Tag: All There Is

Good Grief, pt. 2-ish

Featured ~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

Just shy of four months ago, I was taking my mom on the last trip of her life. A week later, I was watching her die.

Over the summer, I led the cleaning out of her house and the distribution of her belongings to her children, her grandchildren, and then to the small community she lived in for almost sixty years.

Last weekend, my brothers and I met at the home she and my stepfather purchased 50 years ago and cleaned it out from top to bottom, inside and out. This past week it went on the market.

It’s all part of the process, part of saying goodbye — to sort through the detritus, to touch each pair of socks, each food storage container, each bottle of household cleaner, each pillow case, each box of baking soda, each pair of reading glasses — to acknowledge that life was here, but is no more.

This process, the sorting through, is what spurred Anderson Cooper on to creating his podcast All There Is. He was going through the boxes of artifacts left by his mother, his father, and his brother, and grieving those various losses when he made the vulnerable and generous choice to document the process and share it with the masses — all the raw emotion of it.

My experience was somewhat different than that of Anderson Cooper. The sorting through, for me, was almost mechanical. The task at hand shifted me into “do it” mode in such a way that I almost disconnected from emotion — almost forgot that what I was doing was packing up and putting away a life. A whole live. My mom’s life.

And because I got immersed in that task — the sorting, the putting away, the distributing, the cleaning — I almost forgot to feel, to cry, to grieve. But my heart was not forgetting — no. It was hemorrhaging. And all the time I was reaching high shelves, clearing back corners, and surveying spaces that hadn’t been attended to in years, my wounded soul was trying to get my attention, wanting to talk about this colossal loss, wanting to cry, wanting to be soothed.

But doing, (we’ve been over this so many times in this space) seems so much more satisfying than feeling — completing a task so much more gratifying than processing loss, clearing a space so much more enjoyable than opening myself up to the experience of grief.

However…however…this is not really my first loss, is it? This is not my only devastation. I am not an inexperienced child. No. I am an aging woman who has seen what can happen when you ignore pain. So, I’ve been leaning in.

My people know me, so not one, but two — TWO — of my close friends gifted me with journals in the last few months. And while I haven’t been posting much, I have been methodically filling pages each morning — remembering, feeling, opening up the dark spaces and back corners of me. I’ve been taking out old memories, dusting them off, and repositioning them in my consciousness. I’ve been tossing out clutter, and distributing information to those who might find it useful, and guess what I am finding….

Openness. Space. Room for other areas of my life to expand and move into the places I have cleared out.

I have had support in this interior decluttering and inventory.

I’ve had my therapist who I continue — for going on seven years now! — to see every two to four weeks. I’ve not been in crisis that whole time — no — but a soldier like me needs a paid, professional, accountability partner, a dedicated time, a spot on the calendar where she is forced to stop, to put down her pack, and to reflect on what is happening on the inside, apart from the doing.

I’ve had my husband and my friends who have asked me, really, how I am doing and have allowed me the space to cry, to say the words I need to say, and to remember. One day, in the office of my principal who I also consider a friend, I choked up a bit and tried to quickly pull myself together so we could continue our meeting. She paused me and said, “Let’s not move on so quickly. Tell me one memory you have of your mother.” What a gift to help me shift into valuing those moments of emotion rather than trying to run from them.

And, unexpectedly, I’ve had Anderson Cooper. In his podcast, Cooper has etched out time to process his own losses and also to engage in conversations with others who are devasted by grief — to share the experience, to normalize loss and grief, and to give language to the absence, to the longing, to the gratitude, to the hurt. He’s been making this podcast for several years, so for a while, I was listening to an episode a day on my drive into work. Engaging with those who were discussing their losses gave me the time on my commute to process some of my own grief before heading into a day of listening to and caring for the needs of others. 10/10 would recommend.

And, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve had my writing — lots of private and a few public pages to process what is going on, and still, it doesn’t feel 100% real. Still it is ethereal.

But this last week, real got a little bit real-er, because the house — Mom’s house, the house she and Roger purchased in 1976 when they got married, the house I moved into the summer before 5th grade, the house my kids all travelled to for visits with Grandma and Papa, the house I’ve been driving “home” to since I left in 1984 — that house was listed this past week for sale. Soon it will no longer be ours.

