Being Other

"But, Mama!  Why did Jesus get to come back and Daddy doesn't?  That's not fair!"

This has been an ongoing discussion in our household for just about 2 months now.  One of the perils of sending my daughter to a religious pre-school is that I'm forced to sometimes navigate the tricky waters between her emerging faith and my established religious beliefs.  I knew that in sending her to pre-school, my options in this area were religious or nothing.

I have recently, officially made peace with the fact that I am religiously 'other'.  Here in Virginia, most everyone is something.  Most of my friends are Baptists or Methodists or lapsed this or that.  For years I have been a lapsed Catholic and then became part of the "SBNR" crowd--spiritual, but not religious.  I knew I believed in something, but I was hard-pressed to decide what that something was. 

Still, when my husband died, everyone rushed at me with invitations to church from all different directions, genuinely with the best intentions of their hearts aimed at helping me find solace and comfort.  And being that I was widowed at the age of 36, it began to feel extremely isolating.  I suddenly wasn't "couples friends" any more, yet I had a child which made me have to be more responsible than my freewheeling friends in their 20's and 30's who hadn't yet married and/or had children.  I felt 50 years ahead of my time.  And I knew I needed a sense of community.  A place to belong, a place where I could figure out who I was and what I did believe.

When we lived in Massachusetts, Mike and I found and attended the Unitarian Universalist church in Watertown, MA.  I liked it there very much, but when we moved out to the suburbs of Acton, it was impossible to continue attending.  We moved to Fredericksburg and tried attending Mass again at the local Catholic churches, but they were huge and felt impersonal. 

One night at dinner, I told Mike I had found the UU church here in Fredericksburg and asked if he'd like to go.  And then Mike dropped a bombshell on me.  "To tell you the truth, I think I'm an atheist.  When you die, I'm pretty sure that's it."

It was shocking.  I was OK with that belief, but I had never thought he wasn't a person of faith.  So I dropped the matter.  But nine months after his death, I felt a very strong urge to get out and find somewhere to go, so I looked up the UU service again, and I was pleased to find out that they had moved into our neighborhood.  So one Sunday, I took Leah, dropped her off in the nursery, and sat in the sanctuary for an hour.  One year later and 3 months later, just recently, I was introduced with 7 other people as an official member of the church.

Being a UU is now a central pillar of my life.  I volunteer with the choir, community action, and the religious education committee and once a month I go out to dinner with the women's group.  Even when I think, "Oh, that's not really my thing", I still go to church events and I always have a wonderful time.  I feel like here, in Virginia, amongst people who are religiously devout, I have found a little bastion of religious freedom.

One of the central tenets of the UU is a free and responsible search for the truth.  The UUFF (Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fredericksburg)'s website states, "We offer an open-minded and supportive environment for those seeking philosophical, spiritual, intellectual and religious exploration."  I have taken the time to seriously devote myself to that sort of study in the past year.

I am excited to raise Leah in this environment.  It is one in which it is ok, expected even, to ask questions.  And it is ok to choose your own belief system.  I very much doubt you will find 2 people in a UU service who believe exactly the same thing.  

I lived for years with Catholic Guilt.  No sense that I was worth anything, that I was born a sinner, I would die a sinner, there was nothing for it but purgatory if I was lucky and hell if I wasn't.  I thought and re-thought and decided and revised my decisions over and over and over again, never trusting myself to make good choices that would be approved of by God.  I prayed for things and never took credit when my own work resulted in something working out, and accepted that it wasn't God's will if my prayers went unanswered.  

But until July 12, 2012, I truly believed that if I needed a miracle badly enough, God would provide it.  When Mike collapsed, I prayed as hard and as earnestly as I had prayed in my entire life.  I offered my own life in exchange for Mike's.  I prayed for the doctors.  I prayed for the paramedics,  I prayed for Mike, I prayed for the family.  And he died anyway.  And not only did he die, but he died in such a fashion that a loving, innocent 3 year old had to witness it.  And I had to live with the guilt and shame of not being able to save his life.  And his good, bright, big, bold light was extinguished for no good reason.  

And it was then I realized that the God I had always believed in did not exist.  Had never existed.  

