Drink of Life Again

Dear Aidan,

It is a cruel element in the anatomy of grief that your birthdays continue to come and go even though you are not here.

You would have turned--should have turned--18 this year.

Every day I miss you, of course. But on your birthday, especially, I miss the marking of your journey toward adulthood. I am supposed to still be parenting you, helping you navigate this beautiful and scary passage. Soon we will reach the time when you would have (most likely) been gone from our house, living on your own. Adulting, as the kids say. But for now, I still grieve for the loss of young you, growing and maturing but still needing a mom and dad to help you along.

We spent the early morning of your birthday in the ER with M. Peevie, who passed out in the shower. It seemed an uncannily fitting way to start the day. You spent so much time there during your short life that the ER staff knew your name and your face. The scary circumstances evoked an egregious flashback to that traumatic day, three years and seventeen days ago, when we lost you.

In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl observed,

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

For a long time, I felt unable to choose anything but grief and sadness. There were distractions, of course, primarily those that involve loving and taking care of my family. But everything else had been sucked into the black hole of grief.

Nothing is permanent except change. Now my grief is composed of the constant ache of your absence. Certain triggers cut my heart, and I cry: hearing American Pie, visiting your grave in the West Portal, an unexpected remembrance from a friend. But I am learning to live with this "new normal." I'm beginning to experience feelings other than grief, sadness, and depression. I am gradually gaining the strength to set aside grief in order to pursue meaning and purpose. I'm remembering to be grateful.

We spent the evening of your birthday eating pizza with your pals Ben, Nick, Alex, and Gabriel. Being with these boys--young men, really--gave me the feeling of having a part of you back for a time. I could almost picture you sitting at the table with us, abandoning your fear and anxiety and reveling in the silliness and comfort that these friendships brought you. 

Your pal Dr. Steve stopped by, too. We were so touched that he would take a break from the demands of his patients to celebrate and remember you with us. He loved you. He told me he thinks of you every day when he sees your poem on his desk. Your case comes up in his medical conferences frequently as the team of cardiologists and cardiac surgeons continue to improve their understanding of how best to care for their patients. He said that he has started recommending prophylactic cardiac catheterization to his asymptomatic teenage patients. If the parents decline, he tells them your story.

You are still having an impact on the world. I always knew you would.

All of us miss you terribly, darling. I wonder if you are OK. I want desperately to see you again, to receive a gangly, spontaneous hug from you, to hear your voice and your laugh. I yearn for the other side of eternity where the pain of losing you will be destroyed by joy and peace in the presence of Jesus.

When green buds hang in the elm like dust
And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must
And drink of life again.
Forth I must by hedgerow bowers
To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo flowers
Are lying about the world.                                            --A. E. Housman

Sorrow is the Sea

Stay strong, my friend said.

You are so strong, another friend said.

I don't know how you do it, they said. I admire your strength.

I know they mean well. But what does being strong have to do with anything? And what does being strong look like? Sometimes it feels like people who tell me I'm strong have failed to see the real me--or that I have successfully hidden the real me from them.

Aidan died. We observed his memorial day, the two-year anniversary of the day he died, on November 11. Since that day two years ago, we have disappeared.  We have tried to relearn how to breathe, battled the demons of PTSD, and grappled every day with the changes that made everything both easier and harder. 

This is the real me.

There have been weeks when I felt I was past the worst that grief could throw at me, and I was finally beginning to be able to do more than just put one foot in front of the other. But in the past few months, I have been reminded that recovery from grief is not linear, and that anniversary reaction is a thing. 

Aidan, C. Peevie and M. Peevie, September 2010

One day on a long car ride several months ago, American Pie came on the radio. Aidan's favorite. I started to cry, and couldn't stop. I cried for three straight hours. 

Does this qualify as strong?

