Afterword

I used to have trouble differentiating between afterward and afterword. When I wrote books, I would have to think about what, exactly, it meant to write the afterword.  I had this problem even though the meaning is right there in the word: after word. It is the word that comes after the other word, all the other words.

This week I’ve been listening to some Jungian teaching about the American unconscious. Something I heard that interested me was that it is a peculiarily American trait to be forward-looking more than backward-looking, and that by being so future oriented, Americans often miss out on the lessons of the past. We are not a wise people, this teacher said. We are a lot of things, but we are not very wise. We are outwardly and consciously sophisticated and advanced, but unconsciously bestial.

This teaching came from the 1960s or 1970s or so, based on some thoughts of Jung’s about the American temperament. I think that the products of our collective American unconscious do bear out the truth of what Jung and others have said about Americans: we appear to be advanced and sophisticated, but underlying it all is a deep, abiding violent, feral, unattached quality. We see this through our media and cinema, where we splash violence, wanton and irresponsible sexual behavior, and other symbols and myths of our hidden collective life.

The ability to learn from one’s past behaviors is possessed by labaratory rats and by human beings. However, wisdom is the sole possession of human beings, if they choose to cultivate and use it. I’ve written about this distinction before, commenting on why we are called homo sapiens; sapient meaning “wisdom,” from the Latin.

The big holidays are mostly over, and I learned a lot this year because this year we changed the way we did Christmas. We gathered on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas day, and we went to an earlier mass rather than the midnight mass. We played “Dirty Santa” rather than exchanging real gifts among the adults in the family. And we ate a different meal than we would normally eat.

By the end of Christmas Day, I had an Afterword for the holidays this year. My word was “interesting.” I was interested to learn that I am as predictable as the next girl, and like receiving certain types of gifts at Christmas. Though this year we told everyone not to buy us gifts, and they didn’t, I discovered through receiving little that I do like shiny things and baubles. I like small gifts like bookmarks and notebooks, colored pens and new gloves. I also like big, extravagant gifts of jewelry. I like things that smell and feel good, too. My son gave me perfume even though I told him not to buy me anything, and I’ve worn that perfume every day since, and I love it (Notorious, by Ralph Lauren).

I learned that my husband will not only give me what I ask for, but he will do a better job shopping than I would have done for myself. You’d laugh if you knew what we gave one another this year, and you’d probably think, “Wow, what a couple of rednecks!” I’d laugh, too, and I’d say you were right! But he did a thoughtful job while shopping for me this year, and I perceived his love through the gifts he gave me. His backwoods girl.

I learned that I liked doing Christmas Day the way we did it in the past, the way it evolved naturally rather than the experimental other-family way I arranged it this year. I like getting up in the morning, early, and coming to the fireplace with our hair all messy and our jammies on, and the smell of coffee and firewood mingling. I like the kids tearing into their gifts, and their squeals of happiness, and how everything is informal and come-as-you-are. I like it when my daughter Lark and her husband, my son-in-law, come over and he opens the bacon and sausage and starts cooking, and how we stand companionably and side-by-side and cook and smile about it. My first son-in-law. He’s like a son to me.

I like it when my daughter Mari comes over with her husband and baby and he has orange juice and champagne and makes Mimosas, which are very good with the breakfast already being cooked, bacon and sausage, and my famous French toast. There is wrapping paper from one end of the house to the other, and dogs rustling through the paper hunting for dropped candy and chocolate, and everything’s a mess. But I really love that. Ivy and her husband arrive, and the testosterone in the house quadruples when my next son arrives about the same time, looking like he just rolled out of bed. His voice booms through the house, and he is wearing a hat and he doesn’t take it off at all. He looks like a big ole lumberjack about half the time, and we don’t have so many trees around here for him to pull off that look, but he manages to pull it off.  And he and his younger brother start bantering and insulting one another, and they laugh a lot. And then all the boys–and there are a lot of them–go off and play Halo or poker or some other competetive thing that has them hollering and laughing at one another, after we finish opening gifts and eating.

