Category: 2023

We are Blood.

I am sitting in my car waiting. As I have sat inside and outside of schools, doctors’ offices, and in cars, all these years.

Always sitting with my sorrow, I wait.

I wish my mother was here, I find myself saying out loud, welcome tears spring to my eyes. Also, I am still surprised by them.

My health feels like a constant betrayal, as if. Am I owed good health, not headaches, not body aches, not a loose stomach, not fatigue, not depression, not anxiety, not sleeplessness? How is it that I of all people “deserve” good health? I know that I don’t. But my mother would have had wisdom about it. I am lost.

The sky is as gloomy and dismal as my mood. It follows the grief of Palestine that is ringing in my ears, my heart, and my mind; abuzz with adrenaline from witnessing genocide. Don’t we remember Rwanda?

So many families, generations lost. I think.

How do I preserve mine? We’re fractured. My sister doesn’t speak to me, specifically. My parents are dead. Holly is dead. Our children are many including Holly’s and those that have joined ours. We are all a legacy.

We each and all matter.

Even though I feel lost, unmoored, untethered, and without roots, I feel my family lineage breaking in my body; I know that it is now my responsibility to be the strength that holds the generations together. Even though my sister has chosen not to be with me, we are vital. We are a link to the next generation. We are blood.

the hellfire of the mind

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“Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if we are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.” Maria Popova, The Marginalian

She’s not wrong but I couldn’t be reborn. I wasn’t enough. It has consumed me.

Grief is like a hard fall, to smash head-first into the cement repeatedly. Bruised and bleeding, utterly destroyed, but still getting up and on with life.

But what is there to get on to?

I made a grave mistake in the “getting on,” an amateur foolish error, believing I should be strong…

For the children, for the company, for my mother, for my sisters, and more children.

All these minutes, hours, days, months, years, and decades, I’ve been devoted (beyond what’s humanly possible) to those who needed me. I thought that was a good thing. I thought I was superhuman. I was lauded. I was built up as “amazing.” I had no boundaries. And I believed being superhuman was achievable.

But I’ve paid a price. I’ve traded for strength and lost my soul—as tragedy, suffering, and heartache collided inside me. And I’m left Empty. Hurting.

I’m done crying out to God who is all-powerful. Got it. YOU ARE GOD. I don’t disagree. But fuck it. Help already?

I tried the Church and a few people to tell my story.

And I found no one cared.

Where was a container wide or deep enough for the ocean of tears and heartache? No one could receive my fury, my destruction.

I have found comfort only in solitude and in the great cavern of nothingness.

My body, the vessel of nerve endings, hurts. My brain holds an ache. Calling it a headache is too benign. My brain was broken by pain. I can no longer think rationally. I told my shrink I won’t kill myself. And I won’t, I don’t (think I) want to, but sometimes I want to be there, with them, less alone. 

I live in the void where sorrow lives, where life has no purpose.

When others try to understand, reaching for me, I cringe and pity them. I am defeated.

One can’t get to me because I am gone. This physical vessel that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, she is empty.

I am no longer courageous. I am no longer strong.

The void is surrounding me and those who know seem too frightened by my weakness. They leave me be. And I am grateful because my body, heart, soul, and mind are destroyed. It’s too late.

I was strong. It broke me. Now I am vapor.

Survivor’s Guilt and Finding Some Joy

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We want in fact not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who liked to see us enjoying ourselves. And whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”

page 40 The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis

This is by far not the most profound CS Lewis thought, but it hit me today hard between the eyes. My thinking has been a bit convoluted so bear with me and I will try to come to the point.

I have been living the last five years in a coping mode, sheer survival really; and not “having a good time” not even close. Life has been hard. And it hit me after all this time I still have survivor’s guilt.

Holly deserved to live and by contrast I am less worthy of my life. She was so amazing! I’m a depressive, a recovering alcoholic, sarcastic, some (okay, one sister) would say mean, introverted, easily persuaded that life sucks to be honest, completely a cup half empty person and all the rest.  Whereas Holly took hold of her life like a storm, she ran toward life’s opportunities with joy and verve. She was about to go for her PhD for fuck’s sake. I have done nothing with my life by comparison.

She should be alive. Me perhaps not so much.

So, I’ve had this idea of getting all these chicks flying out of our nest and then fade into the proverbial sunset. Be the rock, be the strong one, be what everyone needs from me, until they’re off. And then, what does it even matter?

In my new church, the Black led one, I have found that I cannot stop weeping. I’ve got some deep, deep grief I suppose and well, having decided it didn’t matter what happened to me, a sadness, and a spirit of having given up or just surviving. One Sunday, not long into attending, the usher put us in the middle of the sanctuary – the 50–yard line. There was no hiding, and so I just sat there with tears streaming down my cheeks trying to stop or be invisible. A small, elder Black woman came over, and started praying with “a word for me, did I mind?” There was a word for me today in the sermon. She prayed a powerful, amazing, incredible amount. I don’t remember it all in my mind, but I am sure my spirit remembers. And I did hear something in the sermon – that God doesn’t want me to simply survive these hard years, he wants me to thrive! I heard it and I wanted to believe it. But it has been months and as I have slowly been weeping my way through services, I am starting to understand and believe.

I don’t know what next week, next year or the next several decades holds but I am not going quietly.

I haven’t been having a good time, back to the Lewis quote. I kind of felt that I was owed a good time in life, I have been quite entitled to be frank. But that’s ignorant shit too. This life is hard. People die. People are broke. Companies fail. People foreclose on homes. People can’t afford homes. People lose their jobs. People get divorced. People are murdered.

The problem of pain is that life is full of it.

And there is joy.

There is joy and that’s okay too! I know that it will be okay to grow a garden, gardens are hope. It will be okay to go on a trip. To celebrate 30 years of marriage. To build a study. To buy a camera, to see beauty again. Because even though I can’t promise myself that things won’t go wrong, as someone said to me recently, it might be great! I might find joy.

Thou has created all things and for thy pleasure they are and were created. That’s my core truth. Not my pleasure, God’s. And as I experience joy along the way that makes the creator joy filled too.

The Problem of Pain is Not Pain

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The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.

We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.

Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.

My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.

The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.

The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.

And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion.  And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.

I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.

Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.

I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.

The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.