Tag: grief

Barbara

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
I make myself sit still to
write, to think, to feel
who you were to me all
those years ago when
I was a lost child with
emotions too large for my
body and no place to store
them until I could understand. 

You gave me a space to be
honest and verbose and lost
in safety. Lost 
in arms always open. 
Lost in love with no
conditions. 

You gave me the country and
tick checks and canoeing
the Finley with the children
everyone thought were the reason,
your children, a year above and
below me, who provided cover
for my true purpose — to be held 
to your bosom, to be mothered.

Hearing you died landed as
an anvil. Despite the memory
you had already released and the
hospice and the impending
truth I knew would come, still,
knowing that for the first time
in my life I was on the earth
without you forged iron grief.

Before I knew you, you were
here. After we moved away, you
were here. And during those sacred
years of blooming in a sanctuary
you built for me, you were 
here, always here. And now 
I’m here without you, and 
I feel a little lost.  Not sure
what to write, what to
think, what to feel.  

Nothing has changed.
You lived your life there,
and I lived my life here. We
stopped being daily parts of 
each other decades past.
 
No, nothing has changed, but
it didn’t need to. Because
you loved me enough in two
years to last a lifetime, and that
changed everything for me,
how I understood love and
the world and my space in it.
Everything changed when
you loved me back to myself.

The Bluejay

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment
John William Hill, “The Dead Bluejay,” watercolor, 1865
I saw him on the bench
as I pulled into the carport,
a bluejay, on his back,
pencil-lead feet curled
around a ghost perch.

I took my dinner inside
to eat before it got cold
and to give the bluejay
a chance to rouse if
it was only a stunning. 

It was not. 

Satiated,
I went to the shed,
got the shovel, then thought twice,
and got two shovels. 

With one flat at the bluejay's edge,
the other tipped him onto the metal --
I feel it was a him --
bluejays so often seem more 
they/them. 

I suppose I could have
thrown him in the woods. 
But I didn't.
I took him to the spot
where I dump yard trash --
not trash trash, yard trash --
sticks and weeds and the
dried husks of hanging
baskets I forgot to water. 

I dug a grave, a shallow grave,
no more than six inches.
I was tired, and my full belly
didn't care for so much activity.
But, still, I dug a grave. 

I put the body of the bluejay
in the hole and stood for a moment.
Should I say something?
I didn't know what.
I just looked at him,
saw him, stayed with him
in that moment. 

It took just two heaping
shovels of dirt to secure
him in his final rest,
and I thought,
I wonder if he knows that
every time I take yard trash
to this spot, I will
think of him.
He will be remembered.
HIs grave will be visited.
He will be mourned. 

I took my shovels back to the shed
and only then did I think of my father,
placed into a cremation oven
before I could see his face
one last time,
buried in a jar that sits 
on my stepmother's mantel,
I suppose,
or was he scattered
in the mountains?
No one ever told me. 

I have no grave to visit,
no headstone to decorate,
no symbolic point where
his memory lives on demand.

His voice fades a little every day.
His smell, I can almost . . . 
not quite.
His laugh, the music of his laugh,
dying away. 
And I don't know where to go
to bring any of it back
even for a moment. 

So,
       I named the bluejay 
                                            "David."


Do You Believe . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

 . . . in magic? I do.  

The earliest memory I have of magic is the way I felt at Grandma’s house at Christmas when I was a child — the tree, the presents, the family, and the midnight ham sandwiches because we all just wanted another excuse to be together, and it was Christmas, and the normal rules were suspended. It was a feeling not easily described with true emotional accuracy, and that’s either magic or poetry. 

My grandmother was the quintessential grandmother, the archetype of grandmothers.  She had a soft face and a perpetual smile. Her house felt safe, soft like her. She laughed readily and often. She loved with sincerity and gentleness. Grandma passed away in 1976, just a few months before my twelfth birthday. 

At some point in my early twenties, during a season of angst and despair, I stood out under a night sky, scanning the heavens until my eyes rested on the brightest star, what I once believed to be the North Star, but I now understand was probably Sirius.  Though I was at least a decade beyond my grandmother’s passing, she came strongly into mind as I stared at that star.  I decided the star was grandma, the one person who had always felt safe to me, the one person I believed I could have talked to about all my struggles, had she lived to see me through them.  And I poured my heart out to that star. 

This began a practice I have continued ever since. Problems spoken into a night sky transform into a magic that brings purpose to our challenges and healing to our wounds. They are met with answers, and if not answers, then a form of acceptance so deep and primal it feels like its own kind of answer.  And whether this magic comes from Grandma, or that star, or the simple act of breathing the air of the quiet darkness, it does indeed come. Sometimes profoundly, sometimes subtly, but it comes. 

