A God Thing

I’m a bit of a skeptic at heart when it comes to “God signs.”  That phrase alone makes me cringe (along with its sibling “God thing”) and I have always had a hard time claiming with any amount of certainty that something was a sign or word from God.  

I used to think this was an indication of one of my many shortcomings.  If I just had more faith I could speak confidently of what I knew God was trying to communicate.  If I was a better Christian, God would make himself known more clearly.  If I read the bible/prayed/fasted/devoted myself more, I could use language of certainty.  If only I was more, then those “God signs” would be real.

Sometimes I still believe this.

But I’ve also been around long enough to see how people manipulate these signs from God.  How they speak with such certainty about things that are not certain.  How their “God signs” were often things that they wanted to see or happen. Or to serve as proof of their very “in-ness.”  We Christians are very good at speaking what we want to believe as though it were sound truth.

If I have to err on either side of this conundrum I think I would rather err on the side of skeptic.  I don’t want to be cynical, but I’d rather not feel like everything must be a sign from God in order for it to warrant merit.  And also, if I’m being real honest here, I’m just not confident enough to say with any amount of certainty that something is from God.  Maybe that reveals a weak faith, or maybe wisdom from years of witnessing the voice of God sound an awful lot like whoever is speaking on His behalf.  Probably a little of both.  

And yet still I feel like maybe the spirit is nudging me to be more open to naming God’s work.  Maybe I can acknowledge deep in my heart movement I hope to be of God.

I have two red headed babies.  They have the kind of red hair that stops people in their tracks.  It is truly beautiful hair.  Everyone always asks, “Where on earth does it come from?”  My husband and I are both brunettes through and through.  Neither of us has the fair complexion or ginger roots that would naturally be inclined to produce such vivid red hair on a kid.

For a long time I would answer that question with a simple “my side of the family.”  This is certainly true; my dad, sister and brother all have heads of different shades of ginger.

But I’m never telling my whole truth when I answer this question.  What I want to say when people inquire about their red hair is much more vulnerable.  I want to say, “I think their hair comes from my dad.  I think it’s a sign from God for me to trust that my dad in heaven and God is still good.  Because my first two babies have honey colored and dark brown hair but then, when I was pregnant with this third baby, my dearly loved, red haired dad unexpectedly died and the effects of this tragedy took a toll on my faith and my understanding of God.  Then, six months later, I gave birth to a little red haired anomaly and it felt a little kiss from my dad.  

Maybe it was from God, but it could have just as easily have been a nice coincidence.  

But then, sixteen months later I gave birth to another ginger haired baby and I wonder if surely this meant God was trying to tell me something, that this was more than just coincidence.  Maybe it is a sign.”

If it had just been Lou, the older daughter, I might have been able to convince myself that it was all just a lovely coincidence.  But then Rory came and two babies with the same hair color that is nothing like their parents but everything like their grandfather and maybe, just maybe it’s more.  

It could be a little piece of my dad in the babies he never got to meet.  Maybe it was God’s way of keeping my dad’s name on my tongue.  Whenever anyone asks where their unique hair color comes from I get to speak of my dad.  And I get asked that question multiple times a day.  Or maybe it’s a visual reminder of him I get to kiss and hug every day. 

But sometimes I wonder if it’s even more that that.  Maybe it’s a reminder of God’s love and care for me still.   A physical representation that God cares about me enough to send me a sign, an answer to the rawest and most vulnerable questions my heart holds.  These two babies and their unique hair color came during a season of my life when I so desperately needed to know that God was good.  Could God’s answer to the biggest questions and fears I have about Him lie in the hair atop my daughters’ heads? An answer I desperately need to hear?  Maybe it is a God thing…

I’m learning in this season to claim this truth with a little more certainty.  I could be wrong, sure.  But I’m tired of letting my fear of being wrong allow me to assume that God can’t or won’t move in my life.  I don’t want to stop looking for God’s hand because I’m afraid of placing too much significance on some innocuous seeming event.  I don’t want to be silent because I’m afraid to hope.

And while I will likely not go into this whole mess of theology and belief with the check out girl at Trader Joe’s each time I am asked about their hair, I will settle in a little more deeply in my heart my own truth about God’s work and his “sign.”  I will choose to believe this God thing…

70

When my dad turned 50 my mom threw him a big surprise party.  Our backyard was filled with all the people who loved him: United coworkers, neighborhood friends, family.  My sister and I had been the decoy.  My mom sent us to Target with him and told us to stall as long as we could.  It turns out this is an easy task for two tweens.  We puttered around, going up and down every aisle, eventually hanging out in the bathroom for an insanely long time while my poor dad waited outside, his blood pressure slowly rising.  By the time we left he was seething but it was the only time I was not phased by his anger.  We were doing this for the greater good.