I didn’t like shopping late this year, starting after December 1 and ending only a few days before Christmas, without any cookie-baking time. I don’t like the rudeness people exhibit in their rush, especially in traffic or in long lines at the stores. You can really see who people are, for better or worse, at times like that.

I didn’t like putting up with family members who don’t act like family members any other time of the year. I wonder what’s the expiration date on family membership? I wonder why a person feels obligated over the holidays to be polite and even kind and welcoming to family who are absent the rest of the year? I wonder how many years your drunk relative can spend in recovery or can be sober, as compared with all the years they caused so much pain and chaos, before he or she ever feels like family again. If ever? I wonder why I still say “yes, come on over” when what I feel is, “I don’t want to see you. It’s over between us. You are not my [fill in blank with role relationship].”

I am not fooled. But I am polite and even kind and generous.

I wonder why I do that? And whether I will continue.

On Christmas Day, my son Reed was repeating lines about Jesus from various South Park episodes. One of them was, “Every day before I go out, I ask Jesus, ‘Jesus, if you don’t want me to do what I’m about to go do, please stop me,’ but He never does.” We laughed about this, although it also bothered me on another level, this truth from South Park, because the sobering truth is that the Bible teaches that a person can grieve the Holy Spirit of God to such an extent that he can no longer hear God’s voice, and God’s counsel and whispered love are closed to that person. It is as if a person has been rendered spiritually deaf and completely insensate. The possibility of relationship, communication, and communion are blocked. The Spirit flees, and the person may end like the man Jesus healed in the gospels, who had been naked, hiding among the tombstones, violently crazy. Metaphorically speaking.

So, after the holidays were over, I wondered how long is too long. How many years does it take before a door in your heart is closed, and how many more before it is locked? It isn’t a lack of forgiveness, for forgiveness is easier (if you ask me) than continuing along one’s own way with wholeness and discovering that sometimes, one has to leave others behind because their poison may well render us immobile. There’s something about being whole that makes a person not want or need to be around certain kinds of other people. And yet there is also charity and compassion, service and tending to the wounds, hunger, and nakedness of others.

It isn’t easy to figure out. In fact, I don’t try too much to figure it out. I feel my way through it intuitively, and do what the moment requires. Sometimes the requirement of the moment is easier to bear than others. Not returning my mother-in-law’s call was not easy. It was real and it was congruent, but it wasn’t easy. I don’t even know why it was OK to deny her and OK to allow entrance to my brother.

I do know that sometimes the Afterword is “The End.” I know that much. I know that sometimes the Afterword is “Not Now,” and sometimes it is, “Come Back in 20 Years, and Be Sober.”

What was your holiday Afterword this year?

 

Being There

One of my dearest friends lost her 28-year-old son-in-law to cancer yesterday. He and his wife, her daughter, celebrated their three year wedding anniversary only four months ago. These two kids spent almost half their marriage dealing with cancer. Imagine that.

I don’t mind telling you that my husband and I conducted their wedding and did their pre-marital counseling. They were one of the most attentive couples we’ve ever counseled. And they loved each other. They never even had time to get to that middle-aged phase when you hate each other, either. All they ever had was that heady, youthful love and friendship, and then his sickness. I feel so sorry. 

My friend called me yesterday afternoon to tell me her son-in-law was going downhill, but I didn’t listen to my messages until 7:00 this morning. Of course I intended to go up to the hospital after dropping my girls off at school. But when I called my friend, she said that her son-in-law had already died. And she told me how it went. And we cried and said how unreal it seemed and was.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you guys,” I said, after a time. And I truly was sorry. I felt terrible, because I know what it means to have your loved ones nearby during hardship. And my friend said, “That’s truly OK, I know you would have come. And the hospital was packed. You’ve never seen so many people there for one person—relatives, his fellow National Guardsmen, friends. It was incredible. We had the family room just packed. It’s truly OK.”

I knew she meant it, and wasn’t suffering from lack of support. I thought what a way to go: surrounded by loved ones wishing you godspeed on your journey.

