Tag: healing

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Listen to the Impossible Story

Pull that crystal handle back on your time machine and go all the way back to 12 January, 2018. Go and tell me I’d lose my wife within a month and that before the end of spring I’d be in her parent’s RV guiding my sons on a journey I’d never imagined.

My reaction? Impossible. Mary’s healthier than I am and, God forbid, if I lose her I will be lost. I had considered my own death. I had considered the loss of a son, or two. I had imagined how treacherous the lives of those left behind would be, but I leaned on Mary so hard that I never had the courage to imagine life without her. She was my miracle, she brought me to Christ just by walking like him. She didn’t know a darn thing about soccer and made me a better player, turned me into a coach. She humbled me. She showed me what love could do.

Impossible. All of it. You could go back 13 years and tell me all of this. I would not have listened.

I’m glad you didn’t warn me. I’m blessed our tragedy came down the tracks over six days. I didn’t think about impossible: I prayed for a miracle while planning for the likely. Everything was possible in that moment Mary went to Heaven. I was a super hero. She gave me that magic space ring, that radioactive spider bite, that tragedy that turned Frank Castle into The Punisher. Okay, bad example…kinda. I am more keenly aware of my mortality than ever. This present is the only present I have to make the world better, or worse.

So, let’s make it better I say to myself. The first way to make the world better is by making yourself better (I often ignore this primary fact). The second way is to make your family and friends better (hard to do if #1 isn’t in order). The third way is to help those in your community, physically close to you, but strangers nonetheless.

I had internalized the hero’s journey. From comics to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to the Star Wars trilogy, I bought into it so much that I committed to taking my sons on a road trip adventure before Mary had taken her final breath. It was that thing that happens to us. Not internal, but received. The type of inspiration that told me there was something out there, that my work and my thinking and my mind were not enough on their own, that the work that must be done is opening oneself up to receive the message. That takes more effort and patience than you may think. Your desires and fears will cloud the message and pretend to be the message. Again and again I have found that praying to hear clearly is to ask for the greatest blessing. The more I listen to people; not their declarations, but their stories, the more I love people.

Impossible. We put this barrier before understanding at inconvenient junctures. But how many impossible stories have you heard? Or lived? Impossible isn’t a dream, it’s a mystery we haven’t explored.

God bless,

Jason

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If It Hurts To Go Anywhere, Go Everywhere

There’s no place we go that doesn’t maintain a connection with Mary. The four of us travelled up and down Delaware and tried on every type of event. She’s in the parks, gardens, concert halls, and campgrounds. In places that she had never been, we talk about what her reactions would have been or how she wouldn’t have forgotten the hummus for the carrot sticks.

It doesn’t always hurt, most of the time we’re smiling and remembering how she heightened every experience with her warmth, her smile, and her ability to be present. Sometimes it hurts like hell, especially when there’s something she would particularly enjoy.

Today didn’t hurt. We had fun with family and friends from Lewes to Hockessin and we’re going to bed fully spent.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Not Alone

I got to introduce a new friend to a place that is covered in Mary’s memory today. We met at Delaware Art Museum and I learned that he had never seen the Labyrinth. We chatted and I got to share my favorite place to gather my worries and release them. Besides Mary, he’s the only person I’ve walked the Labyrinth with as a pair. We remained uninterrupted for a full hour, a rarity on a beautiful summer day.

The acoustics kept turning our conversation back to the present and I discovered how much the space resembled a temple in my heart. Sounds are made so crisply clear that I can more easily turn my mind to God and perceive what He wants me to hear. Even through our chatting and the crunching of the gravel under our feet, I could hear that I was in the right place at the right time.

All is well in my world.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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An Unlikely, Art-Filled Life

These pictures were taken three years apart and neither one by me.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016. Reprinted for the DE Creative Kids Passport, 2019.
Peninsula Gallery, 2019

Unschooling has been the most rewarding journey of my life. I still don’t like the word “unschool” and didn’t know it when I started exposing my sons to art before the youngest could walk. I had no history or education with art, I was sent by my wife as she knew there was no way I would be a “stay-at-home” dad. Story times and family-friendly tours and activities got us into museums on a regular basis and I quickly saw the magic that was happening in my sons’ lives.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016
Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2012
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Meeting the Twin Poets at Delaware Contemporary, 2018
Shakespeare at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2013
Terrific Tuesday at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2014

An intentional learning lifestyle has taken us back again and again to our favorite galleries, where there is always something new to discover.