And it was all worth it when he rounded the corner behind our house and saw all the people who’d gathered to celebrate this milestone.  They had a funny tee-shirt for him and all sorts of “over the hill” paraphernalia.  He made his way around our backyard, in his element, laughing and greeting all his people.  Later they would all pass around a basket collecting cash for the parking ticket my mom had incurred in the chaos of trying to get everything done for the party.  The party, as all my parents’ parties did, lasted well into the summer night.

Celebrating birthdays wasn’t a thing we did very well for my dad, so that’s probably why the 50th stands out.  I have no idea what we did for his 60th.  I was wrapping up my time in New York, a month away from getting married.  Did his birthday get lost that year, wrapped up as we were in wedding planning?  I’m sure my mom and siblings had a dinner at home for him like always, but that was probably it.  

The only other birthday I remember for my dad wasn’t an actual birthday, but the acknowledgement of one.  Shortly after my dad’s 63rd birthday he was gathered in our kitchen with his older brothers.  I watched them quietly raise a glass of whisky, toasting their father, who had died at 62.  As the youngest, my dad was now the last one to make it past that cursed age.  Now all three men had celebrated the birthday their father never got to see and there was a murmured recognition of this birthday’s significance for my dad and for them all.  

Sometimes I wonder if one day my siblings and I will gather in the weeks or months after my youngest brother turns 67 to acknowledge that we made it, that we all passed that milestone my dad never did.

Today would have been my dad’s 70th birthday.  As I type those words, tears flood my eyes.  I'm heavy today, anxious and burdened.  Seventy seems particularly significant and, for the first time in a while, I find myself grieving a little more bitterly than usual over this missed milestone. It makes me sad that he never got to see this age, that I will never know what my dad was like in his seventies.  For whatever reason that number, 70, feels more significant than the other three birthdays we’ve marked without him.  

I wonder what we would have done today.  It’s easy to say now, on this side of knowing how quickly and without warning a life can end, that we would have planned a big celebration, another backyard blowout, a cake with 70 candles, and “really over the hill” decorations everywhere.  In all likelihood though, we would have done what we always did: dinner at my mom’s, a simple toast to my dad, and a few gifts.  Either way this longing, this longing to be able to mark in some large or small way my dad entering into a new decade, making it of another year older, this longing is crushing today.

I hate that I don’t know what my dad would be like in his seventies.  I hate that I can’t throw him a big party today, or at least share a pint of Guinness with him.  I hate that he is forever stuck at age 66 while time keeps moving.  The sun will rise and set on June 9, 2017 but this day won’t be the day we want it to be.  Instead it’s a “would have been” day.  The day my dad would have turned 70 if he’d made it that far.  The day we would have celebrated him wildly.

I haven’t had a day like this in a while.  A day of bitter, hot tears and sharp pangs of longing.  I don’t know why this particular milestone feels so hard today but it does.  I’m sad.  And kinda pissed.  Much of the past three and a half years of grieving my dad has involved deep sadness over the loss of all the good he encompassed, sadness over the people who won’t know him, over the ways we no longer get to experience his love and care.  Today, if I’m being really honest, I’m mostly just mad that he didn’t get to be 70.  That we don’t get to celebrate this passage of time with him.  It’s shitty and it sucks.

And I know days like this give me a choice.  I can let my heart stay hard and bitter in it.  I can stay mad and shake my fist at God for not letting my dad at least make it to 70.  Or I can let it teach me and grow me.  I can use it as a reminder that we are not promised milestones forever so we should celebrate the ones that come with abandon.  

I have chosen the latter as often as I can, and I know I will continue to do so today.  But I will also let myself sit in the anger too.  I will let myself long for what “would have been”, even if I know that longing can never be met.  The only healthy way around days like these are through them, through the truth of what is hard to the hope of the good that can be found in hard things.

I will get my dad’s favorite burgers for lunch and maybe even down the fries with a Guinness.  I’ll be with my mom and my sister tonight.  We’ll imagine what celebrating my dad’s 70th birthday would have looked like and we’ll be sad that this particular story will never be told.  And tomorrow will be a new day.

Happy Birthday, Dad.  70 would have looked good on you.

Lessons in Autumn

I wrote this essay two years ago now, the first fall after my dad's death.  For a variety of reasons I never published it.  Each year, as the season start to to change I think back on this essay and the little scraps of hope that came with it.  Today I noticed for the first time that the leaves on the parkway of our street were starting to turn yellow and red and I thought now might be the right time to share a lesson I learned a few years ago.  

