2025.06.22 Tragicomedies or Simply Life—Both. Lyn Brakeman Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Who cares, and yet everyone cares—enough to laugh and weep together with every passing sigh or groan? Yes?  YES!

                        *  *  *  *

Any abrupt and sudden death is shocking. We rarely understand it, and yet, our grief is deeper than it would be if we’d known all about it, if we understood. And too, we do not know exactly what to do or say. What is most important I believe is to gather and talk with those who are also shocked. No, you will not figure it out, never fully understand it, but yes, you may embrace each other anew and weep together before you leap back into life and doings. Sometimes it is helpful to ask the immediately bereaved what would help them.

I recall one such situation when the only thing the bereaved said was: “Please just sit with me and don’t talk.” 

                        *  *  *  *

In 1979, my youngest sister died suddenly post surgery. She was 35. I suddenly could not breathe, literally gasped and gulped. I guess my body could not take in the shock. My mind, despite medical explanations, could not make sense of this death, could not find someone or something to blame. Time and people in sight, at hand but silently, held me in a net of caring, until my lungs gulped air, and a medical professional diagnosed and treated my asthma. “Probably dormant,” the doctor said. 

*  *  * *

Remember the small scene in the biblical New Testament when Jesus, accompanied by his close friends, looked out over the land, his beloved Jerusalem, and he wept?  He’d just heard that his best friend Lazarus had died.  Dominus flevit. means The Lord wept. 

And here in Israel today stands a small church shaped like a teardrop. It honors Jesus’s tears, his grief. Simply so.   

2024.09.29 FOUNDATIONS, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

“Foundations” refers to many things, one of which is a woman’s undergarments. Below is how I see the “foundations” of this United States of America—with a place for ALL of us AND those who desire to join us legally, respectfully, and with pride.  My piece below was recently  published in online journal, Persimmon Tree. It publishes works of women OVER 60 only.     Love that foundational requirement!   

*  *  *  * 

This is the first United States presidential election in which I, a Democrat, will be voting intentionally against the Republican candidate!  I will also be voting for Kamala Harris, not simply because I’m a Democrat, but because I think her plans are closer to my values about socio-economic justice for all people, and especially for the reproductive rights of women, including, and specifically, making decisions about their own bodies.

 

States are biased by the politics of their geography. Some decisions require broader consideration. We need federal legislation to ensure women’s legal rights, specifically a woman’s right to choose abortion with medical assistance as appropriate for her health and her circumstances.  I appreciate Kamala Harris’s openness and honesty about her views—not simply because she is a woman herself, but because she respects and honors the pain of exclusion any human being of any gender, political party, geography, religion, race or ethnicity feels when robbed of personal freedom for any reason. Any reason.

 

I know all the pain of such decisions. I once sat with a young woman who took seriously her own right to life and freedom. We wept together, because this is a matter of personal wellbeing of mind, body, and soul. Either way one decides there is profound grief, and need for kind and compassionate guidance from an unbiased guide.

 

It is neither sin nor crime to choose one’s own good—as an individual or as a nation. 

NEITHER WAR NOR VIOLENCE solveS or resolveS OR evolveS   ANYTHING OR ANYONE.  

2022.08.07 A Special Date, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Today is the day I was born 84 years ago, some time in the early morning hours. I, of course, was a joy to behold—at least that’s what my happy mother told me. 

Today is also the day, my marriage partner, Dick Simeone, was born 81 years ago. He, of course, was also a joy to behold—at least that’s what his happy mother told him. 

Forty-eight and forty-five years later we met, and in 1986, we made a love choice that grew into a commitment called marriage, the second such commitment for both of us, married to each other now for 36 years come November, 2022. Every night, no matter what grief or anger might still lie unresolved between us, we reach our hands under the bed covers for a squeeze as we say, “Okay, good night.”  A love choice. 

*  *  *  *

When a child is born, few birthing, laboring mothers have a choice about loving this child immediately. It’s instinct. After that, love begins to lose its infant sheen and gets more and more complicated over time, depending on one’s circumstances. You all know what I mean. This post is not a plea for abortion care, but simply a plea for women, the politics of the womb, and the justice and compassion society and the law should guarantee all citizens, male and female and everything in between. 

If, as the early 2nd-century Christian Bishop, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, said, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive,” then it is up to all of us human persons to help make sure that glory happens, that it is visible, honored. Every effort towards this vision involves love choices. What are love choices?  

