Waves of Grief

 

Personal observations on the process and state of grief upon the loss of a parent or spouse, or maybe worse yet, a child:

Grief is like standing on the beach just in the surf-line where most of the waves lap up and tickle our toes and encompass your foot. As the wave recedes we can feel the sand erode from under our feet and sense that if we stood there long enough, the beach would altogether cover us up.

Now and again a wave comes in as an ankle slapper and we get surprised but not too worried at the sensations. Then an outsider comes and we are standing up to our thighs in the ocean and we feel like we’ll be pulled out to sea. And so we sob quietly but manage to recover on our own though the emptiness leaves us hungering for another day with our loved one.

Then there is the rogue wave. The ones we hear about that come unexpected and wash people out to sea because they weren’t being vigilant while going about their day on the beach or sitting on the jetty letting their minds wonder. The wave takes us out, off the beach and into a surf so roiled as we feel we may drown. We need help, a lifeguard to show up in his rescue dory or maybe in a Baywatch boat. We need them to pull us in and take us to safety.

Let the toe ticklers do their work. Let the ankle slappers have their way. Be wary of the outsiders and stand firm. Let the lifeguards to their job and bring us in when the rogue wave crashes over us and tosses us about. If you don’t see them, call out and someone will come for you.

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Author’s Notes:

During the past six months my family has endured the loss of both my parents, first my dad early in September 2020 and then my mom ten weeks later in November. Neither was the result of covid-19 and the path we followed starting this last July was shocking and unexpected, almost violent. No, certainly violent to our souls.

While traveling the path of grief I have on occasion written a piece about each of my parent and put up various Facebook posts on the sensations of grief and loss. I took the first motorcycle ride with friends since this all began for me and we ended up at Duke’s Malibu for lunch out in their patio dining area. The above piece came to me while enjoying discussions ranging from home sales riding and what the future has in store for us as we learn to contend with the pandemic. We did not speak about my loss and grief but the waves coming up on the rocks below us and the vast Pacific Ocean stretching out in front of us spoke clearly to me.

Putting up the above observations as a Facebook post generated good discussion points and a great deal of sympathetic replies. One such reply came from my friend Lisa Brickner, a practicing psychologist. She suggested that with so many people in isolation and experiencing the ravages of loneliness that I should submit the writing to newspapers, something I’ve never done. Once I put this post up on Calvary’s Thread I will heed the advice of the professional and submit it somehow to our various local papers and perhaps to the Grants Pass Daily Courier where I will shortly be sending the obituary for my parents.

As a Christian, I have the additional benefit of The Great Lifeguard, Jesus Christ, and his followers.

I am no professional, simply a man in grief feeling his way along the surf line.

Drafted. Doggone it!

 

I called to her, as I have been for weeks now. Finally, she turned to me, the smile on her lips giving her careworn face a lift I hadn’t seen since she last talked to her great-grands. She handed me a wallet card she was holding in her hand. Nothing fancy, muted blues and reds printed on a beige card that read in eighteen-point Times New Roman font “Drafted” across the top.

A message followed in twelve-point Freestyle Script, “Your services are required in the Heavenly Host. Please report at once.”

In the lower right corner in the tiniest of prints possible to read was the signature, “Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior”.

As small as it was, the signature brought a burning to my eyes and as simple as the card was, it broke my heart.

How could I beg her to stay when the servant at her core commanded that she obey the God she had served for at least my lifetime? A lifetime of devotion required one last act of service above and beyond her will to stay and love her kids, laugh with her grandchildren, or teach her great-grands. And so she went quietly and finally without the struggle that so defined the final years of her devotion to her husband.

Aside from being my biggest fan and encourager, I remember mom as being a model of devotion – as a mother, a pre-school teacher, youth advisor, Stephen Minister, Elder, Deacon, bonus mom to many, sister to many more… When you were with her she was devoted to being with you and being whatever it was you needed at the time.

I would really like to know what is behind the door and within the misty room she walked into. I want to know what critical service she is being called to, away from me. Selfish, I know. I suspect a portion of her service will be like that of her father before her, looking over my shoulder and from time to time giving me a nudge.

Mom does nudging well. It is because of her that I started this blog, Calvary’s Thread. I had just put up my second post in Iron Side Up, it was about some Christian mussing or comment of some sort while riding my bike. She said, “You should have a blog just for this kind of stuff.” I had to do what she said, she is my mom after all.