I’m not a fall person.  I’m a summer girl.  I love everything about it.  The flip flops, the sundresses, the warmth, the sun, the general happiness in the air.  If I could live in summer year round I would do in a heart beat.  I don’t really get people who need seasons.  I’d be perfectly happy in San Diego.  Except that all my people are in the Midwest.

And in the Midwest we have fall.  And people here love fall for some reason.  I don’t get it, but without fail the Tuesday after Labor day brings out The Autumns.  The Autumns love fall, love Pumpkin Spice Lattes and boots, and most of all love reveling in the end of summer because it means fall is coming. 

And I don’t get it.

Once at a dinner party one of The Autumns started on about his excitement for fall and I kind of lost it.  “How can you like fall????  Fall is death.  Everyone goes on and on about how beautiful fall is but all those leaves are changing colors because they are dying!  Fall is just one slow death!” 

Later, he confessed to me that all fall he couldn’t look at the beautiful trees without thinking about death.

I felt kind of bad about that one.  I mean, I pretty much ruined an entire season for him.  It was not my finest moment.

This year, on this side of death, I anticipated feeling extra scroogey towards fall.  I’ve lived in the thick of winter for close to a year now and I didn’t need all those leaves changing color and reminding me of dying.  I have enough reminders.

But something funny happened this year.  I don’t know if it was because we had a particularly beautiful fall, or if it was precisely because I am on this side of death, having experienced it so intimately this year, but I found myself marveling at the beauty of fall these past few months.  I couldn’t help myself.  I’d be out walking with the kids and a tree would literally take my breath away.  Drives around town were fraught with  beautiful colors and trees in full bloom.  

I felt guilty at first.  I tried to shove down this acknowledgement of fall’s beauty.  But it kept coming.  I couldn’t stop marveling.   There was something about those beautiful trees.  It was like death wasn’t going down without a fight.  Yes, the leaves were dying and falling away, but they were going to die beautifully, damnit.  They weren’t going quietly.  They weren’t about to leave without bringing a final bit of beauty into the world.

Which of course made me think of my dad’s death.  When I looked, I saw the beauty in it.  His death was traumatic and shocking and so very painful.  But there was beauty, damnit.  There was beauty in the community of people who showed up and loved us immediately after his death and continued to care for us throughout this year.  There was beauty in the way it knit us closer.  And there was so much beauty in the tributes made to my dad.  For weeks after his death people told his stories, the stories of his beautiful life, the things that they loved about him and the ways that he had lived a good story.  It was death that wasn’t going down without a fight.  The beauty of his life wasn’t going away untold. 

And it’s in our love for him.  Our love for him and the ways we carry him with us and try to keep him alive bears witness to this notion of death not going down without a fight.  We speak his name and tell his stories so that in his death, his life still blooms boldly.  His legacy and his love is so deeply embedded in our hearts that he will not die quietly.  There is beauty and color in remembering him and what was so wonderful about his life.

And so maybe I’m changing my mind about fall.  Maybe I’m finding some beauty in the dying.  Or rather I respect the beauty in the dying.  We all die right?  But our legacies, our life’s work.  That’s not going down without a fight, without a final bloom of beautiful.

Bad Heart.

Today would have been my dad's 68th birthday.  I thought about my dad even more than usual and drank a bit of Guinness with dinner to mark this day.  And here I wanted to share a few thoughts about the man that raised me.

In his favorite place: Ireland

My dad had a weak heart.   He was born with a heart condition, the name of which I can never remember, causing me to call my mom from my midwife’s office every time I am newly pregnant so she can remind me what it is that runs through my genes and could lead to trouble for the babe inside of me.  Hearts have plumbing systems and electrical systems, so to speak, and his condition had to do with his electrical system.  There was a hole, or something, and apparently it was a big deal.  My aunt said that when received word that her father, my grandfather, had passed away at first she assumed the call was about her nineteen year old brother, my dad, that the heart condition had finally taken him.  His weak heart wasn’t expected to last very long, I guess.  But you’d never know this from looking at him.

Part of why the details of my dad’s weak heart are so hazy is because I can only remember two times in my whole life when his condition ever came up.  Once he explained that he wasn’t allowed to do sports as a kid, on account of the weak heart, so that’s why he ended up participating in debate team and student council and the school plays.   Which was so like my dad, to turn lemons in to lemonade.  There wasn’t a hint of bitterness or longing when he recalled his inability to do what every other boy on the block was doing.  Just happiness over the opportunity that one closed door afforded.  The other time the weak heart came up was when he and my mom flew to Texas to see a doctor who specialized in my dad’s condition so he could fix the problem.  And he did.

