Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know, “he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have leaned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously have the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer?  Husband, father? Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Never a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know, “he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have leaned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously have the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer?  Husband, father? Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Never a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Lament and Hope ~ Sermon (Psalm 42) ~ A Church Comes to a Close ~ 12

Almost every Sunday after the sermon, we say a creed or confession or statement of faith together.  We do that as part of our Liturgy of the Word, which is usually expressed in three ways: we hear the words of scripture, we hear those words interpreted ~ usually in the form of a sermon, and we respond to those words with our own communal statement of belief, affirming that have heard, and wondered, and believe ~ that what we have heard and wondered about has spoken to our hearts and minds.  And when we say The Apostles’ Creed, which we often do, one of the things we affirm is that we believe in the communion of saints.

The communion of saints – what does that mean?  Many of you grew up in the Catholic tradition, and learned that there are specific individuals whose personal holiness and connection with God is recognized by the church with the label of saint.  Even many of those of us who have always been Protestant have our favorite Catholic saints ~ mine include St. Ignatius, upon whose life of prayer I model my own, and St. Brigid of Kildare (Ireland), who was a great healer and teacher and administrator in the Celtic tradition, someone whom I admire tremendously.  But we in the Protestant church also honor as saints all of those who have gone before us in the faith ~ parents, grandparents, teachers, healers, helpers ~ all of those whom we have loved and lost.   

Today, All Saints Day, is our annual opportunity to remember those saints of our lives, and to remember them well ~ with their names read aloud, with flowers dedicated to their memories, with music to remind us of the important place they have in our lives, with sadness and longing, and with hope and a sense of promise.  It’s also an opportunity to be reminded that the communion of saints, those long gone from our lives on this earth, and those still together here, join at the table at which we will celebrate in just a few minutes.

That’s a bittersweet reminder, isn’t it?  Because, when we tell the truth, we know that we would prefer for our departed loved ones to be here, right here, with us.  We want them to be healthy, and living their lives ~ and here.  I’m sure that as we read the names of the saints of our church and our lives, and as we thought of names of those perhaps not listed, we all felt the heartbreak of having lost them, and wished they were still alive.  The idea of the communion of saints, living and dead, is a powerful one, but it’s nowhere near the same thing as the actual physical and living presence among us of the people we love.

And so . . .  we lament.

“What does that mean?” a few of you have asked me. “That word lament ~ what does it refer to?”

A lament is a song ~ a song of grief, a song of sadness, a song of longing.  It’s the sort of song that makes many of us uncomfortable.  We have been taught, especially in our society, not to feel sorry for ourselves, not to indulge ourselves, not to dwell on the painful aspects of life, and, most especially, not to express ourselves where loss, and death, and grief, are concerned.   Not even where the loss of a mother, or father, or husband, or wife, or child, is concerned.  Not even where the loss of a church is concerned. We are taught to put on a bright face, to put loss behind us, to get on with life.  We are so death-averse in our culture that many of us do not even know the word lament.  We do not know that there is a form of writing, a form of music, designed to express our sorrow. 

And yet the Bible, the book at the center of our spiritual lives, is filled with songs of lament.  There is an entire book in the Bible entitled Lamentations.  Fully one-third of the psalms are psalms, or songs, of lament.  We tend to flip the pages right past these words ~ we want to hear the stories of triumph, of power, of healing; we want to sing the songs of praise, of honor, of glory.  We want so much to avoid death, to pretend that loss is not a constant in our lives, to believe that heartache is not a frequent visitor to our homes, that we also avoid their expression in the Bible.

But the reality, as my friend Patricia Raube preached to her congregation last summer, is that we need songs of lament every bit as much as we need songs of praise: “Because we need all our emotions. . . .  Without them, we are not completely human. We are shut down, and we are cut off. And sometimes that seems like the safest place to be… until we realize that, in the immortal words of John Green, “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”  . . .  We need to feel our sadness. We need lament. Not all the time, not 24-7-365, but as part of the menu of full human expression, full human living.”

And so . . .the Bible offers us models for lament.  Models such as today’s Psalm 42, in which the psalmist cries out:

 

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, 

 ‘Where is your God?’ 

 . . .  I pour out my soul:

 . . . .

