The Compounding of Grief

I went to a funeral this morning. 

While this was a shocking, awful death that affected someone I love, it was not someone I knew well but had only met a few times. For me, the funeral itself was not a time of true grieving but of simply being there for a friend whose life has been flipped upside down. 

But I sat there, and the images came flying through my mind, more and more rapid. Donnie’s funeral in 2004. The last funeral I went to at our church, last fall, for the dear woman who kept Hannah in the nursery. Jeffrey's funeral, that of a fallen soldier. Watching Mike's funeral via my computer, sobbing, haunted for weeks and months over his suicide. And always, always, Stephanie’s, the immense pressing sick feelings of that day just weeks before my high school graduation. 

You don’t know my names, my lost loved ones, but you know yours. 

As I grow older the list grows longer. I’ve gone to more funerals that I can count on both hands now, and I know they just come faster as I age. Maybe it’s my off-the-charts Meyers-Briggs “F” for feeling that rushes up every memory associated with death each time I sit in a pew grasping tissues. Maybe it’s just human. 

Grief is an odd acquaintance. It never goes completely away. It changes form and place, morphing into a nag at the back of the head that sometimes you forget is even there. And then, a trigger. And it’s there in your face, haunting you, once again. I don’t know what I’m trying to say except that today, I am grieving. For people gone one and six and ten and fourteen and eighteen years ago, and more. So if you’re grieving today, over a person or a loss or a dead dream, I want you to know I’m walking along with you. 

Grief is normal, and OK, and good. 

“We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.” -Eugene Kennedy, The Pain of Being Human

Ten

We are pressured in every way but not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed. We always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 

2 Corinthians 4:8-10, HCSB

Past:
Nine Years, New News
That Day

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For Libby

I don't want to be a grown-up
when it means having to grow up,
to do things like bury grandparents,
sort four people's laundry,
feel pain over a credit score.

I thought I'd feel grown-up
when I was married
when I had a baby
when I had two.

Inching near thirty, I wonder
Do you ever feel grown up?
I wish that I could ask her
if, at 80, laying on her death-bed
did she feel like a grown woman?

Or still like the young auburn girl
who swung do-si-do
married a dashing veteran
raised babies with chicken-on-the-bone.

I hate myself for not asking
for more of the story,
and I hate myself for fearing
that she wouldn't remember.

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Why I Treaure a Muffin Tin

I wish I had asked her the story behind it.

It's a beautiful, six-cup muffin tin, stamped with "Muffinaire." The company's name is United Aircraft, Dayton, Ohio, which is where she lived out her adult life.

Libbie and I have been making a lot of muffins lately, and I feel that in my subconscious it might be just so I can pull out the Muffinaire tin and feel connected to her, the first Libby.

It always comes clean perfectly—the advantage to using something that old. You know if it's still clean after so many years, it's been seasoned. It will always be shiny and just right. The muffins will be perfect.

That Libby, my grandmother, died on June 29.

She's been in the process of dying for years, since diverticulitis ripped her insides and left her a shell. Sometimes she was full, a pearl still there ... sometimes cracked open and insides ripped out, lost inside fuzzy memories.

I am thankful, in a way, for the end of her suffering. But guilty and pained that she never met my son, only her second great-grandchild. Guilty that I didn't call her more, because her not-quite-there memory made me cry, because she wasn't sure that I was I and not my sister, her sister, a stranger.

I'll remember her in the mountains, bright smiles as the cool air whips. At the beach; in Chincoteague with the ponies. Clinking 50th anniversary mugs with my grandfather.

She was a beauty, a saint, a reader, a writer, the namesake for my precious daughter.

And I keep making muffins, holding onto her for a last hug I did not get.

______

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This took me slightly longer than 5 minutes, but The Gypsy Mama's 5-Minute Friday was what prompted me to stop staring at the screen and actually write this, without editing.

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Nine Years, New News

In September 2001, I was 19 years old.

Not a child anymore. But very much still a child.

I was in my dorm room, sleeping through my first class with my throat on fire, dreaming of hot tea and honey, when my roommate roused me to come watch the TV.

I just wanted my daddy. Through the next tear-filled weeks, I wanted protection. Love. How he always made everything better.

Sixteen months earlier, we stayed at the World Trade Center Marriott. We ate dinner at Windows on the World. We celebrated my 18th birthday, taking advantage of a landmark that we had no idea would not exist in less than two years. A place that would commemorate pain, terrorism, and a nation that held itself together by clinging to one another, hope, and God.

