Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know," he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have learned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously discussed the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer? Husband, father?   Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers, therapist, spiritual directors, businesswomen, activists, contemplatives.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Not a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you, and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Eight

Some years ago, a young man stopped me after church.  His little daughter played happily in an empty pew behind us.  “How will I know," he asked, “when the time comes – how will I know the difference between typical adolescent angst and something more sinister, something life-threatening?”  His sister, a young adult, had died of suicide; his father, grief-stricken, had followed her five years later.

I have some answers, now, for his question. I know what to look for, what to ask, how to find help – both emergency and long term.  What I do not know is how I have survived long enough to have learned those things.  How have I lived eight years without you?

I do not pretend to be in possession of answers for anyone else. I know so many mothers now . . .  so many women who live, sometimes in the shadow, sometimes in the light, of life’s most crushing blow.  Some have found answers in deeply-held faith; others shrug their shoulders when asked whether God lives, or cares.  Some have become activists and pour themselves into causes in the hope that their loss will mean something, will be transformed into other lives saved;  others run as fast as they can in other directions; and a few isolate themselves.  Perhaps most of us sense an impetus to respond in all ways simultaneously – I have had dinner conversations with friends after long days in Congress in which we have seriously discussed the possibility of simply walking away from our lives.

Where are you?  I wonder . . .  How might you have influenced your world, you with your multitude of gifts, your expansive education, your wit and geniality?  Who might you be – business executive, architect, photographer? Husband, father?   Where will you be as your father and I age, and we and your brother and sister need you to help us?  Need you to be present in our lives?  The door has been slammed shut on the answers to all of those questions.

Work . . .  that helps.  The women I know who have survived have all embraced creative, other-centered lives.  Brilliant artists, every one of them – painters, restauranteurs, nonprofit volunteers, writers, therapist, spiritual directors, businesswomen.  Finding one another . . .  that helps.  We need others who understand when we exclaim, “And you won’t believe what that person said to me . . . ” .  We need others who understand about the birthdays, the holidays, the vacations, the . . .  the everything, actually.  Re-forging relationships from the past that is no more . . .  that helps.  Few people really know us anymore, but they do care about us.  And we, about them. 

Eight years.  The weight that threatened to suffocate me has lifted.  I sleep, frequently through the night.  I can concentrate for hours at a time and often on several things at once.  (My short-term memory does seem to have been a permanent casualty.)  My family remains intact.  My own work is challenging and joyful.  My life is no longer defined by loss, by horror, by grief.

But: eight years.  Not a day, seldom an hour, passes in which you, and the you-now-gone, are not foremost in my mind and heart.   I love you.  My darling boy.

Lady G 'n Me

My college students ~I teach as an adjunct in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of the local Jesuit university ~ were dumbfounded last week to learn that I am a Lady Gaga fan.

I mentioned it to them because Lady G had just posted an expression of gratitude to her Catholic priest on twitter and, consequently, I discovered that she had attended the Convent School of the Sacred Heart in New York City.  "So Lady Gaga and I were both convent schoolgirls," I told my class.  "We both spent part of our lives wandering around in Catholic school uniforms and hanging out with nuns."

Lady G first came to my attention about a year ago when a local radio station began playing her song Edge of Glory.  Could the lyrics be about what I thought they were? I wondered.  On the surface, they are about sex, and the video exudes a blatant and raw sexuality, but I thought there was more to it.  Indeed, it seems that she wrote the song as her beloved grandfather was dying, and that "glory" means exactly what I thought it did.

Glory is what comes next.  After the horror, after the sorrow . . .  glory.

If you know that I have lost a child to suicide, a child with whom I walk every day and whose death haunts my dreams, that perhaps you understand why I sometimes open the car's sunroof and crank my music up loud to listen:

It's time to feel the rush to push the dangerous

I'm gonna run right to, to the edge with you

Where we'll both fall far in love

I'm on the edge of glory and I'm hangin' on a moment of truth

Out on the edge of glory and I'm hangin' on a moment with you.

Lady Gaga's tweet about the meaning of the Eucharist created some controversy among those who understand faith to be more about law than about grace.  I'm guessing that they those folks don't much like the Edge of Glory video. 