I say to God, my rock,  ‘Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’

 

Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever felt disoriented[1] in your relationship with God?  Disoriented due to your feelings of anger, of frustration, of sadness in the wake of loss?  Some of you may be feeling that right now, due to personal losses of loved ones, of health, of other things upon which you have counted.  Many of you may be feeling that way due to the impending loss of this church. 

And if you are feeling such disorientation, such sadness, then your feelings are not denied, or avoided, or ignored, in scripture.  They are affirmed in scripture ~ they are given voice.  Because God does not ask us not to be who we are.  God does not ask us to hide our true selves, our very real feelings of loss and pain.

But ~ God does ask one thing of us in our sorrow.  God does ask one thing of us as we mourn our dead on this All Saints Day, as we grieve the loss of our church this month, as we contend with the other losses that each of us face.  God does ask one thing of us, and that one thing is: not to lose hope.

The hope that God offers us ~ it’s reflected in Psalm 42, and it’s reflected in our communion meal.

Psalm 42, like almost every other psalm of lament, gives voice to pain ~ and then it turns toward hope: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise God, my help and my God.”  One of the remarkable things about most of the psalms of lament is that they do not stop at anguish.  They do not end with despair.  They honor those feelings of anguish and despair ~ they honor and respect them as genuine expressions of the human experience.  But they don’t stop there.  They keep moving.  They move to hope. 

And so do we, because we are called through these words of scripture, and through the rituals of our worship ~ we are called deep into hope.  We are called to know that we will again praise the God who is our hope.  We are called to share a table first set two thousand years ago, on the night before it seemed that all was lost, and two nights before all was gained.

Lament is what we do when we face sorrow ~ when we lose our loved ones, when we lose our church.  We cannot move forward without singing our songs of lament.

But lament is not the end.  Lament is not where we conclude our journey of faith.  Lament is but a waystation on the road toward resurrection, the road toward that day when the entire communion of saints will again gather, not on either side of the barrier between life and death, but together, in God’s new creation.

And, this morning: Know both.  Know both, in the mystery of God.  Know that your longings are honored, that your sorrows are held safe, that communion is a promise, and that resurrection is assured.       Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] See Walter Bruggemann, The Message of the Psalms (1984).

Yes, It Gets Easier.

I am just back from a few days in Algonquin Park, in Ontario, a place which my son Josh loved.  I went with my dad, who in the past took my boys and me, and once our entire family, and eventually just the two boys, canoeing in the backcountry up there, several days at a time.  We weren't so ambitious this year ~ we stayed in a lodge where the food was prepared for us and the beds were comfortable, and took day trips across the lake and down the rivers in the canoe ~ the canoe supplied with our cabin and its plumbing and hot water.

I had a lot of time to think about my Josh, about his 24 years, and about the last seven.  And I realized, as I have over the past few months, that the terrible weight of his death has indeed lessened. No more an enormous slab of iron crushing the breath out of my chest, it has become something more like a sheer, gossamer web that envelops me, tangling me up sometimes, but mostly surrounding me in a memory of grace and horror: delicate, shimmering, hopeful and anguished.

In the first couple of years after Josh died, I used to fall asleep crying and wake up crying.  I'm not sure that I ever stopped crying, except when I had to go out in public.  Two, three, fours years later, I would still sometimes look at a full day's schedule lying before me, say "Nope," and curl up in a blanket to wait out the wave of sorrow that threatened to engulf everything in its path.

 

I once read that it takes somewhere between four to seven years for the grief that follows the death of a child to abate.  It seems that I am right on schedule -- from a detached, clinical point-of-view, I would guess that the suicidal death of a child would push a mother right up against and right on past that seven year edge.  Of course, nothing about grief can be genuinely measured or assessed in clinical terms.

 

What helps?  Love and work, I guess Freud would say.  Prayer and work, St. Benedict would have offered, centuries earlier.

