Tag: grief

Boxes

A couple of weeks ago I was sorting through one of the many boxes from our basement shelves. The object is to sort and discard what is no longer usable or needed so that we can live a bit lighter. Some of our boxes (blush!) have not been opened since we moved to Memphis, hurriedly packing in less than a month. That was 2005, almost 15 years ago.

Sorting through these things was my intention as soon as I retired. Life happened, though, and I am beginning that project now.

As I opened this first box, loose photos and a few written bits met my gaze. As I sat that afternoon and the next, I entered a mostly forgotten time in my life when I was a young, newly minted PhD and mother of a pre-teen. We (my husband, daughter, and me) lived in a house we were gutting and rebuilding for open space living. Pictures showed a progression from bare bricks and studs that we lived with for a time, then wallboard and spackling, naked windows morphing into curtained beauties, a kitchen that was not functional for cooking for 9 months (amazing what you can do with a microwave and the bathroom sink . . . ). I remembered the endless time line of renovations done almost entirely by my husband while he was employed fulltime.

Pictures emerged from the box of our daughter in middle school — awkward but sweet — and cards for Mothers Days and tales of summer camp (“Hi, Mom and Dad, I fell out of the top bunk last night. We’re going swimming today! I really like my friend, Ginny . . . “).

I had forgotten the lushness of my gardens there so long ago. Roses and irises and zinnia’s and many others. Our magnolia trees whose blooms so lush and pink we could see from our bed in the spring. Family events, familiar places, people who surrounded us with warmth and friendship.

So many memories . . . and emotions. I loved that time of my life. It was a golden time — at least in my memory. It is easy to forget the teen and mom struggles, the work conflicts, lack of sleep when working full time and trying to complete a PhD program. Nonetheless, looking at these images of time past I got weepy and for that week, I felt on the edge of tears — grieving the loss of that younger me and wishing I could re-live that time and perhaps live it differently with some different choices.

I sound like Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It is one of my favorite pieces of literature and very wasted on eighth graders who can have little lived experience of the preciousness of life. At least I didn’t appreciate it when it was assigned in middle school. But having read and reread it many times since — such precious wisdom it offers.

“Does anyone ever appreciate life while they live it?”

I am grateful that I saved those photos and that I opened that box to let so many memories tumble out. Today I will start the next box, not knowing what it will offer, yet willing — eager — to let the memories come — even if there are tears that are also there.

In Grief — You Are Not Lost

Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.

 –David Wagoner . Collected Poems 1956-1976

A friend of ours died last week of FTD . . . Fronto Temporal Dementia. FTD is an awful disease that steals yourself – who you are, your personality, your values — and leaves you with your memories fairly intact (unlike Alzheimer’s dementia).  It was awful to watch him lose himself as the disease took hold.  Scary,  heartbreaking, unreal . . . almost like he was possessed by some spirit that took over his body.  His wife and son and daughter-in-law cared for him at home, eventually having to install locks on the refrigerator and cabinets to prevent him from ravenously eating everything — literally.  He wandered and they had to follow him or distract him every moment.  This man who had been a well known photographer and collector became unable to hold his camera still and uninterested in his art.  He was unaware of others’ feelings and uncensored in what hurtful things he said to his wife and son.  

Hospice came and helped with his care a couple of times during the week, and offered one week of respite care so his wife could leave his side and try to escape for a brief time the nightmare that was closing in.

After 10+ years the nightmare ended with our friend’s death.  But for his wife, it continues.  She lost her husband long before he died.  She felt her grief had already overtopped any measure and that after he died there would be relief.  Instead, waves of grief accosted her relentlessly.

When she called me panicked at the myriad of feelings she was experiencing, I was able to reassure her that she was not going crazy.   I, too, had grieved the death of a spouse and knew the terror of uncontrollable and unwelcome feelings that come after the death of a loved one. . .sadness, emptiness, anger, confusion, restlessness, inability to concentrate.  All of them normal, and all of them horribly uncomfortable.  And all of them making the griever question one’s sanity and whether there is enough strength and energy to withstand the waves of feelings.

What surprised me as her friend was not the intensity of her feelings, but my realization that I knew at a gut level that this was not the ending of her ordeal but the beginning.  She would be in for a difficult and painful ride that no one could take away. 

Grief takes us and wrings all the energy and hope out of us, leaving painful empty spaces that we can only fill over time.  Over time, the aches of those empty places fill with new friendships, experiences, goals, hopes that soothe and nurture our emerging self.  And we reclaim and integrate into ourselves “old” parts of ourselves that fit whom we have become.  It is not a painless process but a kind of re-birth/resurrection that comes of the grief process.  

It helps to understand grief as a dual process oscillating between a painful letting go of what was and a dawning of new identity and energy.  It is not something we can “manage” except by allowing the waves of letting go roll over us (knowing they will not last forever) and enjoying the moments of energy and joy (knowing they will come more frequently and eventually become a new normal).

Blessings on all who are in grief this day.  Although a part of you has died — yet a part of you is being reborn.  I promise you.