My dad had a weak heart.

cheering on our team

My dad had a strong heart.  He lost his dad when he was a young man in college.  I thought about this a lot when I was in college, how much I still needed my dad at that time.  How did my dad finish learning to become a man while mourning the loss of the one who was supposed to teach him?  If it had been me I think I would have floundered for a few years in self-pity.  But not my dad.  He took his strong heart and started his career.  At age 20 he started working for the company he would retire with many years later.  And then his strong heart took care of his mom.  He played bridge with her friends and took her on trips with him. 

My dad had a strong heart.  He made strong-hearted decisions.  He followed a moral compass that led him to what was true and good.  His values and priorities lined up and his commitment to them caused him to live a life that made the lives of those around him better, not worse. 

My dad had a strong heart.

My dad had a bad heart.  When I was thirteen, awkward and gangly and in need of braces, my dad suffered his first heart attack at age forty-eight.  While his heart condition had to do with the electrical system of the heart, the heart attack was all plumbing and had nothing to do with his condition.  His arteries were clogged from too much smoking, too little exercise and a few too many trips through the drive through at his go-to lunch spot, Wendy’s.  He wasn’t extraordinarily obese and he’d certainly cut back his once two packs a day habit over the years, but it didn’t matter.  That bad heart got him. 

And I’ll never forget the sight of him in the hospital bed, so pale and weak, hooked up to machines that beeped and hummed.  Seeing us see him in this state was one of two times in my life I’d see him cry.  (The other, for the record, was when he dropped me off at University of Illinois for my freshmen year of college.)  It was the first time I think I realized my dad could die.  That this bad heart could get him in the end.  .

We all changed our lives for my dad’s bad heart.  Skim milk replaced 2%, bagels on Sunday morning instead of donuts (which was met with much weeping and gnashing of teeth).  We ate turkey burgers and oven roasted fries.  My dad joined a gym and went faithfully every morning.   But my dad had a bad heart and even though he made changes I don’t think he could every fully accept this fact.  He looked around and saw people drinking and smoking more, eating worse and working out less whose hearts could handle the abuse.  He didn’t want to accept that his bad heart couldn’t sustain it.  And so, less than twenty years after that first heart attack, his bad heart finally gave out.  Another heart attack took his life.

My dad had a bad heart.

But oh, my dad had such a good heart.  He loved so well.  Never once did I question the simple truth that my dad loved and accepted me.  He was decent and kind-hearted.  He welcomed and invited everyone who crossed his path.  People felt comfortable and accepted in his presence.  You couldn’t help but feel good about yourself with my dad.  He did that.  He made you feel like enough.

helping, always

My dad had a good heart.  He lived the life of a helper.  Letters of encouragement to friends in college, serving the community or those he worked with, my dad never seemed to turn down a chance to help someone.  I had to check with my mom first before asking him to help with the kids because he would tell me he could, even if he had work of his own to do.  He loved nothing more than to serve others (and of course spend time with his beloved grand children).

selfies with Monster

My dad had a good heart.  In the end his most defining feature was his kindness.  His big, good heart.  He loved us with that good, kind heart.  He loved my mom and my siblings and Tommy and my kids and I with everything in him.   We were the fortunate ones, the beneficiaries of his good heart. 

My dad had a weak heart, a bad heart.  My dad had a strong heart, a good heart.  I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.

On Redemption

I had an interesting discussion with my co-workers recently that I haven’t quite been able to get out of my head.  We were discussion that theological dilemma about whether or not God intervenes (or chooses not to intervene) in order to teach us a lesson.  More specifically, did God cause my co-worker to get an intense thyroid virus that rendered him incapable of doing pretty much anything as a way to “slow him down?”  This conversation sprung from an incredibly insensitive comment that I made- pretty much to that effect. 

For the record I felt awful when I realized what I’d said.  I mean if he were battling cancer, I would never in a million years have told him that God caused his cancer in order to slow him down.  That would be awful.  And if someone had told me that God allowed my dad to die so that I could learn something I would have punched that person in the face.  It’s a problematic theology, this “God’s hand in stressful/difficult/tragic situations in order for us to learn something” theology.

And I’ve wrestled with it much this year following my dad’s death.  I don’t believe that God would put our family through the hell of this year to teach us something.  It’s pretty twisted.  I don’t think God causes cancer in order to wake us up or makes us hit that tree with our car to teach us a lesson.  I just don’t think God is that manipulative or cruel. 

