Thankful for just being together

Tags

family, grief, parenting, stepchildren, stepparenting

My stepchildren are now in their early 20s and the struggle to negotiate where they are going to be when is on their plates rather than ours.  I listened this year when our oldest daughter shared her frustrations with her mother’s family for not deciding on a day and time for their Thanksgiving celebration and for not seeming to prioritize the family and travel considerations of she and her cousin, who are at school hours away.  I gave all those sounds that said I was listening and I understood what she was saying.  Until she said that this is her least favorite time of year because it is so hard to juggle everyone’s needs.  I told her that lots of people feel that struggle, even without multiple parents and grandparents.  At her age the in-law and my family issues begin for many.  Where will we go, how long will we stay, and will we enjoy any of it by the time it is over?  I also told her that I wished the scheduling struggles she was dealing with were new, but they were not.  What is new is that they are on her plate now.  The parents no longer argue over where she will be and then just tell her what they decided.  Now she has to decide and that, despite how difficult those childhood years were, is even more difficult.

Both she and our oldest son joined us for our extended family’s Thanksgiving.  They arrived before dinner, we had a chance to talk and catch up.  I had a chance to meet her new boyfriend.  We ate and laughed.  And then they packed up and headed to the next party, having received empathy from others that they were attending three Thanksgiving feasts today.

Why do we drive ourselves crazy to go to such lengths?  Why not just choose one and say someone else is in next year’s rotation?

Because, at least while we are young and believe we can do it all, we want to see everyone and hold onto the idea that it is all going to be possible for always.  Those crazy drives from one party to another can drive us crazy, but they also cement the bonds between lovers and siblings who are our partners in persecution.

As a stepparent, I had to sit down and take the time to write this post when I realized that a) I had no anxiety or inner struggles prior to today’s events and b) I only briefly had the thought that, while we were first, because their mother was last she was likely to end up with more of their time.  I only briefly thought it because the quantity of time was not important.  This year, what mattered was that they loved us enough to make the effort to attend each celebration and to share traditional dishes and some conversation.  I would have missed them were they not there, but I can look ahead and say that, when they come to their senses and realize they can no longer pull everything off in one afternoon, I will be okay missing them because I know I will see them next year or the next day. By then my aunts and uncles may no longer be with us and the extended family celebration will have changed into my mom, brothers, children, and (by then maybe) grandchildren.

Families are funny.  Who is in them changes.  People are born.  People die.  People join and people leave.  The circle expands and contracts, but as long as there is a circle, there is a family.  I also realized, as I walked into Thanksgiving this year, that for the first time since my father died, I was walking into a family gathering with more anticipation of seeing those still with us than dread at feeling his absence.

These are little moments for which I am thankful.  Today’s view from the step was mellow and colored by gratitude, if not exuberant joy.  Those days, I hope, are to come again.

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Stepmothers Take Note–Another Step Forward for Steps

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biomom, grief, loss, stepchildren, stepmoms, stepmothers, stepparenting

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In this week’s issue of Time, Susanna Schorbsdorff (@SusannaSchrobs) writes about the importance of graduation for her daughters and for all teenagers (and their parents) who have made it through those tough years.  I usually enjoy her essays and am sympathetic to her view of families and life, but I was particularly surprised to read this:

“Then there are the unexpected tragedies. For us, it was when the girls lost their beloved stepmother in a freak accident. At the time, my eldest had just finished a rocky entry into high school and her sister was in fifth grade navigating the maddening rules of tween cliques. The fragile bridge they were building to adulthood crumbled in a day.

Grief seemed to reshape my girls at a molecular level. One held tight to the tangible evidence of loss, cycling through photos and calling her stepmom’s cell phone just to hear her gentle voice until the account was shut down. The other turned inside herself, shutting out school, shielding herself from the outside pressures to counteract what was going on inside. It was a dark summer.”

Did you read that, stepmothers?  A biological mother not just admitting without being defensive or hurt, but highlighting, that a stepmother was beloved and important to their daughters.  Even more, she writes that just hearing her voice, her gentle voice, was important.

It is terrible that these girls lost a parent.  It is wonderful and awesome that they had such a wonderful relationship with their stepmother that they grieved deeply for her loss.  She clearly was an influential person in their lives.

