Seated at the Bench

They needed a pianist. Someone to softly play his favorite old hymns. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know any of them. They didn’t go to our church. I don’t remember how they landed there that morning. What I remember is the love they had for him. And I remember his wife.

When you’re a church pianist, you have a bird’s eye view of everything and everyone. You see water drip off the noses of the recently baptized. You notice who’s missing from the choir, how much more gray the pastor’s hair is now, and are in the right spot to throw a glaring stare at your misbehaving children.

I'd played for weddings and funerals before. It wasn’t unusual for me to serve as a musician in someone else’s drama. I just never meant to become invested in their stories. After all, someone needed to stay calm, cool, and collected. And when you’re playing favorite hymns for a grieving family, it’s important to make those quarter notes land correctly on the ivories beneath your fingers. Blurry vision is a hazard.

Hearts have a mind of their own.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Surrounded by a squadron of burly sons, she sat on the front row, her attention focused on the speaker at the mic, smiling. Soft whisps of white hair encircled her wrinkled face, but her eyes were bright, and she nodded her head throughout every tribute given for her late husband. She was the bravest woman I thought I’d ever seen, and it leveled me. How did she do it? How could she sit there and smile, watching her grown sons weep as, one by one, they told of the great love their father had for them and his wife? How in every pickup truck he’d ever bought, the first thing he did was install a seat belt in the center of the bench seat so she could sit right beside him while they drove together.

She just smiled and nodded, still feeling the deep love of a man she would never sit next to again.

When the service was over, I joined the long line of sympathetic guests who waited their turn to offer condolences to the family. I didn’t know what I would say. It just seemed appropriate to acknowledge their loss and not simply be the paid musician who showed up for an hour or two. I needn’t have worried. When it was my turn to awkwardly shake hands with each of them and hug their eighty-year-old mother, I broke down in tears and couldn’t say anything.

The kindhearted widow held my hands and looked into my sad face. “Are you all right, dear?” she gently asked.

Ironic. And kind of hilarious. I never saw her shed a tear, but she was moved by mine. The mourning widow comforting the stranger who wept for her. And, if I’m honest, wept for myself.

Sometimes in life you may notice that it’s difficult to watch the sorrow of others because their circumstances mirror what you know deep down will one day be your story. And it terrifies. I sat there on that piano bench watching grown men cry and observing the diminutive rock of a woman who clearly was the family glue, thinking and hoping that a day like theirs would never come for me. I had it all planned out. I would, of course, go first because Rob would be so much better at handling loss than I would. Plus, he was healthier than me. It just made sense.

But when has life ever made sense? And why do we maintain the illusion that we have control?

The day came for me anyway, seated on the front row, listening to tributes made too soon for my husband. There are few things I remember about that day. His fire helmet placed on top of his grave, a framed photo of him wearing it sat propped on the headstone, his name chiseled into the granite below, and relentless sorrow chiseled into my soul. How did I get through all of that? How am I still getting through it? All the lessons that accompany sadness and sorrow? The realization that grief comes to stay, that you don’t “get over it”, you don’t heal. For the rest of your life you simply learn to carry it and find your way through the dark.

I was thinking about that funeral and the smiling widow today. Who knows what was going on within her. I could only observe from the outside. What surprised me was my reaction to this family’s tragedy. I wanted to stay detached the way the pastor was. Just do my job and stand aloof from the emotion. Offer my sympathy and get out. Get away. Don’t let it rattle my sense of security.

That’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when we feel for someone, but not with them. Sympathy recognizes the sad story and that’s as far as it goes. Sympathy watches from the piano bench and prays to God that they never find themselves on the front row.

But empathy takes the risk of identifying with the pain of someone else. Empathy taps into its own experiences and similar emotions. Empathy, says Brene Brown, is where we drop down into the hole where someone else sits overwhelmed by painful feelings and circumstances, and we say to them, “Hey, I know what it’s like down here and you’re not alone.” Empathy shows up to weep with those who weep, sit with those who can’t move, remains silent with those who have no words, and witnesses the pain so their person won’t be alone.

It makes me wonder why we send “sympathy” cards to people when their hearts are breaking. It’s something. I know. It’s better than nothing. But what if we ditched all the platitudes Hallmark overcharges us for and simply put our hearts in a handwritten note that risks being honest about loss? What if we wrote, “This is so hard and I am so sorry for the pain you are going through. I love you.” As someone who stood over a trash can tossing sympathy cards that told me it was God’s will for Rob to die and explained how God had more work for me to do here and that my memories would be a good enough substitute for having my husband beside me, it became evident that the majority of sympathy cards don’t cut it. What I needed, what I still need, what we all need, is empathy.

When it’s all been said and done, the thing that helps carry us through our pain is the courage of people who just show up and sit beside us without trying to fix something that cannot be fixed. Even if it’s awkward. Even if they fear doing it wrong. Even if they fear it will happen to them someday, too, if it hasn’t already. They are willing to witness the sadness and pain of another and not try to talk them out of it. They do this because we are all human and death is a part of life.

I used to sit on the bench, watch from the sidelines, feeling helpless at the sight of ongoing grief. I sent useless cards. I avoided sad people. I’m not proud of any of this. Our culture is so uncomfortable with sorrow and it was as though I was their mascot.

I hope, after all I’ve been through, all that I have suffered, all that I have lost, that I am learning to choose empathy, too.

