Aftershocks.

I have a new mobile phone.

When my father calls me, my mother's photo and phone number show up, as my Facebook contacts are synced with my phone.

The first time it happened was startling, like hopeful as if there'd been some mistake....
dawning realization.


Yes, I could change that.

But what then? One can not effectively cleanse oneself of memory. Of longing. Of the truth.

This is the picture I see when my father calls me.

It was taken when she lost all her hair from the radiation in 2011.

Today would have been Mother's 74th birthday.

I do not want to forget.


Happy birthday, Mother. Wherever you are. Happy birthday. I love you. You mattered.

You will be remembered.

Advent.

Advent arrived three weeks after Mother went to sleep and didn't wake up.
She'd been in a long term memory care facility for just that long.
The young women who cared for her delivered her medications that morning.
Mother said she wanted to sleep longer.
The young women returned forty-five minutes later, chatting and laying out Mother's clothing for the day.
She was dead but still warm when my father arrived.
Having been through years of hellish suffering, Mother at last went to sleep and simply didn't wake up.
We had prayed for that kind of exit from her broken body and mind.

And now, we are without her.

We have begun the first holiday season without her in our midst, shining during her favorite time of year.

I feel broken myself. Tired. Sad. Normal activity requires monumental strength. Today, home with a sick child, I am given the opportunity to reflect and rest. My boy, now eight, wraps his sweet arms around me constantly, or holds my hand, rakes fingers through my hair.... for these weeks, there has been more contact even than usual. We have given up the pretense of starting him in his own bed even.

Driving in from "town" to Papa's house the other evening, our boy asked, "Where are Diggy's ashes?" When asked by his father why he thought of that at that moment, our boy replied that we'd just passed the place in which he and I last saw her, a week before she died there.

These associations tether us to the living and to the truths of being part of something larger than ourselves. The very next morning, my husband, who'd brought fresh laundry up to the bedroom of my teen years said, "I really like our kid. I just like him so much. Somehow, folding jammies always makes me think of that."

Our boy has encouraged me to again go on a Facebook fast, as I did last Advent. "I get more time with you," he says. And so....

My sister and I created our Advent wreaths this year from cuttings from her yard, dried grape vine wreaths and candles procured by our husbands, holders lifted from Mother's considerable stash.

We are quiet. Waiting. Hopeful.

• Unexpected God, your advent alarms us. Wake us from drowsy worship, from the sleep that neglects love, and the sedative of misdirected frenzy. Awaken us now to your coming, and bend our angers into your peace. Amen.

Telling it just like you're here.

Oh, Mother. I miss you so....

I've been here in your house, staying with Daddy since the day you died.

This house we moved to thirty years ago when I was sixteen and you were younger than we children are now. You made it a home. Let me pick out curtains that Irene custom made, and we had our friends here for slumber parties and late night swimming. Remember that Jeffrey was Johnny Appleseed in his school play one of those first years, and he sang and looked so cute?

I don't even remember our writing this, do you? After freshman year of college?

Every room here, every nook, cranny and drawer, has you in it. A scarf you wore to a soccer game, or a news clipping from your service to UMW or Church Women United. We keep finding little squirreled away stashes of photographs in unexpected places from mismatched eras and your handwriting is on the backs with names and dates and sometimes captions like, "Not a very good picture of Laura." These things have kept us laughing and crying, both.

Dana and I, along with Laura, went through all your clothing. That was tough. We girls all took things of yours that we wanted and we'll be wearing them -- Dana most of all, as she was closest to your size. Jeffrey laundered and folded the clothing you most recently wore, and declined my help to fold. He has been wonderful, as you know. You raised a good boy into an excellent man, Mother.

And Dana gave a hilarious and moving eulogy at your service. Everyone laughed. Smiled. Remembered how fun you were. Eric says she captured that part of you perfectly.

Yesterday just about dark a floral delivery came from one of  Daddy's friends -- a beautiful white camelia in a basket filled with fruit. A LOT of fruit. The lady delivering the fruit told Jeff and me that you banked with her at First Tennessee for years, I remembered her face.... but that she'd been the florist owner the last year and a half, and knowing you, she overfilled the basket with good fruit for your family. She, like everyone, remembered you as gracious and always smiling. I think that's one of the words about you I have heard most often: gracious. And it's true, that was your way.

