Confiteor

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,  . . .  quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

This keeps running through my head, both in English and in Latin: “. . . I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”

 
When it comes into my head in Latin, you know it’s deeply rooted and deadly serious. Lord, have mercy—please not the Latin version.
 
I have sinned in thought. The self-centeredness, the continual struggle with compassion, the failure to keep my mind focused on the things of God instead of getting distracted with the acquisition and maintenance of my petty possessions. The struggle with forgiveness.

I have sinned in word. The mouth from which springs the most idiotic things at the wrong place and time. The sad story that runs on a continuous loop. The drama queen. The it’s-all-about-me sickening syndrome. The gossiping, both thinking and saying unkind things. Lord, I wish I could blame this on an evil force but I am sorry to say it’s my own stupidity, my bottomless pit of weakness.

I have sinned in deed. Indeed I have. The unkind things I have thought and spoken also can be counted among the deeds. I have wasted money, I have had too much to eat and drink. I have not bothered to tell the clerk that she gave me change for $20 instead of $10 or that I didn’t pay for the cat litter that was in the bottom of my grocery cart. When I was too sensitive and thought people were mistreating me, I took it personally instead of cutting them some slack—no, it was all about me again.

Of course, there’s a viscous loop in operation here—I get hurt, I feel like a failure, I withdraw from polite society because I don’t want to impose myself on anyone else for fear of more rejection. This is more self-centered depressed behavior. I think I’m a jerk, everyone else thinks I’m a jerk, so I’m sure God must think I’m a jerk too.

The only way out of this is grace, grace, and more grace. I’m standing in the need of grace, Lord. Bring it on!

Forgiveness revisited

Yesterday Ben Freeth, a farmer from Zimbabwe, spoke at church. He and his family were farmers in Zimbabwe until the government brutally ousted all white property owners from their land. He told a compelling story of how he and other family members were abducted by thugs and taken to a remote area where they were bound and beaten. (Freeth’s skull was fractured and he had many broken bones. His father-in-law later died of his injuries.)

The most compelling part of his story is his account of how he forgave his captors in what he describes as a supernatural experience, something that only could have come from God. His hands and feet were bound and he was lying face-down in the dirt. He recounts his experience in his book Mugabe and the White African:

I saw a leg right in front of my face and I knew what I had to do. I managed to reach out and touch it and said, “May the Lord Jesus bless you.” I saw another and I reached out again, saying, “May the Lord Jesus bless you,” and another, and another.

This kind of forgiveness is beyond amazing. After Freeth spoke, our pastor prayed and challenged each of us to forgive someone we have not been able to forgive. He guided us through prayer and called on us to insert the name of a person we have been unable to forgive. So I did it—I prayed and called the unforgiven one by name. This was at the end of the service and I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I went through the motions but left the church in tears and spent the rest of the day in a funk because this issue, this unforgiveness that keeps rearing its ugly head. I think I’m over it and then it overcomes me again. I know all the pop-psych adages about by not forgiving you only hurt yourself, and so on. I’ve pounded my fist and prayed and said I was done with it. But I wasn’t done with it. Why can't I forgive like Ben Freeth?

So last night I sat and prayed some more. I told God it wasn’t fair. (Like He hasn’t heard that one before.) I said I needed Jesus beside me, needed the intercession of the Holy Spirit, pleaded for this to be resolved for good. I could not connect with God, didn’t feel His presence, not a word. I felt the frustration of knowing that I had been unable to resolve this forgiveness thing and I felt that God was absent. I acknowledged that He must be there, just like He’s always there, so the disconnect must have been my fault. I asked Him, “Is there some reason I’m hanging on to this? Am I getting something out of this victim role? I don’t need it, Lord—do something!” No response.