So now I am embarking on my own search for truth.  The term "Unitarian Universalism" indicates two things I do strongly believe in:  Unitarianism being that there is only one deity/force in the universe, none of this Father, Son, Holy Ghost trinity business; and Universalism, the belief that every person will be saved.  How and why, I don't know.  It's not my business.  I'm leaving it to God.  "What about Hitler?  What about child molesters?"  I do not know.  It's not my business.  I'm leaving it to God.

As I have learned more about God (haven't completely radicalized and starting referring to that force that controls the universe as Goddess), I learned other labels and recently came to the conclusion that I am a deist.  A nice little definition I found online is "A deist believes there is a God who created all things, but does not believe in His superintendence and government. He thinks the Creator implanted in all things certain immutable laws, called the Laws of Nature, which act per se, as a watch acts without the supervision of its maker. Like the theist, he does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation."

(Read more: Theist, Deist, Atheist, Agnostic | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/theist-deist-atheist-agnostic.html#ixzz36ShPbSpQ)

In short, I don't believe God answers our prayers.  I believe he is very hands off and impersonal, if he exists at all as a 'person'.  I'm still trying to figure out what exactly God is.  But the idea of an old white dude on a throne with flowing robes and a long beard no longer jives in accordance with my beliefs.

So Leah spent 2 years in an Episcopal pre-school, as I believed it was the best early education she could get.  And I have no regrets about sending her.  She also went to Vacation Bible School for two years, but that came to a quick end after last year when she came home telling me things like, "I have Jesus in my heart" without actually being able to tell me what that meant to her.  To me, that smacked of indoctrination--being able to repeat something without understanding WHY or what it even meant, so we don't do VBS any more.  

But I want her to feel she can ask hard questions and get answers that make sense.  So she got on a kick about Jesus coming back from the dead.  And she was sure if she just wished hard enough that Daddy would come back from the dead too.  And I was torn between not wanting to quash what could be seeds of her own belief in something with what I feel to be true for myself.  So I tried explaining it to her that when Jesus came back from the dead, he only came back as a ghost, not as an alive person, and he didn't get to stay, he still had to go back to Heaven with everyone else who died.  And no one has seen him in 2000 years.  

And she asked, "You mean like the ghosts in Scooby Doo?"  And I said, "Yes, only a real ghost, not a person hiding in a mask."  And for a while, that worked out OK.  But just today, she asked again, "When is Daddy coming back from the dead?  Jesus got to, and that's just not fair."

And so, in the parking lot of our local Wawa, I looked my 5 year old in the eye and said, "Leah, the story about Jesus is just a story people tell themselves to feel better about the fact he died.  It's just a story."  And in so doing, not only did I tell her what I believed, I told myself.

She asked me what I meant that it was a story, and I said, "Do you know how you feel so sad that Daddy died?  Wouldn't it be fun to think of a story in which Daddy came back to life for a day and got to do fun things with you, even if he had to go away again?" and she said it would.  I said, "It's the same with Jesus.  Everyone was so sad that Jesus died, they made up a story about how he came back to life and they got to spend some more time with him.  But it's just a story.  And if the story makes you feel angry or sad about Daddy being gone, then you don't have to believe in that story any more."

I know that in the future, she will run into people who have a very, very strong faith in Christianity.  Frankly, this blog post scares me a lot because so many of my friends are so faithful and devout and I worry that I have offended them or they will dismiss me because of this.  And somewhere down the road, Leah herself may decide that she believes in Jesus, in the Trinity, and in a more traditional set of religious beliefs and values that I do not share, and I will choose to be OK with that.  My own religious journey caused considerable concern and heartache in my family, and I don't want to feel that way about Leah's journey, whatever it may be, provided she doesn't join a cult of some sort.  :) 

I am going to raise her to seek out information about these kinds of questions, to make her own decisions, and to believe what her conscience dictates.  I struggle with my UU faith.  It makes me want to be a much better person than I am.  Not because of some lightning bolt hurling deity in the sky but because it shows me that the people around me deserve love and compassion and that every single day we have together is a gift.  I struggle with being non-judgmental, jealous, and with holding grudges in particular, but I know now those aren't cosmic failings that will condemn me to an eternity of torment but very real human emotions that I can work on so I don't feel separated from or superior to other people.  

