In this scene, one of the main characters, Amos, is attending one of his seminary classes after he’s just finished reading Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. I bought it immediately after reading this scene.

And on around the table it went, one student after another disagreeing with Tillich’s proposition.

[Editor’s Note: The theory that there is only one ultimate, unconditional concern, and that is for the unconditional itself. Tillich called it “our passion for the infinite.” Rob Bell discusses this at length on his podcast, called The RobCast, starting with episode 111, Pete Rollins on God, Part 1, and there are four altogether.]

The professor asked, “what about when the middle managers at IBM look in the mirror first thing in the morning, or last thing at night? What do they see there?”

“They see profit and loss,” Mike answered, “and I don’t mean metaphorically. They see the company they work for.”

Amos said nothing; his tongue seemed to have failed him. But he thought one thing over and over, the way he used to think a single thought in church on Sunday until he nearly choked on it: You are all wrong. You are all completely wrong about this. We live lives that are hopelessly broken, and we know it.

Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

I don’t shave my legs that often when it’s not shorts weather, but today I did. I have this habit of reading my Kindle for 15-20 minutes in the bathtub to let the aloe strip on the razor get soft so that I A) won’t get razor burn and II) won’t cut the shit out of my knees and ankles.

I love this book from beginning to end, having first read it in 2003, picking it up over and over as the years roll by. Every time, it’s a different story dependent upon where I am in my own life, and today was no exception. I’m reading along and I hit that last line in the quote, and I start shaking and crying with grief in the water- rocking myself and saying, “help me.” Of course I was talking to God. As Anne Lamott famously said, and I’m paraphrasing, “there’s really only three prayers… help, thanks, and wow.” “Help me” became my mantra, self-soothing until I could breathe.

My mother didn’t have to die for me to know that my life was hopelessly broken way before that… and yet, it was her death that broke the dam, because if there has been anyone in my life that truly contained “passion for the infinite,” it was her… and even then, it wasn’t for her own infinite possibilities. It was for mine.

She saw greatness in me long before I did, and I’m not sure she ever really grasped how my homosexuality, emotional abuse, and chemical imbalance combined to render me incapable of it in my own mind. I knew I wanted to be a pastor at 16, and back then (mid-90s), who would have ordained a lesbian? When those rules changed, I didn’t necessarily change with them, because the church that raised me still wouldn’t ordain me, even if I was the greatest theological mind in a hundred years (I’m not.).

I have long known that I am my biggest obstacle, and when I graduate with a BA and an MDiv, it will be because I have finally learned to shove myself out of the way. The external rocks have been moved- I jumped denominations, twice. At first, I wanted to be an Episcopal priest, but a stranger on the steps of the Supreme Court changed my mind. He was a UCC pastor, wearing a black shirt and a clerical collar. He told me that the reason he switched from Episcopal Church USA to UCC was that he wanted more out of liturgy than “turn to page 355.” I was literally stunned into silence.

Why did I want someone else controlling every aspect of my service except the sermon? I’m a writer. The UCC has no polity; if I wanted to introduce Anglican elements into my service, I had every “rite” to do so. When Dr. Susan Leo handed her pulpit to me, on every occasion I wrote the entire service, front to back. If I’d been any kind of smart, I would have saved some of those calls to worship……..

I found Christ Congregational Church because it was an eight minute walk from my house, but I had no intention of remaining there. The Episcopal church was an hour bus ride away, and that was all there was to it. My reasoning was that I could probably show up on Sunday mornings, but any kind of community like youth group or choir that required me to show up more than a couple of hours a week was out.

I had no idea until I happened upon the stranger that it was literally God stepping in to say, “ummmmm… I think this is where you really belong.” Let’s just say that I have internalized “retroactive continuity…” as if learning that one of my favorite pastor bloggers was now my pastor in real life wasn’t a big enough (rainbow?) flag. How did I not know? I never read his “About Me” page, and nearly jumped out of my skin when he mentioned his blog in church one day.

I am not naive about the gargantuan amount of work I need to do on myself to be ready for this task. If all I had to do was prepare the bulletin and get up every Sunday to preach, I could start tomorrow. But I have made so many mistakes in not taking care of people that the years I’m in school will be all about learning healthy coping mechanisms, clinical separation, and just generally trying not to fuck people up. Being a preacher is easy. Being a pastor is ridiculously hard… and I hate to say it, but there are thousands of people in pulpits already that have no idea those things are different… simply their ordination renders them capable of counseling people whether they know how or not, often to disastrous results.

I am leaning on the words of Nadia Bolz-Weber in Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People.

Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel.

God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.

And finally,

The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.

These are the thoughts that stop me from shaking in grief and insecurity. If my mother could believe in my infinite possibilities, I owe it to her to at least try to believe them myself…………….

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

Leslie: Are you making room for grief?
Aaron: I don’t have to. Grief makes its own room.

I’ve published this conversation before, but it seems especially apt now. For reasons I promised to keep confidential, I have left Decision Software. But what I will say is that they are an amazing company and it was a very amicable parting. They were kinder than any company I’ve ever worked for, going above and beyond what they needed to do to make my separation easier. Of course, if you are close to me and want the real story, I will tell it. But there’s not really much more to it than that. I think the reason they went above and beyond is that I was good for them and vice versa.

It was actually very nice that I could leave for Houston at a moment’s notice because I actually left the week before my mother died, so I could have stayed a lot longer than I actually did. I just didn’t tell anyone until now because telling people that my mother died was hard enough without being unemployed on top of it. The difference is that I made so much money while I was at DSI that I don’t have to worry about finding a job right away. I have four months’ worth of living expenses saved up, which will give me plenty of time to find a new job, because my rent and bills total $795 flat.

I didn’t buy a car, I didn’t move out into my own place, I didn’t blow any money on anything, which has totally worked in my favor. Even though he is a conservative Christian, I listen to the Dave Ramsey podcast like a fiend, and his words about an emergency fund stuck in my head. I felt that because I was single, there was no better time in my life to get my financial house in order… because now, my main goal in life is just to be happy, and any job will keep me from losing that four months of savings. If I wanted to reduce it to three months for another professional certification, I just might. We shall see what we shall see.

Alternatively, I can’t afford to go without a job altogether, but I have enough money and my bills are low enough to work part-time so that when school starts in January, I can be there…. and that may be the best response to grief I could have…. to stop doing what I need to do to make money and start doing the things I need to do to make money later on. There would be no better tribute to my mother than to walk across the stage and get my diploma after playing catch-up all these years.

I am so lucky that I have so much work experience not to need a degree for most computer jobs, because many, many people have taken the same route I have… using the phrase on the job description that says “degree or equivalent work experience.” I have 20 years’ worth of helping people solve their computer problems, and it truly works in my favor. Right now I am signed up with two different freelancing services, one called Thumbtack and one called Outsource. Thumbtack is for computer support. Outsource is for writing- all kinds, even blog entries. It’s a shame I’m not good at either one of those things…….

The best thing about freelancing is making my own schedule, and being able to work from home. The worst thing about freelancing is working from home. Anyone who works from home will tell you that it’s a blessing and a curse.

I also have a head hunter that’s been sending me possible jobs every day, and that part is nice, too. My resume is all over the place, except for positions that require relocation. It’s just not going to happen. I don’t want to move again, and DC is my favorite place on earth. I will never move if I can help it, for a multitude of reasons.

The only thing that really bugged the shit out of me the other night was that I parked for about two or two and a half hours in Adams Morgan and it was $20.00. Note to self: TAKE THE METRO. I have $20.00, but not for that. Perhaps I should go back to the parking garage and see if I was overcharged, or whether it was the time of night I was asking to park. I don’t mind paying the money if it was truly owed, but if their automatic system was wonky, that’s different.

