Category: stories

Of Pakistan, Chewing Gum, Chatty Cathy Dolls & Valiant Efforts

A favorite talisman from Pakistan. I loved how all the different sizes nested one inside the other. I’ve carried this painted wooden toy with me for nearly sixty years now. Cracked and repaired, broken but still beautiful, a cradle of memories.

When I was seven, my brother, who was eight, my sister, who was six, and I got dumped in our grandparents’ laps, a harsh ending to what had begun two years earlier as a grand adventure, meant to last a lifetime.

Once it was announced that Dad had secured a coveted engineering job overseas, we had all been celebrities at one festive send off after another from Springfield, to the unknown and mysterious West Pakistan, (now Pakistan). The biggest Bon Voyage event, where each of us had been presented with brand new suitcases to go with our brand new outfits for the journey to the other side of the earth, reflected how impressed friends, coworkers and neighbors had been when Dad had secured the contract.

That the way to Pakistan involved so many shots for so many illnesses was annoying, but, for me, the memories of those jabs are overshadowed by those of international flights on Pan Am where the pilots brought all the children on the flight into the cockpit and each of us received a souvenir Pan Am flight bag and our own set of pilot’s wings. I remember buying a doll in Tokyo, where I was convinced that I could speak Japanese because I could speak to the sales clerk. I remember arriving in Karachi to be served warm milk and runny eggs and that we slept twenty-four hours before driving to our new home in a walled compound in Northern Pakistan. I remember much about our time in Pakistan, but I do not remember the trip home.

Thoughout the two years we were there, Dad was likely excelling in his work, but, before the contract was completed and we could be posted at yet another overseas project on another continent, Dad was forced to break his contract and return to the states on short notice, with little or no money, no job and much anger.

So, just a few days after boarding a plane for home, the three of us children found ourselves seated in a row on the edge of the bed in a motel halfway between our grandparents’ home in the little town of Waynesville, Missouri, and wherever Dad had found a job. The motel bed was low to the ground; our toes just touched the linoleum and we were each individually toeing the floor and pushing the old bed up and down, causing the box springs to creak softly. Next door, we could hear our parents and grandparents arguing loudly. We did not know then the three of us would not be going to the tiny apartment Dad had managed to find. 

I clutched my Chatty Cathy doll. Bless her heart, she’d stayed with me throughout our time overseas in spite of looking like she had mange because my little sister had taken a pair of scissors to her black hair. My sister clutched a stuffed monkey who had a permanent grip on a plastic banana. She had already given up the doll she’d been given, one who giggled when her arms were squeezed, and who likely ended up in another child’s arms, looking like she was just out of the box with that curly, blond hairdo intact. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, though, to experiment on her with scissors. Maybe my sister was just more angry at that time than I was. 

New Clothes, a Bon Voyage Party, Poufy Hair? Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

“Say goodbye to your children!” my father had hissed moments before all three of us climbed in the back of our grandparents’ sedan. Mom’s eyes were already glazed over though; she wasn’t responding. She had said nothing while my father had been yelling for weeks, it seemed, most recently in the next motel room, in front of her parents, who also were silent. We couldn’t hear any of those angry words at all, only loud voices, then we each flinched as the door to our motel room had swung open and we saw our parents standing there.  “Say goodbye!” 

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George seemed just as dumbfounded as we were, I think, and were really in no financial position to take on more, but to their credit, they put the three of us into the back of their tiny dark blue sedan anyway.  Driving away from that motel, each of us rode silently, wide-eyed, tacitly agreeing it was better not to ask. 

His Adventure; Her Nightmare

On our way home from Pakistan, we’d each been wearing a new pair of leather shoes made from a cobbler in Pakistan. Even finding shoes while we were there became an adventure for my father who savored every side trip to a bazaar and whose shopping addiction devoured cameras and jewelry and handmade rugs and carved tables with ivory inlay for playing chess. Being there while the country was at war with India was a nightmare for our mother, though; after my parents ventured to the bazaars, she had nightmares about the children who had been purposely maimed in order to make their begging more lucrative. By the time we left Pakistan, Mom had begun obsessing about keeping the windows covered with foil for nighttime blackouts, long after it was necessary. 

The civil engineering position Dad had secured with this company overseas was his dream and meant to last his whole career; he had not planned to have to return to southwest Missouri with his family at all, certainly not as a quitter. This contract was his chance to escape small towns and small minds, and that dream was not meant to die a quick death because his young wife discovered the balm of alcohol and realized that some men could be sweet. Mom, bless her heart, had been thrust into a world she had never contemplated and one she was vastly unprepared to engage, understand or master. Dad, on the other hand, had served overseas in the Air Force and, when he returned, he invested in National Geographic in order to know more about the world he had only tasted in his two years in Puerto Rico. This job had been his chance to immerse himself in adventure and travel.

A small-town girl who had never left Missouri before, Mom continued dutifully each day to don a crisply ironed dress and heels while struggling to learn to oversee servants, like the first one, a “Bearer.” The Pakistani manservant who did not speak any English was in the house all day, and ironed and cooked unrecognizable meals for us.  He didn’t last long. A gardener, a “Mali,” was required, if only to keep up appearances in the European-style neighborhoods built by the company that had brought so many engineers and families from all over the world. We knew, though, that walking outside one morning to find the gardener, proudly holding up the cobra he’d caught in the yard where her children played was too much for Mom. She began to unravel. Our father held out, though, and doubled down on social activities, including starting a Boy Scout troop, in hopes Mom would adjust. Instead, she discovered the alcohol that had never been allowed in her home growing up. She found the mathematics of rum, to be precise. One drink made her feel good, two made the barbed wire on the compound walls fade, and four drinks made all the lizards and maimed children and strange men in the house just slip away for hours and hours. 

A Church Wednesday Night Meal in Mangla, West Pakistan
Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

We never saw Mom drink, though. We were in bed every night by seven p.m. We never saw her drink and we never saw our father much at all.  For the two years we lived in Pakistan, our father kept twelve-hour work days and so our paths did not cross for two years, except on the occasional family shopping outing. During those two years was the only time we had allowances and every few weeks, the family would venture to the compound’s shopping area where we could find a Pakistani furniture store, a European-style restaurant complete with a dessert cart filled with petit-fours, and a toy store, where we were happy to spend our allowances, most often on comic books since there were no Saturday morning cartoons. We had no television at all in our home there, in fact, so by the time we left after two years, we had amassed more than three hundred Archie, Superman and Richie Rich comic books and often participated in a robust trading circle with other neighborhood children. Once, though, we all three saved our allowance to buy a pale blue scooter that we could see high up on a corner shelf in the toy store. We visited that store several times without buying any new toys or comics, simply to be sure no other children had purchased that little scooter high up in the corner.  We were struggling not to run or pull on our father’s hand to get to the store when the day for purchase finally arrived. Together, the three of us proudly plunked down our rupees onto the counter and watched, holding our breath, as the store owner pulled the scooter down and dusted it off.  When he rolled it around the corner of the counter, however, to present that blue beauty to us, my older brother and I realized that the scooter, heretofore only viewed from afar, was too small for either of us. Only our little sister would be able to enjoy it. There was no going back, however. The store owner was beaming at having sold the toy that had taken up his store’s top shelf for months and our father would have been too embarrassed to halt the purchase. Typical of our relationship, though, my brother and I did not commiserate; we were silent as our feet dragged on the dusty road going home. Our sister stayed on the sidewalks with the scooter but I do not remember her using it very often after that, which only added to our disappointment. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Other than the occasional shopping trip, church and the bowling alley, we did not see our father. Even at those venues, we did not interact with him. Our understanding was that, like the other engineers who worked long hours building that dam, our father was excused from many family activities. When we did participate as a family, like at the bowling alley, the children went off unsupervised mostly, so we still didn’t see our parents unless we were causing a problem. Dad was apparently a minor celebrity at the bowling alley, though, often bowling perfect or near perfect games. Our time there consisted of ordering tuna fish sandwiches and zombies to drink at the adjacent grill and watching, fascinated, as the Pakistani workers reset the pins after each throw of the ball.  No automated pin replacement there. 

Though I was very young, I remember a lot about when my Father was helping in the beginning years to build Mangla Dam in West Pakistan, now Pakistan (as opposed to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.) Most of our old photos from that time, however, are lost. I do remember that strange juxtaposition of Western and Pakistani. We attended a British school where I learned some Urdu and to add an “e” in the middle of judgment, (i.e., British spelling) a bowling alley and we enjoyed a wonderful series of public pools. We also explored some historic sites and went to school with children from all over the world, including Pakistan. (See Wikipedia, Mangla Dam and Mangla Dam Memories on Facebook.)

Otherwise, the three of us were on our own outside of school hours. The compound was large with an American side and a European side and a bus that drove around both sides all day.  On any particularly boring day, the three of us would simply climb onto the old, repainted school bus and ride down all the streets of both sides of the compound, cooled by the hot wind coming through the open windows and fascinated by what our neighbors might be up to that day. I am still amazed that we were simply allowed to wander at five, six and seven years old. In Pakistan.

The entire adventure seemed a contradiction in terms, characterized for me by the fact that we lived in a compound surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire and cut glass on the top but where the gates were always open and unguarded.

There was an open gate at the back of our own yard, in fact, and from it, we could see a small village where, we were told, women slapped cow dung onto the walls of the homes to dry to be later used as fuel for the fire. Every day, we could hear the calls to worship; they were haunting and beautiful, a call to an Islamic understanding of God that serenaded us as we walked to our Christian church potluck supper. For some of the year, the dust on the side of the road was a fine and deep silt and we would slide our feet through it as if it were snow; other times, during monsoon season, there seemed to be nothing that was dry.

Unsupervised. In Pakistan. At age 7.

That we were largely unsupervised outside of school hours made sense to someone I guess. Until the injuries began. First, my five-year-old sister got stitches trying to climb up a ladder to dive off of the high dive at the crowded community pool. Then, I nearly drowned just a few feet from my mother in the same pool; another mother noticed me struggling to keep my head above water and grabbed me. Mom was busy chatting. There was a broken arm, then stitches for me. Twice. This time, however, neglect was not the problem. I had become the target of choice for my older brother who gleefully ran his bicycle into mine, causing the pedal to tear into the fleshy part of my lower right leg, leaving white tissue oozing down my shin. He later threw a cutting board at me, just missing my eye socket but also requiring stitches. We may never know if another parent intervened or if our father walking into the living room to see our mother kissing the neighbor, but there came a day when Dad sat all three of us down on the edge of a bed in our shared bedroom to tell us our mother was ill and would be “going away” for six months or more. It had been decided we three would wait for her there, in Pakistan.

That’s when the wailing began. Paid mourners could not have been louder or more dramatic. At the time, we were terrified, but we were also resolute, huddled together eyeing that dark and dangerous chasm that seemed to open up before us. We did not know this man. No way were we letting Mom go quietly. We did not stop crying until Dad returned to the room hours later to tell us we were all going home. 

Our relief was short-lived, though; once my father dragged Mom away from that motel, we did not see or hear from our parents for months and months. The timeline is vague for me but I remember attending three schools in second grade. So, once we were settled in my grandparents’ two-bedroom duplex in Waynesville, I took to running away, searching for her. From school, from my grandparents’ home, even from church services, I escaped, watching for unsupervised moments and unlocked doors, taking advantage of crowds and distracted adults, always looking for my mother. 

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George. Good people who loved fiercely.
Pictures courtesy of Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved.

More than once, because Grandma Ree was exasperated, I was simply allowed to stay home from school on my grandfather’s day off and we watched cartoons and ate Oreos while he ironed the work shirts he wore driving trucks. Grandpa George seemed to me to be the only adult who was not angry with me; I remain convinced that was because he understood my quest. 

Once, after I’d run away from school, the school principal found me. He and a teacher picked me up in a car after they’d driven all over that little town looking for this wayward seven-year-old. 