Love choices are the most difficult kinds of choices. And there are many in life. Love choices are always painful, always require aborting something or someone precious, including oneself. Doing a cost/benefit analysis may ease the emotional tension, but it is merely a mental exercise, emotionally inefficient. No one is unbroken by love choices, personal or professional. No one. Also, no one can be free without love choices. Let’s face it, love choices are hard, specially those love choices you make that you know will hurt someone else. Many women tend to make love choices that leave themselves out, or too far out, of the satisfaction circle. In truth, many men do the same. Love choices are God choices. 

As I age, I have learned that love choices always include worry, just as love itself does. Worry is not about control, but simply what you feel when you love. Love choices, also always, are driven by the energy of deep caring and Love that is available to us but that we do not possess. God’s love is in Love with us—no matter what. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!!  

  *  *  *  *

AND to recall today’s readings from Holy Scriptures, God tells Abraham and Sarai, who desperately want a child of their own for the faith, yes, and for them to love, to wait and trust. And Jesus tells his followers to wait and trust and pray and watch for Christ’s Presence even after Jesus’s death, because, there are warning signs, discord among people, and weather events we can see, and before which we are afraid and helpless. We live in a climate of grief. To wait and watch and trust is a love choice. 

I tell you a story about a young man, a monastic, who recently heard a presentation about the urgency of global warming  and with it, the possibility of a massive extinction event. The man walked into the winter woods, found a lone hemlock tree, dug a clearing in the snow beneath it until he could see and touch the body of the earth. He nestled against the cold dark soil and prayed as if his life depended upon it. He sobbed and sobbed, feeling  grief and love and gratitude as his flesh knew the earth intimately. He laid claim to a “grief like no other.”  

To grieve deeply and truly is a love choice. 

2021.02.28 A Spirituality of Pandemic

Spirituality: The Spirit weaves its way deeply in and through the fabric of life processes making astonishingly foolish paradoxical life-bearing connections where none seem possible. Notice.

The poet says it best: “The point of life is not to succeed
                                     The point of life is to die trying.”  Millay                                      

Give a damn, I say
I don’t care how you do it, just give a damn

Sleep til noon
Rise before dawn

Worship Satan
Worship God
Both will respond

Try silent listening
A crow may caw

Despise and detest
Adore and believe

Jesus told Peter to go to hell
He did   He became Pope

Stop  Sit down Shut up
Multiple times a day
Recipe for prayer
If you give a damn  
 
Introverts: Pipe up
Extroverts: Shut up

True Story: Visit to the infusion center for allergy/asthma injection
Enter at one of a million entrances. Follow signs.
    1. Register here after already having registered twice digitally
    2. Waved on
    3. Forward march—two more corners
    4. Meet Nazi Nurse, brandishing her weapon of choice
        her stance erect, her face stern
    5. HALT!
    6. Will she fire her “pistol”? Will I live or die?
    7. No, she sweeps my forehead
    7. I’m cool.
    8. She fires anyway, questions like bullets. Fever? Exposure? Travel? No/No/No. Then a brand new one: bruises on your toes? Wha? I bend down to remove my boots and nearly fall over. She says. NO, no, no need. (Liability rules!)
    9. Final exam question: Have you been depressed lately?
        “Haven’t you?” I say
        She grimaces, and at last grins.
She gives a damn. I pass muster. Wait here. Fully trained, scanned, and cleared, I obey.

A young blonde nurse emerges to escort me into the lab. Why are you here? Doesn’t she have mountains of paper work on  me? Oh, and I guess you’re not old enough for vaccinations yet? I tell her I’ve had both. “How come?”  “I’m old,” I say.  She readies my syringe, holds it down at her side and just beyond my vision as if I didn’t know it was there and ready to job me. Why don’t they just blindfold people, like a firing squad? We notice and gaze together at an enormous nest high in a tree. Bird? Squirrel?   

One pandemic
Two pandemic
Three pandemic
Four

Global disease
Global warming
Global murder
Global mindlessness

Watch “An Inconvenient Truth”
Rewatch it   Rewatch it

Take a course in Emotional Intelligence.
We are collectively unintelligent—
Toddlers to seniors

Don’t fight
Do not battle
Do not start wars on anything
Just give a damn and work hard

Wage peace
Wars require one winner
and one loser—always.
Wars sow seed for more wars.