Green Thumb

I must be the worst gardener on the planet. You probably think you collected that award years ago, but I have news for you. There is only one rotten nurserywoman per century, and she is me. My reputation is so vast that no one has ever even asked me to volunteer with the babies at church. Just mention my name and the word nursery in the same sentence and watch what happens. Mothers run away screaming with their infants and florists lock their doors. Thus, the reason you never received a flower arrangement from me at the birth of your child. By the way, belated congratulations.

Obviously, some confusion has occurred. Let me clear things up once and for all. Babies like me. Plants don’t.

I’ve mentioned this problem before, but since the number of followers who read my blog is less than the total number of surviving plants in my front yard, it may have gone unnoticed. Shocking, right? It doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m a kindhearted soul.  I’ve donated to people in need. Wiped the tears from brokenhearted grandbabies. Thrown my trash in the garbage instead of the street. You’d think I could make plants like me. Help them reach their full potential. Thrive and flourish and elicit rapturous sighs from every visitor who walks into my home believing it to be a virtual Garden of Eden. I think I’ve figured it out.

I don’t care about plants.

They’re just so . . . needy. Look at them over in the corner of the living room, leaves dull and lifeless, holding their breaths until they turn yellow. It’s like they’re dramatically gasping, “Hey, we’re thirsty over here.” Or, “You overwatered us again.” I mean, make up your mind. Underwatering turns the leaves yellow and overwatering turns the leaves yellow and lack of nutrients turn the leaves yellow. The way I see it, it’s easier to grow yellow plants than green ones so I’m just doing them all a favor.

I had some kind of tall green thing given to me as a housewarming present when I moved into this house a year ago, and I want you to know I’m incredibly proud of how long it lasted. It sat on my kitchen island until last week. Pretty good, right? It wasn’t thirsty. It wasn’t drowning. It had all its vitamins, I guess. It was safe inside where I keep the air conditioner at a comfortable arctic setting. It had everything in the world to live for. And do you know what took it down? The pot was too small. I threw that whiner in the trash last week, wrestling its rangy stalks into a kitchen-sized garbage bag while I closed my eyes so it couldn’t accuse me of committing a crime. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told it, gritting my teeth as I tied off the bag.

Last night it reappeared. In my dreams.  I think I’m being haunted by a house plant.

There’s another possibility. I don’t think it’s my fault that I can’t grow things. I come from a short line of women with overly green thumbs. It’s a genetic disorder which, I’m sure I read somewhere, could be caused by consuming too much broccoli. At any rate, they kept all the luck with plants for themselves and I didn’t get any. Which is fine with me. I don’t like broccoli anyway. 

Still, people who brag about “shoving a stalk of rutabaga in the ground and watching it take off” really get on my nerves. They don’t understand people like me. A good friend of mine sat me down once and tried to fix me. She was one of those broccoli lovers.

“All you have to do is water them,” she said about African violets, like it was easy. I stared at her like she was speaking Portuguese.

She nodded, noticing the problem. “Or maybe you could just hang pictures of plants around your house,” she offered weakly, like I hadn't already thought of that.

“Then I’d have to dust them,” I answered.

She bit her lip. “Yeah, vicious cycle."

I thought that was the end of the discussion. But when Christmas rolled around, she gave me a special gift. I opened the wrapping and pulled a small, handcrafted clay pot out of the box. It was filled with potting soil over a Styrofoam base and held a cluster of greenery.

“It’s a Velvet Plant!” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “I made it myself.”

She did. There were seven handsewn leaves crafted of wire and dark green velvet, each securely shoved into the Styrofoam base and artistically bent to resemble a houseplant. I looked at the tiny card protruding from the soil and read its name. “Fictus Phyllos.”

“It means Fake Plant,” she told me. The card also contained care instructions. “Never water. Requires no sunlight. Thrives on neglect.”

A tear escaped my eye. I loved that little plant. But I still had to dust it.

A few weeks ago, one of my granddaughter’s cousins asked me to take care of her snake plant for the weekend while she and her family flew out of state for a wedding. Apparently because my surviving houseplants pretended to be happy, she had the impression I could keep her beloved plant alive for five days.

“All you have to do is keep it in a spot with indirect sunlight and water it on Wednesday and Saturday,” she said, fully confident that those were simple directions. “I’ll pick it up Monday,” she finished. I broke out in a cold sweat but assured her that I would keep it alive. Actually, I didn’t use those exact words. I just smiled and prayed for a miracle. I’m only human, you know.

But I did keep it alive and to my enormous relief, she picked it up as promised on Monday and I never had to look at it again.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand how other people can keep green things green unless they’re buying plastic plants. I don’t know why trees keep growing in the desert and dehydrated roses can bloom and Mexican Petunias look deprived every afternoon yet explode with purple blossoms each and every new morning. The only thing that makes me think I’m not as pathetic as I seem is this time of year, when fall arrives. Every single leaf on the ash tree overhanging my patio is about to turn brown and fall to its death on the concrete below, leaving an expression I can only describe as bewildered consternation on that massive tree in the pasture.

If even God struggles to keep things looking green sometimes, I must be in pretty good company. 