But grace abounds in the most unusual places. 

Lady Gaga sings it.  I raise the bread and the wine and I think it.  I'm on the edge of glory, and I'm hangin'on a moment of truth. 

*********

PS: Now that I know about her convent school background, I also "get" Lady Gaga's inspired Sound of Music tribute to Julie Andrews at the 2015 Oscars.  Even though I can't carry a tune, I was actually in our school production of The Sound of Music (7th grade; Kurt) and have astonished my family by my encyclopedic knowledge of every line and lyric, but more than that: it was a convent school. I suspect that Lady Gaga's powerful performance honored Sacred Heart sisters as well as Julie Andrews.

Mother's Day, Ocean Day

If she were still alive, my mother would be 83 for tomorrow's Mothers' Day. 

I try not to harbor illusions about what her presence now would mean for me.  My father and my mother-in-law both face serious surgical procedures in the next month.  A friend and her husband moved his (decade older) parents into skilled nursing care yesterday. Similar versions of the same story are ubiquitous in my circle of 60-something year old friends who have parents still living. I know that my vision of an active, engaged, and healthy mother are mostly fantasy.

Pure fantasy, actually, since my mother died at 28.  I have no memory of her voice, her posture, her gestures.  I have a few recollections of various incidents, most of them concerning the utterly nonmomentous stuff of which daily life is made.

My daughter and I have had a couple of conversations recently about favorite childhood memories.  (Hers seem to center on cats.  So, to tell the truth, do many of mine.)

But in one of my very favorites, my mother and I are in the car, running errands in Vero Beach, Florida, where she and my father have just built the home to which they hope to move us, permanently rather than for just a few months at a time, from Ohio. I am six and it's May, just about this time of year, and I am beside myself with excitement.  I am about to acquire my very own bedroom ~ the boys will share another one ~  and I am consulting with my mother about my decorating plans.  My goal is one of those touristy beach shops, and my prospective treasure includes fishing nets and seashells and buoys and all sorts of ocean-related fabrics and colors. 

That room will never make it past my imagination, just as my mother and youngest brother will not make it past that year.

I will be fine without the room.  But what I will miss, which I do not realize until thirty years later, when I have a daughter of my own, will be the conversations.  The ones about me: school, friends, boys, sports, music, college, legal career, husband, house, children, loss, cancer, ministry.  The ones about her ~ and I don't even know what they would have been.  That move to the beach? More children?  Work?  A return to college?  Her friends?  Her extended family (all gone now)?   Travel?  Health?

I like to think that she and my dad would have driven up here yesterday to spend an extended week-end with us and the kids, because Mother's Day would be a happy kind of holiday.  (Something else I have missed: a mother who would have treasured my children as I do, and shown up frequently just to hang out with them.)  I imagine that she would be standing in the sunroom window, looking out at the back yard, and saying, "Robbie, I wish that you would learn to garden.  It would be so relaxing for you, and your yard would not look like an abandoned lot wishing for a lawnmower.  Would you like me to stay a few days and put some flowers in for you while you're at work next week?"

And I would say, "Momma, yes, that would be great, but could you make some kind of thing with the driftwood and shells out there, so it could look like we live on the ocean?"

Unless, of course, things had worked out as planned, in which case we really would live on the ocean.

Lose a mother, and you lose a whole entire way of life.  Ocean, and almost everything else.

Loss, 7.66

Target. I am leaving for a weeklong training tomorrow.  I need cat litter, some snacks, some Advil.

I see a flowing summer dress and jacket that would look great on my girl ~ if she likes it ~  so I toss them into the cart.  One of maybe my top ten things, picking up gifts for her.  She doesn't always appreciate my taste, but I do it anyway.  Sometimes it works out.

I walk past the displays of summer stuff.  Brightly-colored noodles and beach towels, picnic chairs and coolers. 

We used to have the best times in the summer.  I loved summer SO much.  My daughter said the other day that among her best childhood memories are the days that a group of us, moms and kids, lazed away at a lake south of here.  Moms hauling out food and talking for hours on end, kids splashing off floating whales and turtles and racing to the playground during swim breaks, everyone trudging up to the parking lot as darkness finally fell. 

I look at the noodles and beach towels. 

I want my boy back.