American Dream is a nightmare
Dream your own dream

Try Humility
It will feel too big
You can grow into it

Families are landmines—
death-dealing and life-saving
Tread with caution and humble ear
You give a damn. Don’t lie.

True Story: an old man with dementia lies in a hospital bed at home. He is dying. He knows it. So do his family. They bed him down with great care and affection. They leave. He is alone in dark, sleeplessness. He has one last trip to make. He struggles off his bed, crawls first then staggers, then crawls through a hallway and up a few steps. He’s almost there. He lifts his whole body, just enough to hurl himself forward. He made it. He’s on his bed—bed of marriage, bed of conceptions, bed of sweet sleep, bed of love. His wife of years comes to bed and sees him sprawled there. His presence seems abnormal and normal. She is so tired. There’s no room for her in the bed. She angrily tells him to shove over: “Can’t you at least make room for me after all these years?” He is fast asleep and unmovable. She tries kissing and other persuasions before she realizes that he is dead. He gave a damn.

History: Christendom was a word coined in ancient times (800CE) to translate the concept of universal Christianity into Anglo Saxon language. It offered optimism and hope in the face of Viking brutality and invasion. Missionaries would convert the Norsemen to an all-inclusive religion of compassion divine, based on the generous caring ways of God-in-Christ.
    BUT, over centuries, and coming to a new nadir in this 21st century, religions have consistently been perverted by practices of exclusion and persecution in the putative name of the Father whose Sons aspire to carry out His ways. Will we, sadly through revolution and violence, return to consider the universal nature of salvation for all living things—as it was in the beginning?

I wanna be loose and raucous
I wanna be cool and holy
I kill myself with my bipolarity
I grasp at life and let go of life—at once.

Tell your story
Or keep silent
Shout it out
Or shut it up

Take a risk
Make it brisk
Trust yourself
Trust your God
Tell a friend
Take an M&M

Grief
not peace
Is the global unifier

Just give a damn!    

For the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony: The prayer of the psalmist who gave a damn, prayed a damn. (Translation, Pamela Greenberg, portion of Psalm 19)  

The sky unfolds story of your presence;
the firmament tells of the work of your hands.

There is no word or phrase
in which the voice of your creation is not heard.

Throughout all the earth, rope
of your hopefulness goes forth,

and their words reach the end
of the world’s long stretch of land.

2010.10.28 Bare Naked Love

We live in a world that sobs for love—not romantic, dutiful, or tough.

I mean sobbing, aching, sundering love—the kind that breaks hearts, even hearts most hardened by wealth or poverty.

“How much many more can we take?” A woman said in church today, her eyes flooding with tears. She was referring specifically to the mass shooting yesterday at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tree of Life? How ironic. That is the other tree in Eden, the one we rarely hear about, not the one we humans grab for, prefer, the one that gives them knowledge, both good and evil knowledge. That’s what we grab for.  

“Only eleven people were killed, but still . . .”  the woman went on. Only eleven—only?

How many holocausts must happen before we let go of all our pretenses, our masks, our fears, our reasonable explanations, our religious platitudes, the most clichéd being God is Love, and simply sob.

Most of us look for a leader, a teaching, a solution, a word of wisdom, a path, a hope, a savior, a limb to grab onto as a child grabs the nearest adult leg to hold. This morning’s news reported that President Donald Trump declared that this shooting had ‘little to do’ with gun laws and suggested that the Tree of Life synagogue should have had armed guards. More defensive politics. I wanted heart!

But then . . . he expressed horror at such incomprehensible malice—and during “a baby-naming ceremony at a sacred house of worship on the holy day of Sabbath.”  My heart jumped. Maybe he would drop everything, yes, even in campaign season, and go to Pittsburgh immediately? You know the best, most remembered leaders are the martyrs, the ones who die trying.

But then he said: “We don’t let evil change our life and change our schedule.” My heart broke. We don’t let evil change our life and change our schedule?

To let evil change your life and your schedule is the best definition of Christian behavior I’ve ever heard—or the behavior of any good and true human being. To be a christ you have to let down your guard and sob. You have to see the wound, tend the wound, sob and sob and sob. That’s love—alone or together—no props, no fixes, no doctrines, just naked grief. It’s precarious, delicate, the artistry of a funambulist, a tightrope walker. The Bible says this in every story. So does this poem.

