Tag / Grief

by Michael

Dancing with Death

When I started blogging, my friend David told me to blog about the things that I think about, the things that matter to me.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the decline of my father’s health.  That’s why I’m posting this on both blogs.  I’ve not had much free mental space over the last few months because my dad has been there taking it up with a thousand questions of varying sizes and shapes.

My dad is demented, meaning, he has dementia.  What is the appropriate form for that sentence?  Is my father demented?  It feels like a misuse of language to have to write that way: my father has dementia.  It’s one word or two too long.  Plus, it isn’t true.  Particularly since it feels most days like dementia has my father, like the synapses in his brain are freezing over or cracking or deteriorating or doing anything but firing in the way all my college classes suggested synapses do.  I paid a lot of attention to those classes at U of I.  I got mostly good grades, though I hated statistics and could have done better in Don Dulany’s course, especially if I hadn’t been devoting all that time talking to schizophrenics at strange hours through the night.  But these days I’m thinking that I could have paid more attention.

Anyway, my father’s dementia and the accompanying decline in his condition is essentially unsettling.  My experience of him and his health feels like all the sturdy things in my history with him are getting up, spinning around, and landing in a different place from before.  It feels like every conversation with him, each road trip to Little Rock, leaves me tired from the passing lane and sweating after a long dance with this disease.

And I’m not the one doing the real dancing.  I catch myself to say this.  Over the last six months, since we found out about the strokes and since we’ve started to confuse (i.e., not be able to tell) the stroke’s grip for the dementia’s, I’ve remembered consciously that it’s my father who is suffering.  And that’s the worse part.  Not our collective suffering as we watch or join in as a family responding to our loss and grief.  His suffering is the basic problem here.  I can recover.  Can he?

And I wonder to myself if there is a little grace in my dad not knowing how much he’s suffering.  And I check myself again at the hint of such arrogance.  Can my father, complex man that he is, be written off by my saying, “Well, he doesn’t realize what’s happening to him?”  How can I trust that?  How can I take comfort in the corrosive way the disease is handling him so that his head is all messed up, his memories following?  How can I be encouraged that his brain, eating or sucking or dropping away all the memories which make him him, is so distorting his reality that he is in some way spared?

I ask these questions because I want to be spared.  My father isn’t spared.  We aren’t either.  And these instances of death, these suspensions of time, when I’m not sure if my dad is “there” or “somewhere else,” are not healing.  They are small deaths, and they are upsetting, unsettling, and disturbing.  He is as pained as anyone in this.  He didn’t wish for this end.  And he can’t find the ways to express that any more.  Not on most days.  He’s the one really dancing.

Even though his feet are inching into a straddle some days and stepping normally on other days, it is my dad’s feet that I’m watching.  It is his pair of legs that my eyes fell to the other day as he walked to me on the arm of that nurse.  I had been buzzed into the acute care facility in Searcy, the place where they specialize in treating elderly men and women with psychiatric problems stemming from the disease I keep thinking looks like Skeletor.

He was shuffling slowly, arm wrapped in a sturdy nurse who introduced himself as Billy.  Daddy recognized me and that recognition was a gift even if I was struck by my dad’s gait.  It was an interior compromise, thankful for the recognition and willingness to overlook the pulchritude.

I could overlook that daddy looked bad, really bad.  Bad the way he was when he had the stroke in July.  Bad like when I first saw him in July, my brother Mark at my side, I was wondering where my father’s weight went.  Bad like I saw him for the first time as a truly different figure, no longer the man with muscles and a bench press in his basement with weights I’d never be able to lift.