“There, there,” he said, offering me a piece of gum in a green wrapper folded around shiny foil, very much a treat then.  Defeated for the moment, I cooperated and got into the old car, only because I’d been wandering for hours and it was getting dark. Offering me a stick of gum, though? Did the adults around me really think that would fix this? I remember looking at him as if he were clueless. It would be years later, though, before I could be proud of that seven-year-old slapping that piece of gum from the principal’s hand in the back of that car, and even longer before I could appreciate the courage it had taken for the three of us to stand up to our father. 

We all paid a price, though; we would never have back the mother we had known. When we saw her again, she was subdued, defeated. She had endured shame, therapy, even, we were told later, shock treatments, all because her dream was not his dream. She was not unlike many women of her day, praised for obedience like a child. For the rest of his life, though, my father was on notice. I’m not certain to this day that we accomplished much, but our little rebellion was uncharacteristic of us and I am proud to be able to look back and say that those three little souls refused to go quietly into the darkness. 

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Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family

The last time I read the Scriptural passage about the woman who insisted Jesus heal her even after he likened her people to the dogs under the table, it made me think of my youngest son. And jails.  For several reasons.

"Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly."  Matthew 15:21-28

First, my son is a lawyer, working as a public defender.  He’s the guy who gets assigned to people who don’t have money for a private attorney when they have to appear in court.  He thinks it’s a hoot that he can call his mom whenever he wants to and say he’s headed to jail.  Haha.  

Second, he LOVES to argue.

And third, he likes rules. To be specific, he likes knowing where the line is.  When he was younger, we’d tell him the rules and he would make us hold that line.  We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”  For the longest time, his constant testing of our boundaries and rules for him was frustrating. After a while though, we realized he really DID want to know where the line was because rules helped him feel safe, helped him know where he stood.  That may be WHY he became a lawyer, that love of rules.  He ate all that up, all those laws and statutes, just his cup of tea.  So he likes being a lawyer, at least most of the time, likes helping folks who find themselves in trouble but can’t afford a private lawyer.  

We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”

So most of the folks he defends have very little means and many of them don’t get bailed out while they wait for their day in court.  That’s when he calls mom and says he’s going to jail.  It’s been frustrating for him often but every so often, it is also quite rewarding.  For one exxample, a couple of years ago, he was visiting a young client at the jail and the client asked how old my son was.  He shared that he was in fact turning 32 on that very day and the client was floored. “You mean you have to come here on your birthday?” he asked. “Are you gonna get to have a party or a cake later?” he asked. “Probably not,” my son said, shrugging it off. He didn’t think about it again until he saw the young client again a couple of weeks later and the client, in his twenties, pulled a folded up napkin from the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and unfolded it to reveal a cookie.  “This is for you, man,” he said.  “Because you didn’t get a birthday cake.  I saved my cookie from lunch for you.”  My son was speechless, which is significant for him. He’s never at a loss for words.  

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

It’s not a stretch, though, to say that most of us are not terribly comfortable with courts and jails and prisons so I don’t feel like I’m bragging when I say my son is comfortable going to jail because his mom went to prison.  No no – don’t get me wrong.  I went to prison the way he goes to jail.  

When I was in seminary, we were offered classes that met in Riverbend Prison, classes that were populated half by seminarians and half by inmates.  We studied issues surrounding prisons, legal systems, punishment and forgiveness.  I did that for the entire time I was in seminary, every week, and I can tell you I learned a great deal and came to know about a dozen of the prisoners pretty well – guys in for everything from murder to arson to rape – all of whom were taking the same graduate level classes the seminarians were taking.  When it came time for me to graduate, then, I was invited to continue visiting by getting on the visitation list of one of the inmates.  When you visit Riverbend, like lots of state prisons, you visit during set hours in a large open room and there might be as many as fifty inmates also having visitors in the same room, all seated on molded plastic chairs, all attached in groups of twos or threes. At the corner of many of the sets of chairs are the all-valuable tables.  Tables are at a premium and desired because, all around the walls of the room are vending machines for snacks. Most of the foods in those vending machines are cheese and peanut butter crackers, tuna fish sandwiches and peanuts and candy. None of the items appealed to me much, I realized, because the daily food I had was better and more varied than those offerings. To the men who lived there, the stale hamburgers were a real treat.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Visits generally were on the weekends and lasted several hours; if an inmate had visitor privileges (and those were earned), they could possibly see family or friends who’d been approved by the prison system on Friday evening, Saturday morning and/or Sunday afternoon, for example. Visitors were subject to body searches and metal detectors and not allowed to carry in much, not even key fobs and certainly no phones.  The nice thinga bout the open room was that you can easily visit with several inmates at the same time and that’s what some of us from the classes did.  Usually on Friday night or Saturday morning, we’d go to visit one of the inmates who had been in the class and be able to see several of them and catch up on their lives and share about ours. 

While I always visited as a friend and not as a minister, the inmates always asked about my ministry and the church I was serving and, for a couple of them, it eased the loneliness of not receiving visits from family.  One thing we had learned was that inmates who served their time and then were released were 5-10 more successful staying out of trouble when they got out if they had continued to have relationships that were positive.  So, we particularly focussed on being supportive of those whose families were not involved in their lives and didn’t visit or call. 

Some of us spoke to one or more of the inmates by phone as well.  They were allowed to have up to ten people they called and most looked forward to having someone to call on occasion to break up the monotony if nothing else.  I agreed to be on the phone list of one of the inmates, who is, by the way, not eligible to be released for another decade, if he lives that long.  It was safe.  For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?   I was careful and the school and the prison were careful but I know it still made people nervous who knew me. That included, not surprisingly, my parents, who were at that time retired and who worried alot about me anyway. 

Mom and Dad were especially struggling with my being friends with inmates because neither of them had ever even  met someone who had gone to jail, not even for a DUI, and they didn’t even know anyone else who knew anyone who’d gone to jail.  It was too foreign a concept and just not acceptable. So one weekend I went to Missouri to visit them and told them I was visiting an inmate and he was allowed to call me, they were angry.  I assured them that inmates could NOT call cell phones and they only had my home phone number in Tennessee so they could not call me while I was at my parents home in Missouri.

For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?  

Nevertheless, while I was there with them, while we were arguing about whether or not this was acceptable behavior on my part be friends with some guy who was sitting in a prison cell, the phone rang and my mother answered, then handed me the phone angrily.  It’s your criminal friend, she said. I took the phone trying to answer while also explaining to them that it couldn’t be him because he couldn’t call me at their house when I heard the voice on the other end say, “…an inmate from the Greene County, Missouri, jail is calling.  Do you want to accept the call?”

I realized suddenly that call was not coming from my friend in Tennessee but rather from my brother, who apparently had been arrested the night before.  And suddenly, the inmate in Tennessee – whom they were sure was dangerous and not to be trusted – was sitting on a hard metal bench next to my brother, their son, in a jail cell. And just like that, the circle of their care and compassion grew a whole lot larger.  

My own circle of care and compassion grew exponentially because of my time visiting prisons. When I was sent to another church, turned out that nearly one quarter of the folks in the church had family or friends who had served or were serving time and it helped my ministry greatly that I knew first hand what it was like for them to constantly to worry about the safety of their loved one, to struggle financially because of lost income, to struggle not to be ashamed of what another person had done, to wonder how things would be when they returned home.  

Those families were grateful when their pastor talked then about visiting the prison regularly. For the first time, their pastor was there with them when they sat in the visitation gallery on Christmas Day or Easter or celebrated with them when their son got his GED in prison, sharing hopes he could change the path he was on.   Their pastor seemed to speak the same language and was one of their people, one who at least accepted and cared about their “kind.”

All of that is what leads me to one of the most troubling aspects of this story in Matthew 15: how the disciples AND Jesus treat this woman, who is not one of them, not one of their “kind.”

We find first that Jesus refuses even to answer the woman, then denies he has anything that she could possibly want and then even likens her to a dog.  This is definitely a troubling passage.

 We may believe that Jesus was “truly human,” but usually we don’t want him to be too human. So over the years, people have tried to clean up this story. But Matthew doesn’t clean up this story.  He lets us see this encounter in all its unvarnished glory.   

The woman is a Canaanite woman – and she is NOT one of Jesus’ “people”. But he is in her part of the world –  Tyre and Sidon. This is her home.  

Nevertheless, this woman seems to know who Jesus is. She has tracked him down in order to ask him –  to beg him –  to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon. This is a desperate woman and apparently,  comes at Jesus shouting. The disciples want nothing to do with her and want Jesus to send her packing. 

She isn’t going anywhere, though. She may not be “their kind,” but she somehow knows enough about this healer to find him and call to him in the language of the Jewish prayer: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She has come prepared to fight for her child, it seems. 

Even so, Jesus isn’t even impressed by her using the language he knows is not hers. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he tells her, and still she doesn’t give up.

 “Lord, help me,” she begs. This is where Jesus says what we really wish he hadn’t said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But this woman is feisty and stubborn.   Having a special needs grandchild, though, means there’s one thing I have learned about people who know their children’s lives are in danger –  they will get in your face if necessary – they do not care if you do not like it.  That’s their baby and the hair on the back of their neck stands up every time someone or something threatens that child’s safety.  The life of this woman’s daughter is at stake. She does not back down at all but throws Jesus’s words right back at him: “Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  

And all of a sudden, just like that, Jesus changes his tone. He says, “Woman, great is your faith!” 

Interestingly, she hasn’t made any confession of faith, though. There’s no sign she’s been converted or planning to become a follower. She simply told him what she had heard – what many in the region had heard – that there had been by that time more than one instance where thousands had been fed when they came to see this healer, this rabbi called Jesus.  “I’ve heard that there were enough crumbs to feed thousands,” she seems to be saying.  “You can’t tell me there’s not enough for me and my daughter.” 

That’s what I believe Jesus finally heard and that’s why he not only changes his mind,  but he changes his mission. “For saying that,” he says, “you may go — the demon has left your daughter.”  And just like that, the circle, the line, that defines his mission on earth is widened to include everyone.

It is disturbing to some folks to think of this episode, such harsh words coming out of Jesus, but one thing was clear that Matthew wanted his listeners to understand: in that encounter, Jesus was converted – he understood something he had not understood before – and the circle of his mission and ministry was much larger than he had realized before.  The Kingdom of God had been revealed to him in the face of the Canaanite woman. The Canaanite woman taught Jesus that she and her daughter and so many others like her deserve more than crumbs. After this encounter Jesus went on to feed those who had not yet been fed, went on to include everyone in God’s kingdom to come.

We saw here something that ought to surprise us, certainly surprised me the first time I saw it: Jesus drew a line – as surely as if he had used a stick to draw a line in the sand and said, this, what I am sent to do, is not for you.  I’ve done enough. I am tapped out. I gave at the office.  I don’t have any more energy to help anyone else, to get to know anyone else, to include anyone else in my circle.  He dismissed her and not in a kind way at all.    

IF we are pushed, we will get ugly too, though; we’ve been known to let others see our disdain for that person who does not deserve any help or who needs to go somewhere else to find it.  “WE” don’t know people who go to prison and we don’t want to….

At least not until one of them is sitting next to our child in that jail cell and suddenly our circle is a little wider than we knew.  Any time this happens, it can be frightening, and it can feel like we are out there where we don’t feel so safe any more, and we might be really unsure about how this is gonna go.

If we look again, though, really look, chances are good we will see God in that cell, sitting there with all of them, sitting next to our child and all of them will be sharing cookies.  Amen

4 responses to “Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family”

  1. Nancy Bradshaw Avatar
    Nancy Bradshaw

    Jodi, sitting here on the deck of a cruise ship. My eyes are watering and not from the sun but from the eye opening beauty of this piece that you wrote which reminds me that Jesus was certainly human as well as divine and that the divine is also in me , in you and all humanity. We just need to be reminded. Thank you for doing just that. ❤️

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    1. Jodi McCullah Avatar
      Jodi McCullah

      You are a poet, dear friend. Thank you.

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  2. a. getty Avatar
    a. getty

    Amen.

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  3. Nancy Avatar
    Nancy

    Your ability to unite seemingly unrelated life experiences with a scripture and a message is your special craft, priceless. I bookmarked this weeks ago and I’m glad I came back to it. Forever faithful are we, Amen.

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Boots in the Trunk

Some of the greatest moments in life, I believe, are when you find out you are not the only one who does “that.” You’re not the only kid in class who likes to blow bubbles in her chocolate milk or the only student who questions why you should wear a dress to school on picture day when you hate wearing dresses and no one ever sees your dress because you’re always in the back row for pictures. Once, on a phone interview for a job in Florida, I mentioned that most of my friends “up here in the north” seemed to believe that living in colder climates builds character and people who want to live in warmer places are just lazy. The employer simply said, “Come on down; you’ll find plenty of hardworking folks here; they just happen to like burying their toes in the warm sand.” I remember thinking, “I’ve found my people.”

One of my most affirming moments occurred a few years ago while watching a movie that was set in southern California. A woman was sitting in heavy Los Angeles traffic on her way to work when the road began to shake and seemed to begin rolling. Her first response, once all the motion ceased, was to pop open her trunk and change from her fashionable black pumps into a pair of hiking boots. She evidently kept in her trunk for just such an emergency, or at least the character did. She must have known she’d likely have to walk through streets filled with debris, and the boots were just one of the survival tactics she’d either learned firsthand or been taught. She was prepared.

I remember nothing else now about the movie except that I wondered if she also kept some water and maybe a first aid kit and snacks in her trunk. What I loved was that she wasn’t some hiker out on the Appalachian Trail for weeks; the character must have been created by someone familiar with earthquakes who understood that we never know when or where we’ll need to run for our lives. It would be several years later before I would learn that boots in the trunk was a common response for survivors of trauma and abuse. I don’t know if the woman in the movie was supposed to have grown up with a scoutmaster for a father, or if she was a trauma survivor, but she embraced the boots in the trunk. She didn’t think it was weird.

Boots in the trunk, a “go” bag by the bed…

I was a teen when I realized not everyone slept with a “go bag” next to the bed in case a speedy escape became necessary in the middle of the night. After five decades of being teased by others for it, though, I was especially grateful to finally learn that lots of other trauma survivors sleep with shoes under the bed, a wallet or purse with meds, money and that handy Swiss Army knife by the bed, so that in an emergency, they do not waste precious survival and escape time locating footwear or a flashlight. Finally, I could stop being embarrassed that I preferred to sleep in something I knew I could wear outdoors in case of a fire or an earthquake or tornado. I could stop hiding the fact that I think about not wanting to have to run into the dark barefoot and thus be even more vulnerable in a crisis. My “go bag” has been a reasonable and healthy response to the lessons of my childhood where I was taught to be afraid of the dark and it is also a reflection of a strong instinct to survive. Instead of being embarrassed that I startled so easily, I became proud of my Swiss Army knife and I became grateful for those survival instincts. Plenty of children do not get out.

Escape Artists

I know some people who were abused or whose childhood was traumatic seek vengeance and long to hurt the one hurting them, and even hurt others in an attempt to ease their own pain, but my instinct has always been to escape. When my siblings and I were young, they seemed unaware that following the rules meant escaping the belt or the hair brush.  As we grew older and taller, I knew to stay well away from my parents’ and even my siblings’ arguments because they so easily slid into the violent responses we’d seen modeled. I mostly escaped broken bones and stitches by escaping as a child and teen. Later, I applied the same tactics to job losses and failures and broken relationships because I knew when to escape, and how to – most of the time – make an exit before the explosions.

Because I could escape, none of their crazy dust landed on me. I know without a doubt that is one reason I survived and got this far. Too many children who grew up like we did never get very far from the crazy, never get too many steps out the door.  Maybe that is because they had not managed to stay arm’s lengths away as children and teens; maybe their scars left them less equipped to walk away when they were old enough; maybe their backpacks were just too heavy to carry another step.

Sadly, few if any adults were able back then to recognize this behavior as a survival technique and, thus, necessary. I once attended a junior high church retreat.  Our parents sent us away to every camp and retreat that was offered. My brother and sister hated those camps. In contrast, I eagerly grabbed a bag and hopped into whatever car was taking us away from whatever house we were living in at the time. At that particular junior high retreat, though, the girls’ leader accused me of being like a “wolf.” Because I was being quiet, she accused me of preparing to “pounce, to attack,” when the opportunity arrived.  I’m really not sure what kind of attack she thought I was planning. I remember just staring at her while she accused me of cooperating with some kind of evil. She was only half wrong, though, which meant, of course, that she was half right. I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape, trying to figure out when that might be necessary.  Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life.

I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape. Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life. Photo, 1964.

A counselor once asked me how I had survived the turmoil, upheaval, illnesses and chaos of my home. Since I’d already told her about how often I had simply walked away, I was confused. I know now she wanted me to relate to her how I knew when to get the hell away from my mom or dad or brother or sister or myriad boyfriends. The fact is, in the beginning, I became a girl scout. Well, actually a boy scout. Okay, both.  Being a “girl scout” meant being good. Being good meant usually no one noticed me and, if I followed the rules, usually no one would hit me.  I would certainly never give them a reason to hit me.

Being a “boy scout” meant being prepared. Since we had moved so many times before I was sixteen, it wasn’t like we didn’t have practice packing. I kept my bag and shoes by the bed because they kept me feeling like I had some power to escape if I needed. I knew when to leave because I was what counselors called “hypervigilant.” I watched folks around me like a hawk. That was what concerned the youth leader at the junior high retreat; she did not recognize the behavior as a survival tactic developed over time in response to threats; it was somehow easier for her to imagine a teen as evil than to consider one of the parents in the church might be a predator, I guess.

Live Like a Refugee

The more I worked to find healing over the years after I finally escaped my family home, the more I found like-minded souls who also seemed to move about more than others. My first husband and I were both nomads when we met. “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee” by Tom Petty was the soundtrack of both of our lives at the time. We had both been traveling quite a bit when we separately landed in a writing class and met; even nomads and escape artists settle down for the odd semester. By then, we’d both traveled all over the US and overseas and had both served in the military. We decided to settle down together, to create an alliance, to have each others’ backs; we might have imagined at the time that we’d be more settled, but we found then there were some things about being nomads we still liked and so we promptly moved to California, then to Japan, then to Tennessee, anywhere but where we grew up. So much for no longer being refugees.

Photos by Jodi McCullah. All rights reserved.

Changing Tactics

There came a time, however, when I no longer had the luxury of escape, of running, because our two sons meant there were others I needed to protect and escaping might mean leaving them behind and that was not going to happen. Needing to protect others complicated escape plans, for sure. We taught our boys never to climb up a play structure if they could not make it down without help, to meet up at the back gate if there was ever a fire and we would not let them sleep upstairs until they were big enough to climb out a second story window onto a porch roof and then jump down to safety. Protecting them changed everything. I’d explain it by talking about driving over the huge bridges spanning the Ohio and Missississippi Rivers. We had to drive over both of them at the confluence of the rivers near Cairo, Illinois, every time we went north. Driving over those bridges was frightening enough for me personally but became hellish when I had children and their safety became most important. For myself, to calm my fears as I drove into the monstrous structures crossing those wide and churning rivers, I had developed a bridge survival plan in case the car somehow went into the water: wait for the car to fill up, open the window to swim up and then try to float on the current until I could get to land. With two small children, however, that plan would no longer work. Suddenly, I would need to take two precious little persons with me through that drill and, well, there was not a good time to try to talk to them about that plan and besides, it would most assuredly traumatize them so I prayed extra hard instead that the bridge engineers had done their jobs well and other drivers would keep their distances as we crossed over those bridges.

I still slept with my shoes next to the bed AND I taught my boys as much as possible about safety, but the reality was that escape to survive was no longer always an option. I often still “see death everywhere” as my ex-husband used to say, meaning I am one of those safety-conscious folks that drive some folks crazy. Loving children has helped me learn to stay connected rather than seek escape, though, to find trustworthy people, to ask for help and to allow trustworthy others to help me. Over the years there were a number of folks who definitely helped me when I needed it; reminding myself of their support and encouragement has helped me trust that I can find others and allow them to help, too, if necessary. I needed to learn to choose relationships with trustworthy people and to develop alliances, to stop just trying to survive. I needed to open myself to the possibility that there might be more.

Getting older helped: I started wearing more sensible shoes all the time so boots in the car weren’t major safety concerns anymore!

(Photo by Jodi McCullah, 2023. All rights reserved.)

Why, though?

Watching my responses over the years, though, I know, has perhaps caused some folks who know me to think I’m just paranoid or hypersensitive for no good reason. This blog is, in part, an attempt to explain that behavior to those who do not understand. Writing about what has been in that backpack for so long is also for my tribe, for all those other folks who also were awakened in the night by a touch that taught us to be afraid of touch. We share this because we know “just in case” has come before.

I still struggle to say I am proud of all of this. I wish we were still innocents. I wish we did not know what we know. I wish we had different stories to tell. The things we feared, though, were real for us and we did not have the luxury of going through a day without being hypervigilant, without knowing firsthand that sometimes the unthinkable does happen. Sometimes, for some people, the darkness IS dangerous. To survive then, sometimes you do what you gotta do for the time being and, once it’s safer, you can work on growing, healing and learning other ways to take care of yourself. I am grateful, then, for all of you with boots in your car and a pack slung over your shoulder. Maybe it wasn’t always pretty, but we made it.

Because we were prepared, and we escaped, we can live into new possibilities; we can embrace the reality that the frightening place we came from is not all there is out there. (Photo by Jodi McCullah, 2023. All rights reserved.)

As I was writing this, I wondered why the photo below spoke to me and now I realize it’s because what’s around that corner in Venice promises to be beautful and hopeful and exciting. I celebrate all those survival skills, including learning over time that we will find what we need, AND learning to let ourselves ask for and accept help. Good news: there ARE others who do “that.” We are not alone and there are those who love us anyway. Embrace your backpack then or your boots until you don’t need them, then thank them for getting you this far and go see what’s around that next corner! You’ve got this!

Venice, Italy, 2022, photo by Jodi McCullah. All rights reserved.

Leave me a comment: what was in your survival kit?

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What Tolstoy Said….

All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878

People who are happy are not paying attention. And probably stupid.

Me, 2005 in a seminary class (Yeah, I’m not proud of that.)

We all learn lessons growing up. Some friends tell me today about learning how to hold their own in a fist fight or how to plait hair or how to make a decent pie crust. Those tend to be the friends whose families do not match the same clinical dysfunction criteria mine did. Warning: some of this post might be triggering for readers. Take care of yourself, please.

Little sister, older brother and me in happier times. Circa 1962.

If you looked at my family tree, you’d see the roots are severed. I am grateful, though, that the tree trunk has survived and flowered nonetheless. While I have been cut off from my family of origin for more than a decade, I am so very grateful for my husband, my sons, my granddaughter and my husband’s large extended family. I do not lack for people who care about me; what I was not able to produce for some time, though, was a witness to much of my life before the break with my parents, siblings and extended family. I lacked someone who could pick me out of the class photo (usually one of the taller kids on the back row). Missing was anyone who knew I didn’t usually eat my birthday cake, only the icing, or that I read every biography and autobiography in my elementary school library and that I grieved when I finished books because, for the few hours when I was reading, I was able to wander around in another space and time – one that was not mine. I lacked anyone who could give a witness to any of the reasons why I thought for so long that happy people were not paying attention to the pain in life.

I was surprised to find out how many of my friends thought I was an only child; they were surprised to see these pictures of me with siblings.

Can I get a witness?