He wasn’t responding and I wasn’t going to sit there any longer talking to the walls. So I turned on my computer and typed in “Why can’t I forgive” into the search box. The very first entry that came up was an interview with a contemplative Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. I knew of Richard Rohr and had read other work of his. The mere fact that this was the first thing that came up on my computer blew me away. Okay, Lord, forget what I said earlier—obviously He heard me and responded with a message, exactly what He wanted me to hear. These are some of the things that Father Rohr said in the interview:
 

•  "Forgiveness is a decision, but making that decision doesn't override the emotional residue that often takes much longer to release. That feeling of wanting revenge or wanting to assert your rightness or your victimhood—depending on the depth of your wounding—can take days, weeks, months and even years to dissipate. On certain days, when you're in a down mood, your psyche will want to grab onto that hurt. You have to go through that necessary period of feeling half dead, half angry, half in denial—this is the liminal [transitional] space in which we grow for some reason.
• "I don't know why God made an imperfect world. . . But recognizing that there's an essentially tragic nature to life, one that you have to forgive and accept in a foundational way, allows you to forgive the smaller daily dramas with much greater ease. As much as we want to see the person who hurt us as an evil person—as if they were a major exception to the rule, since we have falsely imagined a perfect world—we need to realize that we're all an exception to the rule of perfection and expectation. Humans are inherently imperfect. That is what differentiates us from the Divine level.
• “Surely people have hurt you and you wish you could punish them, but whether you recognize it or not, you yourself were forgiven when you also were broken and mistaken. All, without exception, live under the waterfall of divine mercy. There is, of course, an essential and direct connection between our receptivity to undeserved love and forgiveness and our ability to forgive other imperfect people. There is not much point in weighing which fault was the greater; that is merely the ego protecting itself. When you understand your own limited but lovely place within this universally imperfect world, you will find it almost natural to become more patient and forgiving with other people too."
• “If we can find a way to live inside of a deep gratitude for our own undeserved grace and mercy, past hurts have very little power to cause us pain in any lasting way. They are not worth our time or energy. They are mere sludge and dredge in the great school and journey of life. The gratuitous surrendering of hurts ("forgiveness"), the refusal to make them our identity, is almost the heart of the matter. If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others. And, I am afraid, you will have pain! Both the Buddha and Jesus seem to say that pain is part of the deal, and its overcoming is the very shape of enlightenment."

So, God led me to some guidance on this issue of forgiveness in the form of words from Richard Rohr found on the Internet. (1) Forgiveness is a decision, but I should not be surprised if I see it rear its ugly head from time to time. So I guess I shouldn’t beat myself over the head about this. (2) The world is broken, imperfect and it’s full of broken, imperfect people. That surely includes me. I do not deserve the love and forgiveness—the grace—that God has given me. Is it my ego that makes me think I deserve special consideration? Wrong again. (3) Focus on God. Keep my eyes on His overwhelming blessings. Move out the hurt and the pain (the "mere sludge and dredge") and fill that space with gratitude.

 

Once again I am incredibly moved by our awesome, awesome God.

Interview with Richard Rohr accessed on June 7, 2015. Online at http://www.oprah.com/spirit/The-Truth-About-the-People-You-Cant-Forgive#ixzz3cUUiYWM7

The heartless Miss Hart

Well into his 80s Daddy would tell us stories from his childhood, stories we had never heard before. His brain was agile and healthy until the end of his life, so it wasn’t a case of him losing mental faculties and slipping back into his youth.

One story he told made our hearts ache. Apparently he had a teacher in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, when he was very young (perhaps first or second grade) named Miss Hart. Miss Hart didn’t like little Donald and she used to scold him and humiliate him. Daddy said that she put him the corner of the classroom and made him wear the shameful dunce cap—she told him he was stupid. Or she made him sit under her desk as punishment.

What my father could have done to elicit this severe humiliation is inconceivable. He was the sweetest, kindest, most hardworking man I have ever known. He was conscientious and he was very smart. He could figure out how to fix anything or build anything. He even cut my hair when I was in high school and my friends asked if he would cut their hair. There was nothing he couldn’t do or figure out how to do. He deserved a crown, a Nobel prize, canonization, not a dunce cap.

The only thing I can imagine he might have done to annoy the cruel Miss Hart is that he might have been a little too sociable. My father could talk the fleas off a dog. It was a trait so deeply ingrained he must have had it at birth so I’m sure he visited his little first grade classmates outside of visiting hours.

What is so sad is that he still felt the shame inflicted on him in that classroom some 80 years after the fact. He said he always felt like he was dumb. And these 80-plus years after the fact I’m angry that the heartless Miss Hart hurt that precious little boy who grew up to be my dad.

 

Dutiful wife

If only you could hear the internal dialogue in my head—it’s either amusing or frightening.

