Intimately the same...

Third memorial service in six weeks.  The three could not be more different in culture, age, and circumstance.  What they all have in common is how deeply the ones left here love the ones who have died.  The ones left here will never quite be the same.  The ones left here will feel the deep dark empty for a long time. The ones left here will be gratefully surprised by the outpouring of love from those who feel their loss with them.  The ones left here will be lost...will wander...will one day find the life in them to walk a new path with new hope and new life.

Amazing how vastly different but intimately the same we all are...

One memorial service was for a student who had only one semester left before graduating...he took his own life. Only child.  Son of a retired Detroit (Irish) police officer and Vietnamese mother. Service held at the Sailing Club Marina---soooo many kids and the stories at the mic went on and on and the afternoon was gorgeous, and the water was beautiful and his boat was up by the platform.

Second service was for a 16 year old hispanic girl who suddenly dropped from an aneurysm...so full of life and love...plans for the future...JROTC...her boyfriend is one of the nicest young gentlemen you will ever meet---he is my student.  The service was in a dominantly Hispanic Catholic church packed to the gills with people in the chapel close circuit tv (and this is not a small church), along the sides and in the narthex...packed full...lovely service.

Third service was for the husband of a good friend in his 60s who had cancer riddling his body, taking his life slowly the last year or more.  Held traditionally in the United Methodist Church---very intimate and formal with a minister who spoke well of him.  Lovely family, close community.  He was a collector and lover of classic cars and the parking lot was filled with them---they are so very beautiful and it was touching to see so many of his friends come and bring their classics in honor of him.

Tuesday's prayer (1221716)

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gratitude.  Yes.  Close my eyes and conjure.  Gratitude.  See the clearing beyond the row of palms along the freeway.  Yellows gold tans a drop of orange brown near white like corn husks and greens all shades... Gratitude.  Rain on the front windshield. Wipers suck.  Smear even in the hardest rain.  Doesn’t last long.  Windows back down.  Gratitude.

Be...
With...
Good good trip, all slights and almost misses notwithstanding
good
gratitude
almost right—close enough for Gratitude...
Now...then...Now...

Ambivalence.
Desire like craving.
Fear like deep sleep escape familiar stories comfort deadens desire.
Avoid it with certainty that nothing matters. Vanity...accusations of self pity.
Whatever.
Desire scares me.  Fear scares me. Deadening desire, escape, scares me.
Disappear into the characters I love with all my heart (and desire) ... scares me.
I live in the same decade of those who die young...just these last few weeks...
Bobby.  George Michaels.  Carrie Fisher.
If you’re gonna do it, do it now.  But it doesn’t matter. Nobody reads it.  Can’t finish it because nobody reads it.  So why is (she) afraid of it.  Nobody reads it.  Can’t sell hot chocolate to Eskimos.  Rather watch Bogey, Myrna Loy, Ray Burr, Barbie Hale, Bill Powell.... What difference does it make?

All I have are words.
Fear that I will spend my life into the words and it won’t matter.  The story won’t save me.  I will disappear.  Death comes ...

Too soon?  Too late?  Why am I caught in this quick sand of ... I’ve no word for it.

I’ve no word for it... it...  No word.

Reflection.
Recognition.
Resurrection?

Forgive me?
It’s not that I don’t believe...but that I fear.

Fear not...you say over and over and over.  How?

How do I fear not?
How do I do?
How do I believe it matters?
How do I move forward?

...I will lose again...

PROMISE ME
promise me...
Promise me you’ll come back.
Promise me all I have to do is look for you
promise me I’ll be there one day too
promise me
PROMISE ME
then keep your promise
keep your word
enable me to believe in the word again

I need the word.

4th Day Poem challenge

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March caves in
caves into my annual calendar
like a florida sinkhole
having given one precious life
takes another
or year
or more
so much promise
pollinating all that is natural
with promise of Easter’s supernatural
hope in life hereafter
beyond the sinkhole
beyond the depth of fear
and the warmth
left on the sofa cushion
a minute only after rising

gratitude grows, cracks the seed of grief
Resurrection morning following on the cusp
of dead and buried

