You haven't walked for more than a year, sweet Dad.  Now you can fly.  

July 3, 1940 - October 18, 2014

A thousand tiny little pieces

Taking pictures with Dad, Hazel wanted to take one "by herself" with Papa.  So, I took a few.

This was yesterday.

"I love you, Papa,"  she said as we stood by his bed to say goodbye.  "I love you too, baby,"  he managed to whisper, almost soundless, under his breath.  "He said I love you too baby!" she exclaimed, with great joy.  It was a pretty large feat for him, who has spoken so few words the last several months.  I could see the adoration in his weary eyes.  My heart swelled, and then broke into a thousand tiny little pieces.  

I am simultaneously angry and grateful.  Angry, that they can't share more time together in this life. Angry that someone so small, should have to suffer such great loss.  I love hearing the ring to his name when she speaks it from her sweet lips.  Their laughter.  How she would light up when she learned he was coming for a visit.

But I'm also so grateful.  So grateful that they got to know each other at all.   Grateful for the great gift of their relationship.

I hope she will remember him always.  I hope she can recall the love he holds for her in his huge heart.  I hope she will tell her little sister all about their Papa, and how he cared for them so.  I hope she will sense his presence in the stars as they light up the sky, the warm sun as it shines on her face, and in the gentle, sweet fragrance of the wind.

Five-Minute Friday: Nothing

This is my first time participating in Five Minute Fridays with Lisa-Jo Baker.  The task is to write for 5 minutes on a topic that she chooses, and post the unedited material.  Well... I wrote for 10 minutes. I'll get better. :)  This week's topic is to write about the word NOTHING. 

Nothing is the place where I sometimes live to get through my day.  It is a numbness that lives in the world of do, do, do. Nothingness is what I feel, when I fix the breakfast, change the diapers, get everyone dressed, fold the clothes.  I feel nothing when I turn on the tv, brew the coffee, or clean up the dishes.  Nothing is a place to survive, from all the intense feelings that sometimes simmer just beneath the surface.  All of the vulnerability, the exposure, that comes with the world of parenthood... having tiny pieces of your heart walking/crawling around, falling down, getting bruised, pushing all of your buttons - pushing you to the limits of yourself.   

Nothing is what I feel when I spend time on facebook or reading articles.  Nothing is what I feel when I leaf through magazines, or watch the Food Network.  Nothing is what I feel when I drink that glass of wine or fill my schedule to the brim.  

It's when I see you - when I REALLY see or hear or feel you - that nothing becomes something.  

I am rescued from the nothing when I exhale and take you all in.  The messy hair, the dirty fingernails.  The excessive toddler demands.  The beautiful curl of your lips.  I feel, so much.  When I take a moment to revel in your sweet, fleeting babyhood, as I hold you in my arms.  As I hug you tightly... and breathe in the sweet scent of baby shampoo in your soft hair.  The sound of your laugh is something... it's everything.  When we sit all together as a family and play music, singing, dancing, expressing.... I feel something.  I feel so happy.  I feel so blessed.  So grateful.  

Nothing is where I survive... but when I allow myself the time and space of something - of everything - is when I'm truly alive.

Letting go - Part 5: Coming Home

It was a moment I'll never forget.  Canon in D had stopped playing, and we stood nervously, ritualistically at the altar after our procession.  Our parents stood proudly behind us, as our friend Jason (an ordained minister) asked who would be giving us away this day.  After our parents' words, "We do," rang happily through the sanctuary, the crowd of loved ones behind us unexpectedly erupted in laughter.  "What in the WORLD just happened??"  raced through my mind.  As we turned to uncover the mystery, we found that our fathers had high-fived each other before returning to their seats.  It was perfect.  It was a perfect, joy-filled moment, that smashed our anxieties into smithereens and enabled us to continue our wedding ceremony with a lightness in our hearts.

A few hours later, "Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole pumped through the sound system as we swayed back and forth.  I clung to him, as if I was still a child, tears streaming down my face.  He hummed sweetly in my ear.  No words were spoken... such warm comfort I felt in his arms as we danced.  I was fully aware of how public, how vulnerable the whole thing was.  I just couldn't help my tears.  I wanted to honor this moment by allowing my feelings to spill out from inside me.  It was too important to hold in.  Something so symbolic... so deep-seated, is this ritual of the father-daughter dance.  I grieved for him.  The man in my life.  I grieved for my family, as I was "leaving them to become one flesh with my husband."  We held tightly to each other, as we were letting go.  Letting go/grieving and celebrating at the same time, the love that I had found.... the love that would grow our family, and bring us all such happiness.

