Angry messy grief

I don’t do funerals. I don’t grieve ceremoniously or corporately. When I grieve, it’s messy, and there’s no make-up involved, but there usually are a lot of cigarettes. So this weekend I’ll be going to a wedding, not a funeral. Not because I’m running away, but because I’m facing what must be faced in my own way… with my iPod turned up as I chase five hundred miles of highway in the opposite direction of the funeral. And this weekend I will laugh and I will shed tears and I might not be sure why, or which is which at any given moment. But that is my mourning.

My uncle’s words, written mere hours after losing his wife:

“Where do I stand now? I am DEFIANT! I hate cancer and all other sickness now more than ever. I expect divine justice to give me back seven-fold or more in healings what I have lost tonight. I am even more determined that what I saw tonight, droplets of blood spraying from Vicki’s nose and mouth as she breathed her last breath, was not God’s will – it’s what Jesus died for in our place. I will not make peace with the enemy of eternal life (sin) or with the enemy of physical life (sickness) and call it God’s will. I will call it mystery – the secret things of God that I do not understand (Deut.29:29), but I will not accept it as some heavenly ‘status quo’."

Until I read these words I had nowhere to place the anger I feel in response to this – yet another – monstrous hit to my family. I tried to place it on God, but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t escape my belief that he is good. And so I carried it until the truth of these words pierced me. Now I see clearly that I am angry towards an enemy which is constantly present yet already defeated. I am angry at this disjointed world, operating contradictorily from the way it was meant to. I am angry because I’m stuck in a temporary existence and it hurts, and I long for the eternal fulfillment my aunt stepped into last night.

Random thoughts

Some thoughts I've been thinking as of late:

The proposition is that you cannot know someone completely until they're dead. This is because, at any moment in time, you can only know someone for who they are at the time. You might know who they have been, but you can't know who they will be, so you don't have a holistic knowledge of them. Say my friend Erica somehow manages to put up with me for another 50 years, and then I die. When she remembers me, she is able to know me in a way she couldn't during the 50 years we were both alive. Because only once I'm dead, can she have a holistic view of me. Whereas when we were both living, she only knew the version of me that I was in the moment. It's like when you're reading a novel: your knowledge of the characters is limited to who they are on the page you're reading. But once you've finished the novel, you have a holistic view of the characters... they are every version of themselves at once.

Peter Kreeft says that our heavenly bodies will be so coated in our essence, so saturated in who we are, that every square inch of us is recognizable to others the way that only our faces are in these earthly bodies. This idea is similar, only it goes beyond physical recognition to the soul of a person. I've never thought before that I can't know someone completely until their life is over, but once it is, who they are contains who they were in every stage of their earthly lives. So in heaven, or when the Kingdom comes to earth, we will all be the most holistic, complete versions of ourselves we could ever be, and we will know one another more fully and holistically than we ever did on earth. It will be as though the child Lauren and the teenager Lauren and the young adult Lauren and the wife Lauren and the mother Lauren and the cranky old woman Lauren are all layered on top of one another to form the true version of me. And and everyone will see each of those layers when they look at me.

(This idea is not mine originally; it was inspired by a realization Sheldon Vanauken records in his memoir "A Severe Mercy")

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Needs vs. wants: When first considering this relationship I concluded that there’s freedom in recognizing the difference between our needs and our wants because it influences our perception of God. For instance, if I don’t end up going back to South Africa and I fail to see that desire as a want (vs. a need), I could be very angry at and hurt by God for not allowing me the fulfillment of what I perceive to be a need.

Upon further reflection, I think that’s wrong.

And this is why: as long as we’re the ones determining which desires are wants and which are needs, we’re caught in that trap. I think to achieve freedom we have to offer up everything – every longing in our hearts – without division or priority or importance, and trust God to provide for us. It’s more complicated than just putting some desires in the “want” box and some in the “need” box. It’s about timing, it’s about our process and growth and I think the same desire could be a want one day and a need the next, depending on where we are. And who can know that but God?

At one point last year I was feeling neglected by God; like maybe he wasn’t seeing me for who I am because I was feeling very unfulfilled despite the fact that all the “big” things in my life were in place. As a result, I was growing distant from him, because when I’m disappointed by God I go into hiding. A friend recommended that I talk to God about every little thing I felt I deserved or needed or just wanted real bad. That was a struggle for me, because though it’s always been natural for me to ask God to provide an apartment and a job and the finances to make tuition payments. But asking him for things that were more emotional - things I felt were irrational - was completely foreign to me. And the biggest challenge I had was fighting the urge to screen all my desires through an “is it a holy desire?” screen. The moment I recognized a desire hidden in my heart, a trillion things pop into my head: “you only have that need because you’re damaged” and “you should want God to fulfill that instead of asking for someone or some thing to” and so on. But the fact of the matter is, my longings are what they are: damaged and idolatrous and selfish and all the rest. Period.

