Here Again

The weather has finally turned in Galveston.  I'm sure that to anyone from farther north than Dallas, it appears we've merely turned our nose towards fall, but the skies are gray and the water is choppy and winter at the Beach is still winter.  I've enjoyed the reprieve from cold weather that comes from moving farther south, but last night when I took Gareth out for a bit, I had to make sure we both wore jackets.  As the breeze blew over me, so did unhappy memories.

It's November again.  If months have colors, November is gray to me.  It was in November that the police first contacted Cliff about our impending ordeal.  It was in November that he was convicted and sentenced to prison.  It was in November that my dad's cancer got its name.  My facebook feed is full of people celebrating November - some are writing novels and some are growing beards and some are donating money to charity and some are recounting their thanksgiving each day.  But I cannot celebrate this month.  The cold winds start blowing and with them come the ghosts of the past three years, and the chill in the wind merely lets me know that it's time to gird up my loins and trudge towards December.

Thankfully, this month only has 30 days.

All the newness of my life here most assuredly helps mitigate the power of these November days.  I have plenty to focus on at church.  No one here remembers those days and their ignorance is actually a boon: there is no pity in the eyes of those around me.  I do not have to drive past the dreaded courthouse, or take the turn to my house and wonder if the police will be there; I do not have to pass by the community theatre where Cliff took our wedding vows in hand and ripped them as if they were fragile muslin.  Here, there is only the water and the rocks and the sand and the strangers and local businesses and the life yet undiscovered.  

But it's still November.

The song of this month is a sad one, melancholy notes, minor chords sliding around in the air,  plaintinve sighing strings and wordless choral moanings.  I think perhaps that it will always be this way, though the years will blunt the jaggedness of the pain until all that is left is the song, the song and the memories and the wind like a sigh that the whole earth lets out on my behalf.

I am far enough from those knife-sharp days, though, to see the people around me and wonder.  Who else is swimming through memories like I am?  At the post-office, in my congregation, at my son's daycare, who else feels the cool weather change and finds themselves unhappily transported back into their own past? Or who is frenetically celebrating these current days because they have made it through their own painful anniversaries?  Or who is looking ahead to the days to come and planning their survival strategies?  We are all around you my friends - perhaps you are one of us.  The invisible crowd who carry on with around you, shouldering our tragedies and unshed tears like modern day Atlases.  

November is a time when I frequently find myself standing still, gazing at horizons.  My mind wanders widely during these days, and I cannot help but stare out beyond the people and places around me, vision cast out and searching the vast expanse of sky.  I have less words during this month, less coherent explanations, fewer stories to tell; I have less words and more need for silence while I listen to the song my soul is trying to sing.

I named my blog "Lonely Bird" after Psalm 102, a psalm of grief and loss that contained these haunting words: "I am like an owl of the wilderness, like a little owl of the waste places.  I lie awake; I am like a lonely bird on the housetop."  In the wake of all the tragedy that swallowed me up 2 years ago, this psalm seemed to speak most closely into my broken heart.  And though since then I've found joy and peace and happiness again, November is the time when I return to the roof of my soul and perch like the little owl of the waste places, lonely and fluttering in my memories.  I won't stay up here forever, my friends.  I've life to come down to now.  But still, this is a retreat I must make.  These are days that must be counted.  These are memories that must be aired out again.   Even gray Novembers have their place.

26 more days.

Piecing Together

Yesterday I ran across and was stopped in my tracks by an opinion piece in the New York Times (go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/great-betrayals.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&).  At it's heart, it was a piece about the nature of memory and betrayal and how the latter always rends the former.  I felt my spirit ring like a bell when I read it; it was as if she had written about the titanic struggle of my last three years.

Last Thursday, I went through an album of my facebook pictures looking for an old-but-cute picture of Gareth and myself to use for "Throwback Thursday."  TBT is a creation of social media, first found on twitter but now spreading to facebook and instagram, and it is a way for users to share with their circles precious/embarrasing/funny pictures of their past.  I like the idea but hadn't utilized it much, and so began a run through my memories as preserved by the FB servers.  And while I found a great picture, the process became suddenly and breathtalkingly painful.  In amongst all the other sweet pictures I lingered through, this one made me gasp and then weep.

That is Gareth when he was less than 3 months old and he is sleeping contentedly on Cliff's chest.  For some reason, this picture pierced (and still pierces) me deep into the spiritual wounds that are still in the process of healing.  This picture represents for me everything that was and everything that is and all that was lost.  Cliff, holding our child, knowing the crime he had already committed against both of us.  Gareth, sleeping in the arms of the man who would one day lose the right to even touch him.  And me, taking the picture of a family that would cease to exist (in all practical ways) within the next 18 months. This picture practically shivers on the screen for me, emitting a song only I can hear, a tune that loops over and over, words that repeat: "What was, What was, What should have been, What never will be again."