My father’s arm was attached to his nurse, straddling, dancing, and I met him the rest of the way, took the other arm, and listened to the music of his experience and started dancing with him.  We walked slowly, really slowly.  And instead of going to the designated room, we sat in the closest chairs.  I suggested them because the distance to the room was too far for daddy after the stint from his room and too far for me after driving those eleven hours.

by Michael

“Words Are Too Small”

Emily Allen quotes her sister friend, Sophia, who is reflecting on her son’s diagnosis and experience of Leukemia.  Her son, Jacob, was experiencing hair loss around that time:

I did not cry, not there, but later when going through the pictures of hair falling off. 
It’s just hair, you can say but no, it’s so much more. 
It’s love. 
It’s a statement. 
It’s hope. 
It’s pain.
It’s a side-effect.
It’s a mother’s heart.
Words are too small. 
I have seen my son’s hair fall off, seen the chemotherapy side-effects, all of them.
It is hair, but it is a big deal It is part of our identity, a part we cut and style and color and pay for to feel prettier. 
Without hair we look different, naked, people notice. 
I know God was there, counting, every single hair that fell, every tear. 
And he is there when new grows back, there in every moment.

I read this here at Rachel Held Evans’s blog.

by Michael

Inconvenience of Death

My next four posts will pull from my day yesterday.  It was a different day, unlike most of my Sundays.  Granted, as a pastor, I meet with people on Sundays.  I pray with people.  I talk about God, squint my eyes, and answer questions people have.  But this Sunday was unique.

I left home, and by the time I was passing the perimeter of blue and white officers around the president’s house, I got a call in the car about the death of a member’s mother.  Then I headed to a meeting before worship where me and another member talked theology.  I officiated a wedding for a couple and then ended the day meeting with another couple who’s expecting their first son in 7 weeks.  Inside those movements were all the other details of the day.  I harassed a few men from church for not wearing helmets while bicycling.  I hugged and held people.  I picked up my son and we went to retrieve his grandmother who would sit with him while we were out.  It turned into a long day.  Most of my Sundays are not this full.

So today I want to think about yesterday.  First, the notice of death’s coming.

Death is hardly convenient when it comes.  I say this as a man who has done some thinking about the confusing event.  I go back and forth between considering death an enemy and grounding my view of it in faith.  My own faith rewrites the story of death.  Christianity has encouraging things to say about death.  And still, good words, strong words, feel weak when death comes.

As I thought about the shocking news on that call yesterday morning, I wondered like most people what was on God’s mind.  I wondered whether the deceased had power over her own exit, whether she was close enough with God herself to choose when to meet him on the other side of life.  I wondered about her daughter, her son, her husband, and her son-in-law.  I turned off my radio because the gospel music I was listening to crowded the long thoughts of nothing-but-wondering.

I ran over the conversations I’d had with our member.  I saw her two days before.  I wasn’t sure if she had traveled to see her mother.  I’d later learn that she was with her mother when she died.  In the car, I heard myself whispering things about grace in the midst of death.  I was talking to myself in the car, rehearsing truths, but the truths came too quickly to take root.  I turned the music on again, thinking that music was the best thing to hear when the inconvenient angel hovered.  I told myself that music was better than truth.  Music was better than an answer with fast feet.

I held that member in my mind all day.  I thought about her during the worship service.  I mentioned her to a few people.  The weight of her grief was on me as I went throughout the other parts of my day.  As much as I was present with everyone else, I was accompanied by the anguish of that member and friend.  I imagined the pain, the anticipation of it I had seen in her eyes during our talks about her mother’s cancer, her father’s disposition, and her brother’s long-term care.

It’s interesting to me, inexplicable too, how you can be somewhere fully and yet be somewhere else.  How you can be with people and have some other matter grab you by the ear or the stomach.  Have you ever said to someone something like, “I’m with you in spirit”?  Or “You’ve been on my mind”?  Those words get at the wonder of being in two places, being with two people, being split, I suppose you could say.  I was very much with the couple I was marrying yesterday, but I was also with the couple who was lingering over the last days they had with their now dead beloved.  I was with my son in the car, but as a pastor, I couldn’t help but recall the shadow of death that cloaked over the otherwise bright day.

I read these words last night in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “truth”

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

Isn’t that an image of death?  Hanging dark.  Heavy dark.  Eye-covering dark.  And that darkness, that hanging drape is hardly ever truly welcome.

by Michael

Repeated Rituals of Domestic Life

Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life.  Setting the table.  Lighting the candles.  Building the fire.  Cooking.  All those souffles, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos.  Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.  These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then.  These fragments mattered to me.  I believed in them.  That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots; the two systems existed for me on parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during earthquakes.

