Mourning with tears… and laughter

I may lose my readers over this one, but I am just going to spit it out and invite you to comment if you disagree.  We can disagree, can’t we?

I have attended two funerals this week and over the last two years I have done a lot of thinking about how I want to respond to the challenge that death brings to those left behind.  I know that I can't cry endlessly and continually relive these death experiences and call that living.

To be harshly realistic,  the death of a loved one is a commonplace event.  It happens every day in any number of ways to an endless variety of people.  Death does not seek us out uniquely; rather, death seeks us out universally.  No matter what PR firms may say in pharmaceutical ads, the human death rate is 100%. 

Whatever else the experience is, the loss of someone through death is  a call to live more fully and more boldly than we have ever lived before.   The experience essentially demands transformation.

Don’t get me wrong.   Death is sad and tragic and life-altering for those left behind.  We need to mourn.  But mourning is best described, I think, as the work it takes to build a new life.  Some of that work is tears.  Some of that work – a good deal of it, in fact – is laughter.

Upon Return

“I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death”

Edna St. Vincent Milay

I am back from Paris, and I will share a bit about that soon, but I returned to two deaths and I need to explore those experiences first.

Frances’s uncle died while I was on the plane home from France.  John’s death, at 55, has been anticipated for at least a year and the fact that he never actually died made it seem like he would live forever.  Less than a month ago he was on an Alaskan cruise with his wife.  10 days ago he took his son fishing. 

Every death envelops me in Molly’s death, and her death taught me that the only way to mourn is to live.  John died in California and it was not even a question that Frances and I would be part of the gathering: his life was remembered by a large family telling stories, hanging out in the pool, eating plenty of Mexican food and drinking plenty of wine.  Even as we mourned John, we instinctively celebrated life – his and our own. 

An hour after our return from California, there was a knock on the door that a neighbor had just died at home. 11 PM.  Dark.  She had been recently diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and I don’t think death took her by surprise.  It was a small and intimate gathering around Cathy’s body as her husband prayed for her and waited for the funeral home to come.  Someone put a flower in Cathy’s hand.  Her husband lit a candle.

I suppose God was in the room with us.  Cathy was not.  She was still warm, but gone and not lingering.  Naked but for a towel over her body. Peaceful but not sleeping.  Dead.

I tend to experience death as spiritual transition; Cathy taught me that before it can be a spiritual reality, death is a physical experience.  But that physical experience is relatively short: the body was removed; the pictures came out; the stories were told.  Life was, and continues to be, celebrated.

So my entire being is full of death and its challenge to live boldly and with passion.   Since death will ultimately take us all, there is not much point in giving it more than its brief moment of physical victory.  I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death.

Blue Herons, Rainbows and Flowers

I sense Molly's presence. 

It's not a constant thing, or a hallucination.   It is not audible or visual.  But in the blue heron that played along the river as Frances and I took a walk yesterday, in the rainbow that appeared over the harbor in Ireland when I went back for the first time without Molly, in the plant that blooms in her favorite color on her birthday - but had never bloomed before her death - I sense Molly's presence.

Some would say that sensing Molly around me is trick I am playing on myself so that I don't have to admit that she is "gone."  They are free to  their opinion.   I choose to believe that regardless of if we live or die we remain connected to each other and that our relationships endure.

To me, she lives on.  Actively. 

Skipping Church

I am not going to church today.

I have, for the most part, been faithful lately.  

But this morning, the prospect of laundry and homework is more compelling than a religious service.  And there are recipes I want to try, some TV shows to catch up on, and for sure I could use some exercise.  I am claiming the three and half church hours for myself.

Why does this feel so naughty?  Though I was raised with the concept, my experience of the sacred has never included a Discliplinarian God with Calendar in Lap and Pen in Hand keeping track of weekly church attendance.  

One result of Molly's death is that I have claimed that part of me that longs for God.  And I have come to understand, in ways that I may never have grasped before, that our lives exist within a single, unextinguishable force. 

Church, for me, is gathering with others to honor, explore and commit to our eternal connections one to another.    Church is not replaced by sitting at home thinking good and affirming thoughts; the gathering itself makes the entire point.