What was, what was, what should have been, what never will be again.

When I see this picture, when I see any picture of Gareth's early infancy, pictures of my pregnancy, pictures of my wedding and honeymoon and vacations and life with Cliff, I experience the shrieking disjointedness that the article above hints at.  My memories are compromised, just as if a virus had worked its way into the codes of my mind and corrupted everything that Cliff touched.  I cannot trust my memory, cannot even trust the good memories that remain (that are very, very hard to keep a steady grip on).  Every moment, every touch, every word now has a shadow hanging over it, a haunting presence that insistently asks me "was he faithful even then?  was he really at work?  were you paying close enough attention?  did he mean the words he said to you? Is it real? Is it real? IS IT REAL?"

I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T KNOW!

...i dont know....

I am not the only one, my friends, who has had to piece together life again after years of being lied to.  And it is as devastating as it seems - to look back into the bright and dark roads of your past and not be sure what actually was true.   Thankfully, my marriage and life with Cliff was not the unifying narrative of my life; thankfully, I had long ago sunk my identity deep into my call as minister and follower of Jesus.  Still, my marriage had entered into the larger sense of my story and uncovering the pervasive and corrupting lies that were woven throughout it from it's inception was violently disturbing. My memory, in part, has become an untrustworthy place, a room filled to the brim with shadows and prowling ghosts, every beautiful moment of joy and peace and love from my years with Cliff suddenly taking on sharp edges and yellowed tints and the smell of rot.  

Who was he?  Did I really know him?  Could I have?

So many questions.  Questions unanswearble.  Questions that cut me still.

The future is built upon our present moments and the past as we understand it.  And I am thankful that I found a therapist who could help me hold together my precariously fragile sense of self while I struggled to believe that there could be any future for me and gareth (and cliff) that had any wholeness or joy in it.  But what gives me strength and courage and even the footing to go forward now is that larger story that I situate myself in (the Kingdom of God) rather than the story that turned out to be a dark parable of "What Marriage Should Never Be."  I cannot dwell too long in the darkness and loss of the years of lying that my relationship with Cliff turned out to be because there is no way for me to piece it together, no way for me to make sense of it, no way to pull any kind of meaning or purpose from it.  

I force myself to turn my eyes from the chaos of those memories and their grating cries and towards the God who has been my constant.  To my boy who was created in but stands apart from the pain.  To my church and my vocation that cannot be taken from me.    I turn my soul towards a future and memories yet to be made and try to release the fury (and the grief) that years of my life have been darkened by confusion that may never be lifted.

The work now, of course, is to let the broken tales of my past stay within the past; to refrain from pulling the painful threads of my memory into my present and ruin what is and what could be.  Pray for me, dear ones?  Pray that I would relinquish my grip upon my memories and the prideful impulse that drives me to make sense of them, to order them, to write a story best left unwritten.  Pray that I would let the dead stay dead and instead open my heart to the new, to the risks ahead, to the life and possibility and potential memories that await me outside every door.  Pray that one day, I would look at this picture and only sigh with the melancholy all parents feel as their children grow.

The Day Of

November 17th-18th of 2011 were the worst days of my life.  When Cliff was convicted on all charges, I went to bed furious and sick at what I thought was a miscarriage of justice.  The next day I discovered my emotional turmoil had been ill-informed - my husband confessed in front of our friends, our family, the jury, the lawyers, judge and news reporters that he had had a sexual relationship with a 16 year old while I was 8 months pregnant. My mother broke the news to me over the phone and I remember the feeling of the earth dropping out from underneath me and the sensation that all sound around me had ceased.  Not only had I been betrayed, but I didn't even have the privilege of being told about the betrayal first.  The local newspaper knew before I did.

The psychic wreckage was unfathomable.  Not only was I dealing with the aftermath of infidelity, but I also had to come to terms with a broken family, single-motherhood, endangered job prospects and possible financial ruin. And the fact that anybody with an internet connection could know my deepest pain and private family tragedy and have an opinion about it.  I've been seeing a therapist since October of 2010 and her help has been critical to my continued mental, spiritual and physical health.  No one comes "standard" with the skills to cope with the level of devastation that I and my family underwent in November of 2011, and her counsel has helped me to navigate the apocalyptic-ruined landscape of what my life became last year.  And this doesn't even factor in my father's cancer diagnosis only one week after Cliff's conviction.