From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, 190-191

by Michael

Images of Fragility

I was at my aunt’s table last week, looking over my father’s discharge papers from the hospital.  He had suffered a stroke a few days prior, while we were all at his family’s reunion.  He didn’t come, of course, because he was in the hospital.  I had a sense that he wasn’t going to come to the reunion, an apprehension that I couldn’t quite explain.  I didn’t know it was going to be a stroke.

It took a few days for me and my brother Mark to get by my aunt’s.  I had to return home with Dawn and Bryce and after being away for a week, be at the office for at least a day, long enough to begin feeling overwhelmed by all that I was leaving undone.

We sat at the table, looking at him, inspecting him.  We talked and listened.  I had read the physician’s notes to a chaplain mentor friend over the phone the night before.  I think we were in the mode of getting things done by the time my aunt brought another stack of papers.  In that stack was a folder, brightly colored with faces of elderly people.  It was a resource packet on dementia.  She told us a few weeks before that he had been diagnosed earlier this year.  I flipped the pages, scanning the headers, not really reading at all.

I looked at the people on the cover of the folder and thought back to my father’s face.  I looked over to him.  He was sitting in a large chair, seeing what I wondered.  His vision, memory, and cognition were impacted in a dozen ways from the stroke.  His face had that strange openness that I had seen before on him, back when it was simply my dad’s way of settling.  He isn’t a hurried man.  He is cool, collected, almost distant.  So watching him, after the stroke, I wasn’t surprised that he was somewhere else, detached from the moment with its anxiety, even while the anxiety stemmed from concern for him, his body’s constitution, and the next doctor’s appointment.

My dad was somewhere else.  Perhaps he was taking refuge in his own thoughts.  Perhaps he was between gratitude that we cared and irritation that we intended to be so convincing.

And I looked down at the pictures of those smiling old folks.  Their faces didn’t look like my dad’s.  There were individuals and couples.  A family sat together, if memory serves me.  They all wore smiles.  I didn’t see hints of broken brains and torn memories in their eyes.  I didn’t see the early signs which were discussed on the back side of all those happy people. There were no true images of fragility there.  I had to glance up to see them.  I had to look at my father for that.

by Michael

A Prayer

In a way September 11 has become a day when people in the United States are being reminded of death and loss and grief.  Many families were impacted by the multiple and horrific deaths ten years ago.  And I’m sure people are saying a lot of prayers.  I want to add one of mine, praying for people touched and held by that tragedy and by other deaths as well.

Dear God,

I pray for fathers who have lost their children.  Be gracious to them, and help them live under the weight of their pain.  Help them find people they trust to share that pain with, and please use all kinds of people to strengthen and comfort and hold them together.  I pray that you would speak to them about how you’ve suffered over time and that your suffering would provide windows and doors and openings for them to feel that life is possible.  Enable them to live with splendid memories of their children in their minds.  I pray that you would befriend them.  I ask that you would help them live each day, no matter how long that day is.  Let them find solace in you and in your things.  May they experience your love in surprising ways.  And I pray that they would grow into more loving men, that they would resist the temptations to close and narrow and shorten themselves because of their large hardships in having lost their children.

I pray for children who have lost their fathers.  I ask that you would gift them with space to remember well the men that they loved, that they had good or bad relationships with, and that they called father.  Help them laugh.  Collect their tears when they cry.  Grant them people and loved ones who will encourage them as they visit the hard and grueling memories which come during their losses.  Make sense of the world when they can’t.  Listen to them when they talk to their fathers, when they scream their names in hopes that death didn’t really keep them.  Carry their hopes into your heart, and turn their best prayers into opportunities for your will to be done.  Console them.  Convince them that they are loved by you.  Love them as best you can.

I pray for families, spouses, friends, and loved ones who have lost people that we love.  Will you show us how to react to ourselves and our fears and our questions?  Will you aide us as we run away from truth?  Will you give us courage when we fall into fear and stumble through illusions?  Tell us who you are.  Give us perspective when we need it most.  Open us to light when the world around us goes dark.  Death is difficult, so be with us as we respond in our own ways to the difficulty that doesn’t go away.  Teach us that life and death are known and handled well in your hands.  Be for us what nothing else can be.  Continue to connect us daily to the truth of your power over death, of your ability to right the wrongs of injustice which lead to death, and of your greatness in the face of something that feels so big as grief.

