#lentinseptember

Wild Geese You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.          -Mary Oliver

With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love

My mom would be chuckling right now, as I write yet another post on death and funerals and loss. When her own mother died, it was weeks and weeks of morose and moribund sermons from the pulpit that nearly drove her as crazy as the Oklahoma winds. But here we are go again. I am not sure what in the hell is going on in the universe, but it's been a shitty week for too many friends.

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For my dear L.T. Love you.

 

I have an image of my mother and her sister outside of the church in Beloit, Kansas, wrapped against the cold wind in fur coats, clutching each other as they followed their mother's casket down the path and into the hearse. They were both sobbing, their handsome, strong beauty crumpled from weeks of grief and pushing against the inevitable that a late-stage lung cancer diagnosis for a vibrant and remarkable woman brings. I don't remember much but that intimate moment, my grandmother's legacy stitched up in the space held by that embrace.

I can imagine that my mom felt the same push and pull that I did in those final days of my mother's own life, the real-time grief nearly impossible to process, the guilt-ridden wishing that this part would be over so that she would be free and so that we could move on to mourning her given that she already was a shadow of herself. The hardest thing to process was that she was never going to go back to the way she was, that it was reality, that it was over. And that's what we all mourned in real time, that space of anger and sad, that glimmer of her old self in between the days of losing her moment upon moment. The winding down was hard,  unfamiliar, not sudden like it had been with nearly every one before. And the winding down was slow and then fast and then too slow in its fastness, which doesn't likely make sense unless you've lived through that interminable time of ending.

There are a million things I want to tell my friend tonight, my girl L.T. who texted me in the wee NYC hours to tell me that she had just today lost her mother, an extraordinary woman with fire and depth and sparking adventure and deep love and good strength, so much good strength, for her family. 

I want to tell her of the things that I learned from Marie Howe about the spaces that are made by loss in which I learned about myself, so many years after she had gone: 

     I had no idea that the gate I would step through

     to finally enter this world

     would be the space my [mother's] body made.

And how I wish now that I had written a jar full of memories to keep for myself, a scrap for each, that I could pluck out and savor, some fit for my kids, many only fit for the curious adults within belly-laughing distance. And that I wish I had recorded those stories told in the numb days after when we all walked around with dead eyes, tracing the thin, worn path we had too many times before, knowing that it would be five days before the smoke cleared and we could begin to see what damage had been done.

And that in the blackened landscape, shoots peek through and life comes back to itself.

And that letting those shoots grow is important. Really important. Live.

And that good music helps. Often on repeat.

And saving that thing that smells like her in the back of the closet. That's the best. Do it.

And how five years, five years after she left, I can still be knocked nearly breathless by a poem from May Sarton that comes across my desktop without warning, kismet in far too many ways:

An Observation

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

So, sweet friend, so many things and nothing all at once. I wish there was more space to tell you right now, right in this time where everything and nothing is there. It's too much, all of it, and there is so much more to write.

Love you, L.T. 

Where it sits

My bit of my mother's remains are nestled between a thick stone slab and the outer box of my brother's coffin, slipped there in a smooth wooden box by a persistent funeral director and a kind person at the Archdiocese who knew that spot, one spot down, was meant for her and not her 15 year old son whose life ended too early. Mom had always joked that she wanted to be with Dad and Hunter in the end. "Just sprinkle me around the edges," she said. "Nobody will ever know."

But she's there with a banded plaque that spans the marble, a three-person plot made out of the two. She thought about the options before she died, knowing she would be cremated, noting that our family plot was still an option in her small hometown in Kansas, talking about Africa and the ranch and of Dad and Hunter. So we divided her ashes, each taking a small part of her great legacy, to trail her earthly being back to the places she loved.

It's a curious thing to think about where your physical being will be after you die. Our people have always been buried with family, generations of people in the same acreage in small towns on the plains, still married through early deaths and lost children and all manner of combinations of life that came next. You were with your people, that man you married or the parents you lived with or the generations of people who stayed within the same range of life that makes a family a community. You can trace that lineage through the fading marble, lives made visible and marked and remembered.

I've never given much thought to where I want my remains to be after I've gone, never had that discussion with anyone outside of my then-husband. In those days of early marriage, I'd always assumed that we'd be together somewhere, ashes mixed, such a romantic notion. Cremation offers you that, a pause button, a hilarious pause button in some ways, allowing you to believe that if you are the one and only, there is life ever after together somewhere.

But life circumstances change, and change radically, and a new life requires you to consider these things anew. And the question of permanence keeps coming to me, of marking space and time, of having a sacred spot for your children to visit if they need to. A place they never go but can if they want to. And this notion of dividing suddenly feels weird, like the human form is elastic, stretched to the corners of the earth.

Even as I write this, my body craves the weight of place, one place, consolidated in its being. Permanence. The intimacy of ritual. The process of saying goodbye. The feeling of knowing where someone is. Not having a plan makes me feel unmoored and anxious.

Where will I go? What is special to me? What will be most important to my kids, most of all? Where is my soul most in touch with this earth? When I think about that one question, a few images appear: The sunrise over the fields at headquarters in Oklahoma, the evening sky in Santa Fe, driving into downtown Seattle on a sunny day, the tiles of the Rome train station, the south China sea at sunrise from the deck of a ship...it suddenly feels as easy for my kids to travel to these places and snap pictures as to fling the grainy remains of this body into any space. I'm adding this to the list of things to leave behind, the ideas and thoughts and what it would mean to remain upon this earth long after I'm gone.

1,640 miles away, I can imagine sitting in the cool marble room tracing the name of my sweet brother who came into this life 40 years ago today. That's where this sits.

Unbroken Circle

Some days I wake up in a panic that the cancer is back, my post-sleep skin wrapped in an uncommon scent, a shoulder that won't unhinge, weird tweaks that I notice. I don't think about it, so much, normally, but there has been a lot of there there lately, my gut/intuition on overdrive in my day to day life which gets me all muddled up when it comes to the inner workings of my body. I keep listening, just listening. Listening is good.

Lately I've had so many friends diagnosed w/cancer, it's overwhelming. We hold hands and walk forward, sometimes we pull each other up out of the choppy water, sometimes we rage and other times we sit quietly. But it's a gift, this presence, being able to be with another who is walking down that road. Years ago, I was lucky to be with my mom as she died. It was at the same time the worst experience ever, and yet something I would never miss. And would never miss for anyone that needed someone in that moment to hold the space. It's at the same time something you never want to experience again, and something you could never deny anyone.

The grace of a post-this-time cancer existence is like that. We shelter each other, feed each other words of solidarity, clothe each other in the warmth of friendship. Because it's the seed of that experience that cracks us open in a fundamentally life-changing way if we let it. It brings out terrifying beauty from our core. And once you've let yourself feel the depth of that change, you could never withhold that grace from another.

Make Yourself Yours

As I shuffled boxes around from room to room yesterday, it dawned on me suddenly that everything I own is finally consolidated in one space. The relics of my highschool and college years and those weird years in between owning my own home have been brought from my mother's house, my grandmother's pieces divided, the selection of things that I took from married life sit boxed and wrapped in my new home.

It's all here. All of my history and present in one place.

And as I've rifled through some of these boxes, I've pulled out old letters from friends, pictures of my much younger self, snapshots of periods of my life when I was somewhat lost and somewhat found. There are the chatty "how are things at ..." letters from my mother that wait for me, along with a cache of chosen objects of my father's that will find a place in my home.

The idea of working through these boxes is remarkably unnerving, observing the hard and the good, remembering what came before and what contributed to who I am now. Meeting that girl at 9 and 13 and 18 and 25 and 30 and loving her, all of her. It's messy to uncover a lot of things I've left boxed away for years, but it feels like something that is part of being the girl I love at 44.

Today Parker Palmer wrote a beautiful piece on loving all of ourselves, inspired by this quote by Florida Scott-Maxwell:

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality.

Then he goes on to add this:

Today, at age 76, I know Scott-Maxwell got it right: there are no short-cuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.

I'm going to spend some time with this today, thinking about how fierce with reality I can be. I feel like I am a good stretch there in my present life. Maybe digging back into my past a bit will make me even more myself, uniquely mine. 

Parker Palmer's piece is on the OnBeing site. Worth a read: http://www.onbeing.org/blog/fierce-with-reality-living-and-loving-well-to-the-end/7729

Distance (Part II)

For T. L. and K. R. especially.

