Last Spring my younger son spent a few days at the Disney theme parks with his marching band. Picking him up from the trip and between the grunts attributed to adolescence and mouths full of food, I understood he spent a lot of time on roller coasters while in Florida. Because…he was fifteen. And not sleeping very much because…he was fifteen. And coming home sick because…he was fifteen.
I spend my days on roller coasters as well. It’s called grief. Sudden grief may be exactly like being strapped in. Climbing up at a laborious speed. Plummeting straight down at the tune of 150 miles per hour. Then there are the times in which the ride seems quiet, even pleasant. Like the calm before the really scary parts in a movie lulling us into a false sense of peace.
My older son and I stopped by the cemetery not long after this trip. It was an impromptu visit. We just happened to be in the neighborhood. While my son danced around the adjacent graves planning what to plant around Tony’s stone, I descended down a steep emotional roller coaster ride because someone, not me, had lain a flower at his grave. “I feel like I’m falling down on my job,” I said.
Back home I felt a sense of true peace. Maybe it was spending a few hours with my son. Making plans for the summer. Running errands. Sharing some time at the cemetery. Maybe it was also my moment of courage in which I shared with my son the verities close to my heart. “You and your brother will heal and live good lives. I will also heal and live a good life. Dad wants this, demands it.”
The truth also being that the beach and water we were on the day of Tony’s death was not adequately marked as dangerous. The universal signs of water safety posted in red, white, and black found on so many beaches across the United States were not there. The swimming buoys or lifeguard were not there. Another person died the same day close to the spot which took Tony. Another man died just a few weeks after. A young woman a few weeks before. My son saying the other man was probably a tourist, an unknowing tourist. Me agreeing. “I need to speak out. Children die in the Wisconsin River.”
“Young children can’t survive that river,” my son replying. Knowing this truth because he too had been caught in its grasp along with his brother. “You might just have to do that Mom,”
Healing, mine, and my sons, occupies my thoughts most days. What we need. Which modalities works best. Finding new or additional healing ways. Reading another book on trauma recovery or Lyme Disease. Going to therapy. Doing the work–both at home and in the therapy office. Paying the bills.
But I tire of this work being the focus of our family’s life both individually and collectively. As if healing is the only thing that binds us together. I yearn to focus on living. Or what I think living is. Healing seems like the past, living more like the now and future. Yes, we all need to do more healing. I have written elsewhere that the world and its people keep hurting and therefore healing is ongoing. Yet I seem to seek something more, not sure what though. Just know I’ve spent eight years focused on healing first. And I wonder if my focus is sustainable over time.
Yet as I think about it, I am not ready to step away from healing’s many ways. And my unreadiness is not about a lack of courage or living. It is about who I have discovered I am these past eight years. And who I am is someone who in my sensitivity to the world needs places, spaces, and people to work through how life impacts me. I also want to continue peeling away the layers of pain stacked up within me. The ones masquerading as personality and temperament and dictating who am I.
In healing, I find myself in new and fascinating ways. And these incremental discoveries bring me joy! So, what I am really discovering is that healing is life’s nourishment not just its balm. An ongoing focus reminding me of the sentence I composed in magnetic words soon after Tony died. The one staring at us from its place on the refrigerator.
“You can do this life well.”
years later adding a few more words:
“You can do this life well only in ongoing healing.”
Living, for me, is doing this life well through healing.
In recent weeks a small snippet of scripture swirls in my mind. Words repeating themselves for days. Demanding acknowledgement. Forcing me to ask if this repetition gets its fuel from my anxiety or if Spirit speaks. The words are from Psalms:
Gentle words suggesting I wake to each day. Acknowledge my place in it. Plant myself in each hour’s time and space. Even in the too busy days of being a pastor, the chaos of moving and home repair, and the ongoing work of caring for family.
“So, teach us to count our days…”
A thought reflected on first while sitting in the quiet of an inn far away from our unpacked boxes and new unknowns. Vacation morning pulsing with no agenda. A day to rest in, hear the rhythm of. Once home, reflection continues in dawn’s daily quiet.
“So, teach us to count our days…”
Phrase reminding me to offer gratitude for the experiences contained in each day. Yet in my own situation—survivor of deep tragedy, pastor, son with chronic illnesses, new empty nester, partner again—I forget these offered moments of acknowledgement. Do not see them or push them away. And in doing so miss gratitude’s slow reveal of what loosens with change.
“So, teach us to count our days…”
I think in my own insecurities, anxiety, and unhealed wounds I hold tightly to my sons, having done so since conception. Even more since my first husband, Tony, died. Now as they move away from me in distance, I am brought back to the time before they existed on this plane. The stage before I knew and loved their father. An earthly space I occupied holding hope for them along with the despair that they might never exist.