Sometimes still I cry so much that my eyes don't stop being red and puffy all day long. One day I started to cry at church, and cried off and on for three days. On the third day, Mr. Peevie came home and asked me why there was a roll of toilet paper on the couch next to me. 

"Because we're out of tissues," I said. We had started the day with a full box.

Is this staying strong?

I'm a different person now. I used to love parties and gatherings with tons of people. I enjoyed meeting new people, and could always strike up a conversation with a stranger. I would always go for the joke. I loved to make people laugh. I tended to be optimistic and positive. I think I was fun to be around. 

Now I'd mostly rather stay home. Occasionally I'll go out for a quiet dinner with one or two friends. I have little energy or inclination to socialize. I feel like grief is written across my face. It feels like an infection that has the power to suck the joy right out of a room.

In Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote 

Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that. 

Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day I feel the loss, the absence, of Aidan. It never, ever goes away.  

This is not being strong. This is surviving.

November is the worst month for anniversary reaction. We have many significant family dates, each with its own unique sorrow. M. Peevie's birthday is a time for celebration--but at the same time, it's a reminder that she is growing up, and Aidan didn't get the chance to do that. She turned fourteen this year--the same age as Aidan when he died.

November 11 is the day we will always remember as the day Aidan died--his memorial day. A week later we observe Mr. Peevie's birthday, which also happens to be the day we buried Aidan. Mr. Peevie deserves to be toasted and celebrated, with festivities and presents and badly-decorated cake. But now his birthday is inexorably tied to the second worst day of his life. It's a terrible incongruity. 

Aidan's birthday comes next. Every year I wonder what he would have looked like as he grew into adulthood. On every birthday, I mourn the passing of another year in which our celebrations, vacations, and new memories don't include him. On Thanksgiving, the family gathers around the table, and there is a gaping hole, the glaring, excruciating absence of a goofy-grinned, crazy-haired boy.

I am changed, weak, broken, sad, feeble, distracted, fearful, untrusting, and unproductive. I keep searching for evidence that I am doing this grief thing right. That I'm not crazy or unstable. That though I'm broken and messed up, I won't feel this bad forever. 

I keep getting up in the morning. I keep doing what I need to do--although some days it's just the bare minimum. 

Is that what they mean by strong?

"Why is it so important to act strong?" Wolterstorff asked. 

I have been graced with the strength to endure. But I have been assaulted, and in the assault, wounded. Am I to pretend otherwise? Wounds are ugly, I know. They repel. But must they always be swathed?

I cling to faith because of what I know about Jesus. I can't not believe. I hold the hope of the Resurrection close, and I don't "grieve as others do who have no hope."* But I struggle to participate in the communal, emotional aspects of worship. I can barely sing at church, unless the song depicts the "not-yet" part of the "already/not-yet" equation that represents the work of the gospel. I cry during communion, because I remember how seriously Aidan took the purpose and promise of the shared symbolic meal.  

We're well into the new year. I used to love New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I loved the feeling of the clean slate, the opportunity to start over, to set goals and imagine a new world and a new me. Even though I knew that resolutions were made to be broken, I still felt optimistic and hopeful. I might not be able to make all the changes I hoped for, but I would be able to change some things some of the time. I could learn to do new things, make different choices, travel an untrodden path.

I think there is a still a tiny kernel of my original sanguine nature buried deep inside me; but the new me, the Aidan-less me, is so different now that the seed is dormant. Hope is covered with a permanent shadow of sadness. The heavy weight of this grievous loss dilutes my optimism.

Sorrow is no longer the islands, but the sea.

I will go to bed tonight thinking of Aidan. Tomorrow I'll get up again, and my first waking thought will be about Aidan. And maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, or next week or next month, the scale will tip slightly over to hope, or peace, or joy.

*I Thessalonians 4:13

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.

Deep Thoughts

I was having some deep thoughts in the car this morning. I thought I'd share.

1. Nothing is linear.

2. Except lines.

3. Everything is a back-and-forth, up-and-down, side-to-side process. Sometimes this feels a little bit like mental illness. Sometimes it IS mental illness.

