Motherhood and Grieving

Shortly after I gave birth to Z, I joined a group on facebook made up of roughly 2,000 mothers. In between posts about car seats and smash cakes and sleep regressions were unforgettable sober pleas from mothers who had lost their children. Please learn to properly buckle a car seat. Please learn the signs of daycare abuse. Please don't put blankets in the crib. Accidents. Suffocation. Abuse. Death.

 

I'm no stranger to death. I've been to the burial plot many times. Years ago, I acquired an acute sense of my own mortality and I doubt it will ever go away.

 

But now I carry something more weighty. I don't bear it as easily or as naturally as my own: an acute sense of my son's mortality. Even as I type, I realize that to struggle with this is, in itself, a privilege. How many of my dear friends, coworkers, family, have lost their child before even bearing them?

 

I often read notes and memes challenging me to cherish every moment. I don't need this reminder. Almost every night for the past 15 months, as I nuzzle his face, swaying him in my arms, I've drank in the smell, the feel, the weight of his body, insisting the sensations imprint on my soul like concrete. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude and love for him. My heart soars with the joy of all that he is to me.

 

And then come the prayers: begging, pleading prayers to let him live. To let me see him graduate high school and get married and even if I'm not here to see it, to let him live it. I never have a good reason why God should do so. I'm not worried about reasoning. Who knows how God orders the world? So I just beg. And often cry. I'm not afraid. I'm aware. Aware that every moment with him could be my last. I grieve that possibility.

Am I grieving a truth or a lie? Am I grieving unnecessarily?

Truth that death is the ultimate and constant culmination of our inherently fallen world...
Lie that there is no rest or peace for a good future or a God loves us and gives...

I think about a woman who lost her son at 7:45am this morning and how every April 1st, she'll say to herself, "he would be this old today" and how, 20, 50 years from now she'll still be thinking of him and longing to hold him and her arms will ache. And that ache will be imprinted with concrete so heavy that her soul will buckle for the rest of her life. And I grieve.

I've been grieving since the moment I first held him in my arms. Since the moment I joined the ranks of women whose body has brought forth life no matter how temporary. Since the moment I first understood. There is no choice here.

To be a mother is to grieve.

The bad goodbye

The last several months have been more settled. I'm grateful for the repose after so much movement (literally) last year. But being still doesn't mean control. Changed happened around me and I've said many goodbyes recently. Sad goodbyes to people who were really good parts of my life.

I'm bad at goodbyes. I'm awkward, I linger, I say silly things, and then I abruptly end it. My excuse is that they're unnatural. As an eternal creature, I wasn't really made for goodbyes. When a person's presence in my life is removed, they take with them the meaning they brought to bear. Though I know another relationship will come, bringing it's own distinct joy and meaning to my soul, I still suffer the movement. In heaven, there won't be this kind of awful movement. Right relationships, right joy, right meaning will simply be and never end.

My women's pastor moved away. She gave me these flowers the last time I saw her. Her presence has been supportive, encouraging, and wonderful. She prayed for the babe that grows inside me when it was just a hope. And after she packed up her belongings and shut up the house which was once her's, she pulled from her yard the last rush of blooms and gave them as a token of her joy for me. What was has passed on, died in a way, and even though what will be next may be equally good, for now, I just don't like it. So there.

Longing

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.
For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Pain is also a method of longing. Sometimes, it is the stench of the earth we have found, the dissonance of the chaos we have heard, and the news of misery all around us. That longing comes from ugliness. It too can break the heart of all who worship mistaken things.

Today the longing is great.

Goodbye

Matthew met Nina shortly after she was born and poured into her the effort naturally required of a puppy. With such goodness as he had faith in her, she repaid him for 15 years. Faithful, joyful, obedient and unconditionally loving.

We had to say goodbye to her last Saturday. It was time and it was right. She was old and in pain and dying anyway.  But is was difficult, hard, sad, and sucky.