My sister and me, at the Les Mis theater in NYC, 2000

I sat and watched the MSNBC special that showed their news coverage "as it happened" nine years ago. While it happened, I didn't really see the pieces come together. They didn't cancel our college classes, so I went to class. I don't really remember much at all of September 11, 2001, except my Chinese class. My teacher was oblivious to what was occurring outside the classroom, and we had a very painful class as she proceeded as normal.

To watch the news as it occurred for the very first time ... it broke me in new places.

Not surprisingly, Ree is right. Sometimes we just have to remember. Especially remember not to forget.


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Two Cars, Two Lives

Last night, I could see in my head a mother, looking at pictures of her chubby-cheeked toddler, a girl full of smiles and pigtails. A girl like mine.

And the mother wondering: How could this happen?

On Saturday night, two senior girls from my husband's tight-knit private school were driving and their car found a tree. The driver, one of my husband's students, ended up in the hospital with broken bones. The passenger ended up in a funeral home.

Mr. V called me, heartbroken. How could he tell his class where their classmate was? How would he teach when she returned to school without her friend?

In an instant, I was transported back 10 years.

_____

The circumstances were not exactly the same. There was no passenger. There was no alcohol. The driver was wearing her seatbelt, on her way to her job as a volunteer EMT. No one knew for sure what happened, but she crossed the yellow line, collided head-on with another car, and lost her life, just after her 18th birthday and almost the exact same time of year: it was April 29, 2000.

On April 30, 2000, I was sitting in my bedroom when my friends Hannah and Marianne called; I assumed it was another of many calls about the upcoming prom. I couldn't have been more wrong.

I remember shock. Crying to my mother. Her making me get dressed and leave the house.

Monday at school. Our class was a mere 120 people, and none of us could do anything except sit in the field behind our school, using hands to make white origami cranes. My Chinese teacher suggested this ancient custom helped the grievers. And it did.

I remember signing out of school one afternoon and spending the entire afternoon playing board games with my Jen. Because it was something to occupy our minds.

I remember the funeral, over a thousand people. I still can't listen to "Tears in Heaven"--I have been known to violently turn off a radio if it dare come on.

_________

So when I told Mr. V, "I know how hard it is," I meant it. I grieve for all his students. For the dear parents of these two girls. I am sick over it.

Sweet Jesus, be near.

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The Art of Losing is TOO Hard to Master, Elizabeth Bishop!

I can picture her, red curls, wide a-lined skirt, a farm girl turned city girl turned who-even-knows at Ohio State. He's an older student, returned from the war, dark hair, light eyes, a twinkle of mischief as he calls the square dance, trying to trip up the frantic dancing adolescents.

She's approached and consents to a dance with someone who subsequently trips all over himself. She's too nice to point out that he's stepping on her feet and trying to promenade the wrong way. From the corner of her eye, she notices the man calling the moves eying her, one eyebrow raised at the jerky movements of the young man at her side.

His time up, he meanders to her side, cutting in deftly and leaving the bespectacled two-left-feeter to the side. They twirl, allemande, bow.

Breathless, he gets her a glass of pink punch and asks her to take a walk outside. He boasts of war stories, of snatching a Nazi armband from the inside of a German church, of fixing tanks and reading books in French. He's going home to see his mother this weekend for Easter (oh so gentlemanly), but he'll meet up with her at church on Sunday night.

Oh sure, she thinks. She's heard that one before. She rolls her eyes when he's not looking and goes on with her holiday weekend, observing the holy holiday and sunny April with fellow students. 

She's standing in the pew, singing, and feels a presence slip in next to her. It's him. He came! Her heart skips a little beat and she listens to his strong tenor voice mixing with her sweet soprano.

They are married in November.

*

After visiting with my grandma this weekend, who is likely dying, I could think of nothing but this sweet story she shared of how she met my grandpa. We lost him in June. To lose her will be devastating.

If you don't know the poem I'm referencing in the title, you can read it here.
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Overdue Grief

I was in sixth grade when my best friend's mother died.

After months and months of treatments and transplants for leukemia, she had gone into remission. The luminescent Cheryl, at whose house I watched Fried Green Tomatoes and learned to play penny poker. Her daughter--also Jessie--was my constant companion from the time we moved to Timbercreek Court. I remember meeting her when one of our homes was still being built. They sat next door to one another, separated only by a large oak tree.