This morning I was cleaning my bedroom. I pulled out a basket under my bed and noted a significant amount of dust under the bed. And I said to myself, “Oh, you stupid, lazy woman! You need to stop wasting time, be a more dutiful wife, and get these things done.”

Was I temporarily transported back to the last millennium? A dutiful wife? I have been unmarried for nearly 18 years. Several weeks ago, I was signing a financial document and signed “Donna X. Burke”—that hasn’t been my name for 16 years since my divorce became final.

The dutiful wife is long gone. So the dialogue in my head and my slip back to signing my long-gone name could be alarming. One thing I can say with surety is that it’s not wishful thinking. I’m a different person now and I couldn’t go back to that life even if I wanted to go back.

Is my brain just distracted and unfocused sometimes? Of course. Everyone I know who is my age goes through these temporary blips in thought processes. It takes at least three of us an hour to remember the name of the actress who was in that movie—that movie based on the book, where her husband and family go away and she has a brief fling with that guy. No, that’s not the movie—it’s the one with the horse. That other guy, that famous American actor was in it. Who was that actor? And the actress, you know who she is—it’s that actress with dark hair. She’s English but she lives in France. I read that in a magazine at the beauty shop. She’s also in that movie where she’s in prison and she smokes a lot of cigarettes. I think the movie was in French. An hour later, when we’re comparing about our mothers’ atrocious recipes for Jell-O molds, someone blurts out “Kristin Scott Thomas!”. We all know what she’s talking about.

Or there’s another worst-case scenario. Am I developing some sort of senile dementia? Lord, please protect me!

Detach

This morning I sat on the floor, praying for the Biden family and all those with broken hearts who have just lost someone they love. I know that pain. I thought about what I had read in the newspaper—after Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car wreck and his two sons were badly injured, his mother gave him some advice: “Out of everything terrible that happens to you, something good will come of it if you look hard enough.”
 

If I look hard, I realize that out of the terrible things that have happened to me—the heartbreak, the seemingly unending losses, that something good had come of it for me. When I found myself on my knees, I realized that was where I needed to be. I needed to pray; I needed God in my life. I saw how little control I have over what unfolds in this earthly life and the only solution is for me to build a stronger relationship with God.

For years I have been on a crooked path, but a path that leads me to Him. Today I prayed, “Draw me closer to you. Show me how to live ever closer to your heart.” I prayed to stay on the mountain, for Him to show me how to live in this crazy broken world without losing the sense of being in God’s presence. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me every minute of every day. And as I sat in silence, trying to just feel the Lord's presence, a word floated through my consciousness. I dismissed it. It came back again—detach. And so, detachment it is.

With detachment, come both certainties and questions. I know that to detach means truly forgiving past hurts. (Period—end of sentence.) I know that I have to detach from petty earthly longings like status and beauty and accomplishment. What it means about possessions I need to figure out. I like trinkets—my little collection of Mexican pottery, vintage Indian sari quilts, and those luscious pieces of Native American silver jewelry. I like cashmere and linen and Eileen Fisher clothes. (In defense of myself, I should point out that most of these things have been bought at thrift stores. But feeling defensive also means I have a certain amount of guilt for wanting them and a certain amount of attachment to the trinkets.) Do I thank God for those things and appreciate their beauty, or do I go all Mother Teresa and give them to the poor? I don’t know.

 

All I do know is that in order to draw closer to God, I need to surrender any illusion that I control my life. He is telling me that I need to detach from earthly things. What that detachment looks like will evolve over time. I’m looking at everything, looking hard. Something good will come of it.

Shot in the back

It's a photo of my little brother and me on a happy day, at a family crab feast, in his front yard, not far from the spot where he later died. Suddenly it washed over me today--a tsunami of grief and anger over my brother's murder. I can't erase the image of the autopsy photos from my brain. It was his birthday last week; he would have turned 60. For what it's worth I wrote this, a letter that won't be mailed, to the murderer who is now rotting in a Maryland prison:

Why did you have to shoot him in the back? He must have been walking away from you, avoiding confrontation. He had no weapon; you had a double-barrel pistol in your pocket, loaded with “cop killer” bullets. You were once a cop yourself, so what made you become one of the bad guys, no better than those you detested, those you roughed up when you arrested them?

