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.”

Wasp

One year after Olivia’s death, my teenage and adult children and I were playing a game called Imaginif, in which the players answer questions about one another. I was the subject of the question, “If this player were an insect, which one would she be?” The possible answers were louse, ant, wasp, praying mantis, butterfly, and glow worm. I guessed that they would say ant; after all, the ant is industrious, a good team player, and can carry up to 50 times its own weight. Surely they would say I’d be an ant. But, no. Those who knew me best said I’d be a wasp. Other than the daughter who had just become part of the family, who deemed me a butterfly, the other children who had lived with and loved me for years knew me as a wasp.

My son Reed explained that a wasp builds a nest and will attack if you try to disturb that nest. Cedar said, “Mom, you can step on an ant and kill it, but if you try to get a wasp, you are going to get hurt.” Fern and Larkspur agreed: you don’t want to mess with the wasp. They’ll protect their nest at any cost. “You fight for us and make our lives better,” Reed commented. His brother agreed, pointing out that a family like ours needed a mother like me.

I was amazed at their agreement, and surprised to see that I carried judgments about wasps, ants, butterflies, and glow worms. Oh, how I wanted to be a butterfly or a lowly glow worm, if not a delight and thing of beauty in the world, then at least someone with the quality of domestic humility. But not a wasp. Anything but a wasp.

My children saw my waspishness as a good thing, my personality foundational to the success of our family; yet all I could think about was how ugly and terrible a wasp is, doing no good for anyone. I realized that I had been carrying negative judgments of myself for many years, that these judgments had led me to abandon parts of myself, and that I had not fully lived out my real self. At home, among long-time friends, and professionally, I had been myself and made it work. But at church, among Christian friends, I had lived out a self that had the power and industry of the ant, but not the fearsomeness of the wasp. That fearsomeness had come into sharp focus while Olivia lay ill and dying; the power of death and of my waspishness had frightened the weak-hearted away. I could see how and why I had lost one of my oldest friends and lost interest, too, in my churchified relationships: they weren’t real.

Olivia’s death heralded the loss of parts of my self that I’d carried for too long and that would do me no good where I was going. The negative judgments I’d made of myself in the past had resulted in my rejecting that self in part. Among church ladies, I had played the role of appeaser, helper, cheerleader, teacher, and even healer. I had won and maintained friends by playing the part of a glow worm, an ant, or a butterfly, when the entire time my true nature was, in fact, that of a wasp. A wasp: a fiercely protective, industrious creature you might use as the mascot for your athletic team or fighter jet squadron, one who intimidates through implied threat. In such a small body, a fearsome sting.

Before Olivia’s death, many of my relationships with women in the church had been based largely on my ability to give other women what they needed or wanted under the guise of servanthood, even though I wasn’t serving out of my real self. After Olivia’s death, and the day my children and I discussed wasps, I had to ask myself why I had been willing to settle for being useful rather than loving and being loved. Church friends who had been abandoning, shallow, or indifferent during Olivia’s illness and death had made me think deeply about what it actually means to be a Christian. Christ-ian: One who follows Christ. What judgments had I made about my own self that made me willing to compromise the only self I had?

By the time Olivia died, only my industry and usefulness seemed to redeem the more difficult aspects of my personality. And yet the Bible I claimed to believe said that I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), or, as Isaiah prophesied:

Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker–

An earthenware vessel among the vessels of earth!

Will the clay say to the potter, “What are you doing?”

Or the thing you are making say, “He has no hands”?

Woe to him who says to a father, “What are you begetting?”

Or to a woman, “To what are you giving birth?”

(Isaiah 45:9-10)

I had quarrelled with my Maker, often asking Him why He had made me thus. When it came down to it, and a life and death situation occurred, He stripped me down to my bare bones and showed me of what stuff I was made, what fearful and wonderful stuff. Fearful, like a wasp. Fearful, making you put your hand on your mouth in amazement. Wonderful and beloved. Cherished in every way. Loved for who I am, because God made me, and loves me. Thou art good, and Thou doest good. There was no mistake when He made me, any more than there was a mistake when Olivia was made, wonderful child, beautiful daughter. And yet I so harshly judged myself, was such an abandoning mother to my own self. No wonder I had an affinity with orphans: I was one.

I knew this, of course. I knew it all, but somehow the empty space where Olivia was, and the long stretches of time and aloneness her illness and death had carved into my life also gave me space to breathe, to think, and to be with my self. I was like a wasp, yes. As my pastor had said, I have a “formidable intellect.” I’d had something formidable about me my entire life, even though I didn’t mean to. God had made me with a lot of ability, intelligence, and energy, the kind that always wished to be male so I could do something with it. The kind that gets females labeled “bitch.” And I had judged myself as a bitch, a wasp, and any manner of ignoble creatures when, in fact, God had made me and I was His bride, and He loved me with an everlasting love. Like Lucifer, I had ascended to the throne of God and passed judgment on myself, even though there is only one judge and one lawgiver. Olivia’s death had cast me down from my high place. The year after she died, I was finally able to welcome the view from my lowly position.

I was weary of churgh-going and church ladies and preachers who scream at you from the pulpit, because I was weary to the bone of my self. I was appalled at what passed for compassion among the people I’d attended church with because I had no compassion for myself! I reeled in this state of disequilibrium for months, discombobulated to the nth degree.

