Illusion of Control

I miss you so much today, Baby. The hurt runs so deep. I saw the hawk flying twice, circling, reminding me that God has me and you’re close. But here’s the rub. It’s pretty obvious. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this one out.

I can’t see you. Or touch you. Or hold you.

This has been the problem with knowing God all my life. And now it’s the problem with you as well.

They tell me life is messy and we don’t have control over anything. Some call it “the illusion of control.” How do I stop being controlled by an illusion? That’s where the cute phrases come in. “Let go and let God.” And tons of scripture that make it sound easy to stop asking for a clear-cut path or searching for answers to the impossible ‘why’s’. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding.” “We walk by faith, not by sight.” “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

But when your soul has been damaged by people who were supposed to love you unconditionally and protect you, and didn’t, trust becomes a foreign language all its own. You were spared that kind of wound. Trust was second nature to you. Your favorite hymn was my worst nightmare. “All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give . . . I surrender all, all to Jesus I surrender, I surrender all.” I wrote my own lyrics to that one, which shocked a few people but, as always, my words were honest. “I surrender some, I let go a bit, I can’t see You, I can’t feel You, Take what you can get.” See what I mean?

I don’t want to let you go. How crazy does that sound when it’s already been eighteen months since you asked us to? Eighteen months since you died, and it still feels like yesterday. I don’t know what’s normal in grief. I’ve never been here before. I hardly know anyone who has been here before. Losing your husband, your best friend in the world, half your literal heart, is a lot different than other losses. That’s what’s so hard to explain to people who think I should be able to blow you a kiss, wish you well, and move on.

You were my everything. “That’s what you get when you love someone too much,” somebody told me days after you died. That one went deep. And yet it’s true. You grieve much when you love much. It’s the price of loving full on, no holds, all in. Eighteen months. You’d think by now I’d be used to living in silence here. I’m not. Even counselors get it wrong sometimes. “This is an opportunity,” I was told once. I disagreed and she thanked me for my honesty. This is pain, she also taught me to say when I couldn’t breathe. I thanked her for her validation.

So, you died. Or rather, your body did. Still, I lost everything, especially you. I’m here trying to pick up the pieces, finding my way in the dark with our family, facing every day without you, not knowing who I am anymore. I was half of Us. I identified with Us. We talked about everything. We made every decision together. We carried each other through other heartbreaks and losses. Not anymore. And now I don’t know how to live this life I’m being forced to live.

A life I have no control over. So, I googled “the illusion of control.” Turns out, that phrase isn’t just a clever wordplay. It’s a psychological abnormality. Great. Guess I won’t use that one anymore. I changed things up, simply searching for some stranger’s outstanding advice on how to let go of what you never had control over anyway. That was also a bust. “While we can’t control the events in our lives," the copycats parroted, "we can control our response to them.” Good luck with that. I suppose that’s true when the grocery store runs out of your favorite potato chips. It’s a lie and more condemnation dumped on a shattered heart, though, when your personal world implodes. You can’t control the triggers waiting to remind you that your husband isn’t here to drink coffee anymore, and in America, where coffee is more important than Mom’s apple pie, that means I’m living in a mine field. When that long term memory gets tapped, so do the tears and heartache.

Who writes this stuff anyway?  

So, here’s my take on lack of control. Here’s what I am capable of doing when I hear myself say something you used to say, when I remember the way you looked at me, when I have to chart my own course on a road trip, when I celebrate our wedding anniversaries alone.

Keep. Breathing.

There it is. That’s what I can control. Maybe.

And one more thing. I may not know how to surrender (which I don’t think matters since it’s clear I don’t control anything anyway), but I am smart enough to know deep in my spirit that the One who has control also has me.

And that helps.

With thanks to JoLynne Martinez for permission to use the exquisite photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: The Magician [Square Crop] | Thanks to my Flickr friend Shir… | Flickr

Tick Tock

I will never forget that woman’s face at that memorial. They rang that bell and she put an arm around one child. They called out his name and she held onto the other. The pipes swelled and even from across the cemetery I could see her suck in a deep gulp of air, her shoulders rising as she tried to hold it together while the Celtic strains of Amazing Grace soared heavenward. I watched as she blew out a huge breath, straightened her posture, and resumed a stoic expression.

Looking back now, I realize it was like looking into my future. 

Stiff upper lip, I could imagine her saying to herself. It’s been months. You can do this. You can sit on the front row where everyone is watching you, wondering how you’re doing and thanking God it’s not them. They’re honoring him, remember? It’s been a year. People expect you to be better by now. You owe it to his friends to be here. You owe it to him. The fire service was his life.

It still makes me weep. The things we do out of obligation.

Sigh. She was young, and I imagine that in time she remarried. Most likely she's had a wonderful life, in spite of it all. I'm sure the kids got therapy and turned out okay. It’s been twenty years. That’s a lot of Christmases without him, but they probably made it. Life goes on.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

I didn't want to stare but I couldn't help myself. I felt like I was trespassing on her pain. Look away, I told myself. It’s too hard to watch. How is she even holding up, sitting there on the front row with her two fatherless children? I could never do that. I could never survive. I dug in my purse for a Kleenex and stepped back into the sparce shadow to escape the heat and shift my view.

