When we are together again

When we are together again,

and everything is as it should be

as it was supposed to be

for the first time, again.

When we are together again…

The things that I will say…

At first, they will start with words

like, “I should have” “I could have”  “I wish”

When we are together again

I will tell you about how it is all this time later

That I realized you had this little treasure chest

And you reached into it, and you pulled things out of it and you gave them to me.

They were barely warmed by my hands

before they were forgotten…

And there was so much still left

that you wanted to give me

But it is with you now.

and when we are together again.

I will kneel down, and I will open it with you,

and I will cherish the things that you share with me.

Living Forever

Somebody once asked Woody Allen “Are you trying to achieve immortality through your films?”

His great response was, “I’d rather achieve immortality through not dying.”

I’ve been reflecting on that idea: immortality.

Almost every secular movie ever made, when somebody is dying, and somebody else is all sad about it, the dying person says “I’ll always be with you: in your heart and memories.”

My first response is a bit off a riff off of Woody Allen.  “I’d rather live forever outside of somebody’s heart.”

But my second thought is that even without the hope of an afterlife, the secular world can do better.

My grandmother passed away a few months back.  I loved here dearly.  She was often a rather un-grandmotherly lady.  She taught me to play poker.  She was probably the best poker player I’ve ever known.  And she never let me win.

She was loving and gentle, but she had this whole stable of hilarious, provacative, and borderline obscene sayings.  I’m about to swear for pretty much the first time on this blog.  All you senestive souls probably want to go read “Guideposts” or something.

Two in particular I remember “That’s uglier than a bucket full of a$$ holes”  and “It’s colder than a witch’s tit”

My grandmother impacted me.  She changed who I am.  I think most people who know me would consider me both gentle and provacative.  I don’t generally let my kids win when we play games.

I am changing the world through these, and many more important ways.  I will be dead someday.  And the people who I impact will change the world, too.

I truly believe we will live forever in a much more literal way.  There is that kind of immortality.

But that doesn’t diminish this kind of immortality. Yes, I remember my grandmother.  But more than that, I’ve been changed by her, made a better person by her.  This is no small thing, and it’s a much bigger thing than mere memories.

An injustice

It is an unjustice.

 

Our passing should ripple across the universe.

In the movies, the other characters they just simply know when it has happened.

This is how it should be.

 

In the wake of the mourning.

There should be nothing else, just mourning.

There should not be those mundane things

That conspire to fill up our days and take over our lives.

 

This morning I was sending an email out to several people.

It was not one of significant importance.

I clicked on the group.

And the man who died was a member of the group.

 

And so when I clicked “select all”

The checkbox next to his name was filled up.

 

It is an unjustice.

Our passing should ripple across the universe.

When he died he should have been removed from all the email

Address books of everyone in the world.

 

I should not have to deselect his name.

I should not wonder about an untended email address.

I should not have to contemplate his widow

Someday

Looking through at the accumulations of messages

From the spam machines and the people who did not know.

 

 

 

A friend and member of my church died this morning.  For the whole time I have known him, he has had cancer.

I want to tell you about his faith.  He inspired me.  He was dying, and he has two beautiful young kids.  And a wife, and he had so much going for him.

Stan had so many reasons to be so very angry.  He probably was, sometimes.  But most of the times, he and his wife both, they were able to praise God for his goodness and affirm his love. 

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, they have this song, “The Impression that I get”  The lyrics in the song are talking about this guy who has never been challenged by life, but he’s watched other people withstand lives tough stuff, and he wonders if he could.  That’s one of the things I feel about Stan.  He’s the guy who’s the real deal. 

I’m not asking to go through his trials.  My heart breaks for him and his wife and his children.  I just kind of want to share that he was this really great guy.

And I want to share that I should have known him better.  I don’t want to pass it off like we were best friends and hung out all the time.  He’s one of those people who I new I could learn a lot from.  And I don’t even have a standard execuse.   With most people, we have some good reasons to delude ourselves into thinking we’ve got all the time in the world.

Isn’t sad how I keep wanting to write about Stan but I keep coming back to myself?

If you’re a person who struggles with faith in the risen Christ, if you’d met Stan, he would have given you pause.  You would have watched Stan and you would have felt a little bit of your doubt eroding.  And if you believe in the truth of the risen Christ, you would have seen Jesus through Stan, Stacy, and the kids.

