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

Remember a few weeks ago when I said that I had a knee-jerk reaction to moving to Houston? Well, the things I could not tell you are public now, and though I am making my peace with them, I am glad that I am released from keeping the secret. It’s time to process everything I’ve been feeling since my dad’s last trip to DC.

I spent every moment memorizing his face, whether he was aware of it or not. I spent every moment wondering what his new face would look like, and whether he would still look like my dad when his plastic surgery was finished. He’s not having anything fun like an eye lift to make him look 30. He’s got a tumor in his nose, and surgery is the best option… and not a small one. In fact, it may take several before it is all said and done. He will go in for the first surgery to take out the tumor, and then they will let that heal before they take a flap from his forehead and recreate a nose. The pictures I’ve seen of others who have had this same surgery look relatively similar once the surgery is done, but not THE SAME. And then this comment on his Facebook page made me crumple in agony when they said, “will you still be able to play the trumpet?” I hadn’t even thought of that.

Six weeks before my dad’s senior-year-of-high school All-State Band audition, he had to have an appendectomy. He spent the entirety of his recovery working on fingerings without even putting his horn to his lips… and ended up winning first chair, which means that his senior year of high school, he was literally the best trumpet player in the state of Texas for the 18-and-under crowd. He got 26 scholarships, from Julliard to Curtis to University of Florida, an invitation to tour Russia with the great Frederick Fennel. He’s kept up his chops, and is still one of the greatest players to ever pick up a horn, even though he knew he was going into the ministry by the time he got to college and never pursued a place in a symphony. When he was a sophomore in college, he was invited to give his senior recital, because as his then trumpet teacher said, “I have no more to teach you.” The thought of these surgeries ruining his embouchure is a gigantic loss if it happens, but I know for certain that if there’s a way, he’s got the will in spades. But that comment, tho…. Nothing like having the shit scared out of you this early in the morning.

Only time will tell as to whether he’ll be able to play, because I can’t imagine him “tooting his own horn” the day after surgery, but again, if there’s a way, he’ll find it.

The reason he came to DC in the first place was to see me before he was stuck in his house for months in recovery. We did some sightseeing, but mostly we just broke bread together and talked. While I was at work, he toured DC on his own, taking incredible pictures and finding out of the way gems in places like Rock Creek Park. He taught me how to use Air Drop on my iPhone, because even though I am a computer person, my dad knows more about Apple products than I’ve forgotten. As he sent his pictures to my phone, it was a metaphor for the brain dump I was trying to acquire, because I knew it would be a long time before we saw each other again. Letters and text messages can only go so far, and I imagine there will be a lot of video calling once he’s well enough to talk on the phone.

I have much less feeling about my dad’s face looking different than I thought I would; it’s more that I hope the surgeons get clean margins on the tumor before it has a chance to spread. However, I am trying hard not to look into the future, because there’s no way to prepare for it except worry, and that always does a fat lot of good. I’d just be sitting and stewing in my own misery, afraid of the unknown, when in reality I need to be trusting of the process and waiting until the doctors tell me I have something to worry about. No need to worry preemptively, as it will do nothing but make me miserable when in reality, there may not be anything to be miserable about. The best I can do is to move on with my own life, checking in as we go along.

My father’s Facebook post about the subject started out with take a long look at my face… I was already asleep when the notification came through, and the buzzing under my pillow woke me up, and that sentence has rung in my ears for hours… because when he was here, it was all I could do.

My sincere thoughts and prayers are with my family as I sit 1800 miles away, in a small and helpless place. I am glad that I have such good friends here that are willing to catch me when I falter, because I talk a big game in terms of not worrying… and the reality is that it is not ever-present, but comes in waves. He is one more person to add to my prayer list as it grows, sending light and peace and joy through the chord that runs between us. I wish I could do more than that, but at the same time, even if I was in Houston, there would be a limited amount I could actually do for him… he is in his oncologist’s hands, and not mine. I’m not a surgeon, and even if I was, I wouldn’t be allowed to work on my own father, anyway.

Again, I just have to trust in the process, trust in his doctors that they will always have his best interests at heart, and hope that things like possible infections are resolved quickly and easily. At times like this, prayer flows ceaselessly from me, but I also turn to writers like Atul Gawande, whose words of comfort in the world of medicine bring me comfort in the chasm between concern and hope.