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It hits you when you open boxes, digging through things that have meaning so essential to who you are and where you have been: letters of kindness from past lovers mixed in with transcripts from years of college where you didn’t give a fuck; paintings that hung in your grandmother’s home that your small-person’s eyes thought were magical; the honest and intentional letter your now ex-husband wrote as homework for the last hopeful stint of marital therapy that you wish you could unpack a little more now; the heartfelt cards your kids made on your last day of chemo that tell their own story of worry; your mother’s St. Gerard prayer card that hung on her bathroom mirror every day of her journey of motherhood.

You are thousands of miles from many of these experiences; time and physical distance and a long journey of letting muddy water settle into clear has brought you to a new space in a city full of its own personal mark on your life, in a beautiful new home that already feels like the right space for your spirit. And these things make you think of a metaphor that your mentor gave you years ago when you worked in a domestic violence organization. She said “The thing is, Fran, that when you are in the middle of something traumatic, hard, unavoidable in life it’s like you are in a house on fire and you are nattering around trying to decide what to carry out with you. You’re thinking ‘Should I take Auntie Harryette’s doily? Or what about these twist-ties? Where is my juicer?’, all while the house is burning around you until someone finally pulls you out of the house and sits you on the curb across the street. It’s only then, wrapped in a blanket and with the oxygen mask on your face do you realize how things were and how, by anyone's measure, you could have not survived it all, but by the grace of whatever moves things* and people who helped you out, you did.”

Today you are sitting in your new home, in the grey sunlight shifting through the windows of your new favorite spot, listening to the songs friends gave you for the journey here. And you are sifting through these many years of so many things, so much loss, so much love, so many good people that have put their arm around you and guided you to a safer place. And it’s this distance, close enough to remember but far away enough to have perspective on, that allows you to feel the full force of gratitude, of loss, of appreciation, of duty, of remaking, of love and to sit weeping at the weight of it all and in appreciation of the opening that has happened in your life that means the next chapter. That it’s not sifting through the ashes to find what is left, but rather the blessing of the spaces and people that were and are no more, to ritualize the memory and to move forward powerfully, happily, with courage, without anger and into a new life of your own creating. And you are so thankful at this moment for this moment. And you are so acutely aware of friends who need that arm around their shoulders to get them out of their own burning houses. And that’s what it’s all about, this remaking of love and kindredness, of your people, of accepting and receiving love when you can't see what you need but just trusting that others can help guide you. And realizing the path was the path in just the way it had to be.** 

It’s beautiful and hopeful and quite different than anything you've ever felt in your entire life. And you are grateful beyond measure, your heart welling and brimming in its fullness. Amen.

*Jan probably said “God” here, but my father always said never ruin a good story for lack of facts.

**I also remember so vividly a FB post from my friend Lee which recalled a moment when she was lying on her bed so ensconced in emotion and feeling that all of the shit she'd been through had been worth it. I think this feeling is similar. I have held on to that post for so long, Lee, and wish I had the exact quote. Thank you for giving life to it.

Be (in love)

For B, who gets it.
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As I was leaving for the airport in Oklahoma City last week, my sister handed me a cloth pouch with these words printed on it:

Be in love with your life. Every minute of it. -Jack Kerouac

I couldn't help the mental eye roll that immediately followed as these kinds of slogans make me nuts. It's impossible to love every minute of your life, much less to live with the pressure to do so.

But I started playing with the phrase as the kids and I boarded the plane.
Be in love became Be (in love)... Be in a state of love. Lead with loving intention. Lead with a being of love, which feels wholly different than expecting your life to have the rapturous quality of being in love with something. Holding yourself in a state of love means that you can hurdle things as they come, that you can deflect the negative and live in truth, that resting in a place of love removes you from being in the place of fear. Being in love with your life is to look at the world with an expectation. Being (in love) means that no matter what comes your way, you are held in a safe state of your own choosing.

Choosing to Be (in love) with your life is not a simple task. It requires you to let things go, which often means letting go of people, old wounds, sadness and fear. It means holding yourself to the promise of possibility. It breaks a lot of old patterns. For someone like me, it's getting past the resistance to the over-positive that smacks of saccharine or delusion. It's understanding what existing in a state of love is about. For real.