Important

    Where can you trace stories back to hope?  What can you make endings of?

I played by the graveside.

Mildly hushed for being a distraction to the service.  I didn’t mind, but I was bored.  So I picked pieces of grass and laid them on the stones nearby by and traced lots of names with my fingers.

Now I know.

All those little children, in the chained off section of the cemetery...they’d like that best.  A four year old making a pile of grass on the headstones.  Finding a way to play through a funeral service and wondering why nobody was paying attention to me.  It makes me smile.  If there is life after death I think they smiled too.  At having their names touched by the hands of a child baptizing ashes with torn bits of the world around them.  The sun was too hot and at some point I moved to the shade of the lone tree outside the perimeter of the infant section. 

I wonder now.

Why were the headstones smaller?  Why I dreamed the night before he died of all the things that happened.  When I woke up in the red tent instead of the green one and knew it was true.  The night before I had called my father by his name, because he hadn’t yet heard my mother.  It sounds almost the same as “dad”.  Mildly chided for the disrespect but I didn’t mind.  We were yelling, my mother and I, and it was important.

I know now.

24 years forward, I’ve a child the age of this memory.  We’re going camping today.  He calls me and his dad by our names sometimes and plays thoughtfully in the dirt.  Still often mildly chided for various things as four year olds are.  He loves to capture attention and tell us about his dreams.  I’m older and wiser and tired and I’ve changed my name.  I know death comes in more than a grave and always wish I dreamed the night before to make waking up the next day easier.  Sometimes I wonder if my whole life is just something born too early.  Sensitivity like pale skin where anybody can see my insides.

So much is muddy between then and now.  So much is senseless, inexplicable, meaningless, and heartbreaking.  And you ought to be silenced if you think otherwise.  As Richard Rohr says, “Higher stages of consciousness always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!”  Stop trying to make sense of things for a bit. It’s better for us all that way. 

But, this very little brother of mine gave me something I do not think I ever knew until just this moment that I have needed to stay.

Grief.

The way (gift?) of it, that comes back around, that never goes away, that you awaken to, that you lay to rest.  A name on a stone in the grass.  Pain in the wilderness, a flight for life, birth, 90 minutes of a beating heart, and waking up the next day.  It is a part of living in this world, the saltwater pool of memory.  A language we all learn without words and then find a way to speak.

I have to finish packing now.  We’ve got a red trailer and we’re going to set up a green tent.  The top is open to the stars and we’ll be far enough out into the dark that light pollution won’t block the view.  And as we look up I think we’ll all listen for stories of when we were younger, though the endings we dreamed may be farther off than the mourning.

We will be imagining, my children and I.

And that is important.

Questions

"You think I prayed for this?" -The Handmaid's Tale, Episode 10 'Night'

The first time I wore borrowed clothes.  I sat in the company of three women, with two dozen children between them, cautiously asking aloud, “The stretch marks, they go away, right?”

In the uproarious laughter that followed I understood: permanence.  These purple lines traced around and out from my belly to my thighs were a part of me I could never erase.

I dropped off the last of my maternity clothes today.  Over near a decade of childbearing, I curated via sales and splurges a wardrobe to trick the eye.  Ruched seams and skinny jeans best keep the illusions of smooth curves over weary flesh, in case you need to know. 

The consigner tallied up the items worth something and handed me a check.  It will be enough to buy a nice bottle of wine.  I stood there for a moment, rejects in hand, knowing it was time to walk away but froze, mumbling a confession about unexpected feelings.  She let out a thin smile offering a handshake and name.  I took it.  She wasn't the type for hugs and I needed sparing the embarrassment of asking.  With a deep breath, I turned around and managed to make it to the car intact.

No one tells you about the heartbreak of fertility.  How you’ll count the days each month, and panic at the slightest wave of nausea.  Every day late compounds the terror that lives on the fringe of your mind, lurking in the dark, ready to quench any fleshly passion.  Oh the guilt you feel for wishing to bleed.  It’s a voiceless shameful ingratitude to want your life for once, over another, and another, and another. 