It’s weird, and a little sad, but it’s not heartbreaking — not the sale of the house.

No heartbreaking was watching my mom suffer with pain the last many years. Since she was diagnosed with leukemia and had to do chemo, she has had to deal with excruciating pain which was likely a chemo side effect. It was constant — the head pain and more recently, the leg pain. She tried botox, pain meds including the controlled kind. She went to the pain clinic, did infusions, but nothing could more than temporarily give her relief.

It was heartbreaking to watch her suffer, but also to watch her life shrink down, which it did as she lost her sight in one eye and, therefore, her ability to drive. For a gal whose love language was gift giving, her loss of access to a car (and shopping!) was a crushing blow. Her limited vision also meant an end to reading for a woman who once chugged through books like some folks binge series on Netflix.

Her life was diminishing, and she knew it. She had become limited to one floor of that 5-bedroom home — pushing her walker from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to recliner. She had to have known she was getting ready to take her leave because she pulled her kids together and insisted — insisted –– that we make it possible for her to go see her sister. The four reluctantly agreed, booked flights, made arrangements, and put the wheels in motion.

It was heartbreaking to select her outfits and carefully pack them in her bag — in past trips she would’ve shopped and selected color-coordinated outfits for each moment of this journey and packed them carefully with designated socks, purses, and jewelry.

It was gut-wrenching to put moisturizer on her face and do her hair for her before helping her into her clothes, guiding her down the stairs, buckling her into the car, and wheeling her into the airport.

It was devastating to witness her nausea and pain throughout the trip, to alter plans as she realized her limitations, and to see fully and in person the reality of her existence.

It was tender, so tender, to see two octogenarian sisters hug and commiserate, then sad, so sad, to watch them say goodbye. It was stressful, so stressful, to reverse all the steps to get her back to her own home safe and sound.

And then, once she had done what she had wanted to do, it was a lesson to watch her acquiesce to the inevitable — to agree to hospice, to quietly wait for the professionals to do what they do, to brighten and smile for visitors, and to continue to engage with the people she loved. She did all of that until she couldn’t any more.

That really happened. It was entirely real — downright visceral.

So, I put words to the experience. I document reality. It’s a way to marry feeling with doing. It’s the only way I know.

And then I step back into the present– away from my keyboard — and I join the humans who still exist in my life. We speak of connection, of creativity, of courage, of love. We gather in community, and we worship. Then, when I consider it all, even with the loss and the heartache, it is well with my soul.

May it be well with yours, too.

of Death and Resurrection

~ Kristin ~ Leave a comment

Nadia* came to my desk the other day. The other students were working on an assignment, and she had a question about something she had missed a few days prior.

“I wasn’t here the day we did this,” she said.

“Yes, I remember. You missed a few days. Is everything OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, “first my grandma died and we had all the arrangements for that, then my uncle died.”

“Oh my goodness! I am so sorry! That is a lot of loss all at once. I am impressed that you are working to get caught up. How can I support you?”

It’s not uncommon for us to hear about these kinds of losses. I myself lost a much-loved uncle last month, and many of us lost loved ones during Covid. However, it always shocks me when I learn of the amount of death my students have faced in their young lives.

Bianca* was sitting near my desk this week working on a college application. She was hoping it wouldn’t require a social security number because her mother had been reluctant to share hers with her when we had been getting FSA IDs, the first step in completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) .

“If it’s required, I’m just gonna call my mom and tell her I have to have it,” she said.

.”Does your mom want you to go to college?” I asked.

She shook her head no.

“Hmm. What would she like you to do?”

“She wants me to keep doing hair.”

“That’s right, you do hair. Is that what she does, too?”

“No, she doesn’t work, because my dad was a firefighter who died, so she is taken care of.”

“Oh my!” I said. “When did that happen?”

She held up three fingers and said, “Three years ago.”

“I am so sorry! I had no idea.”

And while we were chatting, her mom texted her the number, and Bianca completed her application.