I’m not worried, though, because my entire bill at Madam’s Organ was only $9.00, and that was including the tip. Apparently, they do not give free refills. 😛

When I got home, I slept through the night and all day Thursday. It’s my reaction to grief, to get away from it and dwell in my dreams. My mother and my friends visit me and we talk a lot. It’s not about being sleepy. It is escaping the weight of the world, and I feel much better today. I was up by 0600, as per my usual. I just didn’t start writing right away as I normally do. I just had no idea what to say. What is there to say except “my mother just died and that fact is with me every day, all day, and there’s really not another story to write?” Probably why I decided to reveal I don’t have a job. I wanted to write about something else besides death.

Although losing this job was a kind of death, twofold in its loss. The first is that I really miss the people. The second is that I don’t have a place to go every day. Well, actually, I do. Coffeehouses are my office outside my office. I use Starbucks the most often because I save the most money that way. In using Starbucks, I get free refills on coffee and tea, and I gather stars quickly for free drinks, especially if I order beforehand on the app.

The gift card my mother gave me still has over $12.00 on it, and I still haven’t spent it… ditto for the IHOP gift certificate. It’s like once they’re gone, so is she. I did take her out of my phone, because I couldn’t bear to look at her picture and her phone number every day. However, I haven’t erased her Netflix profile. I kind of want to know what she was watching when she died, which was a lot due to her broken foot.

The interesting thing is that I know she’d WANT me to have coffee and double blueberry pancakes…. just another thing where I cannot even. The key card for my hotel room where we stayed the night before her funeral is still in my wallet, and I doubt I’ll ever take it out.

And here I am, writing about death again, when all I really wanted to do was write about life.

 

This is what I was writing when I got the call that my mother had been rushed to the hospital. I was still writing when my sister called back to say she was dead.

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I actually got up early enough for choir today, and despite my better judgment, went. I decided to ride the line between being anxious about the possible music choices and my need to interact. I walked into a service that was all music, all the time, because the choir had toured Europe over the summer and they were doing all their “greatest hits.” I sight-read everything, and thanked the conductor for choosing pieces that were easy enough for me to do so… and she gave me an INCREDIBLE compliment… “they weren’t… you’re just that talented.” It’s true, I was on my game today, but normally sight-reading is my biggest musical downfall because I am too dumb to math.

Everyone was *overjoyed* I was back, and Ingrid said, “man… you sound really good.” It’s because I felt good, and, as I half-kidded, “I have bad back problems and I couldn’t take one more Sunday in the pews.” They are seriously made of hardwoods and hatred. I am sure they are more comfortable without a corkscrew scoliosis, but for me, they make the nerves from my back to my legs go numb and the part of my spine that sticks out a bit rough and painful. I haven’t seen a massage therapist in years, and I’ve never seen a chiropractor. Need to remedy that……

I thought of my mom the whole time, because she would have wanted to buy every piece for her own choir, especially one in the style of Andre Crouch/Mark Hayes. I just need to rewire my brain to think of my mother during church services, because thinking of how much fun we’d have together if she was there makes my day. In fact, I told her that if I did any solo stuff at CCC, I’d love for her to come up and accompany me. One Sunday she came and played a solo during the offertory when I was preaching at Bridgeport in Portland, and my sister and I cried all the way through it…. and then she cried all the way through my sermon. Turnabout is fair play.

During the service, there was also a slideshow of the youth on their mission trip in Atlanta, which I really wanted to attend as well but couldn’t take the time off from work. Off course the work was really meaningful, but my jealousy started eating my lunch when I saw the photos from “World of Coca-Cola.” #bucketlist

The things they were doing in Atlanta also need to be done here in Silver Spring, so really must advocate for that. Some parts of SS are tony and look a little Portland, a little Alexandria. Some parts are just flat poor and torn up. If we’re really going to be the church instead of attending one, it needs to be a priority to get out into those neighborhoods and beautify. That can take on many forms, from feeding people to rebuilding porches and cleaning out yards.

Maybe I’ll bring it up when I get to youth group tonight. Action creates inertia.

After youth group, I am meeting a woman I met on OK Cupid (hopefully)- no solid plans yet but we are overjoyed to have found each other, because we are both Houston born and raised, both sopranos (has done Italian opera, I have eaten spaghetti). Where we differ is that she is a lawyer and I just like to argue a lot…. although I do have a paralegal certificate, so………..

She got into HSPVA, but moved the summer before 9th grade and didn’t get to go. So her exact words to me about it were “jealous as hell.” Forging new friendships is so exciting, free dopamine for someone who could really use it.

Speaking of free dopamine, still looking forward to meeting up with my precious Pri Diddy. Tuesday can’t come fast enough. I would seriously have to be dead before I missed that meeting. I say this because I am a bit sniffly today, taking Zyrtec and Sudafed PE and probably going to stop on the way home tonight for some real Sudafed and some Afrin.

In other news, my douchebag roommate moved out. He was nice enough, but he had two flaws. The first is that he was a raging homophobe behind my back and nice to my face… and he never cleaned anything. Anything. If it was a “shared” responsibility, it was my responsibility. Hoping that male or female, the next roommate is both eye candy and OCD.

I watched this video that my dad posted of someone playing Reverie by Claude Debussy (because my mother played it at her senior recital in college) and I broke inside. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing as I rocked myself and said, “no, Mommy… no….” I haven’t called her Mommy since before Lindsay was born, but I did today. At the time, I thought an almost-six-year-old who helped take care of a baby was too big to call her mother “Mommy.” Having a baby sister when I was old enough to really help was a big deal. I walked taller immediately. There were times I was jealous of my mother because Lindsay had to be fed and therefore, she was “taking her away from me.” I mean, logically, I couldn’t let Lindsay starve, but my life got better when we switched her to bottles… and worse when she learned to hold it herself. 😉

Actually, when Lindsay started doing things by herself, she never wanted to stop. Pretty much her first words were “by MYSELF!”

Incidentally, given how much I hate to drive now, it is ironic that my first words were “car keys.”

We were so much different as children (more alike now)- about as opposite as they come. I was physically delayed and didn’t walk properly until I was almost two, given an EXTRAORDINARY amount of physical therapy that my mother cried all the way through because even though she knew it would help me in the long-term, she hated watching me in pain as she bent my legs. Being so physically delayed, I had a lot of time to sit around and think about things. While Lindsay is the one with all the cute mispronounced words and malapropisms (my favorite being “stunk” for “skunk,” because accuracy), I could speak in full sentences at about a year- which caused a woman in the grocery store to accuse my mother of throwing her voice, because as a preemie, I looked like I was about six months old.

Lindsay was much more physically active, and constantly pushed me out of my comfort zone. I didn’t know why she didn’t want to sit quietly and do things, so she was a constant pain in my ass when she was a toddler, whereas I was an old lady even then. My mother was much more protective of me than she was of Lindsay, because Lindsay didn’t have the physical ailments that I did. In some ways, it backfired, because it made me overly afraid that I couldn’t do things, and wouldn’t even try…. which is why it is even more funny that my first girlfriend was an athlete. Talk about opposite children…. At the time, I really didn’t understand why my mother felt so overprotective. Looking back, I see it perfectly. She treated Lindsay and me differently because her experiences of us were so disparate.

My mother was so glad she was having a second girl, though, because she wanted to give me the relationship she’d had with her own sister growing up. However, we did not have brothers to bind us together against them as they did, so while I have lots of fond childhood memories of Lindsay, we weren’t as close as children as we are now. Lindsay didn’t even start school until I was in sixth grade, so we didn’t have the same friends, the same interests, the same anything until college, when I went back to University of Houston and we ended up in Con Law together…. where everyone just called us “the girls.” In study groups and in going out after class, no one wanted to invite one of us and not the other, so it was easy shorthand. “Did you invite the girls?”