The Highwire of Grief

It’s quite the feat
the funambulism of the newly bereaved.
What a treacherous act it is
to attempt freehand balance without a support point.
Weighed down, paralyzed,
but forced to move anyway.
And press forward
by placing another tentative step
after that last unsteady step
into the thin air
on a fine wire
of twisted memories
stretching from there to here—
and all the while squinting through a salty waterfall.

    by Rabbi Janet Madden
      currently the Rabbi of Providence Saint John’s Health Center
      Santa Monica, California

2017.11.19 The Music of Noble Grief Untold

Here's a small inside story, lean but robust. It’s about a saxophone player, the father of a little six year old girl named Ana. It’s about another father who has two daughters—and very long arms. The saxophonist is Jimmy Green. The man with long arms is President Barack Obama.

The public facts to this story most Americans know and remember with varying degrees of shiver and sorrow. On December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, twenty small children and six staff were murdered —mercilessly, without warning, and arbitrarily— mowed down by a gunman with a rifle.

When I heard about this massacre my first reaction was similar to my reaction when I first heard about the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York: “Come on!” I laughed, as if such things happened regularly—and never. I could access neither fact nor feeling—for days. After the Newtown tragedy, President Obama addressed the nation—with tears and grace— at a memorial gathering. Only then could I cry and, oddly, relax.

President Obama flew right away that same day to Newtown, to the school. This is the duty of a president, the letter of the law one could say. The spirit of that “law” revealed a man’s heart. President Obama is a man who is able to govern and to weep, to take authority and to let his heart break visibly, to wage war and to make peace. On occasion politicians can be heroes.

Joshua Dubois (b.1982) head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 2009 to 2013, wrote about that day in “The President’s Devotional: ‘What Obama Did In Secret In Newtown.”  The staff coordinated details, but the president did the difficult pastoral work. The families gathered in classrooms. The president, briefed on names, moved unhurriedly from room to room. He gave each person a hug and asked “Tell me about your son, or daughter.” He looked at and held photos of every dead child. He listened to descriptions of favorite foods, television shows, the sound of the child’s laughter. Younger siblings were tossed in the air, laughing, and then received a box of White House M&Ms. Who knew there was such a thing?

“In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break,” Dubois wrote. Some small measure of love was given to every single bereaved family member: “The same hugs. The same looks, directly in their eyes. The same sincere offer of support and prayer.”  Over and over, for hours.

How can one sustain such authentic tenderness over an extended time—knowing that no amount of comfort or prayer, even from a president, even from God, could be adequate consolation?

According to Dubois, President Obama never spoke about these meetings. “He was nearly silent on Air Force One as we rode back to Washington, and has said very little about his time with these families since. It must have been one of the defining moments of his presidency, quiet hours in solemn classrooms, extending as much healing as was in his power to extend. But he kept it to himself—never seeking to teach a lesson based on those mournful conversations, or opening them up to public view.”

What is not so public is that Obama went to Newtown a second time, just months after the tragedy, to visit the families in their own homes. I am privileged to know some of one of those visits: the one made to Jimmy Green the professional saxophonist and his wife. 

Think of a saxophone and its sound. Is it not the most lugubrious? Although usually associated with jazz, the saxophone can wail out the mourning night—a long sound, the sound of grieving parents, the eternal sound of God’s grief.

Jimmy Green was in Rockport, Massachusetts last summer as a visiting artist for the Rockport Music Association’s Jazz Camp, an educational jazz program for children.

                                     (Green with his saxophone.) 
A good friend of mine hosted Green and asked him, naturally, about his children. She was taken aback first  to hear that he was the father of a six year old girl named Ana who was murdered in Newtown. Ana, he said, loved music and dance, and she loved to love. Here she dances with her daddy.

About Obama, Green said,  “I knew the guy was tall, but I didn’t realize he had such long arms. He just sat with us (Green and his wife) on the couch and held us both together.”

Grief requires a long reach, a reach only heroes can summon. Heroes are people who do good anytime anyhow.  It is particularly hard for very public people—people who have to be constantly conscious of themselves…like being on camera 24/7— to be heroes of this kind. That takes courage, not just feelings, and not simply military action. Heroes touch the heart of God. Heroes keep us alive and wanting to live.

2017.01.15 Victor RCA

This is Victor RCA. He will always be a hero dog in our family. Victor saved the life of John Brakeman who in turn had saved Victor’s life. Victor died just before Christmas, 2016, at seventeen. 

Victor, a white Jack Russell with black patches over both eyes, a charmingly cocked-head pose, and a big barking mouth came into John’s life at the suggestion of his sister Jill the family animal lover. Victor was only a year old and living in a situation which was “plain no good.” He needed a loving home and good care.

John, just 30, was then living in a rented apartment, working as a teacher of fifth grade, and in the midst of managing a life-threatening medical situation that would end up requiring six surgeries, months of recovery, a frightening stint in the ICU, and all the grit John could muster. It was hardly the time to take on the responsibility of a pup, let alone one as noisy and needy as Victor. But the two fell in love instantly, and John took the dog into his home and named him Victor RCA.

During John’s hardest most painful times Victor was a constant companion, eagerly present to greet John when he came home and swift to cuddle up, lending his warmth and affection to John's every day and night. Victor loved to ride with John in the car often licking John’s neck and face from his perch between the front seats. And Victor would respond to John’s commands to, basically, shut up. He knew his master’s voice.

One of the “tests” of a good marriage partner for John was: could she manage to love Victor as well as John? Emily Hotchkiss Brakeman and Victor bonded quickly. The couple married and soon Victor occupied the space between them in bed. He was a dog who managed to worm and weasel his way into everything— even the love space.

Once Victor, who behaved most of the time as if he’d never been fed, managed to hop onto a counter and retrieve a box of chocolates, which he consumed with relish and then walked with his chocolate-covered paws all over a new beige sofa. Chocolate is supposedly toxic for dogs. Not so for Victor whose intestinal system was ironclad.

Victor got along with the more aloof standoffish cat and together they did food tricks. The cat cold execute the the far reaches of kitchen counters from which she would use her paws to bat food down off the counter to the eager Victor.

The family expanded to include a daughter Phoebe, now eight, and a son Dylan, two-and-a-half. Victor licked both children into the family with doggy kisses. John had been fearful that Victor might feel jealous, but not our Victor. His favorite perch soon became the infant seat.

Victor with Phoebe when she was his height.

Grampy Sim adored Victor. The attraction was mutual, including of course forbidden treats when possible.  Once on a visit we were going out and left Victor alone to guard the house. Believe me his incessant bark would scare off any break-in artist before he or she got in. We, however, had a new alarm system. It was as hypersensitive and hypervigilant  as Victor RCA. We set the new alarm and were walking to catch the red line subway for a day in Boston when the police called. Our alarm had sounded its harsh repetitive warning. John and I were puzzled, but Grampy Sim knew immediately what had happened. Victor was moving about, seeking the best bed after he’d given up hope that the door would open to reveal John, and set off the alarm which is movement-sensitive for the ground floor. Grampy sped home to rescue poor little Victor who was not only hoarse but aquiver with terror. It didn’t take long to silence the alarm but it took some time to quiet Victor. The two went for a leashed walk to the park and spent a man/dog day together.

The decision to put Victor down was heart-breaking. Compassion often is. Victor was not only quite old but had a condition that made it increasingly difficult to breath well. Veterinary care had been exhausted. John sent this text on December 21st to the whole family: “He was truly struggling. Last night we were scared for his life. I could almost tell by the way he was looking at me that he was saying, 'It’s time.' Em and I had to make the difficult decision to put him to sleep. It was the hardest thing I have even done because I love him so much. I’m hanging in there but am a wreck. Say a prayer for him. He will miss all of you.”

Victor’s death was sad and peaceful.  John held him and told me later amidst sobs: “I felt his little heart slow down and slow down and then it stopped and he was gone. He’ll never be back.”

Thank you for your life Victor RCA. In the spring we will have a proper burial with shared memories, blessings and prayers as we bury your ashes. Right now they are in a special container with your name and dates on it— and your paw print. You will never be forgotten, beloved dog.

P.S. Let no one in my presence dare say that there is no resurrection for animals—not just pets!!