I recently had to make a decision for myself and my daughter that ordinarily would cause me to do something I didn't have my heart in because I would feel bad because I would let God down by not keeping my promises.  And then I realized "Hey, no longer do you believe that God operates that way".  I was able to make a decision based on my own well-being and that of my daughter without fear of divine retribution.  That felt so amazing after years of a burden of guilt and fear.  I don't worry any more about what God wants out of me and my life, because I don't believe that he cares about anything in this world beyond the creation of the universe.  The day to day struggles of humanity are things we cause to happen to ourselves, and we can resolve and fix.  My recent car accident was just such an example.  My family was kept safe because of the development of engineering in cars over the years to where safety doesn't have to be as much of a concern because cars are so much safer than they used to be.  We were protected by my car.  God wasn't going to call the insurance agency and deal with the paperwork and the rest of it, I did all of that, and I didn't need divine help to get it done.  I was able to make phone calls, put things to rights, heal my wounds with the help of doctors, get myself together mentally with the help of a counselor, and get back on the road.  

 

I can own my success instead of chocking it up to a being in the sky.  I can accept responsibility for my failures, I can strive to do better.  Not because of divine mandate, not out of fear of not getting to play a harp and sit on a cloud forever, but because that is the human condition.  

I am so grateful to the UUA and the UUFF and all I have learned from the beautiful people with whom I've associated in the past year and a half.  It has been a time of tremendous growth and change in my life, in what I'm sure would otherwise have been a very dark and difficult time.  People have made the difference.  Liberal religion has made the difference.  And for that, i am truly grateful.

Soap

This normal looking package of soap has had me in tears all morning... It is one of the last things I bought my husband before he died, and the first of his bathroom items I'm actively going to get rid of.  He told me just before he died that he needed soap and obviously the package was so fresh, he hadn't had time to even open it yet. 

Unlike many widows, when he died I didn't keep his stuff around.  I packed up the things that I really wanted--shirts he had worn that hadn't been washed so I could retain his scent, his cane, his wallet and keys, his hearing aids and wedding ring.  I gave his family the things they wanted, and then I sat with everything for a while.  After 6 months, I cleared everything out.  His office furniture, the clean clothes from his dresser and closet, his shoes.  I kept his coats, a few articles of clothing I could wear, and everything else went.  Except his bathroom stuff. 

The other day, we were in the bathroom cleaning, and Leah opened Mike's drawer.  His razor, deodorant, a box of Q Tips, and a few other odds and ends remained.  I had already packed up and put away the shaver I used to cut his hair, his cologne, and toothbrush.  But these other things had just been sitting in the drawer, and the soap was under the sink.  Leah found it all, looked me square in the eye and said, "Mama, it's time." 

But I can't.  I tried, and I have tried to.  But I just sat on the floor and cried.  So we put everything in the bottom drawer, and left it.  It all feels too personal, too close to home to discard or to give away.  His razor touched his skin, there are bits of hair clinging to it.  I just can't.

But the soap, although it was his, it's just wasteful.  I gave a couple of bottles of electric pre-shave that had never been opened to friends, but no one wanted soap.  I guess no one really uses soap any more, preferring bubbly, soft body wash. 

Last week, I had lunch with friends of Mike's.  Their son, Justin, died less than a year before Mike died.  He was in his 20's and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.  It was devastating and at the time, Mike was so upset and we never thought such a thing happened to people we knew.  And then it happened to us.  To me.  These lovely people have turned some of their grief into a mission at their church to help in Haiti, and went to Haiti last year.  They are going again this year and I asked for a list of supplies of things they needed to take with them.  Soap was on the list.

So Mike's soap is going to Haiti.  I was fairly sure that there was a bar missing from the package, so I was happy to see that the whole thing is in tact.  I'm happy it's going to a place where people so desperately need it.  I'm glad it's being taken by Mike's friends.  I know it's ridiculous to cry over soap.  I don't want to read too much into it, about how this unopened package of soap shows how life just ends and we leave stuff behind, unopened and unused.  It's easy to ascribe meaning to everything, every little tiny thing.  At the end of the day, it's a package of soap, it's not Mike. 

