Turtle Crossing

This morning, I passed a turtle on the edge of traffic.  It had retreated into it’s shell, but was facing the middle of the road.  I stopped, put on the blinkers, and backed up next to the turtle.  Other cars stopped while I carried it across to a spot on the other side of the roadway.  As I drove away, happy to have done a small good deed, memories of my father flooded in.

Helping a turtle across the road was something Dad would have done —  and did whenever he had the chance.  I could imagine myself, as a child in the back seat, groaning about the delay.  My father taught me to appreciate the turtles in life. He taught me to be patient with their needs and care for them.

I wish I could thank Dad again for his life lessons.  What wouldn’t I give for one more day with him…

turtle-xing

Birthday

From Sharon’s Blog:

You would have been 68 today.

In my heart you are still alive and here.  I remember you everyday.  All of us who loved you do.  You are that close to us, so present you made yourself in our lives.  You changed who we were and loved us so much that we could never forget YOU.   Your joy became our joy as our joy became yours.

Your eyes sparkled with the joy of family life:  babies, burps, bunnies…sounds and silence: never rushed or reckless, you listened and loved us in an unforgettable way.

Your clients still reach out to tell me a story about how you touched their lives and how you still do.   The grandchildren always talk about you with happy and reverent tones.

I knew how lucky, how very blessed, I was to have you in my life.   And I remember how we would look at each other with disbelief to think that we could or would ever come to an end of our time together–the love that we shared was so intense and passionate that we could not imagine ourselves in the pangs of death.  How could it end?

You were never afraid of death.  You consciously became more and more ready as you weathered the years.  More than two years later, I have found your preparatory letters, the living will, and all that I knew was confirmed.  You made yourself clear.  There could be no mistaking your will.  Nothing had been misunderstood.

Your passing remains an unsolved mystery of my unfinished journey.  The solitude is still and silent and does not provide answers to the unending questions.   Why did we miss the signs of your illness?  You were happy to the end.   That last evening you were sitting next to me on the couch mimicking our canary in a joyful duet.   Then you were gone.

I have continued and I don’t know how.  Some days are like a dream.   Nothing suffices the chasm of your loss.  There is still much to be enjoyed, but my desire is dimmed and diminished by your departure.

We had made each other the center of our lives.  How can one be gone and the other remain?      I am less and yet more than I was.  I have had to grow parts of me that I didn’t need before.  Yes, I have remained.

Death stands now before me and comes closer each day.  Life is inside me pulsing and sustaining each breath, each thought and beginning again.   The newness never stops.  New occasions teach new duties.  I remake myself over and over as life’s ebbing waves push me along a new shoreline I am meant to explore.

And I am held by your love now as then as I make my way forward, sometimes back, yet forward again.   I will always be searching to find you again.

Grief, Grace, and Grattitude

From Sharon’s Blog:

I posted the following just four weeks after Lewis died.  He died two years ago today.  It seems, on an emotional level, that I was in a kind of deer-in-the headlight catatonic trance for at least a year.

And now these last twelve months have been an uphill battle emotionally with lots of valleys and even abysses along the way.  The trance gone, the feelings have been very raw.  Looking back and reading the words I wrote in June 2009, it is hard to believe I could write them at all.    Their source, of course, was in the truth of the relationship Lewis and I enjoyed together, his loving presence in my life.  That presence cannot be taken from me and will always endure.  And that presence has been an essential force in my healing through grief.

How can it be that the one whom I have lost is the one who also keeps me going?   This paradox has become my most abiding comfort…..and reflects the one universal and essential truth…that God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.  DEUS CARITAS EST.

Four Weeks (June 2009)

It has been nearly a month since Lewis experienced his earthly death.  He died of heart failure.  It was totally unexpected, undiagnosed, and as best I can remember his symptoms had been scant for those of us who loved him dearly.  That he died of “too big a heart” is perfectly fitting for the man I loved.  I was the largest benefactor of his unreasonable and sometimes delirious ability to love unconditionally, I was his fierce defender and I was his most potent critic, often expressing dismay at how much he was giving of himself to me and others when he was wearing thin and becoming stretched at his seams.