2015.11.08 Tender Scene Remembered

There is no birthday or anniversary of Dad's death right now, but this poem emerged. I suppose I have not quite moved off the mood of death remembrances: Halloween/All Saints/All Souls—aka The Dark Triduum. And I suppose too that this arose out of spending the day yesterday as facilitator of a retreat day focused on grief. I offered a bit of education and some suggestions and then people dispersed to be in silence and solitude. At the end of the day we gathered as a group. I invited people to share anything they wished. The mood wasn't grim or gloomy,  just vulnerable, hushed. My heart was swollen—not inflamed or painful, simply enlarged as we sat together under the valley of the shadow of death, not overshadowed.


Tender Scene
    by the Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman

I knew my father was dead.
The 6 a.m. call told me so, but
surely he wasn’t dead. Like a detective
I needed a body. Some crime had been
committed, a crime against my heart. All
crimes need proof, don’t they?

I rushed to the scene and saw Mom
making Dad’s bed, neatening, purging the
death-bed of death. This bed where my father
had lain dying for a week, groan by
groan, wrestling his demons, like Jacob, to the pillow—six days exactly—
and on the seventh he rested from all the work he had done.

Dying with purpose is no easy work.
What was Dad creating? A life better than one with no esophagus?
From what did he rest on this cold Sunday in January, 1983?  

There remained
not a shred of evidence of his presence—not even the bedpan, I looked.
Where’s Daddy? The funeral director took him, said Mom.

Cry thief.

I turned and saw proof: Dad, cradled in the arms of Mr. Ahern,
the burly undertaker, his limp body draped across Mr. Ahern’s upper body. 
Dad’s bare legs dangled over the undertaker’s right arm; one of his arms hung loose,
the other tucked neatly against his bearer’s chest.
Dad’s head did not hang loose. Mr. Ahern made sure of that— as you would
carrying a young child off to bed—sound asleep after swearing
he could stay wide awake for “just this one more show”—dead weight.

Or a Pieta.

I’d never seen my father’s body so unclothed—
not quite naked but bare enough.
Doesn’t death deserve clothed dignity just like life?

How in the world did those spindly legs play golf? 
Honestly, you think the damnedest things sometimes. 

My Daddy, Dad, father chose death on the seventh day
in the barely-risen morning. I saw him leave
 on Mr. Ahern’s arm—soon to be ash and bone chips.

I was grateful for the raw viewing, yet . . .what?
I rummaged through Dad’s drawers, found an old golf sweater,
took it, scowled at my mother,
left.

I wore the sweater on and off for
two years—caught the scent of Dad’s soul.
                                                   

2015.04.19 LOST. PLEASE HELP: A LOVE NOTE

There was a note in the bathroom of a local restaurant.The note was an e-mail copied and distributed about the neighborhood. It read something like: Lost, one quadroceptor. Please watch for it and please, please return it. E-mail us if you find it.

For some reason the note broke my heart. It was like one of those painful postings you see on phone poles or in restrooms, or anywhere where someone might notice it and come to the rescue. You know the kind: Lost: a black and white kitten named PussyPoo, or worse, a little boy who answers to the name of Timmy, has disappeared from the park. Last seen wearing a blue jacket—and you stop reading. 

But I’ve never seen a note about a thing, a toy I figured, obviously precious to its owner. Did a child write this e-mail?

I had no idea what a quadroceptor was but I knew this one was very important to someone who was very important to whoever posted the sign—a love note.

A quadroceptor is the classic toy reinvented. It's autonomous.  It flies like a  helicopter, zooming all over the house or outdoors. It even flies through windows. It's a drone!  And some small pilot mans the remote controls.

I imagined that the handwritten note was dictated by a child to a parent. I imagined that they went around together to post it. I thought that the parent couldn’t bear the broken heart of a child, and would do everything to try to fix it, and hopefully would not have launched into a little lecture about, “It’s only a toy!”  Or something more shaming. 

I still look for that quadroceptor—more than a toy. 

Children teach us about hearts and show us the lost art of grieving. Young children feel things deeply and do not easily discriminate about relative values until they mature. Death becomes an enemy only when children listen to adults talk about it. Often, then, death becomes an act of God, a God who “takes” someone away. Is this a body-snatcher God? Honestly I do not know how divine love survives with all the errant projections upon its graces. But children are naturally more given to profligate loving, grieving, saving, and finding than they are to destruction, a behavior they learn soon enough.

