Category Archives: grief

“Brace yourself like a man”

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Job 38:1-7 KJV

[1] Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, [2] Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? [3] Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. [4] Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. [5] Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? [6] Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; [7] When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

What Would Tyrone Say?

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I have been a big fan of Alex Hirsch since first encountering Gravity Falls. The series is layered, well-written, lovable, and infinitely quotable. So last night when I found out that Hirsch and his partner have raised money for Planned Parenthood, it was point of sorrow.

Seems ironic that a man whose works are written for children would not see that abortion kills children.

I know, I sound quite plaintive and simplistic, but I can’t stop thinking about one of Hirsch’s most lovable creations–a clone of his comic placeholder, Dipper Pines.

I wonder how Hirsch could have kept the narrative alive for Dipper’s several (and equally lovable) clones?

Keeping the narrative alive–

The opposite of the deadly agenda of Planned Parenthood.

The Imaginary Conversation

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He is gone now

Gone to me, anyway

But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–

Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended

What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair

Forever/

Just

… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes

All your regrets all your missed chances

To cry like a baby

Wail for a Savior

Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent

Shaken finally by what you

Would have been without Him

Frankie Gonzalez

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I can feel the force of the grief, another small tragedy. His death, like his life, will be a small story, buried beneath bigger fires, the roiling of big boy fights, what is the death of one little boy when the world is burning?

Everything.

His life was everything

To him

And to the One who stood at the field of Heaven

Waiting all those days to welcome him home

Wipe away every tear

No more crying

No more pain

You say the sweetest things

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You say the sweetest things

A soft answer turns away wrath

Love is always patient

What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts

One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-

The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w

What if that were a word by itself

And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only

No power only soft and aging

No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one

Just this one last spell-

Let the word when spoken

Set us free from past and illusion

Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-

Oh fragile love-

You say the sweetest things

Pebble Parable

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It was a simple thing

The man reached in and snapped off the treadmill

Came in very close to the boy’s face

Told him “the rules”

Only it turned out “the man” didn’t know the rules as well as he thought he did

Rules like the way a single pebble can make a concentric circle across the whole chest of a river

Or the way the question about what you would do with a time machine

Might just define a person

Forever, forever is how wide and how deep and how long I will

Love you like a pebble

Thrown right at the heart

Of moving water.

The Multiverse You

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It is 4:53 in the morning and the-multiverse-you is sleeping somewhere

(Perhaps held in the arms of her beloved)

…she does not know about the foster children, or the loss, the things you use to distract you

From the sound of being cracked open

a meal, a primitive marine creature–a crab, a lobster, a clam

The oral surgeon calls the missing piece of you by the kind of nickname you might use for a lovable but naughty child—that little stinker or cuss or rascal

Only, the-multiverse-you tells it as though it were a puzzling but mildly discomfiting dream

No mention, no hint even

Of global dishevelment and chaos on the planet where she sleeps,

untouched

As you fiddle with various words for comfort to mask the pain

In all the broken places.

Ah, the tattoo!

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When I was dealing with the trauma of finding out that a little boy I had taken in as a toddler had grown up to become a terrible person I

Had three things

I decided to use as grief-points:

Get a nose ring

Shave my head

Get a tattoo.

This week I have had to face that sometimes “a tattoo” is a luxury item

In a pandemic

In the way grief

Can worm its way into the fabric of who a person is

I am losing something else

Like a tattoo, a marker of the grief

And I found what I would put on that tattoo–

Love is

Unmistakable