Go in peace, Stan.  I will see you again.

 

Stan you will be missed.  I am so looking foreward to a reunion in the next life.

That choice

In that time before:

before my grandmother was sent to that place

where they all were just waiting for death,

where they slept two to a room and where we pretended it did not smell.

before the indignities and disease had ravaged my grandmother,

in that time when the Parkinsons was just begining to form her smile into a rictus

When it was atleast an option– though frowned upon–

to ambulate without the walker that you hated so much.

 

In that time,

before,

I would watch my youngest child and I would watch my oldest child.

With blocks.

 

The wisened preschooler

eyed the toddler warily.

Sometimes he would stack them upwards, upwards, upwards.

always, uneasy, a corner of an eye on the loved-hated sibbling

Teetering, tottering, the blocks would settle.

 

And then the baby-ogre would come in,

the tiny tyrant.

The infant Godzilla.

Crattering smacks, a bowling alley thunderclap!

 

Rectangles, triangles, squares, wooden

down about the bare ankles of The maker and The Destroyer.

 

And then she would crawl away.

Leaving the architect in the aftermath.

Sometimes, discouraged,

he would simply push them around the dusty floor.

in that aftermath, silent now,

but for his baby sister’s babblings.

 

She would be off, then…

Watching preschool nonsense TV

or pulling at the hem of somebody’s pants

or devising ways around the babyproofing

to finally off herself.

 

Sometimes, though,

in that Great Before

he would stack them again.

 

From where I sit now

I see this as an act of great courage.

An act of faith.

It is so much easier to knock the tower down

than it is to rebuild the thing.

That we are built in such a way

that we might sometimes build it back up

this is the deepest argument

that there is a God after all.

 

And so here I am

On the other side of this

My grandmother is gone

she is gone and gone and gone.

 

I remember the choice that he was faced with.

and I know that I am faced with that, too.

Deaths

The burial of my grandmother was today.

Sometimes, I’ve been really intense and emotional.  And other times I’ve been casual and status quo.  There are all these cliches I’m living first hand:  The way this knowledge sneaks up on you.  The way you can be in denial of knowledge that is so basic.  The way you can prepare emotionally, the way you can know it’s coming, and yet somehow, it’s still such a shock.

I’ve been reflecting tonight on the lie we tell, the lie that is so easy to believe.

The lie is that there is one kind of death.  That it happens all at once.  That as long as our hearts beat, we are alive, and that once they stop beatiing, we are dead.

The most recent death I experienced was the one this morning.  There was this casket.  It was so perfect for my grandmother.  It was this ugly shade of pinkish-purple that she had just loved.  It was suspended over the whole it would soon be lowered into.  This is going to sound creepy.  Maybe it’s just my own wierd perspective.  But I experienced a death here.  It was the death of my irrational hope that this was all some mistake.  That maybe she was alive after all.  Because even if she was, when buried under tons of grass, it wouldn’t do her any good.

Twelve hours before, the death preceeding this one was the death at the memorial service.  Normally we don’t talk about death, as a society.  Here, we came together and admitted it outright.  This was the death of denial for me.  The death of pretending by not-talking about it.

Thirty hours before this I had recieved a call.  She had died at about 1:30 AM.  I was at the nursing home by 2 Am.  I spent an hour or so there, with my brother, my dad, and my grandmother’s body.  This is the death that we get so focused on, at the expense of all the others.  We sat in the room.  Together.  It was wonderful and horrible and Godly and eerie.  Her skin was so soft but cold.  Touching her, there was just something missing beneath it.  I don’t know if when we touch each other normally we just don’t consciously process the tiny movements of blood beneath the skin, subtley moving muscles and what not, or if perhaps there is something more supernatural going on… either way, I just new.  Her body had stopped working.   And if those couple times I touched her weren’t proof enough, there were eyes.

They were open (I guess the movie trick where you pull down the eye lids is a Hollywood fiction.) and they were empty.

I was confronted with the death of her physical machinery, then: the end of the biological processes which kept her connected to her body.

But a few nights before, I’d experienced the death of my hopes that she’d get better.   The first midnight call that she was dying.  It’s perfect for her that she confounded everybody’s expectations, that time.  She lived nearly a week beyond that night.