With thanks to Chad Miller for pretending to be a worse gardener than me. Nice try, and thanks for the great picture. The original photo can be viewed here: Everyone in my family has a "green thumb," except me. The… | Flickr

And So I Write

August, 2021

“This is pain,” she says. Hand over heart, or solar plexus or gut, wherever your body concentrates your grief. “May I be kind to myself,” she adds, waiting while I repeat after her. “May I be compassionate with myself, may I accept myself,” she finishes. This is the exercise she taught for when grief surrounds me, heart and soul and mind and body and I can’t breathe or find my way out and think I’ll never survive this loss.

This is pain.

This is grief.

This is hell.

I knew coming home to my temporary apartment might feel like this. Coming home after a big trip is always anticlimactic. But this time I came home alone. Without my right arm. My other half. My everything. I drove into the driveway, five thousand miles after I set out for his memorial service in Florida and sat in the car taking deep breaths.

This is it, I thought. From now on, I’m on my own. Still Rob’s wife, but no longer sharing life with him, shopping for us, planning or dreaming or laughing or loving or even bickering. The echoes of our life together are agonizing. The memories are too much, and my brain won’t let me look at them right now.

Today, everything hurts. Unpacking is always a chore. Today it takes every ounce of energy I possess to pull things out of the solitary suitcase and put them away. What is to become of me? What is my purpose now without Rob beside me? All the courage everyone else sees in me is invisible when I look in the mirror at my tearstained face. 

Who knew courage comes packaged in weeping?

I have lists of things to do. Breathing on this planet requires schedules. Appointments. Shopping. Consuming. Repeat as necessary. It’s been five and a half months since Rob died. Died. I hate that word. The only comfort I have right now is knowing how much God hates it, too, even though pastors insist that 'blessed in the sight of God is the death of His saints.' Jesus wept with loud, obnoxious sobs at the grave of his friend, Lazarus. 

Death was never what God had in mind.

But it’s the human experience. We’re all one hundred per cent terminal. That doesn’t worry me anymore personally. Still, the thought of losing another loved one is too much. “Too much.” That’s what my mother-in-law said as we hugged in her house last week. She’s buried all three sons and her two sisters in the space of three years. Nine years ago, she buried her own beloved.

Death is too much. 

I’d love to be happy again. Some people say it’s a choice. “Look on the bright side,” they encourage. “Be grateful for the years you had together.” And, “Remember how many other people are suffering, too.” Or maybe that’s what I tell myself in the moments when grief suffocates me. I’ll tell myself anything just to catch my breath.

Don’t mind me. This is still early grief, I’m told. That’s not good news. How many more day after days lie ahead of me, missing Rob and trying to absorb the truth that he’s not here anymore and never will be again?

A reality like that is too much.

August, 2023 

“This is pain,” I remind myself, thirty months after he died. I put my hand over my heart again the way she taught me to and give name to what I feel. “This is grief,” I say, for the thousandth time. I glance toward the kitchen that he never saw at the framed word art I hung there. “Be Kind To Yourself” it admonishes, reminding me of what she told me at the end of every session until one day, a few months into this sad space where I live, I blurted out, “What does that even mean?”

“It means to allow yourself to be human, to experience the suffering, the grieving. It means to treat yourself the same way you would treat another person who is hurting. With kindness. Gentleness. Compassion for yourself for all you’ve been through.”

For all I’ve been through.

I have lost so much. Some things I can’t mention here. Significant and difficult but also too personal. As for the others . . .

Two and a half years ago, I lost my beloved. My darling. My safe place. My true north. My best friend and playmate and first love and last love. And with him all the dreams we created together. The life we built. And our future.

In short order, I lost the home we’d just bought. The dream of sitting on our newly finished back deck looking out over the acre and a half that merged into forestry land, scanning the trees for glimpses of deer and elk while drinking morning coffee and cocoa. We never sat out there. Instead, we slept in separate hospital rooms until I was released and he never came home.

There’s been more loss since I drove to Florida to mourn with our family for him. Nearly a year to the day after losing Rob, our dog, Brody, died. The one with the tender heart who came to me and positioned himself against me every time the tears fell. He was six. I don’t know what happened. One day he was happy and playful, and the next day he changed. Within a month I told him goodbye as the vet carried him away, his loving spirit gone forever.

Sometimes there is too much loss. Too close together. Six months after Brody died, the counselor who walked me through the worst time of my life and reminded me to be kind to myself, retired. Some healing strategies were left suspended and incomplete. I bought a book she recommended to use on my own. It’s not exactly the same.

Grief, the feared stranger, came to my house to live. And stayed. I’d rather have my dog.

Long before our last session together, I worried out loud with my counselor about crying in front of my grandchildren. Would they be afraid to be around me? Would my tears frighten them or make them feel that hanging out with only YaYa and no Chief seemed empty? Would it remind them too much of their own loss?

“You are modeling grief for them,” she said. “They grieve their Chief, but there will be more losses in their lives. And when they experience them, they will know how to grieve. Because they watched you do it.”

What a strange purpose to have in this life I live daily but no longer recognize—modeling grief and the freedom to live in sadness and sorrow. “For as long as it takes,” she told me. That’s how long grief lasts.

I often describe this abrupt change forced on me as “feeling shattered.” Sometimes I feel an urgency to put the pieces back together as soon as possible. The pressure to get back to normal only complicates the process. The thing is, Rob and I were one. It’s God’s design in marriage. It took forty-six years of loving each other, goofing up together, misunderstanding and forgiving and trying again to discover who we were both apart and as one and then, somewhere along the way, I knew him better than anyone else on earth, as he also knew me. 

