Verbatim (reboot)

Edit: Sometimes when I'm missing Aidan, I go back and read blog posts about him so I can laugh and cry and remember his amazingness. Here's a post that captures an excellent example of his unique goofiness.


I was driving with A. Peevie, and I received a text from C. Peevie telling me that he had found a ride home from work.

"Text C. Peevie for me, and tell him, OK, good," I told him. Here is the actual verbatim text-versation that occurred:

C. Peevie: I got a ride.

A. Peevie posing as me: That's wonderful. What time do you expect to get home?

[Me to A. Peevie: That text sounds parental.
A. Peevie: That's how I wanted it to sound.]

C. Peevie: 7:30 or a little earlier

A. Peevie: Are you going to practice your dark magic?

C. Peevie: Yea...

A. Peevie: Good. When I get home I expect to see zombies attacking our neighbors. And I think you know which ones. Ass.

[Me: Ass? Why did you write that?
A. Peevie: I typed aargh, but autocorrect changed it.]

C. Peevie: Who is this?

A. Peevie: Dad.

C. Peevie: Immature? Ass.

A. Peevie: You know what a baby Amish person is called?

C. Peevie: No.

A. Peevie: An "Amlette!" Hahahahaha!

C. Peevie: -_-

A. Peevie: Aw schiznit! I spilled coke down my front!

C. Peevie: Im done. Im going back to work

A. Peevie: Darvit!

[Me: What does that mean?
A. Peevie: It's an Elvish swear.]

A. Peevie: I am secretly an elf.

Me, later, to C. Peevie: FYI, that was A. Peevie. In case u didn't figure it out.

C. Peevie: I didnt.

_______________________

I am so grateful for the worlds of entertainment and communication that texting has opened up to my family. Seriously, I feel bereft just thinking of those early days of parenting, before we had cell phones, before we had texting, when we had to rely on our limited periods of face-to-face conversation to communicate our deepest thoughts and intimate feelings to one another.

No Other Prayer

To Be Near Unto God by Abraham Kuyper is a series of devotional reflections on Psalm 73. Today I read number ten, "Seek Ye My Face," in which Kuyper meditates on the various ways and depths of experience of knowing God. He distinguishes between knowing God in a doctrinal and in a mystical way.

In looking at the language that we use to speak about knowing God or knowing another person, Kuyper says, “The face, the countenance speaks; speaks by its entire expression, but especially through and by the eye. The eye is as a window of the body through which we look into another’s soul, and through which he comes out of his soul, to see us, scan, and address us.” It follows, he suggests, that the “face of God” is a prominent image in our seeking Him and his seeking us: “…our walk with God could not be illustrated otherwise than by the privilege of being permitted to meet God face to face.”

In the sweaty, selfish, rude world that I inhabit, a world of physical realities like dirty dishes and sore knees and the smell of urine on the bathroom floor, I have to bring myself to a full internal mental stop before I can change gears and find meaning in metaphorical and anthropomorphic language about God. God does not look like George Burns. I get that. “The imagery which here must lend support remains wrapped in mystical dimness,” Kuyper wrote. “A visible face exhibits what is corporeal, and God is spirit.” We are merely using the image of a face.

Kuyper urges us to employ this image to put ourselves in the way of being close to God, close enough to see His “face”—so that “he looks at us and we at him”:

“The main thing is that we no longer satisfy ourselves with a conception of God, a scientific knowledge of God, or a speaking about God, but that we have come in touch with God himself; that we have met Him, that in and by our way through life He has discovered us to ourselves, and that a personal relation has sprung up between the Living God and our soul.”

In my reading and in my prayer, in my spiritual life, in every aspect of my life at this point, I am all-consumed with grief. I mostly cannot care deeply about anything else but about how much I miss Aidan. I find moments of delight with M. Peevie and Mr. Peevie, and rarer ones with C. Peevie because he’s not at home and often out of touch. But those moments are fleeting, and the minutes and hours in between are filled with either longing for Aidan and missing him, or intentionally trying to push that ache to the background so I can concentrate on something else. Trying to push the grief away is like trying not to notice that Benedict Cumberbatch just walked into the room. It's just not going to happen.

So when I read Kuyper, and remember that God is here, God is All, God is personal, and God offers me a relationship with Himself—I think to myself, I should try to act like I believe this, instead of behaving like a practical atheist. If I take this heavy burden to God in prayer, if I seek God’s face, maybe I will find some comfort there.