The last year has been one sharp moment after another - Thanksgiving, my Birthday, Christmas, New Years, Cliff's Birthday, Valentine's Day, Gareth's Birthday, Mother's Day, our Wedding Anniversary, Father's Day, Fourth of July, Halloween - my progress through life resembling step after step after step through sharp glass.   Every memory was a booby-trap; Every family gathering was a reminder of pain; Every visit to Cliff's prison a jarring journey.  So you can imagine that I approached this last week and this Thanksgiving holiday with a certain amount of trepidation.  I was afraid that I was about to become Alice and fall down the rabbit hole into a land not-so-wonderful.  There be dragons here.

Except...

Except there wasn't any hole to fall into.  I had a couple of fleeting moments when I shed tears (leaving Target and watching several episodes of Deep Space Nine), but mostly this terrible anniversary has lacked any power to bring me low.  My counselor says that it is a sign that I am experiencing healing, that time has leached the poison of these days, that I am progressing normally through the process of grief.  And I think that my decision to have an "Early Thanksgiving" with my family helped to strip the heaviness from this week.  But my lack of debilitating remembering has been confusing for me, and mostly what I have been feeling during these days shadowed by dark memories is guilt.

Guilt that I am not wracked with bitter tears.
Guilt that I am not expansively angry at my unasked for fate.
Guilt that I have not desire to gaze out windows with melancholy brokenness, sighs spilling forth.
Guilt that I seemed to have healed (at least, in part) from what I thought was a mortal wound.

Is this guilt normal?  It wraps around me, but I try to shake it off because I do not wish to return to those wretched first days when I stood stunned in my own emotional holocaust.  I have no desire to cry so much that I leach my body of salt.  I do not wish to experience the disassociative state which I lived in for so many months, months during which I could not accept that this TRULY WAS my life.  I was blessed by the outpouring of love, gifts, money, cards, help, company, but I never EVER again want to suffer so deeply that my whole support system has to turn it's gaze inward to care solely for me.  I want NONE of that.  But I still feel guilt clinging hard onto my back and whispering into my ear "No tears? What's wrong with you?"

Facebook has been overtaken by a daily naming of "thanksgiving" by many of my friends, family, church members, etc.  And I thought about joining in and decided against it in fear of becoming banal or trite about the good things in my life.  And also, because the things I am thankful for are a bit...sharp.

I am thankful that I don't cry much anymore.
I am thankful that my son seems to be no worse for being raised by a single mom.
I am thankful that some days I am not overcome with anger or regret.
I am thankful that I have survived and that I am only plagued by nagging guilt instead of breathless grief.
I am thankful that my days ahead are now familiar territory, days of loneliness that I know the shape of.
I am thankful that my memories no longer hold me hostage.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Repeat

I've started reading apocalyptic fiction again.  The Twelve was recently released (and purchased for my Kindle) and at the local "Friends of the Library Sale" I picked up a copy of Guillermo Del Toro's vampire book The Strain.  I haven't read books in this literary vein since last November, right after All the Evil.  My immersion into this genre last year was a symptom of my grief: I needed to read books where everyone else's lives were tragically destroyed so that I didn't feel isolated in my trauma.  Slowly I made my way out of these worlds and into less fragmented ones - for a while this summer I was voraciously reading several series that focused on strong women coping with unfair/ridiculous life circumstances.  It was a sign of my healing psyche, as I was self-identifying with these plucky women and also desperately wishing that I would somehow attain magical powers.  (To be fair: I wouldn't have caught the deeper implications of my reading choices unless my therapist had helped me to see it.  She's been invaluable to me for the last two years.)

But I've fallen down the rabbit hole back into these ruined worlds with their desolate landscapes and it only seems appropriate for the time of year.  November 14th of 2011 is when Cliff's trial started, November 17th is when he was convicted and November 18th was when he was sentenced to 90 years in prison.  I haven't been swamped with sadness like I thought I would be; I haven't been despondent at night like I expected to feel.  Mostly, I am feeling detached, like an outside observer watching the recordings of another person's life.  I suspect this detachment is something my brain has done to protect me, but I'm aware of it now because the detachment isn't complete: the vampire books are the sign of a "leak" in my psychic seals.

So I've started "repeating" myself and time is about to start throwing more repetitions at me.  I'm reading apocalyptic books again.  Cliff won't be participating in the holidays with me - again.  I'm in charge of my own birthday - again.  And though I expect these days to have pain in them, they will be the dull pain of repeated blows, of aches brought on by cold weather and heavy rains.  I'm mostly done with the surprising pains of time after a tragedy and I am glad for that.  I expect now that grief will be more like a cold wind than a sharp knife.  Less 3D Imax screens and more old VHS or fragile photographs taken long ago.