We were a team. We had each other’s backs. Sometimes we had each other by the throat, but those times were rare. We liked each other. We laughed together and cried and dreamed together. We won and lost together. That one hurts the most. The day we lost everything together. We lost the “together.”

You can’t put a shattered life back “together” when half the pieces are missing.

I miss him tonight. I miss him every night and morning and the hours in between. How could I not? He’s in my DNA. I hear myself saying the things he said. When I drive home late at night, I reach for my phone to text him that I’m on my way, but no one is there to read that text and I remember too late to stop the catch in my heart. To my surprise last fall, I began craving foods I’d never enjoyed before, all his favorite flavors. Baked goods like pumpkin muffins and ginger snap cookies.

But not fruitcake. I’ll never crave fruitcake.

Maybe tasting the things he loved makes him feel close to me again. Almost three dimensional, the same way he appears when someone is willing to listen to a memory of what we built together. Yet another reason why I journal about this grief. Telling my story and writing about him and our life nearly makes it tangible again.

Evenings are the hardest. I’m tired. I’m cooking for one on the nights I can convince myself to do it. I eat most meals by myself. And regularly I tell God, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this life that I never wanted and never asked for and was forced into living.”

I had no choice. Did I say that loud enough? I never had a choice about being widowed. He never had a choice about dying. And leaving me and our family. Losing Rob still feels like losing an arm. It was an amputation. A tearing away of the two who became one.

This is pain.

This is grief.

Some days, this is still hell.

This is processing all of that, writing about it here, trying to find my way in the dark, doing the thing I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never been here before and yet here I am.

And so I write.

I have to dump all of this pain out of my soul so I can breathe.

And so I write.

I write because shoving all of these feelings down out of view would destroy me. And that is what I know grief is not supposed to do.

In whatever ways we are alike or very different, we humans have this in common: we will all grieve at some point in our lives. If we let it, grief can connect us, enabling us to have compassion for ourselves and each other. If we don’t, or if we try to fix people who don’t need to be fixed, we all lose.

I, for one, have lost enough.

 

 

“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried. Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.”

 ― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

As Long As It Takes

Every day I check to see if I care yet. Not so far. Grieving takes as long as it takes. This is not only frustrating for me, but possibly for a few others.

Did you know grief was once considered a mental illness? In some circles it still is. My name just came up for jury duty at the Superior Court in downtown Phoenix. There are all kinds of things which make this kind of civic duty really difficult for me under any conditions, especially in Phoenix in August. I asked to be excused, explaining that I have recently lost my husband and I’m not up for the stress of jury duty right now. A judge reviewed my request and gave me a sixty or ninety day extension to get over it—my choice. He has a job to do and he needs jurors to do it. He didn’t care that I don’t care.

What would caring look like if it poked its little head out of my soul to check for its shadow? It would look like cooking healthy food for myself again. Or cooking anything for myself, which would save me money as well as calories. But do I care? Not enough to do it.

It would look like having fun again. Playing cards and games or staying in a cabin in the mountains or traveling to the ocean or going to see a movie. Even going out to eat with someone. The problem is those are all the things Rob and I did together. Everything reminds me of what we once had. What I once had. Having fun on my own doesn’t have the same appeal as it does when you’re doing it with your best friend.

It would look like going back to a gym. Taking risks. Finding a church. Showing up for Meetup groups instead of just signing up online and staying home anyway. Finishing at least one of the two novels I started back when I locked myself in the office to type while Rob watched a movie in his mancave. Finishing the quilt we started together during the lockdown, made from all his fire department shirt logos. Even simply watering the thirsty plants outside my window.

The longer this goes on, this interminable sorrow and the in-my-face change that makes up my life now, the harder it is to get my butt in gear and locate a direction that feels familiar to me. I’ve given up on “finding my purpose.” It’s too transient and vague. Too big and too vast. Too exhausting and obvious—if Rob were still here and we still had the life we’d only just begun as “mountain people”, there’d already be a purpose in place, a dream unfolding, discoveries and fun happening. Together.

It's the “together” part that is tripping me up. Everything in our world, our culture, is built around couples. Two for one specials at Dairy Queen are hard to cash in on if you’re alone in the drive-thru. Getting my hair and nails done doesn’t get me a dinner out. It just empties my bank account. If I could say anything positive about living alone it’s that I have new empathy for singles who’ve been on this path for decades. They know this is a couples’ world. There’s no new life without both males and females.  No baby birds. No baby people. No flowering plants. New tomatoes on the vine. No Hallmark plots. No date nights. No two-seater cars. No reason for Valentine’s Day.

Some may think it’s wrong to say that my identity was us. Now there is no us. Spiritual connection doesn’t count when you wake up with a bad dream and no one is there to put an arm around you. Comforting memories don’t cut it when the doctor removes another melanoma from your body. Mealtimes lose their flavor when you eat all of them alone and no one is there to thank you for cooking. Meteor showers aren’t worth getting up for when you stand in the backyard by yourself. There’s no one here to grin and follow me out the door when I announce, “I can see a thunderstorm in the distance, Baby! Let’s go find it!”

I know this is part of “life” even though it’s brought on by death. We’re all terminal, Rob used to remind me. We all have an expiration date. Sooner or later we’ll all lose someone we love like our own lives and our hearts will break, perhaps forever.