4. You spend your life trying to get from here to there, and you think, OK, all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, and I will get where I'm going. And then you end up somewhere else. And you don't know where the hell you are.

5. Or what you're supposed to be doing. Or why you're doing it.

6. Then you start to get depressed. Or angry, which is really the same thing.

7. Eventually, you go to see a therapist, who confirms what you've known all along: Yes, you are mentally ill. You are probably one meltdown away from being institutionalized.

8. Some days you feel like a reasonably functional human being. You take a shower and bake some bread. The smell of fresh bread makes you weep with happiness.

9. Other days you feel like an undiagnosed schizophrenic, living two or more secret lives, with a tenuous hold on reality.

10. But your therapist reassures you that you are not really schizophrenic, or bipolar, and you don't really have obsessive-compulsive disorder, although you might, indeed, have a tiny case of ADD.

11. But the real problem is this existential angst (see numbers 4 and 5), which is essentially the human condition.

12. What to do, what to do? Think. Talk. Become more aware of your interior life, so that you make intentional choices which are driven by meaning and purpose. It's a process.

13. This process takes time.

14. And it is not linear.

I just thought I'd share.

Bleah. (How's that for a title?)

Don't you hate it when you just feel bleah?

I feel bleah. For no reason. Just...bleah. Tired, enervated, aimless, disinterested. A little wobbly, emotionally, like a small wind could push me over into depression.

Yuck.

I know there are strategies for coping with the bleahs, like Gratitude, and Remembering, and Doing Kind Deeds. I'm trying to work up the energy to try one of them--but in a vicious-cycle kind of way, the bleahs have drained me of the energy and effort it takes to employ those strategies.

I had this conversation when I dropped off the youngest Peevies this morning:

Mrs. Pitt: How are you?
Me: Bleah.
Mrs. Pitt: I'm sorry.
Me: Yeah.
Mrs. Pitt: Your hair looks cute!
Me, laughing: Thank you. I haven't brushed it in three days.
Mrs. Pitt: At least you're smiling now!

The Peevie household is no longer in crisis, so that's not the problem. We're coping with the thigh-high cast for another week, and hoping that the doc will switch C. Peevie to a weight-bearing cast after that.

We're coping with homework times three. I'm working on a couple of small projects, trying to dig up some new business, and nagging my non- or slow-paying clients to pay up.

Mr. Peevie is five days out from Marathon Day, and is feeling pretty good about his chances for winning the whole thing. Go, Mr. Peevie! I'm proud of him for being so committed; and also? In the throes of my self-centered bleahtitude, I can't wait for it to be over.

But nothing in our lives is hugely disturbing; there's really nothing to complain about, in relative, Western terms. My bleahs are not even hormonal, I don't think--at least, not this week. It's just one of those hopefully brief seasons of bleah. I probably just need a salty, crunchy snack.

OK, that's enough self-absorption for one day. Stay tuned for slightly more edifying posts about critical thinking, bosses, and a lying child.

Sermon on the Mount: Manifesto for Kingdom Living

I'm teaching Sermon on the Mount, Part 2 (Matthew 6 & 7) starting tomorrow, and I thought I'd post weekly (or sporadic) updates on what I'm learning in the process of teaching.

In the spring we studied the first part of the Sermon, Matthew 5. That's all I was able to cover in nine weeks. I reminded my class that there is nothing more ironic than me teaching other people about meekness, being pure in heart, and hungering thirsting for righteousness. (Just ask Mr. Peevie, or any of the Peevies, for that matter.)

Fortunately--blessedly!--the Sermon is all about grace. It's not about my own level (or lack of) spirituality. It's not about how Jesusy I am. It's all about grace, about knowing that--thank God!--what Jesus wants is not for me to grit my teeth and swear I'll be more pure in heart tomorrow. Jesus wants the Sermon to bring us back to the reality of the cross.