If you're the praying kind, throw some prayers my way as well as to Cliff and to all of our families.  I know that I'm not the only one walking into this week and the days ahead with ghosts of tragedy past perched upon my shoulders.  We're about to start walking familiar roads, repeating steps we took not so long ago.

Lighting Candles

Today at church, we celebrated “All Saints Day.”  All Saints is a somber occasion where the family and friends of the recently departed light candles to celebrate and commemorate their lives.  Today I stood by the candles and handed the lighter to person after person, some of whom seemed matter of fact and many who seemed to be walking with the shadow of grief on their faces.  It is a heavy moment to look at the lit candles and see the passing of years, the persons now missing, the seats achingly vacant.

The last time I lit one of these candles was in 2007 for my Great Grandmother Marie Spainhower.  Today, though, I wished I could have lit one for Cliff.  Or maybe for myself.  But mostly for the life that died last November and the life that it has been replaced with.  That seemed worth mourning.

Lots of the talk on All Saints Day is about the losses that have been suffered, the legacy left behind and our own responsibility towards the dead, towards the living, towards our God.  We the living are the Saints yet-to-ascend who face life as it is and the life yet to come.  So it is not all somber remembrance, but also bolstering our collective courage to continue on despite loss, naming the blessedness of what we have had, trusting in a God who calls us along the difficult path that many times intersects with suffering and loss and eventually, resurrection.

And yet, despite the sacred moments of worship today and the ritual of candle light and sorrow, I had a decidedly secular mental intrusion this morning.

  

I heartily recommend this movie.  It’s got a lot of thought provoking moments and themes about government, about choice, about fear, and about liberty.  (Shout out to my dear friend Jetta who went with me to see it during college!)  It takes the story of Guy Fawkes (check out Wikipedia for more info) as a source of inspiration and riffs on the poem heard in the video about Guy Fawkes day (which is tomorrow).  “Remember, Remember” our hero intones, and that seems incredibly apt for the day.

Remember the dead - the heroic and the villainous   Remember the days - the joyful and the terrible.  Remember the history - for which we are culpable, in which we are victims.  Remember, Remember, Remember....

November is the month when we are usually in the business of Remembering – we recount that for which we are thankful ( at least, everyone on facebook is doing so), we dredge up old family recipes for Thanksgiving Dinner, we try to remember which family members don’t get along so we can avoid sitting them next to each other.  And we take note of empty seats and missing faces and lapses in conversation that reveal a hollow shape where a person used to be.

So I’ll avoid maudlin and selfish talk that seeks to place myself at the center of all sorrow and pain, as if I’m the only person who enters into the month of November with dread and nausea.  I’m not the only one who approaches the upcoming holidays with what they have lost in the forefront of their vision.  But for this month, I may be lighting candles more than usual.  Candles to remember what has passed.  Candles to celebrate what was good.  Candles to give me focus and courage.  Candles to invoke the presence of God and to remember that I serve Emmanuel – a God who is with me.  A God who remembers too.

Fantastic Friday

It's probably a hold-over from my days in public school, but I love Friday afternoons. Just the thought of no school/work/responsibilties for the next couple of days makes me giddy. Of course, now I have laundry/cleaning/grocery shopping to do in my free time and Sundays aren't really free since I work in a church...BUT...I still love Fridays. In honor of that, here's a list of the some of the best Friday's in Beffy History:

• Friday, June 8th, 2007 - My last day as a single woman. After the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, Cliff and I met up with some friends to celebrate this next great step in our lives. The sommelier gave us some of the best port I HAVE EVER EVER TASTED IN MY WHOLE LIFE as our wedding gift.
  
• Friday, June 30, 2006 - The day before my sister's wedding. Family was in town, my sister was so happy she could almost float, and I tied so many tiny ribbons my fingers were numb.
  
• Friday, May5, 2006 - The day before I graduated from college I spoke at my college's convocation ceremony that morning and gave a sermon at the baccalaureate ceremony that night (how I got those gigs is a longer story). My parents drove all day long and made it to my baccalaureate mere seconds before I started.
• Friday, April 21, 2006 - The opening night of "The Robber Bridegroom" (a bluegrass musical) where I played the evil stepmother who had a great vampy solo. It was my last show at Ethington, and as it turned out, the last show EVER for GCU theatre. Here are some pictures

What were your best Friday memories?