It Will Find You...

 

I have spent the whole day running from it, ducking into anything to hide from it, evading it at nearly any cost. Like from Dodgeball, “Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.” I poured myself into useless phone apps in the predawn hours. I read the L.A. Times, mostly for the funny pages. I did crossword puzzles to distract myself because I work a puzzle, I get zoned in on it.

Then I inundated myself by waking up hibernating projects. I took a writing piece to the next stopping point and handed it off and still the worry nagged at the edges of my heart and mind. I worked on digitizing old VHS tapes of my grandfather’s 8mm film reels. The device I’d been successfully using crapped out on me so I drove them to a pro with a next step of viewing Cindy’s and my VHS tapes to do the same with the ones we want to preserve. The old DVD/VHS player didn’t play the tapes at all and I was stuck again. To prove the stupid box is connected right I stuck in a DVD and it played masterfully. I let Silverado play through getting lost in western gunfights and awesome dialog. Still, it was always in my periphery. So clearly was it in the edge of vision, I almost cursed the talent that helped me steal hundreds of passes and disrupt even more plays on the basketball court.

I stayed off social media because of Facebook’s constant reminders of past posts on this day four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, last year. I forced myself not to group text; “let them be”, I told myself.

Grief.

The simple definition for this unfathomable process is a deeply poignant anguish caused by bereavement. This is the “it” that has been dogging my tracks today on the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death. The honest truth is that grieving her loss, which followed so closely the loss of my dad, provides a one-two punch that is difficult for me to slip and get in an offensive rhythm of my own. Most days I can dance around the ring and trade blows while staying on my feet and scoring a few touches of my own. I can get things done that need doing, do things that I enjoy doing, and tackle responsibilities that, while I’d rather do something else, I can do them anyway.

What I find most effective is staying toe-to-toe with grief when it enters the ring and face it for what it is. Sometimes it is even better to get close, close enough to get into a clinch and wrestle with it. The only referee for me in a fight like this is Jesus. He can pull us apart and send us to our corners, give me a standing eight-count when I need it, and keep the fight fair. The problem with a bout like I had today is that when I run, hide, and avoid the conflict, my Referee can’t act and I end up exhausting myself. Fighting grief is best done as a tag-team match with our closest of confidants.

We handle grief in our own ways and wrestle with it and grapple with emotions that are as individual as our fingerprints. I don’t recommend running from it nor do I suggest we engage with it to the point it consumes us. Do not deny it, it will only build up to a breaking point. Don’t fill the void with excessiveness or stupid things. Playing hide and seek on a blank canvas surface surrounded by ropes designed to keep combatants together is not a productive approach.

When I spend too much time with pointless mechanisms to handle losses, I end up not being an effective person; I don’t love right and I don’t serve effectively, and these things lead to a self-loathing whirlpool. Breaking the hold with these things weighing us down is doggone difficult and many times we need help in getting back into the flow of life. Reach out and tag them in to help.

When grief taps you on the shoulder and challenges you to meet in the parking lot, turn ever so calmly, look it in the face, and take grief on right there. Don’t screw up the rest of your day worrying over meeting a bully later.

In His grip,

jerry

It is a Pilgrimage

 

Photos courtesy of my Storyblocks subscription

I have been consulting with my friend Webster about the word ‘journey’. The word is all around us these days and I’ve thought about it quite a bit but recently two young friends lost their mother and referred to their experience with her failing health into home-hospice care to its conclusion as a journey.

Now, Noah and the Merriam brothers have given me some formal meaning to journey. As a noun, three descriptions: 1 – Something suggesting travel or passage from one place to another, 2 – an act or instance of traveling from one place to another (trip), and 3 – in a chiefly dialectal sense, a day’s travel. As a verb, intransitive and transitive respectively – to go on a journey or to travel over or through. They go on to give me all sorts of great information about the word but that’s not my point and I don’t want to derail my thoughts.

Journey is an apt and excellent word to use when describing path taken with a loved one from hale and hearty through illnesses and their treatments to hospice and working hard to graciously escort the loved one to end of their time on earth.

My problem with the use of journey is not in their usage but in the banal use of the word for everything from a person’s rise to stardom from the ashes of poverty (not a bad place for the word) down to their ‘journey’ to the pet store for cat litter. Since when did the commonplace act of getting into the car, driving to the pet store, waving their Apple Pay at the device, and coming home with cat litter become a journey? Unless the person got in a wreck, was arrested for dangerous driving or maybe got into a road rage incident, and barely made it home alive and just in time for the cat, it was not a journey. And even then, there are more apt and exciting language to use for those types of things. We have cheapened the word ‘journey’ with overuse and stale thinking.