Look at the beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) if you don't believe me. I like to call them a Manifesto for Kingdom Living. The manifesto is a description of the character of the believer--and yet none of the characteristics and behaviors it describes are natural human tendencies.

None of us is naturally poor in spirit. We don't automatically mourn over our sin, or meekly put the well-being of another person ahead of our own well-being--especially that guy that just cut me off in traffic.

Instead of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, we pursue substitutes that we desperately hope might fill us. Sometimes these substitutes are legitimate, harmless, or neutral in themselves--like watching TV, or drinking wine. But for me, these substitutes often spoil my appetite for righteousness.

We'd rather punish than show mercy; and we are painfully aware that our hearts are far from pure. Look at our world--at the relationships between nations, between partisan segments of government; look at our violent cities, our segregated neighborhoods, our broken relationships. We are not natural peacemakers in any sense of the word.

None of these characteristics is a natural personality trait or temperament. Each one is produced by grace alone. They are fundamentally spiritual, and they can only be produced by the Spirit.

OK, I've gotten carried away. I didn't mean to preach a sermon. (Jesus already did that!) I'll keep you posted--but in the meantime, I'd love to know what you think.

The Remedy

Today my pastor, the Esteemed Reverend Moses Butcher, spoke to my sad and stressed-out heart from Psalm 77.

"I cried out to God for help; I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted."

I'm overwhelmed, sad, distressed, and anxious. I'm experiencing the kind of emotional and spiritual fatigue that makes me want to browse the chip aisle, watch Monk marathons, and consume mind-altering substances. This, apparently, was the emotional state of Asaph when he wrote this psalm.

Pastor Moses pointed out that we don't know the source of Asaph's distress. It could have been something awful from his past that still haunted him; a terrible choice he made that hurt someone; a besetting sin he could not let go; or possibly the illness or death of someone he loved. It might have been the universal feeling of emptiness that every honest human being admits to feeling at times in his life, that everyone recognizes but can't name.

We don't know why Asaph was feeling distress, only that he felt it. The source doesn't matter, because the remedy is the same.

"I remembered you, O God, and I groaned; I mused, and my spirit grew faint. You kept my eyes from closing; I was too troubled to speak."

Poor, pitiful Asaph. He seems to be doing the right thing--remembering God; but it only brings him more sorrow. He remembers God, and then he groans. He's thinking and pondering, but he only grows weaker and sadder. God is even "putting toothpicks on his eyelids", as Rev. Moses described it, not letting Asaph find brief respite in sleep. He can't even put words to his distress.

"Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"

It reaches that point, sometimes, doesn't it? You begin to wonder if what you believe about God is true. You may not say it out loud, but when you're alone, when you pray, you wonder, like Virginia, "Are you there, God? It's me, E. Peevie."

So what's the remedy? What's the tonic, what's the spiritual penicillin that cures the desperate heart?

"Then I thought, 'To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High.' I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will meditate on all your works, and consider all your mighty deeds."

The remedy is remembering. Asaph remembers God's deeds, miracles, holiness. He ponders the greatness of the God who rescued the people of Israel from centuries of slavery. He reminds us to remember God's greatest Rescue, to contemplate the cross, to soak ourselves, as my pastor expressed it, in the gospel.

What is the gospel? It's the good news that I can be right with God because of what Jesus did on the cross. It's the good news that this empty feeling, this guilt, this distress or sorrow or fear or whatever weighs down your heart like a bag of sand can be lifted because Jesus fought the battle for my soul and your soul, and He won.

Remembering, observed Esteemed Reverend Moses Butcher, is not a fast-acting cortisone shot. Remembering is a spiritual discipline. It's like physical therapy that restores gradually, healing years of dysfunction through re-alignment, restoring strength and mobility after months of atrophy. Remembering is the remedy for a sorrowful, weary, oppressed heart.