I had my last conversation with my father, as he was fully-functioning, on October 9th, 2013.  The day before his brain surgery (surgeries).  He cried, as he told me that his heart was at peace.  That he felt that God had spoken to him, telling him not to be afraid.  Not to worry - that God would bring him home.  It was another gift to my anxious heart, his peace that night.  I knew I had to let him go... into the hands of the surgeon and the medical teams and into the uncertainty of the future.

I play these cherished moments over and over again in my mind this week.  This week, one of the hardest of my life.  This week, where my mother and my sisters and I are searching our souls, kneeling before God, holding each other up, and making the most difficult decisions we've ever had to make.

Things have not turned out the way we hoped.  A journey of excruciating ups and downs, filled with fear, trauma, confusion, anger, sadness, hope, weariness, helplessness, guilt, and more.  Complex and twisty and uncertain and inconsistent.  The ground has shifted and rocked and quaked beneath our feet, and we have had to figure out how to stay standing.  It's more than we ever thought we'd have to handle.  My warrior mother, most of all.

After Dad had 3 brain surgeries and an emergency spinal surgery all in a week;  after multiple unforeseen complications and sustaining permanent damage to his brain and spine, which has left him partially paralyzed from the waist down, unable to speak much, and at times largely unresponsive; after his body has been so weakened from spending 6.5 months in a medical bed;   after suffering from a series of mini-strokes;  after infection after inevitable infection and multiple rounds of anti-biotics; after becoming resistant to several anti-biotics;  after his kidneys have begun to fail; after a very difficult meeting with his team of doctors at UVA, who feel that Dad is in his final weeks...

It is time to let him go, once again.

He has been a valiant fighter, and he has won some small victories along the way.  But he's been through enough.  As we honor his wishes, and honor him, the best way we know how... we are letting go of aggressive medicine and our hopes for his physical healing.  Hospice care will ease his suffering and give him the best quality of life for the rest of his days.

He hasn't been home in 6.5 months.  He hasn't seen those walls... those walls, that wood, those bricks... so familiar.  He hasn't smelled those smells, sat in his favorite chair, or seen the fruits of his labors - in which he holds great pride.  He hasn't seen the fabric of his love manifested, or been reminded of all the cherished memories in this place.  Where there is more laughter than beeping machines, and more color than the white of walls and jackets.  This safe place.  His home.

It's time to bring him home.

It's time to let him go, and bring him home.  To bring him home, to reconnect with all that is a part of him and his beautiful life.  Before God brings him forever home.

We feel relief that his struggle will end.  We are at peace, although we grieve deeply.  We have grieved for some time. We will continue to grieve.

And I know in my heart, that although his body and his brain will not heal here on earth, that he will be whole again.

And we will dance.

"Give sorrow words;  the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."  ~William Shakespeare

  

How do you truly honor a life?

Saying goodbye has always been so difficult for me.  I really struggle with it, and most of the time I avoid the painful feelings that saying goodbye can evoke.  Like my nephew, when he was a toddler... he never wanted to say goodbye.  We would come into town for the weekend and have the best time.  And when we were getting ready to leave, his mood completely changed.  He would get all grumpy, hide his face, leave the room, and not speak a word.  I get it, little dude.  I SO get it.

My Auntie Jan - one of my mom's sisters - is currently in hospice care, losing her 10 year fight with ovarian cancer.  Doctors are projecting that she has very little time left.  Days, maybe weeks.  I am so sad.  And so stuck in trying to figure out how to properly deal with this loss.  How to truly honor her life.  How to say goodbye.

A while back, I read a random person's status update on Facebook - it was a friend of a friend type thing, and my friend had re-shared this person's post.  It has really stuck with me... I think it might be one of the most important things I'll ever read in my life.  It was a man who had just lost his father, and was explaining what he had learned in his father's final days.  I will never forget what he learned and what he shared.  And if I could remember his name, I would credit him here.  He said that he struggled with what to say to his father in these last hard moments.  He figured out that it was most important to say these four things:

1) I'm sorry.
2) I forgive you.
3) Thank you.
4) I love you.  

To really honor his relationship with his father, he needed to say these four things.  Wow.  So simple, but it hit me like a ton of bricks.  I don't have much trouble saying the second two things.  But the first two things are very hard for me.  And I can see why they would be so important to say, especially to someone with whom you have/had a close relationship.

In the end, nothing else really matters.  These things matter.  

