Seven years ago today, my first husband and father of my sons died in the Wisconsin River. He was not the first person to die in this river. No, Tony was just one of a growing list of preventable deaths. Preventable by proper signage. Preventable by beach closings. Preventable if the state of Wisconsin allowed victims’ families to sue and thereby effect change. But our voices are capped, squashed. And change? Well, people keep dying.
Today I list those people who have died in the year since I last posted names. I am sorry if I have missed a life. They all matter in this world and to God.
September 5, 2022: Jose R. Borbolla Juarez, age 34
How like a widow she has become…she weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks. Lamentations 1:1-2
Reflection
Limbs fall limp. Eyes drop focus. Mind escapes into sleep. Allowing a few moments of respite.
Until roused by repeated visions and racing words. Breaking in with images and their clinging emotions. Bringing tears, sighs, tossings, and turnings.
Yet some nights the moon rises high mid-mind race. Light filters through closed window shades. Asking for breathing in of its essence. And a breathing out of sleeplessness’ broken record. Inhaling in and out once, twice, as long as it takes for buttock muscles to loosen. Cascading into other muscles letting go.
Until morning wakes. Sunlight slipping in after moonlight. Opening another day for what is possible in healing. Through a compassionate word here. A challenging one there. A few questions to think about. Not fully healed. Something though. Enough to keep going.
Healing Practice: Breadcrumbs
What keeps you going? Write down who and what gives you enough to want to do the work of healing.
Start just with one something. Add another something. Maybe two. Over the coming hours and days, collect five. Name them breadcrumbs. Follow them on your path into healing and restoration.
Prayer
“Restore us…” God, “that we may be restored.” In our restoration give us hope in you, in our now, in our future. Amen. (Based on Lamentations 5:21)
Each year during Holy Week and into Easter, I am reminded of how thin this time is. How tears form and fall after many months of dry eyes. How hearts fill with sadnesses assumed transformed into something resembling new life.
My therapist says these times are dips into small pockets of what once was. Not places demanding we stay or get stuck in. Just revisit. For a few hours or days. Until this small opening reseals and the present now invites us back in. Leaving us with another memory. This one, a remembrance that we loved, love, and will continue to love.
For more writings on grief, trauma recovery, and this time of year, visit my post Easter Early in Grief.
Holidays require a lot of time, preparation, and work. A focus on things that often don’t seem to matter especially when life is full of loss, sorrow, and pain. Whether you are in grief healing or trauma healing or both, our extended holiday season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day can feel relentless. Accompanied by either a cacophony of increased social activity, gift expectations, feast preparations, religious services, family gatherings, scheduling complications, and hectic travel experiences or the agitated silence of isolation and anxiety. Either way, this time requires increased amounts of energy directed toward avoiding emotional triggers, traps, and anniversary issues. Output so often wasted because we cannot continue suppressing the emotional flooding or hijacking regardless of our hypervigilant efforts.
So, what if? What if instead of fastening our seat belts, praying to make it through, and dreaming of the time when this extended performance ends we did something different? What if we embraced these weeks as a time for having difficult yet necessary conversations with ourselves and our loved ones? The conversations which more often than not just simmer below the festive surface. Leaking out regardless. Creating outbreaks of varying levels during a time when we all are supposed to look like one big happy family and community.
What if this dreaded time was an opportunity to say what needs to be said? Speaking into our fears of this time of gathering and reliving what changed our lives without our permission. Emotions named and expressed minimizing the accrual of resentments and anger that we usually either numb with alcohol, food, or drugs or explode out into those gathered.
What if the holidays became more a time of shared reflections of what we’ve healed in the past year, the work we still want to do, and the compassion we are able to give ourselves and each other?
What if these holy and sacred shared revelations became as important as pumpkin pie, beautifully decorated holiday cookies, and holiday sweaters?
What if we looked forward to these yearly conversations, held over a period of six or so weeks? That somehow these conversations felt more needed and less obligatory than the annual fest of too much food and drink, concerts, parties, carols, and movies? Because we came to realize that being fulfilled by our relational transparency with ourselves and others led to deeper connections with the people we both love and need, including ourselves?
What if Emmanuel, God with us, included or even was these connections we made each year with one another? Making the real gift of this season of piled up holidays, each with their own set of implied expectations, an ongoing act of fostering and strengthening human relationships? What if?
Blessings on your holy connections this holiday season. ~Jennifer
“I’m not getting a tree,” I announce in early December.
“What? We always have a tree,” Ricky counters voice climbing into combat. Cave into his insistence.
Drive south, to the edge of Iowa City. Snow storm brewing across grey streaked sky. Sons grumble as they pick out and cut down tree. Farmer saws end off making rough places plain. His sons tie tree to roof of our car. Drive back home. Snow whirling around us. Beautiful. Scary.
Decorate tree. After Epiphany, thought of taking tree down makes head swim. Sends me back to bed. Remember year before. Ricky, in pain from losing his dog, his dear friend to the ravages of suicide, and his mind to a medical mystery screamed at us for trying to take down the Christmas tree. All Tony and I could do was soothe our beloved son. Once again feeling helpless in the face of this unknown something eating him away. Promised again and again we would keep the tree up forever. While he sat on the sofa staring at shedding, browning branches and listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas CD until Spring. When there was now no doubt that the tree needed to leave.
This year, in a trance, put away ornaments. Strip off lights. Ask sons to haul tree outside to curb. Vacuum up mess. Sit on same sofa gazing at empty spot left by tree, by Tony.
WHAT I AM READING
A good read in which religious historian and author Karen Armstrong brings together the thinking and practice of many of the world’s religions on growing compassion for self and one another.
INVITE JENNIFER TO SPEAK
If your organization, church, podcast, conference, library, or literary festival is interested in inviting me to speak, preach, or lead a workshop, please click here: Invite Jennifer to Speak.
Eleven pounds. Eighty-six ounces. Fresh. Organic. Not too heavy for me to lift into my grocery cart. Remember the brussel sprouts. Forget the cranberries. Because I burned my orange, cardamom, cranberry sauce in the crock pot yesterday. Making sauce no one will eat. Because really what we all want are good lingonberries with our feast. The hard-to-find ones costing seven dollars a jar. But I like the smell of simmering cranberries. Warms up our home with thoughts of holidays’ past. Until berries remind me of their fragility and burn. No longer evoking memories. Just another failed cooking attempt.
Earlier, when leaving for the store, gazed at sparkling crystals covering drive. Made mental note to sand upon return and remind sons to scrape mid-afternoon. Ensuring safety for myself, my mother, the delivery people. Before late November sun sets to soon.
Now arriving home, the back seat full for our upcoming feast. Sand our drive, pock-marked by your overuse of salt. Wanting once, a lifetime ago, to make sure I did not slip on this descending slope. Throwing grit down now. Missing you. Not because I do your chore. But because I simply miss you. Today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Miss you on this sunny Sunday day.
Hours later sit with strangers in writing workshop. Flowing tears shift them in their seats. Like so many others blindsided by our pain. Spectators more comfortable with emotions on the page than in living truth. Curious voyeurs hoping against hope to keep covered their own pain while not empathizing with a slice of ours.
Tears emanate from truth told through poem written here and shared. Today, this Sunday before Thanksgiving, I bought my first Thanksgiving turkey since you died. We, no longer qualifying as refugees, welcomed at others’ Thanksgiving tables. Released this third Thanksgiving to celebrate on our own. The stuffing mine to overcook. The cranberries mine to burn. The gravy mine to whisk into lumps. The pumpkin pie mine to forget the sugar. Like the time my sons will not forget.
In following days leading up to event make another phone call asking to have your name removed from some bill, piece of mail. Like I have so many times these past twenty-seven months. Never ending, this removing you from our day-to-day business of living. Realize as this holiday approaches though that I must (once again) slow down. Be good to myself. Take care. Cease all dissassociations and denials. Just be in what was, what is not now, and what can be despite it all. A paradoxical trifecta of sorts. The holy trinity of living after trauma and death.
Third Thanksgiving. First turkey. Wonder what we will be thankful for this year. The brutality of what happened to us compounded by sons’ illnesses, mysterious and hard to treat? No. Will we be thankful for knowing and loving you? Will we be thankful for what we have accomplished in healing grief, trauma, illness? Will we be thankful for mercies still to come? Will we feel hope this day, our first alone. The first we trust ourselves to be alone just sons, me and my mother. Who will bring Norwegian lefse made with gluten free flour, thick instead of thin. Making us all remember when wheat lefse smeared with real butter rolled up easily. You wanting to sweeten yours with brown sugar. Me telling you this way is incorrect in purist lefse culture. You carving the turkey. Looking at me with silent words of, “I really do not know how to do this…”
Me believing you will figure it out. Like now I believe we will continue to figure out life without you as I dish up food. Light candles. Gather us into the grace of this day.
INVITE JENNIFER TO SPEAK
If your organization, church, podcast, conference, library, or literary festival is interested in inviting me to speak, preach, or lead a workshop, please click here: Invite Jennifer to Speak.
I love metaphor. I embrace metaphors for God in my own theological imagination, my own thinking about and encountering God. Rabbi Toba Spitzer’s new book is a welcome addition to my wonderings about God. Here is a small bit of her wisdom:
“There are two elements found in every spiritual and religious tradition that resonate with the power of Voice: music, and the sound of silence. Each of these modalities offer opportunities for transformative spiritual experience.” (109)
There are a number of exciting possibilities incubating for 2023. Stay tuned!
THE VALUE OF REVIEWS
Being an author, especially a spiritual author, means also being my own marketing director. And I admit I have all sorts of feelings about being tied to the social media self-promotion cycle. Yet there has always been a business side to writing. So here’s what publishers, book sellers, and writers know about getting books into readers hands, eyes, and hearts:
NEWSLETTERS: The more people on an author’s newsletter email list, the more the author sells their books. You can be on my newsletter list by simply following my blog. To do so, press the SUBSCRIBE button on the upper left side of this page.
REVIEWS: The more online reviews a book receives, the more a book sells. Please consider reviewing my book on Goodreads and at my Amazon author’s page.
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Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 