My trek for a descriptive word for what we go through as my young friends have done took me from Webster and friends to Roget and on through basic internet searches. I won’t overload you all with the many alternatives I have come across, that is for your own excursion. I’ll get right to the word that struck paydirt for me – pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage, defined by Merriam-Webster as a noun is: 1 – a journey of a pilgrim, especially one to a shrine or a sacred place, or 2 – the course of life on earth. It works as a verb as in, go on a pilgrimage. For the Christian, or any religious order believing in an afterlife or next-life, pilgrimage works wonderfully. For the atheist, not so much – there is only life, then death and whatever good the body is put to afterwards. Alas, no sacred place for them so not too much of a pilgrimage.

When we accompany someone along the inexorable path of life that leads from living to the doorstep of the next life, whether if be as a family member, a friend, or as a nurse or volunteer at a center to people previously unknown to them, we have been given one of the deepest of privileges. It is an honor to serve as a guide, a companion, or even as a crutch to a person on their last leg of the pilgrimage of life. It is crushing to hold their hand as they breath their last and hear someone say, ‘she’s gone’. Crushing until we can sit back and understand the courtesy we’ve been afforded by being present when our companion is in ultimate rest after so much pain. Better to have held their hand than to have had them taken from our presence only to pass away a short time later.

If we are tasked with walking side by side with someone in the final stages of their pilgrimage, we need resources to draw from – other friends, family members, and a higher power – in my case and in the case of the two young friends I wrote of at the beginning of my post, Jesus Christ whom we know greets our loved ones and welcomes them home.

While considering these things, I have come to a better understanding of what I went through with my mom and dad a few short years ago. I see it now in a more favorable light as though a photographer of great artistic talent captured the true nature of their subject. It’s easier on the eyes and warmer in the heart to believe their pilgrimage was successful. I am more thankful now for the courtesy afforded to me by my Lord to have been alongside my folks to see them home.

I hope and pray that this helps my friends find a greater measure of peace when they read this as I hope it does other readers. May God grant that this reaches the mark.

With peace in my heart and I in His grip,

jerry

Lonely Vigil

 

For the most part I was alone for the day. I awoke around 3a.m. and took over for Denise as she’d had a long shift. Textbook vigil. Dad was always a fighter – on the wrestling mats of Gardena High School, in and around the gridirons of football, in the boxing ring on the USS Point Cruz. His biggest fight, he lost. Smoking is a mother-effer to kick and he couldn’t and so we were on a vigil for the final count. Emphysema was the knockout punch that smoking threw at him and he couldn’t duck it though he fended it off as long as he could because he fought death up to his final few breaths.

With the exception of a bathroom break and a few moments to force myself to eat and stand outside to pray and be met by God’s Spirit, I stayed with him from the time I awoke until I helped carry him to the transport van and watched it roll down the driveway. We tried as best we could to keep him from being restless, as good as the uneducated can with drugs prescribed by people with M.D. after their names. I pictured the final fight scene in Rocky where he took a beating from Apollo Creed only my dad couldn’t block a punch nor throw one back and there was no referee to stop the fight, nobody but me in his corner to the throw in the towel. And I did.

Bob came by at some point in time and sat with us for a half an hour or forty minutes and we talked as he kept me company. He’d lost his own mom and had his own vigil not all that long ago. Denise stopped by from time to check on me and I told her I was okay and that I had it 'under control'. The struggle for a man in respiratory distress is violence contained in one rented hospital bed. I’d lied. That’s what big brothers do. But I wasn’t okay and I knew it but by the end of the vigil I did have it under control. God’s Grace is sufficient.

Mom came over for the last couple of hours and was there with me at the end, the two of us holding dad’s hand. She had her own massive fight going on while we helped her struggle to regain her strength and endurance. Throughout the day I played various renditions of Amazing Grace for him, mom liked that. The end finally came with the three clearest and easiest breaths I’d seen him take in years. It was a quiet end to a lonely vigil.

Now I’ve just told you about people coming by and sitting with me so how could this be lonely? It was lonely by choice. I could take in their comfort only so deeply as to get me to the next moment. If I had allowed myself to connect as much as my soul screamed for I would have lost it and not been up to the task for dad, or have been there for Denise or Bob or Mom or Stacey...

It has been 537 days since this happened, why bring it up now? Because I sit removed by a couple of short miles from friends and family on their own vigil and because I love them so much that I am on vigil as well, only somewhat removed.

These are the cruelest of vigils, the meanest of fights, when we have given ourselves over to inevitability. How I hate these things. I badly want to spare them this waiting, sit in their place for them. However, I am not allowed and must suffer my own portion as best I can and pray they have peace on the front lines of their particular fight. I grieve already for my friend, his family, and his friends.

This probably sounds like a lot of unbelief and lack of faith and that is correct. It is. And so the only thing I can really say is Maranatha, come quickly Lord Jesus.

In His grip,

jerry

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

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)