It also leads me to thoughts of my own mortality, because at this point, both my grandfather and my father have had cancer in different areas of their bodies, this being my father’s second bout. But I am not being selfish about it- this is not about me, and never will be. But when someone you love is going through something traumatic, it reminds you just how precious life is and continues to be with enough gratitude for small things… like how one day, we will be together again, my father’s face regenerated like my precious Doctor.

It is here that I place my hope and fears in the hands of The Great Physician, hoping that His influence will extend to the doctors on the ground…………………………

Amen
#prayingonthespaces

I finally got up the courage to send a message to the woman from Ireland and laid it all out there- that I’d been looking at her profile for months trying to think of a way to ask her out just so I could listen to her talk. Yes, I really did say that. But I also acknowledged just how drooling fangirl that sounded. It’s all about balance. Hey, if geeks can’t be awkward when asking girls out, WHEN CAN THEY BE AWKWARD?

I just realized it’s nearly midnight. I need to go to sleep. I’m not used to staying up past 9:00. You were going to get this great entry and then all my energy just zapped out of my body at once.

But I at least think I placed that zap of energy in the right direction while it lasted.

She’s cute.

Today was my first ITIL v3 Foundations class, and it was a blast. Everyone except me worked for the government, and as we were talking about upgrading old systems, I said something about, “yeah, ’cause Bob’s about to retire,” and that became the running joke of the day. This one guy talked about this old Army system that a few people know how to run, but they have no idea how to extract the data “because Bob’s dead.” My only reply to that was, “they say you can’t take it with you… but apparently, you can.” Bob became an icon for all old technology that’s fading because it is no longer worth the cost of upgrading, or perhaps has to be printed out and retyped because the database no longer matches up to anything in the modern world.

Later on, the instructor gets up in front of the class and says, “let’s talk about CIA… and I don’t mean those guys from Langley.” It’s an acronym, and it stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. Basically three questions:

1. Is the data restricted from those who should not have access to it?
2. Is the data complete and legible to those who do?
3. Is the data accessible?

The last question has more to do with network connectivity than the data itself, but you get the picture. It’s more a question of network drive redundancy in several different physical locations, because you have to take into account things like Acts of God (in the insurance sense…. I doubt God cares much about your PDFs). In terms of computer support, it means a “follow the sun” approach, something I first experienced at Alert Logic when I worked in Houston and the Cardiff office opened so that I wouldn’t have to stay up all night… so when you have questions about why you can’t access your data at three in the morning, it’s not three in the morning for the people answering the phone.

All of these things prevent disaster recovery, because it’s much easier to set up failover devices preemptively than to rescue a dead hard drive.

This is going to be short, because I have homework to do for tomorrow. I don’t think I’ve had homework in ten years. I bought a new pencil and everything.

More tomorrow once I’ve finished the class and the exam, although I won’t know my results for about three weeks. I better pass, though….

Because Bob’s about to retire.

 

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

-Stephen Colbert

If you are really paying attention to the Gospel today, and I mean REALLY, it will lay out for you everything you need to know about what it means to be Christ in the world, because this scripture does not address sin, but sin of omission.

It means something to see suffering and just walk by. It means something to be okay with letting poor people eat the food you toss in the garbage. It means something to hoard away video game levels‘ worth of money and ignore everything else because hey, you’re not one of them. We are all guilty of grouping together poor people in order to keep them at bay. It’s much harder to know someone and not help them than it is to lump them all in one category because then it’s not personal. They are wholly other, set apart in their apparent lack of work ethic and inability to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and grab on to all the things we have, as if it were just as simple in practice to do so as it is to say those words out loud.

Maybe that’s why this parable is the only one Jesus ever told where someone was given a name. He didn’t say “poor people.” He didn’t say “homeless.” He didn’t say “the sick, the friendless, and the needy.” He used a man’s name… and to GREAT effect.

The man’s name was Lazarus, a variation of Eleazar, which means “God is my help.” Every day he laid in front of the gate to a rich man’s house. The rich man is not named, but over time, theologians have called him “Dives,” which literally just means “rich man.” And we are not talking about just any kind of rich man. We are talking about somone who wore dyed purple robes, hideously expensive even by today’s standards. Someone whose gate was not just a wooden fence, but the kind you’d imagine at a celebrity’s house. Someone who ate Michelin star meals every day in a land where people were lucky to get meat once a week.

By contrast, Lazarus could not get up, so covered in sores that he could not even keep the dogs from licking them. In terms of begging for food, we are not just talking about the crumbs under the table. In those days, there were no napkins or utensils, and it was common practice for everyone to wipe their hands on pieces of bread that were then thrown out. If you’ve ever seen a homeless person taking a cheeseburger out of a trash can and wiping off the coffee grounds first, you get the picture.

The best part of the whole story to me is the first line… “Jesus said to the Pharisees…” It is the ass-kicking they so richly deserve, because these are exactly the people that Jesus is talking about when he mentions “Dives.” Whether or not the Pharisees picked up on the fact that Jesus was talking about them or not is moot. It brings an evil grin to my lips just thinking about it.

In the parable, both men die. The rich man is in hell, and Lazarus is in heaven, and they can see each other. What becomes immediately clear right off the bat is that “Dives” knows the man’s name. He knows Lazarus. He has walked right by him every day, so this was not an unknown person to him. Did “Dives” sin outright? I mean, he didn’t tell him to leave. He didn’t mind that Lazarus ate his trash. But Jesus clearly wants more from us than that.

“Dives” begs for water, and Abraham is unmoved. According to Jesus, Abraham says, “my child, remember that you have received what was good in your lifetime, while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.” “Dives” isn’t tormented for all the things he’s done, but for all the things he failed to do. He walked around with blinders on his whole life and it cost him dearly.

And here is the crux of the gospel that continues to this very day. Jesus preaches Abraham with words so sharp you could pierce steel. Write them down.

Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours. He (“Dives”) says, “Then I beg you, Father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them lest they too come to this place of torment.”

Abraham says that the brothers already have the Torah and the prophets, and “Dives” begs, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”

Abraham’s reply is so chock-full of reality that the words resound today. If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.

The chasm between rich and poor is still here, and we are still so ignorant of it that mummies could dance before our eyes and even then, it might not change our behavior. Charles Dickens was the only person we know of that actually changed someone by making Jacob Marley resurrect, but let us not forget that Ebenezer Scrooge was a fictional character.

And, of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Jimmy Carter is the first person that comes to mind. But there are so many more Christians that say the words rather than putting in a quarter of the shoe leather he does.

We are on a ledge with this election, not in terms of candidates, but in terms of issues. Republicans want to rip apart an already tenuous social safety net aimed to help poor people when they cannot help themselves, particularly the homeless who are mentally ill and often unable to hold a job because of it, thus continuing the problem of homelessness as they go untreated. Democrats support these legislations, but the problem still remains as to how to get money allocated efficiently so that resources go directly to the people they’re trying to help rather than being tied up in overhead.

Many people say that there should be no safety net under poor people by the government because charity organizations exist for people to give privately, but the truth is that they don’t. Charitable contributions are down across the board as the chasm between rich and poor gets deeper and the once great middle class has no extra to give… and the richest of the rich avoid paying taxes due to a series of loopholes so that all the Lazaruses of the world are just left out in the cold. There is no easy way to solve this problem, especially when there is no state in the union where working 40 hours a week leaves enough income to rent a two-bedroom apartment, and God help anyone who’s trying to buy a house.

Where is the hope in all of this? Where can we find succor?

It starts from the inside out, deciding what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to be the type people that think it’s ok for others to eat out of our trash, or do we want to be the type people whose eyes are open wide to the Lazaruses of the world?

Our choice is not to blanket stereotype “poor people,” and learn their names. Learn their histories. Learn what they need, rather than trying to guess.

Because of this chasm between rich and poor, our choice may not be to give money, but we can give time at local soup kitchens. We can see homeless people and buy an extra entree to give away on the way out of a restaurant. Tiny things add up, because what might be a widow’s mite amount of money to you might mean the world to someone else.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I’m in a bad way today. My stomach is still torn up, even though I have finished all the Tamiflu and am still taking the Zofran. But it’s not just feeling physically ill. I found a Facebook memory that took my breath away, and this morning I could not get out of bed, because I just wanted to hide from it and hope it went away.

The physical is much worse than the mental, which is why I decided not to go to the book fair. There is nothing more embarrassing than being out and about in town and realizing you need a bathroom RIGHTNOW. RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. This was not a case of psychosomatic illness, but the after-effects of not being quite over the flu yet, and I didn’t want to push it.

But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t tell you what the Facebook memory was:

Favorite tongue in cheek comment so far, because I love my friends: “I didn’t watch the video, just saw that it existed. I just felt like someone who caused you so much trauma probably wasn’t the best person to tell teens that “it gets better.”

It was Diane Syrcle’s It Gets Better video made at Oregon Ballet Theater. In response to the post, I said something about loving that video, because it showed her without The Mask.™ Then I realized I hadn’t seen it in years, and when I made the egregious mistake of watching it again (at that time, not today), I ended up with vomit on my shirt. That’s because the new context in which I saw it made all my kid nightmares/fears bubble up to the surface and I could not ignore them anymore, as I had for so many years previously. I haven’t watched it since, because things certainly did not get better for me. Only more muddled, more fear-induced, more protection mode for someone who didn’t deserve it.

The same friend in the above quote said that one day she would have no more power over me, and when that day came, I felt a freedom I hadn’t felt since I was 11. There are still selected moments in time where she can still rattle me, but it has more to do with destroying old tapes than it will ever have to do with trying to reconcile something that never should have happened in the first place.

For instance, about a year and a half after I left Portland, I got an e-mail from her that contained a photo of her with a Timbers scarf and a program autographed by every player that said without my influence, she never would have become interested in soccer. My reaction ran thusly… everything I had to say about all the emotional abuse I’d suffered as a teen was already out on this web site, and I have no doubt that she’d followed every word closely. Because I knew this, I said, “we haven’t talked for almost two years and this is the first thing you want to say? Go fuck yourself.” It was a reaction and not a response, but I doubt after thinking about it I would have said anything differently. Pretending like nothing had happened and just wanting to be buddies creeped me the fuck out, and always, always will.

That’s been the hardest part of this whole process… discovering ways in which I felt entirely creeped out and was powerless to do anything about it… and later discovering I wasn’t powerless, it just seemed like it. If I’d been willing to talk as a teenager, I wouldn’t have spent years pouring meat tenderizer on my skin, trying to get the poison out.

It is not a shock to me that I got so ill I had to be hospitalized, because that’s not something that should have happened as an adult. That’s something that should have happened about the time I turned 15, and yet kept everything locked inside until I exploded. I was so lucky that I had a gaggle of women ready to catch me when I fell, but ultimately, it was up to me. Argo gave me a swift kick in the pants when she said, why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you? When she said that, I was on the phone with my insurance company within the hour. I didn’t just need medication by that point, but a cohort of people who’d been through similarly horrifying experiences with which to debrief in a very real, no bullshit sort of way.

I had leaned on Argo & Dana long enough, because they weren’t trained in dealing with mental health issues this severe, and I don’t think I realized the toll it was taking on them to try and be my support system…. because how do you do that when you’re in the situation and not looking down on it? I couldn’t make myself have enough out of body experiences to be able to look at the situation logically, because even though I could disconnect from my emotions, it wasn’t always in the healthiest of ways. Sometimes I thought I was coolly calculating my next move. In reality, I just made things a whole lot worse for myself, and have had to dig myself up from enormous emotional holes that I spent a lot of time digging, not realizing that if I didn’t stop, the earth was going to swallow me up… not in terms of dead, but in terms of losing everything I held dear and not being able to repair those relationships because too much had happened for them to feel safe with me.

The two sentences I have had to give up thinking that mean the most to me are:

1. Hey Argo, can I buy you a beer? I’ll make good on Aaron’s promise since he isn’t here. 😛
2. Hey Dana, let’s go away for the weekend and see if we can come to some sort of understanding, a working relationship not tinted with the past.

With both of them, there is everything to say and nothing. What could I possibly have to offer them that wouldn’t end in what a piece of shit I was to them previously? What could I possibly offer that would say “I am not perfect, but I am trying?”

It’s all connected, this creepiness I’ve felt over my lifetime except for the first 11 years. My psychosexual dysfunction has crept into every relationship ever, and working with a therapist has helped enormously, and why I didn’t think of it before is something I’ll regret until the day I die.

Life is all about putting away regret and shame, but there are always those cuts and wounds that stay with you, healed over into scar tissue that hopefully makes you stronger. But sometimes, just sometimes, the scab gets ripped off and that part of healing has to begin again.

What I lost in the transaction with Argo & Dana is a lot of laughter, for a lifetime, really.

I am still trying to gather what I gained in terms of life lessons and perspectives. I have a great big tapestry to look back on, but that doesn’t always help. Sometimes, I giggle through our memories, and sometimes really tough ones come to mind and I lose myself in the rumination of what should have happened instead of what did.

Knowing myself is the key to moving forward, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live with, day by day by day by day by day, Sisyphus pushing as hard as he can only to have the rock fall night by night by night by night.

I wish I could have their grace and mercy, but at least I know I’m working toward my own. And, in the end, that’s what has to matter most. I hope that this is the part of my life meant to propel me into the person I’m supposed to be, because I don’t have any desire to keep repeating mistakes. I at least want to switch to new ones.