Summer Solstice 2014

 The long, liquid light of the June solstice illuminates the bittersweet season of the closing days of mothering two daughters, in an intact home, where I tuck them in each night, and coax them into the day each darkened morning.

Bitter, and sweet. This week, I noticed a title on the bookmobile shelf—Parenting Your Emerging Adult—and plucked it down, adding it to my stack of entertaining and enlightening loan materials. It is dense, and daunting, and clearly can’t begin to address the welter of feelings and challenges that fill my heart.

The day before, I had stated my two intentions for this last, languid summer to my emerging adult child: I want to get you ready in every way we can for the adventure ahead, half a continent away. And, I want us both to conduct ourselves in such a way that when the summer is over, we aren’t both filled with relief at parting, and with regret for the summer we didn’t have.

All along, I have tried hard, almost every day, to parent with intention, to make meaning in the spaces between the unending chores of parenting, homekeeping, partnering my spouse. I’ve tried to have conversations with my girls that held real content, communicated deep values and ideas, and in recent years, that communicate more of my real, non-mother individual self, as best as I can recall her, to my children than I feel I gleaned from my own mother.

It has been exhausting and exhilarating work. I hear many parents looking forward to the lightening of the load, the easing of the endless round of family-tending, but the long light of this June makes me yearn to travel back to a solstice 19 years ago, a long evening spent poolside in the tropical heat of St. Maarten, where we waited for it all to begin.

June 20, 2014

Mary for The Poplar Grove Muse

The Traveling Journal

The Traveling Journal

Iona                                                                                       

May 13, 2012

 

Someone said the weather is very passionate today. Aye, that it is, wind and rain, wave erasing wave. I like dramatic weather, as long as no one gets hurt, so I don’t think it’s the weather that’s causing me to feel unsettled, not sure what it is. I feel like the heron gull, totally controlled by the wind, buffeted this way and that, not able to make headway, find direction, not really able to focus. I want to be like the guillemot, who sees her target beneath the water, dislocates her shoulders, locking her wings against her body, she dives like a needle between the waves, spears her prey and heads for the surface. As they say in Scotland, done and dusted. 

Everyone in our group is so excited to be here, rushing around outside in gale force winds, happy ducks in a blustery puddle. I seem to be quite content to sit here in the sunroom at the Argyll Hotel and stare at the constantly changing water.  I don’t feel like writing or being productive. It’s been a hard winter and I think my body is telling me to Sit Down for Pete’s sake. Don’t feel guilty. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to be constantly productive. I’m finding it hard to stop the momentum of the last nine months. I’ve spent nearly every day coordinating this writing retreat on Iona, sort of like a gestation period. I’ve given birth, the baby is healthy and now it’s time to let it thrive on its own. 

When I get home, I will start organizing my move toward retirement, so maybe my brain, body and gut are telling me I had better rest up while I have the chance.

My world has changed forever with the losses death created this winter. I need to stop minimizing that and not move out of the grief too quickly. Iona is just the place for that. She lifts her veil and removes all boundaries, requiring you to be who you truly are, where you truly are. So I’m just going to sit here for however long it takes and let Iona work her magic. Give her time. Give her time.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Endings, Happy and Sad

In my faith community, we have lost a number of beloved, indispensable member-friends in recent months. I believe I have been to eight funerals in the last six months (and have begun to understand my parents’ “resolution,” after living almost their entire lives in a mid-sized Midwestern town, to attend fewer funerals). Many of us are reeling from the passing of these extraordinary “ Greatest Generation” folks and our collective loss of their wisdom and patience and long perspectives.

Being present at so many memorials to lives well-lived has raised issues I had never adequately considered, and allowed me to think about how memorial services can be conducted, as well as how lives can be lived and remembered. I have learned that if you die shortly before your 98^th birthday, the church may not be as full as your life was, because you have outlived so many in your circles. I have learned that the sanctuary can be packed to overflowing, but the words spoken may fail to capture a life that was so much more than could be expressed, so that the gaping hole left in so many lives stands as the most powerful testimony to a life lived to the very limits of human energy. Hearing old-timey hymns I usually have little patience for, and knowing that they were chosen by my deceased friend, or their family, gives me a new appreciation for the comfort that a hymn I had dismissed may hold for others. I have thought long and hard about the demonstrated human qualities that compel friends and family to show up for a memorial service and remember their loved one.

An overwhelming realization, one I hope to carry with me more consistently in my life, is that some of the quietest, humblest people can be, deep down, the most fascinating and wise.  As a somewhat reserved person myself, I don’t tend to draw people out as much as I could, and certainly as much as I later wish I had. I so regret not asking Lou more about his transformative service as a marine in World War II, or talking with Harry about what it was like to run against Jesse Owens, among many other topics. I had no idea that Helen had a career besides that of mother long before most women did, and I wish I had learned more about what demands and indignities her bravery subjected her to. I also wish I had made the effort to learn more about the difficult time our congregation went through in becoming the first integrated church in Bloomington. We have one older member who returned to us only a few years ago, having been removed by his angry parents over this issue decades ago. I think I’ll ask him to tell me all about it next time I see him.

