheeling my scooter to the kitchen sink, washing my hair, wheeling to the tiny half bath to sponge bathe the rest of me, and wheeling to the living room to dress. 

 

I have nothing to complain about on this icy day of yet more snowfall; I am warm and safe inside.   But I decided that I much preferred to daydream about Algonquin while I bathed than to focus on the effort it takes to accomplish the same thing this month!

Hymn to the Eternal Flame

My friend Rosa is making a 30-day retreat and somehow found the time to send me this amazing gift.



Josh ~ Chicago Graduation
Family ~ Arizona
Memorial Service for a Young Woman
My Mother and I
Igantius the Pilgrim  ~ Guelph Retreat Centre
Boats in Poulsbo WA
Family ~ Adirondacks
My Birthday
Marissa and Ursuline Sister Agatha
Matt ~ Law School Graduation
Heart Glass ~ Ordination Gift from Rosa
Chapel of the Martyrs ~ Montmartre
Tanner's Annunciation
Wernersville Jesuit Center
My Mother and Brother
Josh ~ Lake Michigan

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.

 

Wondering

 

Carol Craig 9/32 ~10/5/60

Dudley Craig 10/11/59 ~ 10/5/60

No, I don't even know my mother's birthday.

I've been reading the two letters I have, two letters that she wrote to my (paternal) grandparents from the house on Vero Beach at which this picture was taken, mailed together on April 25, 1960.  I found them in my grandmother's attic decades later. Long, chatty letters in which she describes what we were all up to, laments some of the challenges of young motherhood, anticipates summer at home in Ohio, and reveals herself to have been a thoughtful and articulate young woman with a gift for self-expression:

"One of the things I really miss here [in Florida] is the freshness of spring.  Sometimes I think that's what a lot of the alcoholics here need ~ a change of season to sort of cleanse and re-charge their souls and spirits."

I wonder, sometimes, who she would have become.  She would not even have been fifty when we all finished college; I imagine her returning to school herself, reveling in the opportunity to study.  She and my dad had been planning a permanent move to Florida; maybe she would have become a master gardener, or a teacher, or a photographer, or a writer.  She had a beautiful singing voice; she would have been overjoyed to hear my daughter sing.

And Dudley, who might he have been?  No clue at all.  What if we kids had grown up on the beach, instead of in the midst of corn and soybean fields?   Would the two of us still here be different people? 

And me, now?  My mother would be 81.  Would she have come here and stayed for weeks after Josh died?  Would we be talking on the phone every day?  Would I be looking for a way to move to Florida ( Would I have ever left?) to live nearby and help her out?

What if we could have just skipped this particular day in 1960?

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. 


 

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.

Learn Law. Live Justice.

Today's post title comes from the motto of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.  We heard it repeatedly yesterday as our Matt was graduated cum laude.  It gave me tremendous cause to think about my own life.  But . . .

 

For now, I'm celebrating Matt, and our family.  If you've been a reader of this blog, then you know a little about what it has taken for all of us to reach this milestone.  I suppose that this particular graduation has a little extra significance for me.  When I went to law school, it simply seemed "the next thing" to do.  High school - check.  A.B. - check.  J.D. - check.  Now that I've observed the process from the outside, I have more appreciation for what it entails. 

 

And this particular process?  Matt came home that day we learned that his twin brother died and hasn't left.  He went to work as a server at Aladdin's for two years, pulling himself together and pondering the future.  (The legal job market being what it is, he's back there a couple of nights a week while he studies for the bar exam.)

 

And then: law school on a full merit scholarship, a summer studying international law in Russia, a summer clerking for a judge in Seychelles, and externships with the offices of the U.S. Attorney  and the County Public Defender. 

 

He's soaked up every aspect of legal education he could possibly have fit into the past three years, and he's done it well.   I am one very proud mother.


 

 

Question for the Day

 

In the almost-five years since we came face-to-face with catastrophe, our family has produced a B.A., an M.Div., an M.S.S.A., another J.D., and a potter.

 

(The latter is the quiet husband, who earned his M.S. many years ago, has worked hard ever since, and now may make the best contribution of any of us, in the form of art.)

 

So I'm wondering: if we could achieve all of that under the circumstances we've endured, what else might we be able to pull off?

 

 

 

Almost J.D.

As I said on FB, it's been a long time since a robe and hood like these hung in my hallway, newly pressed and awaiting the next day's law school graduation.  1979, to be exact.

 

Tomorrow Matt joins three generations of Craig law school graduates.  In order: my uncle, me, my cousin, and my half-brother.  Matt's the one named Williams, and I'm the one who went on to something else. 

 

I haven't practiced law since 2000, but as a pastor I use those lawyer skills every day: reading, analyzing, writing writing writing and, oh yeah, talking, in one form or another.  For the past two days, I've been preparing to lead the Ohio delegation to the annual American Foundation for Suicide Prevention D.C. Advocacy Forum ~ more lawyer skills at work.

 

Sometimes I wonder whether I will be called to use both sets of skills ~ ministerial and lawyerly ~ in service to the church.  Who knows?

