Apparently you can buy anything on Amazon I think as once again I am in a club I don’t want to belong to
He says what do I do now without her? And I tell him, she is not there. That is not where she is
Echoing the conversations between angels and other Marys
I tell him what I would tell you, or me or anyone–a dog on the street if I had to–
She is eternal and the pain we feel is that verification that we must seek eternity
Seek the one who can
Get us
Past our terrible selves
It was always there in the story–the danger in the ubiquitous needles, things of ordinary use taken to deadly ends, the beautiful sleeper, unaware that her respiratory response is the key, the lifeboat, the signal-light, wake up,
Breathe
Or if you cannot, make sure to find a prince who
can wake you
back to life
Mary was born on January 1, 1993. She was born to ________ and _______and is survived by _____________________________________. She had kids with__________, who preceded her in death by a handful of months, days, minutes, hours.
Her children are bright little lights, and I want to gather all of them to me, sing with them, raise them onto strong shoulders, proceed with them in a march more wedding than funeral, acknowledge that no life is actually just a handful of years, months, days, hours, minutes, things smaller than that, things that can only be measured by Hands torn for
For her, for me
He precedes us in life, in death, in life again
Walk out of that grave, girl, walk into life
All because of Him
You little dervish
All red hair and fire
Pint-sized
You would get in a mood and storm
Then get distracted by your toys
Begin alternating between
The distraction of playtime and the vague memory that you had been
so recently aggrieved
If I am honest, you were often a pain in the ass. Your attachment disorder meant that I was the primary target of your anger when you were growing up, which was not fun, but good for me.
I remember you when you were little, I remember the stress, chaos and exhaustion. We would look at you and Charles when you were asleep and say, they are cute when they are asleep.
find myself trying to construct an old play fort out of this gray day, the sky folded into the quilted tent
This is heaven, I tell myself, this is Mary, she was college-aged, after all. She could be here, Heaven could be this, the thin line between the realms could be as gossamer as time itself–
Yesterday you were among the living
And now I return to the prayers I prayed when I held you as a child, fierce ball of anger
Oh, God,
Make us real
Make us vivid
Wipe away the tears, the past, the unbearable
All things made new
I don’t have time to write this blog. My house is chaos, I am behind in my “day job,” and my adopted granddaughters live with us now.
Both girls have been through fires, literally and figuratively.
As I see headlines about the Texas heartbeat law, I cannot stop thinking about what an appalling loss to me and the world entire it would be if they were not here.
They, like all my kids, light up my world. If one were missing, the loss would be unbearable.
That is what the rhetoric hides–each child saved from abortion is a
Little girl twirling in a princess dress
A little boy looking for spiny lizards
A child who knows grownup words long before they should
An irreplaceable light in the darkness.
Daniel 10:12-14 KJV
[12] Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. [13] But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia. [14] Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days: for yet the vision is for many days.
We have so misunderstood and utterly misrepresented
What angels do
Who they are
Or how they might appear
(While surely they might be anyone–
Women, children, the dispossessed)
They stand their ground
Fight for us
Maybe when it would seem
We are otherwise entirely
Abandoned
I have friend who is an aficionado of romance. I am too old for that stuff myself, but I tell her that
Jesus is like the nerdy guy who likes you at the lunchroom table you should sit at but what will the cool kids think?
Yep. I am way past cool kids and would argue that if that were a thing, the guy who pays it all for us would have to be the coolest one of us all
But he is ok being
The nerdy guy who
Sends us love songs
All the time
It is scary not being able to breath properly. It looks like you have Covid lung the doctor said, congestive heart failure…
My husband told my daughters what pills to give me and when, bypassing me entirely because the lack of oxygen meant fatigue and fuzzy thinking
I had put my soul at the center of this. Dying was just a space in my peripheral vision, something that was going to be inevitable at the rate I was going.
I tried to sing these songs. Eventually I had to just sit in their presence while others sang.
I talked to Jesus about the pain and paper sack lungs. He told me he took the true agony of a pair of dying lungs so that I could be given
More time, heaven after
When I began to think I would actually live a little longer, I was still afraid to take it for granted
I had to talk myself into the river. Tell myself I could ease in, keep your head above water
When I could go under
Hold my breath
Swim again
I told Jesus I would never tell the story without full acknowledgement
He healed me. He gave me back my life at his own deep expense
His lungs for mine
Carrying Light 