His seams, as I knew them, were very transparent.  You could feel when he was getting cranky.  He was not that way very often, but when he was his face muscles would stiffen and he would firm his lips and hold them tightly together to prevent himself from saying something he would regret.  Being warned, I would wait for his sigh, his long relaxed breath, and then we would begin to communicate in some other way.

What is so wonderful to remember about him is how extraordinarily happy he would become while observing and interacting with life and its pulses, its unique gifts of beauty and intricate design, and its simple eloquence.

He loved collecting feathers from our two ringneck doves.  He preferred the smallest ones, pure white and symetrical and kept them in bottles and plastic containers for display.  He kept an assortment of polished stones that he again would deposit in various preferred places in our home and office–some he found in his  daily walks and some he would collect through his travels here and there.   He also collected seeds and nuts of all kinds and had them displayed on his office shelfs where he could share them with clients and describe his affinity for them in his daily sharing and work.

He was a reader of books and literature of all kinds.   Complex works of scientific scholarship, books of wisdom, all kinds of science fiction and fantasy, religious and theological writings and scholarship, novels, how-to books, historical understandings and works of the ancients were a part of his everyday interest.   I cannot tell you how sad I am to have lost my companion who had such an encylopedic mind.

One of his beloved clients is a woman who is a writer of science fiction and fantasy.  He always looked forward to his time with her, a discussion of her current writing struggles, and he much enjoyed providing her encouragement in her craft.

He was very intentional in his life.  I was the most favored recipient of his kindly intentions.  During the last two years of his life he was slowly working to program me to fasten my seatbelt and harness it safely around the bottom of my mid-section as a matter of habit.  It didn’t take much to tip me to the side of feeling irritated by his trying to direct me, so it became a delicate balance and he was very good at it.  He intentionally responded so as to increase my patience and other character parameters in much the same way.  Fortunately, we were both inclined to laughter and prankishness, so he didn’t have to help me there.

In the last five years we were sharing an office daily.  Many of my clients, and certainly members of our staff, took object lessons from the way he would deal with my excessiveness and enjoyed his frank and sometimes capricious repertoire.

It added humility to our lives.

I have missed him these weeks in every possible way that can be a part of one’s daily encounter.  His presence, his helpfulness, his touch, his light snoring, his companionship, his joviality, his principled rhetoric and playful expressions, his ability to keep our home and office running without breakdown for want of lightbulb or paper and most of all I miss his exorbitant love.

I know from being his life-long companion that he stepped into the heavenly kingdom and God’s side without a scratch or even the smallest of pauses.  He had been a devoted journeyman apprentice of God’s plan and sought to walk in the Light everyday and in every way.  This gives me the most comfort:  that he and God are on the same ” line”  listening to me as I ask for help and guidance each day.   Sometimes it is quite a conversation.

I know that there are others in God’s presence, too, listening and encouraging each of us mortals as we struggle with our loves, losses and lemons.

We are persuaded to move forward, to not flinch from the journey, to enjoy each moment of our passage and to keep God’s dream for humankind as our vision, as our muscle and our innermost hope.   We may cry and feel the pain of our fears and demons but we will always be able to reemerge in the Light.

As the first shaker (1807) hymn with notes tells us:

The heavens of glory are our Destination.  We’re quickly advancing to the that happy shore.  We’re traveling on in the regeneration.  And when we get through we will sorrow no more!

Light as a Feather

From Sharon’s Blog:

Yesterday evening I stopped by my husband’s grave.  Near his gravestone are two small trees we planted that now reach two to three feet of height.  Dangling among the branches were several lovely feathers an anonymous friend of Lewis’ had attached in his honor.  My tears began to flow as I recognized their kindness and how the friend must remember Lewis’ love of fine-feathered tetrapods and their vaned plumes. He would keep his feather collections in bottles or in his top drawer or at his office on a shelf.