 

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic today for the practice of law. 

 

But mostly, I'm very proud and excited, and looking not back, but ahead.

 

Yay, Matt!  Well done!

Mother's Day

I have always thought of Florida as a magical place.  A place where mothers and children practically live on the beach together.  The top photo, of my mother and youngest brother, was taken at the house on Eugenia Lane in Vero Beach, shortly before my parents finished the house on Azalea Lane, the one designed to become our someday permanent home.  We did move in that May -- and I acquired my first room of my own, the one my mother and I planned to decorate with beach paraphernalia.  Those conversations are among the last with her that I remember.  We returned to Ohio for the summer and fall, and then in October she and baby Dudley were gone.

 

I took the bottom photo on the beach at St. Augustine, our last family trip of probably twenty spent there.  Nighttime -- I wonder whether we were saying good-bye?  We always went out to say hello and good-bye to the ocean, first and last thing.  But the kids' college and job schedules became increasingly complicated, and then Josh was gone.

 

I can't say that I hate Mothers' Day. We gave it short shrift, growing up  . . . It wasn't a day I wanted to celebrate with my stepmothers, and no one pushed it. I suppose my various steps-siblings felt much the same about Fathers' Day, although they were all in possession of actual fathers in other places, so the complexities varied.   When I was a young mother myself, we all celebrated joyfully.    These days, Mothers' Day is not much different from Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or Easter, or all the other holidays, really; difficult to endure, but no longer terrible. And I do have two beautiful living children, whose strength and resilience astonish me every day, and whom I will delight in seeing tonight.

 

Other people have already said all the eloquent things: about lost mothers, and lost children, and women who for one reason or another have not had children, or not been able to raise their children, and the whole messy idea of a day to celebrate mothers. I'll just say this:  the young church secretary dashed into a meeting this past week to show me the "Happy Mothers' Day!" cover she had made for Sunday's bulletin and to ask if it was all right.  I guess the look on my face said it all, because someone else offered, "I guess NOT."  (We decided to go with it.  Everyone else seemed to like it, and my prayer for Sunday covers the rest.)

 

Mothers and children.  The greatest anguish ever.  The greatest joy ever.  That's pretty much my life story.

 

 

 

Boarding School Years ~ Catholic

Readers here know that I spent six years in girls' boarding schools: three Catholic and three Protestant.  A treasure trove of images of each has popped up on Facebook recently, and I thought I'd share.  The following come mostly from Pavey Photography; I don't know whether Ann Pavey attended the School of the Brown County Ursulines (now closed) as a girl or Chatfield College as an adult, but her photos reveal a genuine love of the campus.

 

My own family history as intertwined with the Ursulines, in a nutshell:

 

The Ursuline sisters ventured from France to southwestern Ohio in 1845 and opened a school for girls about thirty miles north of Cincinnati.   I'm not sure when this main chapel was built ~ maybe someone will add some information in the comments ~ but it was at one time attached to a massive convent building of red brick. 

 

The nuns hired a master carver to teach them to make the intricate carvings that adorned their small chapel in the main building ~ although I think this one is from what we knew as the main chapel:

 

 

In the late 1800s, my great-grandmother wanted to study piano and, so the story goes, sold her egg money to pay for lessons and drove her buggy the eight miles or so to the convent to study with the nuns.

 

In the early 1900s, she and my great-grandfather were married and he established what would become the family grain business, which eventually developed a relationship with the nuns, who ran a farm as well as a school.  I am sure that my grandfather and father, as well as my brother and I, would count the Ursuline sisters as among our dearest of friends.  I don't think I have a photo of those who came to my ordination service, but I do have one of Sister Agatha with my daughter, taken a couple of summers ago.

 

 

 

No daughters in the family until I came along, and off I went to the Ursulines' school when I was a seventh grader.  The chapel was a good deal more ornate pre-Vatican II, but it's still there.   My family was Methodist in a not-so-much kind of way, although I am told that that same piano-lesson great-grandmother as a grown woman used to sail down the street to the Methodist parsonage on Monday mornings to offer the pastor her views on the previous day's sermon.  (Is that where the genes come from?  I'm sure he was just delighted to see her making her way down the block . . .     . )  At any rate, I was not anything in particular, religion-wise.  But I did attend Mass and various other services here regularly for three years, which meant that when I bumped into the Jesuits decades later, I was comfortable with Catholicism.

 

 

 

 

My friends and I spent an awful lot of time climbing around and through various convent locales in which our presence was not exactly sought.  I think that Ann  Pavey has done an incredible job of capturing the sense of beauty and mystery of  the buildings which I'm sure that all the women who lived there as girls still think of as "ours."

 

 

 

The school is long gone now, and so is the building which housed it.  The nuns built themselves a smaller and more user-friendly home, and the small college on the grounds, established to educate young teaching sisters, is now a vital and thriving educational institution, open to all who live near this community on the edge of Appalachia. 

 

And, while I've posted this one before, I'll close with a photo of the plaque on the wall of one of the college buildings, which reflects a gift made by my father in memory of our Josh and a century-plus of wonderful friendship and love.