So that’s what I shared with God, and I fought the urge to clarify and qualify everything I said. I just expressed it how I felt it, and I cried over it and I just handed him that sloppy, irrational, slimy, needy mess. I did that with dozens of things: desires I’d never even expressed out loud before. And afterwards I felt as though I’d dropped a burden off. I guess that’s what I did.
Because even though lots of the things I asked him for and whined about not having may not be things I really need, he knows that, and he won't accidentally hand me something that isn't good for me. The key is that we don't have to try and decide what’s important enough to ask God for, but to ask him for everything we want, everything we feel we need, and have enough faith in him to provide for us what we really do need.

(This line of thinking stemmed from a conversation with a friend.)

Sterling

His mother named him Sterling out of bitterness. His father had given her a sterling silver wedding band along with a promise to replace it with a gold one when they had gotten a bit more settled and the money was there. But by the time he was born she was still wearing the old ring, and so he forever bore the mark of her bitterness in that moment. Of course Sterling didn't know the meaning behind his name until later. He was about sixteen, as he recalls, when his mother stopped protecting his father. It began slowly, her subtle slander, but quickly grew - as most things of that nature do - into a habitual and ferocious dialogue. Or actually, it was more of a monologue, for Sterling never had much to add to her diatribes. His memories of his father were sparse and hazy at best. He could remember a particular afternoon when he was about four; his mother had gone to the country to visit with her sister Constance, and his father's deep contempt for Aunt Constance compelled him to invent a reason to avoid the gathering. So it was just the two of them for a few hours, walking around town and lunching in the park. Sterling remembers the day in scattered snatches: his father swearing when he spilt strawberry ice cream on the front of his dark jacket, introducing a wide-eyed Sterling to his friends at the pub, the look in his eyes when he talked to the woman in the red dress. Just before his mother was due to return home, the man with a pink stain on his stomach marched up the stairs to their dark wooden door with a sticky-cheeked mite slung over his shoulder. But these memories were rare, mostly Sterling remembers a sense of longing when he thought of his father...

My todays

I've been in Texas for seven weeks now, which is the longest amount of time I've spent here since I moved out five years ago.

My life here is so different from my life in New York. For instance, in Texas people frequently use the freight elevator to get to the second floor of their warehouse style office building. In the city we walk dozens of blocks every day, and bounce up and down multiple flights of stairs just to ride the subway. And when we take the elevator, it's not because we're lazy, but because we work on the 67th floor (or whatever). Here I'm trying to get used to paying $4 for a gallon of gas, instead of $80 for an unlimited train card. I bitch about it alot but the reality is that I'm only paying $3 for every beer I drink here, so it probably ends up about even. When I'm engrossed in my life in New York, my weeks fly by so fast I feel like I barely get the chance to be in them. Here life kind of marches along: steady, dull, consistent, predictable, yet at a brisk pace.

Every other Tuesday a woman comes to clean my mom's house. This cleaning lady is the worst bed-maker I've ever known, so here I don't wash my own sheets, but I do remake my bed every two weeks after Rosario makes her pathetic attempt at it. Here I have to take my nose stud out before I report for my intern duties, but the president of our mortgage banking company wears Nike tennis shoes to work every day. Here the world seems a bit upside down...

... in some ways...

... but in other ways it makes a different kind of sense. I'm greeted every morning by a fresh pot of coffee, thanks to my early-rising father and his commitment to a good strong cup to start each day. I spend an hour and a half every day in the private, protective capsule of my brother's Toyota. This is my time to think, pray, sing along to my iPod, or simply exist without interacting with the outside world. Barnes & Noble is where I spend most of my lunch breaks, and on the weekends minutes fly by while I sit under the sun lost in worlds someone else created while reading whatever I want. Dinners with family and drinks with old friends and breathing and remembering not to underestimate the value of a good twirl when you're wearing a white skirt, and you kick off your shoes to feel the surprising coolness of the lawn. These are my todays, for now.

More

I wanted more
than secret trysts and lies
than this cloak and dagger life
a passion too far off

I wanted more
than almost but not quite
than lonely longing nights
an unrequited love

I wanted more
than tongue and hands and wine
than shutting tight my eyes
to play this losing game

I just want more
like knowing that it's right
and being set on fire
because our hearts aren't ours