We’re even closer now, because I view Lindsay as my mother’s biggest gift to me now that she’s gone… because, of course, it’s not that she wanted another child. It’s that she wanted to give me a present…. and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I feel that perhaps taking the Klonopin allowed me to keep all of this bottled up, because I have not taken it today, and finally, all the darkness I’ve been feeling spilled onto the floor in a heap, and in writing about Lindsay, I feel better… a lightness of being.

There’s just one more thing.

I’ve always taken care of Lindsay when my mom wasn’t around, and now I know there’s money on the table for pizza…. but she’s not coming home.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I was supposed to ask my mother’s permission before I posted this. All the trumpet solos are my dad.

There are so many things you learn when you join the select, shitty club of “my mother just died.”

The first is that very little matters. The minutiae we all busy ourselves with seems so far away, and what is up close and personal is not wasting time on the little things. It seems cliché, but it hits you so much harder… Time cannot be wasted.

The second is that so few people matter. You cannot possibly cultivate strong relationships with everyone you’ve ever met in your life, and you need to stick with the people who are willing to get down in the shit with you, and those people are few and far between. It brings new clarity to the way I’ve treated Dana and Argo. They were never expendable to me, they were my lifeblood, and I covered it up with a lot of defense mechanisms that were designed to push them away, and they worked. Nothing matters more to me than being the kind of friend/girlfriend that can give as much as I receive. Pushing away the people that loved me through an enormous amount of mental instability is not the type of person I want to be… and not the way I want to be remembered.

The way you want to be remembered becomes more important. What is the legacy I want to leave? Do I want to be the type person that is alone by choice? Do I want people to remember me fondly and would actually come to a service celebrating my life? Or isolate people so much that they’re just glad they don’t have to worry about me anymore? And I don’t mean this because I feel depressed. I mean it as reality. The way you treat people in life will exponentially multiply in their thoughts when you die, and if you treat them poorly, it comes back to you…. like the scene in Six Feet Under when the husband of one of the deceased says, “if there’s any justice in the world she’s shoveling shit in hell.” My mother was remembered so incredibly fondly that I realized it was important to me to be more open, more loving, just……. more. I want to reach out to the world in a more concrete way than sitting at my desk and writing about my thoughts. I want to have a life.

Another thing I have learned is that the business of death is slow bureaucracy and there must be a way to streamline it somehow. Grieving people do not want to make a metric fuck tonne of calls to people they don’t know… especially in a society where everyone is more comfortable typing and texting, anyway. It’s not just me. Lots of people would rather have a root canal than make a phone call, especially to people they don’t know.

Alternatively, the phone has become more important to me with the people I do love. I need to hear their voices, at least sometimes. There are a couple of phone calls that I will return today because I feel stronger than I did yesterday. Getting a good night’s sleep helped immensely in my ability to be able to reach out, but it does not help the feeling that I wish I’d known this before my mother died.

I’ve lost the one person in my life who constantly treated me as if I was perfectly perfect in every way. My mother got over her fear and concern at my being gay, and no one could make a homophobic comment in her presence… even when she wouldn’t tell people she had a gay daughter outright. I learned this from her friends after she died, that she was relentless in shutting people up because she was proud of me… even though they didn’t know I was gay until they met me.

The way my mother overcame her fear and concern brings new clarity into the fight I had with Dana’s parents about choosing their church over their child, and the way Dana’s mother said to me that she couldn’t give Dana what she needed and maybe Dana should find someone else…. why I was so vicious because the part of me that worried for Dana boiled over into extreme rage. I regret the way I behaved, because the message was helpful and the rage was not. My own mother lion went off at their treatment of her, but it wasn’t my job. Only Dana could stand up for Dana. I was just meddling in her affairs, but to be fair, Dana’s mother didn’t say the part about finding someone else to her. She said it to me, and I could not hear a mother say that about her child without emotionally going for her jugular. I hope that in the time we’ve been broken up, Dana and her mother have truly reconciled in a concrete way, because I don’t want Dana to have to remember her mother as the person who wouldn’t accept her for who she was when she dies. I thank God that when Dana and I were together, she had two mothers who accepted her for exactly who she was, which was my wife. Two mothers who clearly accepted the fact that long after they were just whispers in the wind, Dana and I would still be a family unto our own.

I find myself listing losses over and over. That my mother didn’t live to see my next relationship, possibly my children or stepchildren, even down to her not being there at my 40th birthday party. I still haven’t cried, haven’t broken down in any way, and the weight is enormous. I want to cry, but I can’t. Still too much shock to accept that my lot in life was to lose my mother so much earlier than anyone would have wanted for my sisters and me. Lisa is particularly affected, because her youngest, Grace, doesn’t remember a time when my mother wasn’t her grandmother.

For those just joining us, Lindsay and I are the only children my mother had biologically, and had four stepdaughters, though she never got to meet Maggie because she is estranged from the family. She was much closer to my other stepsisters, Susan, Lisa, and Linda. They all have children and she still got to be a grandmother even though Lindsay and I are childless. I wanted that for her- to be a grandmother, and I am so glad she got the chance. Grandchildren that were biologically hers wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest, because she would have loved them all equally. The only difference between their children and mine is that they would have looked like her- that familiar widow’s peak, those hands, those eyes.

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I had to take a break to deal with more retirement/insurance stuff and I’ve had to say over and over that my mother died to people who deal with death for a living. Not one of them has said “I’m sorry for your loss” or “I’m sorry for the reason you’re calling.” I have learned that I never want to be anesthetized in that way. I’ve also learned that I don’t care about the money, because it could be fifty million dollars and I’d just rather have my mother back.

I feel the same way about my stats shooting up astronomically since my mother died. No amount of recognition as a writer will ever ease the pain of loss… it makes me a little sick to my stomach, that I might gain “fame” from writing about grief. That I would be successful because my mother died and not despite it.

Alternatively, it helps to know someone is listening, because FUCK. My mother just died. I am so angry and conflicted and hurt and all the things. I cannot even, and I cannot cry. I just feel like there’s a Buick on my chest. I am so raw and agitated, strong but not unbreakable.

Just like her, really. It’s what I’ve learned.

I wrote this line about Argo years ago that’s been running through my mind all night… “that I sleep deeply in the belly of the ship, for I know my passage is safe.” The reason the tape is repeating is that I am in profound and deeply choppy water, and though I can’t say with a voice loud and clear that she is still my friend, the image of being rocked to sleep on a boat with an enormous bulwark helps in my grief, which is presenting physically. My stomach hurts. My head hurts. I want to stay in bed, and I can’t sleep unless I take something and deal with the consequences of an enormous hangover… the kind where every moment until maximum caffeine level is achieved feels like trying to nail Jell-o to a tree. I may be able to take said sleeping medication tonight, but there has just been too much to do to deal with being sluggish (and enormously cranky because of it). I would like to thank the little baby Jesus that I have been on Klonopin the entire time, because it has allowed my fight-or-flight to recede into the background as I just deal with what’s in front of me, one minute at a time.

But now, all the adrenaline-and-Starbucks-fueled crazy is over, and my plane leaves tomorrow at 2:00. I think Prianka is picking me up from the airport, and I want to keep here for the record that she told me under no uncertain terms that if I needed her, she would come. I had friends to fall on here, so I told her not to worry about it. But I will definitely need her once I get back. It’s easy to have a support system here- not quite as easy on the other end…. although I know my church will pour out their love on me in the wake of losing someone this close to me… and now that my mother is dead, not being a church musician is not an option for me. I need it. I will be at choir practice on Thursday, even if I have to sob through every piece.

