Notes from the Bitter Week
I walk the dogs out into cold so frigid my face burns. My fingers burn if I didn’t curl them around to the handwarmers in my gloves. Bitter cold wraps around my thighs despite long underwear. The dogs dance along. Little Dog turns in front of me, herding me to go home. If they step in snow they go three-legged lame. My heart tightens. My eyes water. My nose runs. I could be crying but I’m not. I’m walking into wind chill. It’s not much better when I turn back toward the house. But the dogs pull out in front of me. My mind flutters around my head. I do not care to drop into my body, into all that bitter cold. My heart hurts. My chest is tight.
It’s too cold to even walk to the corner. The chill eases a little as I turn back toward home. I think my still prayer words: “Thank you Lord.” But my mind flutters like a wounded bird that can’t lift from the ground. Poets take on Jesus’ voice with a vindictive tone I don’t recognize. Western civilization needs to die others say. Let it burn. I hear the words of Isreal’s enemies saying of Jerusalem, “Lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations” (Ps 137:7, ESV). This is the Psalm where the singers lament, “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Ps. 137: 1, ESV). I wonder if these folks have any idea what kind of suffering they wish to bring down on friends and neighbors. There’s something anti-human about these sentiments even in Christians. Millions of people would die if we are thrust back to life as it was before the Industrial Revolution. Seems like the powers of darkness have swept across our good earth. The chaos in Washington unsettles me and takes too much focus and trouble to know what to think besides the fact my thoughts don’t make a hill of difference. Discussions are even more pointless, but still I can’t stop looking and reading. When I read some posts, I have to fight to keep from offering my perspective, because my words would do no good.
Once inside I blow my nose and wipe my tears sprung from the cold, not sadness. I don’t have the gift of tears, which springs from grief over the world’s suffering. My heart is hard from holding too many animals in my arms as they died. It is hard from the friends, I thought would be with me to the end, who walked away, pushed me into the pit. And hard from my own family dead and gone some forty years. I don’t mean for the scars, but they are there. I admit to a friend of this page, that Mrs. Horse waits at the fence for me to spend time with her, but I duck my head and dust the house. I admit I don’t like riding because I don’t know if I can handle her startles while sitting on her back. It’s too much work to haul her to a trainer. It was all I could do last summer was hold her in check, when she wanted to bolt across the field, the carriage rattling.
The prophets say God will exchange our calcified hearts for a heart of flesh. There are times I can feel my heart softening. I can feel animal goodness in the walking through stinging air. I don’t fight tears when they pop up, taking me by surprise, even if they aren’t polite. I am braced by the chill. There’s a joy that comes from being stung by the air.
A friend’s husband has died, and I attend the visitation and the funeral despite how it would be easier to send a card and stay home. Our friendship has thrived despite political differences and a few conflicts that cleared the air. We’ve been friends for thirty years. Bruce sits in the car because he knows people there through my painful stories. Laura is beautiful, with the kind of beauty that shines off a woman who has loved well and been loved well. A therapist told me I would see that in widows who have loved well when I have confessed how I fear the pit, when Bruce and I are parted from each other. Laura is almost wearing a halo. Her marriage to John was very human like all marriages, but they deeply loved and cared for each other. Her long sweater looks more like a queen’s robe than a cloak to keep warm. Colleagues and friends stand around talking, the wake closer to a party than a long boring line to pay respects.
We had talked the day before John died about how my vague, possibly false memory that I’d flown up to the ceiling in my very first room, where paint had been scraped back to wood, how those bare patches frightened me. But I slept there. I flew up to the ceiling. My mother screaming with a broom to swat me back to earth. I was less than five. I read They Flew by Carlos Eire to understand the very real phenomenon of levitation as it was documented in history. I was most ashamed to tell this until I told it.
Laura said, “Maybe you died, and your mother’s horror was her finding you and trying to revive you.” She listed the qualities of people with near death experiences such as longing to die in order to return to that place of peace. Well, I was homesick even though I was home, as a child. She continued, “The person also has a focus to do some good for the world. And they receive a download of special knowledge.” Some of it sounds right but by no means do I have special knowledge or gifts. She left me thinking, but no one in our family ever said I’d almost died. But our family held their secrets close. We quit our lunch early because she needed to check on John, who had just been in the hospital from a fall. Laura said she knew he was failing.
The next day she texted me that he had died in an Emergency Room trauma room.
Laura wears all black during the funeral and walks down the aisle with the same dignity as a bride might, her face quiet. Friends gather behind her. The church’s atmosphere is white like the gold and white robes priest’s wear during epiphany. Even though we are on the verge of Lent, the whole church looks like Easter. The priest cloaks her husband’s casket with a white shroud, as he says, “Let us put Christ on.” He talks about John’s goodness and the hope that death is not the last word, the hope that Christ will come again. Scholar John Behr often talks about how death is our birth into life with Christ, how we will finally be refined into the people God had in mind when He created us. The church, the shroud, the priests’ robes, the incense spoke more of a birthday than a death day. What robes of cascading light was this big, gentle man dressed in now?
