On Being At Loose Ends

October 10th, 2013  |   

But every so often there is a moment in the dead of the morning when everything is still as starlight and something invades your room, like a bird that has flown through the window, and you are filled with as much joy as panic. And then you think: I can do anything.

Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats— Roger Rosenblatt

Anything? But Am I Able To Write?

Being at loose ends right now, just to be able to scramble together a few letters from the alphabet and have them come out well done, that would be enough for the time being.

As for joy, I believe the Psalmist is right when he writes, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” The morning glories outside my window may give credence to that, their purple trumpets sucking sun until the darkness descends and the night turns them back in upon themselves.

And when it comes to the panic Rosenblatt mentions, I believe it often arrives in the guise of fear. C. S. Lewis is right when, in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer in 1960, he wrote in Grief Observed: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”  

Awake very early this morning, I went downstairs in the dark, drew light from the inside of the refrigerator, and poured myself a glass of orange juice. I knew what I had to do. I had to climb the stairs to the third floor and get back to the business I left unfinished last night, completing my writings about grief. I could not postpone the subject.

The refrigerator door closed, the sun not yet up, I flicked on a light in the living room, and beagle-like, retrieved the newspaper from the front porch. I went looking to see if the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Tampa Bay Rays had won last night’s playoff baseball games. As always, I also checked on Garfield, Bizarro and Get Fuzzy on the comic page. A front-page story, however, put the sports and the comic on hold.

The story, written by the Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward, our eyes-and-ears on the Appalachian coal business, reported that three miners had died in three days in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wyoming.

Breakfast over, the paper read, an appointment to have coffee downtown at Taylor Books with a friend puts a temporary delay on my writing. After a cup of caffeine, maybe I’ll do a better job at my keyboard upstairs.

Out the backdoor, I started my walk down Quarrier Street. Lo-and-behold, walking in my direction, on the other side of the street, was Ken Ward. Instead of waving and moving on, he crossed the street. I figured he would say he was sorry about Judy’s death, and ask, like so many people do, “How are you?”

 Street Talk With A Chameleon—Yours Truly 

When Ken asks about how I am doing this side of Judy’s death, I describe myself as a chameleon. It’s the best way to describe myself at any given moment.  How am I? I am a chameleon. I duplicate the color of wherever I find myself.

Blue? Like when I come home to an empty house, go to bed by myself, can’t find Judy on Monday serving the Manna Meal at church, or across the table from me at meals.

Green? Like when I feel alive, making some headway through the Valley of the Shadow of Grief. Like feeling the sun as I walk along the river. Watching the children playing in the park beside my house. Like working out at the YWCA. Like being hugged by someone.

Brown? Like when I am doing day-to-day tasks, like grocery shopping, buying stamps, washing clothes, paying bills—you know, task-to-task living. Bland isn’t bright, but it is what it is, dutifully efficient and productive.

Red? Ah, passion, not yet extinguished! Like when I am writing an op-ed piece for the newspaper about Pope Francis and abortion. Like being asked to preach an All Saint’s Day sermon at a United Methodist Church in Huntington. Like planning for the local screening of the Sundance Film Festival movie, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” Maybe there is life after death, Judy’s death. Still not sure about that, I can turn blue at a moment’s notice.

I have listened to Mozart’s Requiem a number of times since Judy died. It was the last concert in which she sang with the West Virginia Symphony Chorus back in January. I morph into a quilt of multiple colors, moved to tears of sorrow and joy as I listen and remember seeing her little face on stage singing. The hair stands up on the back of my neck, as if it were connected to my eyes and the tears forming there.

God, after Darwin, I knew there were apes somewhere in my family tree. But is it possible I came forth from chameleons that slithered their way into existence?

A Twist In The Conversation—Chameleons To Coal To Grief

What starts out as a conversation with Ken Ward about Judy’s death, interestingly enough, leads to conversation about the death of coal miners, and the subject of grief. It is a graciously serendipitous encounter as morning rush hour traffic buzzes along the street.

Having been connected to so many media people during my life, I have often recognized a tie that binds me to them. They see, photograph and report on so much death, so much rawness. They file stories for the rest of us secondhand consumers of if-it-bleeds-it-leads news, blood-and-guts stuff from home and abroad.

I wonder what the aftermath is for them emotionally as they rush off to the next human tragedy. Where do they store empathy? When does grief finally catch up with them? You see, their answers interest me, because I wonder when grief finally catches up with me after my own experience of other people’s suffering and death. When the objectivity required of my work finally gives way to tears. When the death-comes-to-thee-and-thee- but-not-to-me myth melts away, what happens to all the grief I’ve stored over the years, all the bottled tears. I do believe some of them spilled when Judy died.

