i guess this post is in some ways about death, but it is also about valleys and walking and trying again, too. if i finish it at least.
my friend brianna recently lost her dad to an ugly fight with lou gherigs. nobody ever makes it out alive, but we always hope that the transition isn't so ugly. so brutal. but this time it was.
bri and i met because were both athletes who saw the same trainer, sometimes during the same hours. we had a hebrew class together where we translated while in slings, visible or otherwise. and then i worked at the coffee shop, where she retrained me and we laughed about things. there were a couple other odd intersections, but i now think of them as less odd, and more woven. she is a fantastic human and one of my favorite people. I'm so grateful that we're friends. so so so grateful. God is intentional and i don't really ever know what he's doing, but he is surely up to something, and I'm willing to be its usually something redemptive. something good.
so anyways, we've become quite close friends, via choice and lots of God-proddings. i guess in my life, i don't really carry much certainty, which might be a recent thing, but who knows. one of the only things I've never really questioned though, is the presence of good friends in my life. close friends, and good friends have always been consistent, whether i was able to connect with them or not. even in crappy seasons. especially in crappy seasons. i had a rough year one time and it relationally kicked the shit out of me. so i absorbed all these fears that multiplied my uncertainties. maybe they just revealed my doubts, I'm not sure yet. but anyways, even with all of that, I've never questioned the presence of my good friends, seasonal or long term.
i have really good friends. like incredible, make-me-thank-God-a-million-times-throughout-the-day incredible. and I'm learning to live there, like they're really my friends, like its all real. but part of the realness is the tragedy of life. tragedy seems like such a strong word, but its fair sometimes, and for more than just rhetoric. some of my friends have been dealt rough hands, which is a metaphor that works on both levels. sickness and grief have settled in like an inexplicable plague. it is so sad. but it is also real, and you can't compartmentalize reality.
bri's dad passed 3 weeks ago today. lou gherigs is the disease that my parents shake their heads at. my folks work in the medical business. mom is with the babies, and dad is with the cancer folks. both ends of the spectrum. they have some atypical views on treatments and sickness, but lou gherigs is the one that gets them both. i was talking to my mom about it before he passed and she cried on the phone a little bit. its sad. in some anne lamott book that i read recently, she mentioned something about how as we age, the body starts to sag, as if it knows a secret that we can only begin to understand; that our bodies will let go, and soon enough we will too. we will finally learn what our bodies already know. maybe bodies are a metaphor for the rest of life.
Ted tried everything known to man, and some things known only to God too. and his body still failed. the people who loved him knew about it. the people closest to him saw it. there is a book called "love is a mixtape" and it is wonderful and sad. the writer talks about how heart-shaped box is a song about love, and how helpless you are when it comes to the people you love. how you can't really fix anything for them and you can't really protect them, even though you want to so badly, so much that you think you might burst. rob sheffield is brilliant. just read the book. i think the people who loved Ted wanted to protect him. maybe differently. maybe they wanted him to face things differently, but i don't think anyone who loved him wished for the manner of death that he experienced. i think the people who knew him best knew too much about the gospel and forgiveness for that sort of thing. maybe they didn't, but they strike me as that sort of crowd.
he passed away around 10am with his family in the room. the precise moment was nearly unknowable, but i don't know if that matters as much as having people present does. people holding each others hands and his, praying, walking alongside as much as time and capacity would permit. doing the best anyone could, with all the resources anyone had.
bri lives a state away, but she is still connected to this town. as soon as we found out, everyone started making plans, and asking questions, because sometimes you just go. i packed my bags, contacted professors, and cleared my work schedule. my bosses were kind enough to let me leave. there are few things in life that i would lose my job over, but this would have been one of them if they hadn't let me go. which is irrelevant cause they did.
i made my way over and showed up. i told jenna that my goal was the intersection between least stressful and most helpful. stacie & marlowe came too, and we all did whatever was doable. even if it was just a coffee run, or entertaining a relative who needed to tell someone a story. at night, we gathered together and shared our own, because laughter is healthy and stories are connective. it will always be funny that stacie said her arm was broken when we hit a dear on the way to the beach at 2am. the fur in the wheel well will always merit clapping, whooping, laughter. those things are important, and maybe even more so in the face of a funeral. bri was brave and strong. she was loved too, which was obvious when we all watched.