Her loss, and the way Susanna Schrobsdorff writes about it, highlights one of the great gifts of stepparents.  Although the girls lost one of their mothers, they had another to help them through their grief and will still have a mother as they move beyond graduation to the rest of their lives.  I worry far less about my older (step)children because, no matter what happens to me, they will have a mother.  No matter what happens to their father, they will still have a father.  I hope their mother feels the same.  If I could get a stepmother for my younger children without having to go through divorce, I would wish the same for them.  Children today, and, I suspect, always, can never have enough adults that love them and are deeply invested in their happiness and well being.  I think, from what I have read of her work, Susanna Scrobsdorff would agree.

Communal Grief for a Man Who Made Us Laugh and Helped Us Cry

Tags

grief, robin williams

I was riding in the car yesterday when I saw on my Facebook feed that Robin Williams had died. I scrolled madly to find a news story that would explain what had happened. What I saw was amazing. Friends of all ages, from all walks of life, had commented to honor or mourn his death. Friends my own age remembered him as Mork or from Dead Poets Society. My younger friends, the young adults, mourned the Genie from Aladdin. Robin’s impact on the world through his acting, his comedy, was clear from these posts. His larger impact was evident through the organizations that posted to honor his memory–gay rights organizations, St. Jude’s hospital, theater groups, USO, the British Museum, and many more. Twitter told stories from his friends, anecdotes of how he made them smile when they were down or used humor to bring perspective to the world. People were calling him a national treasure. 

I watched Mork and Mindy. I saw most of his movies. I followed him on Facebook and Twitter. I loved him. I hated it when people didn’t like his more serious movies and wanted to put him in his funny-man box. I loved his beautiful sparkling blue eyes.

But I didn’t know Robin Williams.

So why am I so sad to hear of his death? Why did the thought of his light going out bring me to tears in the shower, where tears and cleansing water mingle together to hide the shame of such grief?  Why do I want to watch all of his movies again, search YouTube for standup bits, listen to interviews?  Why this insatiable hunger to hear and see him?

My father died in December. He would have been 63 this July. I didn’t know he and Robin Williams were the same age until reading of Robin’s death. My father did not commit suicide, but I am/was angry at the world for losing him so early. I cannot imagine the feelings his family will go through as they wrestle with their grief at their loss and the way their loss happened. I cried for his daughter and cried for myself through her.

Is that enough to bring this grief?

Two years ago my uncle committed suicide. We knew he was depressed, but not that he was that depressed. My mother and aunt and uncle struggle with guilt that they didn’t know, weren’t able to do something. I cried for his wife and children, his friends, who will struggle with that guilt even while they know it was not their faults.

To my shame, I cried for all of us because we will not have the gift of his humor, his take on the world as we go on. I cried because I wanted more of him that he should not have had to give, but that he did give and so generously.

I also cried for the fact that life has to end. We all know this, but when we start to lose those we love, this intellectual fact becomes an inscribed fact, a physical reality that cannot be bargained or logiced away. Sixty-three is not nearly far enough away. No one says of a loss at 63, he lived a good life and makes peace with that loss.

Tonight my Facebook feed is still full of Robin Williams tributes–videos, memes, anecdotes, reminders of suicide hotlines, reflections on depression. Yahoo News reported in a single sentence the manner of his death. Our communal grief brings us together, ties us to our own losses, and offers us the kind of support we so rarely offer those close to us because we are a society that shares everything but fears intimacy.

At my father’s funeral, I was touched and lifted by the many stories told that demonstrated how many people had valued my father and how many people’s lives he had touched in meaningful ways. I hope Robin Williams’ family finds uplift in the celebrations of his impact on all of our lives.

Despite so many feeling as if they knew Robin Williams, I cannot help but call to mind the speech from Meryl Streep’s character at the end of Out of Africa at the funeral of her lover.

“Now take back the soul of Robin Williams, whom You have shared with us. He brought us joy…we loved him well.

He was not ours.

He was not mine.”

Thank you for the part of you you gave us, Mr. Williams.  I am sorry we could not give you back enough.