So why can't I stop crying?

Mike's Birthday

Yesterday, January 21, 2014 would have been Mike's 40th birthday.  At the time of his death, he had been planning his 40th birthday bash for 2 years.  He had a guest list drawn up, a menu selected, there was probably a play list squirreled away for a DJ.  I have no doubt it would have been quite a scene.

Instead, yesterday, we were blanketed with a soft snowstorm.  Leah and I went out in the morning and set off "floating lights" into the sky.  She sent off a pink one and I sent off a green one, our favorite colors.  They went up beautifully and floated away, striking against the gray clouds of the pre-snow morning.

At noon, we ate pepperoni pizza and drank orange soda and after dinner, had a cake and sang Happy Birthday, and Leah blew out a candle.

I spoke to my mother-in-law and father-in-law, who sounded like you'd expect, and Leah gifted them with an actual conversation, which I did not expect, but I think it was pretty great all the way around.  I called my dad, who was aware of the date and the significance, and certain other members of the family were aware of the date and chose to behave badly anyway.  So I had that to deal with, as well as some issues pertaining to completing my master's degree.  I chatted with several friends in the evening, as if there was a conspiracy amongst them to keep me talking, which I so appreciated.  And of course, Epic Mickey demanded some attention--Leah wants to defeat Captain Hook in the worst way, but we are woefully inept gamers.

Those are the facts.  I can't tell you how it felt. The UU had a speaker months ago who said, "If you can put words to something, it loses its truth."  And that's how I feel about all of this.  I write about it, I talk about it, but I can't really put words to all that has happened in any way that gives it meaning for anyone.  I can't say how spending Mike's 40th birthday without him felt. 

I believe the snow was a sign--everyone got a day off due to some cosmic maneuvering on his part and many people celebrated.  Our house was coated in a little blanket from above and we were kept warm and snug.  For once, I didn't mind a snow day.

Growth

Every morning, Leah comes downstairs, grabs me by the hand and pulls me up, and measures how tall she is against my body.  She falls somewhere between my shoulders and my hips, and seems disturbed by her lack of daily progress.  I want to hug her and tell her not to be in such a hurry, to remind her how she used to fit in my arm just so, how it was all so perfect and how I never put her down, how she didn't walk till she was 16 months old because I carried her everywhere.  And now she has loose teeth, she's getting her hair done, she goes on sleepovers, and I'm registering her for kindergarten this year.  And how a teeny little piece of me curls up and dies with each step towards independence she makes.  I am proud, but it is happening too fast.

But she is not the only one experiencing epic growth in this household.  At the tender age of 38, I am starting to ask my own questions, challenge my own thoughts, and look to my own future.  I wonder if I have the guts to do anything at all.  It has not ever been my situation that I could just do this kind of thing.  But I find myself on the edge of a bunch of different roads, and I'm trying to figure out which way to go.  And there are no maps, signs, or guides that point one direction or another, or give any indication that I will meet with success or failure if I choose that path.

I have been sent and come across many quotes about grief, and one such that recently ambled my way read, "When you lose your parents, you lose your past.  When you lose your spouse, you lose your present.  When you lose your child, you lose your future."  But as a young widow, that isn't true.  In the course of my counseling groups at Hospice, I came to realize that I have lost my future.  Mike and I had a million plans stacked up for "someday".  Vacations, house plans, kids, cars, family issues that would need to be considered and resolved.  I recently came across a folder in Mike's computer with some of those things written down.  Budgets, plans, ideas, schemes. He even had meal plans written out.  It was thoughtful and methodical and planned and measured, in a way only Mike could have done.  And as I read through it all, between the tears, I thought, "None of this has come to matter a bit."

I recently had a phone call with a friend who received our Christmas card.  Upon reading that we had a new car and were putting a new roof on the house, he asked, "So are you putting down roots and planning to stay there?"  And I protested no, no, no, of course not.  But those were words that required some thought.