the funeral was beautiful and well done. his memory was well preserved, and his personhood was honored. death is a weird, weird little thing. maybe a weird big thing, since it is THE thing. and when you are in the christian faith, it is the turning point thing, which follows rising action, right on up to climax, which is the resurrection. so its weird, but its also unbelievably important. i have a friend who says death is the thing that makes her question whether any of this life is real. i wonder sometimes if death is the thing that makes me think that it IS real. seeing someone you awkwardly hugged while dashing into the house to get the world's greatest chocolate milk on your way out of town, with eyes now permanently closed is weird. and hard. but the finality of things makes them feel real to me. maybe more than feel, maybe finality MAKES it real. all of the memories, the conversations, the words, the times, all of them are so real. and they are branded into the people who remember them, because death makes you remember.
remember is my favorite word in hebrew. it is "za-char", and it carries the connotation of "realizing something in actuality", like reliving. it is an important word to me, and it has been since i learned it. death makes you remember. even if it is not a physical death, and it is just the death of your previous self, or the death of your preconceived notions, or more maturely, the death of your own identity. but it does make you remember. with longing, hatred, or more commonly, grief. in a letter, bri said that her favorite word in the bible was redemption. i like that word a lot too. she talked about as a second chance, but more so, as a 'becoming-whole-like-we-were-meant-to-be' thing. some things get redeemed on this side of reality and some don't. but redemption is a real thing. and thats good for all of us.
at some point the other day, i started playing with words, deconstructing them and reconstructing them. REmember, REdemption, REconcilation, REal. so many 'RE' prefixes. in a letter to someone, or an email, RE means reply. in english, the prefix often means to do again. a response. so remembering is membering again. a member is a part of a whole, or a whole itself. it is also related to personhood. its almost like remembering is putting the person back together. i love that so much. redemption is the noun form of redeem. so RE, again + deem, which is to consider, believe, or hold. it is a word used in regard to opinions, but also holding someone in high esteem. to deem someone worthy. so an aspect of redemption might be, holding something again. and depending on who you ask, holding something again might be the greatest gift. it might mean considering something as worthy of remembrance. even in the word 'real'. in latin, al is inclusive meaning, all. so when you reference a work by multiple authors, you say, 'et al'. so the world, in its reality, is the response to all. maybe that is what makes something REal. your response to the 'all'. which makes your response the most real of all in some ways.
these are the things i thought about over easter. i like easter a lot, and for many reasons. for one, if it didn't exist, my degrees would be about things like unicorns and other likely-non-existent creatures, and that would feel silly and annoying. i really like easter because it says we can have a second chance at things. that things as they are might not be how they seem, and even if they are how they seem, they probably won't stay that way. things can change. we can respond differently. God did. Jesus did. the people did. we can respond to new things and we can even respond differently to old things. thats the hope in resurrection. the idea that it is finished, but in many ways, it is not quite finished. or maybe you are not quite finished. and you are somehow connected to the thing that set all of this in motion.
i got back from TN and thought so much about connections. partially because my mind works in concepts, not details, so i am constantly seeking out patterns. i like to compartmentalize, which is normal. but the thing is, it doesn't really work that well. i tried to respectfully separate my experience from bri's because i wanted to honor her experience. taking someone else's pain and making it your own is not always compassion. sometimes it is just transferred chaos, and i did not want to belittle all of the things that she and her community were walking through. but my body wouldn't let me separate it. i had a physical response to grief that wasn't totally mine. but i realized that it wasn't wholly separate either. i walked through some of bri's valley with her. and sometimes, i just sat on the dock while she was submerged. you can't walk through every part of the valley when its not your own. sometimes waiting out in the dark is helpful while someone else is wading out in the muck. it was not my grief, and yet i am still connected to it. because i have, and will always have good friends. that is God's grace in my life. that people will remain friends and walk through each others valleys together. that we will stumble together. but that we will keep walking alongside each other too. i bear the grief differently, and i will never bear all of it, because it is not mine. but some of it will drift into my atmosphere and i will gladly welcome its interruption. grief is never clean. not for the individuals directly affected. it is sticky in the sense that it latches on to whoever is around. and if you are fortunate enough to be allowed there, it will latch on to you too. that is the grace of soul friends. that we can be connected and we can walk with each other, across states and times. that the Lord grants a connected kindness in friendship. he gives us relationships and says okay, take care of each other, you probably won't do it right the whole time, but try for each other. and we do. we try. we show up and offer whatever we have, because love sees the other person, and sometimes it tries to sacrifice. we can't fix, but sometimes we can walk, and sometimes that is enough.