At the trial I saw my brother’s autopsy photo on the big screen. It was my brother alright, his lifeless face in black and white. I saw the autopsy photo of my brother’s back—no blood, no gross trauma—just the hole where the bullet entered at point-blank range before it severed the arteries leading into and out of his heart. Did you even flinch when you saw the bigger-than-life photos from your front-row seat? Why didn’t you bury your head in your hands and sob when you saw the damage you did?

What kind of man can have the arrogance to take another man’s life, to shoot a neighbor in the back on a sunny Sunday afternoon in his own front yard? I can’t understand what kind of human being can do that. God help me, I don’t want to understand that kind of heartless cruelty.

So my brother died in his own front yard on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April four years ago and you are solely responsible. And as you sit in prison, I hope that every minute of every day you know what you are—a miserable excuse for a human being, a bully, and a coward who shot my brother in the back.

Signed . . . still a heart-broken, grieving sister

 

The only cure for loneliness

"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty--it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God." -- Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa

 

Often I have written about loneliness. It is something that has felt like a curse for many years. For so long I have howled at God, pleaded with God, wept, and gnashed my teeth. In the early days I did anything and everything I could to escape loneliness. I ran around like a chicken whose head has been has been severed with a hatchet, spilling blood on the ground and on anyone near me. It wasn’t pretty. This frantic effort to escape loneliness continued for years in different degrees and took different forms.  I got tired and stopped the frantic search for fulfillment, but still the loneliness continued. Then I went to the monastery and it all made sense.

When I went away intentionally and spent a week in silence, I began to see God’s purpose for where He has placed me. God gave me loneliness so I could be alone with Him. I felt the utter peace and fulfillment of spending time in quiet with the Lord. Now I crave solitude. And now I thank Him because I realize that what I once thought was a curse is actually a blessing. I am continually amazed by how perfect is His work.

Re-Hesitation

For a few days I shut down this blog. I was stinging from a comment that a reader left on the blog on my most recent post. I didn’t want to respond in anger, didn’t want to defend myself if what the commenter said had any validity. So I thought about it for a few days and have begun to sort out my thoughts.

Since I removed the post, I suppose I need to include the original post here for the sake of clarity. Here’s what I wrote on May 13th under the title Hesitation:

As I begin to write, I hesitate. I hesitate because I’ve been told that most people won’t understand what I have experienced. They will think I’ve become some sort of religious nutcase and I’ll waste too much energy trying to explain—“throwing pearls before swine.”

But I also know that something real happened, I accept it, and realize that I may never be able to recapture the experience. Even though I can’t find words to adequately describe my experience, I know that it has changed me forever. I have had the incredible privilege of experiencing God’s presence, to my core I felt the power of the Holy Spirit, and I know that the story of redemption—that seemingly cockamamie story of God sending his son to earth to accomplish our salvation—is all true. Yes, I doubted before and probably I will doubt again. But having once felt it, I will carry that knowledge with me for the rest of my life.

I have been home from my retreat at the monastery for over a week. I have come far down from the mountain of peace and joy into the valley of a distracted daily life. I yearn for the closeness with God that I left behind. I don’t want to lose that feeling of joy and peace. I don’t want to forget that absolute certainty that God exists, that He sees me, He knows me, He listens to my prayer. The struggle is to figure out how to continue to grow closer to Him, to be inside the heart of God. I do not understand what God is and I know that the common personification of Him is not accurate—He is not a super-powerful man with a long beard, not the divine Wizard of Oz. My feeble mind does not have the ability to understand God. I don’t need theology and apologetics and intellectual reasoning to prove the existence of God. Now I know Him in my heart.

 
"Find God in interior stillness only once and your attitude toward silence and solitude will be changed. Find God in that silence a hundred times and silence will be your great love, solitude your dear friend because there you come face to face with the Lord your heart seeks.”  From You Can Know God by Marilyn Gustin (hopefully quoted accurately because I wrote this quote in my little notebook and don’t have a hard copy of the book to verify it)

And here is the anonymous comment that I received from the reader:

 “throwing pearls before swine.” ...
Interesting choice of words, I would say. Are we talking about the people who follow this blog? About those who read your posts searching for inspiration?