When asked to describe my family as I was growing up, I’d explain: you could be lying on the braided rug in the living room, devastated, distraught, lost, and sobbing, and every member of my family would step around you at best. Or, at worst, they would chastize you for your selfishness: just look how you are upsetting everyone else by your pain! Not only did we NOT hold onto one another in times of crisis or pain, we denied one another’s right to be in pain. “How long you gonna be a victim?” was what was asked of me by a family member after she’d heard I was in counseling for being assaulted as a teen. I was in my early twenties. I had just remembered the assault that I had blocked out of my consciousness for several years because it was just too painful to remember. I had only just begun counseling and I felt her rebuke keenly. There was evidently no place in our family for that. She, a woman thirty years older and presumably three decades wiser, could not cotton my taking any time to understand and come to terms with what had happened to me. Today, thanks to counselors and learning about trauma, I would be able to put my hand on her arm and reassure her that she would never need to listen to my struggles. I would also explain to her that recovering from trauma requires some reflection, though, and some help understanding what happened and more than a little work to heal. I would assure her I certainly did my part to finish that work – to come home from the journey someone else started me on. I would also plan to be there for her if she ever felt like she could share her own pain.

Sadly, family breaks are more common in my family than not, though, so, when the relationship with my mother’s family was severed, our entire nuclear family was already split from Dad’s people. As an adult, I started a genealogical search only to find I had a great-grandmother living about an hour away by car until I was a teen whom I hadn’t known existed. I asked my parents at the time and was told “We didn’t like her very much.” Later, I found an old family photo with one woman’s face scratched out completely (and she had been sitting next to her twin brother in the photo!). What do you have to do, for goodness, to get completely scratched out of existence? Evidently, severing ties, splitting up was the response of choice for my people.

In the past few years, though, through the magic of the internet, I have been able to reunite with some folks from my childhood. While for some, that can be a hilarious trip down a bumpy old memory lane, for others of us, restablishing connections can be healing and grounding. As a sixty-something woman estranged from her entire family of birth for more than a decade, finding these old friends had been spurred by the need to find folks who could vouch for my previous life.

This, then, is a post about my friends from childhood and teen years reconnecting and discovering how little we knew about each other in spite of how close we thought we were.

Photo by Malcolm Hill on Pexels.com

I was always jealous of those who stayed close to their friends long after school; I believe now that most of my friendships were more akin to life boats in the midst of stormy seas. Survival was the goal, and perhaps we knew instinctively that two or three strands of rope were stronger than one, so we held onto one another. Once we found ourselves in new oceans, though, we grabbed onto new, different life connections, and let go of the old ones, not because we were inconsiderate or uncaring but out of necessity. No one had time or energy to look back; survival was the priority.

Puzzle Pieces

Trauma, though, can leave fragmented memories. One definition of trauma is that we remember all too well what we cannot forget but struggle to remember all the pieces in between – the rest of the story. I have long been embarrassed at being unable to remember large chunks of my life because I didn’t realize how large was the shadow of trauma and how it can so deeply darken the rest of our lives. The details, so many pieces, seem lost, scattered, in my case, all over the world like a favorite nesting toy. Through more than seventeen moves before I was old enough to leave home, curiously, I have somehow held onto most of a wooden nesting toy from Pakistan, where we lived when I was a child (stories for another post.) Some of the pieces are missing and others have been glued back together; today they serve as an apt metaphor for the struggle to repair and hold together memories of traumatic childhoods.

What’s left of a favorite wooden nesting toy I received when I was a child in Pakistan. We lived there when I seven. Parts of it are missing; they are, no doubt, scattered across the world.

Comparing Notes

Once we reconnected, my friends and I began comparing notes. One childhood friend thought I was an only child though I have two siblings and we are all just a year apart in age. One of us had grown up with an abusive father. She married four times before she got help and stopped getting herself into abusive relationships. Another lived with an older brother who we now realize was a sociopath. She had found not words for when, as a seven-year-old, he had cheated, stole and tried to be sexual with her. Weren’t there rules about that?

That no adult saw all of this meant it continued, and by the time she was eight, he had run her over with a bike causing her to need stitches and hit her in the head with cutting board causing more stitches, and routinely touched her inappropriately. “Just a rowdy boy, right? Just a kid who doesn’t like to lose, wasn’t he? He’ll grow out of that, we are certain.” She grew up searching for an adult – any adult – around her to be the adult and a witness to what she was experiencing. She knows now that her brother simply passed along his own pain.

Healing began when a counselor said, “You were not imagining this. You are hurt, angry because you were betrayed by parents who were supposed to take are of you. You have those feelings because you have a brain and eyes to see. You doubted yourself and what you saw and experienced because you were raised by parents who were overwhelmed by their own pain and shame and guilt; they had nothing to offer you for yours.” A teen aged girl, she wanted her mother to teach her to curl her hair; instead, she watched her mother threaten to cut herself.

While it was happening, though, none of us “knew.” As teens in the late 60’s and early 70’s, we braved new styles together: we traded bell bottoms and hip huggers and together we tried cheap strawberry wine behind the concession stand at the drive-in movies, but we never shared about home. We didn’t “know” even though we saw each other every day at school, ate lunches together, joined cheer club together, and moved around in a pack as if we were attached to each other by velcro. We were all taken aback when we collectively realized that none of us, though fast friends throughout junior high and high school, had ever visited the others’ homes. No sleepovers. No parties together. None of us had ever even met the others’ parents. We didn’t know why, but we all somehow understood one another. Somehow we saw in each other kindred, if broken, spirits, and we found respite in our time together.

High School Dance 1973
We didn’t know how much we didn’t know.

Today, as the three of us somewhat gingerly share our memories, fragments and misunderstandings are beginning to make sense to us. Counselors and social scientists tell us now that we compartmentalised our lives, partly out of shame, partly to protect the others. We never spoke of life at home or after school; we kept those separate. In our defense, we didn’t often know what was going on in our homes wasn’t going on in everyone’s homes. Part of the power of dysfunction is that it simply seems like “that’s how it’s done, so why are you whining?” Or worse, we feared that the pain and chaos and constant crisis of our homes was somehow our own faults and if we’d only be better daughters….

Dysfunction, though, happens in shadows and darkness and thrives on secrecy.

We know now that each of us fought to get out of that darkness once we left those homes and we celebrate our individual efforts to keep our own lives in the light.

“The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil. All who do wicked things hate the light for fear their actions will be exposed to the light.”

John 3:19b-20 CEB

What do we do differently?

We learned to encourage the children in our lives because each of us could remember at least one person who had encouraged us. Never underestimate the power of encouraging a child or teen; you may well be the only encouragement they receive.

We refuse to keep secrets. We ask tougher questions. When we see someone sobbing, we approach them gently and ask what we can do. If they don’t know or can’t answer, we sit down with them and wait until they are calmer. We hold sacred space for our own pain and for theirs.

One of the three of us refuses, even when facing family verbal and emotional abuse herself, to walk away completely herself because of a child in the extended family; she doesn’t want the child to feel alone. She knows how important it is for someone to say, “I see you. I see what happened. I see how confusing it must be.”

One of us worked hard to figure out why she kept getting herself into abusive relationships over the years and now she is able to choose healthier relationships and she doesn’t need to hide that relationship from us.

None of our parents paid any attention to where we went or with whom, so we each had resolved to offer our children a healthier childhood, making sure their friends knew us and we knew the parents of their friends.

We also grieve those who did not make it; each of us has family members still hurting, still in the darkness, unable for a variety of reasons to find their way out. We are grateful and we do not take our own growth for granted.

Okay, sharing isn’t always “nice,” but it IS healing.

The tagline on this blog is “Sharing is nice.” That is my witness. Sharing is difficult. Sharing is scary. Sharing is necessary. Sharing is essential. Sharing is healing. Sharing is powerful.

The good news is that we all found healing because we shared. There’s help out there and hope and healing and lots of folks who are called to listen and trained to help us when we share. Make sure you find someone who is trained and, if you don’t feel like you are being heard or they are helping, find someone else.

Several years after my aunt’s rebuke and her impatience with my healing process, I shared with a female friend at church. Sharing with the counselor had helped but the counselor wisely encouraged me to share with a friend. Me sharing, the counselor explained, can also create that sacred space where others find healing, too. That is the power of sharing. Choose someone safe, she said, but share. When we share safely, we create a safe place for ourselves and often for others, a place of healing. Amazingly, pain shared safely dissipates and loses its power over us.

Ask before you share with anyone other than a professional. Be aware that your trauma might trigger theirs. Always ask permission but ask and keep asking until you find someone to listen.

I did share and my friend was lovely and listened and the moment felt healing. The next day, though, her husband dropped by and stunned me when he said, “Mary told me what you told her.” I felt betrayed. How had Mary not known that I would not want others, especially men, to know? How dare she share my story? It was not hers to share.

“You just need to get over it,” he demanded. And suddently there I was again, back home, back where we keep our pain and illness in the dark, back where we keep secrets. I felt my pain rise up and choke me.

This time, however, I was different. This time it was the thought of going back into the darkness that had turned my stomach. “As it happens,” I told him, trying not to vomit, “healing apparently will only happen if I walk through the memory. They tell me I have to share to get well, so I’m gonna.” I was on the verge of apologizing to him for sharing with his wife because it had upset him so much when suddenly he sat down hard and started sobbing. Then he began his own sharing. He’d never talked about being a fighter pilot in VietNam and he desperately needed to tell someone. I don’t remember much of what he shared; what I do remember was being amazed that holding my own space for healing had created space for him. In that moment, he felt safe, too, and he stepped into that space for just a bit. We never talked again about his trauma or mine. Perhaps sharing helped him enough; perhaps he went on to seek more help because he, too, had seen the power of sharing.

Stepping out of the squirrel cage….

Mostly, the friends I reconnected with and I had individually found that, in an unexamined life, pain just gets passed down the line, generation to generation. We all were recipients of pain passed along, never knowing why or where it originated. The effects of trauma will keep rolling back around from generation to generation if no one stops long enough to find some healing and try to get out of that squirrel cage of crazy. Just ignoring the pain, or worse, denying its existence, guarantees the next generation will be expected to hold it, too, and they often have no idea the why or the where of that family trauma.

We may not have been able to protect our own children as well as we might have liked but it was not from lack of trying and we console ourselves by remembering that, because we have reflected, educated ourselves about trauma, shared with counselors, written and prayed, we have at least helped our children to get out of that damn cage. We may have done it clumsily, we may all be still rolling sometimes out of control on the floor after hurtling ourselves out of the cage, but we’re clear. We can take a breath. We can stop, stand back and reflect on that still-spinning wheel and maybe even pray for the family members still running on it. Because we are out, though, because we are talking, because we won’t hide any more, we have a fighting chance to NOT pass that trauma and dysfunction on down the line.

For a recent, well-done example of how trauma not shared can affect us and those around us, consider Tom Hanks’ movie, “A Man Called Otto,” or the book it’s based on, “A Man Called Ove,” by Fredrik Backman.

Talking About Death Won’t Kill You.

Pulling death out from the shadows and examining it in the light does not make death happen. In fact, it does just the opposite. Thinking about death, learning about it and accepting it, makes life happen.

Virginia Morris, “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You,” Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

Death is a funny thing. And I don’t mean in a dark humor kind of way but, rather, funny as in strange: we all do it, and, these days, we all know we ought to muster up our courage and talk to our loved ones about what we know is coming at some time, and yet few of us do.

Talking about how we want to die and what needs to be done when we do is a gift to our families and friends, kind and considerate; sometimes that’s the last gift we give loved ones. Pastors and health care workers and counselors encourage us to start the conversations early but far too few of us ever get our courage up to start, even though we surely love our families.

We often don’t even talk to our loved ones

AS we (or they) are dying.

The first person I sat with who was dying, died alone in a hospital room while his family waited out in a waiting room. That was thirty years ago. We did not know how to help him not be afraid and nothing we said could ease the fear but no one wanted to name that or claim it either, so we talked around him when we were in the room. We talked about the weather, the dog, the cost of eggs, anything except death and eventually most went back out into the aptly named “waiting” room.  I, just starting out as a pastor, stayed in the darkened room with this man who no longer wore his own clothing but rather a hospital-issued and worn cotton gown and asked for some socks that weren’t neon blue or orange and didn’t have those silly dot on them or some salt for the instant potatoes and who was just plain furious. He was angry about sox and pajamas and dying without some damn salt and without any choices: no choices about dying and not even any choices about how he would die. Thus far, as a pastor just starting out, I had read and discussed one book about how to minister to someone who is dying and could remember none of what the damn book said. I drove home that night screaming in my car. I had not signed up for that, and I was unprepared both for his anger and mine and this helplessness we shared. The journey into ministry was going to be rougher than I ever could have imagined.