As we return to all these places in 2019 to complete our DE Creative Kids Passport, I will try not to be overwhelmed by the memories that we have made.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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My Darkest Place

A terrible drawing, to be sure. Not because I have zero talent, but because this is the direction I conceive my journey to be heading. The point Jung was making is that the journey upward is precisely equal to the internal depth one is willing to explore. My scribble is entirely downward, I even left the rest of the page for more roots and more darkness.

I don’t like dwelling here, I’m an amateur Dante trying to find the bottom of the crevasse so I can climb to the city on the hill.

Jordan Peterson talks about facing the worst part of yourself, the treacherous, jealous, even murderous part. I’ve thought hard about what I could do if I let myself be thrown into that chasm and give into the temptation of self loathing and turn it against the world. I’ve thought about how easy that path might be, how many excuses I could make for myself when it all falls apart. I don’t think I could hurt anyone else, but I became sure that I could hurt myself if I became my worst incarnation. I see that I could drink myself to death if I gave into every injustice, perceived or real.

That’s my darkest place. But like that doodle, there are a lot more roots to explore. I can’t rule out finding something worse, but for now, I find strange comfort in knowing how awful I might become.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Hard Questions

Thank God we had a winning soccer match tonight.

Otherwise, I may not have been able to field challenging questions from my ten-year-old. He opened with mumbling and I was an impatient prick until he fell to tears and said, “I’m afraid of what happens when people die.” This wasn’t just about his mom, I could see it in his eyes, he was contemplating everyone’s death on an empathetic level that would be overwhelming to anyone. I remember contemplating pain in a similar way when I was his age, it was so frightening that I closed off my empathetic self for decades.

So I was faced with the light task of not ruining my son’s compassionate path to adulthood. I held him and we talked easily about Heaven, the inevitability of death, and the power we have to choose how to face it. He’s a smart kid, he’s worked out much of this, but needed to cry through it a little. We turned to the subject of Mary and how he thought he didn’t properly say goodbye. The last thing he really remembers about her was watching the first half of the Super Bowl in the hospital. With the Eagles winning, it was a nicely exaggerated happy moment.

I asked him to remember all the times Mom said, “I love you,” and how many times he said the same to her. I told him, “Mom taught me about always doing this because we never know when we won’t have another chance.”

We talked about how he and his brother bravely came to the hospital and faced the news that Mom probably wouldn’t survive. It took them all day to be ready to see her and they stood shoulder to shoulder to tell her goodnight.

I told him that it was the first step towards Mary’s peace with dying. She’d find peace with many other friends and family over the next 36 hours.

There were more questions about the details of my comings and goings and what happened at the hospital while they were at home. We both got our tears out.

I thank God again for the wisdom these circumstances has afforded me and my sons. We’re not letting this break us, but allowing it to make us stronger.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Dreaming Alone

I was telling myself a story. The same story I’ve been telling myself most nights for more than thirty years. It’s a bed time story I needed to tell to get to sleep. It gets away from me and dramatizes my inner- and intra-personal struggles as I sink into sleep. I’m usually late to see the signs, but I’m getting better at receiving the wisdom.

It’s pretty weird right now. I’ve been pulled into another world by the tentacles of an inter-dimensional leviathan, a monster made of reckless psychic energy. I was possessed with power enough to slay an enemy and almost destroy my friends. The creature carried them off, leaving me in a landscape lit in a sickly reddish-pink glow, as if cast by a fluorescent Budweiser sign. I was alone with one eye wounded, a double-headed axe chained to my arm, and nothing but horizon before me.

Weeks later and little has changed. One night, buildings appeared only to topple on faceless victims. My vision has improved and I’ve transformed the prosthetic weapon into my own wings and claws. But nothing else will appear, not the leviathan, not my friends, nor any new enemies. I’m looking for a fight and all I get is loneliness, or at least aloneness.

Maybe that’s it. When I met Mary I could contentedly sit at a bar and read and write on my own. That’s how she found me on our first evening together. I wasn’t sure she’d show for our meeting, so I found a little light to read and drink by. She was late, but I’m not sure I noticed.

Now I’m here at a pub we frequented, drinking water, writing a blog post, and waiting on no one.