8/12/14

The Fault in Our Stars

Tags

aging, fault in our stars, grief

 

Yesterday I dragged my husband to see The Fault in Our Stars.  There were many, many young women in the audience.  There were also older women, much older women, young men, middle-aged men, older men–people in groups, people in pairs, people on their own.  The Fault in Our Stars is a tear-jerker book by John Green now made into a tear-jerker movie starring Shailene Woodley.  She does a beautiful job as Hazel Grace Lancaster in love with Augustus Waters.  But this post is not about the movie.  It’s about what this book and this movie have done to and for people who engage with it.

I bought this book for my oldest daughter for Christmas because I had read good reviews and it seemed up her alley (she’s a Nicholas Sparks kind of gal).  She read it and said I had to read it.  So I did.  I cried.  It haunted me as a girl and as a mother.  Yesterday the movie hit me in the same way but differently.  I knew Augustus was going to be the one to die first.  I knew Hazel would be left to find the strength to go on, to make meaning of this seemingly cruel experience.  

What was most interesting, however, was the audience.  They cheered when Hazel and Augustus shared a first kiss (as did onlookers on screen).  They cheered when they shared their bodies.  They cried when Hazel was sick, then when Augustus was sick.  My husband said it was the first movie he had been to where he could hear sobbing above the sound of the film.  The film was cathartic.  There was communal grief and the expression of that grief was sanctioned because you could hear it from everyone around you.  

On the way out of the theater, the ushers handed out tissues.  Ok, I thought, I got this.  I am fine.  Then I went to the restroom.

The entire restroom was full of women of various ages in various stages of crying–wet eyes, open crying, streaming tears, sobbing, fighting back tears.  Young girls just let it go and clung to their girlfriends.  What really hit me, however, was an older women, short hair, very well put together, emerging from a stall in which she had clearly been crying, her eyes wet, facial muscles taught fighting more tears.  What hit me was her eyes.  They were so deeply sad that I thought, “that’s the thing about pain.  It demands to be felt.”  Had she lost a child to cancer?  A grandchild?  Recently lost a spouse?  The name and relation of the loss was not in her eyes, but the loss was pouring out from every atom of her being.  And she had no one to hug her.  She was a single.

Preparing to write this post, I was looking for images.  My husband had seen a young girl with an okay, okay tshirt, so I knew there was some fanwear out there.  But Google images opened a whole new world of images and quotes.  This book’s title is pulled from a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”  

What those quotes are are very interesting.

• I fell in love the way you fall asleep, slowly and then all at once.
• My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.
• You gave me a forever within the numbered days.
• Some infinities are greater than other infinities.
• The universe wants to be noticed.
• You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you.
• Maybe okay will be our always.
• Love is keeping the promise anyway.
• That’s the thing about pain.  It demands to be felt.

It’s the last one that has stuck most with me as I continue to work through my grief for the loss of my father.  Yesterday was my birthday and it was, like every other event since his death, the first one I celebrated without the man who did so much to make me who I am, and not just with DNA.  I went out of town in part, I think, to get away from that fact, but there it was coming back at me all day.  Because that’s the thing about pain…..it doesn’t matter where you are because it’s inside you.  It’s made of you, just like the cancer that killed Augustus Waters that stopped the heart that was also made of him.  And our hearts, which are made of us, are what will help us survive the pain, which is also made of us.  

Because that’s what the living do.  We live.  And sometimes we cry.

 

my grief weighs 12 pounds

Tags

grief

I have a heavy heart
we say
weighed down by grief
burdened by loss.
how heavy is your grief?
how to weigh a hole?
my grief weighs 12 pounds. 
Ten plus two. 
And still it does not fill the hole.

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A measure of a man

Tags

fathers, grandfathers, grief

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. She chose grandma’s as her birthday dinner location. Two weeks ago our son did the same. Not a restaurant. Grandma’s. In the car on the way home from school she was chattering about going to grandma’s and suddenly grew quiet. When I pried from her what was the matter, she said she misses grandpa. I choked out, me, too, every day, and we had a cry. Our son cried on his day, too, as we gathered in grandpa’s place without grandpa. As I watched her little face in the rear view mirror I was filled with the sense that this is a measure of a man: how deeply his absence is felt by his family on those days we mark together. My dad was a quiet man not given to big displays of affection, but each of us knew how much he loved us from the little rituals: the greeting to the silly goose, the gentle tease, the big grins and big hugs at the door.
May we all be missed as much as my family misses my father, not to bring pain but to witness the love that holds his place.