But if I don’t believe that, can I believe that God does intervene in some cases?  Was it his hand that caused me to be late, narrowly missing that car crash by mere seconds?  If he saved me, why didn’t he also do it for the others?  It’s a tricky rabbit hole to go down. 

And it’s hard because I don’t want to pick and choose, acknowledging God’s intervention when the outcome is good but not when the outcome is bad.  But then is the solution to acknowledge God’s intervention in ALL things or in NO things?

Like most things regarding God I’m finding myself more and more comfortable with a simple “I don’t really know.”  And that’s how I left it in the conversation with my co-workers.  I’m just not really sure.

But then later, as I drove home, I realized there is something that I’m beginning to know for sure.  I’m beginning to know that in all things God redeems.  This is the story told over and over again throughout the Bible.  God redeems.   He takes what is broken, what is lost, what is ruined and he makes it new, better, beautiful.  He turns a horrific death on a cross into salvation for all.  He redeems.  God is in the business of redemption.

For a long time I believed that God’s work of redemption was a begrudging work.  We stupid humans kept messing up what God had created and he kept swooping in to “fix it.”  And each time he did, it came with an eye roll, a heavy sigh and a hint of annoyance that there was yet another thing in need of redemption. 

But I’m starting to wonder if God maybe loves being in the business of redemption.  If this is the kind of work that makes his heart sing.  If it is exhilarating and fulfilling and exciting work for him.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been binge watching last season of Gray’s Anatomy on Netflix, but this idea of God loving the work of redemption makes me think of surgeons.  Surgery is long, and complicated and exhausting.  And yet surgeons, the ones who were made to be surgeons, can’t get enough of it.  They would stand in one place for hours and hours at a time fixing what is broken in the human body and walk out of that operating room exhilarated, fulfilled and excited.  They aren’t rolling their eyes and huffing about having to fix another heart.  They are in the business of fixing hearts.  It’s what they were made to do. 

And I think God is in the business of redeeming what is broken, hard and hurting. 

So I’m starting to pay attention to this work.  When I do this well I notice it all around.  God is redeeming hard things all the time.  Which is good because we humans are really effective at creating hard things in need of redemption.  I want to partner with God in that work of redemption.  I want to pull people out of wells and help redeem their stories.  I want to be a person who looks for ways to bring about something redemptive in all things.

Because there is something different about redemptive work.  It’s not false positivity.  So many times in this past year of grieving I would get so frustrated with people who constantly wanted to point out any positives or push me along to happier thoughts.  Comments like, “I know this is hard but I pray that you can draw on all your happy memories of your dad right now” did anything but uplift me.  People are uncomfortable with sadness and so they are desperate to find anything positive and I get that.  But it left me feeling like I shouldn’t be sad, like if I just focused on the happy stuff the unbearable pain would just go away.  False positivity wants to hide the pain, cover it up, distract from it, pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Redemption is different.  Redemption sits in the pain and broken.   Honors it.  Allows for it.  And then out of that pain creates something new.  Redemption is rooted in the broken so that you don’t have to ignore or deny it, but blooms something beautiful out of pain.  Where false positivity wants to pretend like things can be the same, as before, if we just focus on what’s positive, redemption recognizes that nothing will ever be the same, but beauty is still possible.  Something new is created and it is good.  It is something altogether different than before it was broken, but it is beautiful and redeemed.

Redemption is everywhere I’m realizing.  Just as God is everywhere, so is his redemptive work.  In all things God redeems.   

One Year

Earlier this month marked one year since we lost my dad.  It feels cliché to say, but I can’t believe it’s been a year and I can’t believe it’s only been a year.  I knew it was true at the time, and the process of grieving him his past 365 days has only confirmed it, but thus far in my thirty-one years my dad’s death is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

In the months leading up to this milestone we struggled with what to do.  How do you mark the first anniversary of the worst day of your life?  In the end we decided to bury him.  There wasn’t really time to make the “what to do with dad’s remains” decision when he died, so we didn’t.  But over the course of the past year we’ve realized it might be nice to have a place to go.  A place for him that is not the back corner of my mom’s closet.  So we decided on a burial plot and purchased a gravestone. 

And on the first anniversary we held a small service, attended by us, my mom and siblings, and many of the people that have walked alongside us this year.  The people who have gotten us through.  Afterwards we went to my mom’s house for chili and gumbo, scotch and Guinness. 