For most of my adult life, decisions were always made with an eye to what made Mike's life easier.  He was the one who would have a harder time finding a job or independent transportation, so even if I found opportunities for myself that I thought looked interesting, I didn't apply for them, because uprooting from life here in DC would have been incalculably difficult for him.  When we moved here, I was so happy because unlike greater Boston, where we had lived before, things stayed open here, everything was local, and I was actually able to make some friends, something I had not accomplished outside of work in 3 years in Boston.  Mike had friends.  I had acquaintances.


We moved to Fredericksburg in 2005, although we had both pledged never to live on the I95 corridor.  95 was crowded, congested, the worst traffic back ups happened on 95.  But we came to Fredericksburg for our wedding anniversary and fell in love with Old Town, and this just seemed our destiny.  We bought our house with dreams of a big family that never materialized.  We bought a station wagon.  We put in new doors, new windows, new furnace, new air conditioning, new paint.  There were nights, few and far between, when Mike's commute spanned 30 mile (yes, you read that correctly) traffic back ups.  We missed out on plans we had due to traffic.  It would take us 30 minutes to get 5 miles across town.  One memorable night when 95 was jammed and the traffic on Rte 3 collapsed as a result, it took us 45 minutes to get out of the mall parking lot, with a squalling toddler in the backseat.  I was miserable.  I now refuse to leave my neighborhood at certain hours of the day.  It's not worth it.

There are amenities galore here, lots of history, every shop and store you can imagine, a blossoming arts community, wonderful people committed to improve everything from the plight of the local homeless to the deforestation of the city.  There is an outdoor summer concert venue, three movie theaters, the college where I shook hands with future President Obama, and the Children's Museum is opening in 4 months.  The schools are great, the people are fun, the Civil War is still being waged.

"Are you putting down roots?"

No.  It's just not for me.  Greater Washington DC is just not for me.  The more I live here, the more I feel stressed and tired and worn out.  Too much congestion.  Too high a cost of living.  When I weigh the pros and cons, I come to the conclusion that I just don't want to stay here.  I want to go someplace I can take a deep breath and relax every morning, a place I can look forward to whatever's unfolding every day, even if it's mundane.  A place where people aren't overcome by their own importance, where they take some time to appreciate people and nature and not keeping up with the Joneses and the next great vacation where they never totally unplug their phones and computers and tablets, just in case.  I want to live in a world where getting on the interstate every day is not a fact of life. 

I don't know where I want to go.  I know where I do NOT want to go.  New England is not even a remote possibility.  Although I love Mike's family, I could never go back to a place that is so hard to break into.  So impossible to break into.  Going home to Northern New York holds some appeal--it is a great place to raise children, I know people, I understand the way of life.  But I would feel like I had failed in the great big world out there.  The friends with whom I have talked say, "Come here!  Come here!  You will love it here!"  And I might, I really don't know.  I could go to California, Vermont, Illinois, Northern Virginia, Florida, Georgia, and be surrounded by friends who have found their happiness.  But I don't want to live other people's dreams and find out at the end of it that I still haven't done what made me happy.  I could stay here, cocooned in the life I have built, happily surrounded by friends I went out and sought for myself, people who will drop their lives at a moment's notice to go see a movie, eat a meal, let our kids play. 

A few years ago, I went through an Elizabeth Berg phase and happened upon her book "The Year of Pleasures".  In it, she wrote I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go.  

I didn't ask for this.  But I want it to be an opportunity to change our lives for the better. I am trying to fight off feelings of urgency.  I have nowhere to go, no reason to change at the moment, no promises that life would be better, that the right people are waiting at the end of a geographical rainbow.  There are no promises that I'd get somewhere and love it too.  I wish I could just start driving like Betta Nolan and happen upon the place I'm supposed to be, and the thing I am supposed to do. 

So I will stay here until I come up with a better alternative.  This isn't a giving up or giving in.  I am actively seeking alternatives.  I've begun applying for jobs in farflung locales with exotic names like Waukee and Waikaloa and Seymour.  I dream of the sea . I dream of England.  I dream of adventure.  I dream of peaceful nights and calm days.  I dream of tossing the kid and the cats in the car and moving down the road away from the drama and nonsense that has consumed and fractured my family.  I dream of sending a card that says, "Landed on my feet in Wichita, send the furniture".  I hedge my bets, get more involved in the community here, join, quit, make appointments.  I have some major, major changes coming down the pike in the next 6 months that will make it very difficult to leave just yet. Part of me will hate to leave this house...