I like to think we're making you proud here. Daddy has been kind of amazing, really. Very gracious himself and kind. I keep thinking that you're just a breath away whispering, "You just be the best Joe you can be," and with your encouragement, he's doing just that. The children have been lovely and such a comfort. Every one of them adored you, and my boy told me he knows your spirit lives on inside of his heart. Audrey finds your photograph in one of your church directories and says, "THERE's my Diggy!" The big girls have been wonderful with the younger ones, and I'm glad they'll all help the new baby know you. He hasn't gotten here yet, but little Leo's arrival is imminent.

Mother, I'll admit, I have some unkind thoughts toward people. People who didn't come see you for their own reasons, or were even unkind and dishonest. But I know you, you'd have said, Love them anyway. So I've bitten my tongue, and tried to do as you would -- offered kindness and cried and fussed about it later.

It's hard though, Mother. Because you deserved the best. You didn't deserve the pain and suffering of the last few years. You were supposed to live into your nineties and go on that cruise with me and Dana and the grandkids, go to San Francisco and England and wherever else with Daddy.... I can't face the open years head on and know that you won't be there.

For now, I focus on today, and just the tiniest bit more. It's too hard to do otherwise. I miss you terribly.

Last night I was flipping through television channels and that Hallmark movie Matchmaker Santa was on; the movie that was playing on the television at the Courtyards the last day I saw you before you died a week later. I gasped. You were watching the movie with the other residents while Daddy snoozed on the couch beside you in your wheelchair when my boy and I kissed and hugged you, told you we loved you and that we'd see you soon.

I did not know the next time I'd see you you'd be dead and I'd be seeing your body all cold and stiff at the funeral home. They kept you there for me to see you before the cremation. And even though I knew it was your body, and that your spirit had gone on, I wanted to say goodbye. I left you with a fresh coat of Viva Glam on your lips and kissed you goodbye.

On Friday, I picked up your ashes, and your death certificate. I sat in my husband's car in the parking lot of the funeral home with you in a box beside me and sobbed. I didn't drive back across town until I'd worn myself out and settled into gentle tears. This grief is a real bear, Mother. It hurts so damned much.

We're all relieved, though. Relieved that you are no longer suffering. You never complained. And yet relied upon us for everything. I know that was, as you only said a few times, terrible. And then you'd apologize to us for your needing us. We'd have done anything for you. Any one of us.


And today, I'm going to leave this house and go home to Nashville to my husband and child. I'm going to rent a car and drive back across the plateau to do the next things that need doing and start a job at a new school, help my child make sense of this loss, crump up with my husband in our bed and try to sleep.

It's hard to go, though.... Hard to leave Daddy. Hard to part from this house, from you in every room, in every memory, including that we ultimately couldn't keep you here until the end, even though it broke our hearts.

I'll be back next week. For Thanksgiving. And the beginning of Advent comes just behind that -- your favorite season. I have yet to understand how we'll get through it without you.

But just for today, Mother, I'm going spend some time with Daddy and with my brother, your only son, and pack up and go home to my house for a few days. I am anxious about the drive. I pray for strength and for calm. For safety as I ferry myself from my loved ones here to those there. If you would, please whisper your encouragement. I need it today.

I love you, Mom.

Diggy's Blessing.

Peggy Joyce McDaniel La Grone: December 3, 1939- November 10, 2013

from her Celebration of Life Service on November 14, 2013

First United Methodist Church, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 

Mother Father God, I come to you today broken and full of sorrow, reaching for joy. I call out to you for blessings…. Blessings on the heavy hearted, the ones who sing out of tune or with tears running down cheeks. Blessings on the ones who stumble, who can’t make words come when they want to say, “I am sorry. I love you. I wish I knew how to help.”

Bless the girl who grew up in Deep East Texas and fell in love with a young man who bought her a Dr. Pepper and spent the rest of his life with the goal of trying to impress her. Bless the girl who became a woman who taught school, married, became a mother, cared for own mother through illness and great loss, of her brothers and of her father. Bless her dear sister, loved and lone.

Bless the woman who embodied the radical hospitality of Christ – whose personal viewpoint and politics evolved to reflect the world in which she found herself, a world where families were torn apart by poverty and by war. Blessings on her for working to end them both, for setting the example that her own children would go on to follow.