Sometimes he would take time with adults or children in the practice to share his feather cache of the week.

The day of his burial I went to his office and found a large jar filled with a variety of feathered specimens.  I brought it to the burial and invited friends and family to decorate his burial urn with feathers in his honor.

A few weeks later our office manager stopped by the gravesite and found an owl resting on his stone and later that year I found an owl feather in its shadow.  Nature itself honors him.

I am thinking more this morning about my dear husband and was struck by this thought:

Lewis had an incredible lightness of being and was never a burden to love.   A feather, then, is a perfect tribute to his memory.

I googled and found an apt poem by Eileen T. Waldron from which I have lifted (and repositioned a bit) these fragments:

Light as a feather
Dancing on air

Nothing to hinder
Flightless no more
Wind is my passion
With it I soar

Like Eagles on thermals
I have been freed
To fly over rainbows
With dauntless wings

The sky ever beckons
With new joys to share
I’m light as a feather
Dancing on air

Thanks Dad

After cleaning off my car and playing in the snow with my girls I was standing in my garage wishing for something good to drink. I looked around and found a 6-pack of IBC root beer bottles on a shelf and opened one up. It hit the spot perfectly. Jackie just told me that dad brought them over last Spring, and they have been sitting since.

I’d like to think that Dad reached down from heaven this afternoon with a cold root beer for me. Thanks Dad.

Wedding Anniversary

From Sharon’s Blog:

We had a great Christmas.

The tree was up, the lights were lit. Presents were ready. Your mom was here.

The grandchildren toasted you on New Years. They told me over and over again how much they miss you, how they don’t like it that you died the way you did. On Sunday morning one stopped eating her breakfast and just sat there silently, and when I mentioned that she seemed sad and asked about it, she left the table. Her sister said quietly, “she misses Boka.”

Everybody was home. I made your favorite foods. Even the beef roast at Christmas had turnips fixed the way you like them. No one cared really, but I did, and I knew you would have liked them cooked that way.

I bought my own presents this year, and they never got put under the tree. That was hard. And sad.

I even got one for you, the best one I could come up with: to get your mother here and make her feel welcome in our home again this holiday and to love her as you would have loved her: to take care of her, see after her feet, help her with her bath, spend time with her, listen to her stories and reassure and comfort her. It was a great joy for me to be with her.

I shared with her what I thought would matter the most: your childhood and family pictures in the album she had made so many years ago. I found her looking through it again and again over our week and a half together. A familly picture album of ours. All of the condolence cards, the whole basket of them, filled to the brim. Mostly from your friends. Telling us how much you meant to them.

I told her how grateful I am that she raised you so well. How fortunate I was to have had you in my life and how much I miss you. We cried quiet tears together.

Always humble. Always cheerful. Your mom. Just like you.

You would have loved the way the girls played and asked questions of your mom, following her from place to place. And she read them a story at bedtime, taking her time with them and answering all their questions, just like you.

It was painful saying goodbye at the airport. Very painful.

You should have been here.

It would have been better. Perfect, I’d say.

I Will Rise

By: Chris Tomlin
Click here for the music video.

There’s a peace I’ve come to know
Though my heart and flesh may fail
There’s an anchor for my soul
I can say “It is well”Jesus has overcome
And the grave is overwhelmed
The victory is won
He is risen from the dead

[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles’ wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise

There’s a day that’s drawing near
When this darkness breaks to light
And the shadows disappear
And my faith shall be my eyes

Jesus has overcome
And the grave is overwhelmed
The victory is won
He is risen from the dead

[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles’ wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise

And I hear the voice of many angels sing,
“Worthy is the Lamb”
And I hear the cry of every longing heart,
“Worthy is the Lamb”
[x2]

[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles’ wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise

Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way

By: LeAnn Rimes
Click here for the music video

Got a date a week from Friday with a preacher’s son
Everybody says he’s crazy
I’ll have to see

I finally moved to Jackson when the summer came
I won’t have to pay that boy to rake my leaves

