Loss

[I originally wrote and read this at my mom's graveside service in October, 2011]

 

My mom died on September 25, 2011 after a series of major and minor strokes in her brain that arrived suddenly but were inexorable in their course.  My mom was an extraordinary person.  I know that most sons would make such a statement about their mom merely because they were talking about their mom (or vainly hoped to be genetically related to someone extraordinary).  And while those factors may be present in me, I hope in relaying a few stories to you that I may convince you otherwise.

First off, my mom was clear at the end that she did not want her life unnecessarily extended, and that she did not want to end up a vegetable, kept alive artificially.  We all knew that.  She repeated it to me the Saturday morning that she was admitted to the hospital the week before her death.  This, in spite of the fact that nearly all of what she otherwise said was unintelligible because of the strokes.  She did not flinch away from this position even though she was well aware that it would be her end, most likely in short order.  Her courage here is remarkable and speaks of both her character and her person.

Moreover, when dad and I were in the ER with her that morning, weeping and sobbing away, mom kept making jokes and nagging me.  In the darkest of times, knowing that she was not long for this earth, she was consoling us.  Her love for us was greater than her illness.  It was and remains a deep and abiding love that is the solace in the sea of her absence in which we all feel adrift.

A few years ago, mom gave me a card – I think around the time that I decided to go out on my own as an attorney.  I still remember it.  On the front there was a big pink monster looking thing with this look of anxiety and happiness on its face, arms outstretched, chasing behind a wee little pink monster that was running along at full speed, blissfully unaware of risk or danger.  Inside, the card said that my parents were behind me every step of the way.  I know this to literally be true.  My mom worried about all of us, all of the time.  It was her full time job (between that and making sure that the household used a minimum of 1 gallon of bleach each week on the laundry and that all the dishes were washed twice before being placed in the dishwasher to be washed a third time).

When I was in high school, my mom decided that she wanted to go back to school for her masters in divinity.  At that time, the degree was a 90 credit hour undertaking.  My mom was in her mid-forties.  She was no academic.  She did not have a strong faith in punctuation.  She did not have a great love for driving hours at a time to and from Washington D.C.  But, she felt that she had been called to the ministry.  She came to this decision by faith.  My mom, a mother of two kids in her forties.  I believe she even had to take a remedial course in English along with a number of other students for whom English was a second language.  But she perservered, taking one or two courses a semester, until finally she graduated with her degree. 

Along the way she learned how to use a computer (well, a little bit – I think the computer remained mostly a mystery to her that she simply accepted on faith), and with some help she also began appropriately using periods and maybe even a semi-colon or two.  She also challenged her faith, and greatly expanded the depth of her understanding of god and christianity, of which we had many a conversation when I considered what I wanted to do when I grew up.  She introduced me to Thomas Merton and a host of other writers, which in turn encouraged me to look a little further outside of christianity and helped me to think in a serious way about a number of hard, imponderable questions.  She also helped me to appreciate how beautifully written the book of John was, while also better understanding its underlying intention of converting nonbelievers to the word.  I am thankful to have had the time with her. 

My mom was always a humble person.  She cultivated this about herself.  And even though my dad, through his own research, had verified the truth of this, my mom never made a big thing out of the fact that she was directly related to King John (of Magna Carta fame), through one of his daughters that was married off to a Welsh king in the thirteenth century.  My mom had little patience for phonies and often saw through the nonsense and surface of many people.  She was both disarming and alarming in this way.  She could speak directly to you and express directly what most of us struggle to understand about ourselves.  She also, mostly unintentionally, made enemies of those that were jealous of her abilities or ashamed of how far short they fell in relation to how they perceived themselves. 

She was perceptive and insightful in conversation.  She was intelligent even if she was not very good at math.  She was an artist and a free spirit.  One of my earliest memories remains of my mom and I in the kitchen, painting on canvas board.  She first showed me how to paint with acrylics.  My first painting under her supervision was of the space shuttle (though my composition no doubt had some room for improvement).