I imagine that after she handed over the card to the gatekeeper, she was ushered into a big hall and greeted by the One Who Invited her, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And then there was a reunion – Aunt Jean (Mom’s oldest and closest friend), Carol and the other cohorts who started the Center For Children, my dad, her parents, brothers, and sisters. A bunch from the Heavenly Hall of Fame showed her around, there was singing, worship, incense, and an awesome silence filled with love and warmth.

I can live with this vision of her.

jerry

Forever In His Grip

 

Forever in His Grip

He evolved. During a lifetime of being a leader and possessing intelligence, of being athletic and artistic - dad applied those things to a changing landscape of passions throughout his life. Russell Jay White, aka RJ to my mom and friends, aka Russell to his mom, aka Rusty to his aunts and uncles, and Russ to just about everybody else. Dad and Batman to me.

Dad was class president as a senior and while I don’t know his GPA, I know he was among the top of his class. He led. He was in the DeMolay and that required commitment and leadership. Following high school he went into the Navy and while he was never an officer, he was looked up to by his peers and he led them. He went to work at Pacific Bell Telephone and Telegraph and led his way up from an entry level installer position to a be second level manager and his people loved him. He figured things out and designed systems and procedures that improved every team’s performance.

I am not sure what sports dad participated in as a little boy as it seems we never talked about that. As a high school athlete he was an all-league football player, went to the state gymnastics meet in floor exercise, and was an all-state competitor in wrestling. While playing for and being captain of the football team at El Camino College, Paul Hornung pointed to him and, using some profanity, said to keep that guy out of my face. While Hornung didn’t remember it specifically, he smiled at my telling of the story and said that sounded like something he’d have said. While in the Navy, dad boxed and was the ship’s champion. Not a bad accomplishment on an air craft carrier with 1200 men on it. I was a different athlete and once he figured that out he helped me go my way into baseball, basketball, and track.

He and mom got into racquetball in their mid-forties and I rarely beat him. He won a few club tournaments. Then it was golf, something that took he and mom on wonderful journeys and tourneys. I never beat him.

He evolved.

He loved music. He played clarinet in the school band, must have fooled around with the French Horn because we have one in a closet at the big house. He played keyboard, harmonica, and the kazoo. He sang in the choir and had a lovely voice that ranged from basso to baritone. I got none of this from him and only played the drums one year as a sixth-grader. He finished his singing activities by being part of the praise choir at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He loved building and home projects and creating cool spaces and watched every nail being driven into the house he and mom built in Merlin, Oregon. Later in life he discovered Intarsia, the art of making wood mosaics using the natural colors and grains of various types of wood. He loved making them for family and friends and he told me he thought lovingly about each person as he created the piece. A bit of his soul rests in every piece he made. He had Stacey and Denise and every grandchild pick a piece from the pattern catalogs he had and then he went out to his shop, found the various woods, cut them, sanded them, and pieced them together, sealing in the textures of his love with coats of varnish. He didn’t have me pick mine as he had one he wanted to do for me and it was spot on – the Red-tailed Hawk, my favorite bird. It is one of the most ubiquitous birds and is found in every state of the union but Hawaii. I call it the “Everyman Bird”.

I was relocating mine today so I could put the piece that I brought back from their house as my keepsake and my red-tail now sits where I can see it out of the corner of my eye as I write. While moving it I looked on the back to his inscription, “For ‘Stick’. Together in His grip. Dad 10-24-05”. ‘Stick’ is the nickname he gave me and the one I hold dearest to me of the oh-so-many nicknames I have. I sign off many of my letters and emails ‘In His grip’. It is a phrase I want desperately to always be true.

In His grip,

jerry

How Long?

Photo courtesy of my StoryBlocks subscription

How Long?

How long must we wear these chains and mute the songs of our hearts? Songs meant for praise and love and meant to extol the Kingdom of God. Our hearts are breaking for our neighbors and for a broken world consumed by a focus on self.

Turn our heats to you, Lord. Let us go to our knees in humility rather than stomping in protest. Let us cry out for your Kingdom coming. Who can stop it? And who can stop praises from entering your throne room? None. There are none that can do this. Our hearts pour out worship in spirit and truth and we are those you seek and call to yourself.