First, I apologize for any offense caused by my use of the phrase “throwing pearls before swine”—it is a phrase used in Scripture (specifically, Matthew 7:6). I used the term because that verse advises Christians to be wary about broadcasting the message of the Gospel to those who are not interested in hearing the message. The notes in my Bible on this verse say: “Believers are to be merciful, forgiving, and slow to judge, yet they should wisely discern the true character of people and not indefinitely continue proclaiming the gospel to those who adamantly reject it.” I should have paid more attention to the notes. Honestly, I just used the term without thinking it would offend my readers. I am truly sorry and should have heeded the warning to be wisely discerning. Sometimes words just get away from me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I have found many ways to figuratively stick my foot in my mouth and I humbly regret my choice of words.

Secondly, I never presumed this blog to be a source of inspiration—I have no words of wisdom. I see myself as a woman without answers, someone with many of the same struggles as others. I’m a storyteller, processing many aspects of my life through writing and sometimes the process ends up here. Enough said.

Elsie and me

Vigils, Lauds, Midday Prayer, Vespers, and Compline—the rhythm of the monastic life. I never made it to Vigils at 3:30 in the morning, though I did all the others. I’m not cut out for monastic life if it means I have to pull myself out of bed at 3 a.m., but I particularly loved Lauds and Compline at the beginning and the end of the day.
 

On my first full day at the abbey I quickly dressed and headed out to Lauds. The glow of the sun was just beginning to rise above the mountains to the east. Beyond the low freshly plowed field a blue fog hovered over the Shenandoah River, swollen with spring rain. I pulled my jacket tighter against the early morning chill and slipped on my gloves. I said good morning to a Black Angus bull and walked briskly down the path to the monastery chapel. Glorious, glorious spring morning in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I breathed it in, smiled, and whispered, “This is the day the Lord hath made. Rejoice, rejoice and be glad.”

I climbed the steps to the dimly lit chapel and slid into the corner in the last row. The wood pew creaked loudly in the silence. The bells rang and the monks filed in. The bells rang again, two barely audible taps, and they began to chant. They chanted from Psalm 118: 

This is the LORD’s doing;

     it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day that the LORD has made;
     let us rejoice and be glad in it.
 
How did they know what I had been praying just minutes earlier?

The sun rose above the mountain just then and burst through a window on the side of the chapel. The chapel was dark except for that one beam of light shining directly on me, trying to hide in the corner of the last row. “Okay, God, I get it—you see me. Undoubtedly you know where I am. I hope this is where you want me to be.”

At the end of the day, as the sun began to set, again I went to the chapel for Compline, the last prayer of the day. And again the mountains and the fields glowed as the sun slowly drifted below the horizon. The barn swallows headed home and the cows bellowed louder at sunset than at any other time of the day. And I had a quiet conversation with a yellow cow, the only yellow cow among all the Black Angus cows in the pasture. (Lacking udders, she probably was a he, but I didn't ask any personal questions.) She seemed to need some company. I could grow to love this.

(Yes, it's the yellow cow in the photo, that yellow cow who needed some company.)

More questions than answers

Weeks ago I had one of those odd coincidences when Thomas Merton’s name kept popping up, over and over again in a short period of time. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, a priest, and a prolific writer with a strong interest in social justice, especially during the Vietnam War era. I have read some of his work and have been inspired by him. It seemed more than coincidence—I believed God was sending me a message. I decided to go on a silent retreat at a Trappist monastery, to understand what the Lord wanted me to hear.

So I went to the monastery to spend days in quiet prayer, to hear the voice of the Lord. I have been thrashing around like a hooked fish in the bottom of a boat, struggling to understand what God wants of me. If I could use a single word to describe what I have been looking for, the word would be discernment. I needed to know my purpose—in God’s eyes—what would He have me do with the rest of my life? Where is the answer? Is it in Scripture? Would the Holy Spirit write my instructions with multi-color diagrams and a flow chart on the chapel walls? Not likely.

But as I searched for an answer, I kept bumping into another question—how do I grow into a deeper spirituality, a closeness with God, a union with Him? And it dawned on me that the second question is the answer to the first question. I’m asking God for answers to questions: Where do I live? How should I spend my time? Does He have a purpose for the remaining days of my life? And He wants me to focus on the second question.