There’s no easy way around this because the only way through it is through it. No shortcuts. “It takes as long as it takes.” Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I need to move to France. Or a convent.  I’m tired of trying to figure out things on my own. Remembering to rotate the tires and change the oil and find a tall person to switch out light bulbs and a/c filters. It scares me to face my fears alone or risk sounding stupid to someone unfamiliar with my neuroses. Rob knew what a lunatic I am. There’s a lot of comfort in that kind of acceptance and a lot of fear in trusting the messy in my life to anyone else.

It's just lonely here in widowland. On top of missing Rob and doing whatever it takes to survive, including eating things that are awful for me and going broke on Kleenex, adding my grief counselor as a beneficiary in my trust and posting short, sad blogs here instead of finishing that silly novel that may never get published—every single thing I do every single day I do by myself.

I’m not a complete hermit, though. Talking on the phone with friends and family is always a bright spot in my day. Unless I’ve talked too long to too many and then I’m worn out. Still, I told my daughter last night that I think I’m turning into an introverted poop. I want to escape the house just like I've always needed to do, and I also don’t want to put on mascara and make myself look presentable enough to do it. I think they call that ambiguous. Or broken. I just can’t get my engine to fire so I can get going again.

On top of everything else that’s not working the way it used to, I think my internal battery is dead.

I know this isn’t everyone’s story who has lost their husband. Everyone grieves differently, I’ve been told in soothing tones by those who’ve never been here. Some days are better than others. Some moments I almost feel like me again. Sometimes I force myself to face my fears, plan a trip that includes driving a few hundred miles by myself, and continue the love of road trips that Rob and I relished doing together.

And other days I stand in front of an empty refrigerator deciding which fast-food place I’ll let cook for me again.

It’s not like I’m the only person to feel this way. It’s not like I’m not trying to care. I’m still talking to my counselor and journaling my feelings and going out in public and crying when I need to and opening the curtains and breathing in fresh air and hugging my kids and grandbabies and hoping for a brighter day and believing that Jesus will never stop holding me while realizing He knows what it feels like to be human.

It’s nothing to worry about.

It’s just my grief.

Sacred Cows

    I probably shouldn’t say this. It’s getting so there are so many sacred cows in the world now that they’re all stampeding. I might even say I’m taking my life into my own hands by using them to write my thoughts down. After all, political correctness has taken us so far that we can’t even laugh anymore. It’s insensitive to make fun of ourselves.

I don’t care. I’m just gonna write like no one’s reading.

Every single summer it’s hot. If you look up the word summer in a thesaurus, you’ll find these synonyms: brutal, sweltering, sweaty, exhausting, hellacious. Wait. No. Sorry. Those are the synonyms for Phoenix.

I’ve lived in the Phoenix metro area for forty-five of my sixty-five years. I lived on the gulf coast of Florida for another ten. The remaining ten spent in northern California’s Pacific coast are the only years of my life on planet earth when I owned a coat. I am experienced with hot climates.

What the heck is someone like me doing here? I don’t have the complexion for this.

And yet, here I am, a freckle faced pasty-skinned girl whose pastimes include growing skin cancers, thriving in the Arizona desert. Where summer runs from March until November and spring and fall are tiny bookends to our version of winter. Only the tough survive here and I don’t mean meteorologists.

It must be lonely to be a weatherman. Half the time you’re wrong and the rest of the time you’re not right. It’s miraculous the kind of job security this occupation provides. Still, summers like this one keep us glued to the weather channel, anxious to find out if the heat wave will ever end. Especially a couple of months from now when even locals will be begging for relief and the kids go trick or treating in shorts and tank tops. My favorite ever weather guy was a comedian. Every September the anchorwoman would make small talk by asking him, “When will the cooler temperatures arrive?” And every September he held up the same handmade sign for viewers at home to read: “The Second Week of October.”

He’s the only meteorologist I know who was always right.

It's Arizona. It’s freaking hot here. I don’t know why I live here. Maybe because I don’t know where else to go. When I was a kid growing up, the only air conditioning we had in our house was a window unit in the family room. The rest of the house depended on a swamp cooler for relief, including the bedrooms. We didn’t even have ceiling fans in those days. And when the summer rains, the monsoons, began each July, evaporative cooling was worthless. We hit 118 every single summer which forced us to hide out in that family room for days on end.

It was miserable but not unusual. Unless it happened on a date not previously known to reach 118. Then it was front page news. I ask you, what difference does it make if 118 happens on June 23 or July 2? The difference is called a “record.” As in, record breaking heat.

We love breaking records. Competition is in our boiling blood, even if we’re just competing with ourselves. This summer Arizona has outdone herself. Not only are meteorologists the stars of the show, but our dehydrated state is the belle of the ball. Today we celebrate our thirty-first day spent at or above 110 degrees.

Big deal.

Here’s the thing. Once we hit 105, there’s not a lot of difference between that continuous, monotonous heat and the super scorching 118 I grew up with, or the shocking 122 Phoenix became notorious for in 1990, which I’d like to point out occurred thirty-three years ago. It’s just that big numbers like that make headlines. But is it really hotter than summers in Florida where you still risk heat stroke in the humidity because it’s harder to sweat? Not in my experience.

Miserable is miserable, whether it’s a dry climate or a wet one. Pick your poison.

I know this isn’t a popular perspective. That’s why I’m putting it out there, because I might be the first one to do it. And doing something for the first time is record breaking. Like thirty-one days spent at or above 110 degrees.