I’m going to be putting together a playlist of all my mother’s favorite choir anthems, and I’ll post it here when it’s done. It’s going to take me a while to find them all, but luckily YouTube is a fantastic repository for those sorts of things. She always loved John Rutter’s For the Beauty of the Earth, even asking Lindsay and me to sing it as a duet at her church. Lindsay’s voice is so comforting to me, because she has a tone and quality that I do not. I have a bigger, more operatic voice. Her voice is smaller, more intimate, the kind that can rip your heart out and hand it to you in its purity. Most of the time, she sings absolutely straight-tone, stripped bare of vibrato so that the notes cut deeper and more intensely than mine ever could. We are both fantastic singers thanks to our mother (and our father, really- his voice is gorgeous and I have no doubt that he would have been just as successful as a baritone as he was with his horn had he chosen that route). But mostly it was Mom, because both Lindsay and I had a built-in accompanist whose favorite thing was to play for people she loved.

One of the things that really made me feel good about the service yesterday is that the pianist seemed to really get my mother’s style, and it was literally like she was there. I remember that in my talk, I brought it up when I said that my mother wasn’t just a pianist, she as an accompanist, and there’s a world of difference. A pianist plays beautifully, but doesn’t know how to catch a soloist when they miss an entrance or skip a measure or any number of things that can go wrong when you’re nervous. This was particularly important when I was a trumpet player, because I have far more stage fright about playing my horn than I do singing, because I’m just so much better a singer than I ever was a trumpet player. I should have gone the singer route and started vocal study earlier than I did…. but I wanted to be just like my dad… except that I never rose to the level he did. I just had fun playing next to him. I wish that he wasn’t in the middle of surgery on his face, because I would have loved to play on the brass line at Second today, both for distraction and to be a different kind of church musician, something that doesn’t remind me of just how painful losing my mother really is.

One of my friends said to me, “my mother is still alive, but her death will bring me to my knees. I don’t know how you’re holding up.” Not thinking about it, mostly. In order to function, I’ve had to put my emotions away and just wear the Leslie Lanagan™ mask I’ve worn as a preacher’s kid for a number of years, and I fell right into it without missing a beat.

The part that will be excruciating and bring me to my own knees will be when I am alone, because nothing makes me more embarrassed than losing my snot in public…. and I have to believe it’s what my mother would have wanted for me, because she always wanted us to be “perfect” in public. In our preacher’s family days, we saved our emoting for when we were alone, and not in front of company…. one of the many reasons I am a loud-mouthed asshat today, because I’d had enough of pretending everything was fine. Now, I’m just trying to be leslie, without a cover.

I just want to make this pain stop…. MAKE IT STAAAAAAAAAAHP. And yet, there is no way around, only through. There are ways in which I don’t even know what I will experience over the coming years, but what I know for sure is that I will always be extraordinarily angry at the way her life was cut short. Just because it was a freak accident and no one is to blame doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be angry at the situation.

My mother was the one who sent Christmas presents with candy and things she’d picked out during the year that she thought I’d like. Most of it was too girly for me, but she was the one who got an A for effort. I’ll be making scans of all the Christmas and birthday cards I still have, possibly publishing them, but mostly so I can throw the paper away in my Mari Kondo simplicity and still have all the memories I need.

One of the things that has happened over the last three years is that through my writing, my mother began to understand the real me, so the cards got deeper and closer to what I really needed to hear from her… that she was proud of the real me, and not just the face I present to the world, which are often very different people.

The wake of my mother’s death is a renewed sense of purpose. I don’t know if my mother left me any money in her will, but if she did, I am quitting my job immmediately and going to school full-time so I can graduate as soon as humanly possible. I read fast, so I know I can handle 15-18 hours a semester easily. My first semester back, however, I will take no more than 12, because I cannot forget that I am moving in the world under an enormous amount of grief, and everything takes longer when you’re sad.

I am still grieving the loss of my marriage. I am still grieving the loss of a friendship I’d hoped would last my entire life. I am still grieving not staying in Houston until my mother died and my father was healed… not beating myself up over it, but just thinking about it in that “had I known then what I know now” sort of way. I would have found a way around my “creeped the fuck out” feelings, or tried much harder than I actually did.

My mother knew of my dreams to go to Howard and Howard Divinity School, so I have that going for me…. but the thought of her not getting to see those dreams realized is the wake that causes the most ripples. I regret without shame that I did not break up with Kathleen, stay at University of Houston, and go on to grad school when I was 22 or 23 so that by the time my mother died, she would have gotten to see me in my element.

Right now, I’m out of my element, Donnie.

In so many more ways than one.

My father tried to go live on Facebook as my sister and I were speaking, but he said he must have hit the wrong button, so there’s no record of what I said today.

I remember the first line, and the last line. Everything in between, you’ll have to ask someone else. The first line was “this is the one funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to that she wasn’t working” (funny only if you knew how long she’d been a church musician) and the last was “I couldn’t have turned into a better human being, Mom, and you did it all.”

I still haven’t cried, and I am not saying that as a badge of accomplishment. I am saying that I have not reached the breaking point where I cannot even. On Friday night, I saw my mother in her casket, clearly dead as a door nail, and still, it didn’t feel real. In fact, the whole thing from the visitation to the funeral felt like we’d forgotten to pick her up, as if this was an event she would have wanted to attend and just couldn’t make it.

At the visitation, I just felt like an awkward, gawky teenager, because as I have said before, I left home at 22 and therefore, I was constantly surrounded with people I didn’t know. People that wanted to hug me and cry on me that I’d never met in my life. My mirror neurons went off and I accepted people unconditionally while my inner introvert was screaming that I just wanted these people to go home.

The funeral today was better. There were a lot more people I knew, including my best high school friends that I didn’t even know were coming until James arrived. Because I didn’t have a spouse, I knew I would still need support, so I enlisted James to be the person I could fall on if I suddenly could not even. He sat next to me at the graveside service, told me I did a great job at the funeral, and bought me drinks. Pretty much the way to my heart….. until my other high school friend, Alberto, bought me tacos and gelato.

If we’re going to choose between drinks and ice cream, ice cream wins.

Sorry, James.

Although James got to me when he said that during the funeral, it looked like I just walked up and owned the place…. like I looked comfortable in my own skin. It’s true. In a church service, no matter what kind, I am much more comfortable in the pulpit or in the choir loft. I am a horrible parishioner…. probably due to so many years of learning how the sausage gets made.

It’s to my detriment, though, because I don’t know how to have a pastor, when right now is when I should probably call one. I’ve been meaning to talk to Matt since I was waiting for the plane at BWI, but I still haven’t called back. Remind me, would you?

People have told me that this just looks so easy for me. It will be until reality hits, which I am expecting sometime Tuesday, when I’ve had a full 24 hours back in my own bed in my own house and my mother hasn’t called to ask how my speech went.

I also got to have an amazing amount of closure with Dana, because after that one phone call, she’s practically ignored me this whole trip. Nothing has to be said. I know where I stand.

Help comes from where you least expect it, not from where you go looking…. and that’s all I have to say about that.

I thought that my mind was made up about manuscripting for the funeral, but everything I’ve written has sounded like it’s something I’ve written… intensely cerebral, too many words… perfect for the page but not when you’re in front of a congregation, because it’s amazing how you think you’ve got maybe two minutes of material because there’s only half a page of single-spaced text and then you say it out loud and there’s more like eight…. Because how do you sum up your mother in two minutes? How do you sum up anyone in two minutes? This is not The Gong Show™; no one is going to stop me if I go over, but I want to be respectful of the fact that there are other people speaking besides me.

