Because of your sweet momma, I found myself in a nail salon, in west Texas, feet in a pedicure basin, tearing up at a scene from Family Feud in the middle of a Thursday.
It was sunny, and yet bleak outside. One of those days the sunshine feels both welcome and intrusive.
Like the world doesn’t know the sorrow that it holds and is stubbornly intent upon being hopeful when it should resign to its own sadness.
While my feet soak and soften, before old polish is scraped off and shiny new polish bedecks the toenails on my increasingly wrinkled feet, I watch a family hold onto one another and jump up and down in celebration. They’ve just won $20,000.
And this makes me cry.
I’m not crying because I like gameshow television. Or getting pedicures. Or because I’m really all that happy for them, honestly.
I’m crying because I thought of the day when we go Home. Really home. Forever home.
What a celebration, a real, true cause for celebration that will be.
I cried because I was in west Texas to celebrate your momma’s life. To celebrate her freedom.
Freedom from an earthbound body that was ready for a better resting place.
Because when she took off her shoes to dance at your wedding, we knew it wasn’t because of the shoes. She looked lovely and coiffed and like the Texas belle she must have always been, yet the layers underneath seeped through in flashes and we could tell she was putting on a brave, beautiful face. You slow danced, and she held onto you because she needed to, and her splintered vertebrae was sending piercing pain through her spine. Your looks said it all. The love, the pain, the sadness, the closeness.
Your brother sent out updates and I knew it was bad.
When chemo treatment regimens are changed, adjusted, tweaked because the desired response isn’t happening.
When organs get blocked and stents are placed.
When abdominal fluid, ascites, being drained is measured in liters instead of milliliters.
When bed alarms are introduced for the patient’s own safety.
When “comfort care” is brought into the picture.
When comfort care involves opioid drips and intensive home health care.
When you get the text message that you need to come home.
When we’re all waiting, and the waiting is painful, and the suffering is immense, and the passing on from all of this feels like a relief.
Except the relief, we know that it is mixed. It isn’t relief by itself at all. It’s mixed, swirling, with myriad passing, sometimes stabbing, sometimes almost tangible emotions. Sadness, numbness, anger, brief flashes of gratitude, inexpressible loss.
I’m here because I know what today means; I know what today feels like. And I know that I will likely remember today better than you will. You’re functioning. You’re hosting. You’re pulling on one pant leg and then the other. Your brother is joking about how his suit doesn’t fit the way it used to, when it was purchased for a happier occasion. Because any occasion would be happier than this one.
And all these people are here to support you, but it feels like they need something from you. And they need to be fed. And everyone is offering words, but words feel empty. And as well as the pastor encapsulated your momma in stories and scriptures, none of them truly encapsulate what she was to YOU. None of them ever could.
And I’m sorry for all of these things that you’re feeling. And that right now, maybe you feel guilty that you don’t feel at all. Because you simply aren’t able to yet.
There just aren’t adequate words for times like this.
And yet here I am, offering some of mine.
I told Ian, and I would tell anyone, “If you told me you couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a parent, I would tell you, ‘You’re right, you can’t imagine. Because I couldn’t have imagined until it was my reality.’” I’m sure you feel the same if you’ve lost a child, a sibling, a spouse, a grandparent closer than a mother, a cousin closer than a brother.
And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
The days your spirit is so overwhelmed that productivity seems a cruel invitation to what feels meaningless.
The nights your spirit is too weary to sleep, your dreams oppressive, and your limbs too heavy to move.
Those blindsiding evenings when even a favorite film, a strongest drink -only illuminate the flat feeling in your soul, the dull ache in your intestines.
The weeks getting out of bed seems a fruitless effort, and to what avail?
The months when to your own self you feel “other” and estranged.
The season where words of encouragement feel insulting, admonishments feel shallow, and to all others you feel misunderstood.
I grieve with you the days you will be blindsided by a random billboard that reminds you of your mom.
When you stand in line to get take-out and are struck to realize you know exactly what she would have ordered.
When you realize you have saved the last voicemails from her on your phone, can’t afford to lose them, because there will be no more sounds of her voice in your ear.
When all the little things that frustrated you about her become things you cherish about her-because they were uniquely part and parcel of her and her alone.
When you find something that smells like her in an old forgotten pile of clothes and the smell is so real, you’ll be astonished how cruel a dirty t-shirt can be.
When you uncover letters you’ve sent, texts you’ve exchanged, memories you didn’t know you harbored in bright, blinding flashes that stop you in your tracks without warning-corneas burning, mind spinning, balance maddeningly thrown off.
Because it isn’t the waves you know to brace yourself against that knock you down and drag you out.
It is death by pricks that should feel tiny that are felt more as invisible stabs to an unseeing world. And in gasping at the shock of pain, you look around and find the rest of the rushing world unscathed. And this makes you angry. This is unfair. How can the rest of the world go on as though nothing had happened, when everything has changed? When all is upended and out of order and imperfect and just -wrong. It just isn’t right. And God wasn’t right to take her, or him, or them. At least to your truest of thoughts and feelings and truncated, shocked emotions-it isn’t right or justifiable or fair or good, at all. A good God doesn’t allow these things. Does He?