 

I'm grateful, so grateful, for the work I plowed through ~ the seminary years  I barely remember, the suicide prevention advocacy which brought out my latent lawyer, the ministry I have been, oddly, able to share with others. I'm grateful for the people who really hung in there with me ~ those amazing Jesuit priests and the spiritual director colleagues who kept on listening and then did it some more, the readers of all these blogs of mine, a couple of fearless professors and a couple of even more fearless friends, and all the people who allowed me to enter their lives as pastor and confidant, preacher and teacher, liturgist and floor scrubber, even as I was crumbling inside.  I'm grateful that I learned how to pray, and not pray, into the cavernous darkness of unfathomable loss.

 

Yes, I look at the world differently now.  I have seen and read and heard and pondered things so distressing and heartbreaking that I cannot help but see the most ordinary facets of life in a slanted light.  I used to think that that light had transformed me into a much worse person than I could ever have imagined being: angry, self-absorbed, brittle ~ suicidal, myself.  And maybe it did, at least for awhile.  Now I think: it provides an angle into a depth of darkness seldom acknowledged, but always there, here, as a persistent backdrop to our lives.  It's a penetrating source of illumination, a kind of darkroom light, the light from a sort of space in which Josh and I used to work intently together.

 

Maybe we still do.

 

 

Image: Lake Between Two Rivers, Algonquin Park

Seven

If you had told me seven years ago that I would survive the events of the following week, I would have told you that I would not.

Which is true, in some ways.  That girl is gone.  She disappeared late one night in Chicago, hours before she even knew it.

Because our minds no longer work as they did before, it took me seven years ~ seven! ~ to register the proximity of the coming and going days of the children of the four women, me included, who met online soon after our children died, and shared much of those first tender years together.  Two birthdays in the past couple of weeks.  Another loss anniversary in the next few days.  And then, the day Josh was born, followed by the day he died.  I am inundated ~ not unhappily ~ by words and pictures from heroic women, women still moving forward.  Seven and eight years later.

I could not tell you how we do that.

It seems to me that at seven years, I might have words of wisdom to share. 

I am grateful, so grateful, to be his mother. 

I am not grateful that he is unable to live out his life, that the world does not enjoy his many gifts, and that I no longer share his company.   I am, by turn and all at once, horrified, bereft, angered, heartbroken, baffled, lost.

 

I can hardly stand it, actually.  Perhaps that is the wisdom I have to offer: You wouldn't believe how far you can continue to walk when you can't stand it.  How brave you can be.

 

One of my FB friends, who lost her son to suicide only two years ago, posted this song last year.  A vampire wedding song?  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .   .  A thousand years, and a thousand more.

The Pretty Pictures

Over the past several months, I've been re-posting a lot of nature and scenic photos on Facebook.  A lot of them come from the Department of the Interior; others, from various photographers focused on Ohio (my home state), the Blue Ridge Mountains (North Carolina being my pretend home state), northern Florida (the other one), the National Park Service . . .  you get the idea. 

 

Sometimes friends thank me for re-posting those beautiful images.  I suppose that's what it looks like I'm doing: posting pretty pictures.  Or humorous or moving or unusual ones.

 

But what I am really doing is FIGHTING BACK.

 

I have no idea how one heals from the suicide of a child.  But it occurred to me, last winter or so, that one possibility might be to recover some small portion of my enthusiasm for the beauty of this universe.  When a child dies, so does pretty much everything else.  But small glimmers of life eventually reappear here and there, and for me, they take the form and shape of nature.

 

Every time you see one of those posts, you are seeing me say: There is life beyond death.

 

Some time after I started collecting these photographs, I came across an article about Amherst College psychology professor Catherine Sanderson, who apparently does a lot of public speaking (including a famous TED Talk) on the topic of happiness.   More explicitly, on what people think makes them happy and what, in contrast, actually does.  Nature is high on her list of what makes us happy.

 

I don't know what I think about happiness, other than that it can be hard to come by.  But I'm not surprised by Catherine Sanderson's conclusion about nature.

 

********

 

 

Image: from the Department of the Interior FB page ~ a RWB hitches a ride on a RTH

 

More Asia, More Memory

Some seeds flower into the most astonishing color.

 

This morning I received an email from Josh's girlfriend's father, to whom I had written apologizing for having to leave his wife's memorial service early (previous post).  He filled me in on what we had missed, which included this video as his final farewell to his wife in  honor of their cross-cultural romance.

 

It is worth attending to for the entire five minutes.  And, of course, it speaks to all of us in our losses.