Everywhere there are still reminders of her (as if we needed material evidence that we miss her deeply) - her food, her hair, her smell, even her poop. But we are grateful, especially me, who never met a better dog and didn't even like dogs until Nina convinced me they were awesome.

I'll close with a fitting exerpt from C.S. Lewis' book the Problem of Pain:

"Another type is the love of a man for a beast - a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolize the relation between God and men; 'we are his people and the sheep of his pasture'. This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding [artist & art], because the inferior party is sentient, and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interests are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the 'best' of irrational creatures, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations - man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the 'goodness' of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale - because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses - that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves; but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less."

Date night

It was a Sunday. My husband took me to the Ft. Worth Botanical Gardens for classical music and a picnic. That morning, I played a piano piece in church. Playing is a nerve-wracking experience and I force myself to do it because I feel responsible for the gifts God gave me. I have to use them even if they aren't perfect. In fact, it is humbling to be transparent with my faulty gifts - but I'm called to be a city on a hill not a lamp under a bush. God is in charge of the light, I'm simply supposed to stand instead of crouch. Earlier in the week, the heartbreak had come. And so it was providence that the song I practised all week in preparation was Be Still My Soul. God knew I would need to hear it over and over that week for its truth to settle me. So I played it that week and I played it that morning. 

As Matt and I sat under the fading light and listened to various excerpts from Beethoven and Vivaldi's four season, the conductor threw in Jean Sibelius' Finlandia.  I invite you to pop open a side window and listen to it (if you're impatient, forward to minute 4.5). The beginning drums of dark anticipation, then moves into the sound of heartbreak. Halfway through it surprises you with a brightness; an inspirational charge to move forward resolved and confident and daringly joyful. But what shocked me most came just as the song tips past mid-point. The melody for Be Still My Soul. Apparently, it was taken from Finlandia. So imagine me sitting there, as the light faded, hearing the same notes I played that morning in worship to God, hearing the same notes He had soothed me with all week. It was as if, in the middle of this gorgeous piece of music, God had put a hidden message to me. The notes are repeated again in stunning epic fanfare at the end of the song. And then we see this: light in the darkness.  

Heartbreak

Two weeks ago, I stood during sharing time at church and choked out some words. A warm motley crew filled the small wooden structure - a people so honest that my brokenness was not out of place. As Foster expresses in his book Celebrations, we learn and live "the necessity of bringing spiritual realities into the press of raw humanity."

I told them my father is going to prison. And I am heart-broken.

Afterwards, a friend approached me about lunch. I talk regularly with her but always within the pew. In my desperation, I was bolder than normal. We agreed to meet for lunch during the week.

Sitting in a wooden booth between slices of sandwich, we traced our lives discovering arcs so similar as to leave us in astonishment. Two hours of conversation about pain and numbness, lost childhoods, anger and fear, running (always running) and questions about the reality of Jesus.

Our words curved through time, to past and present and past again, and somehow truth about who God is and the way things are on earth came flowing. Truth heals and it startled me to realize if I was silent, she may not have heard about a God that always runs after us; a God who always ran after me, one whose life is so parallel to her own.

People struggle with sin and it breaks them just as it breaks us. But praise be to Christ that our brokenness can be someone else's healing. 

Revelation 1:5 "To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood." And the sins of our fathers.

Weekend on 6th street

I sit here and try to write about something for which I have no words.

I could show you a picture of 6th street but chances are you've already seen one. I could describe rubble upon rubble but chances are you wouldn't understand any more than I do. I expected it to be like mississippi in 2005. But debris piles alone are impersonal. On 6th street, I saw faces in the rubble: people whose belongings I sifted through, vacant stares of those waving away help, and tearful pleas to stave off the bulldozers (as if I could). I didn't anticipate so many conversations with faces in the midst of ruined lives.

I confess I was all business as I recorded data on my clipboard, directed volunteers, marked my map with discovered street names, listed tools (chainsaws needed, check). A coping mechanism, I suppose, as frail as those I saw: faces clinging to half-twisted things as if they were a precious jewel or a lost limb. Do we humans define ourselves so readily, so errantly? The longer I looked, the less I could deny. Though secretly, I resolved to make a life impervious to such destruction, my constructs are just as these: vulnerable to the broken world of which I am made.