bri and i met because were both athletes who saw the same trainer, sometimes during the same hours. we had a hebrew class together where we translated while in slings, visible or otherwise. and then i worked at the coffee shop, where she retrained me and we laughed about things. there were a couple other odd intersections, but i now think of them as less odd, and more woven. she is a fantastic human and one of my favorite people. I'm so grateful that we're friends. so so so grateful. God is intentional and i don't really ever know what he's doing, but he is surely up to something, and I'm willing to be its usually something redemptive. something good.
so anyways, we've become quite close friends, via choice and lots of God-proddings. i guess in my life, i don't really carry much certainty, which might be a recent thing, but who knows. one of the only things I've never really questioned though, is the presence of good friends in my life. close friends, and good friends have always been consistent, whether i was able to connect with them or not. even in crappy seasons. especially in crappy seasons. i had a rough year one time and it relationally kicked the shit out of me. so i absorbed all these fears that multiplied my uncertainties. maybe they just revealed my doubts, I'm not sure yet. but anyways, even with all of that, I've never questioned the presence of my good friends, seasonal or long term.
i have really good friends. like incredible, make-me-thank-God-a-million-times-throughout-the-day incredible. and I'm learning to live there, like they're really my friends, like its all real. but part of the realness is the tragedy of life. tragedy seems like such a strong word, but its fair sometimes, and for more than just rhetoric. some of my friends have been dealt rough hands, which is a metaphor that works on both levels. sickness and grief have settled in like an inexplicable plague. it is so sad. but it is also real, and you can't compartmentalize reality.
bri's dad passed 3 weeks ago today. lou gherigs is the disease that my parents shake their heads at. my folks work in the medical business. mom is with the babies, and dad is with the cancer folks. both ends of the spectrum. they have some atypical views on treatments and sickness, but lou gherigs is the one that gets them both. i was talking to my mom about it before he passed and she cried on the phone a little bit. its sad. in some anne lamott book that i read recently, she mentioned something about how as we age, the body starts to sag, as if it knows a secret that we can only begin to understand; that our bodies will let go, and soon enough we will too. we will finally learn what our bodies already know. maybe bodies are a metaphor for the rest of life.
Ted tried everything known to man, and some things known only to God too. and his body still failed. the people who loved him knew about it. the people closest to him saw it. there is a book called "love is a mixtape" and it is wonderful and sad. the writer talks about how heart-shaped box is a song about love, and how helpless you are when it comes to the people you love. how you can't really fix anything for them and you can't really protect them, even though you want to so badly, so much that you think you might burst. rob sheffield is brilliant. just read the book. i think the people who loved Ted wanted to protect him. maybe differently. maybe they wanted him to face things differently, but i don't think anyone who loved him wished for the manner of death that he experienced. i think the people who knew him best knew too much about the gospel and forgiveness for that sort of thing. maybe they didn't, but they strike me as that sort of crowd.
he passed away around 10am with his family in the room. the precise moment was nearly unknowable, but i don't know if that matters as much as having people present does. people holding each others hands and his, praying, walking alongside as much as time and capacity would permit. doing the best anyone could, with all the resources anyone had.
bri lives a state away, but she is still connected to this town. as soon as we found out, everyone started making plans, and asking questions, because sometimes you just go. i packed my bags, contacted professors, and cleared my work schedule. my bosses were kind enough to let me leave. there are few things in life that i would lose my job over, but this would have been one of them if they hadn't let me go. which is irrelevant cause they did.
i made my way over and showed up. i told jenna that my goal was the intersection between least stressful and most helpful. stacie & marlowe came too, and we all did whatever was doable. even if it was just a coffee run, or entertaining a relative who needed to tell someone a story. at night, we gathered together and shared our own, because laughter is healthy and stories are connective. it will always be funny that stacie said her arm was broken when we hit a dear on the way to the beach at 2am. the fur in the wheel well will always merit clapping, whooping, laughter. those things are important, and maybe even more so in the face of a funeral. bri was brave and strong. she was loved too, which was obvious when we all watched.
