Tag / Loss

by Michael

“…recollections at soft distance…”

Some would say memory brings life after death.  Perhaps there’s truth in that, but only if we’re content to enjoy our recollections at soft distance, as passing flickers or occasional sparks.  If we’re grasping and desperate, if we want it all too much, if we reach out and try to touch it, what happens then?  It fades so fast from view that we’re left wondering if it was ever there at all.  Perhaps the trick is to find a gentle use for memory.  Learn to cup the small and glorious moments in our hands and treasure them, finding some solace this way.  Otherwise, all they do is remind us that we are too late.  That what is lost is lost forever.

From Emylia Hall’s The Book of Summers (pg. 323)

by Michael

Events That Require Attention

My spiritual director told me, among many other precious things, that there are some events in life that require our attention.  She said that those events don’t necessarily care when they get attention just as long as they get what they deserve.  They interrupt us, sometimes an inconvenient times.  They vie for a spot in our field of vision.

We were discussing my father’s health and my recent visits to see him.  She had mentioned that her mother was ill for years before she died and that she too had some dementia.  Then, she said the most appropriate thing.  These things are in our peripheral vision.  They’re always present, though not always in front of us.  Whatever we do, they are present, waiting, and, often, off to the sides of our lives.

There are other things to pay attention to.  There is the work of ministry, work that seems to flow against common boundaries.  There is the immediate family, in my case a rambunctious two-year old and a wife who studies part-time in grad school.  There is the rest of me.

And the normal events trade places with the peripheral ones, and the pieces of my life dance around until I see what I need to see.  There are moments when what we’ve been changes because of who’s around us.  There are similar moments when we change because who isn’t.

And the event of my father’s health.  The series of moments I’m holding regarding what can only be seen as tentative progress and expected deterioration.  These moments are changing me.

I’ve never been the sporadic type.  I’ve never been impulsive.  I’m comfortable with slower rhythms, with taking care, with intention.  But the slow movement in front of me, and in front of my father, scratches at who I am.  And I’m left with a deepening knowing that, sometimes, attending to the needed things is dreadful.

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.

by Michael

From Migrations of the Heart

I’m reading Marita Golden’s autobiography, Migrations of the Heart.  Her story is compelling and thoughtful and beautifully written.  Can I use beautifully?  It’s hard at times and yet still somehow beautiful.  Her writing is striking and full and lively.

In this passage, she’s writing about a very powerful loss.  Her first pregnancy ended with what her doctor called a spontaneous abortion.  Ms. Golden is “taking me to school” in her writing.  I’m learning.  I’m listening.  As she’s talked about her experiences in this autobiography of loving Femi, a Nigerian, and moving into his culture after having lived for years in the US, I’m learning, through her, of what it took for her to adjust.  New expectations, new rules, spoken and unspoken.  I’m learning of how manhood and womanhood was seen and expressed in her life.  I’m learning about being a husband.

At home I recuperated, confined by the doctor, Femi and my own desire to bed.  Almost immediately I began to write furiously, with the fervor of a long-awaited eruption.  I filled page after page with an outpouring the loss of my child released.  The writing affirmed me, anointed me with a sense of purpose.  Most of all, it slowly began to dissipate the sense of failure that squatted, a mannerless intruder, inside my spirit.  The writing redeemed my talent for creation and, as the days passed, made me whole once again.

In the evenings Bisi came to visit, and for several days under her hand I received a postpartum “native treatment.”  Filling the tub with warm water and an assortment of leaves, grasses and herbs, her hands pressed and gently kneaded my stomach in a downward motion.  “This will bring out the poisons,” she explained.  The water was the color of strong tea and the steam rising from it made me drowsy.  Drying me with a towel, she warned, “Tell uncle to let you rest.  Let your body heal.  Tell him to be patient.”

“I will,” I assured her, “I will.”

Mourning the loss of his child, his son, Femi inhabited the house with me but was dazed with grief.  As I ate dinner from a tray in bed one evening, he said, “We lost a man.”

“No, Femi, we lost a child.”

“We lost my son,” he insisted.  “And we must find out why this happened.  What went wrong, so that it won’t happen again.  Next time you will not drive; the roads alone could cause a miscarriage.”

“Femi, the doctor told me that sometimes a weak or defective fetus will spontaneously abort.  That perhaps if the child had gone nine months, it may not have been a healthy baby anyway.”

In response he quieted me with a wave of his hand.  “We will be more careful next time.”