Ten years ago, we couldn’t keep Isaac off the ladder as Westen helped Mary place the star on our tree.
Today, these boys grabbed the tree out of the van and placed it without waiting for me.
Christmas Helpers
That Was Quick
Breaking records every week.
September 15th, 2022, would have been my 15th wedding anniversary. I wasn’t anxious leading up to the day. I’m in a positive place with my grief right now.
I went to yoga that morning and all was chill. The ladies in the class were talking about dying their hair and I was content to silently prepare myself for practice.
Then the teacher told a story about her husband cutting his own hair in horrible fashion weeks before their wedding. I chimed in, “Oh, I have a funny story like that. Wow. Today’s my wedding anniversary.” Maybe one of them knew I was a widower, but I was not up for repeating that part of the story.
On the morning of my wedding I was nervous and wanted to do an extra special job on my beard. I used the electric trimmer closer than usual and took a line of hair out of one sideburn. I was sick. I just ruined our photos and Mary would have to stare at this foolishness during our vows.
It turned out that no one noticed and you can’t see the mistake in the photos.
Back to yoga and a few laughs over the story. Time for practice. Before I could settle into my first pose, tears flowed down my face. A quiet, hot crying, highly preferable to heaving sobbing.
I didn’t sit too long in the sadness. We had ten years of marriage and it struck me that I’m halfway to ten years without it. It feels like distance from something I love. Not “loved,” but a life I care deeply for in the present.
I recently heard Joseph Campbell talk about how grief gives us an intimation of the everlasting. It allows us to imagine life after death, to see how we could live forever.
I was fortunate to experience a glimpse of forever this week.
Congenital Music Madness
Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Citizen Cope, The Crow soundtrack, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Carolina Chocolate Drops have been blasting from my sons’ room.
We’ve been rearranging things and my 13-year-old discovered his mom’s CD stash a few days ago. Today I let him at the music I’ve been collecting for 30 years.
Before Home Education
We were new (tired) parents in 2009 and didn’t have a grand educational philosophy or plan for future schooling.
I was excited to read to my baby son, but we had hardly any children’s books and I wasn’t terribly interested in that kind of material yet.
I picked up Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and started reading aloud to my one-month-old.
He fell asleep on me most times and I kept on reading because it felt like a magic spell. Sometimes I fell asleep.
Mary laughed everytime I said, “Passepartout,” and it strikes me that Westen just this week discovered an interest in French that was unexpected. Although, he says, he may switch to Spanish.
I always try to remind parents interested in home education that they’ve been doing it for years. No child between the ages of 1 and 5 needs school to learn a vast amount of skills and knowledge. No one needs any school after that either. We’ve been conditioned to accept school as a universal, yet we are born to learn. The home education community is growing exponentially and the examples of children thriving without school are plentiful.
Flashback Friday
To a joyous day at Longwood Gardens with our boys in 2012.
Always Making Friends
I got to meet new people (and a couple spiders) today and share my story.
It’s been a remarkable journey from husband to dad to believer to widower to something greater than the sum of those parts.
I’m grateful to God for all my blessings, the bountiful ones as well as the difficult ones that have taught me much.
The Greatest Thing About the Shittiest Thing About Grief
I’ve denied my loneliness.
I don’t even know how long I’ve been lonely. I haven’t allowed myself to feel it most times.
This past weekend I took my sons to camp with home education friends. It was the type of gathering that Mary loved so much, with tons of food, fun, adventure, and laughter. I had her favorite camp chair, coffee mug, and the tent we decided to buy, but didn’t receive until after she passed away. Camping always brings out Mary stories and every campfire is like going home with her.
I’ve lived these four years without her as a prideful single dad. I’ve been setting up and breaking down camps with little adult help and I’ve felt strong. That’s changing as I see I have a romantic partner who I can lean on and trust with tasks I assumed were my responsibility. She wasn’t with me this weekend, but my friends were generous with their help. I’ve grown a better practice of accepting help, but I still felt weakness. As I drove home (on schedule, thanks to my friends), I was overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy. Triggered by wet tarps and sandy bike tires, it ran right down to not being the type of husband who could protect his wife’s life.
That’s one of the shittiest things about grief. It’ll take new feelings and tie them up with the past or some impossible present. I’m a better man than the one who lost Mary. What if I had been better for her? What would my life look like now? Then comes the guilt of not appreciating the wonderful people and things in my life now. Then none of it makes sense and I’m just crying behind the wheel of a 19-foot RV as I make my way to play soccer.
At least I know how this goes. I keep the truck on the road, let the tears do their thing, and feel a whole lot better, if a little drained.
I performed well in the game, but the emotional toll weakened me enough to bring on a nagging blueness complete with brain fog and body aches. The next day I learned that I had missed a dedication ceremony for Mary. The storm of emotions has held my recovery in slow motion. Three days later, this morning, I finally received the answer about my loneliness. I had been hiding from it. I didn’t want to admit that I was counting on anyone for anything. I’m now accepting my loneliness and being honest with myself about who I can lean on and who I cannot.
Some of it is clear and some not, but I needed to return to this space and start a new chapter of healing. That’s the greatest thing about the shittiest thing about grief: if you are lucky enough to turn the pain into healing, you will forever have a source of improved spiritual, mental, and physical health.
Fireside Chats
Growing up with camping and a lot of outdoor play (and being a troublemaking boy), I have always loved fires. When I met my wife, her passion for tending fires inside and out drew me closer immediately. As we started a family and the boys approached school age, we sat at our fire pan and discussed the possibility of homeschooling. Soon that turned to discussions of all the things we were doing wrong. Yet, through all the mistakes, we saw the horizon becoming clearer. The potential of what we were attempting changed us. “Unschooling” and “deschooling” became the next wild topics around the fire after the boys were in bed. The ground under our assumptions start to shift; our parenting changed, our politics changed, we became Christians, and our priorities narrowed in focus.
Mary passed away during this process, five months after we were baptized into Christ’s arms. I got a cord of firewood delivered to the house during her short hospital stay. I still don’t know why. Irrational hope? A grasp at normalcy? Making the first declaration about things that would not change?
What I do know is that fire is magical. I remember Mary in every fire. There’s nothing more dynamic and active, yet calming. We were like that too. I was the flickering flames jumping about and she was the glowing embers, moving around the wood with relaxed intention.
Thank you for letting me share my memories with you. Have a blessed day.
365 Devotionals: Disapproval
Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.
-Galatians 1:10
I’m getting, at least, half of this right.
I was told I should use my energy to be honest with my children about the threat they pose to their loved ones.
And what if I shared that “truth”? What happens when a loved one gets sick and dies, as is inevitable in a life full of loving support? How do my sons not feel responsible for that death? How could I curse them with a guilt that I know too well? A guilt they may already feel over their mother’s passing?
I will not gain the approval of someone who says my sons are dangerous carriers of disease. Does that get me closer to God? Further from the prince of lies?
In other madness-of-our-times news, a friend is watching her husband slip away in a hospital that won’t let her, nor their children, say what they need to say to him at his bedside.
I remember the moments between hopelessness and resolution, discovering in my heart that I would never see my wife’s smile again. I was by her side the entire time. We felt each other in that room when our souls said, Goodbye.
Those are some of the most important moments in my life. God let me watch her rise to Heaven. I needed that vision when I was alone with her mortal coil. I needed that vision to balance the horrors of that day.
The cruelty to separate people in times of trauma and loss is incalculable. My anger at supporters of Lockdown reddens my eyes to tears. I would burn that place down trying to get in. I would say Fuck You to the whole world.
I wouldn’t please anyone. That’s my overcorrection.
Martin Luther King Jr. taught to love the oppressor, as Jesus teaches us to love our neighbor. My heart struggles to grow big enough and my mind strains under the weight of that injunction.
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From Sobriety to Self Love
I got sober to get laid.
She had divorced an alcoholic and her stories of a neglectful husband and father of her children touched a fearful place in my heart.
I didn’t look into that place. I looked at an opportunity to aleviate the terrible loneliness of widowhood. I stopped drinking out of fear of harming myself, my children, and this rare chance at love.
Before our relationship became sexual, it was marital. We were mistaken as a family constantly and reveled in our roles. We thought we were in control, but I was driven by loneliness and lust. She craved the father figure and partner I was so good at portraying.
Sobriety did lead to love making. The dangerous kind that digs deeper and demands vulnerability and truth. The facades were exposed and our assumptions about our future together crumbled.
I started to face my patterns around alcohol. It was a confounding time. I needed to work on myself, yet I was pouring energy into a relationship that would dissolve, quite literally, overnight.
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Now I had to face two big fears. Was I forever an alcoholic? Would that trap me alone in confusion?
I picked up a book I had been carrying with me for twenty years, Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. Sitting on my kitchen floor in the early hours before my boys woke up, reading her affirmations and discovering my perilous lack of self love turned my life around. Addiction, loneliness, parenting, and all my fears were finally put up against an immutable power: Love.
Hay doesn’t use Christian language, but her words helped me accept the eternal river of love flowing from God. I got a glimpse of that source in my wife’s last moments on Earth. Mary showed me what was possible and it took me more than a year of hurt before I allowed it into my heart.
I bridged the cavity between believing and worthiness. Until you feel worthy of God’s love, you cannot fully receive it.
It turned out that my first chance at love after loss was not rare. I stopped looking at love as a scarce resource and began discovering it in all its forms and in all sorts of places.