A Quiet Remembrance During This Happy Season

Even sadness fades from the scene, when the scene is the festive holiday season. Someone shared a poignant remembrance of those who can't yet forget their losses, even though surrounded by a season of celebration. As the wife of someone working in law enforcement, I know this is only one heartbeat away from being my story, too--or anyone's, who serves in this profession. Though I wish everyone the happiest of celebrations these next few days, please remember to take some time to appreciate those who sacrifice so that we, unimpeded, may enjoy our blessings.

Connected by sadness

Just when life seems too full of one's own miseries, something befalls someone unknown, yet linked through a tenuous connection that forges an invisible link to pathos.

It is so sad to share in the tragedy of the four police officers mercilessly dispatched by a madman in Washington state. Chris headed for a flight to Seattle this morning as part of his agency's honor guard, linking us to this sadness not only through professional association, but also through the presence of those we know at home.

The grief is palpable, even through the photos and amateur YouTube displays. The display of solidarity, though immense, consoles only on one level; for the families who will never see their loved ones, and for the colleagues of those being laid to rest, the pain will subside to that dull ache at some point, but it will be very far in the future.

To know that it was a senseless tragedy compounds the pain. The agony of justice is that it can only attempt to right the wrongs after the loss has occurred.

Silence Still Speaks

A blogging friend of mine complained recently about how she missed writing. There were so many things running through her head that she wanted to write about. So many things, in fact, that she needed to “get the words out of my head; it’s getting crowded in there and I need a pressure release valve.”

True, writing can be a form of venting as well as an artful way to grant tangible shape to mental shadows. Sometimes, though, the shadows can be so murky that it is hard to coax them from the nether regions of mood into visible light. There are times when the flurry of life’s actions can produce an avalanche of words. Other times, events can turn and become the bottleneck damming that very flow.

It’s been four months since I last blogged. For some reason, though life kept moving forward at its usual warp speed, the words never assumed their own nascent presence—to break away and make any sound or take any shape of their own. Perhaps it’s that small matter of sound barrier. Or its equivalent in the realm of light. If there is a life barrier, is it possible to break it?

With all that has passed, how hard it has been to make myself sit down and write; how unusual for me to see myself saying this. I determined yesterday: tomorrow I will write.

Last time I wrote, it was a goodbye message for the one whose partner just joined him. Phone call, 4 a.m. I lose again all ability to put words on paper.

Putting in a Good Word

“Begin with the end in mind,” advised author Stephen R. Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I don’t suppose Grandpa Don ever considered that advice—at least not when he considered smoking. That was when he was a kid. He had no idea it would get the best of him on the other end of life. But it did.

We made the long trip to the land’s end of Texas to be with him in his last days this summer, and to remember him after he just couldn’t keep on breathing. And a funny thing happened when folks gathered to remember him with us: we saw a man take shape who, though still the man we knew, was also a man we had never really fully known.

It happened during the eulogy. Eulogy: that’s a word you never hear until you are going to a funeral. Nobody seems to really know what it means—unless it means someone getting up in front of everyone to say nice things about a person (because it just isn’t fair to say mean things about people after they’ve died). In Grandpa Don’s case, the eulogy was said in an old country church that couldn’t have held more than thirty people—and even that would be a generous estimate.

In the simplest way that night, people came up and made their own contribution to a pot-luck eulogy. At first, it looked like the only ones speaking would be family members, then someone reading notes from grandkids who couldn’t make it. But bit by bit, neighbors got up to say their piece about remembering Don. A representative from his workplace—he was long retired but long-remembered—was there to say a public goodbye. And people from his church, even teenagers, told their favorite stories about him.

That’s when something happened. See, Don wasn’t really Dad to this family—he was Step-Dad. No matter how many good times were had when the family gathered, there was always the long shadow of the dad who really was Dad but only lived on in the childhood memories of those who were now adults. There was no replacing Dad. But that kept eyes from seeing who Don really was.

The turning point was the eulogy. Eulogy: from two Greek words, the one a handy prefix, the other a term that has been oft-appropriated by our own mother tongue. “Eu” was a sort of accelerator for the Greeks; when plugged into the beginning of another word, it intensified its status. It basically means “good.” The “-logy” is actually from the Greek “logos,” the same root that gives English-speakers their business logo or their philosophical logic. It is recognized by Christians as a significant term representing not only the literal meaning of “word” but also the intelligence behind it: God Himself. “In the beginning was the Word.”

Plugged together, the two components signify “to bless” or “to praise.”

Funerals are events that rank fairly low in most people’s list of preferred activities, so I can understand why people don’t often rub shoulders with concepts like “eulogy.” I can’t think of how many funerals I’ve attended that I didn’t really want to be at. I’m not talking about close family members’ funerals, but those of distant relatives or friends’ family members—events which I’ve attended not for the dead, but for their living. A solidarity thing. Standing with them in their pain.

There was one such funeral I had attended that stands out, though. It was for my neighbor’s mom. One evening after work, my neighbor had mentioned that his mother had unexpectedly passed away. Though sorrow in such a case is understandable, there was something so plaintive in the way he told us about it, my husband and I felt we should support him by being at his mom’s service. We really didn’t know her—had only met her once. But once her eulogy began, she became transformed in our minds, lifted up by the vibrations of the stories her family offered up in her praise. We left that funeral regretting having missed the opportunity to get to know someone so neat!