Blessings on those children who grew up utterly sure of love they were loved, of the grace they were given, even when – especially when – they least deserved it. Bless the daily communion dispensed by way of motherly love and bedside hot cocoa and cinnamon toast. Bless the quarters taped to paper lunch sacks and encouraging love notes on napkins.

Blessings on this family. Bless them in their anger. Their anger with you, God. Their disbelief, their hurt, and their canyon wide missing of the one they cannot comprehend losing. Bless their old saddle shoes in a hat box in the basement, their Pinewood Derby cars and letters home from camp and from college and far away cities. Bless their little child selves in such pain at their beloved Mother’s long suffering, the unimaginable loss, the duties that call them to tend to children of their own who are afraid to go to sleep, even when their little bodies won’t let them cry.

Bless the grey hairs and the exhaustion, the doctors and the nurses and the tearful care takers who weep and shudder. Bless the hand needing another to hold, the shawl needing shoulders, the wheeled chair with nowhere left to roam. Blessings on the remembrances of words she seemingly just spoke, like, “My daughter who sings has come back.” OR “I love you so much I think my heart might explode.” OR  “Thank you.” And at hearing her as yet unborn grandbaby’s chosen name, “Leo the lion.”

Bless the father and husband of near fifty years whose heart is not just heavy, but broken, for he has loved her since they were almost children themselves. Blessings on him, God. Bless him and bring him comfort. Bless the brown recliner which holds respite from gravity’s pull and from the big too-empty bed. Bless the tears that go unwept, as well as the ones that baptize chins and cheeks, and shoulders of tall husbands, of wives ready to bear children, of sisters and of brothers, of small children like cats in laps. Bless the grandbabies who adored their Diggy. The youngest of whom only know or remember her as sick and as dying. Bless them.

Bless them all, God. Bless them. And most of all, God, Bless her. Bless our Diggy, the one that you know by name, by the sweetness of her Spirit, the enormity of her heart. Bless her, God. Bless her freedom from suffering in a broken body and from the shackles of her precious damaged mind.

Blessings on her, and on her people, all of them. The ones related by blood or by marriage or because she claimed them as friend.

Bless US dear Lord. Blessings on us when we falter, when we ask why, when we are not sleeping for nights upon nights and we know that life will never again be the same. Bless us at this time when faith is scarce, forgiveness just a word, but the love that loves that can’t stop loving goes on and on and on.

Blessings on THAT--  Blessings on what she taught us by the way she lived, and in what she ardently believed, through even the worst of it all….

Bless that love that goes on loving in this sweet little messy God filled life.

Amen. 

That kind of love.

I'm home sick this week. First with my boy, who had inflamed lungs and a stellar case of thick snot. And now I've got the parainfluenza. Cruelly, it mocks the flu, but isn't the real deal. Hardly seems a difference.

And so I'm home with my hair in a bad ponytail, wearing a Y tee shirt and a cardigan with yoga pants, drinking mug after mug of hot tea, emptying box after box of Kleenex tissue.

I've watched episode upon episode of The United States of Tara, streaming onto our new Christmas family present television through the new Christmas family present Wii on Netflix.

My boy is back at school in his standard school attire uniform, missing both top front teeth and looking more adorable than I can stand and I have the nicest damned husband in the world who brought me a steaming container of Tom Yum Goong last night.

And today, I'm crying trying to remember the last "normal" pre dementia conversation I had with my mother and there's so much of life, THIS Life, this sweet messy little one, that is good and right and I'm grateful. And yet, I miss my mother. Terribly. It's not fair.

I may be forty-five years old and a mother and a wife myself, a school teacher, a tax payer, a late night laundry doer. And still, I miss my very own mother. So badly.

I miss her able-bodied, well minded Mother self who taught me pretty much everything, including how to love her because I can't not even when there's something different to hold onto.

I know my brother and my sister, they know that kind of love, too. Our mom is the best mom. Our mom is magic.

Thank you, Mom. for giving us everything.

Our mom IS that kind of love.

Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer....

for help in times of fear and upset.

for single parents raising children with mental illness.

for the great suffering inflicted upon the victims and the families of the victims of this senseless act of violence.

for the voices silenced, the children who lost their mothers at the hands of a very troubled young man.

for the children left behind without a best friend or a beloved teacher, without the prior sense of safety and of innocence.

for the mothers and the fathers in Sandy Hook and their paperboys, their newscasters, their truck drivers and nannies; their bakers and store clerks and city councilmen and women. for that community, please God, grant them peace. grant them comfort in each other in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

for all the teachers and the mamas and grannies and fathers and uncles everywhere like in Nashville and in Dallas and San Francisco, in St. Paul, Denver and Philadelphia.... the ones who are weeping and watching their children sleep, worrying about other families in other towns, or wishing their own dead children could come back from cancer or overdose or maybe a car accident.

there is such great suffering. it is hard to understand. to wrap even the most agile of hearts around....

please and thank you and help: these are the prayers today, yesterday, into the new week as laundry spins, fractions are added and subtracted, maps are studied, ornaments are hung, choirs sing and families gather to hold one another another day, another year, another little while.


we want things to be predictable here on earth with the excitement coming from things like roller coasters and new babies and chili cook-off winners and beautiful new postage stamps on love letters. we want all the rent hearts to be mended, the cleaving couples to come back together, the church to stop pointing fingers and fussing about who marries who because love is love is love. we want every man, woman and child to have plenty to eat and a warm place to go where he or she can get plenty to eat and the ones that love them open their arms.

we want to stop weeping at the brokeness and the senselessless, the confusion. we want to say, Enough!! Everyone brush your teeth and go to bed. Tomorrow will be softer, we will find an answer.

Mother-Father God, I'm not sure that can be. but it's what we want here.

I want my students to be safe and well fed, to learn how to read and multiply, to believe in themselves and to become productive citizens of the community. I want not to get out of work at four o'clock in the afternoon while I've been teaching children in a poor neighborhood -- one that knows violence and unmet desire well -- to learn that north of me by several states, a man walked into a school and shot up a bunch of people for reasons we may never understand. I want to get to my child across town fast, so fast, and drive him home even if it takes two hours through the traffic and he falls asleep.

thank you for that. for that small inconvenience of time, with the sweetness of my lightly snoring son in his booster seat while I am driving in quiet. thank you for no radio or television over the weekend, but instead Christmas carols and a husband who loves us and a place to call home. thank you for a safe place to be a family, and to cry for those that woke yesterday in a world where that was no longer true for them.


it isn't fair, God. any of it. and I've been pretty mad at you this year, anyway. but I'm still looking for you. still praying. still hoping.

Many things have happened since....

our lives went ass over tea kettle.


 In short list form:


 * My brother Jeff and I stayed with our mother during her most recent MRI, earplugs in tight. We got lost in the drone. I laid hands on Mother. I prayed over and over in my head, "Help. Give her peace." Not very eloquent, instead practical, urgent, even desperate. Jeff checked her eyes to see if she was sleeping or awake.

 * My son has now had several sleep overs with his girl cousins and loves his Aunt Dana ferociously. At last, he has made up to her all the early years of snubbing her (and most everyone else) for yours truly. 

* I have attended, with a caravan of co-workers, the pre-funeral visitation for one of the mothers of children at our school. She was struck by a car very near school, and died. We are all deeply saddened keeping watch over the children by day in our hallways and classrooms.

 * As my fast talking three on the Enneagram friend Jo Ellen says -- I expected my job as a schoolteacher in an urban inner city school to be difficult -- Kingdom work. Goodness, love, mercy. Daily, I struggle and fall short of the peace inside I strive toward. I question myself and my abilities in a way that hurts. Still, I show up every single day and give the best I've got.

 * I missed the Holiday Luncheon at my boy's school. Again. Forgot that it was happening. Forgot to send funds. The boy reduced to puddles of tears on the second night in a row I came home late.... sometimes I get home after he is in bed, leave before he's out of it.

 * I am thankful for Katherine and Karen, mothers who mother my boy in my absence. Mothers who show up for the Parents Visit Music Class Day and make our boy feel just as special as their boy and girl, respectively, by loving him up and sending pictures and videos to my phone to include me on his experience. Blessings, they are, these other mothers so full of joy and love and heart-full friendship.