Let there be no doubt, my mom was no saint.  She walked among us and struggled like any other person with the same things that all people struggle with.  Whatever her human failings may have been, however, she was unswerving in trying to do what she thought was right.  She did not shy away from the truth, nor was she shy in speaking her mind to others.  But she also was gentle.  She would call or (in more recent years) email me the weather report to keep in touch; always making an effort to be easy to engage and always there for me when I needed a shoulder to cry on or an ear to bend with a problem.  And I know that my mom was so happy for me when I first called to tell her and dad that Suzanne and I were getting married.  I also know how devastated she was when I called her after we had a miscarriage, having herself survived one almost forty years ago.  Whatever it was, she was present and stood by me.  I know she did the same for many people over her life.  It was what she was about.

In mourning mom, I would be remiss if I did not speak directly to her profound faith and her struggles as a person and a christian.  Having spent a little time with her papers and sermons in recent days, I am struck by her profound sense of faith and the presence of God that pervaded her thoughts on a regular, almost daily basis, for nearly all of her life.

In a document entitled “What I Believe,” mom wrote this:

God gives to us the example of nonviolent love.  Jesus did not resist evil but broke the power of it.  Somehow accepting brokenness often breaks the power of it.  In my own experience, it is the fear of something that keeps us from doing anything constructive about it.  When I started my field experience this year my biggest fear was of being hurt by church people, and I was hurt by them.  But I realized that this hurt broke the power of the fear.  I feel free of it now and even though I do not want to be hurt, I know that I will survive it.  In a far greater sense, this is what happened to Christ on the cross, he accepted death and broke the power of death.   We need the cross in our lives, because it breaks the power of sin for us.  Those who are powerless in the world can  find power in the cross of Christ and be set free to live new lives and gain control over powerlessness. (Galatians 5)  When God allowed Christ to be crucified, God became vulnerable to hurt and pain and suffering, and showed us the power of  vulnerability.  For out of this vulnerability came new freedom and life.  For me, Christ is the source of life  and if  I am deserted by others, Christ promises that he will not leave me or forsake me.

In offering consolation to others at the passing of Florence Faith, mom wrote: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

Her personal commitment to live a Christian life as she came to understand it led her to many places that she never expected.  Her sense of the community of the church and the importance of the church to serve and to reach out and welcome strangers in, guided her life.  In more recent years, she felt estranged from this community, referring to herself as a heretic.  I’m certain that she asked how her faith in God had led her so far away from the vocation to which she was called.  I know that she felt, at times, profoundly alone.  In 1994, mom wrote in a sermon:

I was talking to one of my former ministers and we were discussing prayer and the significance for our lives and I said that prayer got me into trouble, my life has changed so radically and I have changed so radically that I almost do not recognize it anymore. I found myself at odds with others who wanted to live as if God was not in the picture for them. I found that the organized church did not want to hear about what God may be doing and this was quite a shock for me.  But listening to God [begins] a new process in our lives that takes us upon a journey which will bring about many changes-changes in us, not in God. We do not control God.......God is free to do as God chooses to do.

I am confident, from personal observation, that at the end of her life it was her deep sense of faith and love that gave her the strength to remain present with us, consoling us, even as her body failed her.

Her strength in such dark times is a clear reminder of what we are made of and what we all are capable of.  It made us rise to the occasion for her and to respect her wishes with regards to her life and the present arrangements for her burial, even if we would have preferred to shy away from this painful duty.  And in talking with some of the professionals that cared for her, it has become clear that she drew in complete strangers to care about her.  She was magnetic.  Mom would probably explain that this was caused by her own struggle to point herself towards True North; the deep care expressed by strangers to her was because of God.

Losing mom is, to date, the hardest thing I have ever experienced.  But this process has also helped make me a bit more empathetic and has been a reminder that kindness is all around us, from friends and even complete strangers, if we but open our eyes to it.  I am thankful that I had the opportunity to know her as an adult.