As I walk to the grave, I listen to the NIU teacher’s Union president saying his work has become interesting because of the executive orders coming out of Washington halting funding for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. He says, “There are people who have built their entire careers on it.” He’s hoping the national union will help their cause. His gentleness and understatement grab my heart. I feel for the people whose lives are being upended.
We stand under a green tent, on cloth covering snow and listen as the priest sprinkles holy water on John’s casket. Wind flaps the canvas. He reminds us that Christ has gone ahead through death, bursting its bonds and rising. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says, his words defying his friend’s body wrapped in the grave, that he calls forth. His words defy his own death.
At the end of the funeral luncheon Laura invites us to stay and listen to the local ukulele group play John’s favorite hymns. What a wonderful way to push back against the grief by welcoming tears and the memories that swim to the surface with those songs. There’s wisdom in speaking to each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
I hate this for Laura—the long, hard walk through grief. The days when you feel like you should be crying, when you almost feel good and the days you’re crying, and you wonder if you’ll ever feel good. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis has said there’s the anxiety that feels like fear. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing” (7). This is how grief felt for me in the wake of my parents and brothers’ deaths.
I think of Bonhoeffer’s words, how they promise that God won’t even fill the hollow when our beloved has left. “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve — even in pain — the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”
We can hope that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, how if we are in Christ and our deceased beloved is in Christ we are not far from each other. Even our prayers for our deceased loved ones to enter the joy and peace of God’s kingdom can connect us. And there is the great hope that death does not have the last word. As Molly Skaags sings, “Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.”
Notes from Mud Season’s Arrival
The weather has broken. Mud season is here, so much so I have to rinse off Omalola after I’ve thrown the ball for her. But oh what joy when she runs hard after it and loops away for the joy of running and loops back. The birds are singing. A hawk drops down from a tree to fly over the local woodlot, sparrows dive bombing him. The neighbor is readying his semi for a load. His dogs greet him. He carries his son back to the house and shuts the dogs in. I pause and wait. Oma is alert. Tense and paused.
But the next day or the day after I walk past their house and their four year old son lets all three of their dogs out. (I know how easy this can be. Omalola and even Little Dog have pushed past me out the door on occasion.) The little boy tries calling the dogs back but they don’t hear his voice. I yell for his mom, too fiercely. And sweet talk to the dogs so they know this is just a game. Their Leonberger circles around us, with a beautiful romping gait. She’s just a pup, but has grown bigger than their Golden Retriever. She looks like a lion with a black mask and tan coat. I sing her name which is the same as Oma’s. Lola. HolylolaOmalola. The Golden and heeler circle and sniff. Oma is on tippy toes, tucking her butt, speaking dog language that probably says I don’t want to fight to the other dogs. Everyone stays happy. No one gets tangled in the leashes.
Our neighbor comes out, says “I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace.” How true. How true. The other day, Oma was so desperate, she peed in the bathroom while I was tending to my own needs. I walk the dogs up to her door where we chat about the neighborhood, how expensive everything has gotten, especially for a young family. We think it would be nice to have a neighborhood gathering this spring but it’s so much work. I’ve been so self-conscious about the clutter in my house that I don’t invite people. I feel like I have to clean, clean, declutter, to have anyone in. Several times I’ve been mildly insulted. Funny how exposed a person can feel when opening their house to others. But I’ve been in enough farm wives’ homes to know clutter comes with the lifestyle. It’s more important to keep the barn picked up than the house. There’s pressure to make joy by clearing out all the excess, so it would take less time to dust. There’s pressure to give it away to help the less fortunate. Early church fathers scold us by saying we are robbing the poor and St Paul says we should lay up treasure in heaven. But scolding merely freezes me. I turn to my phone.
When I turn to walk towards home the light settles on the fields behind our house. It’s no longer sunrise light. But it’s softened by a sun that hasn’t lifted to mid-morning. Even the fiercely gray days with blue sky leaning against the clouds turned over as if a spatula has rolled them are beautiful. Perhaps they are the most beautiful with grays and blues and curled shapes.
It’s funny how after this, the dogs turn to go up the other road, away from the neighbor dogs, who are tiny in the distance, their barking carrying all the way over to where we are walking. I swear the clouds are dancing, tossing up in the air and down, almost sun showers if the rain could drop to the ground. I walk past our neighbor’s trash thrown on a burn pile, he sets by the gravel so it doesn’t get away from him like it did once. (We’ve seen a burn pile get away from our other neighbor, the fire loud and scary as it crawled across the field. The big tractors pulled their wide spreading disks to make fire breaks and the fire department’s pick up drove along the flames, spraying water.)
I watch a UPS jet that has circled back around from Minneapolis. I seem to time it right for these jets to drop along my field of vision. I see the open doors to the barn and Morgen eating hay at the corner. I pick up one Miller Lite beer bottle on the top of the hill and wonder who might be hiding their drinking, so their bottles and beer cans litter the roadside. The wind blows across the beer bottle mouth like an aeolian harp, telling me something about joy.
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