But today, I am in my ratty blue jeans at my computer.  My existence, with all others,  within an eternal entity, is central to who I am.   Still,  my life as a temporal individual also needs some tending to and, for me,  there is nothing naughty in that.  

Intuition

I am learning that one of the tools for living a full life is honoring intuition.

This week in the eastern United States has been one snowstorm after another, which is just fine with me. I am fit enough to shovel; I am not losing income; I have the great privilege of being able to settle in to a pace set by the uncontrollable forces of nature. I LOVE giving in to it. Snow days are a gift.

Whie enjoying the gift, I am not blind to the fact that snow days completely disrupt schedules and that - literally overnight - shovelling emerges as a survival skill, second only, perhaps, to maintaing fire.

Shovelling out cars in a townhouse community is a family event of sorts. Folks boldly tackle the seemingly insurmountable piles of white, exchanging stories of epic snows from years gone by as the piles of snow are re-arranged in a manner that makes movement possible. Shoveling torques your body in unfamilar ways, and somehow that generally feels good - especially because it has the beneift of providing a discrete vantage point from which to watch neighborhood kids playing in their own snow memories.

Maybe somebody makes hot chocolate. The work gets done. Neighbors lend a helping hand.

It is the helping hand thing that can be a bit problematic. Will my neighbor be insulted if I shovel their sidewalk? Will the woman three doors down be appreicative if I dig her car out, or will she be watching from her window, terrified that I might chip her car's finish? What if I do chip the damn finish?

Should I use salt on someone else's sidewalk? What about their pets? What about the enviornmental considerations of salt? I will use salt on my sidewalk but I don't want that on anyone else's conscience. What about the teens who are out and about trying to make a buck? Shouldn't they have a shot at some business?

Forget it. I will do my own shovelling and retreat to my warm home. I have plenty to do.

And yet. Yesterday. My neighbor - a nice guy with a bum hip - was out shovelling his car alone at dusk. Something told me - JUST TOLD ME - to go out and help him. As I walked out with my shovel, he welcomed my help and thanked me for coming. And then he took a deep breath, and with heistation, said that he'd been meaning to tell me something. His wife has been ill. Very ill. It has been a sercet they have held to themselves for months, but can no longer shoulder on their own.

AH HA. The sky opened. My intuition to help my neighbor wasn't really about the snow. Or the shovelling. In retrospect, it was about being attentive to the needs of someone else before I even knew what the needs were.

I get a kick out of being caught up in those moments. For me, it is in the times when our intuition won't let us go, and we take a risk of interaction, that eternity breaks into our life and we get a glimpse of our eternal connections both to each other - and to something else that far exceeds are ability to grasp.

Good reminders.

Merry Christmas

The Sunday before Christmas, and I feel settled in all of it. The tree is lit, the wine is poured. Let the Christmas tunes play at the grocery store, in the elevator, and in the television commercials. Bring it on.

Today, my partner and I lived out the messiness of Christmas. She spent the day with friends watching the Eagles play what I guess was an amazing football game while I went to the cathedral for the day. Her day was a heavily secular celebration, mine an overtly religious obsevance.

Christmas has always been both secular and religious. In defining Christmas, the early Christian church "adopted" the already robust secular solistice celebration as a religious holiday. The party definitely came before the theology.

The secular holiday today celebrates family traditions, treasured recipes, the discipline of giving and the wonder of mystery. All wonderful things to celebrate in and of themselves. Add a bit of wine and too many sweets, some candles, and some songs about Rudolph and Santa Claus and you've got the stuff of memory. God is present. Watching a great football game with dear friends is clearly at home in the secular holiday tradition.

The overtly religious tradition celebrates God's movement in our lives. If Christmas means anything at all to me, it means that God is present in the totality of human life. And I do want to celebrate that presence - with song, and with poetry and with the vigor of thousands of years of tradition. God is present in the mourning; God is there in the gathering; God lives in the celebration. Amen.

There are many roads. God is there among the friends on the couch watching football. God is in the manger. God lives and dwells among us.