Rob’s in administration now, I thought. He’s not on the end of a hose line anymore. This is part of the risk. Everyone knows it and accepts it. This will never happen to him. Or to me. I don’t know how it happened to her and her husband. It was unthinkable. Unbelievable. Even unforgiveable. They get so much training. He was so strong. He was always the hero. Now he’s the one being mourned.

I looked at my watch. Was it time to go yet? How could Rob stand there so patiently, attending these memorials and tributes every fall? How could he make himself show up at funerals of men he didn’t even know and yet still considered his brothers? How could he endure the sadness knowing he was helpless to change anything?

I hated this. I should never have come. It was too scary to watch her and know at some shallow level of my own just how deep her loss was. All the dreams destroyed. All the nights while her heart was breaking that she’d have to find a way to console their children on her own. It was so unfair. There must be an explanation. Somewhere. Did he do something wrong? Miss a protocol? Go rogue and abandon his team? Get stubborn and try to be the hero? How could he leave her like this?

I didn’t know her. I could only watch and wonder and try to reassure myself that I would never be in her shoes. Her sorrow would never be mine. Especially if I followed the rules and didn’t deviate. If I stayed afraid and never took a risk. If we remained alert and avoided trouble and lived by the Book, I’d never find myself sitting on the front row in a cemetery where a uniformed man walked toward me and handed me . . .

“The Fire Service extends its deep sorrow at the passing of your husband, Rob McLeod,” his friend said, interrupting my reflection with the folded American flag in his hands.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

Puzzling Pieces

I think I need to explain.  

This blog is where I think out loud. Laugh at myself. Ask the hard questions. Explore the extent of my courage. Reveal my weaknesses. And sometimes hope for a little common sense to show up. This is where I risk exposing my point of view, the details of my journey through life, and what I’m learning in the classroom of experience. Everything I believe is dissected here in the sanctity of my private space and yet you are invited to listen in on my private thoughts—the good, the bad, and even the ugly.

But this is not a place where I invite anyone to try to fix me. No one wants someone else to fix them without asking. What we all need is to be heard. We long for someone to listen. And when we’re in excruciating pain, we need to be surrounded by the comfort of witnesses. "Grief is a natural response to death or loss. It is not an illness to be cured or a problem to be fixed. . . You need someone to see your grief and to acknowledge it." *

I’ve had people tell me that they don’t know what to say to me. They feel helpless or ineffective or useless because eloquence and wisdom evade them. But that’s the perfect place to be. In the absence of knowing what to say, we discover the truth—you don’t need to say anything. You just need to show up.

I’ve been on both sides of pain, as a witness to yours and a participant in mine. I’ve said things I regret because I wanted to be the savior, too, just like everyone tries to be. To come up with the answer to the impossible question and be the hero. I never do. No one does. No one can. In general, attempts to do so end up wounding a broken heart again at the exact moment that they most need comfort.

We don’t know the answers to the hard questions in life and yet we keep trying to explain as if God is on trial and we are His legal representation. We fear that if we don’t defend Him with our anemic reasoning, His reputation might be tarnished. As if.

• ·         We don’t know why a baby dies in a mother’s womb, but we’re quick to tell a grieving mother that she can have more children.
• ·         We don’t know why a father dies of cancer leaving his children to grow up without him, but we think it will comfort them to say that he’s no longer suffering, ignoring the reality that their suffering has just begun.
• ·         We don’t know why a wife dies but it’s obvious to us that it must have been God’s will and that God had other plans for her besides granting her family’s prayers for her recovery.
• ·         We don’t have a clue why a million things go wrong from sexual predators to elder abuse, financial bankruptcy to car accidents, mass shootings to terrorist attacks. We don’t know why avalanches occur or tornadoes appear or earthquakes erupt. We can’t explain how the wind moves or why the Titanic sank or why politics is corrupt.

The common denominator here is that we don’t know and yet we offer explanations to someone in pain when we’re not the ones trying to breathe in and breathe out every moment for the rest of our shattered lives.

Why do we do this?

For so many reasons. I’d like to think that at the core of our hand-wringing hearts, we want to stop the suffering we see in the eyes of those we love. We want them to smile again, laugh with us, find the lilt in their step and hope for a better future. We want to see them whole, to watch them enjoy life, we want the person they used to be before they suffered loss to re-surface.

And we want them to stop reminding us with their tears and anger and depression and questions that we might be in their shoes someday. We are uncomfortable with grief. We are ignorant about grief. Our culture has not taught us that grief is part of life just as dying is, so we don’t know what to do with either one except to try to make it go away.

And when people of faith suffer great loss, if they don’t bounce back quickly enough, praise God soon enough, and get back in the game fast enough, we shame them. We may critique their spiritual walk. We may even question if they really know Jesus. Certainly, we believe it’s our job to set them straight and explain that they have no right to question or complain or cry their eyes out endlessly. They must trust and obey for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, as the hymnwriters say.

Life is a no question zone. Put on your happy face and move on.