“So, teach us to count our days…”
My sons, now six feet tall, are hope made real. And what connected me to something bigger than myself each day when raising them remains. Joined by the absorbing vocational work of writer and pastor. Past despair turning toward wondering: What comes next in this new iteration of our family’s “we?” Each of us counting our days separately yet with the others’ love and support. Life transforming from one time to the next.
“So, teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart,” the psalmist writes. Action words infusing my prayers.
God, you remain in every time and space. Teach us to live each day traversing change with grace and in doing so growing “the enlightened eyes of our hearts.” [2]Hearts seeing the truths of life together and apart. Truth building wisdom so that sight, gratitude, and compassion teach us to live well within ourselves, live well with others, live in healing, and live in you. Amen.
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)
Dark meets light as first thin layer of dawn emerges from behind distant darkened peaks. A horizontal sliver of glowing brightness slowly claiming more of night’s sky with morning’s rise. Revealing, minute after minute, a rounded, pulsating ball of glare. Forcing me to look away.
For many years I’ve been watching these mountains. In predawn peace they appear grey black against a sky of the same color. By mid-morning the mountains have turned bright brown. Afternoon finds them dressed in light grey. Impending dusk turns them taupe, then rose pink followed by pale pink partnering with evening’s greyish blue. Night shadows the mountains against a star-studded sky, black on black.
Mornings with these mountains captivate me most. Choir of birds joining me in my morning’s reverence. Singing a new day’s canon in chirps, calls, twitters, buzzing’s, hoots, echoed responses, and sounded alarms. Mostly from my left as morning traffic sounds reflect off the mountains to my right. Bouncing off these grand giants into the pocked valleys below before climbing up the foothills to where I sit. Staring. Listening. Breathing in the sweetness of desert Spring bloom. Noticing a young jackrabbit’s entrance into the yard. A quail calling from fence’s perch. A hummingbird zipping by.
In this morning place I feel the deepness of my fatigue. The concerns I carry. The sadness filling me, always moving within me like flowing caplets through my veins. My body, in its weighted worries, rests here among birds, desertscape, and in what remains of night’s coolness amidst these mountains. A combination allowing my truth within its safety.
The sun continues its climb, today into a cloudless, blue sky. Blanketing peaks with morning’s haze. A dry fog diffusing downward until the mountains are fully covered. Allowing my eyes to gaze their way again. Seeing their craggy skin, full of bumps, crevices, and stubs, appear more immense than the sun.
A quail couple walks along the view fence unaware of my presence as more hoots and chirps resonate around me. My breath releases. Body quivers as I embrace this act of morning sitting as self-directed, compassionate self-care. Even though it is not my day off nor am I on holiday claiming a series of days just for basking here while watching the day progress through its phases. Instead, I am, like so many now, working remotely for a brief time. Doing so affords me the chance to be with my son as he once again attempts to free himself from Lyme Disease, a co-infection, and mold growing in his body. Our days’ rhythm aligned with the tempo of healing—slow, weighted, disciplined. Combined with calls to this doctor or that hospital’s billing department—the business side of finding answers, possible medical protocols, and people who can help.
This desert, the Sonoran Desert, my son’s physical and emotional container for this time. Mine as well. Only leaving the house for necessary food or an occasional bout of discount retail therapy. Birds, lizards, and rabbits, the only visitors allowed inside the fence. Deep healing requiring solitude. “Like being a monk,” my son tells me.
Sort of like those ancient Christians choosing to live in desert caves, I think. Begin referring to this contained place and time as his monk-dom and to the work itself as monking having worn out the word healing these past eight years.
Last night, my son banged around the house waking me up. The night giving him respite while stealing mine. Once quiet, I sobbed in bed. Something I did nightly, upon a time. The first time living in New York City feeling directionless and alone at the same age of my son, twenty-five. The second, twenty-seven years later in acute traumatic stress which after a few months shifted officially into PTSD. Again, feeling alone. Pain isolating my sons and me. Home, creating a physical and emotional container reaching only as far as our home’s walls and deck. A time demanding a closing off from the world. Parameters secured with lots of therapy, and time. No mountains. Just a field stretching one direction into farmland and the other into woods. Accompanied by birds as well—just different ones with different sounds.
It was in that solitude that I learned the difficult-to-accept realities of true healing, of becoming whole from within. One, that healing is always possible even when it seems elusive. Two, that healing takes healers (as many as needed). And three, healing demands its own time and is stubborn, sure of its own way. Its own rhythm, tempo, count.
Returning from these memories, I sit. Desert breeze comforting me. Sun sending warmth. Mountains rising in protective stance while birds’ flit around me in the light of day. Dart. Land. Preen. My morning’s only external movement in this daily ritual. Allowing pent up breath to discover an escape route. Releasing into body’s inner dance. Desertscape containing me in active witnessing to what my sleeping son’s body does in its cloak of skin and bones. Rid itself of festering disease. Return to true homeostasis breath by breath. While we exist together in illness’ quiet pause, safely in our mountainous waiting room wondering if the birds’ combined, chaotic message is really one of hope.
Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 