Jesus came from the Father, became man, to teach us to be more like Him, to be one with the Father. So this yearning that I have to do something, to be something just may be a yearning for a closeness with God. Could it be that it’s a higher yearning than what I imagined? Could it be that it’s not about where I live or what I do with my time? It’s not the practical quotidian stuff—it’s about Him.

I still need to live and I’ll still fret about practical decisions, but maybe those things will flow more easily, with more confidence, when I have a deeper connection with my Creator.

(While on the retreat I wandered around the beautiful local countryside. I took this photo of an old abandoned church. I love the crooked cross on the peak of the roof.)

Shhh. . .

Shhh . . . don’t talk to me. I have just returned from spending the week at a silent retreat at a Trappist monastery. When I told people I was going they told me stories of others who had done such silent retreats. The usual scenario was that participants would go crazy in the silence after a couple of days. “Just be prepared,” they warned. But I didn’t go crazy; I found peace. I live a rather quiet, somewhat sequestered life at home so the silence seemed normal. Being at the monastery has drawn me into it even more. But being totally focused on God for these days has changed me, hopefully forever.

This is my first day back. I got up early to walk outside, hoping the practice of being up at first light would bring peace and joy into my heart that would last the entire day. I can see how hard it is in this fast-paced environment. Even yesterday as I drove home I felt it change. I started the trip home, driving over gravel roads and country lanes, leaving the river and the gentle mountains in my rear-view mirror. I was hurling myself back into life outside the monastery—cars and concrete and super achievers. I know this crazy world is where my life is. Somehow I’ll figure out how to keep that peace and joy in my heart. Somehow.

I’ll write more about my experience in the next few days, but for now I’m resting in the silence.

 

House dresses and divorce

This is a socio-anthropological study. My study group is people in the United States of America in the post-World War II era to the present. My thesis is that there is a direct correlation between women wearing house dresses and the divorce rate. My primary sources of information include Wikipedia and my mother.

My mother recently told me that when she got married she was confused about what to wear. I’m not referring to her wedding dress—that was easy—she borrowed it from her friend Gertrude McIntyre Catucci. She didn’t know what she should wear in her new role as a married woman.

My mother was 19 when she married my father in the rectory of St. Francis de Sales Church in Northeast Washington, DC, on June 30, 1945. Their reception was in her parents’ backyard. The idea of being a married woman meant that her wardrobe would have to change dramatically. She thought that having that gold band on her left hand meant she would have to wear house dresses.

I know what house dresses are—they are simple, washable dresses, sometimes with aprons attached, that women wore to do their house chores. (I verified this description by reading a brief entry on Wikipedia. Where else would I go for a serious study like this?) Some women bought these dresses from the Sears or the Spiegel catalogs. Other women made their own dresses. Mama Riley (my cousin’s grandmother with whom I spent a summer in Silsbee, Texas—another story—hot and lots of mosquitos) must have made her own houses dresses. She made my cousin and me skirts out of feed sacks, she milked the cow, and she slaughtered chickens before my very eyes. Women who both wore and sewed their own house dresses were hard-core, not to be messed with, the queen bees of house dresses.

In the early years after the War, women stayed home to care for the children, polish the furniture, and make Jell-O concoctions for dessert. They were called housewives, an archaic term no longer considered politically correct. But in time these women became dissatisfied with their domestic roles and their daughters, the next generation, went bonkers—they started movements for equality for women, they burned their bras, they used contraceptives. I can guarantee you they weren’t wearing house dresses.

When I was growing up in that post-War era, I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced. None of the mothers worked outside the home, and in the early days they wore house dresses. Fast forward 50 or more years. No one wears house dresses any more. Even if a woman doesn’t work outside the home she wears jeans or—heaven forbid—yoga pants. And the divorce rate has soared.

I rest my case.

(Photo is my grandmother, Rose Blain, with her cow.)

Back into the raw

There she was, sitting by the back door in the waning afternoon sun, probably watching the chickadees building a nest in the birdhouse in the cherry tree. I caught only a quick glimpse of her, took her for granted, just part of the rhythm of my life. In that brief moment I didn’t even get enough time to savor her existence. It’s early spring now and she died just before Christmas. My mind and my old eyes were playing a nasty trick on me—it was a bag of things from the hardware that I had dropped inside the back door. It wasn’t my sweet cat sitting in the sun on our first beautiful spring day.  