Tonight is the visitation. I definitely want to see my mother, because her death happened so fast that I need to see her to believe it is real. After that, I am going to find a nice place to sit and stay there. I don’t do well with dead bodies. My parents rarely got a babysitter for me, because my dad had the type job where he could juggle things around, or he’d just take me along. As I child, I prayed with families, went to visitations and graveside services, and just generally provided company for my dad as we rolled around town taking care of parishioners while my sister and my mom were off on their own (generally strange) adventures. I have seen enough death to last my whole life, and enough grieving people to know that we all act insane because our sense of purpose has come unmoored and we are drifting aimlessly saying, “what now?”

To add to my feeling of weird, I’ve never really liked funeral homes, not because the people aren’t lovely, but because the stuff they use to sanitize the air smells really, really weird and loud and cloying….. probably all of the things you would want air freshener that covers up the smell of death to do, but still. I mean, that scent sticking in your nose is probably far more pleasant than if they didn’t spray at all, but it’s like breathing oranges, the air is so thick. Think classic Ozium™ in a professional strength that goes to eleven. I once bought classic Ozium for my car, sprayed it once and threw it out the window because it smelled like the funeral home that held my grandfather after he passed away from ALS.

I was a middle schooler then, so perhaps I will be a different person. My grandparents had such different kinds of deaths than my mother. Even though the strain of ALS he had started backward, taking his throat muscles and eating ability first instead of his legs so that the denouement was quick, there was still enough time to see him get sick and deteriorate so that it was not a mind-numbing shock… just sad. My grandmother had lots of strokes and got to the point where she was speechless and didn’t recognize any of us, and that process was over two years…. again, plenty of time to get used to the idea that this person was not doing well.

If there is anything I know that was important to my mother, it’s that she died with her mind intact. Yes, her life was cut short, but she told me many times that her worst fear was being alive and not recognizing people, not being able to play the piano, and worst of all, in her mind, being dependent on others for her every need.

My mother did not, and I do not, ask for help well. If I ask for help, the worst thing imaginable is about to happen because I just can’t cover it up anymore….. an inherited trait. I thought that my dad’s cancer was bringing up issues of my own mortality, but it is nothing compared to the feeling that my mother died from a fall and I am the biggest klutz in the entire world. Pretty sure if you look up “clumsy” in the dictionary, there’s just a picture of me. My mother wasn’t a klutz, though. Her leg went numb and she tried to stand up too fast, which is how she ended up ass over tea kettle and telling Forbes that they didn’t have to go to the Emergency Room right then… they could wait until in the morning.

It is not lost on me that I could die because of the palsy (palsies?) in my brain, because it affects my movements so greatly. Even when my room is completely spotless, I will still find things to trip over. I have fallen down the stairs in my house more times than I can count. My mother’s parting message to me is not to ignore it if I feel weird after a fall…. and to call the ambulance regardless if I hit my head. Someone needs to look at my pupils with a trained eye.

Otherwise, you might end up fainting and coding before you even reach the hospital.

People have been asking what I need during this time. I need all the mothers to comment. I need all the mothers to rush in, whether they have kids my age or not. I just want love from people who know how I might feel as one of the children left behind, and the wisdom they pass on to their own sons and daughters. I pick up just as much mother-love from people that have toddlers as I do from mothers who have teenagers/adult children.

Because I do not have a partner, I invited my best friend James to be with me at the funeral. We’ve been friends since the first day of school when I was a senior and he was a junior. He fell asleep in chemistry every single day, and I thought he was lazy because it never occurred to me that he had narcolepsy. So, this first day of class, James looks over after waking up and sees the “rainbow rings” around my neck and asked me why I wear them. I told him it was because I was gay, and he said that he was just making sure I wasn’t clueless.

I wasn’t.

I started wearing my freedom rings to school once my father left the ministry, because while I was out at HSPVA, I went back into the closet for my junior year of high school (my church and my school were quite a bit more conservative than the ones I had in the Heights and the Montrose, as you can imagine if you know the area). Clements High School in Sugar Land was my first dose of “Fuckitol” once I wasn’t afraid that my dad would lose his job.

Sufficed to say, it bonded James and me because he knew something about me that other people did not… there was only one other girl in my grade who knew what freedom rings were and said, “do you wear those because you’re gay, or because you’re an idiot?” Not an idiot. Advertising.

It worked. I found a high school sweetheart that same first day, because our senior English teacher told us that before we left the class, we needed to get the phone number of someone in our class and I beat over three desks to get to Meagan. When I walked in the door to my mother’s apartment, the land line was ringing, and it was her. She said, “why do you wear that rainbow necklace?” It was time to feel her out. “Because I’m gay. Do you have a problem with that?” She said “no, I’m a Melissa Etheridge fan.” I said, “well, I’m not, but thank you for giving money to my people.”

We were falling in love under her boyfriend’s nose, you know, the one you have in high school where you realize that love isn’t supposed to be like this? I never had that experience. I loved Ryan like I loved air. Love was definitely supposed to be like that. I wore his promise ring long after we broke up, because even though I was moving on with my life, the fact that he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore gutted me like an axe… even though by all accounts, it was a mutually beneficial parting. I was starting to come out as bi. He was starting to come out as wanting to see other people. Our frienship wasn’t the same until after high school, when we were both over the hurt. Now he is one of the faces I look to for love in that deep, brother/sister way.

Though I identify as gay, I will always claim bisexuality as well, because I never want Ryan to think that he didn’t matter… that only my female/female relationships did. We went beyond knowing each other to the much-deeper “grok.” Because we were so young, I never got to experience what my sexuality would have blossomed into had we stayed together, another reason it was so inopportune to meet Diane at exactly the same time I was enmeshed in the best relationship I’d ever had to date. She liked Ryan, but she could see right through me, for two reasons. The first is that baby dykes are easy to spot. The second is that she made an effort not to like Ryan, as well, because in the same way she’s had close and intimate friendships with women as an adult, it felt like she expected the same of me. She didn’t want me herself (or so I’d come to believe), but she didn’t really want me to have other relationships, either, because it took away from the attention I had to give her…. exactly the same way I treated Susan…. oooooh, chewy.

I am writing around my grief, because I am trying my very best not to say “kiss my ass” right now. I can’t divulge why, because those people are still living. And I think that anger is a very valid reaction to grief when things aren’t going your way. Remember, I am not in UCC country. I am in a conservative area where people are more likely to use bad theology than good. That this was God’s plan and not some fucking freak accident. That she is in a better place, when her better place is touring Mt. Vernon with me. It was not “her time.” God is not the Actor. God is the responder. God is the one I can go to in my grief, and scream to the top of my lungs if I need to… just use God as the fucking punching bag God is so that I don’t have to take out my anger, frustration, and grief on the people around me.

God is just as angry as I am that my mother’s death came so suddenly. God sits with me in my quiet moments. God thinks all of this is incredibly unfair to me.

God is not the Actor. God is the Responder.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

One of the best and worst parts of someone dying is that you learn things that they thought about you that they never told you themselves, and now you can’t respond to them. For instance, Lindsay told me that my mother read my blog religiously, and would say things like, “did you read that funny story Leslie posted?” or “She sounds good right now, doesn’t she?” or, the one that made me laugh the most, “Who is that Argo woman and what has she done to my baby?”

The short answer to that is “nothing,” but mothers do not believe that their children aren’t perfect, and anything I did to convince her of it wouldn’t have worked, anyway. Believe me, Argo wasn’t the problem. I was. But try telling that to a tiger mom.

Lindsay’s main point is that my mother never left me, even though I wasn’t physically in Houston. She kept tabs on my life even when I was too weak to call back… because now that I’ve lost her suddenly, I regret the times when I couldn’t see past my own anxiety and just pick up the phone. She never commented on a single entry, but would call with her thoughts, which were never about craft, or even about content. It was just, “are you ok?” I always was in front of her, with very few exceptions.

Those few exceptions were monumental in my growth and development, because she was the one that wanted to know how I was really doing, as opposed to the “I’m fine” you give in a “ladies who lunch” setting.