Friends, Pain and Sabbath

After a weekend with friends - all of whom are facing a crisis of one sort or another - it felt good to experience Sabbath.

On Friday and Saturday we powered up the crock pot, pulled out the flannel sheets for the guest beds, poured some wine and some Chai Tea and settled in for a long fall weekend. And it was wonderful, except that within that LL Bean picture, our friends were crying - or taking up smoking again - or screaming at our walls becuase there was no one else to scream at.

Almost immediately after Molly's death, I sensed myself becoming increasingly open to the pain of others. Part of this had to do with the ever-so-public nature of teenage suicide. There was no way to avoid people - and I didn't really want to. So there I was, in the darkest days of my life, in a confusion of shock and sleeping pills, with a spotlight of sorts focused right on my heart. And having seen my heart, I sensed folks wanting to share their hearts with me.

Molly's death also humbled me in a way that has made me more available to others. I am really proud of Molly. She is amazing. And I thoroughly enjoyed her successes in horseback riding and acting and music and school and just about anything that she tried. She lived surrounded by love and she never questioned that love. And yet she died by suicide. The humility involved in living her death has given me a new compassion for the pain of others. My friendships have definitely deepened over the last year and a half.

So to get back to this weekend... friends are over... and they are all hurting... and then they leave. Sunday. I had to do two things. First - spend some time at the cathedral; and second - get on the treadmill. The cathedral is the place that - at least for now - calms my soul. The treadmill strengthens my body to hold the pain of others, to prepare for the discipline of listening, and to fight the uncertainties of middle age!

I am also working on my art homework, which is due tomorrow and is very hard and while I like it very much, drawing is one of the hardest classes I have ever taken.

I will keep you posted.

Sabbath

I am intrigued with the idea of sabbath. When I was a kid, I think my dad went through a "sabbath" period, but the concept got so caught in contradiction that it just didn't last long.

Can you watch football on the sabbath? That seems restful. Until you think about all of the people that are working - including the players - to make watching football possible. And when my dad went along with the football he wanted to watch on the sabbath, but not the shopping that I wanted to do on Sunday, it was pretty easy to point out the gaps in his reasoning. Without a set of guidelines or a sense of what the sabbath is meant to be, the whole concept sort of gets lost in a wishy washy film of nothingness.

I recall Bible stories about what work can be done on the sabbath. This is not a new question. But for me, it is a personal question. And suprisingly, I am having a hard time answering it.

The only formal religious services that regualarly reach and inspire me are about an hour drive from my home. And sometimes, sabbath for me is making the drive and immersing myself in the formal worship. Two hours of drive time costs me some eco points, but I always come home with a sense of purpose and connection.

BUT WHAT ELSE IS SABBATH? Maybe for me, it is baking bread. Or reading a book. Or taking a walk with a friend. Or avoiding news. Or catching up with a friend over the phone. Or exercising. Maybe anything that grounds me in a sense of the sacred and a connection to others is sabbath.

What is sabbath to you?

Some Light

Right now they are saying my dad has Viral Meningitis and will fully recover. I was afraid he had samonella or e-coli because I gave him brownies for his birthday last week and they were just a bit gooey - undercooked even. The hypochondriac in me, a quality I picked up from Dad, was sure the brownies caused all of this when I heard that he was ill. So the news from the hospital is improving.

I went to the cathedral this morning - Dad would have wanted me to. And to be honest, I enjoy spending time there. Just arriving at the cathedral brings me a sense of calm; the grounds are a natural expression of God's boundless creativity, and the building itself seems to echo with the whispered prayers of generations . The sermons are spiritually challenging, the music creates a sense of infinity, and the rituals are performed with care. God is present.

Part of this next chapter of my life has to do with God. I am leaving my job because I was wasting so much time; I was more politician than servant; I was caught up in pettiness and image making that left me cold at the end of the day.

Whatever else I believe, I believe that how we use our time matters. In fact, it may be the only thing that matters. And I can simply no longer sit in a cubicle surfing the internet all day. So, I am practicing new ways to live my life. Ideas, anyone?