I will not pretend to fully understand what comes after this life.  At the end, I said to mom that I have glimpsed it, and believe that her dad and my dad’s brothers and others that have preceded her in death were waiting to help her to find her way to wherever or whatever comes after life here.  It is an article of my faith that she will be waiting for me when it is my turn.  Ultimately we do all die alone (even when surrounded by family and friends).  It is a process that is intensely personal.  In spite of this reality, we were there at the end for her, even if we had nothing to do but hold vigil and her hand.  I could not turn away because she did not, even in the darkest of times.  I loved her my whole life, and love her still today.

This process has left me feeling like I was run over repeatedly by a truck.  I know that I share this unenviable feeling with many of you.  I also know that my mom would want me to leave you with some consolation and to remind you that her love abides.  While we must grieve in our own way, mom would not have us grieving interminably.  We leave mom here in a beautiful and peaceful place, among friends and loved ones.  And she leaves us on this side of the hereafter, also among friends and loved ones.  The divide that seems to run between us is much narrower than we usually acknowledge, and in any case, is overrun by the common cause of love.

It is also true that we grieve far less when our friends or loved ones travel to another place, or even move to a new state or country, than when those same people die.  We treat death as absolute in its finality and certainty.  But truly, nothing is permanent.  Just as certainly as this day shall pass, so shall our grief and all things.  As my grandfather said to my mom at his passing a decade ago, “look up, not down.”

Psalm 23 is often read at times like these, and I think for good reason.  This short verse has always been a consolation to me and I hope it will be for you this day.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters;

He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I fear no evil;

for thou are with me;

thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

“I cry out: ‘Lord, have I not been humbled enough?’ And the Lord Answers: ‘No.’”

At various personal crises, I have wondered when I will finally be done with being humbled.  “Surely this time is the last time for that particular lesson,” I think in exasperated tones.  When I was younger, my mom was there to talk to when something happened – the loss of a loved one, the ending of a personal relationship, a miscarriage, change in jobs or careers, and so on.  Her counsel was a comfort, even when I did not heed it.  After she died, I was on my own.  I cast about, talking to others I expected might offer counsel, but was rebuffed by them.  Most were simply not interested in discussing loss, were too busy with their own lives, felt no professional obligation to discuss the matter, or otherwise preferred a different topic of conversation.  My mom would have been there, but she was not.  It was a great humbling experience to be alone at such a difficult place.

The year following my mom’s death, however, saw a great re-ordering of my life, as I left one law practice to truly be on my own, and worked in earnest to transition to a career in teaching, ultimately leading to my appointment as assistant professor at the Community College of Baltimore County, where I presently teach law.

I remember talking with one of my college professors, Timothy App, about his experience with painting.  He recalled making a breakthrough in his work and producing the start of an important body of work after many years of challenges and difficulties.  He remarked that his instinct was to take a vacation and bask in arriving at this beginning.  But his lesson was that taking a break then was absolutely the wrong choice; the breakthrough for him was the beginning rather than the end of the hard work.

Love is not merely a destination or a status. It is hard work, difficult choices, failure, forgiveness, desolation, salvation, inexorable, sustenance.

Love is a lifelong commitment to being humbled, picking yourself up and dusting yourself off, and continuing.  We are cast headlong into the dark night like an arrow always aimed precisely at a single bullseye.  Waiver and spin as we might, resisted by the air, pulled down by gravity, but our path is constant, quick and certain.  Love we must, aimed expertly by another.

I do not wish to die but over death we have no human control.  I do not wish to suffer but my suffering may ultimately be rooted in my own choices in my life.  I wish to be happy, and the path of happiness is paved with love.  I am a soldier for love.  My end is certain but I may not waiver or tarry long on any single wound.  “I have miles to go before I sleep.”

Spiritual Journey

My mom was always a spiritual person.  Early in her life, she was part of a charismatic church, which includes among its beliefs that individuals may talk in tongues through the holy spirit.