unending tribute to Dad through cycles of grief, joy, gratitude...and hope

I remember the feel of the bark on the tree against my palms and against my cheek, the tricky slickness of the bottoms of my mary janes against the skirting of the trunk and roots.  I was five.  I could feel wisps of hair from the loose bun falling around my face and lilting across  my eyes as I blew kisses toward the camera at Dad’s beckoning. It was a pretty day and I felt pretty in my dress with the white top and dark blue skirt (were there polka dots?) And lacy socks and mary jane’s.  I felt pretty being photographed like a model and hanging out with my dad.  He was thin and his hair was still black, waved back with a beautiful hairline I see now when I look at photos.  He was cool.  He could sing beautifully.  He could take beautiful photographs.  He could tell wonderful stories.  He could write words to move you to tears or laughter.  He could take the big rabbit out of its cage behind Granny’s house and let me pet it.  He could drive fast through the mountains.  He could make up really good stories about people in restaurants eating at nearby tables. He could work all night. He could win writing, advertising and marketing awards. He could sell anything. He could only write when he had a deadline and a paycheck.  He could be gone for long stretches of time.  He could hurt my feelings faster than anyone.  He could make things that didn’t make sense make sense.  He could explain why people were the way they were.  He could pray with his eyes open. He could help millions of people get through national disasters or a political crisis.  He could negotiate the release of prisoners or a change in policy.  He could get splinters out of my finger.  He could pick out the best puppies.  He could bake a chicken that had cinnamon as a main seasoning ingredient.  He could order the best steaks.  He could help me map out a better plot sequence.  He could decorate a house—perfect compositions of wall hangings and furniture.  He could make things sound better.  Or worse.  He could move and uproot his family every two to three years.  He could make up the best words like disgustipating. He could make me feel like the most special and important person in the universe.  He could make me feel suffocated.  He could make me angry.  He could make me laugh.  He could make me cry.  He could NOT beat me at racquet ball once I turned 12.  Otherwise, he could do anything.  Except prevent vascular disease from taking over his life. He can still make me miss him and love him and forgive him for being human like the rest of us.  He can still be the best dad ever.  He can still speak to me.  He can still make me laugh and cry.  He can still make me feel special and loved.  He can still make me wish he were here to eat Calabash shrimp at the beach, or drink cherry ibc colas, or watch tennis.  He can still be here with me, for me, in my memory and in my ways.  I hope he can forgive me for not knowing a lot of things I wish I’d known...about how and how much he loved me...about misunderstandings that seem to linger...about how really really far death can separate you...about how impossible it is to know the story when it wasn’t told...  I put all of this into a pretty box of joy without sides, wrapped in paper of unlimited gratitude, and ribboned in swirls of grieving that will hopefully one day be untied...to find us all there—all the family for generations—together inside (and out) once again...

how weird was that? just streamed it all of a sudden...  and i might post it but I’d have to name it something like unending tribute to dad through cycles of grief and joy and gratitude...and hope...

i hope you have a great father's day and will celebrate your dad in a special way.  i'm grabbing moon pies and cherry ibc colas and going to the beach...

 

between death and resurrection october 4

100414  Emotional bombs keep exploding at the sight of things I’d forgotten.  Why do I weep?  Does it matter? I weep.   Dad, dead now only five months.  Like yesterday and forever alive but I can’t reach him or talk to him or roll my eyes when he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.  Except for that one time just before we had to move him to hospice, I got home from a visit, they live three hours away, and I called him to say I’d arrived home safely and we chatted about how wonderful the weekend was (as we always do) and then in childlike fun we exchanged all kinds of goodbyes—his voice, my dad’s of all my life so familiar so right so him, but in light-heartedness so rare for a man so serious—we played with, exchanged, all the different words for bubye...see you later alligator, tata for now, ciao, ciao bella, so long, see you next time, it’s been real, sianara, toodloo, adios amigos, bubye...and it went on for awhile and I was giggling and he chuckling, so great to hear joy in his voice, and mama was in the background saying, “Jerry!  Hang up the phone now!”  Dad and I were gloriously stuck in some delightful spin of timeless, spaceless connection that of course now is weighted down with all the grief of time violently chiseling away at such precious moments of being and connection, forever here separated by a violent, traumatic death that quickly followed that call.  It keeps roaring back at me like the relentless ocean waves storming onto the beaches of my memory and I can’t swim there any more.