I feel like I have taken the easy way out of goodbyes too many times in my life thus far.  I avoid break-ups.  I don't make it to the goodbye party.   My childhood best friend's mother passed away a few years ago from breast cancer, and I couldn't make it home for the funeral.  I was secretly relieved.  I chickened out.  And I'm still so disappointed in myself for not properly honoring this woman's life.  This woman, who is so present in my childhood memories, and was like a second mother to me during that time.  It just felt so huge to me, and I was overwhelmed with the idea of laying her to rest in my heart.

And that brings me to today.  How I'm feeling about saying goodbye to my spunky, funny, loving, courageous Auntie Jan.  Someone so dear to my family and my mom, and so present in all my family memories.  Someone so important in the scope of my extended family life and so close to the beating heart of my collective kin.  Someone who has loved me well, although we live far away and don't see each other often.  It feels so huge, so hard.

I don't want to open myself up to the pain.  I don't want to feel the weight of this loss.  I want to hide my face and leave the room.

However, I really don't want to keep chickening out of goodbyes, either.  This is so important.  It is a basic tenant of the human life.  You say hello, you say goodbye.  You enter this world, you leave it.  Why is it so difficult when people leave?

My husband and I talked the other night about why losing someone is so hard.  I asked, "Why is loss always so sad?  Why can't we celebrate someone's life when they are at the end of it?  Why can't we be happy about the life they lived?  Why does it hurt so much?"  My wise husband brought up the idea that we tend to emotionally attach to people - to each other - and therefore it's hard and sad to let them go.  Rather than trying to see our time with each other as a gift and stay a bit more un-attached.  It wouldn't mean that we don't love... it would mean that we love without selfish attachment.  It's a very zen Buddhist concept.  One that I aspire to attain in my own life, as I think and write a lot about being able to let go of things.  But I am not quite there yet with people.  Not at all yet there.

I want to do the right thing.  I want to be brave and to let the pain in, to wash through me, so that I can honor my Aunt the best way that I know how... to acknowledge her in my heart.  To acknowledge what she has meant to me in my life.  To celebrate hers.

So that I can peacefully, and presently, let her go.

I'm trying.

I'm so sorry for everything you've endured.  I'm sorry we didn't have more time together, and that I didn't visit more often.  I forgive you, although there is nothing you've done that really needs my forgiveness.  Thank you for your heart, your humor, for loving us all - for everything you are.  I love you always, dear Auntie Jan.  

Making Room for Tears

"We need never be ashamed of our tears." ~  Charles Dickens

For years and years and probably always and forever, well-meaning parents have been telling their children, directly or non-directly (verbally or non-verbally), not to cry.  To be strong in the face of disappointment, adversity, seemingly trivial encounters, etc.  Sometimes trying to hug the tears away, and sometimes trying to force quit the flood of emotions erupting from their child.  It is pure instinct.  We don't want our children to be upset.  We want them to be happy little people who go with the flow.  It would be so great if they would always do what we say, always feel good, and never show any overt signs of intense anger or pain or sadness.  Raising little robots would be so much easier, wouldn't it?

Even as adults, when someone feels pain and expresses it, it often automatically triggers anxiety and uncomfortable feelings in a person who is witness.  And although we may want to, we can't really tell an adult to "stop crying, please."  But when it's our children, we often DO tell them to stop crying.  To toughen up.  "Chin up," we say.  "There is nothing to cry about."  We say these things, perhaps to ease our own discomfort.  Instead of doing some internal work to reduce our own anxiety reactions, and to make room for their tears.  To let them know that their expressions of frustration and feelings are okay.  I believe that most of us don't even consider the ramifications that this has on our children and our society at large.  

We are such a repressed people.  And people make terrible robots.  When we learn not to feel or to suppress what we feel, bad things can happen.  People with no feelings (or suppressed feelings) hurt other people, and hurt themselves.

We do all kinds of things to keep our feelings hidden... we run like mad from them.  So that we don't have to feel or to be vulnerable.  So we can numb out the pain.  We drink, we drug, we work too much.  We have affairs, we obsess about our bodies, we control everything we can.  Because we learned, somewhere, that it wasn't okay to have feelings.  Or we think that because they sometimes feel bad, we should keep them inside.  But here's the kicker - as humans, we DO have them.  Some people are wired to feel more.  Some people are wired to feel less.  But everyone has them.  Whether we admit it or not. 