My prayers are so selfish and self-centered. Really, pretty much 98 percent of my thoughts, actions and words are selfish and self-centered. I’m just trying to get through the day without breaking up into a million Aidan-missing pieces.

Kuyper concludes this meditation with these words: 

“There is a moment in the life of the child of God when he feels the stress of the inability to rest, until he finds God; until after he has found Him, he has placed himself before Him, and standing before Him, seeks His face; and he cannot cease that search until he has met God’s eye, and in that meeting has obtained the touching realization that God has looked into his soul and he has looked God in the eye of Grace. And only when it has come to this the mystery of grace discloses itself.”

This makes me wonder, and hope, that perhaps if there is a God, He is somehow available to me, and that I might actually find comfort and relief by seeking His face. It does not make sense to my troubled, messed-up mind, which only wants Aidan and misses him and cannot fathom the egregious wrong of his sudden, traumatic, and premature death. It does not make sense that anything but Aidan can salve this wound—but I do believe, or at least I want to believe, that this is what God wants to do for me, and can do for me.

Maybe these words can be my prayer, because I have no other.

Flies, Fairy Tales, and Shakespeare

Somebody left the screen door open, and now our house is overrun with flies. I keep killing them with fat insurance envelopes and a TCF Bank flyer printed on sturdy coated stock. I wish I had a fly swatter, but thank gooodness we still live in a world where there's junk mail.

C. Peevie has killed a few flies also, and likes to brag about it. 

He walked out of the bathroom and said, "I just killed another fly."

"Me too," I said. "I added three more notches to my belt this morning."

"You put the notches on your belt?" he asked. "I put them on my knife." I pictured him throwing a Bowie knife and pinning flies to the wall, their tiny legs flailing. 

He is apparently unfamiliar with the Grimm fairy tale, The Brave Little Tailor--so I sent him the link.

"Read it," I told him. "Clearly, your education has been sadly neglected."

"OK," he said. 

We both know he won't. You might want to re-read this clever story, however. It's more entertaining than I remembered.

The flies, however, who understood no German, would not be turned away. 

When he drew it away, and counted, there lay before him no fewer than seven, dead and with their legs stretched out.

His heart wagged with joy like a lamb's tail.

I could go on--but I'll just let you read it for yourself.

There are good reasons to read fairy tales even beyond the fact that they're entertaining.  Albert Einstein is questionably credited with saying, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Whether he actually said those words or not, the essence of the quote -- that developing the imagination is key to an educated mind -- correlates with his belief that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Others have extolled the value of the imagination for learning, success, and life as well. 

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. --Edgar Allan Poe

Imagination rules the world! --Napoleon Bonaparte

You can find dozens of pages of quotes on BrainyQuotes, ThinkExist, and similar sites--but the chain of proper attribution on these sites unreliably begins and ends at "I read it on the Internet!"

I don't know how I got from a fly infestation to Shakespeare, but I leave you with these words from Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heavne to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. 

Not Yet.

"Made his final transition."

"Crossed the river."

"Passed on/away."

"Went to be with the Lord."

"Departed."

A euphemism is "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant" (Merriam-Webster). This website offers more than 200 euphemisms for death.

It's still hard, a year and a half later, to say the words, "Aidan died." They stick in my throat like a cinnamon challenge. When I say them, I have to clench my jaw and swallow to hold my facial muscles in place. I don't mind the tears one little bit -- but I hate my lack of control over the ugly, contorted facial expressions of grief.

But I refuse to make this unacceptable death more palatable with euphemism or spiritual platitudes. I don't want anyone to get the impression that there is anything right or OK about the fact that I have to live the rest of my life without seeing, touching, or hearing my son. Aidan, a fourteen-year-old boy on the cusp of manhood, gentle and kind, enthusiastic about learning, funny, quirky nearly to the point of diagnosis--this child died a sudden, harsh death; and we are left with memories, photographs, and flashes of PTSD.

Both C. Peevie and M. Peevie dreamed about Aidan recently; and both of them woke up sobbing into the reality that Aidan is gone. Euphemizing this death does not make it easier. In fact it makes it harder, in a way, by minimizing the harsh reality of our future without him.