As we pieced together what that day would look like I couldn’t help but think about the day of his funeral.  On that day we’d had a large service in the morning and then invited everyone back to my mom’s house for food, scotch and Guinness.  The day of the funeral is mostly a wild blur, but I remember the raw feeling of grief.  The tears that sprang at a moment’s notice and the numb shock. 

In the weeks leading up to the first anniversary I worried I would feel just as I had on the day of his funeral.  Because those days shared a similar cadence I assumed the emotions would be the same too.

But, much to my surprise, things were different.  There was sadness to be sure.  Tears and that ache of what should be but is not.  But for most of the day I moved with an anticipation of feelings that did not come.  At one point I ran to Mariano’s grocery story for (another) last minute trip before the service.  As I moved up and down the aisles I couldn’t help but think about how it felt to be there immediately following his death.  I remembered how I found myself looking for him in the faces of the shoppers.  I remembered how I couldn’t walk through the international food aisles without crying.  I remembered how for some reason the grocery story had become a hard place to be in the weeks following my dad’s death.  I remembered all these things differently though.  Instead of reliving the memories, feeling the pain and sadness of that time a year ago, I remembered them slightly removed now, with only a vague sense of what it all felt like.

I continued to remember the emotions without the raw feeling throughout that day.  And I realized that time really did what everyone said it would do.  The 365 days of isolating grief I’d endured had a purpose.  Time started to softened the blow.  Time started to heal.  And that was good. 

Which of course carries it’s own set of baggage.  Because acknowledging that you are moving along brings forth guilt.  This is the thing that makes grief the biggest asshole I know.   You can’t make progress without then experiencing sadness about said progress.  

But the point of this story is that one year later time had done something.  My heart had healed a little.  I was a little further along down the road of grieving my dad than I’d thought.

In a ridiculous twist of irony I found myself waiting in a receiving line at the exact same funeral home on the exact same Friday evening of my father’s wake one year later.  A church friend of my husband passed away in a similar sudden fashion.  Like my dad, Robb had died younger than one would have expected and his loved ones, like us, were left reeling.  The receiving line at Robb’s wake wound all through the funeral parlor and we had to wait a while to see his loved ones.  The same thing had happened at my dad’s wake- the line extending all the way outside.  I’d never really appreciated before just what people went through to express their condolences to us.

Once we got to Robb’s widow and stepson I found myself fumbling for words.  I wanted so badly to express to them that I knew, I knew exactly what this felt like.  I knew how hard it was to receive people graciously and how your feet hurt from standing and you still really can’t believe this is happening, that this is what your life looks like right now.  And I wanted to tell that that I can honestly say, one year later, that time does start to do something.  But that I also know how much they probably don’t want to hear that.  I know I didn’t want to hear that when I stood in their place.  I wanted to say that this is the shittiest thing that will ever happen to you and it’s awful and more than once in the next 365 days you will feel like you’ve been hit by a truck.  It is the worst thing you will ever have to go through but you will get through it.  You will get to this day in November 2015 and it won’t feel the same.  And that will be hard too, but it won’t feel the same.  It’s awful, but it won’t kill you.  Grieving will affect every aspect of your life and you’ll hate it but you will get through it.  And it won’t always be as awful as it is right this moment. 

I didn’t say all that.  But I tried to say enough.  I tried to help them know that they were not alone in their pain even though it felt like it.  And as we left the funeral home I once again acknowledged that time had allowed me to remember the pain of this day one year ago without feeling it fresh.  Time had done something.  And that’s good. 

on birth and death and when they're connected...

At my dad’s wake my aunt shared a story of my father from his toddlerhood.  As a small child, she said, my dad would play quietly in his crib in the early hours of morning as he awaited his release into the day.  My aunt said my father could be heard at this time saying to himself, “what should I be happy about today?”

It is a fitting story of my dad.  He was always pretty happy.  And it always seemed to bother him when we weren’t happy.  It drove me nuts in my teenage angsty years, the way my dad would implore me to “be happy” when my latest crush/friend/school/rejection drama left me feeling anything but.  My dad though, was pretty much always happy.  I think sixty some odd years after he asked himself that question in his crib he was still finding ways to wonder what he could be happy about each day.

I think of this story almost every time I put Red down for a nap or to bed.  I wonder if she will be like my dad in this way?  If some morning I will hear her pondering what to be happy about that day.

Because I was very newly pregnant when my dad died I think we all hoped Red would fill the void he left.  My mom and I were both convinced she was going to be a boy, I think in hopes that somehow he would be reincarnated in her.  On her journey earthside my dad must have kissed her in someway, her red hair bearing witness to him.  But is that all?  Will I see other similarities?