I don't remember too much about Cheryl, except for her willowy blonde hair and calming presence. She was willing to let us try experiments in the kitchen or seclude ourselves in a bedroom with Sonic the Hedgehog.

As I can remember, she played a tune on a recorder infected by a sick someone. The cancer came back upon her weakened body.

I will never forget standing in our kitchen in Richmond. We were in the corner by the microwave. My mom turned to me and barely holding it together, said, "It's time for the big cry. Cheryl's dead."

I had the big cry. And months of feeling lost, of not knowing what to say to my very best friend. I didn't know what it was like to lose my mother.

Gradually, the other Jessie flew away from my life. She moved in with her aunt and uncle in another school district. We visited when she came to stay with her dad, but her house was full of smoke and go-carts and other women now, and it left me smelling disgusting and with a heavy heart.

I was always heart-sick that I didn't know the right words.

When my Michelle's mom died this past May of ovarian cancer, the same feelings washed over me. Why is it that when someone needs you the most you can't seem to eke out any words? I felt like the most useless friend on the planet. I still didn't know what it was like and I had nothing to offer. Not being able to see her in person, I couldn't even share a hug and cry with her.

I am sorry, friends.




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My day, in Twitterese

(The second status was not because I am quitting my job and hate Christian publishers--it is because I could use some money and I can't work for other Christian publishers since it is conflict of interest.)

I'd say I've spent about 30% of today crying. Just having a hard time holding it together. Hopefully back tomorrow with a little more cheer. Trying to keep this in mind.

And hey, if you want to get more of my riveting updates, you can follow me on Twitter here.

Heavy Heart

I hate the part when the pallbearers move the casket.

I think this is only the second funeral I've been to that I remember the moving of the casket. The first was in May 2004, when my dad's best friend Donnie died of liver cancer. My dad was a pallbearer and I can vividly remember the sad, glassy look in his eyes as he walked that casket out of the church.

In this funeral, the military men rolled the casket out on its base, but it still held the same feeling. I don't know if it's the finality--the end of the funeral, the real saying good-bye after just days of pulling this together have occupied your mind. It is heartbreaking to see that casket leave the church or funeral home. Once you are at the cemetary, it's too late. The person is really gone. He has his own plot there, a marker with his name being prepared already.

It laid so heavy on my heart at this funeral that no one should have to lose a child. My husband and I both have child deaths in our families (my uncle, his brother), and it leaves such a terrible mark on a family. I don't know how a mother lives after she loses a child ... but I do know mothers who have. Who do.

It struck me that the very first mother lost two sons: Abel, who did not just die, but was killed by his own brother; and Cain, as he was banished to the east. How Eve must have wept for her two children, lost in different ways. I think I've always considered her next son, Seth, a happy replacement for Abel, but I'm sure there were those nights not recorded in Scripture: the ones where she wept over Seth, guilty for wanting him to be Abel, angry at herself for being joyful as he took his first baby steps. Remembering the first steps of two other children.

It was a honor to be able to attend the funeral of a man who gave his life for our country. I know he will be sorely, acutely missed by his family and friends. Please keep them in your prayers. You can read about Jeffrey's story here.

Grief, Continued

A quote from my dear friend Sam's blog, which says it all:

Sin cannot be explained; it is no thing, and that is why it is so horrifying, so unspeakable.

Amen and the end.

Frightened and Grieving

This whole VA tech shooting is just baffling and awful. First of all, how could someone manage to shoot 42 people before being caught? Or stopped by someone, anyone?? My little sister came very close to going to Tech and that frightens the beejeebies out of me. Other peoples' little sisters are seniors there, like Ashley could be, scared out of their minds and maybe having lost a sibling. Ashley is my only sibling and I can't stand the thought of losing her. My heart hurts so bad for these families and for the school. How do you continue running a school after something like this?

Sometimes I wish I weren't so sensitive to things...but I think that when we stop being horrified by bad things we become immune to sin. And that, I definitely don't want to be. Please pray for the families of these victims. VA Tech is very close to my hometown and I know tons of people who went there, I know my sisters knows plenty of people who still go there. It is so heartbreaking. I am going to try to get some work done today, but I am so torn up about why someone would do something like this.

J