 

Our relationship with this family is tenuous and unusual.  But I think that many families who have lost children find themselves briefly and intensely connected to those who have in some way shared in those losses.

 

I am extremely grateful that six years later this video has come my way because of one of those connections.

Rediscovering Wonder

When I was a little girl growing up in the country, wonder was an everyday experience. The caterpillars we watched morph into butterflies, the birds we spent days trying to catch, the creek we wandered for hours, the snakes we actually did catch and keep in jars on the stone wall out back until we tired of them and let them go.

Today they say that children experience grief in spurts, moving quickly back and forth between moments of intense sadness and periods of play and humor.  That rings true to me, and it also explains why otherwise intelligent and perceptive adults fifty years ago believed the professionals who told them that children do not grieve.  Those moments of intensity come on quickly for children, and disappear almost as fast, rendering them invisible to people who don't want to see them anyway.  And children are quick to sense the latter, and learn to keep their sorrows to themselves.

Thus I could roam the countryside, play sixteen-inning games of softball, and splash in summer camp brooks and waterfalls, finding wonder easily despite the airless density of childhood loss.

For adults, it's somewhat different.

A couple of summers ago, I heard myself saying to a spiritual director, "I was, quite simply . . . completely enchanted by my children.  And then . . . one of them was gone.  And thus enchantment evaporated from my life."

I've been reflecting on that statement this summer.  Perhaps my capacity for wonder, if not actual enchantment, is making a comeback.  Or, at least, tapping on the door.  This summer has already ushered in its grueling moments, with more predicted ~ most of them having to do with pretending to enjoy myself so that others are not burdened.  But I find that I am longing for some genuine joy.

Interesting, isn't it, that this surge of hopeful anticipation should accompany my renewed ability to walk short distances?  Yesterday I walked a mile around my immediate neighborhood early in the morning, and another mile in the opposite direction in the evening.  It's such a pleasure to see the world on foot again, to notice faces and dogs and gardens in ways that one can't from a car.

 

In her poem When Death Comes, Mary Oliver, who has certainly experienced her own deep loss, says:

 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Regretfully, I will not be able to say that of all my life.   Or, perhaps, I will.  Perhaps the black hole of the last six years, sucking all the gravity into a huge and heavy space of darkness, will someday reveal itself as its own venue of wonder.

 

But for now, I think I would like to return to the more conventional forms.

 

For Bereaved Parents: How Many Children Do You Have?

Such a simple question, here in middle-class America.  Kind of like asking, "Are you cool enough?" in the middle of a midwestern summer.

 

This post was occasioned by a parent asking on the Compassionate Friends' FB page how others respond.  She lost a son a year ago and has just begun a new job, so the question is a frequent one. I think she's outrageously gutsy in taking on a new job at this point in her life, but most people at her work would have no idea about that.

 

The answers vary, of course.  Mine was:

 

"I would say that it depends on the situation. If I can get away with it, I say three and immediately ask about their family. Most people are more interested in talking about themselves anyway! and warm to the change of subject. Sometimes I say that I have a son who lives here and a daughter in a nearby city and don't mention where the other son is. Sometimes I say the exact truth. But after six years, I have become so "comfortable" with the topic of suicide that I am wary of the latter approach, because I have lost my patience for dealing with others' shock and discomfort."

 

It was FB, so I didn't elaborate, but I might have added:

 

As a pastor, I am often in situations which are all about the other person.  Not my time to share my life story, and so I don't.  When I am asked, I try one of the first two alternatives above.  On Mother's Day my answer to a friendly parishoner was admittedly extremely awkward; I had almost made it through the morning and was feeling quite pleased with myself for having done so, and then there it was, that question, on one of the worst days possible.

 

If it's a professional, public situation in which I can offer suicide prevention education, I go for it.

 

If I think it might help someone in a similar situation, I tell the truth, but tread cautiously.  We all grieve so differently, on such different timetables, and find comfort in such different ways.  Personally, I find it a lot more palatable to wonder where exactly God wandered off to when my son needed God most of all than to hear that God needed another angel in heaven ~ a God who gets lost or busy is a lot better than a God who steals children ~ but I have found that many others do not share my viewpoint!  I was honest this past week with the mom who had just lost a son to suicide, but I told truths that I thought might make her path a tiny bit easier.  I did not grab her by the shoulders and scream "This is the F-----G worst thing ever and when the shock starts to wear off you are going to want to DIE!"