I learn so much from being a mother.  Raising a toddler - developmentally the most transparent group of people ever - has brought me face to face with this reality that as adults, we don't want to feel.  This reality, that I have already been uncovering for myself for the past several years.  My almost three year old sometimes seamlessly turns into my life lesson guru.  And recently, she has been unknowingly teaching me a very important lesson about her tears.  And about my discomfort with them.  So often, mid-tantrum, I feel my anxiety levels creep higher and higher and higher.  I ask her, "What do you need? What is wrong?"  And our favorite new attempt to nip the typical toddler no-apparent-reason-tears in the bud, "WHY ARE YOU CRYING?"  This used to stop her for a few moments, while she thought and searched for an answer... and then went back to crying.  But her most recent answer to this question, which she has given several times, floors me.

"Because I NEED to crrrrrryyyyyyyy."

Silence.

Oh, Lord, yes.  She needs to cry.  The child NEEDS to cry and to express her feelings and this is the only way she knows how.  She doesn't need a reason.  Who am I to stop her from doing this?  Because of my own shortcomings and discomfort with her pain?  It shuts me down.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I take a deep breath and try to get comfortable with the sounds of her cries.  And almost always, when I relax and make space and let her express her emotions in this way, she calms down.  She gets it out and returns to a more even state.  But when I keep trying to get her to stop,  or to rationalize with her that she has nothing to cry about, she continues and cries even louder.  Hmmmm.

What we can learn from children, if we just listen to what they are saying. 

It can be uncomfortable... it can be awful.... but we will not be washed away by our feelings - our own  or someone else's.  They come and they go.  But when we suppress them - that can leave a permanent mark.  It is important and so necessary to express what is inside of us.  For all of us.

Children, teenagers, adults, alike.

Here's a recent personal example.  On Christmas eve, we were home in Lynchburg with my family.  We had been there since Dec. 19th, and we were leaving that day to head back to NOVA.  My Dad, after 4 more weeks at UVA medical center (due to getting pneumonia, sepsis, and suffering a series of mini-strokes) had just been discharged from the hospital the day before and had arrived in Lynchburg.  He was back at the same skilled nursing facility, just in time for Christmas.  I had these visions and hopes of our whole family being together with Dad at the nursing home, on Christmas Eve.  Singing him Christmas carols, etc.  It was really all I wanted for Christmas.  But my children had just contracted the black plague of colds, the day we got into town.  And since my Dad's immune system had been compromised and any infection could be potentially life-threatening, I knew that I couldn't take the kids over to see Dad.  I knew.

But instead of being honest about how sad that made me feel... about how devastated I was that my family wouldn't all be together, for the first Christmas in maybe my whole life... about this grief I feel about what has happened to my Dad the last few months.... I pushed those feelings aside.  I was cranky all morning, spewing meanness onto everyone.  I don't even think that I consciously realized what was going on.

And then, when I finally allowed those feelings to enter my consciousness and rise to the surface... and I allowed that wall that I had constructed to come down....

I cried.

I cried, hugged my mom and my sisters and my husband, and I told them that I was sad.

And amazingly, I didn't explode.  My tears didn't wash we away.   They served a very real purpose.  They gave me release.  

I felt better.  I was able to make peace with the fact that my daughters would not be with Papa this Christmas.  It didn't completely dissolve my sadness, but it lessened it.  Because I had allowed myself to grieve it by expressing what I really felt.  

All this to say, that I think it's possible that this pattern of shutting down our feelings all starts at the very beginning.  We need to fight the urge as parents to stop our children's tears.  To stop them from expressing intense or negative emotions, and instead, help them to find a healthy way to express what is happening on the inside.  For if they feel nurtured in their pain, or even that there is time and space to let it out (no matter the cause of it), they may grow up to be healthier adults.  And to take it a (few) steps further, we may just be able to change our society as a whole.  One child at a time, into one that is more tolerant of emotional expression.  One that is honest and wholehearted and has a chance to heal.

One that makes room for tears, instead of repressing and numbing and hurting in silence.

In all truth, it is one of my greatest hopes and dreams for myself, for those I love, and for all humans everywhere.  Some people hope for world peace... I just want people to feel.  And I believe that those two things could have a very close correlation.

Acknowledge what we honestly feel, express it, and only THEN, can we work on letting it go.

Peace could be waiting patiently for us, on the other side of our tears.  

"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." ~ William Shakespeare

A Day in (my) Life: Searching for the Ground

Last night, Charlie was up 3 times.  She woke at 11:30pm, 3:30am, and 5:45am.  At 5:45am, she wouldn't do her typical nurse for 10 minutes and go back to bed.  She had several discomforts -  gas, congestion, and maybe teething gums.  We were up for a bit.  I went back to bed around 6:30am, and was awakened by Mike leaving for work at 8:15am with a goodbye kiss.  At 8:30am, Hazel was calling for me.