I thought, too, about my friend’s daughter and how untimely this is. How she will be the only 27- or 28-year-old in her circle of friends to have suffered and lost so much at such a young age. Already. Imagine that. When you’re supposed to be young and naive, stupid and foolishly invulnerable and immortal in your own head. And that’s been taken from her.

I talked to my other friend today, too, my friend who has just had a new baby over the weekend. A new baby who came with flashing lights and EMTs, for my friend didn’t even know she was in labor until the baby decided to pretty much fall out and be born at home in the bathroom, as her daddy dialed 9-1-1 and tried to catch her with a free hand. Exciting stuff, all right. And all turned out well.

So my friend’s parents and brothers and in-laws all crowded into her small house, so that when her darling toddler son woke up the next morning, he was greeted by all those adoring fans, who promptly whisked him up and fed him, and then took him away to granny and grampa’s house to spoil him for a week while mom and dad recovered and fell in love with new baby sister.

I asked how she was doing, and she said, “Oh, it’s wonderful. I’m glorious! I am so enjoying this new baby. I feel so warm and enclosed and loved, and it’s been so great. Everyone is helping, and all I have to do is nurse the baby.”

This friend of mine has always been surrounded by love and has available, loving parents. She’s always had supportive siblings. Though their family has had some very tough times, they have stuck together and grown as human beings. My friend has also always had good friends, because she herself is a wonderful person. She believes and speaks the best of people. She’s enthusiastic about life and about loving other people. She is so filled up within herself that she has an abundance to give to others, and give she does. She’s someone who really never meets a stranger. The worst she ever does is to become cross. That’s what she says, “I felt so cross.”

She’s charming, really. Cross? Cross?! I wax absolutely bitchy on people, but she is merely cross. And she really is that way. Just a good, warm, kind-hearted human being. I don’t know anyone who knows her and doesn’t say that they feel enriched by knowing her. She is that sort of a human being.

So I started thinking about sorts of human beings. I thought about how my friend’s son-in-law died surrounded by love, and about how my other friend had her baby surrounded by love.  I thought about how this love wasn’t just hanging in the air, because it came from people. And then I suddenly realized just how much I’ve dealt with in my life without a mother and father nearby, or a brother or any family member there for me. I thought about the hours I’ve spent sitting in a hospital by myself, and how only my husband or the children we were raising sat with us, and sometimes a friend from church. I remembered how none of our parents had the time or compassion or—what is it that you have when you will just sit with people, and help them by just sitting and loving on them, and being there? oh… is it love?—whatever it was we needed (it was love we needed). Didn’t have something to give. And really haven’t. And still don’t.

And I thought about all I handled as a young parent, when I could have used help but had none. The one time when my sixth or eighth child was born and I had an infection, and was in a lot of pain, and had to drive 45 minutes to a hospital to see a specialist and how I had to take my newborn and five or seven little children with me, because I had no help. And I did that myself. And didn’t even think about it ’til later, when I realized how I have so often just plodded on and pushed through and taken care of myself.

I realized then that people who have never had that sort of love or support just do it anyway, survive. Live. We do it and we don’t know any better until we get a vision and put into motion the ways and means that lead to that place of Family. Love. Being-there-ness. Then we realize one day that we are giving our children, and they are giving to us and to one another and to others, exactly what we didn’t have, but knew we needed. We’re pioneers in our own families of origin. It’s rough. But we’re making it because we know love is real.

I thought for the zillionth time about how my friend sat with me as Olivia died, and once again I couldn’t get over what that has meant to me. I can’t stop crying as I am sitting here right now. I want to just weep and die over my keyboard at times like this, because a part of my heart breaks all over again. I want to ask, “Why don’t you love me?” And then another part of me sees the family my husband and I have created, and the grownup children who would drop anything at all that they were doing (and have), and will be there for us, and who know how to be there for their friends (and have)… and I know we did good. I know that we had so many fewer love resources and so many big wounds, and yet by God—yes, by the grace of God—somehow we did it. By God’s grace and psychology and yes, by self help and professional help and school, and education.