I thought I had all the answers once. I thought I had suffered and overcome enough to earn immunity from any more trauma and loss. I thought I knew how to pray without ceasing. I wasn’t great at trusting, but I’m a pretty good reader, so I thought if I studied enough and taught what I’d learned and discussed enough books that I’d figure out what God is doing in the world and in my life. I thought bad things happened to other people and that Rob and I would grow old together and never have to live a single day apart. I thought scripture verses would dissolve grief, so I gave them to people in pain and sat back in satisfaction waiting for them to rejoice.

And if the puzzle of their complicated life was missing an important piece, I thought I could share one of my own and it would complete their story. It didn’t matter if their picture was different than mine or the shape didn’t fit. Just pound that funky piece into place so no one would have to look at the awkward hole in their life anymore.

What I do here in this blog space is process my life. I write because it is my glory. It is an outlet for my difficult emotions and unimaginable questions. It’s where I put down “on paper” what I thought I knew and what I was forced to discover. It’s where I move the pieces of my puzzle around and look for a picture to emerge. When it does, I post it. It’s not always the picture others expect me to reveal. But it’s always honest.

I need to explain why I'm here with this broken heart, processing the details of my shattered life while I try to survive without Rob beside me. No one can comprehend how much he meant to me or how rich our relationship was or how safe he made me feel or how much he and I loved each other. No one sees me come home at the end of every day to an empty house where no one waits for me anymore, try to convince myself to prepare a meal that I alone will eat, and in the evening when something I read or watch on TV or see in an email triggers sorrow, that I am alone here with my head bent down, sobbing, trying to catch my breath with no one to put their arms around me and tell me it’s going to be all right.

No one else has the missing piece to my puzzle.

Nor am I the only one in this position. 800,000 people become widowed in America every single year. And I guarantee that every one of them has had salt rubbed into the wound by good intentioned, painful words assuring them that losing half their heart and all of their dreams is God’s will.

I’m not here to destroy God’s reputation. He’s not afraid of my honesty. He’s not easily offended, either. And He has never let go of me. The feelings I am experiencing are normal and real. I’ve taken some hits for expressing them in public, and I’ve also given voice to some suffering hearts who are afraid to speak up.

Remember the elephants who gather around a fallen member, standing still, forming a quiet circle of support? They don’t do or say anything. They just show up.

To those of you who have shown up, you have my eternal thanks. You know who you are. Thank you for being here without having answers. For loving me as I am. For reminding me that we are all human. And for praying for my family.

I say again that I love you. You are awesome elephants. 

*Megan Devine, "It's Okay That You're Not Okay"

With thanks to Shelah for the use of the artwork shown above. The original can be viewed by following this link: fitting the pieces together | Shelah | Flickr

Triage and Trust

I turned on your phone today and searched until the text messages I sent you in ICU appeared. I needed to remind myself that I’d done everything I could to tell you how much I love you and reassure you that we were fighting for you.

Each one spoke of my deep love for you. How you mean everything to me. I reminded you how you'd texted me early on that "we’ve done hard before” and we’d get through this, too. The messages were filled with love and devotion and scripture verses I was clinging to and lyrics to songs that were inspiring and hopeful and encouragement to keep fighting and my confidence that you would beat this. They were cheerleading blurbs, pre-loaded with positive energy, focused on what we wanted and expected and claimed from God, all based on the belief that we should always “stand on our authority” as children of God. Everything I could think of to spur you on, keep your mind focused on the business at hand—getting well again—it was all there, stored on the magic of your smartphone.

I couldn’t read all of them. I was crying too hard. I'd sent the last one on Feb. 16, the day before the palliative doctor usurped Risa’s call and gave us the bad news. You were done fighting and you didn’t want to continue anymore. You wanted to die a natural death.

I shut off your cellphone and put it back in the drawer where I keep it with your Florida Gators sweatshirt and that little piece of fabric that I found wadded up in your pocket for cleaning your glasses. As I closed the drawer, I said for the thousandth time, “That’s why I don’t believe in prayer anymore. Or healing. I only believe in talking to You, God.” Some tell me that’s what prayer is, but what they're really describing is a laundry list where faith is the price of its fulfilment. Well, we did that. We prayed without doubt. Believed without compromise. Faithed without flinching. And we lost it all anyway.

I walked into the kitchen with all of that fresh on my mind, all the words running together, when I realized how much pep talking I was doing in those texts. I'd sent weeks worth of cell phone messages, asking your nurses to read them to you because covid protocol wouldn’t allow us to be there in person while you were fighting for your life on a ventilator.  Everything I texted you was one sided. One desire allowing one outcome. Of course, God would heal you. Anything else was out of the question. It was standard operating procedure, our SOP. Everyone who knew what you were going through was praying their guts out for God to heal you. None of us could imagine a world without Rob McLeod in it.

Except Rob McLeod.

The realization took my breath away, Baby. You knew. You knew for weeks that this one was the one that would take you down. We were hours away from your hospital room. You were there on the frontline fighting for your life. Fighting to breathe. Struggling to stay alive. Facing the truth like the straight up guy you are and relying on the medical experience of your entire career to analyze the situation. You could see the writing on the wall when we refused to look. You knew if you made it out of the hospital, it would be as a broken man facing a life as a vegetable. It was unacceptable.

We were praying for you to live while you were praying to go Home to God.