Somehow, the same thing happened this summer for Grandpa Don—for us. It is incredible to see a life taking shape solely through the words pieced together by people who care deeply for that person. The pity is that it is a life in retrospect. Oh, to know the person that way while he or she is still living…

It makes me wonder why we wait so long to acquiesce and admit that those we know—those closest to us, those we see the most often and the clearest in all their glaring faults—are really those neat, special people we make them out to be after they are gone. Why do we wait until they are gone? Why don’t we eulogize them when they are still living and can enjoy the love we show through our words?

Used to be, when someone was looking for one of those scarce jobs in tough times, a friend might help the process along by promising to “put in a good word” for him. Though a good (“eu”) word (“logos”) for a job hunter would never be called a eulogy, that is exactly what it is. There are all sorts of ways to bless the living with our good words. Why wait until people pass away to speak up?

Photograph courtesy of Christa Elza Photography

A Day I've Learned to Consider Carefully

Today: July 8. Twenty one years ago today, I lost my first husband to premature death. July 8, one year ago, an ultrasound revealed the growth that was later determined to be cancerous. Today, again July 8, my family flies halfway across the country to be with my father-in-law in what most likely will be his last days as he lingers in an intensive care unit in a Texas hospital. July 8 has become a day I am most familiar with, but most unwilling to participate in.

And I thought I'd have plenty to say about it

So it was cancer. But now it is all gone. They say.

I hope.

It’s been ten weeks, now, since the event. Ten weeks of opportunity for recuperation. Ten weeks of ample time for reflection—and yet, in all that time, no chance taken to simply sit down and write about it. How can that be so hard?

There is something stultifying about facing the threat of cancer. Why does it take away words? Even the least threatening of cases yields the same result. The mere threat of death is itself enough to suck words right out of the soul.

I had to make myself sit down and write. Ten weeks of saying nothing about what is at the core of my being right now is ridiculous. But don’t expect profound. These words resemble output of a grade school student forced to recount “What I Did During My Summer Vacation.”

If facing death can be one of the most critical tasks we endure, then why does it produce such a vacuum in response? When I think of life, I can think of all sorts of profound responses. When I stare at the brick wall of the end of life, I find no inspiration.

But the current, self-imposed task was to write about it. So I’m writing.

And having met my obligation, I'm moving on.

Pass It On

Last week was my mother’s birthday. Oh, no splurgy celebration scheduled. She’s been gone now for well over a year. But there is definitely a remembrance.

It’s not always an easy remembrance. I have some friends whose family members constantly dote on each other. It’s quite warming to observe their public postings of mutual support on Facebook. And no surprise that they are as obsessed with publicly appreciating their mother as they are in affirming their siblings.

But, unfortunately, that’s not me. Knowing that memories include flashbacks to not only the good days but bad ones as well makes it particularly challenging to rightly sort through the details.

I imagine a friend of mine is going through that same process right now. Today is her mother’s funeral. I have been acquainted with this mother-daughter duo for decades, having met the daughter when we were college students together. For every time she sighed in frustration over a momentary clash with her mother, I think I have matched it in one of my own. That’s not to say she didn’t love her mom—she was quite devoted to her. Yet the devotion was embedded with many passing frustrations, too.

We had talked about it from time to time. It can be challenging to not have the “Average American Mom” for a mother—the stereotypical mom who is always there to feed you chicken soup when your soul is needing a dose. But that is the legacy each of us had been given. The challenge to live up to was to honor despite the drawbacks, to see the value in what we have been given.

We are not alone, evidently. I remember talking with a coworker once, a master’s level professional. We were musing over the difficulties we sometimes had, interacting as adults with our mothers. I can remember the specific instance of horror hitting her face when she, thinking aloud over her reflections, realized, “I’ve become my mother!”

We have become our mothers. What we have found difficult, provoking, alienating, about their momentary behaviors has become the same opinionated off-the-top-of-our-heads verbal snapshots of our own lives. Their foibles, attitudes, insistences have become second nature to our next-generation beings. Without even thinking about it, we have assumed their affect, morphed into their mold.

It’s a kind of heritage. Not one that would be written out on a will, but written in an unspoken code—a genetic code. Somehow, it’s as if the product of our environment has become the very essence of our genes. After my mother was gone, I could sometimes hear her laugh, or her sigh—and thinking I was hearing her again, realize that I was only hearing my own voice.

Or was it really my own voice? Where did that voice come from? The sound, the breath, the pacing, the inflection—how could it just be imitation of what I had heard countless times?

Regardless of the current opinion held of our parents—and farther back than that, our ancestors—we are actually a product of who they were. We carry all the benefits and all the foibles of what made them up. And, can we blame them? They were merely the recipients of what was given to them.

The minute tendencies that make each of us up are somehow our own, but somehow are also owing to those we call our parents, our grandparents. They live on in us. We benefit from them. We owe them much—whether in frustration or in gratitude.

And we have to understand that we, too, will pass that all along to others who will share our same frustrations. Just as there is no way to escape who we really are, there is no escaping the fact that we received it from those who went before us. The real task is to sift through that mixed bag of inherited items and learn to see the real value in what we’ve received—then pass it along in such a way that those beyond us will realize, with gratitude, what they are receiving.