I’m probably going on and on
It seems I’m doing more of that these days

[CHORUS 1:]
I probably wouldn’t be this way
I probably wouldn’t hurt so bad
I never pictured every minute without you in it
Oh you left so fast
Sometimes I see you standing there
Sometimes it’s like I’m losing touch
Sometimes I feel that I’m so lucky to have had the chance to love this much
God gave me a moment’s grace
‘Cause if I’d never seen your face
I probably wouldn’t be this way

Mama says that I just shouldn’t speak to you
Susan says that I should just move on

You oughta see the way these people look at me
When they see me ’round here talking to this stone

Everybody thinks I’ve lost my mind
But I just take it day by day

[CHORUS 2:]
I probably wouldn’t be this way
I probably wouldn’t hurt so bad
I never pictured every minute without you in it
Oh you left so fast
Sometimes I see you standing there
Sometimes I feel an angel’s touch
Sometimes I feel that I’m so lucky to have had the chance to love this much
God gave me a moment’s grace
‘Cause if I’d never seen your face
I probably wouldn’t be this way

Probably wouldn’t be this way

Got a date a week from Friday with a preacher’s son
Everybody says I’m crazy
Guess I’ll have to see….

Six Months

From Sharon’s Blog:

I have to admit the fact.  He is gone.  Forever in this life.  Gone from my touch, my hearing, all my senses.  It is a particular loneliness to face that change.  For when you are intimately connected and married to someone your senses intermingle and all of the ways the body goes about connecting the other become fixed:  routines get established at a very visceral and I am sure cellular and sub-cellular level.  Phermones are just a hint of how lovers hook up their senses to one another.

So I am adrift from all that now, but some part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the sameness, the routines, the regularity, the indivisibility of our accumulated oneness to reassert itself and demand that I conform and get back into the routine.

No matter, though, it won’t and can’t work.  I am but a fragment now of what that oneness had become, a solitary interloper on a strange new planet.

I am making a few new connections, feeling my boundaries and oneness now as an individual in ways that surprise me.  I can see that I can go on, even alone, the rest of my days.  My mother did that when she lost my father.  I can feel a deep commonality with her now.  My empathy for her grows as I have assumed a taste of some of the shoes she has walked in. 

I understand now, even more, her fierce independence and irascibility that sometimes threw me for a loop.  I would think we would be doing fine, that she was comfortable with some aspect of her life with me, and then she suddenly would take a right turn just when I was expecting her to go straight ahead.  No wonder.  Muscles need to be stretched, heart muscles and head muscles are no exception.

The truth is, of course, that I would like to find a nice replacement for Lewis.  Someone who loves me much as he did, who has many of his qualities, who is a great companion, and who is a stimulating person with unique strengths to bear in a relationship.  I don’t mind quirkiness, and I don’t expect a saint.  Largeness of heart is my most important criterion. 

Let us hope that I am able to put out the kind of positive energy and attentiveness that will encourage such a relationship to grow. 

If it doesn’t, I won’t be any worse for the wear. 
And I am sure I’ll be OK and find my way no matter the way this goes.

Life is like a box of chocolates.   You never know….

Just ask Forrest. 

Finding My Own Way

From Sharon’s Blog

myself with my mother at six

myself with my mother at six

Some of my friends have suggested that I see a therapist.   Recently, after a bout of arrhythmia I was evaluated at the Washing

ton Hospital Center and the psychiatrist there, who saw me for only ten minutes, also suggested I start taking an antidepressant SSRI, and gave me the name of a colleague who could see me.  

Maybe, quite possibly, I do need to see someone.   The tests indicate that my heart is basically sound, I was reassured.  Yet I puzzled over the issue of her referral.

All my life, when I have been struggling with problems, significant problems, I have looked outside myself for answers.  I have read books.  I have talked with my friends.  I have googled what could be googled before there was a google. 

But this time, I don’t think this is what I need to do.   I believe that I need to turn my search inward. 

The truth is there cannot be anything much more devastating to me than to have lost my husband so suddenly, while we were both still quite in the fullness of our lives.  