Later, when I was in high school, my mom believed that she had a calling to become a minister, and enrolled at Wesley Theological Seminary, a part of American University in Washington, D.C.  She spent a total of seven years finishing her master’s in divinity and graduated from school the same year that I graduated with my bachelor’s in fine art.

However, at the end of that journey, she faced a committee to be ordained within the Methodist Conference.  Ultimately she was rejected by that committee and left the church (having later attempted and denied entry a second time through the Congregationalist ministry).  After much sojourning, she arrived as an outsider to a church she had belonged to for most of her adult life, having failed to attain the goal to which she believed was called.  A particularly heartless colleague quipped to her, “Many are called but few are chosen,” after he received his appointment as minister to her former Methodist church in Catonsville (where she had been an active member since we had moved to Catonsville in the 1980’s).  There could not have been a greater failure to be unable to reach a calling in the spiritual life, and her subsequent frustration and disillusion from the organized church left her deeply hurt, abandoned it would seem even by god.

My mom was ultimately called home; she saw her end about a week before it arrived on a Sunday afternoon, in a quiet intensive care unit, away from all that she knew and loved in this world, forced by her failing body to let go of the people she cared most about here.  Her agony and suffering at her end – physically and spiritually – would have broken a lesser person.  Just watching left the rest of us heartbroken and desolate.

Some years later, I find myself walking on my own spiritual journey.  I know neither the way nor the destination, but find myself walking – perhaps alone and truly in the wilderness of false expectations – but compelled forward by love anyway.  Some days I think we may really be marooned here, left to our devices, cut off from the “real,” left instead with this world and its meaninglessness.  Assuming that the New Testament reveals truth to us, God sent Christ into this world to show us the path of eternal salvation, and we responded by crucifying him and his own followers denying him.  On the darkest days, perhaps as a mere mortal I can be excused for losing the way when even saints and apostles can be so easily lost.

But then I hear my son reminding me that it is time to get up, I see a rainbow out my window, I hear the silence after a deep snow, I awake just in time to watch the sunrise over the landscape, I see a student come to an understanding of a difficult matter, I smell the spring flowers and cherry blossoms, I walk a familiar path on a clear day, I make a new friend or re-connect with an old one, I level-off to my own internal center, I see a little way down the path clearly after some of the fog clears off.  Broken as I may be, my love points to true north, pale reflection that it may be of its greater source.  All of us – All of us – forever know the true way home.

Courage

It takes some courage to love other people.  People are sort of unreliable and you run the risk they may hurt you. And to make matters worse, love makes you vulnerable and defenseless towards those that you love. The instinct is to avoid hurt, so love in some ways is like holding your hand close to a candle – you know that too close or too long means getting burned.

But love we must. I suppose you could live your life without loving others. There are probably some people that lack the capacity to love or be loved. But by and large we are intended to love, even if sometimes misguided, hurtful, selfish, or indecent.

One problem is that our initial love mindset is focused on those closest to us. Our love is uneven. Christ teaches us that a just love is an even one – that we ought to love our neighbors and our enemies; everyone really.[1] Matthew, relaying the words of Christ, writes “ ‘You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Matthew 5:43-45.  That one could generate such a profound attachment to others that have not even been met represents a great mystery of Christianity.

Deeply ingrained in the New Testament, however, is Christ’s self-sacrifice for humanity. Christ ultimately was crucified for our sins and for a new covenant with God based on acceptance of Christ as God, and founded on a single expression of love – that we act in a way towards others that we would ourselves wished to be treated. Coupled with self-sacrifice is a calling that we should follow Christ.  This is first evident, of course, when Christ calls on his disciples to follow him in the world.  Later, to comfort his disciples that are troubled that he would be going where they could not immediately follow him, Christ says in John 14:2-3 “In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

Martin Luther writes in Volume 24 of his Works that there is no other way to heaven but by Christ, suggesting that the many earthly ceremonies and rituals, even of monks and others deemed to be holy, is senseless: “when the hour comes for you to leave this life and enter a different one, then you must either [follow Christ] or be eternally lost.”