Following Olivia’s death, I came to terms with my own hypocrisy and that of some of the people with whom I’d closely associated. I embraced my inner wasp and stung myself silly, over and over again. I forgave, reconciled with, and finally vetted the friends or family who had abandoned me when I needed them most. I hated them because I hated the part of myself that loved people like that, and because on some level I needed them to be everything I rejected in myself.

After Olivia died, my wasp self was born again. Like the queen wasp who goes down into the ground all winter long and awaits the spring, I went down into the cold and dark. I waited, my buzzing wings and hateful stinger still. Quiet. Brooding. Waiting.

I came out a queen without no kingdom or subject other than my self, and I built a new comb. I sealed a thousand fertile things in the cells of my heart; they are still growing.

The Nandi people of Kenya used to paint themselves with white clay to signify their transformation into invisible ancestral spirits. After Olivia’s death, I became an invisible ghost in my deepest self, dreaming at night that I held my daughter as we both heaved with sobs, by day balancing checkbooks, planning menus, home schooling the children.

How did I heal after Olivia died? I never did. I went into a tomb, I was swallowed by a great whale, I was shipwrecked and cast into the tossing waves of the sea, and three years later I emerged, a creature once whitewashed, but now etiolated by life in the underworld.

Tribulation is Treasure

Writing about my daughter’s death has been disturbing. I’ve found my sleep upset by difficult dreams, even though they also always contain some symbol of transcendence. I’ve been carrying around a weighty sorrow and disappointment these past few weeks, probably not all arising from her death. But it’s simpler to think that it’s all about that particular sorrow.

My son-in-law and I were talking about the trying summer we’ve had, which began with his father’s suicide. He had an email from an attorney addressing his “putative” claim to part of his father’s estate, which was ridiculous because under our state laws his claim is in no way putative. His claim is actual. But, because of the email and the way our summer went, we’ve dubbed this The Putative Summer. It was summer, all right, but we experienced few or none of the usual joys of summer, just funerals and grieving and disturbing questions.

Our Putative Summer made me think about things I don’t want to think about, much. I’ve carried around a tennis-ball sized knot right below my heart for some weeks now. Writing about how I’ve “healed” has, ironically, pushed me back to that place where

The whole head is sick,

And the whole heart is faint.

From the sole of the foot even to the head

There is nothing sound in it,

Only bruises, welts, and raw wounds,

Not pressed out or bandaged,

Nor softened with oil.

(Isaiah 1:5-6)

We seem to have consensus that people integrate their great losses and griefs and go on with their lives, for the most part. But there may also be unresolved grief, delayed grief, chronic grief, delayed grief, distorted grief, somatized grief, and interferences with grief. Parents who have lost a child may rush to conceive another child or adopt one, replacing the lost child and thus sealing the fate of the unborn with a weight too heavy for a baby to carry. They may make shrines to the dead in their homes, or may become bitter and angry. Marriages end. There is no doubt that for some, there is no “healing,” no return or progression to a state where there is no longer any infirmity arising from the loss.

What I think about most is not how I healed, but how I changed after Olivia’s death. I changed in such profound ways that I completely abandoned some of my former habits and some of my former relationships. One of my closest friends deserted me as Olivia lay dying, and even though we later made peace, I ultimately decided that she was not a friend worth keeping. I would not have made this decision earlier in my life, for in olden days I willingly suffered fools and weak people who needed someone like me to prop them up. I look back at who I was before Olivia died, how indiscriminately helpful and giving I was at times, and I feel sick to my stomach because I know that I sometimes gave out of guilt over having so much. If not for Olivia’s death, I might have continued to live out of guilt, an appeaser and mollifier for the rest of my adult life. How I thank God that I did not.

Like many others who have lost children, I changed most in my thinking about what matters. In The Worst Loss, Barbara Rosof writes that the majority of bereaved parents say that their values shifted dramatically after their child’s death. Their dedication to “the conventional markers of success-promotions, a nicer house, more money and things-all mattered much less to them after their child died. Their commitments changed as well” (258).

Before Olivia died, I was more committed to fostering the growth of other peoples’ real selves than my own. This changed as I became more of my true self after she died. I had held onto God through the most terrifying experience, and He had made marvelous to me His lovingkindness in a besieged city. While this steeled me in my innermost being, it also compromised the patience I’d had with ridiculous people in the past. I became sick to death of hypocritical Christians. I stopped going to church for a year, and stayed home and worshiped God on my own. Some mornings, while my husband took all our children to church, I stayed for an hour and a half on my face on our bedroom floor, my heart rent in two.

My true self sprang out of the head of my old self after Olivia died. She was my teacher even in death, and I think that it has taken every bit of eight years to make sense of what happened. A place that had never been hard in me hardened and became immovable under the developmental demands of middle age and the tutelage of sorrow.

I don’t have time for foolishness any more. I hear the clock ticking.

. . . any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery,

or a borrowing of misery,

as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves,

but must fetch in more from the next house,

in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did,

for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it,

and made fit for God by that affliction.
If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold,

and have none coined into current money,

his treasure will not defray him as he travels.
Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it,

but it is not current money in the use of it,

except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.

 

John Donne, From “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris