Yesterday, I did a really stupid thing. I got into someone’s car without looking, and she had wood piled up that stuck out between the driver and passenger seats. It banged into the space just under my occipital bone, and after four or five hours of all the symptoms of brain injury, I decided that to fall asleep before having a CT scan would have been the second stupid thing… and as Florence Capp said, “the next best thing to doing something smart is not doing something stupid.” However, I didn’t do the smartest thing- I drove myself to the ER. I made it both there and home by being extraordinarily careful, but I’m going to say for the record that I should have gotten someone to drive me. That’s because as my brain started to swell larger, I thought, “this is bad on so many levels.” I could have called said friend, but she lives in Fairfax, VA- not exactly conducive to getting to me and I didn’t want to put her out. On second thought, I should’ve.

When I Googled “Silver Spring ER,” the closest was 25 minutes away. I didn’t go to Urgent Care because I wasn’t sure they’d have a CT scanner and I’d have to be transferred, anyway, and I WAS intelligent enough to realize THAT.

It was not without certain… problems. They wanted to do a urine screen to make sure I wasn’t pregnant before they did the scan, and they seriously made me carry the locked container around until the sample was about to spoil. Then, three hours later, I realized that my semi-permanent earrings were a bitch to remove, and I got all of them out eventually save one, which my attendant taped. Why I didn’t just let him tape all of them, I do not know. What can I say? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer with my condition and the time of morning. Probably because the attendant was Muslim and I wanted to be respectful and not make him touch me more than he had to. Perhaps liberal Muslim men do not have a restriction on touching women they don’t know, but I didn’t think of that, either.

Speaking of my earrings, I gushed inside when a gaggle of teenage girls said they were cool at Chipotle, unprovoked. They specifically sought me out to compliment me. Being thought of as cool by teenagers is not a life goal, but traditionally them thinking any adults have something good going on seems rare. I mean, I passed 30 long ago, which generally renders me worthy of an eyeroll, or at the very least, invisibility.

I definitely felt uncool carrying around a cup of piss at three in the morning.

The only good part of the experience was finding a ton of change in my backpack, enough for all the Diet Cokes I could drink, which ended up being two, but I should have bought more, because they were cheaper than going to the store. 😛

When I finally got the results, the doctor assured me that I did not have a bleed, but the headache and muscle stiffness was going to get a lot worse before it got better, which I have found to be true. She then handed me three prescriptions; one was for percocet, one was for robaxin, and one was for Motrin 600. I didn’t fill the Motrin because I had a thousand ibuprofen at home and I can count.

Even with all that, my head and neck still ache, the first time that even lying down hurts, because I’m putting pressure on my head. I should check whether the percocet naturally is a 12-hour dose, or whether it’s an extended release, because if it isn’t, I can at least cut them in half and get a fresh injection of relief every six.

It doesn’t specifically say “XR,” but the last thing I want is to accidentally kill myself, which would be a third stupid thing in less than that many days.

It feels like a cruel world when I have so much other emotional shit to deal with, but at least the medication makes it where I don’t care about anything, much less something specific.
With my mother falling and dying, I didn’t want to think that I was overreacting, so I waited about four hours to see if it was a thing before I went in. Perhaps that was a mistake, or perhaps it was common sense. I Googled brain injury first and took some Tylenol, but I made sure to tell the triage nurse I’d taken it. The acetaminophen wore off about the time I actually got the CT, but the sponge pillow on the table helped.

I also learned that I’ve gained weight, but not in a bad way. The last time I had it checked, I was 118. Now I’m a buck twenty and some change. I don’t want to go much higher than that because I’m so short, but at least I am getting to a healthy size instead of feeling scrawny. For people who are anxious and depressed, it is often just as hard to gain weight as it is to lose it. Where I really struggle is muscle mass, because I don’t have enough motivation to work out… therefore, I am constantly winded and feel like weak sauce.

There’s a great podcast called “Podrunner” that I want to start again because it’s cooler- a superior introduction to working out because it starts at “couch to 5k.” I have been a casual runner since I was 18, which I remember with clarity because I started to bulk up for skiing and nearly jumped out of my skin with pain the first time I locked in my boots because I didn’t know I had shin splints. If there’s anything that would get me motivated into running, it would be the promise of a ski trip at the end. I love to ski, mostly because I’m such a klutz that I was surprised at how good I am at it. The first time, I went from greens to blues in less than a week.

I still haven’t tried a black diamond, and it is not a goal, because I enjoy skiing without being afraid of it and I’d like to continue that trend. Coming down the mountain with speed is thrill enough. I don’t want to take the lift up to a black diamond and be utterly afraid to come down, like climbing the ladder to the highest diving board and looking down at the water before you jump. I always end up diving, though, because I am not good with ladders and coming up is less scary than trying to climb back down. It would probably be the same with skiing, because I’ve never noticed a lift that carries people downward. There is no going back, only through.

If that isn’t a metaphor for life, I’m really not sure what would be. My grief is acute because even though my mom couldn’t help with the medical part, she would be a superstar in terms of listening or coming up and driving me around. I can’t believe she just retired last school year and she didn’t even get a chance to really settle in and enjoy it. On the flip side, the last time we talked, she was extraordinarily bored… not that the solution to ennui is death (N is for Neville, who died of ennui), but it must be fascinating to “watch me on TV.” I am nothing if not a constant source of amusement. Last night, I forgot she was dead and told the doctor and the triage nurse that if I was pregnant, I’d have to call my mom with an “I’ve had an immaculate conception” speech, because I promise you, that is the only logical conclusion one could make from my monk-like existence.

You would think that I’d miss that kind of intimacy by now, and you would be wrong. Between the medication that I’m taking and my utter lack of drive to put myself out there as available, I have no need. I put myself out there to meet people in the area and have had good success in finding friends, but there’s been no one that has lit up my insides. The memory of it is enough. I simply have a fear of flying… but when I get over it, I want Diana Gabaldon hot, which is scorching in temperature even on the page, much less watching it on screen.

Because I take it back. Wanting sex, for me, has never come from the drive itself, but from the drive to know someone. There’s no one I want to know THAT WELL.

But there will be, eventually. It wouldn’t be fair to any potential anything to drag them into my freak show of a life right now. You’ll just have to wait for the blog entry. I know I  do.

Matt (my own pastor) started off today with a paragraph from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the sudden death of her husband. Tears started to fall as he described the circumstances of the husband’s death, and I lost my snot when he got to “I couldn’t give away his shoes, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that he might need them.” I howled inside at “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” He was reflecting on the psalm, which now I forget, but basically it talked about railing at God, and grief didn’t have to be about death… It could be about divorce, or a friend saying they didn’t want to be your friend anymore… I just kept crying, harder and harder, words gutting me like an ax, deeper with each blow. He was dissecting my world, and holding the diseased organs in front of me. I couldn’t just grit my teeth and keep it together. I was sitting in the back, alone, and my head hit my knees as I crouched in pain.

There was a reason I was crouched over. I did not want anyone to see me. I did not want to be touched, I did not want to be consoled, I wanted to be invisible.

We do not get everything that we want. The anxiety of being seen grieving in public was so great that I would have walked out if I hadn’t had an obligation to stay. It was not the grieving itself that undid me. Had it just been a couple of tears running down my face, I doubt I would have taken much notice. It was being seen at this level, where I couldn’t breathe, I had gone into the Oprah “ugly cry,” and there was no Kleenex. I didn’t want to be him:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, `God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’

I did not want to draw attention to myself, as if grief were a show I needed to put on to tell everyone just how hurt I was… that no one was hurting as much as me… that there was indeed a notion of competitive suffering, and I looked to the outside world like I was truly “winning.”

I wanted to be him:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, `God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Because Jesus’ whole point in the parable is this:

‘I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’

Bridget, one of my fellow sopranos, saw me crumpled into myself and came over just to hold me, rock me back and forth until I could get air into my lungs. I had to remind myself that it gave her something to see hurt and respond, and in order to live in community, I would have done the exact same thing had it been someone else’s mother and not mine. Otherwise, I would have buried myself with shame that I let myself emote.

That being said, what I know to be true is that sometimes people need to be left alone to self-soothe, to be able to draw on their own strength.

It came to me later that I’d already been doing that for weeks, without letting anyone in… the exception being Thursday at choir practice, but I knew that I’d be emotional ahead of time and I didn’t have any fucks to give. Those that didn’t know my mother just died could think I was mentally unstable because I was. I don’t know of any person in deep grief who isn’t; particularly those who have lost someone suddenly and are struck dumb by the ordinary circumstances under which it happened. As Didion points out, Sept. 11th dawned bright and sunny, and even though I only saw a patch of blue sky through my blinds that morning, I knew she was right.

After church was over, Bridget and I were walking up the stairs to the choir room to put our music away and get our stuff. I said, “I sometimes preach from my web site, and what jumped out at me today is that grieving people are both the Pharisee and the tax collector at the same time… because what do grieving people do in public? Try to act like they’re fine.” Grieving people, in order to hide how much they hurt, laugh a little too loudly or make the jokes themselves to cover up the wounded animal that lurks within. Often this is for the same reasoning I had- that grieving in public is calling attention to themselves for the wrong reasons.

What saved me today was knowing I was emoting for the right ones. My grief was genuine, deep and pure to the point of exhaustion. It was an ordinary Sunday, and I was caught off-guard, not knowing that I was going to hear such a message directed at my own heart, unprepared to have my heart sliced to that degree and have every feeling I’d tried to keep inside pour onto my shirt and pants.

Gloria mentioned that my mother had died during her pastoral prayer, and all of the people around me had the light bulb go on as to why I was crying all the way through that particular sermon. It’s possible it was just for me. I mean, I know Matt. We’ve met. It’s possible he’s a “Fanagan.” But it’s not likely. Occam’s Razor is that it was what I needed to hear in the place I needed to hear it, without regard for my own time.

I was the tax collector who didn’t want to be a Pharisee, and yet, sometimes we all need to throw caution to the wind and be open with our prayers, because otherwise, we can only guess if God is listening. To be vulnerable in a place where people can hear it is to be sure.

When Joan Didion was open in her grief with her sister-in-law, the response was strong and immediate- that we cannot catch the light by chasing it into the sunset, only by walking back through the darkness to find the dawn.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

It has officially been four weeks since my mother died, and three weeks since her funeral. I count it like a personal Lectionary, like the way today is 23 weeks after Pentecost. Because her death occurred on a Sunday, I always will. Sundays are about rest and reflection, and I cannot believe that there will ever be a Sunday again in which part of the reflection doesn’t include how beautiful church was and how I wish she’d been with me to see it… whether I am just going to church, or whether I was responsible for creating the experience.

There are so many firsts when your mother dies. This week it’s been the first period of my whole life that I didn’t have a mother to complain to, or when I lived in Texas, to bring me chocolate stashed in her purse. It seems like a small thing, but trust me when I say that small things are writ large. Besides, isn’t a period the most universal mother/daughter experience of which you can think? Are You There God? It’s Me, Leslie.

I have never done anything normally, and my period is no different. I got my first one when I was in the hospital for identifiable symptoms and no clear diagnosis… and I thought I was bleeding out the other end as a result. I was ten, maybe 11, so of course that’s how medicine worked. My mother had taught me about the birds and the bees long ago, but that information did not occur to me in the middle of being hospitalized for something else. I thought it was all connected. To my mother’s credit, she did not laugh. She just bought me my first package of Always and taught me how to use it.

It was a hallmark for me- the first problem in which I did not immediately run to my dad, the fixer of all things. This is because he wasn’t there, and she was. My dad, even then, was interested in medicine and had she not been with me, I probably would have told him first… because this wasn’t a woman thing to me. It was a symptom… of what, I did not know… but surely it wasn’t universal.

It was.

However, I’d just had a battery of tests, so if it hadn’t been for my mother, I would probably think to this day that meningismus and menarche were related. I mean, obviously everyone bleeds out of their hooha after a spinal tap, right? Right? #crickets

I am picturing Dr. Anthony spitting her coffee onto her keyboard at this point.

That image made me laugh, and anything that makes me laugh right now is invaluable. It is my reflex to laugh in the face of enormous pain.

Now I just have to buy my own Mr. Goodbars.

I wish I had more to say today, but I just don’t. I’m going to try and pull out feelings, but mostly today I’ve been asleep. I am not ignoring the fact that I don’t have a job, but I am also not ignoring that it’s nice not to have one in the midst of recovering from the worst thing that has ever happened in my world… and my world was broken before. My mother dying is just the latest thing that’s happened. In fact, my landlady and my adopted family speak of it, and not in hushed tones (blessedly), but straight to my face. They believe I have endured so much, and this is just the shitty icing on the burnt cake.

Let’s review, shall we?

Dana and I broke up in Feb. 2015, after having broken up in 2013 for approximately an hour and a half… not knowing why I couldn’t make it stick, but I couldn’t, so that the denouement was painful and slow until it was traumatic. It seems cruel to have asked her to pick up her life and move with me to Houston and then break up with her, but she had enough of her own money that she could have done whatever she wanted. I did not feel like I was making her stay anywhere, or that I would have left her out in the cold had she had none of her own resources. In fact, if I’d been the one with the large sum of money, I would have given it to her, because my heart was broken but my brain wasn’t… Just because I couldn’t continue to be married to her didn’t mean that all my friendship neurons disappeared. To me, being friends and being married were just different commitments, and I did not want to break both… at first.

I broke up with her because she had once again, broken my confidentiality with something I specifically told her to keep quiet… a repeating pattern in my own life with Argo, because Argo thought I couldn’t keep my trap shut and simultaneously said to make sure Dana read everything so she’d know that Argo wasn’t at fault for anything… that those “in love with her mind” feelings were mine to deal with and were not reciprocated, which was how I felt about the matter. I was never deluded into thinking that they were until Dana called my attention to it (repeatedly), and because she was someone I trusted implicitly, I later thought she might be right (she was, in fact, not). Those “in love with her mind” feelings WERE my shit to deal with and I did, quite successfully, once I was out of the tug-of-war Dana thought they were having (and were, in fact, not).

The fact that Argo told me to tell Dana everything didn’t stick in my mind. The notion that I’d hurt Argo on purpose because she told me I did stuck like glue. The fact that she did not put any constraints on “tell her everything” was lost on me, and if I’d put more thought into it than I did, I would have realized that saying “tell her everything” did not render past confirmation of confidentiality null and void… nor did I realize that when she said “this goes no further than here,” that meant Dana, too. Because, as I have learned since, it’s ok to have friends apart from your partner, to share secrets that deserve honesty, but always respect. I didn’t know that then, because I’d never had a friend like that before.

It wasn’t about isolating me from Dana, it was about our relationship being separate from my marriage, and that wasn’t a bad thing. Dana and I didn’t always have to come as a package deal, and the fact that I thought we did was in itself inherently in my worst interest… not with Argo… with all my friends.

It stripped me of my ability to see myself as a complete entity unto myself, lost without my other half. That’s probably the biggest reason I haven’t dated anyone since. I don’t want to give up my independence, and want to make sure that I have healthy coping mechanisms for continuing to be self-sufficient in a relationship as well as I do without one. Because there are no more package deals. The two-for-one special isn’t always going…

So it was a nasty breakup and World War Me with Argo as we’ve gone through so many extreme highs and lows, both willing to forgive an enormous amount of shit right up until we couldn’t anymore. Neither of us should be willing to stay no matter how bad it gets, hoping against hope that it will get better when we’ve seen no evidence of it. The things she’s said to me run through my mind constantly in a good way, memories as opposed to creating a future, because the future does not render past laughs invalid.

I keep a small flame of hope alive that one day there will be this great redemption story, because to not is to think contrary to who I am. There is always redemption, even in the middle of disaster. I don’t think that way because of how she feels, but because I am a Christian, and I would be really bad at my faith if I didn’t see resurrection in all things, and I refuse to walk around in Good Friday. I want to be one of the Easter people in what is seemingly a Good Friday world.

In my own mind, it is Holy Saturday, a constant vigil for everything I’ve lost because I don’t know that the resurrection is even a thing, as the Disciples didn’t, either. I have one advantage over them knowing that resurrections do indeed happen all the time, but in this case, I cannot search for what it might be because I am not through crying and tearing my clothes over the many Good Fridays that have happened in a relatively short amount of time.

I just have to remember that they didn’t happen to me. I participated in the end of my relationships with both Dana and Argo, and my mother didn’t die because I didn’t love her enough. It happened of its own accord. In this case, it isn’t about me, and to think so is to encourage ego to get in the way. I am not the center of the universe.

However, I am responsible for my tiny part.

Speaking of which, on Sunday I am singing “ballsetto,” because we’re doing an anthem that requires tenors we don’t have. I think I’m going to go up to the church and work on the part, because I was doing ok with a strong tenor next to me at choir and when he wasn’t singing with me, I couldn’t immediately find where I was supposed to be (we do have tenors, they’re just not going to be there on Sunday). When you’re used to reading the top line, reading the third one down gets tricky at page turns, and in this particular piece, the accompaniment is no help. I’m hoping that by doing the work on Saturday, I might even be able to look up at the conductor once in a while.

I just wish I had a horrible cold, because it makes my low Fs come out so nicely.

Maybe I should go to a cigar bar tomorrow night. Nothing turns a soprano into a tenor faster than a Macanudo.

It’s also casual Sunday, which means we’re not wearing robes. I wish I still had my WTFWJD? T-shirt.

Because at this point, that’s really all I have to say.

I went to choir tonight because I needed music and friends, in that order. Ingrid and Leslie #1 are closest to me, and we cracked each other up the entire time…. Well, not the entire time. I made it all the way to 8:50 before I cried so hard that I was shaking uncontrollably, and Leslie (who lost her mother when her mother was only 52) and Ingrid just wrapped their arms around me and held me close until the piece was over.

Everything just collapsed inside me, because I’d sung that piece before at Epiphany with Joseph Painter, and between losing him as a voice teacher and losing my mother as my accompanist (a truly special relationship in addition to just being my mom), I was a total mess. There were about ten full seconds that I thought I was going to go into a full-blown panic attack and I didn’t have any Klonopin in my backpack and I hadn’t taken it earlier… but at the same time, I do not regret it in the slightest. If I had, it would not have been the same choir practice, one in which I needed to sob uncontrollably at God working through music, #prayingontherests (See what I did there? I thought it was clever, too). Sam, the interim choir director now that Nae has left, just lost her mother last year, and we talked for about 30 minutes afterward. I told her about the intense feelings I had about my grief not being for the past, but for the lost future. We all think we have more time, but again, “here today, gone tomorrow” is a thing- in Toby Ziegler’s voice every time.

Sam and Leslie #1 were both Leo McGarry- “I’ve been in this hole before, and I know the way out.”

I needed to go to choir because I found this blog entry from 2003:

I know I am not alone when I say that at 13, I mentally, physically, and spiritually lost touch with my mother. Though I would like to say that it was all due to normal teenage angst, it was actually a mutual blessing and releasing process. She had made it clear through thought, word, and deed that she did not want to raise a lesbian daughter. I made it clear that should she treat me as if lesbian were my only adjective, I was going to need more than she could give.

It was not without incident. I could see the pain behind my mother’s eyes as she watched my clean, pure mother-love transfer away to the woman who would guide me through adolescence. I could sense that she felt powerless to stop it- and at times, wanted to reach across the divide. It was in those moments that I felt equally impotent, unable in my 13-year-old mind to divide loyalties and regain ground that had been lost.

It was a time of deep, impenetrable fog, and the piano was our only lighthouse. Hearing her fingers fly over the keys would rescue me, if only for a moment, from the dark weather moving across my mind. Occasionally, I would sit next to her, turning the pages in her music when she was involved in a difficult passage. It was the closest that we could come to being in communion with each other.

Last year, after living in Washington, DC for several months, I went back to Houston and visited with my mother. Though the conversation was light and easy, it was as if we were two friends… simply “ladies who lunch.” Then she suggested she show me the music she had planned for her church choir on Sunday. I sat down next to her, intent on doing “my job.”

As she started to play, I could feel a lump starting to invade my throat, and my eyes welled in a familiar stinging sensation. The connection that we had felt all those years ago had returned, bringing with it a different kind of peace, one that transcended both of our past transgressions.

No, our relationship would not, could not be the same as it was… but new emotions were starting to wash over me. We were now free to make a new covenant, mindful of the road on which we had walked… but diverging sharply into unfamiliar territory.

From 2003 to 2016, we had a very different relationship than the one we had when I was a teen, because as a teen, you just don’t get the concept that your mother is irreplaceable and to try as hard as you can to love her despite your differences. I also have a different perspective on what I have done, what I have left undone, and what wasn’t my fault. The only thing that’s left is regretting that our relationship didn’t continue to move past my teenage years and all the processing power it took out of me, because I allowed myself to spend so much more time thinking about her, because as a kid I didn’t want to be close to anyone who didn’t want to be close to me. I am probably wrong that she didn’t want to be close to me, and it is more accurate that she didn’t know how. When you are so conflicted about the ideas of sin and nature, how is it possible to bridge that gap?

Time.

And it ran out.

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