I recently attended a funeral where the euphemisms, especially the spiritual ones, were on everyone's lips. There seemed to be a conspiracy to substitute spiritual bromides for real emotion and authentic grief. 

"He's in a better place," they said. "He's still with us; I can feel him."

At one point I offered my condolences to a relative of the deceased. He said, "It's OK. Everything is OK." 

I looked at him in disbelief. 

"No," I said, "It's not OK. Nothing is OK." 

Mr. Peevie echoed my words: "It's NOT OK," he said. 

I saw him two more times that afternoon, and both times he reiterated, "It really is OK."

I realized in retrospect that this was a coping mechanism--but at the time I felt so furious at those words I wanted to have a temper tantrum and say fuck a lot. 

I am still -- almost exactly one year and nine months later -- in the place where every death is Aidan's death, and every funeral is Aidan's funeral. Every grief, every sorrow, every loss is connected to Aidan in a way that I don't really understand. When the grieving relative said, "It's OK", it felt like he was telling me that I should feel that Aidan's death is OK. 

A few days ago the New York Times printed a letter in Philip Galanes' Social Q's column from a woman whose 18-year-old son died a year ago from an undiagnosed heart condition. She said she and her husband 

find it extremely distressing when people we haven't seen in the last year rush up to us at social events to tell us how sorry they are and how they 'just can't imagine' our loss. We know they mean well, but it makes us overwhelmingly sad and ruins festive occasions...What can we do to stop people from launching into their grief for us?

Mr. Galanes suggested a line to divert the conversation--but then took it one step further.

And for the rest of us, hold back, even though our hearts are pure. Sending a condolence note or even an email allows the bereaved to deal with our sympathy in their own time. Let them bring up their loss in conversation, not us.

All of this is very upsetting to me. If I see someone for the first time since Aidan died, I expect and hope that the first words out of their mouths are,"I'm so sorry about Aidan." Because guess what? This is in the front of my mind. All. The. Time. Someone expressing their condolences doesn't make me overwhelmingly sad because I'm already overwhelmingly sad. It doesn't ruin festive occasions because for me, there is already a damper on every occasion, festive or otherwise. We are never without the presence of Aidan's absence.

I find myself avoiding festive occasions not because I dread people bringing up our loss, but because I resent it when people avoid the subject. 

And this whole business of 'let them bring up their loss' is for the birds. I'm sorry, but it is. I will gratefully accept your sympathetic concern and your fond remembrances of my son. But I am not going to hijack the conversation at a social occasion by bringing it up myself. 

The letter writer, of course, gets to deal with her grief in whatever manner feels most helpful and appropriate to her. But please do not take Mr. Galanes' advice about avoiding the one topic that is foremost on the mind of any bereaved person. Say your words of condolence--and then follow her lead. Respect her choice if she says, "Let's talk about this another time." But chances are, she will be grateful you took the risk. For a brief moment, you will have given her a gift, and you will have made her sorrow a mite less lonely.  

Eventually, I hope, I will be able to keep my own grief separate, and allow others the comfort of their own coping mechanisms, rituals, and euphemisms graciously and without judgment. But not yet. Not yet.

Letting Go and Holding on Tight

One thing defines 2013 for me: the loss of Aidan. He died in 2012, but we spent 2013 trying to learn how to live our Aidan-less lives.

I still have days, like Sunday a week ago, when I cry so hard and for so long that I'm exhausted and ready to go back to bed by 2 p.m. But then days go by when I only cry a little bit, like today. I shed a few tears when I write about him; or when I see something Aidan-esque, such as a manatee, a toy train, or a Pokemon; or when I walk past the table that holds photos, cards, and mementos. Mr. Peevie has moments, hours, and days like this, too.

Seattle

I think this is what getting through grief looks like. Midway through the year I said to the therapist, I don't know how to do this, how to walk through this dark valley. He said, "You're doing it." I suppose what he meant was that I was getting out of bed, working, taking care of my family--sometimes badly, and always with the constant presence of Aidan's absence, but I was doing it.

We took a family vacation to Seattle in late June. We had a fabulous trip--as as perfect as it could be without Aidan. Everything is measured by that yardstick, now; everything is viewed through the lens of not having Aidan. Our photographs have two kids in them, instead of three. We asked for a table for four at dinner; we purchased four bus tickets; four people divide easily between two beds. 