Yes, I’m sick of it. The problem is, it’s only July 31. We still have another three months to go. While Hobby Lobby is already rolling out Halloween and Christmas decorations, and department stores are switching out swimsuits for turtleneck sweaters, us desert rats are still hiding inside in the air conditioning and dreaming of a white Christmas.

There’s nothing unusual about hot summers here. We don’t praise the Lord and put on a sweater when it cools down to 102. The numbers may vary, but the intensity is the same. It takes tenacity and endurance to survive this annual season, but we know when the sun moves to the south, the heat will go with it. We’ll get through one more summer just like we always do so long as the media and politicians leave us alone and find something else to panic over. Arizona natives know there’s hope just beyond the horizon. It happens every year.

The Second Week of October.

With thanks to Spike Stitch for permission to use the angry cow photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: cow | Spike Stitch | Flickr

Naturally

I have struggled against this. Struggled with this. Reasoned against reason and listened to the professionals who are paid to know more than I do. But the only one who knows my heart, besides my God, is me. Learning to trust my heart has been harder than learning to trust my God.

Death is not natural.

It’s not. It’s a thief. It’s a liar. It’s an illusion.

I’ve been reassured without reassurance for more than two years that death is a natural part of life. That it is, as songwriters insist, the “circle of life.” This is exactly why music is so powerful. And also, at times, dangerous. Caught up in the emotion of its swell and passion, who really listens to the words? Yet the words are the most important thing.

Death is the enemy. How can we believe it’s a natural part of life when it is the exact opposite of life? The day the palliative care doctor called and said Rob wanted to “die a natural death,” was the day my heart began to beat out of rhythm. Something wasn’t right. Those couldn’t have been his words. It didn’t sound like Rob. It didn’t sound like God either. What is supposed to be so natural about a life ending?

That’s the point. Life doesn’t end. Death is an unnatural separation of a soul from its body. Our bodies were designed by God to last forever. That’s the reason it’s so hard to die, because we weren’t meant to die at all. And by that, I mean that our bodies were not meant to die. Something has interfered with God’s design.

We stood at the foot of Rob’s hospital bed watching as he labored to breathe, listening as the cheerful hospice representative voiced the pattern we were encouraged to follow. “You can go now, Rob,” she insisted. “It’s all right. You can go.” Easy for her to say. He wasn’t the sun to her moon. He was mine.

The idea was that he was now hesitant, despite what we’d witnessed when we asked him ourselves if he wanted to “die a natural death.” Again, words spoken in the pattern of the professionals. The implication was that we were unwilling to let him go. That we had to release the reins of our hold on him so he could escape his body in peace.

But here is what I struggle with. If letting him go was the greatest act of love I could ever give him, why am I still in so much pain? I have been robbed of Rob. He was robbed of the future we dreamed about together. Of watching his grandchildren grow and investing in their hearts and lives. They grieve his loss still. Surely this is not natural.

It’s not. And I’m weary of being told that it is the final step in life, as if we are, as that melancholy shepherd journaled, flowers that bloom in the field only to disappear when a wind sweeps over it. (Psalm 103) Only that’s not exactly what he wrote. It’s an analogy, because David was an artist who painted with words. But words matter. When you read that in context, he prefaced it by saying, “As for man, his days are like grass.” Here today, gone tomorrow, our days are like grass, disappearing quickly, difficult to remember. But mankind, humans, are created in God’s image, the image of the Eternal One. The One Who does not die. And neither do we.

I think the problem lies here—the topic of death has been taken over by humanistic logic. Evolutionary explanation. A reduction in our value. If we are simply another in the animal kingdom, then we can be summed up by the words, “Start” and “Finish.” We become walking tombstones, lacking the details as represented by a three-inch hyphen separating “Birth date” and “Death date.” That’s it. That’s the total summation of a human being. You were born. The wind blew. You died.

Pathetic.

I will not accept that death wins. Nor that it is “normal” and “natural.” I don’t have to. Jesus didn’t, or he wouldn’t have stood in his full humanity at the grave of his friend, Lazarus, and ugly cried like He did. Of course those who are released from the confines of physical bodies are jubilant afterward. I’m not an idiot. I fully realize that Rob wouldn’t want to come back here even if he had the chance, no matter how much he loves all of us. And he loves all of us tremendously. I get that. If he needed my permission or my blessing to be set free from his suffering and an interminable future in a broken body, I loved him enough to put his needs before my own and I did.

I am through being mollified or patronized with the idea that having to make a decision like that at all is “natural” or even “God’s will.” I've lost my person and half of my heart. This is no place for judgment.  I won’t be convinced to put a new spin on Rob’s death by painting it up with flowers and flourishes labeled as “natural.”

If death was not natural to Jesus, then it is not natural to us either. He’s the one who called it the Final Enemy and promised it will eventually be put under his feet. I admit, it would soothe my heart in this terrible meantime between losing Rob and being with him again if I could view his death as a common transition. If I could stop fighting against the unfairness of it all. Stop pushing back against the idea that it is normal and ordinary, even expected, to see God’s damaged, perfect creation perish.

But I can’t. Because He doesn’t.

We are not grass. We are eternal. Created in the image of God.

This Is That Story

Two inches.  

What good is two inches? If you’re hitchhiking, that two-inch thumb might get you a ride. If you’re hangry, a snack sized Hershey’s bar cheers you up. If you like pickles, a gherkin makes your sandwich sparkle. If you don’t like pickles, it ruins your lunch.