Once I’d calmed down a bit, a pastor with more experience offered this simple advice: “Next time,” she said, “name it. Fear. Uncertainty. Anger. Questions. Whatever is in front of you while you sit there, name it.” There was a time when I would have discounted such a ridiculously simple suggestion, but it turned out to be great advice. In fact, in any difficult situation, naming whatever is in “in the room,” especially if it is scary, lessens the fear and opens up the space for questions, laments or even the jokes, all ways of sharing.

I buried about a couple of dozen members of that church over the next few years, including a suicide, my 18-year-old communion steward and a couple who had been married for more than 75 years and who died within a week of one another. All of those deaths brought up questions, and I tried to name what I saw and reassure us all that talking about death would not kill us. Most of those folks’ deaths happened fairly quickly, but one member of that first church took almost a year to die after receiving what he called his “death pink slip.” Over that year, David showed an entire church how to die a good death. Diagnosed with metastasized prostate cancer already destroying his back and ribs, the construction engineer who could no longer build houses started building birdhouses. He built hundreds of them in the months he was dying. His mind and his hands still moved well and in sync and he was grateful when his friends’ eyes lit up. He designed bird homes that celebrated the University of Tennessee for a Vols fan, several that looked like our little white country church and one I requested that mimicked a Lincoln Log cabin.

Birdhouses built by a former construction foreman who could not keep building homes for his friends so he started building them for the birds in the area. He built hundreds in the months after he was diagnosed with advanced Prostate cancer.

More importantly, though, as David died, as he dealt with the diagnoses, the treatments and the rapid onslaught of decay and death, he shared. He talked about what was happening to him to everyone who visited him. He taught us what the Hospice folks were teaching him, even describing what death might look like, how he might have some better days right before he died and what to watch for in his breathing as death grew nearer. In short, he did not hide or try to protect us from what was happening.  He named all of it and we are grateful for this evidence of his courage and love for us.

Because of David, I also found a great resource and over the years referred to it both for personal help and also to preach and teach. In, “Talking About Death,” Virginia Morris addresses so much of what keeps us from these important discussions. First of all, she says, “Pulling death out from the shadows and examining it in the light does not make death happen. In fact, it does just the opposite. Thinking about death, learning about it and accepting it, makes life happen.”

When I started this project a friend of mine called me, all upset. She felt that this endeavor was not only morbid, but dangerous. By studying death, she said, I might make it happen. A friend of hers had died of cancer while studying Portuguese death rituals. I, too, might be on a suicide mission. This subject was better left untouched. Her concerns may seem a bit odd at first, but they are not unusual. Death is the boogeyman, hiding in the shadows of our bedrooms, arousing all sorts of anxieties and fears—some valid, some silly, some we don’t readily admit even to ourselves. Most of us can’t imagine the end of our existence as we know it. We dread the process of dying, the pain and disability. We panic at the thought of leaving loved ones, or having them leave us.

Morris, Virginia. Talking About Death (p. 7). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

What Did COVID teach us?

So many died during COVID alone and unable to be comforted by family or friends and we are more aware now than ever of the importance of being there for one another.

NEVERTHELESS, we struggle with starting the conversations before we are ill, before we are hospitalized, before we need hospice care.

Part of the issue is that we simply don’t have to talk about death much anymore. We simply do not talk about death, not even in churches even though a church seems like the best place to talk about death.

Wartrace United Methodist Church, est. 1849. Homecoming suppers were “on the grounds.” For most smaller Methodist churches, the cemetery often surrounded the church building.

In so many of those little churches we attended, all of the “Saints” who’d gone before were buried all around the church in the cemetery just outside the doors. Every few months, we would have “supper” on the grounds, meaning we spread our biscuits and fried chicken legs and pickles on platters on old checked table cloths on top of the graves of our ancestors, who were buried all around us.

There was no pretending they weren’t there with us, bodies underneath and souls swirling overhead, whispering in our ears, reminding us all they’d taught us and all they’d done, good, bad or just human. Don’t slouch. Eat your greens, too. Wipe your fingers on that napkin and not on your shirt, young man. These were the folks who’d walked through those cemetery gates and into that old wooden sanctuary each week and they had taught us how to follow those 10 rules Moses brought down from the mountain AND to turn that other cheek. Still, they didn’t have to create a moment to talk about death because they reminded us of it every Sunday and during revivals as we entered that sacred space.

Today we don’t have those reminders.  We do not see the cycle of life and death firsthand on a daily basis now. We do not wring the chickens’ necks and pluck them ourselves; few of rely on butchering hogs to have food for the winter, and we no longer prepare loved ones’ bodies for burial ourselves. We have people called to and trained to do these tasks and so the majority of us will never touch any dead body, never be faced with the need to handle a lifeless body, never have to be reminded we too will die, never find an occasion to talk about our deaths.

Easy for You to Say.

You might be thinking that as a retired pastor, of course, I have lots of experience sitting with people who are dying, sitting with the family and friends of someone who has died and just talking about death in general.  That is true, but all that professional experience did not make it any easier to start the discussions with my own family or to begin the work personally. In fact, I am embarrassed to say that it was a neighbor who suggested the book that started me on the process for myself and my family, by suggesting the book she’d found: “I’m Dead, Now What?” (See below.)

I want to offer some suggestions, then, some topics and some resources to help you do what is one of the most loving things you can for your family: discuss with them, prepare and plan so they are not left with the burden when you are gone or can no longer help. We can do this.

Excellent planner to provide peace of mind for those who need to settle your affairs. Helps organize your information, from pet needs to email and social medea to banking. Available on Amazon. By Peter Pauper Press

Start with the easier stuff.

If talking about death at all is just difficult for you, start with putting your papers in order and maybe your mind will become more used to the idea of realizing there will be a day when you (posthumously) say, “I’m Dead. Now What?” When you are gone, will your papers be in order? Will whomever is left to pay the bills, deal with property, take care of Fido or make other decisions know where to find what they need? Thankfully, there are wonderful resources for that as well. Starting here will often help us begin the many conversations we need to have around our own deaths.

Passwords, please. Can I get an amen?

If nothing else, safely providing a list of the seemingly thousands of passwords we all have now is one of the greatest gifts you can give these days. Don’t forget to tell them what the site is for the password; you know how you have spent hours trying to get back into your Netflix account. Think about how that’s going to work when it’s time to close out the account and stop the automatic draft for that times about fifty or a hundred, depending on how many apps and accounts you have.

Talk About How You Want to Die

We all hope to die at a certain way if we are honest and think about it for a moment and sharing that with one another around a kitchen table is a way to learn about one another.

Some of us want to die quickly, instantly. Some of us only hope for no pain. Many of us in my culture hope to die at home in our own beds surrounded by family and friends. Some of us hope to die with a silk parachute inflating overhead one last time; others of us hope to die in in satin ballroom shoes, our hips responding to the beat on the congas as a Latin band plays a cha-cha. Still others of us would love to take our last breaths in the arms of a lover. Some of the sweetest couples I’ve known debate who should go first: some do not want to be left alone after a longterm companion goes but most are more concerned about their sweetheart and hope that the other will go first so they are not left alone to grieve. They would take that grief upon themselves.

Consider doing a bit of research, then sharing.

In Japan, at least thirty years ago when I lived there, everyone in the neighborhood chips in to help pay for the costs of a neighbor’s funeral knowing that everyone else will do the same when their own time comes.

Funeral traditions there offered us a number of occasions to talk about dying and our own deaths. Once, a neighbor came to visit after her father had died and shared with me about the funeral since I had not been in town on the day of the funeral. I remember trying to put my finger on what was wrong as we sat and looked at a picture album of the funeral gathering and ceremonies until I realized that what was strange for me was that there was a photo album of the event. I had never known anyone to photograph a funeral.

There’s some fascinating and/or disturbing historical examples of cultural differences around death, such as mummifying and burying with everything you’d need to survive in the afterlife, including, sadly, your pets, and others we pray have been banned forever such as the Hindu custom of a wife immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.

Write down your information first, then your wishes.

Think about what you want for a service, write down your wishes and share them with a family member and a pastor or another family friend who can help when the time comes. What are your wishes around being kept alive? Wishes around resusitation, extreme measures and even feeding tubes are much more difficult for family members if they are not aware of your wishes.

Do you want certain songs included in your service? Have a favorite verse? Talk about what you want and need or don’t want. Tell a pastor or trusted friend who can help you when you need to let your loved one die the way they’ve chosen, whether that means no , no on every possible intervention, i.e., their choices as best can be honored.

Clean up after before yourself.

In some societies, sorting through all your belongings, “death cleaning” is an established tradition. They are aware of the stress and pain of leaving all our “stuff” behind for our family to have to sort and clear and give away or sell or keep.

“Death cleaning,” or “döstädning” is a Swedish term that refers the process of downsizing before you die. Death Cleaning, explained in “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is an gift you give your family. Sorting through, clearing out, giving away or selling all the “stuff” we can accumulate throughout our lives is an indication, the author writes, that you love your family enough to clear our unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly well before you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet. The idea is that our spouses and children or grandchildren are not burdened with what can become a beast of a process, yet another source of pain for those grieving us when we’re gone, yet another indication that we didn’t want to talk about death.

(Magnusson, Margareta. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (The Swedish Art of Living & Dying Series) (p. 2). Scribner. Kindle Edition.) Also available on Amazon.

Start the conversation any way you can.

We all face it; people all over the world face it, but not always in the same manner, using the same customs, so, I’m thinking maybe talking about cultural differences around death and dying might be a way to start a conversation.

Did you know that those death masks, usually made by taking a cast of a person’s face after their death, were often kept as mementoes or used for the creation of a portrait or perhaps a scupture after the person had died and been buried. That could open a conversation. A lock of hair often is kept, a tradition started by Queen Victoria after the death of her husband. Tiny brooches might hold cremation ashes. Do you want to be cremated? This is the time to make sure a loved one knows that.

Just start.

Finally, to start the conversation, if none of the suggestions above have spurred you to sit down with your spouse or children or companion or pastor or priest yet, here is a poem I wrote after sitting with a man at my last church who was dying. Perhaps you can start simply by sharing this poem over a cup of tea, a pint of beer or some lovely scones your neighbor dropped by to share. “Hey,” you can say, “I read this poem about death and dying today and it made me think. Can I read it to you and you tell me what you think?” You get a yes and maybe some discussion will follow. Have some questions ready. Maybe a version of “Would you rather…?” Would you rather be buried at sea or on a mountain? Would you rather have everyone sing happy songs at your funeral or maybe tell their favorite joke?

Every time I have spent time with someone who is close to death, I recognize I am closer to my own death and my own fears and though both death and the fear of dying creep ever closer, neither seem to crowd out the peace I have found in talking about, in naming, what is before me, even death. It’s pretty much the one thing we all have in common. Let’s talk!

Sitting with the Dying

I used to think sitting with someone who's dying took courage.
Now I think it is much more selfish than I might ever want to admit.
It is an act of hope, yes.
If I am honest, though,
the hope is that someone else will sit with me when I'm the one who's dying.
There is prayer
but the prayer is that someone who knows me will wipe the drool
from my chin when the time comes.
There is the seeking of promises, guarantees, bartering if
necessary,
so that someone whose face I used to recognize will
cup my face in the palm of their hands when I cry like a baby, or
pluck the hairs from my upper lip because even a dying woman
deserves to feel pretty.
The first time I sat with someone who was dying, I went into that dark room because no one else would and because I couldn't bear
anyone dying alone.
Except now I know we too often do anyway.
Still, if there's any comfort to be offered there, I will selfishly offer warm, gentle and soft touches if only because I know I want the return.
I confess then that sitting with someone who's dying
is a selfish act for me.
It is my way. A way to make the world the place I want it to be,
where no one dies alone
if only because I cannot bear to live in a world where we do.