I stumbled into her room, where we played with puzzles, my mind still half asleep. I was remembering the dream I was deeply embedded in when I heard her calling.  Hoping she wouldn't notice that I couldn't yet form complete sentences and how clumsy and slowly my hands were moving.  After a while we went downstairs to get some breakfast.  Hazel played and I fixed breakfast and put the much needed coffee on.  Even though I make it half-caffeinated because I'm still nursing, it is an important part of my tired morning routine.  I'll take whatever small amount of caffeine I can get pumping into my weary bod.

After breakfast, Hazel watched a show while I did some online Christmas shopping and checked my email.  I browsed job listings for part-time social work jobs.  My mind raced about how nice it has been (mostly) to be home with both kids for these past 6 months.  One of the hardest jobs I've ever done, no doubt in my mind.  But as much as it stretches me... I love being with the girls.  And I thought about how nice it has been to be more available to travel at a moment's notice to be with my family, since Dad's first surgery on October 10th.  Since he hasn't been well, and we have been clinging to each other to get through these weeks/days/moments of difficulty and to process the unknowns of the future.

I thought about dance, and how therapeutic it is for me.  And how it plays no role in my life at the current moment.  And how I miss it so very much.  And I rack my brain about how I can get it back.

As I looked at jobs online, my thoughts drifted to our finances.  And how we are just not making it on one income.  We knew we wouldn't.  We planned for this time.  And talked about how it would be worth it for me to be home for this temporary period, and then I would look for work eventually.  I've been browsing part-time listings for months.  And as each month gets financially tighter, we realize it's go time.  Every time I think about it my heart does flip flops in my chest.  I have such mixed emotions about proceeding back into the working-outside-of-the-home world.  I feel both a weighty heaviness and also some nervous excitement.   So much complexity wrapped up in this "little" decision.

The struggle for the elusive balance continues.

And then Charlie wakes around 9:30am... so I get her up, change her diaper, feed her, and bring her downstairs.  We play on the floor next to Hazel while she watches her show.  Charlie's laughter fills my heart until it almost bursts... it shuts down my thoughts, so that my mind is no where else but with her and her happiness.  It is a real light in my life... a gift, that brings me out of my swirling thoughts and into the beauty of the present.  

It is around then that Hazel's foot knocks over the stool where her bowl of snacks and my beloved coffee sits.  Both tumble to the floor, soaking the blanket that Charlie is playing on, the carpet, and me.  In slow motion, peanuts and raisins fly through the air, landing everywhere.  Momentarily, I lose it.  I grumble at Hazel, asking her if she understands what she has just done and tell her to be more careful.  Then, after the frustration subsides, I feel bad for not displaying more patience.  I start to clean it all up and as I look at the spilled coffee and strewn snacks, I see how disgustingly dirty our floor is.  It is REALLY dirty.  Like living with two kids and a cat dirty.  Like I need to vacuum 4 times a week but I only vacuum once a week -  maybe - dirty.

And I think, wow... sometimes I'm just not good at this.  I'm not good at staying home with the kids and having endless patience and taking care of the house.  I'm so tired and so foggy and so scattered... so sad about my Dad and so worried about our finances and so nervous about going back to work.  And I just feel so... lost.  And dizzy.  And guilty.  And inadequate.

The opposite of grounded.

Juggling identities and responsibilities and feelings and oh, the constant stream of these pressing thoughts.  What am I doing, where am I going, and how am I going to get there?  A lot going on in the old noggin these days.

And then it hits me. The biggest thing I'm not doing well is this:  Grace.   What gives with all this meanness to myself?  All the high expectations?

My family gives me grace, my friends give me grace.  My God, my church, and my community give me grace.   Why can't I give it to myself?  I can extend it to others, but when life gets tough or confusing or sad or tedious or overwhelming and I just can't cope, I turn the blame inward.  With no where else to throw my frustrations, I let myself take the bullet.  I begin to self-destruct.

Grace.

Life is going to be hard sometimes.  And in the hardest moments, God whispers the message that I so need to hear, so very gently in my ear....

Give yourself grace.  Give yourself buckets of grace.

I imagine Him saying these words, "It's okay.  You're okay.  Take some space.  Breathe.  You are enough.  You are good.  I love your dirty floors and your messy heart.  You will find your way through the darkness.  You will find the ground.  I will lead you.  Be still and cast your arrows away from your gentle exterior, and into my arms.  My arms are tough.  I will catch them."  

And so, a new day dawns and I begin again.   Weary, I pray for grace.  And I start by reaching my feet toward the ground.