I just wasn’t comfortable sharing myself with her, because I was so practiced at guarding myself around her. The walls that were starting to come down never will.

I wish I had been more brave. I wish that I could have realized earlier that she really could handle everything I had to tell her, that there was no scenario on earth in which she’d say I was anything but perfect.

It’s just that if there’s anything my mother wanted me to be, it was healthy and happy, and showing her that I wasn’t caused her so much empathetic agony that I wouldn’t open up… but it wasn’t just that.

I’d decided as a teenager that my mother was never going to accept me for who I was, and that I had to find other people to fill that role. Those feelings didn’t completely go away until my 36th birthday, and after that, I was a little more comfortable regarding needing her mother love, but reticent to activate her mirror neurons. She felt more deeply when I was hurt than she ever did with her own scrapes and bruises.

I think I know now why I am such an empath today, picking up every emotion in the room. One of the reasons that this is “theantileslie.com” is that in person, I am very much the empath that just wants to fix all the things, and when I write, I just want you people to get off my lawn.

I don’t think my mother ever got to the point where she’d had enough. She just gave until she gave out. She didn’t even go to the emergency room when she first fell. She waited until it was impossible to avoid telling someone she needed help before she actually did it.

When I think about my 36th birthday, I think about how much that last paragraph echoes my own story, the one where I waited until every possible sign that I was about to have the “holy shit I am going down” parade had already passed and an unspoken want had to be expressed. I am embarrassed to need, in exactly the same way she was.

She asked her husband to call the ambulance, and for that to happen, I can only imagine how bad and/or weird she must have felt.

So many parallels in my own life that I cannot even. I am her blood, she lives in me. It is an impossibility that some of the things I feel are things that she felt during her relatively short life.

Her relatively short life.

DAMN IT.

I’m not supposed to be writing this right now. I’m supposed to be telling you all the things we’re going to do when she comes to DC, because we’d set aside an ENTIRE DAY for Mt. Vernon.

I want to be able to tell you about her hopes and dreams for the denouement of her life, rather than having to face the fact that “here today, gone tomorrow” is a thing.

There were so many things that my mother thought about me that she never told me, and thank God Lindsay is able to fill me in on some of them. I just wish that she hadn’t had to have so many conversations about me…..

because I didn’t pick up the phone.

The other funny Christmas story is that my mother knew Dana liked football, but didn’t know which team. So one year my mother got her a Cowboys jersey (or maybe it was me and it didn’t fit). Either way, there was now a Cowboys jersey in our house, and to Dana’s credit, she did not burn it on our front lawn in effigy.

Hail to the Redskins. May their name eventually rest in peace.

IF there is anything I would like to say directly to Dana & Argo, it is that through our conversations, my mother got to have three full years of hearing every day that she was right about Diane and me, that it never should have happened, and that I’d gaslighed her into believing two things; the first is that I was okay. The second is that it was over. Because of you, my mother and I were able to reconcile on a deeper level than we ever had before, because I was able to atone for a number of things that weighed deeply on me, the biggest one being when Diane and I separated from each other permanently…. as I told Diane directly, “don’t you see that I left her for you and now I don’t have either one? Can you see how much it is killing me inside?” It was the resurrection in the middle of the mess, in the words of Dr. Susan Leo.

Our last conversation lasted two and a half hours. There was nothing more to be said, no unfinished business. The grief is for the future, the fact that she is left out from seeing the enormous dreams I have for myself come to fruition. She was wholly supportive of me going into the ministry, because if her ex-husband was any indication, there’s no way I would fail. She’ll never see “The House that Leslie Built.” She won’t be at my graduation from Howard. She won’t be at my UCC ordination service. She won’t work for me until I find a choir director. She won’t play the piano in my sanctuary, as she did one Sunday when I was preaching at Bridgeport. Lindsay and I cried all the way through her solo, and then she cried all the way through my sermon. So, the memory of it happening once has to be enough, even though it was only a pulpit on loan.

In my grief I am feeling absolute disgust at the fact that all I want to do is hug Diane and cry and get snot all over her shirt because we both have such deep, ingrained memories with her. Despite her distaste for Diane in some ways, she was also her accompanist and they used to have a blast together. In fact, as I have said before, Diane came to visit a week before my 16th birthday and my mother was accompanying Diane at a funeral (I think). She knew that we’d want to spend some time alone catching up (because she didn’t know we were actually talking all the time), so she let me go to the church early before they were supposed to meet and said, “I should let you drive so you can show off for Diane.” I was trying to play it cool and said, “no, that’s ok. I’ll walk.” She looked at me and said, “is that what you’re wearing? You usually dress up for her.” That’s how I knew my mom had my number way before I did.

Confidentially, I think she was smarter than me.

I’m speaking for two minutes at the funeral. I decided in the car that I would manuscript, mostly because even with mood stabilizers and Klonopin on board, I’m still not sure how I’m going to feel at the funeral. If I manuscript, and then I start really bawling, I’ve got someone to read it and the story still gets out. Plus, I can publish it here when the funeral is over or have someone video it. Fuck it. If I lose my snot on camera, I don’t mind being shown as grieving. I am not planning on a spazz attack, I’m just planning because planning is logical in a time when grieving people are not.

Although I am so cerebral that I am planning this logically. It’s what I do. I am cool, confident, and capable until everyone else has had their meltdowns and I’ve coached them through it. Then, when everyone else is well, my delayed reaction is immense, but I may not be able to have it until I get home. Right now, adrenaline is high. I am betting that I will need some time for it to dissipate, but I know for sure that my experience of grief will evolve over time, especially since I left town at 22 and have rarely looked back. I feel bad that I could never settle into a routine here, that my nerves were always completely lacking in myelin because some parts of the city rattle me into a cold sweat. I never had to go by St. Mark’s or Bering that often, but since I lived in SW Houston, I was really close to Diane’s old house. I never went by it, because I remember the one and only day I was there with extraordinary clarity.

I remember the pained way my parents’ eyes looked, because on the one hand I knew for certain that they had doubts about bringing me to Diane’s send-off in the first place. On the other, they realized it was important to me to say goodbye in person. I think they thought it would introduce some kind of finality for me, the way seeing my mother in her casket will provide an enormous amount of closure…. opposite of my experience with my “other mother,” who continued a relationship with me for many years even though my biological mother forbade it.

I was caught in the idea of mother love for many years, because since I was so young when Diane and I met, that’s mostly the way I thought of her at the time. Part of abuse is the sunshine, and because our story is one of dichotomy, it made ours a great platonic love story because we’d each met a kindred spirit. My falling-in-love butterflies were rooted in so much more than attraction. We were both young musicians. We were both interested in the same types of music. Diane was a professional opera singer and I wanted an entire brain dump every time she sat next to me in choir. I was hungry for singing lessons, but I chose to take trumpet lessons instead because I was getting two singing lessons a week by watching someone who even Pavarotti said had a good voice at the Met auditions in Dallas. IF there is anything that I carry with me every day of my life, it is the shared flourishes we learned to sing together.

In fact, I don’t know if you Bridgeporters will know this or not, but church was “shake and bake….” and because she was up in front of the congregation, I got to be “Ricky Bobby.” When we were singing the hymns, if they ended with a high G or high A in the accompaniment, Diane would put up one finger if she saw me in the crowd. When we were next to each other, I would lean into the fullness of her sound, picking up her style so that even the grace notes lined up. It was also fun when Terry (the primary conductor at St. Mark’s) was out and Diane took over, because one of the introits in the Methodist Hymnal is “Blow Ye, The Trumpet Blow,” and both Terry and Diane wanted me to play the first line, but when Diane was conducting, I was always less nervous…. she was the face I looked to for love.