Ken Ward has been covering the destruction of our mountains for a long time. He has seen the mountains raped by a voracious coal industry hell-bent on sucking greenbacks out of the streams of black coal hidden beneath the rich soil upon which the people of Appalachia have built their lives and buried their dead. He has, through his reporting, given visible eyewitness accounts of the blood shed by miners, and the tears shed by miner’s families and friends. Reading his reports, I hear grieving mountains also crying.

Occasionally people will thank me for a sermon. In this case, I thank him for his stories. A simple thank you, as it so often does, takes our conversation to a subterranean level. Together, we bemoan the veil of tears that cover the families, and communities in which these men lived.

That word, bemoan seems fitting. Laments have been uttered—non-liturgical prayers—on my way to an early morning cup of coffee. For a few valuable moments, grief has caught up with me, and I do believe it has for Ken as well.

A Spear Through the Heart

The dictionary definition of grief is succinct and straightforward. Grief: Deep sorrow, especially caused by someone’s death. When it comes to the death of someone we know and love, grief comes in its most personally powerful form. The poet John Keats, writing about his beloved Fanny Brawne spares no sentiment to that understanding of grief. “Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” How painfully true, grief is a spear through the heart, barbed at that.

Ah, Keats! I think of the gift that came from a friend after Judy died—a stone with Keats’ words carved into it. A THING OF BEAUTY IS A JOY FOREVER. It is placed in our garden, in sight when I water the flowers, a task Judy used to do each day.

But don’t be romantically deceived; grief can emanate from outside of one’s own family. Grief plays no favorites, shows no preference when it comes to national, cultural, ethnic, and religious boundaries. It needs no passport. The Bible reminds us, that the sun shines and the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, the good and the evil. In like manner, grief embraces friends and enemies alike.

Grief Catches Up With Me

This time twenty-three years ago, I left Judy in Raleigh, North Carolina, and went with a peace delegation to Iraq just prior to the Gulf War. I often think about people I met while in Iraq just before our country went off to war three months later.

I think about the college student in Baghdad, who took my hand and walked with me, and in anxious, tearful tones said he hoped we would not invade his country. I think of the couple in wedding attire having their picture taken outside Al Rashid Hotel where I stayed. I bring to mind the children I saw in the villages we visited, and the women I saw in the marketplace.  

Are they still alive? Have they survived the death that has blanketed Iraq since our nation went to war there? Grief for them, and this distant country, presses in on me as I read the news that 6,000 Iraqi’s have died this year, the result of the horror we unleashed there when we invaded that country. An e-mail message from Canon White at St. George’s Church, where I worshipped while in Baghdad, speaks of the wounding and killing of over 130 children at a primary school in Tel Afar. “The killing and massacres continues non stop every day, the violence is so terrible but when it is children the pain is so great.” He goes on to write, “Things remain terrible here, they are so bad but very little mention on the media as scores of people are being killed each day.”

Thinking About Who Sent The Grief To Me

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each day in endless grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

C.S. Lewis wrote those words in his book, A Grief Observed. A couple of friends have recommended that I read it. I did years ago. Maybe I should read it again, this time with a different set of eyes, not in preparation for my ministry with others, but for my own sake.

Someone always seems to be there for me with a book, a gift full of words. What else do we have but words when tears and silence have had their way? Of course, silence is golden, but there are times when we need to be embraced and cuddled by words. When, thank God, the word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

The poet, T.S. Eliot warns us that “Words strain/Crack and sometimes break under the burden/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place/Will not stay still.” Nevertheless, I must add, words somehow manage to point the way to truth beyond even the point of understanding. If the word is there in the beginning, perhaps it will be there in the end as well. Consider words as the alpha and the omega, the cornerstones of our quest for relationships. 

I’ve been given three books since Judy died, along with poetry hurled into cyberspace by friends trying to reach my heart. I am truly grateful for all of them. They are manna in the wilderness. I read books, but the books that capture my soul are the ones that read me.

One of those books did precisely that. It came from a woman whose husband died recently from cancer, the same uninvited guest that knocked on our door 28 years ago—cancer. The book is Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. I devoured it. Like a special book always does, it has affirmed what I am feeling, brought out of hiding what begs for exposure with my own words. I know that because I have said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” over and over again as I digested the words in this book.

Being out on the water in a kayak helped Rosenblatt write his way through the grief he felt after his daughter’s death. I have no kayak and don’t intend to buy one, but I can understand his gravitation to a boat and water. As for me, I feel like those passengers must have felt on board the Costa Concordia after it ran aground on a reef off the coast of Italy. Stuck. Panicked. No captain in sight. Everything turned upside down.