 

Yeah. No.

 

I don't know a single person who wants to say a number of children one (or more) less than he or she actually has.  But that question ~ it's a minefield.  How are you doing with it?  And what about when it is your only child who has died?

Picking Up a Pen . . .

OK, not a pen.

 

But I've blogged very little this year, and I do think that I'll pick that up again.

 

What am I wondering about these days?

 

Ministry, the church, the world, of course.  What are we doing??? Yesterday, I took some time to write out my thoughts about what my call to ministry entails and then a job description based on what I actually do on a daily basis.  Few points of intersection ~ much to consider there.

 

What happens to relationships in the wake of earth-shaking loss?  The picture isn't a pretty one.

 

Spiritual direction ~ what's that all about?  I mean, I know what it's about; perhaps it's where I want to focus my life much more completely?  I am accompanying someone through the Spiritual Exercises ~ fifth time, which isn't a lot for five years, but it's such a huge commitment that I can't manage it with more than one person at a time.  As always, though, I am in awe.

 

Preaching ~ what's that all about?  How much I wish I had had a series of decent preaching courses in seminary! 

 

I am a bit envious of my son as he begins his new law practice.  He's in court nearly every day, and learning quickly that the practice of law is about far more than advocating for folks in adversarial contexts.  It's about being present to them, about letting them know that they are heard, and about helping to quell the fears arising from uncertainty and lack of control. 

 

Suicide prevention.  Is there such a thing, really?  I spend a lot of time and effort on projects in the hope that there is. 

 

Aging.  Sixty-one next month.  Thinking a lot about what I would do if I had less than a decade left.  Not in a morose kind of way, but in a priority-setting kind of way.  I really don't have my act together at all.

 

Grief.  Learning to live alongside it.  I guess it gets better, in the sense that I am more functional all the time.  Clarity of thought has become a reasonable expectation on most days.  But the pain of it -- oh, God. 

 

Intentional solitude.  I need a lot more of that.  I have LOTS of time alone, but I am making a poor showing where taking advantage of it is concerned. 

 

Books.  I have been reading.  A lot.

 

So, yeah.  More writing.  In shorter gusts, I think.

 

Funeral Mass

Here's one of the things I really like about Catholic churches: you can almost always find a portrayal of a heartbroken mother.  This one is a section of a spectacular crucifixion window.

 

Here's what I remember about this day in my own life:  after the service, and the food, and all the people, the thought:

 

OK, we did that, and it was truly awful, but it's over.  He'll come back now, right? 


 

Funeral Home Calling Hours

In a little while a friend is picking me up so that we can go to the calling hours for our other friend's son.  Here is what I remember from 5.5 years ago:

 

My surviving son said that the place looked like, ummmm, I believe that what he said was  "a Vegas brothel."  I trust that that remark emerged out of imagination rather than experience.  I believe that it had to do with the overdone décor, particularly the drapes and upholstery.

 

The event seemed very stilted at first.  People began to sit quietly in the chairs ringing the rooms.  I went over to a group of Josh's college friends and urged them to move about freely and talk among themselves.  "One would think that you were in a funeral home.  Oh.  I guess you are."  Yes, I actually said that.

 

One consequence of the above was that, as the afternoon and evening wore on, the crowd became a large crush of people.  We abandoned all sense of a receiving line and wandered about greeting our guests.

 

I was surprised by who showed up.  A lot of it I could not remember afterward, and I had to look at the guestbooks to see who had been there.  But there are moments that remain clear to me.  A lawyer colleague whom I had not seen in a decade, but who had lost a college-age daughter years earlier.  Parents and children from the Jewish school in which I had taught ~ a brave move on their part on many levels.  My cousin who flew in from Chicago and had only an hour to spare before his flight back.  Two nuns who had made the four hour drive from southern Ohio and had to make their return trip that night.  That's why I'm going today, because I remember those moments.