We just “got” each other. Diane admitted up front that I was often older than she was despite me being almost 12 years younger, and the fact that she looked to me for advice really meant a ton. We were always the closest when she was single, and for me, Diane meeting Susan was a mixed bag. I wasn’t sad that I was so much losing the chance to marry her myself, I was sad that now someone else had her primary attention. Relationships, particularly between two women, are insulated. It is the coccoon we choose, because since women tend to be more emotional than men, they choose that one intense emotional relationship that comes with sex over the emotional intensity of several relationships that straight women have with their wine and yoga pants girlfriends….. oh, wow, that line just hit home for a number of reasons.

And through all of this, my mother was grinning her teeth and bearing it. The more she tried to get me to separate from Diane, the more I rebelled, thinking that she was being homophobic and she just needed to get over it. I couldn’t have been more wrong, but I forgive myself. I only had so much processing power at that age.

During that time, the only thing that really connected us came on at 4:00 PM. We couldn’t discuss my homosexuality, and because I felt alienated, that’s why Oprah is one of the people in whom I see the face of God. For five solid days in a row for 25 years, there was one full hour a day we had something to discuss. We talked about her hair, her weight, and all the superficial things that everyone talked about above and beyond the content of the show. I don’t think my mother ever knew I was running the game…. that by talking about superficial things, I knew that the deeper message was sinking in. She even watched “The Puppy Episode” of Ellen because Oprah was in it.

Through Oprah, my mother became more and more accepting of the fact that gay just happens. She no longer felt responsible, as a lot of Christians do when they hear that homosexuality is a sin and now they’ve gone and fucked up their kids.

I don’t think that she ever fully understood the idea of two women being married to each other, but that didn’t stop her from spoiling the hell out of Kathleen and Dana. They always got just as big a Christmas gift as me, and even though we lived far apart and there was no family picture, her tradition was to send us a Target gift card so that we could buy matching pajamas to wear after Christmas Eve services It was one of our favorite things about Christmas, with both of “my girls,” because as a soprano I would always stagger in the door after Christmas Eve services, having literally worked my abs for three hours, and having fresh, new pajamas renewed my spirit. And, of course, the tradition got deeper with Dana, because we had seven Christmases.

[Editor’s Note: Keep Seven Christmases in the back of your mind for a Dana-centric title]….

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I actually wrote a lot more than this, but WordPress did not save my changes and published an earlier draft. I’ll try to recreate what I said and post again.

These are words that I figuratively never thought I’d have to write and realistically thought I’d have another 15 plus years before I had to say them out loud… my mother is dead.

I do not say she passed away. I do not say she has passed on. I say that she is dead.

It’s not for anyone but me, because I need the finality of those words, not to gloss over this fact, because when I do I remain in the doe-eyed shock that this is not real, that she is coming back, and this is all just some sort of cosmic joke that will eventually end with God laughing and saying, “gotcha!”

Truth be told, God is weeping with me.

My mother had a bad fall a couple of weeks ago, where she broke her foot and hit her head. Therefore, we will not know until the autopsy comes back whether it was a slow bleed from hitting her head or an embolism from her elevated leg that ultimately killed her, but neither thought is comforting. The thought that she slipped out of consciousness and died quickly without pain certainly is.

I will always remember that she died on a Sunday, because when Lindsay called to tell me that an ambulance had rushed her to the hospital, I was writing a blog entry on how I’d actually made it to choir, thinking that I could not take one more Sunday in those uncomfortable pews because the choir has nice chairs…. and how much my mother would have loved the music and how I wanted to send her every piece to order for her own choir, and how when she came to DC I wanted her to accompany me if I was singing a solo that week.

Lindsay called back before I was even finished with the entry to tell me that she was dead, and the file sits on my home computer in Silver Spring as I write this from my iPad on a blow-up mattress in my sister’s living room, praying my frayed, “end of the rope” prayer…. SHIT, GOD!

When I got off the phone with Lindsay (the only sister I share biologically with my mother, five and a half years younger, for those who are just joining us), time sped up in a frenetic, manic burst of energy. I threw my dop kit and my medication into a backpack, ran to my landlady, and said “I need you to take me to the airport. My mother has died.” She said, “which one?” I said, “it doesn’t matter.” She said, “I’ll take you to BWI. Give me five minutes.”

Just then, my dad called and said that he was so sorry, and I told him my plan. He said to let him check on flights, when my plan was just to show up at the counter and buy the first ticket available. I ended up letting him help me, and he called back and said that the next flight out was at 8:45 from BWI and he’d see me at Hobby at 11:00.

It was a wonderful thing that he did, but now there was time to kill, or in my mind, waste. I couldn’t DO anything. Even packing seemed like wasted breath, so I didn’t. I called Dana. When she picked up, I said, “thank you so much for picking up.” She said, “I would never just not pick up… I figured if you were calling me, it had to be for something important.”

It was.

When Dana started to cry, the shock wore off a little bit and I started to feel some real emotion about the subject, whereas previously it had felt like those few minutes after you break a bone and the impact is so jarring that you don’t feel anything due to shock. My dad called back, and I told her I had to take it, but I would indeed call her again. By the time I got off the phone with my dad, my clinical separation was intact, and Dana and I spent my remaining time in Silver Spring laughing and joking and catching up on each other’s lives. It helped me to forget what I was about to do, and comforted me in our ability to put negative emotions away and just enjoy each other so that I didn’t have to think about the enormity of what I was about to do.

Because I didn’t even know what it would entail, but I knew it was enormous.

When it was time to leave, I grabbed my backpack and ran.

When I went to passenger pickup at Hobby, it was my sister that picked me up and not my dad, wherein we proceeded directly to Spanish Flowers for some comfort food. The food tasted different, just one of the many things that was different now.

Yesterday we spent time with the minister, the funeral home, and driving to a local cemetary to see if we liked it. In this garbage dump of a situation, it was as much fun as it could be, and I mean that literally. Lindsay and I, along with my mother’s husband, Forbes, and Lindsay’s husband, Matt, had a good time picking out what we thought she would have wanted.

As good a time as can be had when the world has shifted violently and without warning, anyway.

The entire day can be summed up in “this is lovely, but now I have to go scream.”

Lindsay has been open in her grief, and I haven’t cried once. I am having bouts of internal thunderstorms coupled with mind-numbing shock, because it still doesn’t feel real.

The visitation is in the quiet momemts, where I remember all the things I loved and didn’t about our long and sometimes strange relationship. My father, in his UMC pastor days, said something to me that I am trying not to let ring true to myself, that “death is 50% anasthesia for the living.” Meaning that they try to assure themselves that the person who has just died is some sort of saint, and the truth is that in a lot of ways, my mother absolutely was. But I don’t want that to be her entire narrative. I want to remember her AS SHE WAS.

Over time, those stories will come out, but right now, they are locked deep inside as I actively try not to cry, try not to feel so that I can function. I will break down later, when the business of death is over.

For now, I can only concentrate on the Beautiful Memory Picture™ Jessica Mitford told me I’d get.

I don’t want to tell this story on myself because I don’t even want to think about it. But I need to have it here, in this repository, for me to reflect on later in order to forgive myself, when it has been long enough that it feels like I was someone else. I am so self-aware that I cannot get away from this mistake, and I am beating myself up quite handily. The good news is that I am about to get a real, live, in the flesh therapist as opposed to Talkspace,™ which has worked very well, but is not the same… it was sort of foolish for me to do it in the first place, knowing how I feel about the Internet rabbit hole… but at the same time, I thought I might be able to better divulge what was really going on with me if I had a layer of anonymity between my therapist and me. That layer of anonymity really, really makes it where I can look at my own landmines without the blast radius an in-person conversation would have. I don’t shake and cry. I can get the words out… and even if I have to shake and cry, I can get up from my desk and come back to it, rather than wasting time in session. It’s a mixed bag, knowing this AND knowing that I crave connection with real people.