Once a cat we had in NYC flew out of a window and fell six stories down onto concrete. She used to race back and forth across the width of our apartment, jumping up onto the radiators at each end and pivoting to race back. One of the radiators was under a window. That day the window was open. I was about nine. My back was turned to the sight but I remember my mother’s face shattered into a thousand pieces. She had seen what happened. She cared little, not at all really, for the cat whose name was Lilliput. But it was my first pet. Sobbing and choking with terror and grief, I ran to the window, climbed up on the radiator sill and looked down. I saw, not a flattened, limp heap of mangled and bloody fur on the pavement, but a small cat slowly rising to its feet to look around and let out the loudest yowl imaginable. Then it walked around trying to figure out a way out of the back alley while my mother and I raced to the rescue as fast as we could. Lilliput was uninjured, though she yowled  inconsolably for hours, which was her right really. She rose up. She lived on for years.  

The note about the lost quadroceptor could have been written by God. And the amazing risen cat  seemed to me as a child like God’s doing. It still does. It’s a heart thing.   

2012.08.22 Death Days

The death of summer sizzle and shine makes me sad enough but when a tragedy like suicidal death strikes and death intervenes on life leaving ragged edges, I say, “Oh my God!” thrice and count it as prayer— a cry from the depths of helplessness to the only Love that feels as if it might just be trustworthy enough to bear up and to last.

A good friend—not long-term and not very close but good—is dead, and I never said good bye. I didn’t know he was going to die.

I remembered an event of some years ago when a friend’s teenage son committed suicide.  The memory of her grief gave me a little distance from my own.

After the shock and the inner explosion of every feeling imaginable, my friend settled into a numbness almost worse than raw pain.  She just couldn’t figure out why her son took his own life and why God LET it happen. She kept praying and praying and praying, asking and asking and asking her almighty loving God to be accountable. God and her friends listened and listened and listened.

I had the mental image of God being throttled by prayers of anguish and unknowing and deep faith.  And I’d thought God was supposed to be the hound of heaven!

Months passed before God, who had exercised superb divine patience, finally was able to penetrate this mother’s beseechings, in a moment I suppose of sheer exhaustion—hers not God’s.  What makes you think I wasn’t there? God said from the depths of her soul. A question not an answer but a question that liberated.

The friend I now grieve committed suicide and left a mystery.  Rational explanations about depression and despair and etc. etc. are helpful, but not healing.  Another friend who knew this man wrote, “Mental illness be damned!”  Sin and guilt be damned as well. Advice, judgments and reason at a time like this feel hollow. 

Still, I’ve had my share of grief and have walked with others through theirs.  I know that suicide grieving is the hardest, in part because it will inevitably involve plenty of ideas about preventability.  I wonder if… What if… If only he’d….. If only I’d……..   And on and on it will go till it exhausts itself and you say goodbye to your fantasies and sob.

My good friend is gone. I already miss his joviality, humor, deep belly laughs, and bear hugs. Most of all I will miss his deep religious faith.  He spoke eloquently about God and praised Christ in song and word—despite the darkness that too often threatened to possess him. I’m grateful for positive memories that outlast cruel twists. 

Suicidal death is a spiritual lemon, one you want to turn into lemonade but can’t and shouldn’t, one that many people curse, but God, who knows a whole lot more than we do, blesses.  So what is the spirituality of suicide?

I dare to wonder if my good friend, and others who find themselves wholly lost, reach out, finally and devotedly, consciously or not, for the one hand they know belongs in theirs, forever and eternally. 

And the grasp holds.

2011.09.11 9/11

Do what you are able and for God’s sake be kind to yourself and all creation. But above all pray, for that is how you will be in touch with your internal arbiter, the soul voice that, at its most naked, conjoins with the transcendent to bring forth goodness and peace.

There is no accounting for tragedy—no need to quantify it, no need to compare it as if every tragedy weren't exactly the same to the human hearts involved, and no need to get even for we can't. There is just a need to name our heart's truth and grieve together.

To share on this day of remembrance I quote from Leo Tolstoi who in 1854 was at the front in the Crimean war. On leave he witnessed a public beheading in Paris that changed his spiritual life forever and brought forth his lasting work War and Peace.

Tolstoi wrote: "During my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I."

Judith Shulevitz writing about the sabbath remembrance in her book Sabbath World ends her fine book with wise and simple words: “We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.”

To pray is to stop, remember, and allow Other to transform your heart’s soul. A sabbath community reminds us to stop, pray and remember to strengthen our collective hearts.