I heard it in the quiet of Your sanctuary.

I was free not to sing.

I tell you that I found a deep well of untapped love and adoration for our King dammed up for the need to sound out words and notes in precise and harmonic ways. When that need for the mechanics of song was broken by the command not to sing, worship gushed forth and broke chains. The logjam has moved downstream. Lord, let the force of your rushing waters take it down to the ocean and leave me free.

The Lord was good to me, he broke through my reticence and allowed me to move, clap, raise my hands in praise, and punch out emphasis to the prayers and worship during the service. I felt liberated, likely more so than I have in the years since returning to my home church.

I am thankful. It is not too much to ask that the fires to remain hot and that our ardor continue for the King.

In His grip,

jerry

I'm Sorry

Revisionist History? Balderdash! (Alternate Title)

WE have been studying revisionist history all our lives, every last one of us who are now living and breathing and all who have gone through modern day educational systems. To say that the removal of Confederate statues and public memorabilia honoring the breakaway republic is revisionist history is balderdash. To say that removing racist and offensive team monikers and removing the Confederate flag from public symbols is changing history is bunk. WE cannot change history.

I do not often write regarding politics as I believe Jesus is a-political and I wish to be in line with His political thinking. However, I am seeing on my limited social media outlets, Instagram and Facebook mostly, that some of my friends and colleagues are decrying the removal of Confederate icons, statues, and symbols, as well as the removal of racially offensive corporate symbols, as an attempt to change history. I am trying not to think less of them for doing so and my struggle is raging.

WE cannot change history. To borrow a tired phrase, it is what it is. WE have been offering in our schools, our textbooks, our museums, and a host of other media outlets, a revisionist history constructed by those in power in order to shade themselves in some sort of romantic light so they can feel better about themselves and justify the continued oppression of races of people different from themselves. WE have romanticized the genocidal actions as WE tried to wipe out our American Native brothers and sisters. This is historical.

I was not taught of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in school and yet it is a part of history. It took the murders of several black people in rapid succession by white policemen to bring it to light for me and put it in the news. I would have loved to say that those murders culminated in the murder of George Floyd but sadly it has continued, and continued with a blind eye from those in the highest levels of our leadership.

I did not learn of the Trail of Tears in the classroom. I picked up a book about, and perhaps by, Will Rogers, a Cherokee citizen. The first chapter was about the hardships and degradations he suffered on the Trail of Tears. I was so ashamed that WE did this and so much more to inhabitants of our land that I could not continue reading. I don’t know where the book is. It is a treasure I snagged from a church rummage sale to support work we did at the Vah Ki Presbyterian Church and it is still in this house filled with hundreds of books. I will find it, take my medicine, and read it cover to cover.

WE weren’t satisfied that we had denigrated a race of people and forced them to live in designated reservations set in the most inhospitable parts of the continent. I am friends with residents of the Gila River Indian Community and while reading of their history and the history of a man who tied our church into this community I learned that WE had to take this reservation and dam the river which gave it life, beauty, an agricultural culture, and their identity and plunge them into a depth of poverty that made them wholly reliant on the WE that never publicized or taught this bit in our history classes.

WE cannot rewrite history. We the People can rewrite the history books and the anthologies WE use to teach history and continue the righting of wrongs. WE must name them so that We the People might be truly free.

We the People are making moves to stop the romanticizing and glorification of the vilest parts of our history and are naming it what it is, teaching what it is, fighting what it is – the sin of racism, the sin of discrimination, the sin of genocide…

There is one act, and one act only, in the history of creation that can erase any act in one’s personal history and that is the once given sacrifice God made of his son, God in the flesh, Jesus Christ. This one act atones for the actions of an individual who accepts it as true and confesses his sins. It does not change history nor the way it should be taught.

Sadly,

jj white

Tail of Tears Map

Regarding Grief

Grief comes upon us in many guises and we often wonder what it was about the little nuance that caused us to weep with a sadness best left undefined. It can ride in on the wings of a random hummingbird to touch our cheek as a kiss blown from across the room or it might crash over us as a Banzai Pipeline wave, one we’d have much rather ridden the long board on or even watched from afar.

It would be best if we could embrace and accept it as our own but it just isn’t always ours to enwrap. Our empathy for another, one stung by the sharp barbs of loss, locks us into their hearts and we feel as they do but we can only wrap them in our arms and hold tight while they are wracked by nameless pain. It is theirs to claim, they are ours to love through it.

When it is our own though, do we push it away, run from it into some escape hatch, or deny it all together? Make it our own I say, let it rush through us to cleanse and bring new joy at some forgotten memory of our lost one. Hold the best of them to ourselves to inform and shape a future without them at our side. After a while the rivers of feeling will run clean and pure like the rivulet from the base of Bridalveil Fall.

Writer’s note: the Ahwahneechee Native Peoples called the fall Pohono which means “Spirit of the Puffing Wind”. I ran across this today while looking into the fall and after I’d already used the simile, ‘as a kiss blown from across the room’. The Ahwahneechee called the falls Pohono because the fall is often blown sideways and during a lite flow of the creek may not reach the ground directly below the origins of the fall.

I note it because I think grief can often be like this - blown here and there by winds of time and emotion only to find rest in places we can’t predict.

Peace friends.

To Laugh or To Cry?

(courtesy of my storyblocks.com account)

Romans 12:15 “¹⁵Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”

Phil had me read a short, powerful scripture the other morning during our Zoom Men’s Meeting. The impact on me was immediate and many-faceted and continues to expand for me as I write this post. Let me lay the foundation that I would have hoped would have been known to me a bit more than twenty years ago but, as it turns out, was laid down in the beginning, as in ‘In the beginning was the Word…’

It was an earlyish Mission Arizona (MAZ) and when the senior high students were doing a project on one part of the reservation (Gila River Indian Community) and I was off with Julia, James, and the junior high students painting the interior of the Sacaton Presbyterian Church. Earlier in the week Julia and I were talking about things and a subject came up where she wanted to know what was in store for her and a tad frustrated at the progress in the area under discussion. In my hubris, I told her I would pray about it and come back to her with something. Nothing seemed forthcoming as the week rolled on.

Thursday is generally the last day of major work during MAZ with Friday the day we clean up and put the final wrappings on our projects so that we can enjoy a fun evening before trekking home on Saturday. Our painting wore on deep into the night while our paint supplies ran short. So we instructed the students that only an adult was to pour paint from the 5-gallon bucket into the individual cans and roller pans to make sure we didn’t waste any.

It was somewhere around one a.m. Friday morning when I went outside to pour paint for someone and found a good quart had been spilled on the sidewalk thus wasting the paint and making a mess that needed to be cleaned up. I probably said some inappropriate things as I went down on my knees to scrub the paint up as best I could. I know I mumbled things like, ‘those thrashers!’. I love those kids but junior boys and girls are thrashers. Everybody stayed clear of me while I worked out the week’s frustrations on the sidewalk.

A coyote jogged through the parking lot, stopped, and stared at me while cocking his head to the side to help him figure out what he was seeing. I sat up from my scrubbing and had to laugh with him and that is when I heard as clearly as I hear His voice, “It is not for you to know or determine. It is for you to laugh with her when she laughs and the cry with her when she cries.”

Reading that scripture on this Wednesday morning for me was like jumping off the rocks into a cold alpine lake. It was shocking and it awakened me to more of God's. When I was spoken to it was directly out of scripture and for twenty-three, twenty-four years, I had never realized it.

The implication is plain to me – if I want to hear God speak to me, I need to read the Bible. While I’m reading it, He will speak to me. While I’m praying or being silent, the Lord will speak to me from the Word. Homer Simpson said it very well for me, “D’oh!”

A more timely aspect of this passage from Romans is how much need the world has for us to pick it up this scripture and live it. We need to grab hold of this and in Christian empathy and concern weep with those who are in mourning for the loss of family and friends and their way of life. And we need to laugh and celebrate with those who overcome and persevere and find accomplishments in spite of a world gone sideways.

We must resist those who live in the ‘me-first’ moment. You know, the attitude that led to the ‘America First’ movement and the continued and ever deepening of America’s isolation from a world shrinking in on itself in misery and international effects? That is not of God and never will be. We are to be in the world. Not of it, no. But in it and among those who weep and laugh, celebrate and mourn. If we are to be Christ’s ambassadors in the world, we need to become really good at heeding this short verse.

Find someone and mourn or laugh with them as required.

In His grip

jerry

(images courtesy of my storyblocks.com account)