The imitation of Christ however leads the follower logically to the ultimate sacrifice of self for others, as Christ did for the world.  I think this bar is set too high for mere mortals. Much as we wish it were otherwise, we are not gods. Loving others requires that we also love ourselves, placing each as equals, not one subjugated to another.  Perhaps Christ expects us to subjugate ourselves to Him in the passage “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”  John 14:6. But I can’t read that passage to also mean in imitation of Christ we must subjugate ourselves for the love of others, or live as slaves to the will of others.  We must love ourselves and each other.

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[1] Writes John: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.” 1 Letters of John 4:7.

Death

My father called me on a Saturday morning uncertain of what to do.  My mom was exhibiting much more serious symptoms of a stroke.  When I spoke with her on the phone, she was essentially incoherent. I told my father to call an ambulance and that I would be up from my home in Towson shortly.  As I raced up the interstate (I managed to get to the emergency room shortly after the ambulance, even though I was easily four times as distant to the hospital), I could not hold back wave after wave of profound sadness.

My mom’s stroke that morning was not her first.  She had, in fact, been to the hospital about a month prior, been treated and had been subsequently released, seemingly on the mend. But I was not prepared for her to be facing a second stroke so soon.  It was clear that something more serious was wrong. When I arrived and walked into the room where she was, I broke down again in tears, though she showed both the patience of Buddha and also managed to make a joke while waiting for the ER doc to make a diagnosis and determine what could be done.

I learned later that my mom had had a recurrence of a nightmare the evening before.  Periodically she dreamed of the angel of death standing at the foot of her bed.  These dreams had occurred at various other times near when another family member had died, such as around the times that her brother-in-law had died.  However, in those other nightmares, the angel of death did not look at her directly.  The evening prior was different as it had looked right into her eyes.  Going into the hospital that morning, she knew it was likely her end.

That end came in eight days, after numerous tests to attempt to rule out other possibilities, a trip packed up in an ambulance from the local hospital down to the specialists at University of Maryland, and a third stroke that ultimately would be her undoing.

The morning of the Sunday that she died, I was at her bedside.  Even though the nurse monitoring her told us that her higher brain functions by that point had likely stopped, I think that she was crying. I held her hand, crying myself and telling her that she need not tarry here for us and that it was ok to go where she needed to. Though she had borne her end with much dignity and some humor, I think it broke her heart to leave behind the people she loved so much and would not see again in this life.

That afternoon, my father called me to tell me that the hospital had called and that she died. We went down and stood there for a bit in her room, next to the shell that was her body. It was jarring to be there with her knowing that she had died, when only a few hours before she had been alive.

We buried mom a month later in a graveyard in Western Maryland in Grantsville.  I don’t remember very much about that intervening month.  I know that I met with clients, went to work, and did the things that I had done before my mom’s passing, but I frankly forget the details.  I do remember that in the days after she died, a song by Adele would come on the radio and I could not help but cry, though the song had nothing to do with the loss that I was grieving.

We had decided to have a graveside service for mom. Ironically, this would have been a job for her, as she was the family member with a master’s of divinity and had actual experience pastoring to others.  But mom did not leave any instructions or directions.  I reached out to one of her friends who also was a minister, Douglas Fox, and he agreed to lead the service. In the intervening period, I wrote a eulogy to help remember her life, which I read with the wind to my back beside her grave marker. I had barely slept the evening before and could not eat I was so full of emotional turmoil at the prospect of this service. But as it turned out, it was my father that was more upset than me at mom’s loss. It was I that held onto him to comfort him in his grief that afternoon after he could not contain his emotion any longer at the injustice of his loss.

Since that time I have not tarried long at her grave marker, though the last visit there was more peaceful.  I noticed also that the plot my father had bought for her originally stood alone when she was buried, but has since filled in on both sides.