 

Grief

Grief

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness. . . Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow.    (Fr. Joe Mahoney)

Grief is one of the loneliest experiences one can have in our “I can handle this — I’m OK”, death-defying American culture.   Many of us run from the grief of a friend and even pretend that we haven’t noticed their pain. We try to distance from the grieving by making sense of it with one of many inanities: “She’s better off now and isn’t in pain”, or “Don’t cry.  He’s in heaven with God,” or “Your little girl is a flower in God’s garden now.”  Our corporate culture gives us 3 days of bereavement leave and assumes we should be all over our grief after that. 

Not at all!   Grief opens a trap door into deep darkness where we search desperately for the path that will return us to the life we knew — but we cannot find it.  And indeed there is no path back to the life we once knew.  That life is gone forever because of our loss.  We want our dinner table to have the same faces around it — but someone is missing.  We want our self-confidence back after the loss of a job, and yet when we bump into a former co-worker at the grocery store, we turn down another aisle hoping that she hasn’t seen us.  We feel an urgency to make a friend more comfortable by reassuring him that we are just fine even though our sad eyes betray the lie.

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness.

Yes, I need someone who can allow my tears to flow.  I need someone who doesn’t feel the tug to cheer me up.  I need someone who can just hold me safely and firmly in a hug that lasts long enough for me to relax into it and trust the closeness.

I need someone who has faced the darkness of loss in their own life, who knows the pain is deep and real, and yet who knows — at a cellular level — that however long the darkness of grief lasts for me or for anyone, healing will follow, and I will laugh again.  It is only someone who has felt the numbness and darkness of loss suck them  into the dark, bottomless pit. . . one who has waited, longed to find, yearned for the path that travels toward light again . . . only that one can truly bear witness with their presence alongside another’s grief that joy will come with the morning (Psalm 30:5).

. . .Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow.

The path toward the light and toward life again is not backward toward restoring what was.  The path toward the light is a path toward a life that is different in some way.  Grief changes us.   Loss (whatever has been lost) has taken something from us.  Over time as healing comes, we can learn something about our resilience, creativity, faith, hope, love.  Love will connect us forever with what we have lost., if we wish that.  Memories will remain.  But we will need to move forward with our lives, looking for a way to use the lessons of loss and survival in ways that may help others.  We can create meaningful action from the hard won struggle that heals.

I pray that when we heal from our own losses, we may become persons who, having heard the thunder and seen the lightning, still watch for the rainbows.  May we be the ones who can be present in another’s darkness without fear, knowing the sunrise is just over the horizon.

Jane

 

 

 

 

Airplane — 38 years ago

I just read a post on my Facebook stream that Airplane (the movie) was released 38 years ago.  What memories that brought back.  Bittersweet and yet not sad.

Thirty-eight years ago, my then husband Ken Williams and I had fled to the shore to spend a long weekend in Ocean City at a borrowed house belonging to friends who wanted to offer us a bit of comfort after a huge shock.  I had sat in a doctor’s office with Ken just 3 days before and heard what no one wants or expects to hear . . . a diagnosis of late stage cancer.  It was called non-Hodgkins lymphoma — a cancer that these days is serious but considered more of a chronic condition than a terminal one.  But in those days, there were far fewer effective treatments and the doc struggled to tell us that Ken might have 3 months to live and would need to begin treatment in the hospital immediately.

We bargained with the doc (and, I suppose, with fate) and asked for one week of reprieve.  We had been married just over one year, and were trying to get pregnant, but treatment (if Ken survived) would make him infertile.  The doc said one week would not make a difference, but  to be sure it wasn’t longer.

So, we ended up in Ocean City.  Our time together was not only to try (futilely, it turned out) to get pregnant, but also to savor our last few days together before entering the world of chemo, radiation, and hospitals.  It was time tinged with knowledge of what we were facing, but holding each other, not letting go of each other’s hands as we walked, trying to hide tears from each other — all this was important and, in a sense, offering whatever balm was possible at such times.

So the second night we were at Ocean City we walked the boardwalk, one of Ken’s favorite things.  We passed the lone theater which was advertising Airplane.  It had been overcast all day — that grey sky dark with ominous heavy curtains of clouds just waiting to drop their payload of rain.  As we passed the marquee, the sky opened and rain fell with ferocity.   We stood under the marquee, then I suggested maybe seeing this movie — I had not seen ads for it and had no idea what it was.  I just wanted a distraction.

What a wonderful serendipitous opportunity it was.  We sat in the theater, almost the only patrons, and laughted until tears came.  These were not the tears of sadness, though, but of unbridled laughter.  For 90 minutes, our fears and grief were lightened and less present as we watched the screen.

At the end of 5 days, we returned to our home in Mt. Pocono and Ken entered St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem — a 50 minute ride from home and the closest cancer treatment center at the time.  But our time in Ocean City was marked by that movie — we found we could laugh and find joy even in the midst of tragedy and threat.  That experience has never been forgotten.  Thirty-eight years ago today . . . like it was yesterday.

Jane+