But are we not immortal beings? Am I not reborn of materials such as spirit and soul, no longer made only of brokenness and dirt? The longer I looked, the less I was confident. I give myself to the world's seduction more completely than I ought. I need some salvation still.

The end of all things will be rubble except for our souls.

Run into the Woods

It will soon be October. In October, fires should be lit, pines should be smelled, chill bumps should be felt. The change of season reminds our minds and bodies that change is ever happening. It calls for a response: reflection at the very least.

Here I lay, trying to type in the prone position; temporarily disabled at mere 30 years of age. Some say the culprit is stress, some say heavy lifting. My body (my back) is telling me “no” with sharp signals and parts that malfunction in movement. It (my body and back) are supposed to carry me and 35 lbs. into the smells and greens of October next week – into the high altitude of emotion, the fires of reflection and the visceral ness of change. But it can’t even carry me to the bathroom.

Who am I? I feel this week stripped me and sent me wandering. My father was sent to jail and then released into my (partial) federal custody. I missed so much work it was embarrassing. I conferred with siblings and lawyers, signed more paperwork, drove far and wide, didn’t see my home for 3 straight days, spoke with my mom and prosecutors – and generally found myself in alternate realities right and left. I used to work, clean, cook, ride bikes, pet my dog, and smile. Suddenly, I’m texting pre-trial officers and signing leases in walmart parking lots? And now I can hardly walk?

What’s happening? When did the world turn upside down? When did I fall into the hole? I never liked Alice in Wonderland. It didn’t seem all that wonder-filled to me. I don’t want to fall into alternate realities. I want to run away into the chill of woods and the smell of burning fire. I want to run from broken humanity and my own human limits into some change. But the air outside is still and hot at 96 degrees. There is no relief.

faith

I said a few words at a memorial Wednesday. The last time I did that was 2002 for Becca G. I visited Connie's home and we talked of Elizabeth's death. The last time I visited her was 2005 and we were speaking of Nancy's death.

There is no comparison. When you live through an event so different, so full, it takes awhile to find words that fit. I can't comprehend the loss of a spouse.

I didn't have a four year old look up at me and say, "My mommy died" and struggle to choke out the words "I know, honey."

He taught me something, that little boy. We talked of sadness and missing her in short sentences before things like playing and drinking distracted him. His life is shattered by the loss much more than mine but he doesn't cry. He doesn't blink. He solemnly addresses the matter and with all faith that life will be okay, he gets up and moves forward. It's not naivety, it's simplicity because he's right. His life will be drastically different but it will still continue. We adults can't stop the chaos inside that constantly screams - how can things go on? He taught me to remember the faith I once had. Though it comes harder now, it can be simple again. It needs to be simple again.

In the face of death, faith is the only way to keep living.

bye-bye

I'll fly away
Oh glory
I'll fly away
When I die
Hallelujah by-and-by
I'll fly away.

Elizabeth passed away this morning. I don't have much to say. The peace which passes all understanding still doesn't negate the pain.

no title part 2

I talked to Christina briefly and she helped me see that I am weary, overwhelmed and frustrated. I want to crawl into a hole and have everyone leave me alone but of course, there's much to do at work, restructuring, etc. and students to placate who are concerned about this or that. There is homework, there are commitments, there is life (groceries and cleaning and laundry). The weekend was wonderful and I enjoyed every minute of it but it did nothing to soothe the weariness that seeped into me from last week. I'm still tired and battle worn and frayed at the edges.

no title

I told Jill, as I decimated the kleenex in my hand, that I hated how death never goes away.

My boss suddenly died this morning. I am in shock. Last week, I saw them at a restaurant and they stopped by to say hi. Ginny gave me a hug :-]. I spoke with Dr. Hoehner yesterday about a couple of meetings and letters he had to sign. He left with that beaming smile on his face.

