Grief like Fear

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”.   CS Lewis

     I sit in my overstuffed chair bundled up with my dog, steaming coffee in my mug, old blanket from my mom wrapped tightly around me.  I started using half n half several years ago because coffee felt more like a treat with it… a small thing to round off sharp edges that poke and tear at me as I walk through this life.   I am grieving in this season losses that have and have not yet happened.  It seems the deep ones that have stolen something from my life edge in to the now to steal things I still have.  To add to my sorrow, my naivete has slipped from me and I realize with a deep understanding that at any moment what I hold dear can be swept away. 

     This realization can make me cynical, valuing everything a little less in order to dilute the intensity of my feelings and hopefully alleviate future pain.  Or on the contrary, I become inclined to cling to how precious these moments are, to not miss the minutia that makes up life.  This is the path I am I walking today.  My oldest and dearest friend is in the hospital with her baby who is battling for his life against a sudden and horrible disease.  I am helpless, it seems, to do anything to help her.  I sit by the phone waiting for updates, send out countless e-mails to ask people to pray, and have nearly worn a figure eight in my kitchen floor from pacing.  I made oatmeal for my kids today and sent them off on the bus to picture day at school, with their shirts freshly pressed and hair combed more nicely than usual.  After they left, I wondered, did I kiss them each good-bye? Did I cherish this moment?  What if something would happen and I wouldn’t have that chance again to tell them how proud I am of them or how much I love them?

     It occurs to me that in deep suffering, I am able to love with a place in my heart that is not activated during the day to day practice of living.  When I am brought to this threshold of grief, I am moving in a capacity unlike any other experience.  I am freer to love wholly.  This concept was punctuated for me when I sat with one of my clients this week.  Her husband is coming home next week after being deployed for a year in Iraq.  She said, “In one moment I am praying so hard that he would get home safely and in the next moment I am hoping he isn’t going to leave his underwear on the floor when he does get home”.   We do not stay in the tender places too long.  They are reserved for those sacred times where we are more aware of the thin veneer between this world and the next .

     Since I sat down to write the sun has peaked through the clouds, my dog has jumped off the couch, and my blanket has become too warm.  I will get up and move, aware of the space in my heart that carries my losses, holding the young soldiers who are flying home on a plane next week, carrying my friend whose world is suspended in a hospital hundreds of miles away and saying prayers for my kids on picture day at school.  Thankful for the minutia.  Thankful for the gift of today.

Petal Dust

We seem to swirl around each other in a furious dance of busyness. Time is a precious commodity of which none of us seem to have enough.  Every moment filled with thoughts, plans, and productivity.  Many mornings I awake with a “to do” list scrolling through my mind and continue at a steady pace of it until it is time for bed.  There are often days I look back on when I realize I have simply responded to all of the demands that were thrown at me, not actually being purposeful to choose how I wanted to live in that given day.  This harried way of existence not only seems to suck the Life out of life, it fails to make room for others. 

I often walk my dog on a path near my office. Many others walk this same little strip as it is near the new hospital, the new light rail and a few shops and restaurants.  It strikes me that I am often quite content to move past another without looking into their eyes or even offering a greeting. Yet, when a rare moment is taken to acknowledge the other, the stranger who is passing by, some small pleasantry, an exchange that says, “I see you”, something shifts internally for me.  Something changes.  It’s as if I have been let into the experience of another, a small interruption in their day. And that other person has been let into my day in some way. 

My husband has a favorite story that he likes to tell.   When he was attending CU Boulder as a college student he would often ride his bike to and from campus.  One day he happened to ride up behind this burly black man who was‘clipping right along’ on the bike path that runs throughout the Boulder landscape.  Something in Aaron's natural competitive spirit took hold and he decided he was going to pass this guy and beat him to the non-existent finish line.  So as he was pulling around him, out of the corner of his eye, the guy looked over with a friendly but fierce gleam in his eye and said, “Oh, no you don’t!” And thus began the sprint.  And so for the next however far, the two of them pushed their bikes and their bodies to the limit, all the while, catching glances of amusement and unspoken comradry with the other, until they both lost their breath in peals of laughter and the stranger on the bike turned off onto what Aaron supposed was his own street.  As my husband often shares the story, I have a touch of nostalgia for this man I have never met, wondering if he tells this same story to his wife and kids around the dinner table.  Secretly I even hope that someday we will all share a meal and a laugh telling of the day of the "great race".

It compels me to wonder what would happen if I could stop the running list of “to dos” for a moment and notice the life that is in front of me.  Maybe it my child who needs a little attention.  Maybe it is a homeless man panhandling for some spare change. Perhaps it is a business executive who looks important and busy. Maybe it is the one staring back at me in the mirror who says,  “ I need to be seen. Not what I can do for you or how I check off the list of what it means to matter in this life.  I need to be seen. All the cracks, breaks, and messes that I seem to make.”  I wonder what I am missing in the eyes, the handshake, the laugh of another when I fail to look, to see, to notice or touch.  Because of those five spontaneous minutes over twenty years ago, the guy on the bike and my husband's stories have somehow become linked, rubbed off on each other in some way.  Like when you bump into the petal of a lily and the powdery stuff gets knocked off leaving an orange dust on whatever it touches. Is it annoying and now I must rinse it off...or is it beauty...rubbed off onto me?