 

And something I learned.  I had been most opposed to the urn being "displayed" at the funeral home and at the service the next day.  The funeral home director kept talking about "closure," which I consider a BS kind of word.  But there it was.  And at one point I glanced in that direction, and saw Josh's ex-girlfriend, fiancee' really, standing alone in front of the table.  She quietly blew a kiss in the direction of the urn and mouthed the word, "Good-bye."  So.  I thought.  Maybe it is of some use. 

 

 

 

Reverence: Healing

The cat squirms in my lap for a few moments and then leaps, an elegant arc of orange and white fluff, four feet into the air and through the doorway into the next room.

 

The vet had told us that she would lie quietly, recovering for a couple of days, and not to permit her to run around.  Ah, but the cat is six months old, and I am sixty years.  There are some differences.

 

Yesterday, utterly discouraged, I huddled under my blanket in my space, the corner of our living room where my recliner and table scattered with meds and electronics are located.  I laughed briefly when I read another woman's account of her recovery from ankle surgery; she describes an identical geography.  But I wanted  to cry when I looked at the dates on her descriptions and realize how long a recovery this will be. 

 

Each trip to the bathroom, eighteen steps  through the same sunroom into which the cat flew with such ease, and eighteen steps back, hopping with my entire weight borne by my walker, hands aching, is an undertaking akin to hiking the Great Wall.   I have had to relinquish my teaching job, and to give up my long-anticipated retreat time.  Will my pastorate go as well?    There's so much to worry about, work-wise and money-wise.   

 

And yet, healing is taking place.  In some mysterious and miraculous way, the severed edges of bone are binding themselves back together, recreating blood flow and rebuilding marrow and spongy and hard bone.  Just as astonishingly, my body is accepting the presence of metal parts as the new normal. 

If all goes well, the result will be an ankle that will support walks on the beach some months from now.

 

Miscellaneous movements ripple through even this disrupted and limited life.  I hear from a lady twenty years my senior, a new widow, and I am able to write to her with the authority of experience about her days of freshly felt grief, the exhaustion and the disorientation.  I don't mention that the spirit often takes considerably longer to heal than the body. 

 

I ponder Ignatius, he of the 1521 cannonball injury, which resulted in months of bed-ridden recovery and the understanding of religious psychology that led to the Spiritual Exercises.   What would he think, I wonder, of my binge-watching of The Sopranos, which I have not seen before?  An extended meditation on spiritual desolation if ever there were one. 

 

And last night, or this morning, around 3:00 a.m., I turned to read a piece written by the Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele S.J, to which my friend Michelle has linked.  When I first saw her post, I had saved it for later, thinking to pray with the poem as a form of lectio divina, but when I went to the link at 3:00 a.m.,  I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, Peter Steele died of cancer in the summer of 2012.

 

I am devastated. It was a stack of Peter Steele's poems that spiritual director emeritus had emailed to me in the first months after Josh died; the two men had developed a friendship while both were at Georgetown that year.  It was Peter Steele's poems that I sat reading, tears in my eyes, late one night in the computer lab at seminary, surrounded by other students pursuing their Greek or Hebrew, oblivious to anything beyond the linguistic challenges staring back at them from their screens. 

 

I never even met the man, and I'm sure he never knew of my existence, but I sat here, and sit here still, grieving the loss of someone who gave life to words in a way that touched me when it seemed that nothing could.

 

This poem to which Michelle linked, is an elegy of sorts, a litany of good-byes to places and sights the dying poet knows will not be his again.  And yet it is also a celebration, of the beauty of this life as recorded in one man's recollections.

 

It would seem that in his case, as in that of Ignatius, the body finally gave out, but the healed spirit continues to soar, with the lithe elegance of a small cat.

 

Suicide

Honestly, I promise, I wasn't going to write here about suicide or grief for awhile.  Enough, already.  I know that Lent and Easter, like Advent and Christmas and like the end of summer, when all my children's birthdays are, make me just a little crazy with sorrow.  And Holy Week sends me right over the top, what with the reliving, over and over, the grief of a mother while at the same time preparing to proclaim resurrection.  But, really, who cares?

 

There are plenty of other things I could write about.  Ministry supplies an endless variety of intriguing topics, if one can but figure out how to disguise people and events adequately so as to explore the dilemmas without revealing identities or inadvertently hurting congregations.

