The stages of grief

I stay up too late. I am looking for meaning. I feel like an old woman rummaging through her things, longing for the people attached to them–
Tom’s chair
Ruby’s dress

The people I want back are mostly living. I want them to be braver or more honorable, kinder or stronger.

But they are not. So I rummage

For meaning
For hope
For the person I once was
This is my nightly vigil
My grief.

Quotidian

There is a point in the cycle of loss when people come up for air. The tragedy at the heart of the universe is still there but there is the small hope that words may matter, when so much has been lost.

I tell one child to look up reactive attachment disorder and describe to the other the symptoms of borderline personality disorder.

I am leery of words. How do you describe the damage to a baby or a child of rootlessness and hunger and a world of cold loneliness punctuated by chaos and violence?

I hate what he did to the point of wishing with all my heart that I could unspool his childhood to the day he was born and undo the damage, hold and feed the wee baby to prevent the hours and days and years of pain he will inflict on others.

He has inflicted on us.

Only God can breathe life into the dead.

I broke my own rule

One time in the same week I wrote a letter to someone and a poem to someone else.  Both someones had behaved badly.  My intrepid partner (always the English major) told me he liked the poem more than the letter.

Of course, I thought. Poetry is the marble colonade you hide in when followed by ghosts or splendor.  A letter is an everyday thing.  Too blunt to be art.  But is any of this about Art?

No.  Not really.  It is about sanctuary and splendor.  Borrowed safety and borrowed beauty.

And attempting however obliquely to suggest the existence of Absolute Love.

So I violated my own rule about my other blog– called etiology.  I told myself I would keep etiology free of my obsession with grief and injustice and the anger that follows these things.

I once wrote a poem I cannot see myself publishing.  Too painful, too personal.  I once wrote a letter to C’s prison therapist which simply described C’s crimes from what his victims and witnesses had said.  Just the facts, as they say.  The therapist read it and said he read my anger.

 

Anger? I thought.  That was just the facts.  I wonder what he would think if he saw my angry letter.

In my Father’s House

There is a camp that we go to every summer.  The kids love it.  Years ago it taught me about heaven–

Beautiful place/people kind, generous, helpful/full of joy/few there are afraid to be childlike/exuberant

Good dancing/food/music

This year we brought home a bug which is now besetting my 4 yr old

When he threw up at 2 am he apologized

My poor darling.

I told him that was why I am here.  No problem.  I love him.  I got it.

Jesus said in his Father’s house there are many mansions

Which is not an odd thing for a Carpenter God to say, but a very odd thing for a homeless non-materialist.  Like many things He says it illuminates when a person walks behind Him.

He means shelters

Hangouts

Splendor

He means God giving us His own

Beautiful Heart

Forgiveness is not the same as lying about the past

A friend asked me, do you put the kids to bed and at least get five minutes to yourself?  No, I say, not really but I like them all…

Hours later I realize how strange that must sound, how incomplete.  What I see in my head is thirteen years of eidetic episodes of unlikable events–bullying, tantrums,  swearing, violent protracted rages, physical assaults, homicidal imaginary friends, routine larceny, and lies, cursing of the most egregious kind.  Some stories so awful I do not want to write about the hurt.  And all of this before the years of C’s sexual felonies were dragged to light.

Most sane and normal people would have known better, right?  We believed if we did not give up on m and c they would be good, or at least better because of love.  Because of Love.

Jesus said, greater love has no man than he lays down his life for his friend.

Somethings are easier than others to lay down, I say beneath the shadow of the Cross.

Those 13 years took things that did not belong to me from the most precious people I know.  To say I like my children is an understatement.

They are my heroes.