The Perpetrators

The perpetrators were apprehended and after quite an ordeal, finally secured into my back seat. I had been careful of their heads, like I had seen on Cops, to not ram them into the door as I strapped them in.  Now barreling down the road, I could see the two of them in my rear view mirror, downcast stares, the acknowledgment that they were busted. The swirl of red and blue lights lit up the contours of their soiled faces as I drove them to the drop spot.  Guilt has an odd presence. It seems to seep from pores and stream from exhaled breath.  The heaviness of it can engulf you and threaten to extinguish any light it touches.  This guilt was no different and as I felt it’s cold familiar strangling sensation, one of the guilty spoke breaking the silence.

 “Mommy? Can we unbuckle yet?  I dropped my ambulance on the floor!” It was my four year old who spoke first, the seven year old didn’t dare. He was quicker to grasp when I had had enough and that nothing good could come from any further interaction with Mom at this point.  And before I could open my mouth to answer, the four year old had wriggled out of his car seat to fetch his plastic ambulance.  These toys usually come from the grandparents or other well-meaning relatives who haven’t had kids in their backseats for at least a couple of decades.  Who don’t remember that a constant clattering of noise and flashing lights could, one day, in fact, be the catalyst that finally pushes a mother over the brink she has been teetering on into full-fledged insanity.  The ambulance’s lights were still on, the siren had a minor tone to it as the batteries were wearing out. As I turned around to shut the toy off, my older son and I briefly made eye contact.  I could discern his thoughts as if they were actually written across his face; “Just get me to the front of the carpool lane so I can get out of this car”. 

Just then, as if on cue, the door opened and the teachers scooped the children out of the backseat with a gracious smile that relayed they had had a wonderful child-free weekend of adult activity and mornings to sleep in and were thereby energized and delighted to care for my little beasts for the next 6 and a half hours. I gratefully smiled at this strange breed of human who seemed to actually enjoy the constant swirl of chaos that accompanies caring for little children. The door shut and I drove off into my freedom, briefly glancing back to see their gigantic backpacks walking up the sidewalk.  One purple, one gray. The only other body parts to be seen behind the enormous school bags were four, little legs popping out beneath, and two uncombed heads bobbing up and down, as if the backpacks, themselves had sprouted little appendages. I made a mental note to myself: when kids start riding school bus next year, get appropriate sized school bags.

Driving away, I now have the space in my mind to replay the insanity that had transpired over the first three waking hours of my Monday morning.  It had begun the moment before my eyes pried themselves open.  It was a knocking at my bedroom door by my four year-old. We’ll call him Lucifer for the purposes of this article.  Little Luci was distraught because he couldn’t seem to find a silver mixing bowl which had accompanied his kitchen set we had donated to charity over a year ago. Apparently, he desperately needed this very bowl for his Zhu Zhu pet to use as a swimming pool, this very instant, at 6:30 am. The facts: Said bowl was last spotted in the hot tub a week ago and Lucifer had been outside on the patio for the last 20 minutes working the childproof clips to open the hot tub death trap and perform the rescue of the bowl. The rescue operation had failed and now he was making it very clear that this bowl fiasco was now my problem.

This information came to me in streams of broken 4 year old commands, demands and complaints, while I was beginning the first signs of the awakening process.  I pulled the blanket up around my head and listened as the volume outside increased. The intensity of the bowl situation at my bedroom door was only to be usurped by his older brother’s louder knocks and poundings to gleefully announce that he had finally decided that he wants to have an “Extreme Challenge” birthday party in 5 and a half months when his birthday will finally arrive!  Scuffling, punches and wrestling ensued because of seven year old’s infringement on door space and general lack of concern that Momo the Zhu Zhu pet won’t have a morning swim today.  At this point, some may be wondering why the children are still outside the bedroom door…I sleep with it locked. Wouldn’t you?

My husband was nowhere in sight, probably downstairs hiding in the office.  (They can’t ask you for things if they can’t find you.) Who could blame him? As I tried to formulate a thought that would hopefully transpire into a word, above named son became irate that I was “id-knowing him” (Just sound it out phonetically…ignoring him for those less familiar with the 4 year old speech) So the pitch and tone of his whining began to rise to high f note, I think.  I only remember that this could be an F note on the musical scale as I have distinct memories of the lady at church every Christmas Eve shooting for this exact note at the end of Oh Holy Night. Afterward, my sister would comment, “She almost hit that F note this year!”

But the children are gone now, in a happy place with blocks and easels, paints and markers, kind faces and gentle reminders to use “indoor voices”.  They are truly in a better place now. Someone else is meeting their needs and caring for their little minds.  So I will drink coffee and clean up the breakfast mess.  I will fold laundry and catch up on e-mails. My heart rate has slowed, brain patterns will soon return to normal, my own thoughts can re-enter, not crowded out by irrational demands like, “Mommy, can you make it Easter today please?”  By lunchtime I will most likely change their names back to the originals and yes, by 3:00 maybe even be excited to see their little smiling faces when I pick them up at school.  But for now, I will cherish the mind space that has been freed up to put toward other things like write about, talk about and think about them!