And a few weeks before that, there was yet another death, when we made the decision to implement hospice care and manage her pain but not fight the symptoms and prolong her suffering.

And there were all these little deaths, even before that.  The death of her recognition of us.  The death of her wakefullness.  The death of her muscle mobility, robbed by Parkinson’s disease.  The death of her memories, robbed by dementia.

Before that, the death of her time living with family, when we moved her to the nursing home.  Before that, the death of her ability to move freely about the city when she gave up her license… prior to that the death of her independence, when she moved in with my parents, the death of her regular contributions to the family when she was no longer able to cook her weekly meal for the whole family…

She started dying over thirty years ago, when her husband died.  I never really new him, except by her fond and loving memories, and a few pictures.   She is with him now.  Her remains are next to his.  But that’s so unimportant: what is important is that all she is, all she ever was, the very best of her, is in a world beyond this one, with the very best of him.

Someday, I’ll be with them.  It will be good to be with them both.

Goodbye

My grandmother died, night before last.

The funeral is tonight (Thursday).

We’re running around, getting ready.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, all this running around.  I know that when I keep busy I can just lose myself in being busy.   And then, it comes back, this realization, almost a mini-flashback to the other night, sitting in the room with my dad and older brother and my grandmother’s body.

I find myself simultanously wishing for more ritual in my life, more of a prescribed way of doing this, and simultanously wishing that I wasn’t having to rush around, preparing for the rituals that we do have.

Her death was not sudden or unexpected.  She was not comfortable, independent, or even aware, for a very long time.  I believe that she is in a better place.

And yet, I miss her terribly.  And I am so sad.  As long as she was alive I could hope that the dementia would clear, that the Parkinson’s would recede, that she would suddenly get better.  Rationally I new this wasn’t going to happen.  But strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be impossible.

Now? 

 Well, now she is gone.  There is no more holding on to delusions that we’ll play one more game of poker, that she’ll cackle her crazy laugh after she’s said something provacative, that she’ll cook a mountain of mashed potatoes when only like two people are eating.

And so I suppose that it is not only a mercy for her but also a mercy for me, that now I can’t live in denial about it anymore.   It’s not fun, but it is a mercy.

Any suggestions?

My grandmother is dying.

She has a number of days left most likely. 

One of the issues we’ve been navigating is how best to handle this with our kids.  They are aged 11, 8, and 6.  I am not proud to admit that she’s had a slowly decreasing role in our lives.  She has suffered fairly advanced dementia and has lived in a nursing home for the last several years.

She’s not often conscious, at this point, and this is a blessing.  She’s got a pretty severe respitory infection.  The other clients in the nursing home sometimes do stuff that the kids find disturbing.

We’ve done an o.k. job of talking about it and sharing our feelings.

The real struggle is this: the older two kids really don’t want to see her. 

On some level, there is no point.  She’s hardly ever even awake.  And when she is, she has no clue who she is, where she is, or who we are.

On some other level, though, visiting is the right thing to do.  I’m working really hard at sorting out what people think and say is the right thing to do, because I don’t particularly care if anybody is impressed or not.   I have been visiting her every day or two.  I’m trying to lead by example.

And one of my deals is just sorting out my own junk.  My own issues with aging, and death, and saying goodbye, and putting everything in God’s hands… She was an important figure in my life.  I am sad that she will be gone.

I just don’t know how much pressure we should put on them.  Will they someday think that we should have put more pressure on them to say goodbye?  Will they someday blame us if we do pressure them?  More important than what they will someday think, is the question of what is best for them, what is the right thing to do.  And it’s pretty hard to work that all out right now.

What do you think?

Trees of Life

For a while, I’ve had this interest in the tree of life that appears in Genesis.  I never really connected it to the pair of trees of life that occur in Revelation.  Interpretations of Revelations are so hard to understand, and so divisive, and frankly, in my opinion, have given rise to so much silliness that I probably don’t pay it the attention it deserves.

But it’s a pretty interesting thing, the way it’s described in Revelations”a pure river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, coursing down the center of the main street.  On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month.  The leaves were medicine to heal the nations.” (22: 1-2)

I’m open to the possibility that these “trees” aren’t actual trees.  There’s certainly lots of fodder for symbolism here.  The number 12 seems to represent, through out the Bible, people who are supposed to be doing God’s work in the world.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish people trace their ancestory through the 12 tribes to the original 12 ancestors.  In the New Testament, Jesus has 12 disciples.   Through out both testaments, but particularly from Jesus, crops, fruit and the like are also a symbol for mantaining a connection to God.