Death inevitably comes. I won't ever be able to escape it here. But not always:

Isaiah 25: 8-9
He will swallow up death for all time,
And the Lord GOD will wipe tears away from all faces,
And He will remove the reproach of His people from all the earth;
For the LORD has spoken.
And it will be said in that day,
"Behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that He might save us This is the LORD for whom we have waited; Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation."

I have no idea what comes next. But the Lord is our salvation. And Dr. Hoehner knew that well.

a paltry tribute

Qualifiers come fast to mind: I knew him far less than others how can I attempt a tribute? The results will be paltry at best. Is that dishonoring to him; to his daughters? I just want to say what he meant to me. I want to share my memories. Grief is so weighty even the small droplet which falls on me needs an umbrella to deflect and absorb; this post is my umbrella. I imagine his daughters feel the tsunami of their loss ravaging, there's no protection or coping mechanism for that kind of grief. You don't really survive it, until you wake up one day and find that you have. My memories are for me, but my tears are for them.

I worked for Mr. Jackson for two and a half years while an impressionable college student. In the bubble effect, we saw each other everywhere and became fast friends. He was one of my first positive fatherly role models. Don always picked on me. :] Once, I expressed the need for a ride home from work, looking up I saw him standing there with that twinkle in his eye and a broom in his hand. I feigned outrage and we laughed a lot. Each day on the way to work, I would bring him a McDonald's egg mcmuffin and small coffee, he was always too busy for breakfast, he would say, and I would scold him continuously about his eating habits. :] One day in front of chapel, he told me if I could stand his motorcycle up, I could ride it. :] Since it was a half-ton beast, there was no way. We laughed then too. I think the most vivid picture I'll remember is of him on his red motorcycle. He would tell me, now and again, with difficulty, what Vietnam was like. I learned from his quiet unassuming self-sacrifice. It was his way of living.

He talked about his daughters endlessly with love and pride. As a single father his dedication to them was inspiring. You could tell they were his life. He was their champion and confidant and best friend. I loved getting peeks into their relationship. I know his daughters a little, they are my age and I feel for them deeply. When I saw him in April, he said, with the usual self-effacing good humor, he was fine, though we both knew better. He didn't burdened anyone with sadness he carried, instead, he simply gave ceaselessly with that mischievous twinkle. He taught me much about inner strength. I wish I would've said more to him then, about what he meant to me and how it blessed me to know him and keep up with him beyond college. But I think he knew.

To write every memory would be too long. The tribute is paltry but his gifts to my life are not. My father and I have a much better relationship, in part, because of him. So I'm filled with thankfulness even while I mourn and that's about the best I can do.

~never settle~

fractured

What is it to hope? My life used to be full of beginnings and then it became full of endings. I’ve learned that all things go. To borrow an analogy from Sheldon, you cannot experience the whole of a symphony until the last note is played and the moment which you experience the whole of it, is also the moment it ends. You cannot be in the whole of anything. You can only move through the parts.

Fractured is the word she used. It fit. You stand in a room full of friends and they know you but they haven’t lived what you have lived and that experience is isolating. You are lost at home.

What is it to hope? I now see each new beginning in terms of its end and in that light it feels pointless to start. Hesitation replaces hope. Can I live off obedience? Does it hold enough meaning to sustain me?

In that hesitation, I only take two steps when I’m capable of five. I hold back so when the end comes the fracturing is minimized. If I don’t admit to being capable of more then failing to reach it won’t matter. I wear weakness on my sleeve as a way to excuse mediocrity.

Despondency is just another way to despise grace.

The Problem of Evil

A knock on the door and he waited. With a creek of a hinge, the atmosphere parted, sliced by a bullet and she fell. Last week’s custody battle flitted across her mind as she stared into the face of her husband. Evil came and left its mark of agony—Death.

Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

We feel it in our hearts. We see it on the news, in the faces of our friends, and in our own portraits; evil penetrates every corner of life as an insidious cancer entwined into our cells. Like Lori’s husband, it betrays us. We open the door to sin and find death tearing our flesh.