When she was first born I worried about her.  I worried that because she grew so close to such a broken heart for so many months she would enter the world broken-hearted, filled with an inherited sadness.  And when I lay her down on her polka dotted bedding, thinking of the story of my dad in his own crib, I still worry.

I worry she will know how hard it was to grow her.  How I despaired comments about my growing belly and reminders of the passing weeks of pregnancy.  Her growth was a physical sign that we were all moving away from my dad, moving away from a life that included him.  Her entrance into the world would be a reminder of his absence.

I worry she will bear the weight of his legacy.  That we will all try to convince ourselves she is like him because she came when he left.  And she will wear that legacy like a heavy, ill-fitting coat.  Unhappy about playing the role of someone she never even knew.

Red’s life feels so connected to my father’s death.  It was such a strange, hard season, growing new life, while viscerally mourning the end of one.  Everything was upside down, topsy turvy and impossibly hard.

I wonder what it will feel like when I look back on this season five, ten, twenty years down the road.  Will time have a way of softening reality?  Will my fears about the effect of my grief on her come to fruition?  Will my memories of her first months be so tempered by mourning?  Or will I look back and only remember what was happy and light?

Probably yes to all.  Or something completely different.  I haven’t lived through enough hardship to know what time does to these things.

I hope I see glimpses of my dad in Red in the same way I hope to see it in Toots and Monster.  Not because they replace him but because he was incredible and his characteristics worth inheriting.    And I pray that time will separate these two events, his death and her birth, so that some day they won’t seem quite so entwined.  So that some day they will stand alone with only the happier threads connecting them.

On Holding the Happy and the Sad- My Messy Beautiful

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE!  I LOVE Carry on Warrior.  I keep ordering more copies for myself because I keep giving them away to my friends.  If you haven't read it yet- do.  Please.  She says it all better than I ever could :)

We bought a house last month.  If my dad were alive there would have been champagne popping and celebratory hugs.  Instead there were tears and panicked phone calls to my friends for reassurance that moving forward was permissible.  We moved our family of four into my parents’ home 12 months ago, expecting our stay to be a year, tops, while we got Monster into his school and through surgery then found a home of our own.  We moved in whole and intact and then 7 months into this new living arrangement my dad died and nothing was as it should be.

Once I swam through the swamp thick waters of hard feelings about our new house I was able to tread in clearer, stiller waters of excitement about this house that will become our home.  It has character and charm and an openness that is begging to be filled with our people.  When I let myself get there, I was excited, happy, and grateful for our new home. 

But buying a new house means not living with my mom anymore.  When we moved in a year ago my dad helped direct the movers and every morning he drove Tommy to the train station on his way to the gym, then rushed home early to help get the kids breakfast.  It’s where the four of us, my mom and dad, Tommy and I would sit down with a glass of wine after the kids were down and watch episode after episode of The West Wing.  And then it was where we rushed home to the night we got the call that my dad died.  Where we woke up, morning after morning, overwhelmed by grief.  It’s where we’ve been with my mom, watching helplessly as she has struggled to learn what life looks like without her other half.  Where my sister has come home to every weekend.  It’s where we’ve been as we’ve grieved the loss of my dad together, so that we wouldn’t do it alone.

And so the sadness of leaving here, of moving forward taints the happiness of leaving here, of moving forward.  Sometimes the sadness distorts the happy altogether. 

Over the coming weeks we will welcome a baby into this world.  Our third.  And yet all I can think about is what it will feel like without my dad.  Will it be more bitter than sweet?  More tears than joy?

The list of these types of occasions goes on and on- occasions we always assumed my dad would be present for.  Will sadness over his absence eclipse all the happiness in these moments?  I worry about my sister’s wedding day, my brother’s graduation from art school, the day my youngest brother gets his first real job.  When you lose a parent so young the greatest heartache seems to surround all the future happy events.  Can they still be happy without a key player?  Can I hold happy and sad together?

I’ve been fumbling, carrying these opposing emotions for months as the pain has eclipsed the joy, tainting it beyond recognition at times.  And I long for the carefree days before my loss when happy didn’t also contain a bit of sad.

Maybe I’m longing for something that can’t be.  I don’t know if any of us who want to live fully present and wholeheartedly in our lives can expect to not have to hold joy and pain simultaneously.  My messy beautiful is learning to hold the happy and the sad together in my heart. 

I’m learning that holding these opposing emotions together may be the necessary work of growing up and living with my whole heart.