At the bare minimum, the trees could be understood to mean that Christ-followers are the crop which healed the world.

I think there’s a lot more going on than this.

I’ve been noticing a theme lately.  This theme is that the New Earth is what Eden was meant to become.  It’s easy for me to think, somehow, that the New Earth is a bit of a consolation prize.  Perhaps it’s easier for me to wrap my brain around a God who wants to punish us.  Maybe it seems like there are so many things that are just ruined forever and the best we can do is cope with the aftermath.  It’s possible that I am not fully adressing how very much God loves us, and how indomimatable his spirit is.

Whatever the reason, it’s not my natural tendency to think that what we will end up with is what was supposed to happen.  It’s not easy to recognize that the whole of human history was just this temporary diversion, this speed bump.   The more I read and pray and think the more I recognize that God won’t be thwarted.  The end that will happen will be the end that was meant to be.

The scriptures give a variety of instructions around offering the first fruits to God and around people not eating the fruit of young trees.  I wonder if God started Eden with only one tree of life expecting that it would be left alone.  I wonder if he thought that the right naturally processes were underway for the second one to pop up without his direct intervention, the same way that other fruit trees spread.  (Fruit falls, is eaten by a wild animal, seed is excreted with a bunch of natural fertilizer from the animal, wind covers the seed, seed grows.) 

I can’t say for sure that the reason stated above is the reason we’re told not to eat the fruit of young trees.  And of course, the instruction to do this hadn’t been handed down to Adam and Eve.  I suppose that the whole point of the fall is that sometimes God isn’t going to give us all the details.  If we want to live in harmony with God we need to be o.k. with this.  He certainly didn’t owe Adam and Eve and explanation for why they shouldn’t eat from the tree.  Genesis says that one reason for this is that they would live forever.  Ultimately, it is of course the principal of the thing.  But I wonder if there was more.  On a pragmatic, and perhaps trivial level, I’m wondering if the issue of original sin was about interfering with God’s forestry plans.

The statement around what the trees can do is pretty interesting stuff to.  In Genesis, the tree of life leads to eternal life.  In revalations, it leads to healing.  These two uses aren’t particularly contradictory.  In fact, on the New Earth, we’re already eternal. 

This leads to all sorts of questions, some gory, some quite practical, about what that eternal life will be like.   We’ll be capeable of getting sick or hurt.  Otherwise, the medicines from the tree would be quite irrelevant.  But we also live forever…  This leads me to wonder what if the fruit wasn’t around?  What if we used the whole crop and we had somebody who suffered some sort of horrible accident: an explosion, hideous burn, etc.   The New Earth is supposed to be a place where all our tears are wiped away.  But I think I’d shed a few tears if I was crushed or blown to pieces or burned all over my body and I had to heal up.

I suppose this is part of a wider question about how it all will work… Can we have excitement without tears?  With an eternity that stretches out before us, will we be motivated to do anything?

The little deaths

Do not speak to meof the languages that die every day

with the little dark people

and the ways that have not ever changed

and so they all died.

Do not speak to me

of the extinctions every day

microbes and critters and plants

and the way my ways have not ever changed

and so they all died.

Do not speak to me

of my missed opportunities.

Choices I made only once

Frost said that one way leads to another and so I will never be back here again

do not speak to me of the ways I am dying.

Because I understand

in a manner much more basic than words

That there are so many ways to die.

When I was a child the water in the pools could be well below freezing

in August in California

and yet it would still inexplicably be liquid.

I would spend our allotted time

dipping first my toe in, next my young naked smooth foot in

I would shiver when the cholorine waves lapped my angle

and stand proud on the second step.

The brave ones, bike-jump mud smeared on their shorn foreheads

would yell

“Marco! Marco!”

“POLE-OH! POLE-OH!”

Occasionally, they would look my way

Like Adam, I hadn’t yet given a name to contempt though I new it.

Eventually, Portly waist deep,

I kept my arms rigid over the liquid-nitrogen H₂O

Part way into the shallow end, now, moving away from the steps.

(MAR-Coh; Polo!)

I learned about death but didn’t know it back then.

They jumped right in.

I went in slow agony.