But I digress.

In what seems like a galaxy ago (perhaps a year and some change), I added Argo to my Google contacts… not because I wanted to talk/text her in the slightest. Because I wanted to know if she was contacting me… for instance, Diane and crew are still in my Google contacts as well, so I could choose whether or not I wanted to answer the phone (I wouldn’t, for anyone, really… just stay with me) rather than being shocked by a totally anonymous number. I am terrified of the phone. I didn’t know what to expect when I got here, and all I can say in my defense is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Being caught off-guard is not one of my strong points, but I would like to believe that I would have been Southern and polite about it, anyway. As Kumar points out in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, “just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.” However, it has never been my call to make. I made so many mistakes with Argo that I couldn’t even fathom needing that number for any reason except avoiding being shaken.

All of that came crashing down on my head when I got a new phone for my birthday, because Android works off of your Google account and not iCloud. So, without even realizing it, her number was now on my cell phone instead of just the phone number associated with my Google account, which for the record is (503) 770-0818. It’s not my real cell phone number, just a Google Hangouts passthrough, which is why I don’t mind publishing it.

Again, I digress… mostly because I am anxious AF and am really having a hard time getting all of this out, even though it is necessary because this is not an experience I want to forget. I have, however, kept it from ever happening again by erasing her contact completely, even her e-mail address, because it lives in my memory and not online.

In the Android operating system, your messages appear in the same box… both ingoing and outgoing. Without realizing it, I “butt-texted” Argo twice, and because I did not know this about Android, I thought she was trying to send me a picture or something, because both messages said “multimedia” without anything attached. Why I went there, I do not know. In retrospect, it seems like the stupidest idea ever in the history of the world.

So, like the cowardly lion that I can be at times, I texted back and asked her if she was trying to send me something without admitting that I knew who it was. It was fairly innocuous, just asking if she meant to send me something, but of course when I said who I was, she saw right through me, as if this was some elaborate plan to get in touch with her when in reality, I genuinely thought she was reaching out. When that boom came down, I was so fucking scared that I couldn’t admit that I did know who it was, and I acted like a fucking jackass… not that I said anything inappropriate, just that it was inappropriate to feign ignorance in the first place.

Humiliation complete.

I thought about it, and I realized what a dick move it was, and wrote to her and said so. My heart was already crispy thinking about everything going on back in Houston, and I couldn’t take adding Argo being angry on top of it, so I lied to protect myself… an ingrained pattern over years and years of metaphorically putting my arm over my face and emotionally saying “I don’t want to get hurt.” I was so afraid of her reaction that I leaned back on that unhealthy tape, instead of just being upfront and saying who it was and why I was contacting her in the first place and how I got said number, because we’d talked about talking on the phone, but she didn’t hand over her cell number herself. It wasn’t any internet voodoo shit, it’s public information.

In trying to protect myself from future hurt feelings, I stepped into it up to my ass, and it’s all my fault. I was just in this small, hurt space and reached back into faulty wiring instead of the woman I’m trying to become. I don’t know why I can be so cagey about the truth at times and so bleeding heart at others. Nadia Bolz-Weber says that we are all sinners, all saints, all of the time. I have to believe it… because what actually happened is that I was so embarrassed that I forgot all else and just retreated into my cave of a room and didn’t talk to anyone all day… meaning that I forgot to call the one person in my life that truly mattered at that moment… my dad.

All of the light and sweet I was supposed to be sending him landed somewhere left of Albuquerque because I was so lost in my own mistakes that I couldn’t reach out. My get up and go got up and left.

I think that’s because I didn’t realize just how ingrained those faulty, negative, harmful patterns are in my life, where I protect myself to the point that I can’t see other people in their need of me. It is not intentional. It’s a worthlessness loop that says “now that I have made a mistake, I will just keep making them, so it’s better to stay away and not take the chance that I will hurt someone else.” My misguided and fragile heart was trying to cut off a fight at the pass, and I sort of did. No reply at all is better than having an RPG launched right back… even though I truly and honestly did not mean to launch one. I just had that piece of sensitivity to her feelings cut off in my need to avoid.

I avoid a lot. I am comfortable in my room with my bed and my computer, and I will stay here for days without moving if I let myself. It’s all about controlling the amount of damage I inflict on others, even when they don’t see it that way. I know that in person, I get a chance to feel love that I just don’t on this medium, but it is extraordinary the lengths I will go to in order not to feel it…. because I keep bad things out at the cost of letting light in. I have said this before, and it is no less true today.

Yesterday was one of those days where I really wished that “snap out of it” was a thing. Because if I could have risen above, I would’ve. But I didn’t. I gave in to that small, frightening place that says I will lose everything if people really knew the truth about me, when in reality, it is amazing at how open the heart can be with a large amount of honesty. I know I would have forgiven me if it had been someone else, but by the time the whole ordeal was over I was shaking under the covers, thinking that it was the end of the world… making a mountain out of a molehill because Argo has made it clear she doesn’t have any fucks to give anymore, so I doubt that I lingered on her mind, but my behavior lingered on mine for far too long… an endless rumination about what a horrible person I was and how insurmountable this rewiring into healthy patterns seems at this moment.

I went back into the truly shitty feelings of sitting in Dr. Goodman’s office, where she told me that she thought she was too old to take me on, that I needed the same therapist throughout the whole process and she thought it would take five to ten years. That came across to me as “wow, you are way too fucked up for me to help you.” So I take those words and beat myself with them often, that there’s no way out in the immediate future and hanging on is a task in and of itself at times. I just have to keep feeling gratitude for the smallest things, like the smell of the air today.

The world isn’t going to end, even when I think it might, or think it should, because something embarrassing has happened and I cannot deal. My faith slaps me in the face all the time, and yesterday was one of those days where I realized that in order to make room for love, I had to leave fear behind. Shame and regret will only bind me to my bed and my Netflix even further, because the more I feel it, the more I regress into wishing for some sort of zombie apocalypse, or that the earth would explode prematurely so I could go the rest of my life without having to…… emote.

Because the more I do, the more I worry that I am somehow pissing someone off, even when it’s entirely unwarranted…. and when it is, I go into overworry mode, unable to let go. In this case, the mistake was serious, but it isn’t always so. The littlest things set me into fight or flight and I just have no coping mechanisms for it. I still regret things I’ve done in childhood, as if it still matters. I have to start learning that the statute of limitations does run out on beating yourself half to death with your own insecurities… and it also runs out on friends who are willing to bear with you when you’re down, because as Dana has said, “being in relationship with you is just too hard. As if I don’t feel unlovable enough.

I suppose the thing I have working in my favor is that I recognize these ingrained patterns and am willing to do something about it… some people never get that far. I suppose that I am blessed with the desire to unpack my own emotional baggage, as painful and real as it is.

I feel better today, but I feel like I acted like a child and covered it up in douchebag…. wait… strike that…. reverse it.

I’m seeing Pri-Diddy on Tuesday, and I know that will lift my spirits more than anything in the world at a time when I could desperately use it.

Sometimes enormous spiritual gurus come in tiny packages. If there’s anyone that consistently gives me the gift of thinking I am lovable and worthy, it’s her… and of course, my friends in the cloud, but I’m talking about the love that comes with being wrapped up in hugs.

I isolate so much that I rarely touch anyone, and perhaps that is part of the problem. It’s hard to feel loved when you don’t give love, either… and in no way am I talking about romance. I’m talking about a shoulder to lean on, an arm around yours when you’re depressed, someone that will feed you to death with vegan delights and send you home, full-bellied and warm-hearted once again…. beauty and simplicity from a fire that sparks within.

Amen
#prayingonthespaces