Driving away that day, I did not know my own tears.  This is uncommon; I’ve worked hard for three years to deliver a soul from the shadow of death; bringing the source of my desires to meet regret.  They have kissed each other.  Yet these streaking dark lines in blush across my face, were foreign.

I won’t scoff at your question of whether I wanted more; I do, but not of children.  The grief of unchangeable past is too familiar to wear another guise.  Is it because those dresses and elastic pants hold stories?  Do I have some illusion about the next owner understanding the weight of these years?  It’s futile to hoard interpretation of that which is given away.  So I keep searching.

Maybe its just loss, some friends shrugged.  I doubt.  I love names too much to let it go.

But I got nothin’.  Maybe it’s here to stay. 

Yes, I have four beautiful children.  Two towheads and two almost brunettes.  The last one even has my eyes.  People that don’t know either side of the family say they favor my looks.  The oldest is a bookworm with dry humor, the second an intense creative who writes business plans and plays, the third a cuddly dramatist obsessed with Spiderman, and last a scheming rascal who knows her own mind.  They are my children and they belong to themselves.  When I ask if they are “my…?” and state their name.  They answer, “No!... I’m my…” and state their name.  I did not teach them this.

I’m rounding the bend of not being pregnant, or nursing, for the longest time in my married life.  The time I’ve been caring for children in diapers on a daily basis is longer.  That would be over fifteen years. 

I need a break.  I don’t want to miss this.  I’m here, I’m drowning.  I’m tired and not enough.  Can anybody see me?
That's some days, though it feels like more.

I’m present.  I’m not actually missing this.  I need a break.  I’m tired and still enough and I am the one who sees me
That's really all the days, though it feels like less.

So.  I drop off the uniform that has shaped my identity as I was born and raised to birth and raise.  I let it go far before a menopausal, god-plans-the-family, eggs shriveled up state.  No small feat.

A year later and I still wonder, hovering over those tears.  Not (just?) for maternity clothes and baby blankets and newborn heads and first giggles and stretch marks and back fat and the night’s watch and labor pains and that sweet cry and mesh underwear and refrigerated Tucks and burp cloths and first Christmases and…

I have a question. 

How many women did God ask before Mary said yes?  If it’s a real story I wonder if a virgin was the only one fool enough to accept the gift of loss without reason. 

“You can be like God” he said.
“You can be liked by God” they said.
“You can birth God” He said.

What’s the difference? 

Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes I pushed them out.  Head, shoulders, knees and heals she pushed him out.  Those purple webbed lines are here to stay.  I bless them.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t also wish them away.  My heart holds enough scars.

So.  This void of children amidst children, of God amidst their God, a soul too ready for dust, nameless tears, and the marks that stay.

Does anybody want to know about the pain of fertility?  A divine feminine held under the water.

Suicide

"All this time you’ve been a flower growing in the darkness. Perhaps the least I could do is offer some light.” -Westworld, Episode 8 'Kiksuya'

 6.14.2018

Today I made it.  Out of bed, downstairs to make coffee, then into the shower, though I skipped washing my hair, again, and finally, onto the back of a motorcycle.  Now I’m here, writing.  Honestly, nothing short of a miracle, except I don’t believe in miracles.  But, more on that another time.

I’ve been watching the discussion on suicide from the edges.  Has anyone else noticed that we only pick up these topics pursuant to national tragedy?  It’s going to cycle through until the next catastrophe has us talking about something else we’ve already addressed before.  Maybe we should start wondering if it’s not them, it’s us, and the current trend of events gives our humanity a constant stream of narratives to pretend we resist, at least, here in the Western world. Maybe there’s a cause and effect we have yet to notice by those of us who perceive our hearts to be well meaning, when they really aren’t after all.

It’s dangerous, because if your reason to live is to oppose a darker force, you haven’t considered that the very thing you’re against may actually be where you’re deriving life.

Just a thought.