 * My husband, my friend, my man, my love, my partner. My Beloved Mister. With the time in, we're a better team then ever. I tell him that my siblings are concerned about my scatteredness, my repetition in telling the same things. He wisely reminds me that my talking about something is like most people thinking about something. It's how I process. And now that I've given up the Facebook time suck, which in many ways was a way for me to empty my brain, my verbal tics, such as they are, are all the more apparent. We have all had a good laugh over that.

 * Too, I have laughed (again, at my expense, but why not?) about my traveling road show. My cobalt blue station wagon crammed full of hiking boots, apples and clementines and thermoses of water, a box of clothing outgrown as a pass along for a friend's son, glass baby food jars for science projects at school, books and Legos and far too many fast food straw wrappers, extra coats and sweaters and random things piled or chucked in at the last minute on my daily commute, or the longer weekend version across the plateau and down into the valley and back..... My father says, "Hell, you could throw a pumpkin in the back of her car and she'd not realize it until the vine starts growing out the windows!"



Oh, oh. The mistletoe. The cancer. The lack of kid toothpaste in the house. The overdue library books and friends I don't deserve. Merry Happy Wonder.

Help. Give us Peace.

Our Quaker Oats Star, fashioned by me in the first year of our marriage, covered with aluminum foil and  painted with spirals, makes an appearance this year in its naked state..... at the boy's request. 

And what happened was.....

My job at Eakin was not renewed after last year. The funding was reallocated.

I went to school all summer semester long with four classes three days a week back to back to back to back, April to August. I sold Thirty One. I kept kids. We swam. Played a lot of Uno and read Harry Potter and listened to Percy Jackson stories on audio disk.  I wrote a honking ton of papers and did bulletin boards and projects and lesson plans and hunted for a job.

We made a very quick run to Michigan for the Fourth of July. I wrote scripts and taught multi age / multi cultural Sunday School. I felt God being in the presence of children. In holding my husband's hand. In preparing meals for my family.

After a rough Spring semester, my husband needed a break. He worked a couple days a week at the record and comics shop and didn't get his contract renewed at the middle school. We decided it was in his best interest to student teach and go a more traditional route.

Our boy became a spectacular reader and grew many inches. He refused to sleep in his own bed for many many months because of a bad incident at school in the Spring. We're actually still working through it.

My brother and his wife and their baby moved from Boston to Oak Ridge, and moved in with my folks.

My sister's family thrived, even though Dana had a boot for months on her foot and kidney stones. They got a new van, stayed in their beautiful home and Dana began her sixteenth year teaching gifted middle schoolers at the same locale.

Our mother's health rapidly declined. We had noticed it for months. Worried, fretted, made late night phone calls. We googled and asked each other questions. Made observations. She called me up sometimes telling me that her memory was going. In the early summer, she admitted to my brother, which he then told to us girls (through tears) that Mother couldn't remember what went on the breakfast table in the mornings.

Daddy seemed unmoored.

Mother kept falling. Nearly into the creek. Onto the potato bin during the blessing before supper. On the steps. Over her feet. Into the bushes. She had a little black-out incident in the swimming pool.

School started again. I kept looking for a job. We spent all our student loan money on tuition and rent and new shoes for  the boy and car repairs and gasoline to run back and forth across the plateau for me to see family. To figure things out with Mother. To print off resumes and jump through hoops and dream about moving closer to the folks if only the right job materialized.

It did not.

What happened was: Mother had a grand mal seizure in her bedroom on September the eleventh. Daddy and my brother found her. By the next evening, she'd already been in three ambulances and was checking into her third hospital, Vanderbilt this time, in MY city. ICU.

I was offered a job, and declined it, going into the red with our bank account but needing to be with Mother to see what was going on.

The short story is that she had a brain tumor. Had had it awhile. (It'd been missed in a scan a year before.) Hydrocephalus had made her forgetful and unbalanced and it had made her seize. The night before they went into her head with endoscopic instruments, I made a pot of chicken and dumplings and took it to the ICU. My mother, my father, my sister, my brother and I all ate the dumplings together and gathered around Mother to say a prayer. It was Communion, in the truest sense.

That may have been the first time in twenty plus years it'd been just us having a meal together: no boyfriends, husbands, grandbabies, others.

Well, God was there.

