Nine years ago, my husband and I were married the day after Christmas and enjoyed a two night honeymoon at a darling bed and breakfast.

A mere four days after the wedding, we were on the road with a U-Haul moving to our new home in Ontario and we arrived on New Year’s Eve to an apartment so small and perfect.

We celebrated our anniversary last night, and as I scramble around this morning to pack and organize so many little bits, I realized with a start what day it is. We will again be on the road on the same day of the year with a U-Haul moving to our new home in Ontario, arriving on New Year’s Eve.

Only this time with our two beautiful children and the knowledge that this is our last crossing. God is surprisingly consistent on occasion.

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C.S. Lewis has that most interesting writing style. You know the one. You are reading and following along, but after a few minutes pass, you find yourself in a sea of letters of the alphabet, all random and mixed up. Few of said letters are forming words and none of those words seem the least bit relevant to what you thought you were reading. I had a friend once who could talk like that. Genius, they are both.

I can’t say that I gave this last book of his a great deal of my attention. I fit it in between bites of food and commercial breaks in a mild quest to deal with my own grief. Poor man though, here I am commenting on the thoughts and raw emotions that poured out of him and into a journal when his wife died of cancer. (I’m suddenly reminded of m2 and her quest for a book of individual journal pages.) Jack really never meant this book to be a book. I present to you its gems.

I learned the most from this excerpt:

“For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow… that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right…

I seem to remember – though I couldn’t quote one at the moment – all sorts of ballads and folk-tales in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it…

For me at any rate the programme is plain. I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her.

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs…

How often – will it be for always? – how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’?”

And was brought to tears by this one:

” ‘She is in God’s hand.’ That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword. Perhaps the earthy life I shared with her was only part of the tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes lightnings with it in the air. ‘A right Jerusalem blade.’ “

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This weekend, our church parish held a mini-retreat for my daughter and the whole class of soon-to-be first communicants. The focus was on confession, specifically this their very first, which followed at the end of the two hours. They asked that one parent be present for the entire morning. I found the whole idea curious and didn’t know what to expect.

To start us off, our pastor arrived and spoke to the children. He focused on the idea that now they — the kids — are old enough to take responsibility for what they do or do not, the good and the bad. And that their goal is to grow in holiness and become saints. It was particularly effective when he was gleeful about admitting – as an example – that he was the one to do so well in school and then was equally silly and excited to admit that he was the one to own up to something done wrong.

We are lucky to have a fatherly priest. He spoke for half an hour, but the time seemed to fly by with almost no fidgeting. He spoke in ways and stories that the kids could understand, but I was happiest to see him relating everything in terms of the children’s relationship with Jesus. He made it personal, and then shared something personal that I’d never heard another priest say — that once he leaves the confessional, he honestly does not remember what you tell him.

The next part was pretty boring – they played a cartoon of the Prodigal Son and then we did worksheets together about it. All I can remember thinking was that I didn’t care for some of the ways that the movie company interpreted/softened the story for kids.

But afterward, their version of an examination of conscious for 2nd graders was pretty cool. Over the course of their weekly classes, they have taught the kids the Ten Commandments to the tune of The Farmer and the Dell. You’re thinking, “Weird!” aren’t you? Yeah, that’s how I was too until I heard almost fifty kids sing and remember them.

Having passed out plastic Christmas balls that could split in half along with paint and brushes, they sang each commandment by itself and then the teacher went through real-life examples of what “taking the Lord’s name in vain” meant – and so on down through the line. If the children had broken that commandment, they were to paint a brown spot inside their individual ball. As we went through them, there was a lot of painting and no fussing at all by the parents. I, for one, felt really honored to be sitting with my daughter and listening, not judging.

The exercise was of course designed to allow the kids to see exactly how muddy sin makes their ball and their soul. Best of all, at the end and after the point was made, we washed their balls totally clean of the brown paint, just as Confession cleans our soul. They were each given a sprig of evergreen, a symbol of life, to place inside the ball instead, a reminder that Jesus lives within us always.

When it was finally time for the real thing, my daughter ended up first in line and she was so brave. I hugged her very close when she was done. It was awe-some. God had let me hold her when she was born, and here she was being born all over again and into my arms she came.

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I dunno, pick one.
One day I’m Kalanna.
One day I’m {insert my real name.}
One day I’m five years old.

Does anyone else have this problem?
What problem, you ask?

Literally morphing
into some one else
around some one else.

Bouncing back and forth,
trying to reconcile one with the other,
feeling like an idiot.

I honestly really do feel like
my personal little game of ping-pong has a point.
Otherwise, I’d have to believe that God is a sadist
and having a great time too.

He’s going somewhere,
but while he and I are en-route,
what do I do in the meantime?
What do I do today?

Hello, my name is…

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So, Joyce Carol Oates surprised me in the end. Her novel Missing Mom — which I picked up for obvious reasons — was pretty slow in places and predictable in the series of events that propelled the story to its conclusion, but its that last line that got me:

“In this way ended my first full year of missing Mom.”

Set in upstate New York, the story is narrated by Nikki Eaton and chronicles the year following her mother’s murder. Within which, she waits for the trial, watches her family fall apart and begins to take over her mother’s life. She begins innocently enough, responding and speaking what she knows her mother would have wanted her to say to this individual or that in the community. Then she comes up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why she must move into her deceased parents’ home “for the summer.” And yet when the season changes, she is still there as well as taken up her mother’s hobbies of baking bread and visiting elderly relatives, even attending her swim class.

My own enticement to drive my mother’s last road or the odd comfort I received from the kids this year attending the elementary school that she last worked at didn’t seem so unusual anymore. Obviously, I’m not the first to think of interesting ways to be close to my mother. Granted, the road and the school were choices made for me, but they felt good and right. And if I had received it, I would have been as thankful as Nikki to stay in my mom’s last house to sort out, sort through and hide from the emotions that come – whichever may be best in the moment.

There was another odd haunting coincidence – the last she saw her mother was on Mother’s Day, the last I spoke to mine we were preparing for Mother’s Day. But mostly it was simply consoling to hear and be able to identify with another human being’s reaction to being thrust into the shoes of loss and grief — to hear how she works through — and to hear that she actually does begin to work through.

Yeap, that’s all. I feel quite stunned and it was nice to watch someone else be stunned too. To see the big city girl turn to bread baking, sleeping, surrounding herself with Mom and a cat. Then to know her anger at being watched or whispered about or avoided in town. To feel my own self in her and to know that I am not alone.

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