The articles and sentiments I see floating around the web from experts and survivors are offering sound advice.  Please do check in on one another.  Learn to know what is needed in someone’s life and offer it without being asked.  Help hold the inevitable presence of shame in relationships so that you and others can really talk about how you both are and ask and answer questions with kindness and curiosity.   These are all good things.

Trouble is.  We aren’t trustworthy.  We’re voyeurs.  There’s a hungry, destructive curiosity in all of us to know how others are in ways we know we won’t honor or protect.  The main cause of this, I believe, is that we are afraid of our own stories.  We won’t know our history and how it’s harmed us, so we let the drive out in other ways.  If we can be pleasant enough, kind enough, vulnerable enough—on most days of the week, we can think that our consumerism is allocated to the tabloids or sympathizing with news that was never our business to know.

People like Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, and Robin Williams are the product of our social experiment.  We can brush it off as the pressures of fame, and pretend we never wondered or wanted justification for the moments of discontent in our small unknown life.  Now we use that information to keep us alive and make our provincial existence more meaningful.  We say, “It’s so sad, it’s so tragic.”   And it’s not really different when the loss is your distant relative or the kid down the street.  We say the same thing and always find a way to utilize their circumstances to our advantage, never ever considering we were part of the same reality all along.  Did anyone read the story of the father who died in a jail cell at the border because his wife and child were separated from him?  They said he just “lost it”, that he “suffered a breakdown” and died “despite being checked on by officers every half an hour and the presence of a cell camera.”  Do you see the construct being built?  

This is the problem.

We want people to die of shame.  We want them to die of loneliness.  We want them to die of heartbreak, of misunderstanding.  Why?  Because then we don’t have to.  They go into the desert where no one will touch them and we are safe because they will never touch us.  Someone is going to experience loss and we carefully manage society to make sure it is only a select few.  We’ve even structured the entire discussion so that they are the fulcrum.  We’ll be grieved for sure, but even in the statement, “please stay” there’s a deliberate ignorance, or better said, a subtle arrogance, that will not ask the question, “how have I failed such that you feel the need to leave?” or if one was courageous enough, “I see how I have failed and caused you harm to the point of believing death is better.”

I know our demons are our own.  I know that suicide is a tender topic.  No one can bear the weight of that guilt.  This is not to place guilt or blame on anyone.  This also isn’t about people who manipulate others with threat of suicide.  That’s abuse and another form of evil entirely.   This is something I’m saying about how we have chosen to do life together here in this country.  If we belong to each other, this is the other side of that coin.

The conversation on mental illness needs to shift to restitution and restoration for the impact cruel words and cowardly choices have had on us individually and collectively as a human race.  I don’t think Jesus was being dramatic when he said our little quips over dinner are murder.  We are killing people with our words, as well as our self-guarding silences.  Perhaps we should do away with the word suicide altogether.  Knowing what I know now and surviving what I have survived, if I did not make it, there’s a list of actions/inactions that could be read at my funeral as cause of death.  If the first things you want to jump to when you read that are the words bitterness and forgiveness, you’re part of the problem.  Jesus forgave people on the cross.  He was supposedly God (and planned his own death).  They still killed him.  Those things don’t guarantee mental health, healing, and recovery.  We can continue to encourage people all we want, tell them how much they mean to us, ask them to be here, but as long as we won’t look over our shoulder to address the harm in our own past we’re going to be afraid of the harm we’ve caused others. 

Better than asking others to trust you before you’ve earned that trust, better than expressing kind sentiments towards those in your life you love and know are struggling, start showing up with real confession to those you’ve brought harm.  Start showing up in your own story so that you stop reenacting your past hurts on others and you stop needing others to be hurt via emotional surrogacy.  We are not scapegoats. 

Suicide is more reflective of the community than it is of the person who lost their life.  A community has the power to kill or to heal, to sustain or to starve.   Nothing is neutral. 

Listen to the absence and notice how loud you’ve had to sing your hymns to drown it out.

"Take my heart when you go."
"Take mine in its place" -Westworld, Episode 8 'Kiksuya'