I’ve also had ample time to think about what we are actually grieving in our loss. Happily, people sometimes die having lived their time among us so fully, and having made such complete peace with the end of life, that it is inspiring, and in our sadness we realize that the loss is almost completely our own, that there is virtually nothing more we would wish for the deceased; our magical thinking is only for ourselves, to have had more time, or to have treasured the time we had more intentionally.

The first death that touched me deeply was that of my maternal grandmother, when I was 19. I had grown up around the block from her, and she had been a constant, patient, deeply supportive, and inspiring presence throughout my life. While my mother had been with her in her final hours of physical suffering and was grateful to see her out of her pain, my sister and I were inconsolable, and wept unceasingly throughout a triumphant celebration of her life in the home congregation in which she had married, seen her daughter and son married, and provided years of deeply musical keyboard and vocal service. We simply wanted MORE, for ourselves, more time and experience with the woman who had meant so much to us from our very beginnings.

I have much to learn about so many things surrounding the end of life, as well as the living of it. However, I am hoping for a pause in the intensity of my recent learning experiences. Enough loss, for now.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

And Then There Was One... Redux

And Then There Was One…Redux

Since April 2011 I have lost my brother, my father and now my mother.

Thea Wentz Riebsomer passed away on February 26, 2012 at 12:35 a.m., just shy of her ninety-second birthday. She died as she lived, chaotically, until the very end. I had not seen her for almost eight years. She had disowned me, having told me I ruined her life for reasons that I won’t go into here, except to say that Mother tried so hard to be loved her whole life, but the love she sought had to be on her terms and it was never quite good enough. I had made my own personal peace with our estrangement long ago.

All I ever wanted was for her to find some peace and I felt in my heart that she would never find it here on this earth. I returned to Connersville just six weeks after my dad’s death because my niece, Aimee, needed me and to help ease my mother in her passing. She had said that she was ready to go, but she was afraid. Mother had what is called terminal restlessness the last two days of her life and only calmed down with the help of morphine and, strangely, my presence. Aimee told her I was on my way and she nodded.  Mother had been staying with my niece for two weeks, since she was diagnosed as terminal, due to congestive heart failure.

I wish that she had had a happier life, that she had made better choices for herself. She was smart, funny and beautiful. I don’t think she believed those things about herself. In the end she was surrounded by people who cared about her. The great fear she had of dying alone did not come to pass. Her youngest granddaughter Beth, who lives in Michigan, was on her shoulder via cell phone until the very end, her nurse, her oldest granddaughter Aimee, her former daughter-in-law, Pam, her estranged daughter, and her pastor and his wife surrounded Mother with love and light. This odd mix of people took such good care of her and in that she was very fortunate.

 I talked to my mother for nine straight hours as I tried to get her to let go. It’s hard work to convince someone who has never been known as cooperative into floating away. She was unable to respond, but I know she heard me. I told her I knew that she loved me and she squeezed my hand. When I started talking to her about her beloved Panama City Beach, Florida, where she wintered for twenty years, and the beautiful sunsets she had taken thousands of pictures of, we could see her relaxing. I told her she would never be alone again, she would never be in pain again, and she would never have to reveal her age again. Her breathing slowed, her jaw relaxed and at long last she let go.

Rebekah for Poplar Grove Muse

9/11 All Over Again

We each remember the day so clearly, the perfect blue sky for those of us nearby in the Northeast, all crispness and clarity, the very best of fall in New England. We all remember in literally excruciating detail what we were doing, how we heard, the endless loops of destruction playing out over and over on our televisions, the emergency calls and commentary and analysis, rhetoric and remembrances, and throughout, the astonished collective grieving.

Ten years have passed, both quickly and painfully slowly. Two wars have multiplied and misdirected death and destruction in ways we could not, but should have, imagined. International solidarity has been transmuted into a complex soup of contradictory and self-justifying impulses.

People magazine’s cover profiles 9-year-olds born after the devastation of their fathers’ unexpected deaths, who will never know them. Every publication has manufactured coverage, some lesson or lecture or occasion for taking stock and counting blessings. Localities across the nation have scrambled to create memorials befitting the losses and the learnings of a decade, no doubt with varying degrees of success, but all with the intention to wrest something noble from the wreckage.

For those who suffered unimaginable losses on that day (and in the years since, in ways related or unrelated to 9/11), the evocation of grief is necessary, but necessarily painful. For those whose griefs are newer, the anniversary raises them afresh.

In the stunned aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I promised myself to do everything I could to make my own days matter, to honor those who wouldn’t have that chance. The past weeks have been a time of taking stock, and renewing that promise to myself.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse