Category: Memories of Mary

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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.

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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.



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No Language is Safe from the Past

I came to her crying. It was Iggy Pop’s fault. A song, memories, a broken narrative.

I knew it was coming. “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” played on the drive to her house. I felt the desperation with which I begged God to save my wife three years ago. Bargaining. I ran through the stages of grief like a series of ineveitable, twisting rapids in six nights sleeping by her side in the hospital. Alone. So many people moving in and out, but lonely and only a nascent relationship with Jesus to comfort me.

Grief is a long river. The rapids are always ahead. No matter how practiced you become, they remain dangerous and unpredictable. The nasty bitch that Nature can be. Anger.

In traffic, on the way to see my girlfriend, I forged into the tumult. Better to welcome the ugly crying and regain myself before we were reunited.

Reunited. No language is safe from the past.

I didn’t lose it in the car. It waited until I was in her driveway. I was upturned as she wrapped her arms around me. Slow tears. Hot and heavy (no language is safe) tears.

She listened. She made me dinner. She made love with me. The guilt and confusion don’t go away, they take breaks.

Now I’m alone in her house, but not lonely. I have Mary in my heart. I have Kristen in my heart. I have Jesus in my heart. God has blessed me with Unending Love.

It’s so green here. Mary would have loved it. She would love how cared for her sons and I feel here.

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Love for Mom

A close friend was redoing his driveway shortly after Mary passed away. He invited her sons to leave a permenant memorial next to the future site of a fire pit area.

Mary loved fires and being outside. To see the project completed and be reminded of how much those little hands have grown in three years was comforting to us all.

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Beauty Gratitudes

Spring is rebirth and renewal. The beautifying of the earth.

Resurrection has been on my heart since Easter. A slow movement of the Holy Spirit through my body as I’ve watched flora bloom and fauna nest.

May is when it hits. Mary’s magnolia blossoms have appeared and I feel the strength and beauty of her through this tree.

We can’t have Life of Spring without the Dead of Winter.

I’m spending the next 30 days documenting the beauty around me. I’ll focus on nature, but keep my eyes wide for the radiance of life.

God bless this world.

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Picture Petal

She’s always in the garden
Beneath the dirt breathing her magic
Pressing mystery shoots into the sunlight
Opening pink picture petals.

I tilled the modest plot to start fresh
Yet it remains her domain
It is her beautiful earth
Her seeds and surprises bring it alive in May.

We plant and weed and tend
She feeds
We work
Yet the reward is not our doing.

This garden is God speaking in her voice
It is reborn for good and beauty.

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Playing With Poetry

It’s a mystery to me why I stopped writing poetry in my twenties.

I’m sure drinking had something to do with it. But that’s not enough. It was part of a process that had been working in me for years. An intentional repression of my empathetic self.

Poetry worked against that process. I learned that to excel in the art I needed to be open to emotions, mine and others’. I had been walking away from that deep well of emotion for years and wasn’t prepared to change my course.

In my last semesters before leaving college, I took more poetry workshops than were allowed. I worked the system to spend more time on the one thing that brought me value in the university.

In doing so, I started writing about a secret in confusing ways. I had bottled it up and needed to share, but it wasn’t all mine, so my poems became increasingly opaque.

I don’t yet have the courage to write about it.

I played with words today, like I did when I was young. I still feel the block. I still feel that secret holding me back.

These feelings emerge as I remember that April is National Poetry Month. This used to be a big deal in my world.

I wasn’t looking for a new challenge, but I believe one has found me. I’m going to publish poetry every day for the next month. It’ll be bad, like the wordplay below. I’ll write until I can’t contain that ancient secret any longer. I’ll write until I produce that poem I promised Mary when we were dating. I’ll find the words I need on these magnetic tiles until I can form my own.