Slowly, a strong realization rose up in my soul and I knew that in all those weeks I had only considered what I wanted, what I needed, what I thought was best for you and for us. And then it hit me. Nancy was right all along. I talked to her the night before Katy and I drove up to Show Low to ask you in person if you wanted us to let you go. Nancy believes in healing and so did I once. But it’s not our desires that set us free. It’s the truth. “So, you’ve been praying for Rob’s healing while he’s been asking to go Home. Which prayer is God supposed to answer?” she asked me. It was hard. Painful. Impossible to believe. I tucked it away in a corner of my heart where all the difficult things in life are kept under lock and key. Still, I knew. The next day we asked you in person, saw your firm answer, and let you go. You were free. It was our first of many days in prison.

I told God He was a liar the night after we got that call. I had a book full of scriptures and “promises” I’d been keeping to show you once you recovered, and I threw it in the trash. I started calling Him “The God I’m Not Talking To” as I began life as your widow, lost in a whirlwind of pain and shock. I blamed myself for a thousand things I wished I’d done differently, as if I alone have control over anything in this world. I blamed the doctors. The hospital staff. The government, although that one still seems appropriate.

But I missed the truth. I didn’t see it. I was so blinded by disbelief and anguish that I was unable to see it. I suppose timing is everything. If I’d had a glimpse of it before now, I wouldn’t have given it the time of day.

You wanted to go Home. It was your body. It was your life. You love me still with the fervency of true love, but you are a realist. You see the black and the white and have always been a good judge of circumstances, even the horrible, terrible, please-don’t-let-it-happen kind. Some of that was the years you spent doing triage on the side of the road, the horrible job of assessing which patients were the highest priority and discerning which ones would never make it. Some of it was the sturdy faith you always had in God, trusting Him no matter what. The early woundings my heart has suffered make trust difficult for me. You were always the truest version of Jesus I've ever seen in flesh and blood. You loved me like Him, and you trusted Him like I didn’t know how to do.

That day it all came down to the wire. Triage and Trust. It was time. You helped us recognize the unimaginable. You did your best. We did our best. The medical staff did their best. No one wanted it to happen, but you needed us to let you go.

How could that possibly be the right prayer?

I see it now. I was praying wrong. Or, perhaps, it would be more kind for me to say I didn’t know there was another way to pray. And the reason I didn’t know that is because the price of praying for that kind of wisdom is too high. For me. Not for you. I did everything I could to save the man I loved and when that wasn't how it was going to end, I gave you the freedom you asked for. I was praying for healing because I didn't want to let you go. Completely natural. I knew what it would cost me to love you enough to grant what you needed most. It was the last act of love I could give you, but it cost me everything. That's the definition of love.

Finally, standing alone in my kitchen, I was able in some degree to rest in the outcome of what happened, knowing you made that hard call and yours was the prayer that needed to be answered. You simply knew of the two choices facing you, which side of triage was yours.

I was praying for your healing. You were asking to go Home.

Which prayer was God supposed to answer?

Rock Life

I could hear her take a breath on the other end of the line. A pause. “What we’re doing is really hard, Mom,” she said. It is. I couldn’t say anything because my heart was in my throat again. Validation. No excuses or cheerleading or minimizing or avoiding. This is pain. I didn’t know this is how it goes until it happened to me. To us.

After a few minutes, we talked about last night’s storm - the one that missed us - and joked that it might rain here eventually. My best guess was sometime around Thanksgiving, sporadic as summer showers are here in the desert. We hung up. I went around closing windows and had put on my pajamas when a change in background sounds grabbed my attention.

Was that rain? Or just my imagination? Because sometimes when the air conditioner kicks on it sounds like . . . nope. It never sounds like thunder.

I walked into my bedroom, raised the blinds, and sat down in my chair across the room to watch the show. Lightning lit up the night sky, showcasing the beating the massive ash tree was taking from the monsoon’s onslaught. Violent winds whipped the branches, forcing them to twist and bend close to the ground in obedience to the storm’s demand. I began to pray that none of the old growth treasures in Katy’s backyard would be damaged by the storm. I remembered what happened to a neighbor’s elm a year ago during a similar onslaught. I didn’t want to see everyone’s favorite here pulled up by its roots and laid out across the back pasture.

Torrential rain pounded heavily against my huge bedroom window, but this house, this new home where I've lived for three months, was built strong and sturdy. It took the punishing wind in stride, allowing the storm’s fury to lash out relentlessly without giving up any ground. It reminded me of something I’d heard once, or maybe a thousand times, about another storm. How the rain fell, and the floods and torrents came, and the winds blew and slammed against another house in a similar storm. Yet that house did not fall because it had been built upon a rock.

I got it, but what about my questions? There are so many days when my feet seem to be sinking in quicksand that I have to wonder if my “house,” my life, can weather this terrible storm that’s overtaken me, pummeling my heart and those of my children, for the last year and a half. Every day I face multiple reminders of the truth my mind and my heart still haven't fully grasped. I carry the weight of it for hours, all day long, trudging through every normal routine with the energy of a sloth, and when I finally force myself to go to bed alone sleep is restless. I wake up exhausted, only to start all over again.

That just doesn’t feel like rock life to me.

So, I questioned the story of the house. I questioned the Author of the story. He’s used to that by now. And it doesn’t rock His world, so to speak.

