Category Archives: grief

Eternal Sea

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When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.

I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,

Sea like the color of his eyes

Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together

Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all

Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce

C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me

But I can still remember

The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist

The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because

Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang

The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car

If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly

It would not begin to be as much as you are worth

Of your eternal value

Of the Light you can become forever

If you just

Turn and face the Sea.

All hat, no cattle

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I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children

If only an ordinary person like me could

Cast a spell with words

Hocus pocus–live!

Abracadabra–live!

I alternate between believing

That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or

The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing

Calvariums.

The borrowed borrowed story about crises

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A pastor told a story about a priest or monk whose brother was a fighter pilot. The pilot took his brother to the flight simulator. In the course of learning and crashing in a computerized model of flight, the non-pilot commented on the steep cost of learning to fly, the risks, and what happens when there is a crisis.

The pilot said, people train to a level and in a crisis they revert to that level–to what they know or have already mastered.

Rarely more.

We don’t rise to a higher level in a crisis. We revert to what we have trained for.

That is what the pilot said, I tell myself

When what we have trained for

Happens

Louisiana and the Supreme Court

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The idea that a person whose sole job it is to cut out and exterminate living humans from their home by force is “a real doctor” is directly related to the Rabbits of Ravensbruck, the death camps of Hitler, the medical experiments conducted on unwilling victims by “licensed doctors” in WWII German and Poland, to Pol Pot, and ultimately to all the forced, anti-disability, and sex-attributed abortions around the world.

Real doctors try to save life, not crush unborn patients. So I get why the Supreme Court would be a little confused about the Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges.

But it is a good and appropriate law and should have been upheld.

If it is not, then we must ask what the five ruling justices think will happen when the mothers in these clinics face the physical trauma of an operation or procedure that is by its very definition violent?

They will face it alone, because the person who did this to them does not live in their community. Does not reveal their true identity. Does this thing to them and then leaves them alone.

When our courts are unjust and our moral compass has been knocked out by nearly 50 years of acquiescence to legal and institutional murder, it is no wonder that we have lost our way.

We will not find it again without facing what we have done and what it has cost us–

Our very souls and our own children.

Abortion is murder, not medicine, and SCOTUS has just proved it by shielding practitioners who perform it from the full and appropriate licensing and credentialing process.

Shame on us. Shame and mourning.

Job 4:7 NIV

[7] “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?

Abortion. That is where.

“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