Two inches of something indulgent is no cause for alarm. Unless it’s a pickle. Two inches of something crawling up inside your denim capris is a different story.

This is that story.

I’ve lived most of my life in the desert southwest. I was born in Arizona, so even though I should have been born in Ireland, I’ve adapted to sweltering heat and harsh terrains. I owe my resilience to the invention of air conditioning and a good dermatologist. What I haven’t adjusted to very well are two-inch invasive species. It’s a fair descriptor. Native or not, some species shouldn’t invade my space.

When I was in the sixth grade, my family and I moved to a small house in the desert where, one afternoon, I stepped outside and crushed the life out of a scorpion with my bare foot. I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t see him. But I felt him. It scared me to death to step on the creepy thing, but the pain was no worse than a bee sting for me. I thought I’d learned my lesson—shoes matter. It was the only time I’ve ever been on the wrong side of a scorpion.

Until last week.

In my own living room.

Wearing shoes.

And denim capris.

I’ve probably killed about two dozen of the crunchy little demons in my lifetime, but only one of them with my bare foot. All the rest I’ve pulverized wearing sturdy shoes. It’s easy to recognize Arizona’s dangerous bark scorpion, even on my fake wood floors. Sure, they’re the same color, but they still look like a scorpion.

Maybe overconfidence was my downfall.

When I’m sitting at my desk like I was last weekend, lost in my writing and enjoying some iced tea, I’m not usually thinking about scorpions. Not until I realize a two-inch version is crawling inside the leg of my capris. Suddenly, intuition becomes better than vision, and I don’t need to see the freaky beast to realize I’m in a lot of trouble.

No one was here to watch me boogie last week. Or stomp my leg until the terrorist fell to his death on the fake wood floor, crushed by my frenzied dance moves. He deserved it. Nor did anyone hear me sob like a baby as the venom quickly spread across my shin and encircled my lower leg. Within seconds, from knee to ankle, my leg throbbed with fiery pain, pulsating my nerve endings like a TENs unit set to warp speed.

I kid you not. 

My daughter, Katy, came over to administer first aid, but as it turns out there is no pain relief for an attack like this. You just put up with the effects of its powerful neurotoxin for the next seven hours, making sure you can still breathe, and facing the fact that it’ll be close to a week before residual numbness goes away.

Oh, goody.

I had my home sealed last year by professionals against criminals like these. They missed a spot. Yesterday they came back to re-seal my foundation and go after all the door jams that don’t jam and gaps in the plumbing, as well as every air vent in my ceiling. Never underestimate predatory arachnids. They are contortionists on steroids, able to squeeze inside the house my contractor promised was impossible for them to penetrate.

im·​pos·​si·​ble.

I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.

There’s not a lot to do while sitting with your leg elevated except shallow breathe and wait for the poison to work its way out of your system. For the next two days, while every nerve in my lower leg pulsated to the bizarre beat of some frantic jungle rhythm, my unnerved thoughts drifted to my grandmother. Not because she was bohemian or a bad dancer, but because she was well acquainted with scorpions.

For twenty-five years, she and my granddad lived on fifty acres of desert land, raising their family in a home devoid of both air conditioning and evaporative cooling. In the extreme heat of Phoenix summers, equipped with only floor fans and cross ventilation to alleviate their suffering, she developed frequent, massive migraines.

One afternoon while dealing with one of those awful headaches, a scorpion, meaning to add insult to injury, crawled over and stung her on the leg. Unfortunately, I don’t know how she would describe the pain that followed. All she told me is that her migraine instantly disappeared.

Gone.

Kaput.

Vanished.

Vamoose.

Umm, bu bye. And instead of showing up every few weeks, it didn’t return for six months. So, while she rubbed her throbbing leg instead of her throbbing temples, she came up with a brilliant idea.

Now, this might have been a side effect of the neurotoxins ravaging her body at the time. Possibly she was hallucinating from the pain. I’m pretty sure that’s what I was doing last weekend. I actually wonder if Grandma had an out of body experience, perhaps something akin to what Peter Parker encountered when a radioactive spider bit him. (Well, they are distant cousins of scorpions.)

Yes. I’m saying it right here. That savage beast changed Grandma on the spot. She leaned into her new superpower Spidey Sense and, every six months after that, whenever a new migraine tried to take over, she invited another willing scorpion to sting her. On purpose.

I’m telling you the truth, they don’t call them the Greatest Generation for nothing. That woman was tough. Sad to say, on the advice of her doctor, who lacked spidey sense, she eventually gave up on her homeopathic remedy and resorted to enduring regular migraines for the rest of her life.

I often wonder how much better she’d have felt if that horrified doctor hadn’t discouraged her from trusting her own instincts. It’s not like the poison transformed her into some kind of mutant. She didn’t start climbing up walls with her bare hands. She didn’t develop supersonic hearing. And she didn’t become a crime fighter on the back streets of Phoenix. She just wanted to get rid of a bad headache.

In other words, the neurotoxins from scorpion stings seemed to counterattack whatever triggered her migraines. It’s like two negatives making a positive. Isn’t that what science is all about? Or maybe that’s math. I don’t know.

So, while I sat there ruminating on Grandma’s courage, I wondered if I, too, would reap benefits from a severe scorpion sting. Maybe the poison would clear up my chronic hives. Or my chocolate cravings. I don’t really want to look through walls like Superman, but it would be nice if my eyesight became an even 20/20 again. Is that asking too much for everything I went through?