Sheer determination fails. Man’s best attempt at extracting evil never fully works. We cannot change ourselves. Weak and entangled, all men continue to sin and death continues to spread. Hope is not found inside.

There is a Man who walked the earth uninfected with evil, who did not succumb to its betrayal and who, having felt the tear of flesh at the hand of death, defied it by rising from the grave. Evil could not mark Him with it's agony. Only He can eviscerate evil from the hearts of mankind and destroy it forever. He is the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is your rescue, both here and coming.

Hold on.

I was commissioned to write a devo based on the scripture above.

Waiting for the New

Like a plastic carasole horse with pretty bows, time spins my life up and down to a chorus of chiming music. At the high places, I could reach and touch the top, filled with wonder at the possibility and joy at the movement. At the low places, possibility seems far away, the spin is nauseating and I get weary.

Revelation 3:11-12 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it. I will write on him the name of my God...

I did a Bible search on the word "new" and though I realize this verse has a rich context beyond me, I think I get the point. Hold on; He is coming. All things here will go and He will make the "new" begin and never end.

I am waiting.

Return

I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud and your sins like a heavy mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. Isaiah 44:22

I stood on the top of the ridge overlooking a vast canyon. It felt like the top of the world. The wind blew sharply against me; I could barely stand; I could barely breathe. Perhaps its as close to the hand of God I will ever get, I felt Him there. His awesomeness was more than I could bear. Who would dare to stand before our God? Next to Him, everything about me is marked with irreverance.

The fierce wind blew through me and I imagined every weight, every distraction, every thing being blown away. Purify me. All the things I tie myself too, balls of lead dragging me deeper into the world when He would lift me up to heaven, to His side.

Nothing but sky and air and me and Him. Purify me.

Lay aside every hinderance and run the race to win, and the prize, the astonishing incomprehensible prize is to see His face. On that ridge, I dropped the foolishness and reached for Him.

balance

My sister told those gathered around, "February is always hard month." She was referring to memories we both share, hard memories, but she's more right than she knows, for secret reasons I cannot yet share.

When hard things happen I struggle to find the balance in how I exist. The day after some news has shattered me is always surreal. Nothing around me has changed and everything inside me has. It happened Feb.27th when the social workers and police busted into our best friend's home and cartered their grandparents off to jail. It happened Feb. 2rd when Charlene was born and left on our doorstep. It happened Feb.24th when the phone call came that Paul had been injured in war. It happened this Saturday, Feb.9th, with what I cannot yet share.

I feel so accutely and I could debate whether this was a curse or a blessing until I'm blue, but the fact remains: right next to the joy in my soul is the pain which sometimes belongs to me and sometimes belongs to someone else but I carry it. The world can't handle all that is there and so the question "What parts do I let them see?" begs to be answered. I normally answer it with joy. Whatever spins around inside is always anchored by hope and joy. For this I am immensley grateful. But the awareness of my own self-reliant tendencies and how my one-man island is not the intention of my Creator always leads me to question if I shouldn't be more open and if so, then how and how far?

When friends ask how I am, in times like these, I often don't have an answer.

Hope

What is hope?

Hope is believing that God is good. Tradegy often illuminates unbelief. Hebrews is a great book about faith - believing what is not always seen - the goodness of God in the middle of evil and pain. Often times people will ask in the midst of a crisis if God is good [I certainly have]. But the answer to that question is not a mystery, it is not hidden, when circumstances fail to point to His goodness, His Word still stands in testimony to it. The question is not if God is good, the question is whether we will believe Him when He says He is.

I know, with all the tradegies hidden up my sleeve, that this is very hard, sometimes impossible. But I also know that God is the one who always brings me back to the place of belief; He always brings me back to hope.

Life

Yesterday, Easter, William Andrew Hilleke's life on earth stopped after 24 years. And Kayla Abigail Gillilan began her life outside of the womb. I've heard it said many times that death gives life meaning. But we know that Christ gives life meaning and we know He conquered death, so it's the other way around. That is hope. -never settle-