Category Archives: grief

What would you do with the end of “normal?”

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In the early months of 2021 I formulated a plan based on the return of my life to me. I had almost died of Covid and had spent some time tethered to an oxygen machine.

I decided I should move slowly—literally. I felt like there was a sense of my own human fragility that had to be acknowledged—drive carefully, walk carefully, acknowledge the fog of your recovery.

Give some stuff away. I am a thrift store shopper and I tend to hold on to clothes. I went through several bags of clothes and was able to give them away with the acknowledgment that I had survived something and did not need that dress or that shirt in my new chapter.

Use the gift of a life given back for something. We took in our adopted granddaughters, whose lives have been pretty traumatic. I told myself—if I have been given more time, I need to use the time for brave things. That is not the easiest decision to make when your brave decision changes the lives of your entire family. But I can’t imagine my life without my granddaughters now.

I feel like we are all on the edge of change. Economies are brittle, wars are on horizons. Have we even really recovered from the trauma of a pandemic?

What would you do if today or tomorrow or Sunday was the last day of “normal?”

John 13

Childhood Friend

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She was a strikingly pretty college student with a disconcerting way of saying truly disfiguring things as though she was doing an elevator pitch for a rom-com puppet movie.

She said the “idea was based on a childhood friend,” and that the horror movie centered on the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of the Christian God (wait for it)…being the malevolent antagonistic killer!

Quite. A. Plot. Twist!

Somehow in the process of writing a home-cooked horror movie she managed to pull off an egregious character assassination of both her childhood “friend” and mine.

I listened aghast as emblems of rescue and redemption were suborned for a Mean-Girls-meets-The-Shining revenge plot.

At one point the thinly-veiled childhood-friend-turned-megalomaniac-killer-omnipotent-deity murders the protagonist after repeating a common Christian invocation of the Trinity.

She got a fan-girl response from many in the audience with questions about whether her movie was going to be produced, possibly with the support of the university?

Afterwards, I broached a few questions—

Was she concerned about alienating over a billion Christians?

Had she shown the manuscript to the “childhood friend?”

Had she considered making a fictitious murderous-god-antagonist to vilify instead of the explicitly stated Real One?

Had she or would she run all this by Him?

It is a gut check to have to listen to someone you love get raked through the fire of untrue and scourging misrepresentation.

But this was not Jesus’ first rodeo.

He paid the price for my ransom and hers, and whether she could or would see it, his drowning snd destruction in the abyss of human violence and folly was, is, and will be our only way out of it.

It is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” not primarily because we are so broken, but because he was-for us, and that should require a response.

My childhood friend has saved me from the deep end so many times. I would be lost without him.

Thank you, Jesus.

Yeshua

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I usually call him Jesus, like to think I am “his girl” and rarely live up to what he deserves.

Yesterday the daily Bible reading was Isaiah 53 and it brought me to tears, as it always does. “Crushed for our transgressions”? I think of the ordinary atrocities we humans endorse on the reg as well as the ones which will forever radiate darkness in our history.

He took them.

And he offers such untrammeled friendship. King of kings, yet he is the friend of every yet-born child.

I should stop there. Benign, seek Jesus stuff, right?

But that is not all. Isaiah’s view of the Messiah is polarizing. He is not depicted as the universally recognized cool guy everyone loves. He is depicted as “despised and rejected of men.”

Why?

Because we do not usually like to be told we are wrong, helpless—supine. We like to be in charge.

Jesus is our, wants to be, our friend, but ultimately that should be on his terms, not yours or mine.

Does that galvanize or offend you?

I do not enjoy thinking about Jesus’ crucified death, his humiliation, blooded and broken and naked and alone, but I know

That and worse was to be my lot without him.

She is not the same

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There was a canal outside the city where we would go with cookies some afternoons after school had released us. Watch the boats glide past the steep bank, press down among the long grasses—brittle spun gold—punctuated by poppies

She is not the same anymore

Neither the woman on the canal nor the one in the hospital bed

She has been set free

And I feel the silence

A migratory grief

Sometimes in the head, other times

the heart

Hidden Cameras Prologue

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It was at his youngest child’s birthday party that I saw what at the time was one of E’s distinctive “celebrity” qualities—he used his pitcher’s arm to lob a beach ball into the splash pad pour bucket—ball, plunk, fill, pour, repeat. The crowd of summer park goers reveled his ability to beguile and entertain.

At the time I took his boyish self-confidence as the contributing factor—he had an athletic gift and had been praised and admired for it for years.

Why not use it for harmless fun?

I look through all of this with grief and anger now. All I did not see or understand about him that day, who he had been for years, and what was to come.

What would you paste to doors of cathedrals?

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Over a year ago we found out that a family we knew had been devastated when they discovered that their child had been the victim of rape at the hands of a former MLB pitcher.

The rapes were recorded and shared. There is strong anecdotal evidence that other children were harmed this way as well.

The local police bullied and intimidated the victim, made no arrest, and closed the case.

As did CPS.

The FBI ignored requests for help as did the office of DPS and the Texas Rangers.

Oh, and President Biden too.

I have begun to think about Martin Luther and letters pasted on the walls and doors of cathedrals.

What would you say or do if you were haunted by the damage done to one child? Dozens?

We are all abandoned houses

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I can close my eyes and see the road, the house, the caged tigers at the roadside pit stop. I can see the cities and the precipitous bridges, the waterside parks and the places we have been before—with the very people lost to us now

What I would give to tell the mother to let the girl go

Like a beloved but hopelessly tangled kite

And tell the girl to just

Untangle toward the sun,

We are all abandoned houses

Without him anyway

Advice for the dictator

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Lately he doesn’t seem to smile much, hardly a surprise when his latest hobby is world domination.

I pray for him, but how?

How do you pray for a monster?

By acknowledging we are all monsters, only some monsters do not obey the voices in our heads which

Reduce cities to rubble and children to dust.

The advice is simple–

You are a man, just a man

And you are dying

You cannot, no,will not, outrun God

Repent and change

Leave everything but your soul behind and say you are sorry for what you have done

Replace your illusions of control with the acknowledgement of your weakness

For we are all monsters here

Debtors all to grace

Leave your robe

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I try to gather traveling instructions for the “nice lady” I met at the coffee shop

Find those who sell the oil and stick with them closely until the bridegroom comes

Leave even your best robe behind

Be willing to sell all you have for the treasure in the field

Do all this for the least of these

Because narrow is the path to life (and few there are who will find it)

Call on the name of the Lord to be saved

If you don’t already seek and find him in

Ordinary wonders

Matthew 25:11-14 KJV

[11] Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. [12] But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. [13] Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. [14] For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.

Sometimes we drive in the dark

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Every once upon a time I take the girls

Driving in the dark

We look for places to call home–ramshackle garage, vape shop, dry cleaner with its window smashed

In the apocalypse there is still no

Room left in the inns of the world they ask

Why did she have to stick the needle in her arm? Why did she stick the needle in her arm? What was it about the needle that

Caused us to lose her?

The little one has poured her anger out over her minders all afternoon

Unwilling to face what it costs them

So I try to de Bergerac her through the necessary obsequities

I tell her I will whisper the words and she will shout–

I’m sorry

I’m sorry!

I’m sorry I was mean before

I’m sorry I was mean before

I was working out my grief

I was working out my grief

And sometimes there is anger in grief

And sometimes there is anger in grief

She has such a comical little girl voice

But when she says these things I know what God means

When He whispers in my ear