I pray these in and through Jesus Christ,

Amen

by Michael

Guest Post: Dreams For My Father

I asked Aja Carr, a colleague and editor of mine, to write a post for the blog.  She’s a faithful coach and encourager in my own life, though the best word that describes her is friend.  I’m glad to offer you this post, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Dreams For My Father

When I was a kid, I dreaded those days when the teacher asked everyone in the class to stand up and talk about their parents’ occupation. I was proud of my mom, a nurse who’d worked long hours and double shifts to cover our mortgage and private school tuition. But, I was in no ways proud of my father, a man who’d been only a few points away from the intellectual label of, “genius”—when he was forced to undergo that sort of testing prior to his incarceration.

Everyone knew my father was smart. So smart, in fact, that he’d earned a Bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia College and nearly finished a Master’s degree prior to leaving the penitentiary. As a child, I had no frame of reference for his intellectual abilities. Up until the age of twelve, I’d only known him through letters and occasional phone calls. I’d seen him maybe 4 or 5 times before I went to high school…that was it.

I rarely received gifts from my father. The very first thing he’d ever given me was a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It had no value to me back then. But, when I weigh it’s worth in the life of someone who has since spent 11 years in publishing—its value is tremendous. Sometimes, I think of what it must have cost him—how he might have had to barter or save in order to buy a book and then mail it from prison, and what the gesture predicted about who I’d become.

When my father left prison, I had hoped it would mean that my parents would get back together. My hopes daunted, my mother re-married (my step-father is the most remarkable man you’ll ever meet). However, what I would learn (later in life) was that my father had beat my mother in times past. Armed with this knowledge, I was a little embarrassed to have hope for their reconciliation.

My father was released from prison in 1995. It was a bittersweet reunion. Bitter, because I had no desire to know him. Sweet, because the little I had come to know about him answered so many questions I had about myself. His love for books. his love for desserts, his genuine need to be in charge—all things I’d mimicked—even without fully knowing him.

I will never forget sitting at my desk, preparing to work on some pressing project, when I received a call that my father was in the hospital. That was a Monday night.  By the next Sunday, I had watched him lay in bed unable to breathe on his own.  He was unconscious, unaware, unmoved.

This was last November, and by that time, we’d become friends. By that time, I knew that he loved me, and he knew that I loved him. Still, it didn’t hurt any less. The most I’d ever done for my father happened in the 7 days leading up to his death. I was his next of kin (his wife had taken ill the same day he was admitted to the hospital). In those moments, I began to dream about all the things my father could have been and could have done—things he will now never be and never do. I’d come to learn that he was a high-ranking member of the Masonic Order in our city (something I knew nothing about). Watching those Masons keep a vigil at his bedside—one after the other— I knew he had been well loved by them.

My dreams for my father involved being loved in that way by his own children. We loved him, but not the way they loved him. We’d experienced too many absences on his part, too many lost moments, and too many missed birthdays to love him the way that they loved him.

I can’t remember what pressing matters had captured my attention the day I received the call to come to Roseland Hospital. But, I do remember how my father looked in that hospital bed. I remember all the things I wanted to say.  I remember the things that went unsaid.  I remember the things that would have likely gone unheard even if they had been spoken.

When I was a kid, I dreaded those days when other kids would talk about their parents’ occupation. My father went on to become an adjunct English instructor at several city colleges. He even received awards for excellence in the classroom. These awards and his recognition were good for him and for me.

In my dreams, my father was a real father—one who came home everyday. One who wondered what we might be having for dinner and how he could juggle his work assignments so he could be at my dance recitals.

I still dream about him. I still stop in my tracks when someone mentions the Elements of Style. I still brace myself before passing the hospital where he died. I’m still challenged by the thought of his passing. Now, I’ve come to realize that I love him they way they loved him. I just realized it too late.