What if I wanted to enjoy a memory or a good cry? I wasn't weaned from that yet; I wasn't finished being with him in the only way I had left.

But I know as surely as Leah does that growth is happening, slowly and steadily, and will continue whether I'm ready for it or not.  There is a future out there somewhere and I'm excited for it.  I'm ready for change.  I just need to make a few plans first.

The Coffee Pot

(Writing Our Grief paper, December 6, 2013)

Mike’s coffee pot died recently.  This was no mere Mr. Coffee, nor was it a simple matter of going to the nearest big box store to get it.  Mike was an avid coffee drinker.  He loved coffee with a passion, and we used to joke that if we cut open his veins, there’d be pure caffeine running through.  I should have asked the medical examiner if that was true.  Mike’s odyssey to own a new coffee pot started when he decided he’d like to be able to make his own fresh-ground coffee every day before work.  He was convinced there was a pot out there that would fresh grind only enough beans to make exactly two cups of coffee for him, or 12 if he was entertaining.

When Mike was a little boy, he had a similar fascination with night tables.  His parents have long regaled us with stories of how he used to ask everyone he knew if they had a night table.  If they answered that they did, he wanted to know what was on it.  One fine Sunday, his parents took him to church, and the Bishop of Providence was conducting the service.  Afterwards, they all went to greet him, and Mike’s father Hank issued a stern warning that Mike was not to ask the bishop about his night table.  But sure enough, when it was his turn, Mike strolled up to the bishop and asked what was on his night table.

The coffee pot became the new night table.  He began to grill everyone he knew who drank coffee with the precision of an FBI task force.  The merits of fresh ground coffee was debated.  The merits of Keurig, Krups, Mr. Coffee, and Gevalia were studied.  Prices were compared.  Beans and brands were debated with fellow connoisseurs, and Mike gained new respect for a man at work who roasted his own beans and would pass the bounty along.  He found a new best friend when he met an aide for Senator Inouye from Hawaii, who used to pass bags of Kona beans along to him on the Metro once a month.

Eventually, he settled on a Krups KM7000, which was fully programmable, ground the beans fresh for anywhere from 2 to 12 cups of coffee, had a strength selector (which he immediately set to the strongest available), and had a golden filter.  It cost well over $200, but that’s what he wanted for Christmas, and so that’s what I bought for him, along with 5 pounds of his favorite Dunkin Donuts coffee beans.  We installed it in his office with a mini fridge to hold flavored creamers, I was regularly dispatched for sugar packets, and many was the morning I would hear that grinder going, smell coffee, and know Mike was going to work or reading the news.

And then: disaster.  My father was tasked with washing the carafe and broke it.  Mike was on the phone to Krups almost before he heard the crack.  In no time at all, he managed to convince the person on the phone that there was surely a manufacturing flaw that had caused the crack, not his father-in-law who is known within the family for breaking things with merely a passing glace.  And surely Krups would make it right.  And sure enough, within days, a new carafe was delivered to the door, and all was right with the world again.

In time, the filter wore out.  Krups assured Mike he could get a replacement at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and so again he got my father involved in the expedition, only to discover they couldn’t find it.  He called Krups, oozed on the charm and the “poor little blind guy” story, and Krups delivered a filter to our house with their compliments.

When Mike died, I wasn’t sure what to do with the coffee pot.  I don’t drink coffee and I didn’t want it sitting around taking up a lot of space and gathering dust.  Finally, I gave it to my mother, who shared Mike’s passion for coffee and many fond memories of morning coffee with her “favorite oldest son-in-law”.  For a year and half, it perked merrily on, and now it is gone, fallen victim to faulty wiring.  I’d like to think its spirit floated to heaven to reunite with its owner, and the two of them are sitting happily together, making and drinking endless cups of just right coffee, maybe with a mug kept on the night table.