death

Why This Day Matters

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Yesterday, December 5th, is as gone as the life of a pig farmer who nearly changed my life.

Brown, plaid, and in every house in America in the 80’s was the chair where I clung to my mom and tried to understand why my daddy wasn’t coming back. It is my earliest memory, and the start of my changing family.

My dad remarried and we became a split unit of four with weekends divvied up and holidays traded.
This was my worldview until about fourth grade. The year a flame-haired boy brought a condom to school and showed all of us aghast and giggling 10-year olds in the back of the room by the books what they actually looked like: gross. The year my best friend in class got glasses and I became recklessly jealous to the point of lying at my eye exam soon after. The year I first became self-conscious about my growling stomach before lunch, especially sitting next to Flame-Hair who seemed eons ahead in all things worldly and mature.

But it was also the year my mom did something quite unlike my mom. She feathered and sprayed her bangs, gathered her courage, and went on a blind date. With a farmer. A, PIG farmer. 

This, of course, is my version. And this is what I know of the events.

He wasn’t what I expected, probably because he wasn’t my dad and yet was a man allowed to hold hands with my mom in the gleam of the car dashboard, kiss her around the corner far from where they thought I was standing, and with the power to bring a stock of Pepsi and Nutty Bars to our cabinets. Which wasn’t allowed ever. EVER. It was a strange series of transitions. One that scared and excited me.

I remember his moustache and how fast his mouth moved when he auctioned. I remember how he sang Garth Brooks and knew his way around a farm like a worm in the dirt. I remember fall, and driving around rural Missouri for leaves of every species on my science project list that were then sealed between old picture album pages.

I got real, authentic ropers (hick talk for boots), and a short whip for showing hogs at fair. I got sisters, and new cousins who lived just a house down the road. I got a trampoline (a moment of silence here) that I apparently knew less about than he. It only took one instance of his perfectly timed jumping to catapult me like a broken arrow straight in the air, and have me pleading for my life. I got more family.

Almost.

After school one day in December, I walked in my house to find a tissue, and my mom’s face smushed behind it. Beside her were two or three very close friends. My gut rocked and I wanted nothing more than to find an empty house with only pretzels and mustard for snacks and consecutive reruns of Save By The Bell and Full House until my mom got off work. Please, can we just do that day instead of this one?

We didn’t know he was sick. We didn’t know he’d stopped taking his medication. We didn’t know he was a prisoner of his own thoughts and that his greatest idea for relief would be a tower of hay bales and a rope. We didn’t know.

The months that followed were difficult to say the least. Books with titles like, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, started showing up around her dresser. Apples and peanut butter went on hold while she closed her hollow wooden doors and sobbed choking cries, her wedding dress limp and empty on a hanger in the closet.

No child should have to hear that. And no mother should have to be that heartbroken.

I talked to her today, nineteen years later. I’d forgotten details, she’d forgotten it was the 5th until it was already the 6th.

We are here. We did survive it. And although I don’t know what the plan would have been, or should have been, I know that I may not have had as many weekends hunting, golfing, fishing, and lazing with my dad if she’d remarried. I may not have ever gone to college at sixteen. I may never have met the one freshman student who took my breath away. I may have not changed my last name or had three kids or lived in my favorite place in the world. She may not have come on that journey with me.

So whatever the plan was, we’re okay with the new one now.

When the Show Starts

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My mocha has long since been gone, the powder and syrup likely settled in a gooey mess of scrumptious at the bottom of the paper cup. Outside, my lettuce is solid, traces of our first snow still weighing down the leaves. It will not get the chance to be begrudgingly eaten by my three young ones. Don’t worry kids, the grocery store stocks it all year.

It is date night. That blessed of all nights when we scoot off everyone in our family who isn’t married to grandparents who will sugar them senseless and let them stay up until they’re hooting like owls. The coziness of the cold day makes me want to cuddle up with a movie. That’s where the coffee and the classic You’ve Got Mail come in. I know my husband loves me because he’s agreed to watch it with me.

Nora Ephron’s quirky, whimsical, graceful script carries us through four seasons as Tom Hanks’ eye rolling makes us laugh and I study the way Meg Ryan’s masculine walk is perfectly charming for this movie.
“What’s your favorite season?” I’ve been asked the question several times recently and I always say the same thing. “The next one.” I like the change. Cold is nice until it starts to warm up. Hot is perfect until it cools down.

By the climax of the story it is spring and I suddenly declare, “Oh, I love spring.” If I am absolutely forced to settle on one, it will always be spring. It’s newness, life. You know, all those clichéd words that we say around Easter. It’s kinda true.
I’m drawn to the stark contrast of what’s happening beyond our living room window. Death. Fall is the process of the dying, slumbering of what was alive. And yet, the leaves are so brilliant before they go, the animals so full before they sleep. Did you know that the immense colors of fall leaves are there even in summer? Chlorophyll, so overpoweringly green, hides the yellows and oranges until it starts to fade. That’s when the show starts and the brilliant hues come forth.

I think when it’s my time to go and my smooth skin is sagging around my mouth, my richly brown hair is white, maybe my contact lense eyesight is only blackness or ability to walk sits with me in a wheelchair; when everything else has faded and I’m left only with the vibrance of who I truly am, I want someone to come paint my nails a fall red. I want all the years of journals I’ve filled to pile around me like raked leaves. They are the essence of the every day, authentic me. And I want my kids and grandkids to come…for a party. A last hurrah.
At the end, what remains and shines is the real us, and I hope I’m as breathtakingly beautiful as a fire-orange maple.

Eveyone is someone’s, someone.

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Savage, rushing water sounds like city traffic. And it can be just as deadly if you are caught unprotected in it’s eye.

Was she screaming? Did she try to claw her way to higher ground, hungry and even weaker in her frail bones than normal? Did she grip the backs of her ears with stiff, aged fingers to try to block the sound of what was coming? When it finally found her feet, was the water frigid, muddy, and full of pieces of her neighbor’s front porch furniture?

She was born somewhere around 1933, Roosevelt’s inaugural year. She would live through 13 president’s in all, including the first black leader of our country. Is that what went through her mind as her living room became a pool? Her best friend in grade school, her mom’s famous casserole, the kiss her lover gave her on their wedding day, WWII and it’s end, Tom and Jerry in black and white, Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, the Civil Rights Act, a new baby boy or the constant emptiness of her arms, fighting and bills and anniversaries, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Elvis dying, the economy swinging up then down a thousand times, grandbabies, death and loss.

 A life. A legacy.

At a certain point that day, she had to know how it would end. That it would end. And in all the ways we go did she ever guess that this was going to be her journey?

Maybe she was in her Sunday best. Stockings, pearls, and heels that clasped at ankles. Her hair perfect and sprayed stable, maybe she wore her favorite cotton dress with pearl buttons and the earrings she got for Mother’s Day one year. Maybe she sat peaceful, pretty, clutching her tattered Bible and family albums, waiting for Him to take her home.

However she died, whatever she was thinking, she is now dearly missed. Everyone is someone’s, someone.  

This is based on a news story of a woman who died in the Colorado flooding last week. Please join me in praying for the families who have lost loved ones and homes in this devastating event.