“Are you sure, Lord?” I sighed. I knew those embedded verses floated to the surface at His command. They sure weren’t my idea. “What if I can’t keep standing against these winds? You hear them pounding me. You see me catch my breath and turn my head in public, trying to push the image of him to the back of my mind so no one feels uncomfortable or, worse, feels sorry for me when my eyes overflow with tears. You know it would be easier for me to resign from humanity and stay locked up in my house than to risk breaking down in public.

“I’m trying to rebuild my life without him beside me, not because I want to but because I have no other choice. What if I fall? What if I’m not stronger than I seem and braver than I believe and smarter than I think? What then? WHAT IF THIS STORM IS THE ONE THAT TAKES ME OUT?”

There wasn’t even a delay in the answer. There was no condemnation for the way I phrased it, either. There was, as there always is, supreme confidence and complete acceptance. And love. All enveloping love and understanding.

“God is within her, she will not fall.” Short and sweet and to the point, as usual, the reply came. There it is. This thing we’re doing is really hard. It won’t be over in a year. Not in two years. Or three. For all I know, it will take the rest of my life to grieve him and us. I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. I hardly know anyone else who has either. As Katy and Lee and I have often reminded each other, we don't know what we're doing.

All I can say for sure is that it’s hard. I miss him. Desperately. It makes me doubt what I’m made of. It makes me think I’m not “performing” well. I feel fragile and lost sometimes. I’m tired all the time. My family has had to circle the wagons while we take care of ourselves and each other. We used to run on autopilot, managing life with one arm tied behind our backs. Now it takes every ounce of focus just to put one foot in front of the other. Trying to survive is a full-time job.

Does it look like I’m falling? Yes, sometimes. Am I bent to the ground in sorrow? You bet. Will I break in this storm? I’m already broken. Am I built on the Rock? It’s the only thing I know for sure in a world that has taken away the security I once had.

When the storms come, I am His.
When the sun shines, I am still His.
Nothing depends on me.
Everything depends on Him.
That’s why he’s the Rock.
And I’m not.

Storms are scary, though. I’m afraid a lot. This one has dug in like a cut-off low and the waters are rising. Riding out this storm is harder than it looks, takes longer than you’d think, and is lonelier than you’d believe. How do I know I will come out on the other side in one piece?

Because God is within her. She will not fall. **

Fine. Bring me another umbrella. 

 

* And the storm came.  And the rain fell, and the floods and torrents came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. Matthew 7:25       **God is within her, she will not fall. Ps. 46:5   

Angel Story

It was an old blue Toyota that once belonged to his father. The two men loved that rusty piece of antique machinery. Lee paid so much money to repair it and turn it into a rock climber that he later told me, “I could have had a brand-new Corolla with its very own key fob for all I’ve spent on these wheels.” True. I felt kind of guilty there since it was my idea that he buy back the Landcruiser which Rob had driven for so many years before he’d sold it. And then I got over it. Even with its new Chevrolet engine and expanded, wide wheelbase, that faded blue truck with its original Toyota body still didn’t have air conditioning or enough seat belts or power anything. Lee dubbed the hybrid version they’d come up with “The Toy-let.” It was a man’s truck inside and out and that’s the reason they loved it. It’s also the reason I seldom rode in it.

“I want you to tell me about that afternoon in the mountains,” I told Lee today as we caught up by phone. “The day the steering gave out on the Landcruiser.”

Instantly, Lee was back behind the wheel of his first vehicle, careening out of control at sixty miles an hour down the last mountain grade before he hit desert flatlands--literally. With him rode two of his best friends, one in the passenger seat in the front, the other in the boxy rear without a safety belt.

“I told them to brace themselves,” he said, remembering the terrifying experience. “A pin came out of the steering column on the last steep grade coming down off the Mogollon Rim. I tried to use the brakes, but I had no control over the wheels.” The college age boys hung on in terror, unable to do anything as the Toyota gained speed, its wheels unresponsive to Lee’s frantic efforts to straighten out. With no one able to steer it, the truck and its passengers were headed for a deep ravine in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona heat.

“A curb suddenly appeared right before we went off the road,” Lee remembered, telling his story as if it happened yesterday. “In the middle of the desert, our right front wheel clipped a solitary curb, careened off it, and the impact sent us across two lanes to the other side of the divided highway.”

“You coasted to a stop on the side of the road then?” I asked.

“Yep. For a minute, we just sat there, trying to believe what had happened. That’s when another truck pulled in behind us. There hadn’t been anyone around for miles, we crash into a curb and come to a stop on the side of the highway, and suddenly there’s this old pickup rolling to a stop a few yards back of us. It was loaded up with a bunch of junk covered by a big tarp and the guy told me he and his family were moving to California, taking all the back roads on their way. This was a weird back road to drive in a truck like that. It looked like it was straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. The driver told me he’d run out of gas.”

He ran out of gas at exactly the same place where Lee’s truck had gone rogue.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“We siphoned some gas from my tank and put it in his truck.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you had an extra can with you. But if you had to siphon it, what did you use to get it out?”

“He had a piece of garden hose in that pile of junk in the pickup bed. And he dug around in there for a while, found a screw, crawled up under the Landcruiser and used it to tighten down the steering mechanism. He said it’d hold until I got home and was sure I could drive it. Dad arrived after the guy left and followed us home, but the man was right. I never broke down and we made it back.”

That’s when I asked the hard question. Right after I reviewed the crazy story he’d just told me.

The boys had spent a weekend camping in the mountains and trying out the rock-climbing features of Lee’s truck. They were headed home and nearly made it to the flatlands off the curvy mountain grade when a pin fell out of the steering system, making it impossible for Lee to straighten out the wheels and avoid driving off into a ravine at sixty miles per hour. Only two of the three passengers had seatbelts. There was tragedy in the making in the desert that afternoon when a piece of curbing suddenly appeared at exactly the right place to re-direct an out-of-control Landcruiser away from the ravine and back onto the straightaway so Lee’s braking could stop his vehicle. Then a stranger rolls in right behind them in his Grapes of Wrath truck with the know-how to make a screw work in place of a pin in an antique Toyota, whips out a length of hose and siphons gasoline from the Landcruiser into his own vehicle, and goes on his merry way. To California. In the middle of a hot September day in Arizona’s desert.

I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “So . . . did you think the guy in the Grapes of Wrath truck might have been an angel?”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” he answered. “As soon as the adrenalin calmed and we could talk about it, we were all convinced the guy was an angel.”

It still makes me break out in a cold sweat when I think how very differently that day could have turned out. It was an impossible situation, and they knew it. They were bracing for the worst, holding on for dear life with no options available to stop the inevitable.

But then a curb appeared.

Followed by a beat-up truck and a driver with an unlikely story.

And a screw in place of a pin that held the steering together all the way back from the desert to the city.

I mean, it could have been a coincidence. All those miraculous things that came together at exactly the right moment and saved the lives of three young men. It could have been. Except later we drove back to the scene of the crime, rode up and down that highway for miles, and we never found that cement curb—which had no reason to be there in the first place since there wasn’t another building in sight for fifty miles in any direction.

I don’t know about you, but in a world where things are desperately trying to go to hell in a hand basket, it gives me more hope than I can describe to know we have armies of angels on our side all the time.

Even before we ask, even if there’s no time to ask for help, God’s messengers are watching, ready to intervene. “What role, then, do the angels have? The angels are spirit-messengers sent by God to serve those who are going to be saved. . . I make my angels swift winds, and my ministers fiery flames.” *

And, sometimes, they even drive old pickup trucks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Hebrews 1:14 and 1:7, Amplified Bible

With thanks to SoulRider.222 for permission to use this photo of the Toy-let's twin, but with a lot less rust. The original photo can be viewed by following this link: Toyota Land Cruiser | May 2011. While riding. Nikon Coolpix … | Flickr

Honesty

 

Where did the hawks go?

Where’d the hawks go, Papa?

 

Why?

Why did I have to lose everything?

 

 

Didn’t I serve you and your church well enough?

 

 

 

 

 

Didn’t I spend my life raising my children with integrity and devotion?

 

 

 

 

 

Didn’t I love my husband with loyalty and commitment?

 

 

Where did the hawks go? 

Papa?

Another Day At The Beach

The opposite of “glory” is “shame.” 

I looked up the definition for glory today. I’ve been told that writing is my glory, but I didn’t understand. I’ve only ever heard glory attributed to God, not to us - praise, worship, and thanksgiving offered to a deity. But that's the third meaning. The first speaks of notable achievements. The second to beauty or fame.

Isaiah 42:8 tells us God will not share his glory with another.

John 17:22 says Jesus has given to us the glory God gave to Him.

Psalm 3:3 reads, “Thou, oh Lord, art a shield about me, you’re my glory and the lifter of my head.” I want to understand what glory is, so I'll know how it gives honor to my writing. And because of that picture I had to buy. 

And because shame tells me I'm not grieving right.

I feel so down, Lord. It seems that every day the raw real of what has happened sinks a little more into my consciousness. I guess it’s because of what I’ve been told - that my brain is both protecting me from the head-on knowledge of Rob’s death while at the same time slowly re-wiring itself to accept the truth. This is a hard one to explain to those who’ve never been here. But I’ll try.

Every morning I wake up and miss his arms reaching for me. I remember them clearly. Forty-four years makes an indelible impression in my psyche. I remember his hands and his arms and his eyes so clearly, it’s almost like I can see him.

But I can’t. Because he’s not here. And he will never be here again.

That’s a pretty difficult fact to face, even after sixteen months of staring at it.

Sometimes I’m paralyzed lying in my bed, knowing I’ll feel better if I can simply stand up and move. But it’s not simple. I’m frozen. It’s almost as though I have to learn to walk again. Because it’s just like that. Only I have to learn to live again.

So, I get up. Because the call of nature is insistent. I open a blind letting sunshine stream in, setting serotonin buzzing in my body. This is good. Drugs without a rap sheet. I shower. Or dress. Make my bed. Apply some makeup. Eat some food and drink some water. All the things. Counting up the hours of sleep, I congratulate myself on fighting for another eight and winning.

The throbbing ache of sorrow softens now. Rest and movement supply some normalcy that translates into hope. Perhaps if I keep doing this every day, someday I’ll get up the way I used to, without drowning in my tears, and look forward to a new day. Someday. It was our word. Not anymore. A new dictionary is in play.

While the sun rules in ascension, my spirits rise with it. But as afternoon surrenders to incoming shadows, weariness replaces courage and I falter. Who knows why. There are so many things waiting to ambush my heart. A photo on my phone. A phrase he used to say, now carelessly repeated by me. A sudden memory. A longing while watching a movie. The smell of coffee. The list is endless, the surprises merciless.

For the rest of the day as fatigue stages a coup, waves of grief rush in, knocking me to my knees the way waves steal my footing in the sand. They rush out again, leaving me breathless and hopeful that the retreat is permanent. But it’s not. Only with the renewal of another battle fighting for eight hours of rest will I find the energy needed to face another day at the beach.

There is a rhythm to life. There is a rhythm in grief. I’ve been told that grief never leaves, but it changes. Perhaps I’m seeing that here, almost halfway through my second year without Rob. It must be painful for others to watch, chewing their fingernails the way he did as they root for me to surface again from these dark waters. And again. And again.

And again.

Grief does the work of re-orienting my brain until the new normal is one where Rob and I once lived in unison, but now I live alone. Sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone. I keep expecting him to come around the corner. I long for him to come around the corner. I ache for him to come around the corner.

I will never see him come around the corner. My brain is slowly, painfully, one atom at a time, reframing the way I see the world—a world without Rob McLeod in it.

This is not healing. There is no healing when your heart has been shattered. This is not moving on. This is just my story. And ours. The price of deep love.

I wish I could say that I will be myself again. I don’t think that’s true. You don’t just “get over” a loss this big. Keep breathing, yes. Laugh again, yes. Get over it? No. Learn to carry what cannot be fixed, yes.

So, that picture I bought. A continuous-line drawing of a woman’s silhouette, hugging her knees, her face bent to the ground. There’s no sense of glory there. She hugs her beauty to herself, hiding her face from the audience, frozen as if in shame. 

But her Deliverer comes. The lifter of her head. The One Who shields her from accusation and carries her when she can’t walk. The One Who feels her grief and saves her tears. He will lift her head. He will restore her glory. He will even reunite her Someday with her love.

There is no shame in the glory God gives.

It’s just the opposite.

 

Bowling for Pigs

I’ve always considered myself a smart woman. My intelligence might be slightly above average. I graduated high school twenty-third out of five hundred eighty-nine. I wasn’t headed to MIT in the fall like the first twenty-two, but I led the parade of future blue-collar workers. I’m not bragging here. I just think that whatever life throws my way, eventually I’ll be up to the challenge

So, why am I so inept when it comes to taking care of farm animals?

After all, I raised my own kids and lots of people think that’s like being a zookeeper. In addition, I’ve owned three rescue dogs, one hamster, a love bird, some Japanese fighting fish, and I was stepmom to my son’s tarantula. I got skills. I got brains. I got hutzpah.

What I might be lacking is some common sense.

For six days this month, all the inmates at the Brady Rehabilitation Ranch were subjected to my inexperience as a farmhand. Again. Katy and Dan and the fam took off for their cabin to escape the heat and left me in charge of all the critters—six chickens, including two so reclusive I didn’t know they existed, one mama pig with six piglets, and two bossy sistersheep. They took their dog with them to the mountains so there’d be at least one survivor when they got home, and the desert tortoise was left to his own devices.

Lord, have mercy.

It was a circus from the get-go, right after twelve-year-old Jules, aka The Animal Whisperer, entrusted me with the schedule and ratios for feeding the flock, followed immediately by Katy’s whispered summary, “Just try to keep them alive,” and the telltale sound of their Suburban fleeing imminent disaster in a cloud of diesel fumes.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms I am not. I don’t even compare to Ma Kettle. I’m more like Gilligan if The Minnow had run aground in a chicken coop. Feathers flying everywhere, poultry running for their lives, splintered wood covered in chicken doo doo. When I’m in charge of the henhouse, it’s one big . . . poop show.

It could drive a good Skipper to drink.

Case in point. “Toss a few alfalfa pellets over there to distract the sheep,” Jules instructed me, pointing to right field, “and then fill the entire scoop with more pellets and dump them into Maggie’s dish, there,” she continued, pointing down at about six o’clock on the other side of the pasture gate, “then . . . toss a quarter of a scoop of chicken scratch that way," she finished, gesturing toward the pitcher’s mound. This was gonna be a lot of math. And geometry. The pitcher’s mound looked pretty far away to me, and my arthritic throwing arm isn’t what it used to be. I wasn’t sure I could do much more than bunt the stuff.

Sure enough, it was a fiasco. I shook up that game plan every way I could imagine, but the sistersheep always raced in from the outfield, drop kicking the chickens in their mad scramble for a few dozen alfalfa pellets, followed by knocking the piglets on their kiesters. And it hurts my heart to say this in public, but Maggie’s mothering instincts are nothing to write home about. She was just as selfish at the dinner table as everybody else and left her little piglets out in left field to fend for themselves. One night while I was entertaining neighbors at my house, I spotted the sistersheep headbutting those poor little piglets over a few pieces of alfalfa in the pasture. The dark-haired youngsters rolled across the fairway with so much momentum they looked like bowling balls flying down a green alley. I jumped up from my chair, muttering forgivable things, ready to give those wooly bullies a piece of my mind, when one of my visitors stopped me midstride.