In one of his thoughtfully insightful vignettes, Rosenblatt crafts dialogue between himself and a woman—could be God, could be an angel, or could be an imaginary dream-like mentor or teacher. In my last Notes, written in tribute to Judy, I said I was searching for her presence in her absence, some gleanings worthy of harvesting around this acreage of grief that I am confronting. Words from a man in a kayak bring some relief to my grief.

 “You have to understand,” she said. “Grief lasts forever.”

            “Like death,” I said.

Like death. Except death is someone else’s condition, and grief is all yours.”

            “I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died.”

“And you’ll feel even worse next year. And worse next year. And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to transform your grief.”

            “We’re back to that.”

“We’ve never left it,” she said. “Grief comes to you all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime.

            “How should I treat this guest? This unwelcome, uninvited guest.”

“Think of the one who sent it to you,” she said.

Oh my God! That Judy might have sent this grief to me is an agonizingly beautiful possibility.

The Empty Bathtub

Sylvia Plath writes in her book, The Bell Jar, “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with someone I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say, ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.’”

Sitting next to our shower is an old fashion claw-foot bathtub with four paws that elevate it from the bathroom floor. Judy loved that tub. Stretched out in it, her mind was able to drift God knows where. Time in that tub was her private time, but on occasion, when she would hear me coming downstairs from the third floor, she would invite me in for conversation. For fun, sometimes I would say, “How ‘bout I get in there with you.” But she kept that space to herself. There wasn’t room enough in that tub for both of us.

With a port in her side to drain fluid from her chest, she was unable to drift into reverie in her tub. Desperately short of breath, I suggested that she get in the shower with me. Tears come quickly when I think of her clinging to me, her chest up against mine as I washed her back. Denied her tub, this proud woman had to depend on me in a way that sadly robbed her of the very independence I loved in her. It was her independence, and mine as well, that had fueled our attraction for one another, our passionate interdependency.   

A Call For Hospital Duty  

Someone calls and asks me to come to the hospital and pray with her before her surgery. She tells me it will bring her comfort if I am there. But I wonder if I have any comfort to bring. I am an empty vessel, one that feels full of nothing but grief. I am sick of hospitals but I must go. I have to rely on a free-spirited grace capable of being present even though I am hardly presentable. For Christ’s sake, and I do mean for Christ’s sake, have I abandoned my belief that God can use even me, even now?

In Spite Of This, We Call It Good

Good Grief: Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, is dead, but his work lives on, reproduced daily in newspapers all over the world. Charlie Brown, the main character in the strip, is a little boy who has been called a “lovable loser” by some. He says “good grief” frequently after things so often go wrong. Like when Lucy holds the football for him to kick, but pulls it away at the last second causing Charlie Brown to go flying, and land on the ground. All he can say is “Good Grief.”

Despite his apparent despair, Charlie Brown has endless determination, rock-solid hope when faced with things that are beyond his understanding and control. Plagued by deep-seated insecurities, he just keeps plodding along, always ready to take another run at the ball.

Let’s face it; from the time we are born, until the time we die, we are dealing with loss. A lost tooth is an early warning sign of things to come. Learning how to cope with and overcome the multitude of losses a person has to deal with, all the falls one has to take in a lifetime is a test of faith in search of hope. 

Based on the full and joyous life I have been fortunate enough to live, 78 years worth now, I have to acknowledge the often-troubling fact that each one of us, certainly including me, lives each day in endless, omnipresent grief over things that are changing and things that are lost, suffered and painfully felt. We may deny that reality, run from it, or camouflage it. We may carry it in our insecurities and failures, and, interestingly enough, often times in our successes as well. It shadows us with our children’s struggles, a neighbor’s plight, and the suffering we witness everywhere in the world, that is, if we care to look at it. I must always remember that everyone carries a burden of grief.

I recognize the fact that grief is often hidden beneath busy activity, superficial quests, inordinate passions, and even humor. No matter, it inevitably finally finds its way, to seep into our lives at critical moments in time. Obviously, Judy’s dearth is one of those points where seepage has occurred.  

I have no easy answers or appropriate techniques for how to eradicate grief or avoid it. But I do know that my faith hangs, though even at times by a thread, beside Charlie Brown’s “good grief,” and the Man from Galilee, who triumphantly found his way through death on a day some call Good Friday. 

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A BIG THANKS, to those of you who responded so graciously to my tribute to Judy. I prize the way your hearts were opened to me, as mine was to you. 

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