Science and math will never know. Because I’m not as brave as Grandma. I’m doing everything I can to keep two inches of pure terror from ever tormenting me again. I’ve sealed up this house so tight I’ll probably asphyxiate from lack of oxygen.

This is my new normal. That, and glowing in the dark. Hmmm. Grandma never mentioned that side effect. 

With thanks to hjl for permission to use the great visual aid seen above. His original photo can be viewed at this site: Horizontal Measure [50mm + 12mm macro extension test] | Flickr

Spaced Out

In the last two months I’ve knitted three blankets, one sleeping bag, and I’m halfway through two more throws. Meanwhile, the experts in Utah still have no clue what’s behind all the anomalies lighting up the skies every night on Skinwalker Ranch. At this rate, if they don’t sort it out soon, JoAnn Fabrics will be out of yarn and my wrists will be in traction. At least I do something productive while I binge watch mysterious documentaries. 

I’m addicted to learning about things no one can explain.

Exactly the reason, I think, why they never find explanations. It keeps the sponsors happy and their bank accounts delirious. I think I’m okay with this arrangement. I have an insatiable curiosity and if ever it were to be satiated, I might lose my reason for living. And knitting.

Yesterday morning I woke up in time to sit on my back patio and enjoy what was left of a cool morning in the shade. I brought a cup of hot cocoa out with me, leaned back in my mesh patio chair, and looked up at the thousands of green leaves hovering above me while a refreshing breeze swept across my skin. There were birds hiding in the branches, but I could only hear them, not see them, camouflaged as they were by the dense foliage. And it occurred to me that in about four months every single one of those leaves was going to metamorph or something and fall to the ground on my clean patio like an avalanche of orange, and I’d be forced to sweep their daredevil little lifeless carcasses the entire length of my house and out the gate to decompose.

Leaves are selfish little narcissists.

This might be the reason I got a C- in high school biology.

And then I remembered a story I’ve heard several times about the changing of the colors every fall. Supposedly, all those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges which explode from deciduous stands of trees were there all the time, hiding beneath their green exteriors, just like all those invisible birds who drop poop bombs on my patio table every day. When cold weather arrives in September or, in our case, every February, the sap stops flowing, the chlorophyll starves, and a tree’s true nature is exposed. Or something like that. I reference here that C minus.

I wondered if I could convince a leaf to reveal its true inner self early. What if I carefully skimmed one with a razorblade. Would it uncover a golden underskirt? I ran that idea by my granddaughter, but she scrunched up her forehead, exposing the eleven between her confused brows, and told me, “No.”

Fine. That’s what comes of earning an A in biology. No sense of adventure.

Before long, I abandoned my hypothesis and let my mind wander across other mysteries of the universe. Between the leaves of the tree, I could make out patches of blue sky. Now my thoughts turned heavenward where stars and galaxies and exiled planets like Pluto exist. And, with my thoughts going full circle, I wondered once more, what is going on with Skinwalker Ranch? Could there be visitors from other worlds planning vacations in ours? Are these lifeforms friendly? Are they actually superior to us in intelligence? If so, why do they keep crashing their aircraft into our mountains? Don’t they have mountains of their own? Sure, we’re mesmerized by the speed and vibrant lights emanating from their space age, sophisticated saucers, but don’t you think an advanced race of beings determined to explore outer space should hire better pilots? I do.

That’s why I’m not afraid of aliens. I’m not any good at flying aircraft either, but at least when I know I’m terrible at something I quit making a fool of myself and find something else to do. Like knitting.

That’s not my main concern about UFOs, though, or, as they are now referred to, UAPs, which stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and, of late, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, because even scientists who came up with the Scientific Method can’t make up their minds what to call things that they can’t identify.

Here’s my real question about the whole subject, though, whether we’re discussing UAPs in Utah or mysterious lights over Phoenix. Let’s suppose for a moment there really are spaceships which are not of this world but which keep flying over us and crashing into us. And, let’s assume they’re not manned by Artificial Intelligence, the way Washington is, for example.

Who created their pilots?

I’ll wait.

I don’t recall reading in the Bible about civilizations in other galaxies. I’ll admit, there were parts of Deuteronomy and Numbers and even Leviticus which I may have skimmed over in Sunday School, so perhaps in the long list of genealogies recorded in those books some of the names mentioned are of extraterrestrial origin. I mean, you’ve got to admit a lot of them sound pretty weird. Adonizedek comes to mind, although not without a lot of effort. Or Cushan-rishathaim. If my parents had given me a name like one of those, I’d have crashed my spaceship into a mountain, too.

But back to the question of creation and the physical evidence of pathetic piloting. I don’t mean to alarm anyone, and possibly our government is lying when they say they are not developing sub-standard aircraft incapable of making it over a mountain, let alone to infinity and beyond. But what if they’re telling the truth for a change? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That God has a secret family He’s not telling us about?

Oh. That’s not what you were thinking. You were thinking that our government can’t handle telling the truth. And also about that C minus. 

You're right. Good idea. I’ll just pull out those knitting needles and get to work on another blanket. Maybe tomorrow I’ll explore the existence of Bigfoot. I’m pretty sure he’s mentioned in the Bible, too. 

With thanks to Arnet for permission to use the phun photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: UFO ? | Arnet | Flickr