But over the week-end, three people known to friends died of suicide: a young man about the age my son was, and a youngish-couple, parents of young adult children.

 

WTF??????

 

Or do I even feel like yelling? 

 

I feel . . .  depleted.  Deflated. 

 

I have learned so much about suicide in the past four years that I automatically begin to contemplate the final minutes in the lives of each of these individuals, all of them unknown to me, but each of whose pain was searing and then, ultimately, numbing.  My friends and I who have lost children, we have discussed their final minutes with one another in considerable detail.  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

 

And I also imagine the days and months and years ahead to which the surviving loved ones have been consigned.  There will be no resurrection morning at an empty tomb, not in this lifetime.  And who knows about the next?

 

I remember what my friend Lisa once said: You think you cannot survive for another minute, and then one day you look back and it's been years.

 

What would I say to all these new survivors? 

 

Minute by minute. 

 

They could not do this, but you can.

 

For now, just hang on to the minutes.

 

 

In the Bleak Midwinter

The young people seeking a pastoral presence and some structure for their candle-light service were adamant: Their friend, who had grown up in a Presbyterian Church down the road from mine of many years and died far away last week-end, did not believe in God, and they did not want to dishonor her memory with a gathering framed in religious terms. One of the dads ~ a neighbor and my daughter's grad school advisor, in fact ~ a Mennonite member of my home Presbyterian church, asked me as he arrived whether that particular message had been relayed to me.

"Yes, yes," I said.

And so here's what we did:

I offered some opening remarks.  I started with Emily Dickinson ~ "After great pain a formal feeling comes" ~ and reminded them that we were in that time frame, and of the essential demands that grief makes before celebration can ensue.

I shared a bit of information about suicide:

That it's a consequence of an illness, depression, which is every bit as insidious and devastating as cancer or heart disease.

That they might find it helpful to dispense with the phrase "She committed suicide'" and to replace it with "She died of suicide."  We would never say that someone committed cancer and, while suicide can appear to be an intentional, thoughtful act of a rational mind, things are not always as they seem.

That they are not to blame.  That, as the literature tells us, "If you had been responsible for this death, it would not have occurred."

They shared stories and memories.

Outside the small and dark picnic shelter, sheets of rain poured down, and the wind whipped across the lake.  The candles they lit as they played recordings of "For Good" and "Hallelujah" repeatedly sputtered and blew out.  Finally someone had an idea: Huddle closely together and hold a bundle of candles as one.  They were able to watch the light flame up in silence as they listened to their last piece of music (one they had assured me, correctly,  that I would not know).

 

Perhaps the most moving statement of the night came from the aforementioned dad, who noted that "The candles tell you: You shine when you come together."

 

As they dimmed their candles, I told them what I always tell people: Choose a date on next year's calendar, circle it, and fill the circle with the name of your friend.  When that day rolls around, sit down and write a letter filled with your memories ~ a letter to her parents, to her brother or sister, to each other.  It will be the most important thing you do that day.

 

And then I ended with another poem of Emily's, "Hope is the thing with feathers."

 

I don't know whether I was of any help.  I think that mostly they helped one another, with their memories and their music and their candles.

 

It felt odd to me, leading what was essentially a memorial service, without any mention of the God who watches over them and has welcomed their friend into wherever it is that we go and whoever it is that we become.  But it felt honest, as well, to try to offer them a sense of peace and hope in the context of a friendship that meant so much to them.

 

In Florida, there are two parents and a brother and a sister whose torment has only just begun. 

 

Lord, have mercy.

 

 

**********

 

 

I posted only yesterday's photo of the light on Facebook, as I felt that it would intrude on the young people's privacy to publish an image of their faces.  But here, where the readership is a small and fairly private group, I want to give a sense of these beautiful young people and the generous and giving spirit which they share.

Again

Today . . .a flurry of emails and calls and texts . . .  three beautiful young college women in my living room by late afternoon, seeking help in creating an impromptu memorial service . . . their high school friend dead by suicide less than a week ago  . . .  gathered in a park picnic pavilion . . . cold and dark and windy and pouring rain . . . the candles kept going out until they huddled closer and burned them together . . .