I see now how everything about me was so fastened to him and it was from our connection that I experienced meaning in my life.

We observed our friends, our children, the political process, the beauty of each day, even the despair that comes from defeat or tragedy, from the aperture of our relationship.  There was a unity of perspective and experience.

But now I am one again.   A lot of who I became in the relationship was unconsciously driven–what we ate, what we accumulated, the way we spent our money, the friends we made, the cultural pleasures we shared–and Lewis, more than I, was much more aware of his choosing and the need to simplify and separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives.

Now that he is gone, the choices are mine alone.   The friends I make and keep.  The books I will keep and the ones I will throw away.  His belongings:  where will they go, to whom will they be given?  Do I keep the house or sell it?  The boat? 

Do I try to see more of the world or stay here near my sons, their families, the grandchildren?  Some of both?

One thing is for certain.  I am more conscious and grateful in my work with my clients.  To have the opportunity to share in the depth, struggles and triumphs of their lives is a rare privilege.   And without their understanding and support these weeks I cannot imagine how I could have kept going…  

And my friends:  how fortunate I am to have them.  Lewis and I were so fortunate to have made such good friends.  My awareness of their kindness, goodness and generosity grows with each passing day. 

Meanwhile, everything in my life is re-examined.   I am on trial, sitting in the witness stand, pondering in the jury box, standing in judicial robes pronouncing myself verdicts, and then watching from the seats in the court room and writing and reading my daily news, sometimes just a twitter.   I am given more days to live but what am I to do with myself?

I remember once being moved so much by a sermon of a chaplain in Huntington, West Virginia.  The chaplain worked with young students at the university and observed that when each student came there it was as if they had to sort through every value they had accepted in their childhood and examine each one and then decide for themselves what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to modify or discard.   He compared it to a cloak one would wear and there would be symbols or badges covering the cloak and each student wearer decides which figures would continue to worn and kept in their emerging identity.   One at a time.

I have to do something similar while I am at the same time losing what has been my comfort zone and I know all too well that I cannot be sure at all what number of days may lie ahead.

To turn inward at this time is challenging.   It is easy to glide, to let time pass and pretend or imagine that little has really changed.   Some part of me wants this bargain with reality.   And as a therapist I know that I help create my own reality and that often in life the best answer to any dilemma is to do nothing.   To let things be.   So I weigh these paths and choices in my mind.  A kind of to be or not to be sort of thing.

Often my loss breaks through and I find myself feeling as if I am broken and beyond repair.   I ache in every possible way.   Everything I touch, see, smell, or hear reminds me of what is gone, of him.   I rebel, moan and lament.  I mourn and mourn some more.  I am in a blind and altered state and I have missed the fullness that is left, the love that surrounds me.   The happiness of my grandchildren.  The morning air.  The delight and mess of my pets.  

I readjust myself and just as quickly, almost, the experience is reversed and everything I touch, see, smell, or hear seems all the more significant, precious and irreplaceable.

My awareness softens and I can see more easily the whole of my life again.

One thing is for certain.  I must simplify and redraw the lines of my identity so that I am ME and not what WE were.

And while I am doing that I must deal with the task of reducing the stuff that was his and ours determining what to keep, what to sell or give away, and what I can discard forever not just put in a box somewhere. 

I am just getting started.    I have a ways to go and a certain zest for the journey, tears and all. 

Yesterday I talked with my office manager, Betty, about my decision.  I told her I thought I would continue without professional advice or medication.

I asked her opinion.  She says she thinks that I am OK and that she would be worried if I weren’t struggling like this.  She has assured me that if she sees that I am really faltering she will let me know.    She reassured me.

Her reassurance helped.  So do the words of others.  And so do writers and poets.

Take these poems for instance:

Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden 

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

  Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht 

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee.
Their flight sets the boulevards streaming.
And you know: he whom they flee is the one
you move toward.  All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back into the source of everything.
You thought you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain.
Now the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered
leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.