Working with high school seniors, I see that kind of subtle movement all the time. One week a parent refuses to let their child have her SSN, then suddenly, nonchalantly, she sends it in a text two weeks later. Parents are ready to release when they are ready to release and not a moment sooner.

And it makes sense when you know that the mother and the daughter have already experienced devastating loss.

I’ve been listening to Anderson Cooper’s new podcast, All There Is, which is his examination of his own grief through conversations with others who have also experienced loss. Cooper lost his father to heart disease at age 10, his brother to suicide when he was 21, and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, just a few years ago. As he navigates the packing up of his mother’s things, he is struck by all the unprocessed grief from the previous losses and how raw the hurt still is.

As I’m listening, I hear his voice crack as he recalls a detail, and my throat tightens, My eyes well up and my chest feels heavy. I have not experienced much physical death among my immediate family and friends, but I have definitely experienced loss — the loss of my parents’ marriage when I was seven, the loss of some dreams for our family that were taken away, some by circumstance, some by error, and some by violence, and the loss of my health and career before I was even 50.

We all experience loss. We all experience death.

Cooper posits, and I agree, that we don’t make enough space for discussions of our losses and the hurts that we carry with us. Instead, we try to pack them up, put them away, and function in a way that seems “normal” when we will never feel “normal” again.

In one of his interviews, Cooper speaks with Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brothers in an airplane crash when he was 10. Colbert says it was the worst thing that happened in his life, but he has grown to be grateful for it — not the deaths, of course, but the opening it created in him that has allowed him to see the devastations in the lives of others and the ability to have compassion for them.

I resonate with that. For many years I have said that while my parents’ divorce was — for a long time — the biggest blow to my life, it grew in me an understanding of brokenness that prepared me to marry a man who had been divorced. Having stepparents prepared me to be a stepparent. Having experienced trauma and devastation in our own family has opened a chasm in my heart that has space for the brokenness I see in my students and my friends.

Because I have written about loss, and because my husband and I have explored our losses in depth with our therapists, with each other, and most extensively with a small group of friends who we meet with every week, we were prepared last spring and again this fall, to share our story with a small group of others like us who are in the midst of devastation and who are looking for shreds of hope. We believe, like Anderson Cooper, that we don’t talk about our losses — especially not in polite company, and even less in the church. Especially if those losses involve estrangement, divorce, sexual assault, alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling, or crime.

So when we stand in front of a group of church folk (last spring) or church workers (this fall) and tell our story, we do it as educators. We model — this is how you can be vulnerable and tell your story. We provide safety — you are in a room full of others who also have a story. We give space — take a chance, and share a piece of your story with someone next to you.

And they do.

And the tears flow.

Strangers touch hands and are no longer strangers.

It looks like resurrection.

Theologian and writer Jeff Chu asked in his opening talk at the 2022 Evolving Faith Conference** last weekend, “What does resurrection matter except to those have tasted death?”

What does new life matter, until you thought that life was gone forever?

When you have sobbed on your pillow knowing your family will never be whole again and then you see a connection, you receive an invitation, you embrace someone who has felt the rending of the flesh as deeply as you have and somehow what was dead seems to breathe new life,

Resurrection isn’t witnessed in isolation, is it? I find I see it most in community — in the sharing of stories, of tears, of understanding. I see it in friendships that walk through the valley of the shadow of death together long enough to get to the other side.

This fall I’ve had a student in my class, Monique*. Her attendance has been intermittent — she’s pregnant. When she comes, I greet her without judgment because I don’t know her story.; I only know that she has one. For the past week or more her seat has been empty. She didn’t appear to be full-term, so I didn’t expect that she had had the baby. I expected her to walk back in any morning, just as she had been doing all fall. But yesterday, I was standing in the office when her sister, a recent graduate, walked in. We chatted, and she mentioned that Monique had had the baby, but that the baby “didn’t make it”.

What happens to a seventeen year old heart when it has carried a life, moved through labor, and then experienced such a devastating loss?

I have no idea, but I am hoping to hear Monique’s story, and I am longing for her to experience resurrection.

[He] comforts us in all our trouble so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

2 Corinthians 1:4

*All student names have been changed, of course.

**Although the Evolving Faith conference is over, you can still register and watch the entire event, which was virtual and recorded.