Two kids rolling down a hill instead of three.

In August we attended the wedding of friends whom Aidan loved, and who loved Aidan. I started to cry from the moment the groom looked down the aisle at his bride as her father walked her to the front of the church. I cried for Aidan and for our lost future; I cried because Aidan did not get to see his friends' beautiful ceremony, because he won't have his own, or stand next to C. Peevie and M. Peevie at theirs.

I had lunch with a friend later that month, and our conversation covered many topics--but later she said she felt that every conversation should be about Aidan and about our loss, about our missing him. This notion felt exactly right to me. For a long time nothing else mattered except that Aidan was gone.

I think this is at the Space Needle.

His loss was a bleeding, internal wound that would never heal. It was chronic and debilitating. 

There are still times that nothing else matters except that Aidan is not here. Bereavement obstructs my work, my relationships, even my faith. In church, there are still times when I cannot worship, pray, confess, commune, or greet because all I can be and feel is that I have lost Aidan-- which feels incompatible with worship, and especially with confession. I can look at Jesus, but only as a sufferer, not as a sinner. It's like I exist on two different planes, or in two different dimensions; or I'm schizophrenic. If one personality has surfaced, the other recedes. 

But one year, one month and twenty-one days later, I can see that my grieving has changed from what it used to be, when it consumed most of my waking hours. It is still a constant presence, but it is no longer constantly debilitating. Bereavement has changed me--it has changed all of us--but this new, bereaved me is slowly re-learning how to do relationships, work, and worship all over again.

Part of me feels that this reduction in debilitation is a betrayal of Aidan, like I don't love him enough to keep on suffering the most intense and painful grief. But if I let myself go down that rabbit-hole of despair, I would spend the rest of my life not just grieving, but clinically depressed and possibly suicidal. So I remind myself that moving through grief and letting go of the empty despair of those first few weeks and months is the right thing to do for myself, my family, and for Aidan's memory.

Aidan and Mr. Peevie in Colorado, 2011.

Continuing to let go of debilitating grief, but holding on tight to Aidan, to my memories of him, to the things he loved and valued, and to the lessons he taught me--this is where I hope 2014 will take me. 

But god, I miss that kid.

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, Aidan died. 

We had spent the afternoon with Manuel and his wife, Mrs. Manuel. (I wrote about Manuel here.) Manuel rudely moved to North Dakota in June 2012. We all missed him, but Aidan missed him most of all. Manuel and Aidan had a tender friendship: as the youth director at our church, Manuel gave Aidan spiritual insight and support, academic help and encouragement, and loving acceptance. Aidan gave Manuel—what, exactly? I’m not sure, but Manuel described their friendship this way when he gave a remembrance at Aidan’s funeral:

I have found myself treasuring the memory of a young man who quietly defied convention. Though our friendship was brief, I will forever be grateful beyond words that Aidan allowed me to be a part of his beautiful and complex inner world... Our friendship was initially established in the realm of the imagination--his mostly...

I discovered a boy whose favorite hobbies were creativity and imagination. These were not static nouns to him--they were his every waking moment. Dragon lore, reference manuals on mythical monsters, fantasy novels, and poetry all captured Aidan with a sense of wonder. It was a regular sight--Aidan staring off into space, only to whip out a spiral-bound notebook and begin drawing furiously; and then creating action statistics in case this new character made it into the card game he had invented.

I love that he was able to capture Aidan's essence so beautifully.

Two weeks before Aidan died (Aidan died. Will I ever be able to hear or say those words without receiving an emotional concussion?) he had told me several times how much he missed Manuel, wished he could see him, and wondered if he would come back to visit. “I need to talk to Manuel,” he told me at one point. I told him we’d be having lunch with him after church in a few days, and his face lit up. “How long will he be here?” he asked. “Probably for at least a few hours,” I said. “I’m sure he wants to spend time with you.” He smiled his curvy Aidan smile. I don’t remember, but he probably hugged me, because he rarely passed up an opportunity for a hug.

We had lunch together around the kitchen table. We ate corn and wild rice chowder with polish sausage, and crusty Dutch oven artisan bread straight out of the oven. Manuel, a frequent bread baker, was impressed with the simplicity and ease of the Dutch oven recipe.