Now Mama stands in her new, smaller, more cost efficient “garden apartment” sorting through for the third time in as many months, what she treasures.  This last time she sorted without me and so I picked up boxes labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” (my friend and I and others are having a garage sale next month).  This morning, back at my house, I opened one box she’d filled and in it, carefully wrapped, are the blue delft plates she so dearly loves from Holland they bought when they traveled there, permanent fixtures in every kitchen since, emblems of my youth and the certainty of a loving, mostly stable family and there they are in a box labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” and the whole world again crashes down on my heart and soul and it’s like the earth opens and swallows me into the shards of no longer being. And I hear echoing mama’s voice last weekend as she stands in her new, smaller, more efficient “garden apartment” say, “I just don’t really care about any of it any more.  I’m over it.  I look at things I’ve loved for so long and I’m just over it. Is that horrible?”  I don’t remember what I answered (didn’t know she meant my childhood, our whole lives together, surely she didn’t mean that exactly) probably responded that it might just be the numbness of so much grief and loss happening all at once that this is kind of a defense mechanism.  I’ll keep everything for you, Mama.  Maybe one day soon you’ll want it back.

Then again maybe not.

As keeper of the treasure I feel the weight of all who have gone before more profoundly than ever.  I have furniture and wall hangings and treasures with rich, variegated stories, swords and knives from all over the world, figurines and plates and, plateware, a window from Mama Ruth’s house, Chinese praying Jesus from Mema’s house, quilts from grands I never met, a village carved from a single piece of mahogany three feet long, and I can’t let go of any of it because I want my Dad back.

Before I Knew It

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Long journeys into night
as a child I hunkered down in the floor board
curled into the bucket where feet should go
a box of kleenex, tote umbrella, empty paper cup
pushed further under the seat like secrets
my cheek on the scratchy carpet
same color as my hamster
but if you wiggled just right it was comfortable
and warm.  The hum pulled me to sleep.

Later, half awake, cooler air revived me just enough
to feel
softer embrace in the bucket of Dad’s arms
he carried me through the dim light of home again home again
jiggity jog
he laid me to rest like a most precious treasure
in my own bed
I briefly expanded between the cooler brighter sheets
and softest feather pillow that held the shape of my head
from the night before
and off to sleep before I knew it

before I knew it
now I awake from the dream of his presence
gone before I knew it

between death and resurrection

050514 early this morning I was overwhelmed again with that fierce burning desire to know that God really Is and that there is a heaven and that one day we who are beloved will be reunited and that desire extended to being one of the beloved and rather humbled at knowing it all so profoundly depended on trust and faith and I fear perpetually whether I have it in me to be so loved among the beloved if there is a beloved...and that circle just kept spinning and I think I was trying to articulate that in an email to Miriam and I basically only got so far as clumsily and without much ability to communicate it set down the words “God to Be” but looking at the email now, that’s as much as I actually penned but what happened in my head was this spinning desire and pursuit of being and knowing and feeling and understanding and having this conflicting painful sense that I couldn’t know and nothing would ever be right again and all I wanted was for God to be and for me to be able to SEE God and KNOW God and have no doubt about it and swarming in the back of all that was that same sense of brief connection with the disciples in the room between death and resurrection and how frustrating it is to see such a horrific death and those images keep tormenting me out of the blue sometimes and this is what I see and this is what is blocking me from the internal seeing that there is Heaven and so none of that stuff matters any more if there is God and is Heaven then it’s forgiven and understood within a different context and it’s all okay but my soul was crying out that this is crazy—I can’t SEE God!  I can’t SEE heaven or SEE Dad and I can’t SEE what isn’t right here before my eyes!  This feeling tormented me beyond words which were not there to be articulated this morning, only the feelings and the longings and tears rained down my face and my nose started running—I was sitting right there on the sofa where I always sit and writing on the computer or so I thought and I looked to my right where my box of kleenex sits right beside me on the cushion and it wasn’t there, but it’s always there but it wasn’t so I looked behind the throw pillows because sometimes I throw it back there when it gets in my feet’s way when watching tv and it wasn’t there so I looked on the floor because sometimes I kick it off by accident and it wasn’t there, not on the end table either and my nose was now running down my upper lip and I mumbled some incoherent expletive about the kleenex box that had to be there because it was there last night, as I walk indignantly into the kitchen to the box that always sits on the counter by the sink and I blew my nose and went back to the sofa and sat down and right there beside my leg on the sofa right there where it always is was that box of kleenex.  Right there where I had looked for it and around it and everywhere and it was NOT there before.  It was NOT.  I looked for it right there and didn’t see it.    I was right there that whole time and looked everywhere around it. How could it possibly have been there all along when I did NOT see it???