the funeral was beautiful and well done. his memory was well preserved, and his personhood was honored. death is a weird, weird little thing. maybe a weird big thing, since it is THE thing. and when you are in the christian faith, it is the turning point thing, which follows rising action, right on up to climax, which is the resurrection. so its weird, but its also unbelievably important. i have a friend who says death is the thing that makes her question whether any of this life is real. i wonder sometimes if death is the thing that makes me think that it IS real. seeing someone you awkwardly hugged while dashing into the house to get the world's greatest chocolate milk on your way out of town, with eyes now permanently closed is weird. and hard. but the finality of things makes them feel real to me. maybe more than feel, maybe finality MAKES it real. all of the memories, the conversations, the words, the times, all of them are so real. and they are branded into the people who remember them, because death makes you remember.
remember is my favorite word in hebrew. it is "za-char", and it carries the connotation of "realizing something in actuality", like reliving. it is an important word to me, and it has been since i learned it. death makes you remember. even if it is not a physical death, and it is just the death of your previous self, or the death of your preconceived notions, or more maturely, the death of your own identity. but it does make you remember. with longing, hatred, or more commonly, grief. in a letter, bri said that her favorite word in the bible was redemption. i like that word a lot too. she talked about as a second chance, but more so, as a 'becoming-whole-like-we-were-meant-to-be' thing. some things get redeemed on this side of reality and some don't. but redemption is a real thing. and thats good for all of us.
at some point the other day, i started playing with words, deconstructing them and reconstructing them. REmember, REdemption, REconcilation, REal. so many 'RE' prefixes. in a letter to someone, or an email, RE means reply. in english, the prefix often means to do again. a response. so remembering is membering again. a member is a part of a whole, or a whole itself. it is also related to personhood. its almost like remembering is putting the person back together. i love that so much. redemption is the noun form of redeem. so RE, again + deem, which is to consider, believe, or hold. it is a word used in regard to opinions, but also holding someone in high esteem. to deem someone worthy. so an aspect of redemption might be, holding something again. and depending on who you ask, holding something again might be the greatest gift. it might mean considering something as worthy of remembrance. even in the word 'real'. in latin, al is inclusive meaning, all. so when you reference a work by multiple authors, you say, 'et al'. so the world, in its reality, is the response to all. maybe that is what makes something REal. your response to the 'all'. which makes your response the most real of all in some ways.
these are the things i thought about over easter. i like easter a lot, and for many reasons. for one, if it didn't exist, my degrees would be about things like unicorns and other likely-non-existent creatures, and that would feel silly and annoying. i really like easter because it says we can have a second chance at things. that things as they are might not be how they seem, and even if they are how they seem, they probably won't stay that way. things can change. we can respond differently. God did. Jesus did. the people did. we can respond to new things and we can even respond differently to old things. thats the hope in resurrection. the idea that it is finished, but in many ways, it is not quite finished. or maybe you are not quite finished. and you are somehow connected to the thing that set all of this in motion.
i got back from TN and thought so much about connections. partially because my mind works in concepts, not details, so i am constantly seeking out patterns. i like to compartmentalize, which is normal. but the thing is, it doesn't really work that well. i tried to respectfully separate my experience from bri's because i wanted to honor her experience. taking someone else's pain and making it your own is not always compassion. sometimes it is just transferred chaos, and i did not want to belittle all of the things that she and her community were walking through. but my body wouldn't let me separate it. i had a physical response to grief that wasn't totally mine. but i realized that it wasn't wholly separate either. i walked through some of bri's valley with her. and sometimes, i just sat on the dock while she was submerged. you can't walk through every part of the valley when its not your own. sometimes waiting out in the dark is helpful while someone else is wading out in the muck. it was not my grief, and yet i am still connected to it. because i have, and will always have good friends. that is God's grace in my life. that people will remain friends and walk through each others valleys together. that we will stumble together. but that we will keep walking alongside each other too. i bear the grief differently, and i will never bear all of it, because it is not mine. but some of it will drift into my atmosphere and i will gladly welcome its interruption. grief is never clean. not for the individuals directly affected. it is sticky in the sense that it latches on to whoever is around. and if you are fortunate enough to be allowed there, it will latch on to you too. that is the grace of soul friends. that we can be connected and we can walk with each other, across states and times. that the Lord grants a connected kindness in friendship. he gives us relationships and says okay, take care of each other, you probably won't do it right the whole time, but try for each other. and we do. we try. we show up and offer whatever we have, because love sees the other person, and sometimes it tries to sacrifice. we can't fix, but sometimes we can walk, and sometimes that is enough.
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