All is right in my world.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Back to the Labyrinth

I think about Mary every day. It’s hard to wake up in a king size bed she bought and not look across the emptiness of it. It’s hard to collapse into that bed before sundown and remember how much easier it was to simply get dinner on the table with her help. It is hard to look at my sons and wonder why they had to lose a mother who loved them completely.

As I push ourselves to new places and heightened experiences, I get these moments in the ashes. The phoenix cycle: mental, physical, and spiritual destruction followed by a bursting forth of power. It gets easier to recognize, but more painful to experience. I wonder if it will ever stop. I wonder if I want it to stop.

The primary course of the hero’s journey is within. To enact that process through ritual in the physical world helps make sense of it. I’ve walked the Labyrinth at Delaware Art Museum dozens of times. I’ve received knowledge and comfort each time. I need those on this Summer Solstice. I’ll have my boys as well as friends of theirs who have lost their father. I’ll have a dear friend on my mind who lost her husband a year ago. I’ll have so much weight when I step to the entrance of the Labyrinth today. I’ll shed it on the path in, I’ll strip myself down to what is good and right and beautiful in Creation. I’ll sit at the center and thank God for His love and this treacherous road that has let me love myself more.

I may be there for a while today.

I’m always lighter on the way out. Maybe I’ll be on my toes. Maybe I’ll skip with my younger son. Maybe I’ll get a devilish smile and dream up some glorious quest to launch. Maybe I’m already on my way there.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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Solo Dadding at Mountain Jam

This one was intimidating. Assumptions had crept in as I planned and envisioned our spring and summer adventures. I expected to have more support, a co-parent, to teamwork on grand excursions. I thought things might be getting easier. After 16 months of having my parental assumptions repeatedly blown up one would think that I should be used to this; or better yet, that I would give up on assumptions and the future. But I can be a slow learner.

Cap the dissolving of expectations with waves of grief and a busy unschool schedule, and I wasn’t feeling up to the task of four nights of festival camping. Especially since this music festival, Mountain Jam in Bethel, New York, would feature bands that had significant ties to memories of my late wife, Mary.

Screw all that. I have slept in tents since I was an infant, attended day-long festivals since I was a preteen, survived the riots of Woodstock ’99, logged thousands of hours alone on the road with my sons, and honed my situational intuitions over those many hours. I set my back straight and climbed into our Dodge Caravan with confidence.

The road smoothed and eased before us. The trip was shorter than expected. Somewhat miraculously, an online friend spotted us as we drove by her camp site and hollered. The rain came down and the van got stuck in the mud, but, with help, we got the tent up and had ourselves set for the first night of music before sundown. We continued to find the right people at the right times. Friendly staff and volunteers, helpful young people, generous vendors, fun and engaging performers, and very special families made for easy going days and nights.

Above all, I was reminded of how good my sons are at this. They made friends, charmed adults, and carved their own unique experience out of the weekend’s offerings. For my own part, I simplified personal obligations and expectations, enjoyed as much music as I could consume, and let myself have a whole lot of fun. We stayed up late, danced and played recklessly, and took care of business when circumstances called for it.

I came away from the weekend with my shoulders back and my head high. Our story seems impossible, I saw that in many faces as I told it to new friends, but there is an immense power in mastering an impossible task. Or just in taking it on and failing, as I have many times.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Bold Healing

“You know, I think this just might be the best summer eva.”

This declaration of a widower to motherless children may seem ludicrous. Maybe I have more confidence and chutzpah than I have any right to, but my ten-year-old responded with an easy, “Yeah, Dad, I agree.”

Summer’s not even here, yet we’re between road trips, on our way to a four-day music festival, and getting ready for my sons to appear in two Shakespeare productions, a jiu-jitsu tournament or two, and innumerable Delaware events.

I’ve been asked how I do all that I do with my sons. My first thought is that they’re not mine. They’re beautiful individuals who are stuck with me as their caregiver for a time. I feel a responsibility to not just prepare them for the world, but to launch them on mini quests into it. It is eternally challenging, frustrating, exhausting, and fulfilling. Their ability to navigate difficult situations rivals most adults I observe. They’ve had a crash course in unfairness, yet know they can make this world better by exploring and mastering it.

So, yeah, I think we’re looking ahead to the best summer eva.

God bless,

Jason