I want to remember every word of our conversation around that table. I remember that M. Peevie and C. Peevie dominated the conversation, and that Aidan was quiet but happy—but I don’t know if this is a true memory, or just a typical meal-time scenario. Whether he said much or little, I do know for sure that Aidan was happy.

Manuel left, and a half hour later Aidan collapsed, was rushed to the hospital, and was not able to be resuscitated. Manuel and Mrs. Manuel joined us in the ER, along with our pastors and several friends. We sat in shock; our friends surrounded us, and we clung to them. Mrs. Manuel wrapped her arms around M. Peevie. 

"I don't know how to leave this place without him," I said, over and over again. But we left, eventually, and went home to a house filled with neighbors and friends who somehow understood that showing up was the right thing to do. They came, with bleak expressions, offering their tears and embraces. I think 40 or 50 people showed up that night.

I cried a bit in those first few hours, but mostly I felt numb. My tears did not come until four weeks later, even though I desperately wanted to cry. 

In the weeks and months following, we have slowly re-learned how to breathe, how to laugh, how to somehow live our Aidan-less lives.

How often--will it be for always?--how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss until this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.                                                                                    --C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Thirteen

Hello InterWebs,

M. Peevie here. I took a year off from guest blogging my annual birthday post on The Green Room. I was working on my post last year, didn't quite get it done, and then my brother Aidan died. As Mim has said, we lost our whimsy--and since these posts are generally chock-full of whimsy, I just could not hit "publish."

(Mim, or Mimsey, is one of my nicknames for my mom. C. Peevie came up with it. I am also fond of calling her by her first name, and I get a small rush of pleasure when her friends overhear this and make a shocked and horrified face. Mim doesn't mind, she said, as long as it doesn't feel like disrespect to her. I guess so far it doesn't.)

Me, Aidan and C. Peevie, December 2011

So. Aidan. Yeah. It's really hard to talk about that. I love to talk about Aidan, and I miss him all the time. Sometimes I wish my friends would talk to me more about him, and ask me about him. The part I don't want to talk about is how I feel about him dying or about how much I miss him, because I don't really have words for it, and I don't know how talking about it is going to make it any better. So I just sort of go along missing him, and remembering him, and telling Aidan stories when I get a chance.

So much has changed in my life since my last post when I turned 11. I am nearly thirteen now, and I am a different person.

I left my little school where I had lots of friends, and teachers who love worksheets and who sometimes seemed to love rules more than children, and went to a big school, Whitney Young. I went from having two brothers at home to no brothers at home because C. Peevie left for college in August. I went from being a pre-teen who likes big words like "anthropomorphism" to an actual teenager who still likes big words like "precipitously" and "petrichor" and "sesquipedalian." 

I went from getting straight As in school without breaking a sweat to getting almost straight As but definitely breaking a sweat. When I was 10, I wanted to go to DePaul on a softball scholarship. When I was 11, I wanted to go to MIT to study architecture and engineering. And now I have determined that it makes more sense to get a liberal arts education first, so I want to go to DePauw University, and then maybe MIT, or maybe somewhere else, depending on where the liberal arts take me.

My school is great. I have new friends (Hi MK! Hi BB! Hi Beckham!). I like that my classes help me understand important topics in our country like the Affordable Care Act, the debt ceiling, and the government shut-down. I made advanced honors band, which keeps me awake at night with anxiety. I have to keep up with kids who are in high school and who have A LOT more experience than I do. 

I am riding the school bus for the first time (boo) with other seventh and eighth graders who are loud and obnoxious and immature and annoying and stupid. They make me envy deaf people. I also take CTA now (yay), and have my own Ventra card.

It might interest you to know, InterWebs, that I have become a Fangirl. Fangirls are girls (duh) who are fans (duh) of certain TV shows, movies, and actors--but we are more than fans. We are obsessed. My particular areas of obsession include Doctor Who, Sherlock (the BBC version), Supernatural, and the Marvel Universe. I'm pretty sure that Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, and David Tennant all love me as much as I love them, which is a lot.

Oh, and I am now a card-carrying Nerdfighter--one who is not ashamed to be intelligent, and who fights to decrease WorldSuck. Nerdfighters are entirely composed of awesome. I highly recommend that you check out the books of the Nerdfighter in Chief, John Green, and in particular, The Fault in our Stars, which I have read multiple times.

That is about enough for now. This is M. Peevie, signing off.