Because life is not getting any easier.  When I look at my friends, all of us in our thirties now for the most part, I see that life is getting harder, heavier, sometimes sadder.  Our 20’s were all about the happy.  Weddings and fun trips, disposable income and babies and lots of showers to celebrate all the happy.  As we approached our 30’s I noticed a shift.  Suddenly we found ourselves facing the scary stuff.  Spouses had health scares, mortgages and bills added pressure, marriages went through significant battles, we lost babies and jobs, our kids got diagnoses and our parents died.  I can’t tell you how many friends waged difficult seasons in the last few years.  Time and again I listened to friends nostalgically wish for the ease and happiness of our twenties, watched as they worked to find ways to bring lightness to their world.

image credit

I’m accepting the truth of Ann Voskamp’s words above more and more these days.  If I want to live fully, presently, and whole-heartedly in this messy beautiful world God created I have to learn to live in both dynamics.  Maybe the holiness is being able to coexist with them both, not just to tolerate the pain but to embrace it, to let it make you fully human.   Maybe the sad doesn’t just taint the happy.  Maybe the happy also seeps into the sad.

I want a life that sadness doesn’t touch, I want happy to just be happy.  For most of my life until now, that’s been pretty realistic.  I’ve had hard things, but never a loss like this.  Never something that felt so permanent.  The last five months have taught me that life is hard.  Life is messy and darkness can sometimes abound.  But it is oh so beautiful too.  If I don’t learn to hold the messy with the beautiful I’ll never see the beautiful.  But I think too, that the messy enhances the beautiful.  The sad is real and true and in some ways beautiful in it’s own messy right.  I could write thousands more words on the ways that my grieving has opened me up to deeper relationships and more honesty and vulnerability.  There is value in the sadness; it's not just something to endure.   

Holding both the sad and the happy keeps me from going numb.  Keeps the happy from feeling fake.  It’s a hard won happy, the kind that coexists with sad.  But I’m learning that it may just be the best kind.

On Practicing Gratitude...

gratitude journals should always be polka dotted...

It’s Holy Week.  In a few days people will return to Facebook and social media after their 40 day fast during Lent.  Others will consume sweets again or other forbidden foods.  Catholics will no longer frequent Fish Frys on Friday nights, finally able to eat meat any day of the week they please.  If my dad were alive he’d be counting down the days until he could enjoy scotch again, his yearly Lenten “fast.”

In the past I’ve fasted from television and online/impersonal shopping during the season of Lent.  I hadn’t planned on doing anything this year, but a few days before Ash Wednesday I saw Momastery’s

challenge on Facebook to “fast from ingratitude” for Lent this year by noting three things you were grateful for each night.  To be honest I dismissed it pretty immediately.  I felt like I didn’t have much to be grateful for at the moment and in light of these past few months I didn’t think I should have to practice gratitude.  I felt like I deserved to be ungrateful.  I was angry with the turn my life has taken and the ways that everything feels heavy and hard.

In short, I was in the midst of the Infinite Sadness and practicing gratitude felt like more work than I wanted to do.  It required me to claw and scratch, to work at something that I just wanted to come naturally.  And in this season gratitude has not come naturally.

But as Ash Wednesday approached I found myself rethinking this stance.  It’s a poor way to live, really.  I had felt like Eeyore for weeks and if I wasn’t careful I knew I would find myself so deep in that mindset that it would require much more than I had to get out.   Still, I waffled, not sure of what I wanted to do.

Then something happened on that Wednesday that made me so deeply and profoundly grateful.  I broke down in the shower at the gym that morning, desperately needing some sign that hope and light still existed in my life and I begged God for just that, hope and light.  And then, later that day, two incredible friends gave me an early birthday gift that was so thoughtful, so loving, and so generous that it took my breath away.  It was a gift that made me feel loved and cared for, that supported my marriage that has borne the weight of so much stress these past few months and that gave me something to hope for and look forward to after many months of feeling hopeless and dark.  It was light and hope all in one.

And so I knew I needed to keep looking for things to be thankful for.  If God had given me such a big gift of hope and light maybe there was more I was missing while I held onto my “right” to be ungrateful.  And maybe this would be what I needed to pull myself out of the Infinite Sadness.

things I'm grateful for

I’ve been writing down three things every night and it’s been a good practice.  There is so much to be thankful for.  Even in the midst of the hardest season of my life so far, there is still hope and light.  Noting things each night helped me to feel profoundly grateful in the moment each day.  Most things were as small as gratitude for the way Toots shines when she laughs or Monster’s sweet little voice when he tells me “I like you Mommy.”  But to acknowledge them, to see them as the gifts that they are is a choice, an act of work at times.  It’s good work, though.  And I think I’d rather scratch and claw my way to a life of gratitude than wallow in Eeyore land.