“Ummmmm,” he began, as his wife looked at me with alarm. “Ya gotta let the animals work it out for themselves.” I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing Napoleon said at Waterloo, but I sat down anyway and played another domino. What the heck, I thought. I fed them like Jules asked me to and kept them alive like Katy suggested. Nobody told me to break up fights. What else can you expect from a city girl?

My guests headed home soon after and I began to clean up the kitchen. Tossing some food scraps and a couple of cracked eggs into a large bowl, I found a pint of moldy strawberries in the fridge, too, and decided to throw everything over my patio fence out to the animals. Not that they deserved any treats, but it saved space in my trash can. The eggs had barely splattered on the ground when all hell broke loose. It was like they knew I was coming, and they were waiting for me. Creepy. The chickens, racing on skinny legs and looking like their arms were tied behind their backs, ran like drunken sailors across the pasture, headed straight for disappointment. I’m pretty sure chickens don’t eat eggs. By the time I’d lobbed red pepper remnants and onion skins over the no-climb fencing, the roly poly piglets arrived with both the sistersheep hot on their tails. Maggie pulled up the rear.

I guess nothing excites a bunch of freeloaders more than rotten food.

I had the porch light on, but the rest of the pasture was in pitch darkness. I’d given them all my scraps except for the strawberries. Since the whole pint was ruined, I thought it’d be less messy if I simply held the plastic clamshell upside down over the fence and let gravity empty it out. But gravity took the whole thing out of my hands and the entire container with its contents landed at the feet of a crazed crowd. Holy.Moly. Now I know where the inspiration for that painting of stacked farm animals came from—it was a feeding frenzy on the south side of somebody else’s pasture. A riot broke out on the other side of my patio fence as the inmates mutinied there over a bunch of gnarly berries. Now Maggie was headbutting her own piglets who rolled between the feet of the sheep like a bunch of croquet balls through wooly wickets. The chickens staged a counterattack, pecking everything in sight including sheep feet, and no one seemed to notice that they’d devoured all of those stupid strawberries and were now fighting over an empty, plastic clamshell.

All I could think of was Katy’s last words to me. “Just try to keep them alive.” I didn’t know if chickens can chew plastic and stay alive. Or if sheep eat trash like goats do, or if pigs are the equivalent of grazing garbage cans, but if any jagged piece of that container made it into their digestive tracts, I was pretty sure Jules was gonna fire me.

“Geeze Louise,” I muttered in frustration, quickly reviewing my options.  I’d have to walk all the way down to the double gates, open that tight chain in the dark, then double back up the pasture in the pitch blackness, make my way through a herd of filthy animals to retrieve a defiled clam shell covered in pig snot and chicken slobber if I couldn’t figure this out. Gross. Double gross. There was no way I was gonna put my life at risk like that. I was not going to die trampled to death by pigs in a field of chicken poop. I had my dignity, after all.

My mind racing, I ran into the house and retrieved the only thing I could think of—my handy dandy grabber from Amazon. If I hurried, maybe I could stab it through the mesh opening in the fence, grab the edge of the clamshell, and lift it up above the animals’ heads and over the fence to safety. But by the time I returned, they’d wrestled the filthy thing out of my reach. Back to the house I ran. This time, I seized my long-handled broom and hurried outside with it. The criminals were still struggling with the empty strawberry container, slowly edging it further and further away from my fence.

With seconds to spare, I shoved the handle of the broom through the open mesh, pinned the clamshell to the ground and held on for dear life. It was like hanging on to a slab of meat in a river boiling with pirhanas as the wild animals fought for control of the desecrated plastic. But I had more to lose than they did if I didn’t regain control of this situation—I’d have to explain why the animals died of PVC poisoning to the Bradys when they got home. Finally, after a tense couple of seconds, Maggie lost interest and she and her dizzy brood all wandered off, the chickens got distracted by random bug vibrations, and the snooty sistersheep gave me a bleat of contempt and disappeared. I didn’t care. I scooched the container back toward my fence, retrieved it with the grabbers, and brought the clamshell over for the win.

It was disgusting. All I had to show for my expertise and amazing courage was a snot-covered clam shell painted muddy brown with animal drool and dirt. And a filthy grabber that I once used to pull clean clothes out of the washing machine. I wasn’t even sure it could be salvaged after the way I’d humiliated it. Probably I’d just have to burn it at the stake.

Holding the plastic hostage at arm’s length, I scooped the broom up off the patio, and cradled the sacrificial grabber under my arm while I headed back inside. I shoved the clamshell deep inside the garbage can and washed my hands. Repeatedly.

Those pigs. I used to think a lot of Maggie, but she had really let me down this time. Drying my hands on a towel, I leaned back against the counter, exhausted and disheartened. I didn’t know when I’d ever been so disillusioned by a pig before.

Staring off into space, I blew out a breath.

“I’m so disappointed in Maggie,” I said, choking out the words. "I'm not sure I’ll ever enjoy eating sausage again.”

With thanks to Bill Harrison for permission to use his hilarious photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link: I went bowling - everyone was impressed | I thought this was… | Flickr