Trying to see death (flash fiction)

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The house was dark and quiet, as it was every morning when she rose at 4:00 to spend time being before having to face the chaos of the day.  Living alone was glorious.  She moved through the house in the dark as easily as midday.  Flipped on the light in the kitchen and squint blinked until  her eyes adjusted.  She filled the kettle, plugged it in, pressed the lever.  There was a message on her cell—leaving for ny.  Dad’s gone.
    Expected and unexpected death.  Had it always been like this?  This looming presence of ending or loss?  She was nine when her great grandmother died.  It wasn’t scary or particularly sad but it was profoundly memorable and interesting then and now.  It was the first time she saw death in a person.  The body was laid on top of flowers on a table and she stepped up a moveable wooden stair to see her better.  Now she knows that the flowers where really attached to the sides of the casket but her memory is that of the descriptions of old English kings and warriors whose bodies were laid on a funeral pyre of jewels and armor and wild flowers. 
    Apparently death has always been here.  Always been lurking in the shadows and behind closed doors and people’s secret anguish veiled in black netting and spoken of in awkward short phrases—sorry for your loss.  And, may God comfort you in your time of loss.  And the hardest one for her to write but the truest, no one is ever old enough to lose your mother.
    She inhaled a breath slowly, intentionally, focused on its ability to relax her shoulders and expand her chest.  The water had boiled and she poured it into the cup she’d poured water into for tea for more than twenty years.  She had visited her newly married sister and their newly born baby girl. To commemorate the occasion she bought this teacup that was now solidly a part of her daily routine.  Her sister’s two kids were grown and off to college.  Where does the time go?
    She sat outside on the porch in the dark, just the amber street lamp sending an odd glow but not enough to define anything in her back garden.  Such quiet and peace.  What about those who are miserable.  Those who are older, who see no purpose to their life?  Would death be better?  Would it be an answer to the misery, the perpetual depression.  If it is true that there is another life beyond this one, that being “saved” means eternal life with God and returning to the presence of all who have gone before, all whom we have loved and lost and by extension who we would have loved had life overlapped, then yes, a resounding yes, this life can be counted as less than satisfactory, is lived in shadow and amber street lamps and purple flowers that pop on the stem and fall off by noon where nothing is permanent not even the same cup for twenty years, not even the dreams and goals of youth that wear thin, soiled and scuffed by necessity and the unforeseen.... Surely yes to move on is something to be planned for, expected, anticipated, like the date you count down to and pack the night before and stay awake with relishing how good it will be to be home the next day.  Shouldn’t death be like that?  What is death after all?  What is this life?  This life, here?  What exactly is each of us supposed to contribute? 
    An invisible mocking bird pierced the stillness with his song that sounded like he said “right now, right now.”  Thank God for all the living things around her who brought her focus to the joy of the moment, the peace that passes understanding.  The pleasures of a cup of hot tea and birdsong.  She checked the time on her cell.  So bound to the time.  To the moment.  Right now she had to get her shower and dress for the day.  Right now she had to make breakfast and gather lunch.  Right now she had to make sure she had all her stuff together.
    Once again it was time to leave for work.  She opened the door to the garage and pressed the garage door opener, opened the trunk of the car and put her satchel in, shoes for the rain inevitable this time of year, and lunch bag.  As she looked out from the garage, she saw what she saw every day and had seen every day for the past four years in this house.  But suddenly everything was different.  Everything held its breath for her to see reality for the first time.  The dark of night was just beginning to lift a shade into that deep dark navy blue, dim street lamps cast a pale glow.  She loved this quiet, calm neighborhood stretched beyond her house at the end of the cul-de-sac.  Established, gated community whose houses were all similar with only a small variation, maybe four different styles.  Mailboxes all the same with slight variations.  She looked down the street at the series of 2x2 white posts on either side of the street with a white cross post upon which the black mail boxes sat in regimen.  Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the vision of these mailboxes, these crosses that bore the names of all her neighbors; they appeared like tombstones, those white crosses that mark graves in rows in a military cemetery.  Her neighbors identified on their mailboxes slept right now in their homes...superimposed in a vision, a mere foreshadowing of their imminent graves.