And my kids, some of them, don’t understand why I’m so big on education. I’ll tell you why, my child: BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION CAN SAVE AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

I mean that. It can. It has saved me and changed the sort of person I am.

And so my friend—the one who had the baby—she told me that her own mother had also tearfully expressed to her how she, as a young mother, didn’t have the family support that she herself has been able to give to her own children. And I thought about how the Bible says “and women shall be saved through the bearing of children.” I thought about how we carry our own selves as we give our children what we know we should have gotten from our parents, but didn’t.

I thought about all those people whose parents or spouses or children die out of time, people like Crazymumma who are not finished growing up themselves and absolutely have to go through hell before they are half ready (and who ever is ready? and yet… go we must). And about my friend’s daughter, who just lost her husband… and how wrong that is. And there was no free pass for her. I know she’s strong, though. And she has a good mom.

I don’t have a conclusion. I do know that it’s hard being a parent. It’s hard being a human being. It’s hard being someone’s child. Life is difficult. Life is suffering. There’s beauty in it, too, but it can be fleeting and sometimes the sun is gone for a long time.

The only thing that really compensates for the way life is, is other people. God is a big help, and I’m not being weird about it when I write that. I love God and I can hardly wait to die, sometimes. I sometimes am just ready to move on, because it ain’t gonna get easier. I am such a spiritual and mental work horse that death seems like a vacation to me, sometimes.

But God is not really my own personal reason for sticking around. My own personal reason is people. That’s right: people. I stick around because it means something, loving others. It means something to hold someone’s hand. It means something to sit in a crowded waiting room and to take turns sitting with a dying young man. It means something to call and tearfully say “I’m sorry.” It means something to show up at the funeral or memorial, tissues in hand. It means something to go to weddings and births, sicknesses, recoveries, anniversaries, drunken dancing parties and christenings, and deaths.

It means a lot. It means a lot to be there for someone. And so I thank God that there has always been someone there for me, a person or even more. How lucky and blessed I am. It reminds me of a verse in Isaiah, I think, where it says, “If even my mother and father abandon me, the LORD will take me up.”

Purity

In our part of the country, we’re more likely to get ice than snow, so when the winds howl and the temperature drops and the precipitation begins, the grownups groan.

I picked up our youngest girls from school early today because of an appointment, and they were chattering  joyfully about the possibility of snow.

“Oh, I hope it snows!” Rosemary exclaimed, clapping her mittened hands with excitement. “Me, too!” rejoined her sisters, practically skipping across the parking lot as the wind threatened to unhat us.

I rolled my eyes, but Rosemary caught me in my moment of cynicism. “Mo-om! You don’t want it to snow?!” she asked with disbelief.

“Not really,” I replied, “because I still have so much to do that requires driving around.”

“That’s what all the grownups say,” Sage commented. “In our whole class there wasn’t one kid who said their parents were excited about the snow.”

Juniper agreed. “They don’t like snow,” she explained.

As we fought the wind to get into the car, I told them that probably the grownups don’t want to drive on the ice, especially since drivers in our area may not know much about driving in ice and snow and it could be dangerous.

“When I grow up, I’m always going to love the snow,” Rosemary declared. “When it snows, I’m going to be sooooo happy! I love the big white flakes! I love the quiet of the whole world when it snows. And I love how when you look outside it’s magical and it seems like a whole different world. And I especially love making snow angels and building snowmen and igloos.”

“I’ll never stop loving snow, not even when I have children! When it snows, I won’t worry about driving around because we’ll all stay home! We’ll build a big fire in the fireplace, and we’ll watch movies and snuggle up under blankets. And if the television goes out, we’ll read books around the fire. And if all the electricity goes out, we’ll light candles and lamps and read ’til it’s too dark to read. And when it’s too dark to read and there’s only one candle left, we’ll tell ghost stories. And when the last candle goes out and it’s dark, we’ll all take naps.”

“I will always love the snow.”

I smiled as we drove away, hoping that her heart stays as pure and optimistic as newly fallen snow.