Grief is

Tags

grief

Grief is greedy and patient and recursive.
Grief is become my codependent companion.

Because I’m (Not) Happy

Tags

grief

Grateful is not the same as happy.

Happy is fleeting.

Grief is selfish.  It has to be.  I’m grieving for what I lost.  I have empathy for what others lost.

Sunshine helps with happy, but is in rare supply here,now.

It’s possible to carry burdens and not feel the weight until it starts to break you.

My Way seems grim.

Tomorrow may be better.

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Exaggerating

Tags

daughters, faith, fathers, grief, sons

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When my grandfather died, my father gave a beautiful eulogy.  In it, he focused on key character traits that epitomized his father:  his work ethic, his love for family, his kindness to strangers, and some quirky manifestations of his moral code.  In the years that followed, my father emulated those traits in a way that I observed to be exaggerated, almost like political cartoons.  He would say, over and again, as my dad would have said or as my dad would have done, and I wondered why the repetition as we all knew these traits were from grandpa.

Walk a mile in my shoes.  Take a walk in their shoes.  Imagine walking a mile in his or her shoes.

Now I get it.  Why is so much of life like that?  We don’t get it, we categorize behaviors as odd, disordered even, irritating maybe, and then, boom, it all clicks into place and what seemed irrational becomes the only rational option.  

All children want to make their parents proud and for some reason this seems to be an even greater drive with fathers.  The drive is so strong that we feel this need even more after they’re gone.  We want to show them that they did the job right, that we get it now, all of those lessons they tried to model and more actively drill into us.  Their actions weren’t in vain.  We emulate the traits we define as most characteristic of them. We remind ourselves and others that they are their traits because each time we speak the words, we re-perform the material bond that bound us to our fathers.  Each repetition puts another link in a chain that must be maintained in a way that was not necessary when one could just look at the two of us and see we were father and child (all three of us shared a deep cleft in our chins–butt chins my children call them).  If we stop repeating, stop building the links, the chain dissolves because no one will see it but us.  We emulate those traits, exaggerating them to near caricature, as a child traces a favorite figure over and over and over, making the lines darker and darker to make it stay, to make it real.  

What else will I get later?  What other mysteries will be revealed at some future date?  Is that what religions promise in the afterlife–a giant click as we get “it,” whatever lesson the god was trying to teach us?  Or is it just that all of the lessons from all of our experiences finally click–that is the god, our experiences with one another and with the world? 

Big questions.  I guess I’ll keep waiting for the click.  And building my chain.

Sunshine on My Window Makes Me Happy

Tags

daughters, fathers, grief, spring

I forget it every winter.  I forget how the cold and dark and cloudy makes the world seem cruel and pointless.  Sunshine is such a little thing and such an everything. 

Last week my students read the story of Demeter and Persephone, that beautiful explanation of the seasons when the world goes dark and death stalks the land as a mother grieves for her daughter lost to the Underworld.  It makes sense to me. 

Winter too often brings death.  Of flowers.  Grass. Leaves from the trees. Loved ones.  Celebrity ones.  Strangers and other people’s loved ones. 

When the sun is not shining and the cold and dark prevail, it is so easy to forget that life goes on, that death is part of life.

And I cried typing that life goes on.  Every day still seems like a little betrayal.  Every day gets me further away from the last day.  yesterday I emptied into a bowl on my coffee table the last of my dad’s favorite mints that I had bought him for Christmas.  It was a warehouse-sized bag and soon it will be gone.  I’ll buy a new bag, but it will those mints my dad used to like rather than those mints I was going to give him because he was around just a few days ago, so few days ago that I still have consumable gifts that I meant to give him.

Sunshine switches the focus, however.  Sunshine pushes me to look not at the last time, but at the best time and to look forward to more best times with the people he loved, that we love. 

Grief goes on.  Life goes on.  The sun returns and I remember.