And your mind reels and guffaws and loops through these emotions over and over again.
Maybe, like me, you’ll realize you don’t trust a lot of things. Chief among them God. Also friends-who don’t understand. Co-workers, who express undiscerning condolences. Church members, who send way too many fattening casseroles and sympathy cards that feel pathetic to a soul whose pathos is worn dry. And the few safe people who actually get it—they know they can’t fix it.
It is their silent strength that will uphold you. Like a salt-water-warped post on a pier, they are a ballast, a leaning post, but it still hurts to hold on. The waves still crash. They come with force of indeterminate, alternating strength, and it seems you can’t track the moon to understand the tide.
Hold on. Don’t let go.
You’re Gonna Be Ok- Brian & Jenn Johnson
(I would sing it to you, but Jenn Johnson does so much more beautifully and powerfully)
I know it’s all you’ve got to just be strong
And it’s a fight just to keep it together
I know you think that you are too far gone
But hope is never lost
Hope is never lost
Hold on, don’t let go
Hold on, don’t let go
Just take one step closer
Put one foot in front of the other
You’ll get through this
Just follow the light in the darkness
You’re gonna be ok
I know your heart is heavy from those nights
But just remember that you are a fighter
You never know just what tomorrow holds
And you’re stronger than you know
You’re stronger than you know
I know. I know you’re stronger than you feel. Stronger than you think you are.
I know that some days, the sunshine is blinding. The nighttime is deafening. That talk is empty. That all seems noise.
You need a Samwise Gamgee. (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers)
Someone who, when you are at the end of your rope, you can admit to, “I can’t do this, Sam.”
Who will respond,
(watch first, it’s better in video)
Sam’s Speech- LOTR: The Two Towers
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding onto something.
“What are we holding onto, Sam?”
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
You’ll need a Sam, a person who is your ballast, to agree with you that it’s all wrong. That this isn’t the way it was meant to be. To remind you that the stories you loved as a child were the ones where the heroes had lots of chances of turning back, and they didn’t. To refuse to leave you on your journey despite the many things you have and will yet encounter.
Paul calls our struggles, “light and momentary” (2 Cor 4:17). He says that they are, “achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Most of the time, I can’t help but let out a belabored, longing sigh when I hear that verse. A half-believing half-laugh. Light and momentary. If we only knew what heaven held that rendered what feels heart-wrenching and endless on this side of the curtain “light and momentary” -how much our perspective would change!
I agree with you, nothing about this feels light. Or momentary.
As I approach the twelfth anniversary of my own father’s passing, I still feel the ache. I’m still, at times, blindsided by memories and smells and a sense of what can never be recovered.
But hold that tension with me for a moment.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, let me refer now from Tolkien to C.S. Lewis.
If I’ve learned anything from Lewis it’s that, in the end, Aslan wins. And he defeats the White Witch. And he melts the endless winter. And he breathes life into the unfairly entombed stone creatures-again. (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
New life has been breathed into ME since that day.
New life is offered to me-to all of us, if we will accept it. Life that is to come and cannot be measured by time clocks.
I wish it weren’t so, but sometimes, God has to let us sit in the fullness of the weight of the world, before the weightlessness of what we are offered has any appeal. But despite the cyclic reality of reasons to despair, I know there is reason for hope.
In my best of moments, I am a poor apologist. Yet still I believe in a Jesus who offers life beyond this one-one that is full of a glory that far outweighs them all, and if you want to talk about my Jesus with me, I’d be thrilled to talk about your Jesus with you.
Even the son of God cried out to his Father for relief from his suffering in the midst of his despair-asked to be spared of it if it were possible.
And He wasn’t.
Because God knew what was more important. I can only imagine the anguish that ripped through his heart when Jesus suffered innocently on the torture device we call a cross. It wasn’t needless suffering-it was needed, for our sake. Reluctantly, I am learning that when we aren’t spared, it is for good reason. For the best of reasons.
There are still reasons and answers that I want. Most likely always will. Sometimes I resent that I may never have them. But the answers that I have? They point to a path better than I would have chosen from my own myopic vantage point. I have come to cherish that my own wisdom is short-sighted and fallible. Because if I called the shots and God fixed it all– if those who suffered, struggled, died along the way had been saved –how many of us who have stood stricken, astonished, and in wonderstruck admiration at their stories would have been changed in ways they couldn’t have chosen to change us of their own accord, had they been “saved” from their own struggles?
How many have been changed by simply watching those who have lost loved ones carry on in the midst of crushing grief?
It is both an honor and a visceral gut check to be present with people in such deeply painful times.
To have been someone who needed others to be present with me in those times.
~~~
Another brother of yours yells at God in the bathroom early in the morning, that Valentine’s dawn. Tells you to take her home.
And you do.
mojoy1494 