I’m sure it’s not unusual to think we see someone we love after they have died. I was almost certain I saw Mike driving his truck down my street one day. Not long ago I saw a man who looked so much like my former husband that I gasped. There was man in the parking lot outside my mother’s apartment recently who walked like my father and seemed to be wearing my father’s clothes. And occasionally I will feel a presence, a hovering in the house that I can’t explain. Sometimes it’s comforting; sometimes it’s unsettling. 

“Seeing” my cat made me ache for her soft, warm little body. Once again I slipped back into the raw familiar territory of inconsolable grief. I thought it was gone, finished. All those deaths in such a short time have been hard to process. There are a couple of things I am learning about grief. One thing I’m learning is that it takes much, much more time to heal than I ever imagined. Sometimes it’s two steps forward, two steps back. But another thing I’m learning is that the resurgence of deep grief doesn’t last as long now; it isn’t the same paralyzing anguish that it once was. I don’t want to learn any more lessons. I just want it to be over.

Farewell to Forrest

He died a couple of days ago. A big, strong guy taken down by brain cancer—glioblastoma, the same cancer that killed my husband. Cancer sucks.

 

I am proud to be among what must be a huge number of people who called Keylon Thompson a friend. There is no exaggeration when I say that Keylon was the kindest, most compassionate person I have ever known. He was so full of life and a spirit of adventure that we all felt like slackers in comparison to him.

 

He would post those crazy photos on Facebook—Keylon at the National Spelling Bee, Keylon at the Special Olympics, Keylon on the top of some mountain somewhere, Keylon biking in a cancer cure fundraiser, Keylon in Times Square, Keylon at a music festival in Mongolia. (I made up the Mongolia thing, but he went to music festivals and concerts with no regard to geographic restrictions, especially if Bela Fleck was involved.) I compared him to Forrest Gump because seemingly he was part of everything fun that was happening everywhere. So I started calling him Forrest.

 

Then one day in September of 2013, a gunman came into a building at the Washington Navy Yard and killed 12 people. That was where Keylon worked and he was there when the shooting happened, but he was not injured. It was a bad day for Forrest.

 

The gunman didn’t kill him, but cancer did. For me, I’m crushed to know that I’ll never see him again, never get one of those world-class hugs from the nicest guy in the world. The only thing I can do is carry a little ray of his sunshine, try to remember to do what he would do—live a big life with a big, big kind heart.

 

I’ll miss you, Forrest.

The view from here

When one has had the opportunity to live a significant number of years, the overview of life becomes different than it was in younger years. This my 68^th year on this planet. How can that be? And how will I see things in another 10 or 20 years, if I am still hanging on to this spinning hunk of rock?

From this vantage point, at age 67 years and 8 months, these are some of my observations:

(1) I can now begin to see the fruits of my life’s work and it’s a glorious thing. My children are adults. Out of my body sprung two amazing people. They weren’t the size they are now when they were born. For that alone I am so grateful. They grew up and had children of their own. I sometimes have this image of those nesting Russian wooden dolls with a big doll that contains a smaller doll, and inside the smaller doll, another doll . . . me, my kids, their kids . . . a seemingly simple yet incredibly complex story of the perpetuation of the human race. And I see that I not only created a family, but I also forged life-long friendships. I created things with my own hands, I gained knowledge and skills. So, looking down from the hilltop, I see that some things worked, some things didn’t work, and that some things may endure beyond my lifetime. But I know that my existence mattered; I have left an imprint, however small it may be.

(2) From this vantage point I see the unending horrors of life. The hate and pain inflicted by some people on others never stop. The horrors morph and grow—different people in different places and new, hideous means of inflicting harm—but the human race seems incapable of living in peace. It seems we’ve been praying for peace since the beginning of recorded time and we never get one step closer.

(3) The enduring love of God has become so much clearer to me as I grow older. I see how he has blessed me by sometimes not giving me the things I wanted. Just looking back at prayers not answered gives me a small glimpse of His plan. His plan is so much better than any plan of mine. He has such incredible surprises for me, things I never could have imagined. I really am beginning to see that all things work together for the good of those who love Him. Seeing that love from this vantage point has given me an almost giddy joy. It makes me want to sink deeper and deeper into that peaceful surrender that only comes from a total trust in God. Sometimes being old has its advantages.