In the wee early morning, I had my car valet parked and went up to Mother's room. She was awake and I laid down in the bed with her and we held hands and listened to each other breathe and reminded each other of funny and tender and outrageous things. She reminded me that in life-- and in the event of her death -- her wish for each of us, her children, was this, these three things on which we could base THE WAY WE LIVED:

Love fully. Forgive, forgive, forgive. And: stay true to the Spirit of your Christian core. 

She made sure to express that my core might differ from someone else's and that Christian was based in Christ, not in political garble or evangelical smack downs. She's good that way, my Mother.



After the surgery, everything got messy. Bad. Painful.

For her. For us.

I turned down another job.

My brother tried to juggle his new job and still new baby with being in Nashville so much. Daddy fought with each of his children. We fought with him.

Mother talked a blue streak in word salad and had a hard time orienting to time and place for awhile. Some days we were in Afghanistan, fighting a war. Some days we were in Virginia; it was 1992. Or 1970, somewhere else. In England. In Knoxville. The nurse was the church secretary and her husband was coming to pick her up.

My child turned six. On his birthday, even though he was afraid of Mother's catheter bag and the PIC line in her hand, he and I had a picnic lunch in the ICU with hand picked fancy cupcakes and little plastic dishes of ice cream.

My husband and I were so tired. We'd fight. I'd cry. He'd hold me. I'd promise him we'd make it okay somehow. We'd get more rest. We'd finish school. I'd get a job. He'd finish student teaching.


The day Mother left Vanderbilt on a stretcher being pushed by the EMTs, she waved like the queen to everyone on the way out. I hear the nurses are still using my phrase, "Cover up your pocketbook!"

When the ambulance pulled away, I felt as though my heart had just been pulled from my body and I couldn't get enough air. I didn't know what to do.


I took a job.

I teach sixth grade reading at an urban middle school. It's an incredibly challenging gig, and I work way too many hours a week, up very very early in the morning, staying at school into dark.

I go to school and will graduate in mere weeks. On off weekends, I drive east to see Mother. I help with math homework and shuttle my child to martial arts and birthday parties and make sure his Cub Scout tasks are complete. My house is in constant disarray. We eat a lot of sandwiches. I don't see friends. There is no time. At night, I reach across my six year old and hold my husband's hand and tell him how much I love him.

Last night I said, "I miss you." He said, "I miss you, too, Babe." We know we'll make it back to each other.


Mother got stronger at Patricia Neal doing rehabilitative therapies. She still has some double vision and some confusion. She thought Thanksgiving was this week, she told me on the phone last night. She'd been expecting me to arrive and assigning different ones different jobs like pie baking and such.

She has cancer.


My beautiful amazing Mother has brain cancer.


Already, she has been through it, nearly having lost her life to a fluke virus that invaded her heart back in the nineties.

And now this.


I'm angry.

And sad.

And a fighter. I am the cheer team captain of Team Happy Club.



Sometime during the time of the ICU and the worst of all the days, I came home one night with this revelation to my husband. You know what? I asked --- It's my MOTHER that's the extraordinary one. Daddy's so brilliant with his photographic memory and his charm and the ability to suck all the air out of the room because he's just who he is. But it's my mother who is extraordinary. She's not just the glue. She's IT.


Thankfully, we children have a lot of her in us. I see it in my brother's tender ministrations to her (and his frustration, too,) and in my sister, with her no-nonsense To DOs and her absolute refusal to believe anything bad is going to happen. To mother, or to any of us. I see it in my own need to do SOMETHING, even though I am here and she is now at home....


I set up a meal train and update folks on Facebook. We talk on the phone. I cry in private. A lot. I pray. A lot. I try really hard to love fully. To forgive, forgive, forgive. And to stay true to the Spirit of my Christian core.


A lot of the time I'm bungling things. I forget stuff because I'm tired and over extended and nowhere near the extraordinary woman my mother is.

I'm working on it.

Justice for Henry.

Please read about Henry Granju, his life, his death, and the lack of justice in his case. His mother Katie is blogging the full story as she knows it, and she is actively seeking media coverage. Please contact her if you are able to help in that regard.

Henry was Katie's and Chris' child. Stepchild of two additional loving parental figures. Brother, cousin, nephew, grandchild and friend to many. He could be my child. Or yours.

Love over judgement.