This week is Halloween, Samhain in the Celtic tradition, followed by All Saints Day on November 1st for the Christian World and Dia de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead in Mexican culture. All of these observances, to varying extents, involve the interaction of the living with those who have already passed beyond the veil.  In fact, that veil between the incarnate and the spirit world is said to be at its thinnest on October 31st.  

On October 28 of 2013, eight years ago, my father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. He was an otherwise healthy 71-year-old man who had been hiking just that morning. He was lean and muscular, still cutting a dashing figure and able to scamper over the East Tennessee mountains like a billy goat.  He lived that way even on the last day of his life, and then he sat down in his easy chair and had a heart attack.  We held his memorial on October 31. Halloween. 

When my grandmother passed, I was a child. But I was a middle-aged adult when my father passed. The grief was full-grown. 

In many ways, I felt him around me more intimately than when he was alive. There were times I knew that I knew that I knew that he had paid me a visit or sent me a sign. And I could talk to him about things we wouldn’t have touched when he was alive, our differences far too profound on certain subjects.  But now I knew him as a father who loved me not through a veil of disappointments or expectations, but with unlimited compassion and understanding.  

He became the other inhabitant of the brightest star in the sky, and Grandma seemed happy to share. 

So, on Halloween, or the next full moon or new moon, or any night, really, when a problem is haunting you or a general unease is hovering about in your person, try stepping outside and talking to whomever you believe might live in the brightest star.  There’s plenty of room for them there, and they are happy to listen as long as you need.  

And through that conversation can come healing and release and understanding and peace. 

And I call that magic. 

Everything Happens for a Reason . . .

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment

. . . at least that’s what folks say.  But, is it true?  Like many matters of faith, and this is indeed a matter of faith, it’s impossible to prove. If you could prove it, then it wouldn’t be faith.  

Not being provable, however, does not negate the value of a belief. It’s impossible to prove, for example, that Jesus was an actual person who lived, you know, right around the same time someone was inventing the calendar.  There are some theologians who contend that Jesus or Yeshua or Joshua, as he might more accurately be called, was a creation of the early Gnostic Christians, a kind of avatar of perfection, a character specifically developed to be a model and a cornerstone for this new religious belief.  But even if they are right, even if Jesus was a fictional character and not a real person at all, that doesn’t necessarily devalue his role in shaping world thought. Provability is not always the standard by which we can measure value. 

So, what value is there in believing that everything happens for a reason, regardless of whether it’s true or not? 

We tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason because we’re trying to make sense out of things that make no sense.  Sometimes life is a mystery. Sometimes it’s even a tragedy. For people of faith — whether that’s a traditional faith running as a thread through a particular religious tradition or whether it’s a private tendency toward hope — it’s important and even vital for this existence to fit into some grand scheme. We want to see a design, at first invisible, become gradually clearer, like those magic eye pictures that look like nothing more than busy wallpaper until we shift our focus, look through the picture somehow, and then, as if it should have been obvious the entire time, an image pushes through the chaos and becomes clear.

Believing that everything happens for a reason can be the reason we even start the practice of looking for patterns in our lives.  And those patterns are there. Of that, I have no doubt. I’ve seen patterns play out in my own life, and sometimes patterns within patterns, the events of my life acting as so many interconnected cogs in a giant machine. 

Believing that everything happens for a reason can also comfort us when nothing else will.  When we can’t understand anything about a situation, resting in the faith of believing there is a rhyme and reason to it can bring a kind of peace. But, the comfort of “everything happens for a reason” is a personal comfort. It can be a reminder we use for ourselves that everything will turn out okay, but it doesn’t always land quite right when it comes from someone else. 

I overheard someone at a funeral a few years back as they grasped the hands of the newly widowed woman struggling to make it through the unimaginable.  They said, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” and you could almost hear the internal cringe of several of us standing nearby.  Here’s a small piece of advice; do with it what you will. In that situation, the situation where someone has experienced tremendous loss, say that you feel for them, say you’re praying for them, say you’re carrying them in your heart — say just about anything except everything happens for a reason.  Even if you believe it’s true. Even if you know THEY believe it’s true.  Just don’t say it.  Not then. Not ever. Keep it for yourself.  

Actually, I might suggest that when people are really hurting we should set our “spiritual-ness” down and just be with them.  The hurt they are feeling isn’t in their divine nature anyway; it’s in the very human, fragile person they are, and the hurt they are experiencing is real for that person.  Any spiritual attempt to explain it, suppress it, redirect it, or enlighten it is often, in reality, acting to negate it, belittle it, and self-righteously sweep real pain away as if it was insignificant dust on an otherwise shiny life. 

Sometimes people need comfort, true and gentle comfort, not an aphorism or a spiritual sound bite.  “Everything happens for a reason” may be true, but “I’m so sorry this happened to you” is far more comforting.  And human. And real. 

And if our heart is right when we say it, no one will need faith to believe it’s true.