~Jodi McCullah 2022

4 responses to “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You.”

  1. Anne Culver Avatar
    Anne Culver

    Thank you for these reflections, Jodi. As a hospital chaplain, I’ve found that many people who’ve been told “some bad news” (that they’re dying), desperately need someone willing to help them work through just what that might mean for them and their loved ones in our culture in which even thinking about death seems to be taboo.

    Liked by 1 person

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  2. A. Getty Avatar
    A. Getty

    Thank you for sharing. We have been having more of these conversations lately and your reading suggestions are helpful.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  3. Earnie L Avatar
    Earnie L

    I was raised with grandparents who took me to their church’s dinner on the grounds. One of my favorite places to photograph is a cemetery. I imagine all of the lovely lives and interesting people there. And, my Mother taught me that there are far worse things in this life than dying. Thanks for the lovely article.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  4. Joan Butler Avatar
    Joan Butler

    Jodi, thanks so much for these thought provoking words. We’ve started the process, but need to go deeper.

    Liked by 1 person

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Commit = Finding My Nerve Again.

Good news this week from Papa Luie: You are never too old to learn something new! Papa Luie is the conga player who encouraged me to learn congas so I could make music with the Saturday morning music group playing at the St Augustine Farmers Market.

Actually, he said, “Learn conga or washboard. We need both.”

I chose conga, though I was more than a little intimidated. Now he’s teaching me and making a place for me to play music too. The lessons last week centered around some new patterns to practice, as well as three rules: 1) there are no rules for playing; 2) you’re never too old to learn; and 3) ya gotta commit. Papa Louie, whose age I will no longer try to guess, took up playing conga when he was 75. Yeah. Now he’s like my own personal Yoda and that is not because he is a head shorter than me. “There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner,” he said.

Commitment is the theme of the week: commit to not backing away, commit to not being timid but rather putting your back into the return of the ball in a volley, commit to the drive, commit to the first few notes of a verse. Commit or go home.

Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images, 2023

Commitment

Actually, commitment was this week’s lesson ad nauseum. From traffic, bluegrass music, pickleball, and life in general, I heard: Do not back away from what you want to or need to do.

The time is now to speed up a bit more when you enter traffic, to move forward, not backwards when you see the ball coming at you, and to sing out rather than wait for another chance.

Commit = speed up or move over?

As it was, the insistence of several noisy and angry drivers behind me was not so gentle after all, though. I confess they were justified in their angry gestures and (likely)rude comments; I was, in my mind, still driving in Monteagle, our bucolic and peaceful mountain (of course) town and summer home, where rush hour” means six cars, the speed limit on many roads is whatever you want it to be, and meandering drivers share the gravel roads with speeders. We don’t even have a stop light in Monteagle. That’s actually for safety’s sake. Besides the deer, the biggest danger for drivers in Monteagle is fog. We live at about 2000 feet elevation there, and the fog comes in and sets for a spell, has a cup of coffee and lingers far too long in the winter. Uninvited, the fog seems to camp out on our front lawn most of the winter, and, while it is pretty if you’re sitting by the fire looking out, driving in the fog is nerve-wracking for those of us who are already more timid drivers.

Ghost ship in the fog off California Coast
Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images.

The advice they give you for driving in the fog doesn’t help, either: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Driving in the fog 101: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Such dangerous driving conditions separate the timid drivers from the more aggressive ones; some drivers seem to see the fog as a reason to hit the accelerator. Wisdom dictates then that putting a stop light in downtown so some of us might be waiting to start or turn when another driver barrels through would be a foolish and short-lived experiment. Driving in Monteagle, though, usually allows me to meander, to notice who’s at the Piggly Wiggly when I drive by or decide if the line at the pharmacy is too long and I can wait to get those meds tomorrow. Driving in Florida, where we are “wintering,” however, does not tolerate, invite or accept any lack of commitment when I turn onto the road. Meander onto the Beach Highway at your own risk.

Wait, you might wonder: doesn’t being at the beach encourage you to meander? 

That’s the rub, as they say. (Pass the Coppertone.) So many folks now want to live where they can meander that others move to the beach to serve them beers and crab legs, to sell them big beach houses or to build newer, even bigger ones. All those folks are in a hurry; they have zero patience for meandering. The many interactions between those two groups of beach dwellers as well as the struggle many visitors have with being able to slow down while on vacation combine to create what is the social ebb and flow of today’s beach life. Meander onto the Beach highway then at your own peril. You have to commit, to turn onto the road and be ready to accelerate immediately, not after you’ve checked the sidewalks for neighbors out walking dogs. They’re out there dodging traffic themselves as they make their way to the quiet of the actual beach, where we all have permission not to commit to much of anything except meandering.

Commit = Don’t Back Away

“Commit.” Be ready to accelerate. Be ready to hit that ball when it comes your way on the pickleball court or accept being in the losing team most of the time. “Don’t back away,” Steve, my partner in several games yesterday, encouraged me. “It [the ball] won’t hurt you,” he said. (Actually it does sting, but not as badly as always losing or worse being the one person no one wants to play with because you let the ball go by too often.) “Stand your ground,” he said, gently, but with some insistence. “You’re not here to watch, right?” Steve is older than I am, slender and wiry, clearly someone who has always been athletic. He sports a neatly-trimmed beard and is the kind of consistent player I’d like to be.  “You didn’t start playing this game to watch the ball go by,” he says.  Steve makes it look so easy to keep the ball in play without being aggressive.  I find his coaching to be so much more compelling precisely because he isn’t one of the “Every shot is a kill shot” players.  Those guys tell me not to back up and watch the ball go by as well but, in my thinking, they are suspect because their response to aggressive play is more aggressive play. “If the ball is hit hard, hit it back even harder.”  Steve, though, is himself trying to navigate the game by being assertive rather than aggressive, and I really appreciate the distinction.  

Assertive Does Not Equal Aggressive

Coaches and Instructors have shown me how to practice returning those more aggressive volleys, they’ve shown me how to use my torso to garner greater strength myself, they’ve even taught me, at my request, how to slow down someone else’s aggressive volley. That takes a lot of practice. And commitment. We haven’t talked, though, about the struggles of those of us who have been intimidated around more aggressive folks all our lives. Easily half the pickleball players out there struggle when facing more aggressive players, which can be especially disappointing in light of the fact that many players take up the sport as much for the social outlet as for the workout or the competition. We’ve wondered more than a few times if this was really our game since we don’t want to be aggressive ourselves and so many players seem to embrace the aggressive potential of the pickleball. 

I’m grateful I realized, though, that the encouragement from Steve was not whether to be aggressive but whether or not to stand my ground as best I could, to take my place as one of the players on the court for that particular game, or simply to give it up. Instead, his encouragement was just that: encouraging. He was suggesting I needed to see how it feels to claim my space. That’s not the same as being aggressive. Aggressive players want their space and mine. I have the option of walking away and letting aggressive players have my space, or, I have the option of standing my ground and that, Steve was trying to tell me, is satisfying and even empowering and is why many of us play. I’m actually okay( with not winning all the time. Well, most of the time.) I’m good so long as matches are close games and include lots of good volleys and points. I don’t like getting “pickled” (losing 11-0) any more than the next player, but, mostly, the fun comes when the games are fairly evenly matched. A game where one server simply aces every serve bores most of us. Like most every other player, I’m here on the court to try to improve my skills, to compete, and to play. “You gotta commit,though,” Steve said. “You aren’t out here to watch the ball go by.”

Commit = Sing Out

That message seems to be everywhere right now.  The next step in my joining in with the Saturday morning jam session at the St. Augustine Farmers Market (see previous post about setting goals) is being allowed to sing a song or two, and I’ve been practicing to meet that goal. I’ve been studying bluegrass singing techniques, practicing finding the tenor or baritone line above or below the melody and learning lyrics to old bluegrass songs. 

“Commit,” Annie said. Annie took up banjo later in life also and she gets my hesitation but she knows hesitation is not a singer’s friend.  “You gotta hit that note or it’Il sound like you’re being strangled,” she says. 

At a session in the near future, I’m gonna have to ask to sing lead but first they need to hear me harmonize and so I’ve been joining on Mondays with a smaller group to harmonize and offer percussion. 

Talking about singing won’t get me anywhere, though; they need to hear me sing. So, this week I jumped in with that smaller group and, while I’m not sure my tenor line wasn’t flat, I committed. I sang loudly enough to be heard or so I thought. Let’s just say the invitations to sing did not come flying in, though, and it was clear heading into the larger jam session this week that I would have to work that much harder at  overcoming my timidity. My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this. 

My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this. 

I used to have nerve until…

I’m pretty sure I was considerably more self-assured, bolder even, when I was younger. I did not hesitate to enter the flow of traffic using only peripheral vision to scan lanes while I pedaled a ten-speed bicycle into city traffic. I didn’t think twice about riding at night through town or riding alone even in the dark. That, though, was before I realized I was mortal. 

Perhaps realizing you will not actually live forever is something most folks don’t realize until they are “up in years” as my grandmother used to say, or declining in health or strength. Some of us can point to a moment when we lost at least some of our nerve, though, because we suddenly realized, “Hey, we could die.” Until that time, many of us had ridden or skated or raced through life, jumped trestles, run stop signs and woven through traffic like our favorite friend of Mario. Life – or at least the possibility of it ending – first slapped me upside the head when I was about eighteen. I was biking to a college class, weaving in and out of city traffic and, of course, wearing no helmet. No one wore them back then. I stopped at a light next to a semi. The light changed and I started pedaling just as the truck  turned my way, dragging me and my ten-speed along the road. Another driver evidently alerted him to the bicycle and rider he had been trying to crush, and, thank God, he stopped. I remember thinking, as I was being dragged, that those big rigs looked even more menacing from underneath. When the dragging stopped, I laid my head on the pavement for a moment, grateful that my bike had protected me from the truck’s tires. I phoned home and got a ride to my classes.  

…that moment when I realized I am mortal after all.

Maybe realizing I could die, that I was not going to live forever, ought to have compelled me to trade up from my ten-speed to something more substantial—a small tank, for instance—but mine and my parents’ response at the time was to get me a motorcycle. Maybe we figured I’d be able to outrun the big rigs. I got a couple of lessons from the guy at the dealership, then the salesman said I was good to go and so I went. I had to get to work and school, and, with two adults and three driving teens in the family, we simply could not afford a car just for me. 

Like so much else, the motorcycle worked for a while, right up until I woke up in the back of an ambulance.  Thing is, I wasn’t driving that motorcycle when we wrecked; my mother and I had decided together that she ought to learn to drive the motorcycle as well.  Yes, my mother was driving and no, she had not taken the lessons.  In retrospect, that was not exactly a shining moment for either mother or daughter.  I have long regretted climbing on the back of that little Yamaha 250 to share with my mother my vast experience handling a motorcycle. In our defense, we lived on a small road where the only regular traffic consisted of neighbors pulling into their driveways.  The road did, however, dump out onto a busier road so while Mom did well driving down our road away from calamity, the trip back required she remember how to apply the brakes and, well, that didn’t happen. It was a bonafide miracle that we ran into the side of that car; if we’d been going another mile per hour faster, he likely would have hit us full on and shoved us into ongoing traffic. As it was, I was thrown backwards onto our road. Thank God we were wearing helmets. Mine was cracked; that’ll tell you something about impact. I woke up in the ambulance the first time, looked at the EMT and asked him what day it was. He got flustered and couldn’t tell me and I remember thinking that, if the EMT didn’t know what day it was, what chance did I have to figure it out? A nurse told me when I awoke again later in the hospital that I had upset the EMT.  Poor guy, he was not much older than I was, and it had been his first day. I would like to be able to tell you that he wore the uniform well or that he visited me in the ER and I found his blue eyes haunting.  Instead, I wonder to this day if he had any personal thoughts about mortality when he saw a girl his age lying next to her mother on the pavement unconscious. 

The physical effects for both my mother and me were miraculously minor. We each had a concussion and lots of scrapes but those injuries were far less memorable than the tension and strain of living in our home for the next few weeks. I did apologize several times over the next few weeks to my father without much effect. He couldn’t speak to me or my mother for several weeks even though neither of us were injured worse than we were.  He didn’t even lecture me when he showed up in a used car for me to drive from then on. 

I can show you the scars on my legs nearly five decades later, but the greater impact of those two incidents was that I was no longer confident about much of anything and my go-to response for anything coming at me fast was to curl up like an armadillo and hope whatever it was would bounce off me. This is the red carpet of trauma I have been trying to unfurl now for years and lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time.   

…lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time for me to find my nerve again.   

Everywhere I turn in the past few months, weeks, days, I see or hear encouragement to commit, to overcome the tendency to sit back and let the ball go by or miss my chance to make music. Yesterday, Annie, who gets my hesitation, took matters into her own hands and shoved me up front to where the microphone was so I could sing that tenor line on “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” It’s apparently time. Being thrown onto the pavement was neither the beginning nor the end of trauma for me; but, after decades of watching too much of my life go by, it seems the universe is urging me to accelerate back into the midst of life’s flow, to not just sit and watch the ball go by, to risk being the one making music and to not simply stay on the sidelines any more.

“There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner.”

Papa Luie

Quitters, Goals and Macrame, Oh My!

On Saturday, December 31, 2022, I achieved one of my biggest goals. . .for 2022. Just in the nick of time, right? The goal was to sit in and play some kind of percussion with a group that plays every Saturday morning at the local Farmer’s Market. Anyone is invited to join in but it took several steps to get there, including: several scouting expeditions to see they really were inviting and open to new folks; lessons to learn the Congas because that’s what one of their drummers suggested; and, oh yeah, a new set of Congas provided expressly to encourage me to meet this goal.

Playing at the Farmer’s Market December 31. They were welcoming but they needed to see if I could really play that drum. Next goals: working my way into the group by slowly, steadily building their trust and showing I can keep a beat and add to the music.

Working to get comfortable bringing a drum to the jam and sitting in required several more steps, actually, including sitting in with another “drop-in” jamming group where I already knew some folks. Completing the final step of this goal took several months and there were even more steps beforehand, including taking drumming lessons in general for some time, years actually. Sitting in with this well-established group whose regular jam is a performance for an audience was the final step to complete that goal and I did that on December 31. Actually that it was completed just as the year ended didn’t occur to me until a couple of days into the new year, partly because I was feeling so good about meeting the goal. I just love checking items off my list of goals.

Yes, I keep a list of goals. Specific goals, in fact. Some of them have taken years and several steps to achieve; others are quicker or easier. Full disclosure: I am a list maker and a goal setter. I have been making lists – and being made fun of for it – for years. Don’t care. I started making lists before anyone ever suggested I might have some sort of attention disorder; I just realized early on that I was easily distracted and, if I wanted to remember to do something of a day, a week or a year, I’d better write it down. I’m gonna pat myself a bit on the back here and say the practice has served me well. I’ve been asked more than a few times how I have gotten so much done and making lists has been one of my most successful tools.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

Of course, the idea of setting goals is appropriate for New Year’s in general. We’ve all likely seen or heard a lot about setting goals in the past few weeks; plenty of products are being advertised on all forms of media as being willing to help us “meet our goals.” Sadly, as new tools and programs are promsing to help us finally lose weight, start exercising, further our education or learn macrame, we generally listen while surrounded by the remnants of past goals abandoned, like the macrame plant hangers on that never-used exercise bike; or worse, we consume those cigarettes or sugar or french fries while we listen to the experts tell us how to stop it now.

Sometimes it’s good to be a quitter.

One of the toughest goals I ever managed – finally- to achieve was quitting smoking. I almost wrote, “one of the biggest goals I ever managed to meet.” Ever thought about why we say we “meet” goals? I have. Other synonyms are match, satisfy, answer, comply, discharge, execute, fit, fufill and so on. To meet, though, makes me think of encountering, of running into someone on a narrow pathway and then needing to decide whether or not to hug, to join hands, to negotiate getting around one another or to bail, to jump off the path entirely to avoid the other, that goal. What if we thought of our goals as other life companions we hope one day to fully embrace, to welcome, to love and hold? How do we get to the place where we do not think of these goals as adverseries, enemies, unreachable or unloveable?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I began smoking on the rifle range in Army basic training. That’s a story in itself. Maybe that really set up this goal of NOT smoking as an adversary? While I had never found cigarettes even tolerable before the day my company stepped onto that range with live ammunition in our rifles, I smoked half a pack of Marlboros before the day was out and then I was hooked. Smoking actually was more attractive in Basic Training for another reason. When the company took a break, the Drill Sergeants often barked: “Smok’em if you gottem! If ya don’t, you can police the area. ” (“Policing the area” meant picking up cigarette butts left by smokers who had not yet learned to field strip their cigs. Hmm…smoke…or pick up someone else’s cigarette butts. Hmm.) That was in ’78.

I smoked until 1985. July 1, 1985, to be exact. I had wanted to quit for a couple of years before that. I had even managed to ease back from a pack of regular Marlboros a day to the light version and then even managed to be able to ration them, to limit them. For a year, I smoked five or fewer cigarettes a day, but I could not let them go completely. My husband at the time and I both smoked and we had both entertained quitting but neither of us was willing to create a concrete goal at New Year’s or any other time of the year that we knew we wouldn’t achieve. Why set ourselves up for failure, we figured? Still, while I knew I wanted to be not smoking before having children, the desire to quit not as strong as the urge to have one more after supper or before bed or whenever I saw someone else light up.

Out of the mouths of babes….

We needed some help and prodding to accomplish this goal; we just didn’t know it. Perhaps the most powerful deterrent to lighting up came from a four-year-old we knew who, while we were lighting up one day at her house, asked us point-blank, “Why do you want to die?” I’m pretty sure that at the time I shrugged it off or walked outside but her question followed me everywhere. I couldn’t answer her. Neither my husband nor I could answer her because we realized this child might in fact love us more than we loved ourselves.

Neither my husband nor I could answer her because we realized she might in fact love us more than we loved ourselves.

We carried that question for weeks with no answer until we were surprised to be confronted by another couple, good friends. They wanted to know when we would stop. “You have told us before you’re gonna stop smoking. When? We’d like to know!” We were so surprised by that full-frontal assault that we threw out a date that seemed far far away. July 1, 1985, we said. Conversation over. They seemed happy. Everyone was happy.

Until July 1, 1985. Actually, June something or other. We were at their home and they reminded us of our promise months earlier. Dammit. Now we had to choose. Lose the nasty habit or lose the friends. How sad is it that too often we hold onto the nasty habit? We didn’t, though. We looked at each other and decided to go for it. It still wasn’t easy. July 1 was going to be a Monday. On Sunday around noon, we ran out of cigarettes. I argued that we had one more day. I knew I’d only have one or two more smokes before the deadline hit and that I’d have no trouble trashing the others but my husband argued we’d be too tempted to keep smoking til that pack, then the next and the next were gone. We needed to simply stop, he insisted. Really ticked me off at the time. But we quit. I took up knitting in hopes that it would help to keep my hands busy when I was sitting and agitated or bored; today it irks me to remember that I smoked sometimes out of boredom!

Quitters

We stayed quitters even after moving away to Japan where, it seemed, everyone smoked, and there weren’t even any non-smoking areas in restaurants or on trains. That was a test of our resolve. By that time, though, we had another incentive: while it had been tough to stop, it had with time become tougher to decide to start. We were not ready to tick the box that said “Smoker” again. Turns out, that’s a great way to succeed in goals – make it so you have to choose openly, publicly, to go against your goal. Or disincentivize it. Make a bet with someone that will cost real money; one suggestion I heard was make it so that you have to give money to a cause you hate if you slip and start smoking again.

I have found that not having some goals, not knowing where I’d like to be next year, next decade even, means it’ll be a surprise and often a disappointment where I am when those days arrive. There WILL be regrets. Here’s to no regrets!!

Strangely, much of what has served me well, especially as I have sought direction in life, I learned in Al-Anon, the family counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous. I joined when I was nineteen at the suggestion of a friend. I was feeling quite lost at the time, adrift, at the mercy of the storms of those around me who were miserable and who definitely wanted some company in that. I couldn’t tell you at the time what rules or concepts or guidelines I lived by other than trying to follow the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

No Regrets.

Other than that, all I could tell you was that I wanted to reach the end of my life with no regrets. It was clear at the time though that I needed more because I was so easily distracted from my personal goals and that led to regrets. I needed to know where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do with my life in general and specifically each day. I needed some worthwhile, meaningful goals and I needed to have some general life guidelines that would help me achieve those goals.

Al-Anon’s teachings suggested several really important concepts for me, like the power of having support while you learn new behaviors, (my husband I quit smoking together but goals are far more attainable when you have someone who is willing to be your support person or persons) and the importance of removing the temptations (we agreed to no cigarettes in the house and managed for a long while not to frequent places where people smoked). Perhaps the toughest concept to ingest but the most important one for me sends us back to the idea of “meeting” our goals.

What if we thought of our goals as life companions we hope one day to fully embrace, to welcome, to love and hold? How might we then see them and figure out how to embrace them? Maybe we would no longer see goals like eating healthy or quitting smoking as something keeping us from fun but rather as ways of living that help us carve out time or keep us healthy enough to do what truly brings us joy. I love walking on the beach and dancing and playing pickleball and all of those would be infinitely more difficult (or I might not even have attempted them) had I kept smoking.

Whatever goals you set or changes you make, make them for the right reasons. Make them because you love yourself as much as you love others and others as much as you love yourself. Recognize the two go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other; if you think you can, you’ve been deceived. Make your goals because you are recognizing and honoring the fact that others love you. Make them with the understanding that your goals and life changes are companions who hope to help you live life joyfully and reach the next year and the next with fewer and fewer regrets. You can do it!

Asking Your Questions Before It’s Too Late

Erasmus Pershing – Civil War era Ambrotype Portrait – We have no other information about him so far.

During a visit some thirty years ago, my (now late) grandmother mentioned being descended from French Huguenots. (I had to look them up at the time: A French Protestant movement in the 16th and 17th centuries. Calvinist. Suffered persecution by the religious majority at the time and many thousands of them emigrated from France). Grandma also lamented at the time that very little of her family history was recorded anywhere. Because I was working outside the home then and raising two little boys, I could only lament with her and suggest she record some stories for us on a cassette recorder. She didn’t, though, and now she and her siblings are gone and we have lost most of that history, including any details about our little soldier in the Ambrotype portrait above.

Many family stories today go untold, or if they are told, they have gaps, and placing them in time or understanding the story is tough after all the actors have left the stage. After Grandma died, I could find no one who knew anything about Huguenots and a family connection. No one was left to rebut the rumors of our being related to President Grover Cleveland (because Grandma’s family name was Cleland, not Cleveland, that is highly unlikely.) I had known through my research that she was a cousin of Black Jack Pershing, but we had not talked about any of this and now we cannot.

Grandma lamented once that she possibly was descended from the author of the Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, an erotic novel that led to the arrest of author John Cleland in 1748. This particular piece of history especially mortified Grandma, which is sad because it is likely accurate, and I would love to know more about how her parents and grandparents felt then, too.

Most of my family history though has been learned through online research, which means that by itself, it is just the list of ancestors with little of the background, the scenery, or the props and, of course, no narration. The result of relying only on such research is that we get just enough of several of the stories to need and want more – context, detail, resolution – but, again, because the principals were gone, we are left to research and then try to fill in the gaps, leaving many of these rich stories to be lost forever. Needlessly.

Too many of these rich stories are lost forever. Needlessly.

I once even learned from online research that I had a great-grandmother who was alive until I was fourteen and lived an hour away, but I never met her. When I asked, I was told, “We didn’t like her very much.” I was stunned at the time and now of course totally regret that I did not press the matter and ask about what had happened, did not seek the story while there was a player still around to offer some narration.

Turns out, I’m not alone. Elizabeth Keating, PH.D., is the author of The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations and writes about the loss of these stories:

“The people I interviewed knew so little about their grandparents’ or parents’ early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people. Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children. Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”

The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, by Elizabeth Keating, PH.D., is available on back order if you want a hardcopy but a Kindle version is available. I think the hard copy would be a great gift for family members

Asking family members for family stories ought to be quite easy and entertaining but that doesn’t seem to be the case in our media-saturated world.

The good news is that we can use our online research and our boxes of pictures to start the conversations. Keating gives lots of examples of what to ask to flesh out your family’s tales. If there are still older family members alive, starting the storytelling can be as simply as carefully studying some of those old sepia tone family portraits.

On my father’s side of the family, most of the stories I’d learned were from online research until the day his sister asked if I’d be interested in a box of old photos. That cardboard box was a treasure chest of stories about tumult, typhoid and the kindness of strangers. The next time I saw my aunt, I came to the conversation with some specific questions and a vague feeling about why two photos in particular made no sense to me.

The photos set her memories flowing and one story in particular that she remembered as being set in the Depression but, we soon realized, could not be the case. Certainly the family, like many in the country, lived with few creature comforts even before the country was plunged into a depression. Indeed, pretty much everyone spent their lives at the mercy of the elements, epidemics and accidents with little modern health care and only the food they could plant and harvest, hunt or gain in a barter.

My aunt knew that the father in the family was out of the picture; he would die in a sanatorium with tuberculosis. So, at the time that this story begins, my great-grandmother was running a small farm with her children, whom records indicated were born in 1903, 1905, 1911 and 1914. My grandmother was the one born in 1911.

The children’s pictures below, shared with me by my aunt, were what directed my questions and, eventually, led her to remember and share the story of what she called “the family’s angel.” The configurations simply made no sense to me.

The first picture is of her (and my Dad’s) uncle Raymond (born 1905), with baby Pearl (born 1914) and my grandmother, Arbaleta, born 1911. That picture would have been taken after 1914, obviously. Love the box Grandma is standing on, by the way. The second picture would have been taken later, with Grandma Arbaleta (standing,) then Raymond and then Pearl. Even though the picture to the right says it is Caddie on the left, actually she is absent from either picture. Caddie, their older sister, was born in 1903, but died 1909. We found no pictures of her. Had she lived, there would have been a girl taller than Raymond in the picture to the left. Okay, that mystery was solved. Still, something was off.

From the family Bible

We turned to the rest of the the dates recorded in the front of the family Bible and my aunt was reminded that Pearl also had died young, and that particular tidbit of information started the memories swirling. Her memory of what happened to Pearl is the real treasure here: over the next hour, she told me about how a stranger, an “angel,” she said, kept the family together in a time that could only be described as bleak.

Evidently, Baby Pearl, (in both pictures) died in 1923 at age nine when Raymond was 18 and Grandma was 12. Their father had died three years earlier, and a typhoid epidemic took Pearl and made their mother, Mila, deathly ill.

Things would have been rough enough since Mila was trying to keep a small family farm going even before the typhoid epidemic hit the area.  When Pearl died, the fact that their mother was near death meant Raymond, 18, and Grandma Leta, 12, were left to do what most folks did back then: they had to prepare their sister’s body to be buried. Few could afford for an undertaker to come, so, typically, a coffin would be built by a friend or relative and then it would be laid upon the kitchen table so the family could prepare the body to be buried. As I sat there listening, I could not imagine how tragic and overwhelming it must have been to have a coffin for a sister laid on the kitchen table before me. I could not imagine taking a cloth and soap and water and preparing the body of someone I loved in order for them to be buried. Worse, in this case, though, was that, because the mother was so ill, two coffins were delivered, one for the little sister and one for the mother who was expected to die soon. 

The future for these two siblings looked pretty bleak, too. They likely both wondered how they’d manage, once their mother died, and how they’d find food, or pay for oil or firewood. We’re not aware if Raymond was working or at what at the time, but, for the time being, he was tasked with keeping things going and caring for their mother as well. It must have been somewhat overwhelming, but, the story goes, one day, a stranger happened by.   Travelers often stopped at farms then – there were no gas stations or Cracker Barrels – and even before the Great Depression swept across the nation, it was not at all unusual for a stranger traveling through to stop to ask for a bite of something to eat or offer to work for a day to earn a meal and a place to sleep.  

Such a traveler evidently stopped into the home of my great-grandmother Mila as she was dying of Typhoid and offered to help this young boy and girl keep the farm going. Perhaps this traveler was even hoping to stay after Mila died. 

Can you imagine standing outside the door, being told there was typhoid in the home but being so tired, destitute and hungry that you would offer to stay anyway if it meant some food for a few days?  Who knows, maybe he thought, “Either I’ll be spared this illness and have found a new home OR I’ll die soon.”  Evidently it was worth it to him because this stranger stayed.  He helped the two teens keep the farm running, helped them bury their little sister in the church cemetery and made sure they had heat, the occasional hamhock and hope while they cared for their dying mother.  

Turns out, though, Mila, my great-grandmother didn’t die.  Instead, she began to recover, and once she was able to be up and about, the traveler took his leave. When my aunt shared this rather miraculous ending, I hoped she also would share what happened to the traveler, but, alas, she said, we don’t know his name; that piece of the story was lost.  

All that my aunt remembered was that the children had a stranger willing to help to keep things going and, because of him,  the family stayed together and kept the home.  I’d love to know more about this stranger, this “angel.”

I encourage you not to rely simply on genealogical research if your desire is to know your own family’s stories. Such research is a great start, but it’s a little like being online friends: the tendency is for there to be very little face to face time or conversation, and, in the end, what you have is a more shallow, less meaningful, sanitized experience. Your interaction might be safe but not necessarily satisfying, like the “hug” emoji in place of a real hug. If you want the story, the real hug, you need to sit together and ask specific questions – about social interactions, treasured possessions, popular culture when Grandma was young, and how these all changed with historic events or her own life changes, for just a few examples.

What did you have to do to get your picture scratched off of the family record?

Of course, this is risky since the feel-good miracle stories often are right next to the bitter ones in the picture box. Potentially huge clues to family history can be found on documents that still exist but have been angrily altered like the photo below where some family member’s face has been scratched off. In a time when having even one portrait of yourself was a true luxury,  and often that picture is the only record of a family group, what did you have to do to get your picture scratched off of the family record?

What caused someone to scratch out the picture of the woman seated 2nd from right? You know there’s a story there.

In the book, Keating argues that sometimes this kind of research is touchy but NOT asking just perpetuates the pain. She talks about her own family stories and the questions she didn’t ask of her mother, for example: “Before she died, I—like many children, I suspect—avoided any potential clashes, wanting to preserve harmony rather than ask sensitive questions.” (Keating, Elizabeth. The Essential Questions, p. 2. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.) Take the chance, she suggests, to avoid regrets.

Finally, Keating asks and I would ask too: what do you wish people knew about you? That question is one I ask myself as I write this blog. I think especially of my children and grandchildren and want to offer them some of the stories we have not shared before now. While on the one hand such explorations can feel selfish, I know how much I wish even one of my grandparents and I had sought the answers to these questions while we still could.

Go then.

Ask.

Ask specific questions.

Ask them to tell you what you don’t even know to ask. Maybe you’ll find your Huguenots before it’s too late.

War in the Second Grade

Some of the mementos from my backpack. Ever wonder why you held onto some and not others?

As stories go, this one is incomplete, like a puzzle missing some corner pieces, or a picture torn, by accident, of course. It’s my hope that through this process of unpacking my backpack of memories, I’ll locate those missing puzzle pieces or that torn corner of the picture and all – or at least more – will make sense.

Some years ago, I went looking for, or at least information about, my teacher from third grade. I’m sad to say, so far, I haven’t found her, though I am pleased to report I’ve found some folks I’d lost track of some decades ago. As the child of a father who moved us to new cities – and even new countries – at least every three years, I certainly have felt disconnected. For the longest time, because I also was estranged from my family, there existed no one in my life who could vouch for me ever existing prior to college. No one would say, for example, “You were always the tall one in the class.” No one was ready and eager to remind me that I was always late for the traffic patrol crossing guard duty – dear God, they let us do that in sixth grade then! No one would raise their hand to verify – or deny – if I were accused of being teacher’s pet (I sure wanted to be.) or if I had read every historical biography in our primary school library. (I had!)

Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary

I attended Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary School in Jefferson City, Missouri, from the last part of second grade until sixth. We arrived after living overseas for a couple of years (There’s another couple of items from the backpack and a few more stories for another cold day). Today, though, I am seriously regretting tossing all those class pictures a few years ago. You know, the ones where we all stood on those metal risers and tried to hold still long enough for the photographer who counted it a win if he could get us all looking at the camera when the bulb flashed. (If you have pictures from Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary in the mid-sixties, by the way, I’d love to see them.)

To the best of my recollection, my teacher when the year began was a Mrs. Peterson (sp?). She was young, pretty, energetic and fun, and we all loved her.

At least that’s how I remember it, but then, for the longest time, I remembered this as happening in second grade. Since I didn’t start Thorpe J. Gordon until after Christmas in the second grade, seems like some memories got fragmented and some pieces indeed might be missing. We do all have somewhat mashed up, muddled memories, don’t we? I don’t know about you, but whether they are from last week or our childhood, my memories toy with me.

In my mashed up memories, Mrs. Peterson was lively and pretty and cheerful, which was amazing because she was married to a Soldier. Mr. Peterson was, at the time, serving in Viet Nam. He was at war. We didn’t know why he had to be at war but we knew she didn’t get to see him or talk to him much and he wasn’t at home when her day was over. We knew too that he was a pretty nice guy because, every time he sent a cassette-taped message to his wife, he included a message for our class. In return, when Mrs. Peterson was preparing her own cassette message, she allowed us to add some greetings and questions. Sometimes, much to our delight, in the subsequent message, he answered those 8- and 9-year-old’s questions. We felt special and connected and heard, both from him and from her, something most children could not say in that generation, to be sure, and something that, sadly, would not last.

Christmas Corsages

That year, just like every year I can remember, we were off of school for two or three weeks for Christmas break. Before the break, at the class Christmas party, we’d all given Mrs. Peterson our Christmas gifts. The practice in the mid-sixties in the cold, gray, windy midwest, or at least in our neighborhood, was to give your teacher a Christmas corsage; these were pretty, often fake flowers (or no flowers at all, if I remember correctly) and they were adorned with ribbons and trinkets. They certainly were festive. The trouble, as far as I could see at the time, though, was that everyone gave the teacher a corsage. How many dang corsages could one teacher wear? So, I opted that year to give the teacher something else, likely some candy or perfume; it made sense to me, but the gesture did not pass without incurring grief from several of my classmates.

A Typical Christmas Corsage

Over time, I would become more accustomed to classmates wondering what on earth I was thinking. In fifth grade, for example, a couple of us created a class-wide crisis when we did not wear dresses on picture day. Whoa. (Strangely, we were allowed to wear pants in grade school at that school; later, I’d transfer to another town where girls were required to wear dresses, no matter what the weather.) What some of us had figured out, though, was this: when we wore a dress (with nice shoes) for picture day, recess was a wash and we really, really liked running and climbing during recess. In addition, the individual pictures were only head and shoulders so a pretty blouse would serve the same purpose as a dress. Finally, at least in my case, since I was the second tallest kid in the class, I always always stood on the back row for the class picture anyway so no one ever saw what I was wearing. I could see no reason to endure the discomfort of the dress and patent-leather shoes all day when I could be in pants and tennis shoes. Sadly, I had to explain that about twenty-five times that year and, while I was annoyed at that, I was more annoyed at myself for not figuring this out in first or second grade. Still, embracing my generation’s dictim “Question Everything” was a learning curve, and the Christmas corsage might be considered the first volley in my war on ridiculous expectations.

No Questions Allowed.

Still, this post is about war, war and children.

That Christmas break, we went home a happy lot and looked forward to returning in January. When we did step back into that classroom, we did not find Mrs. Peterson at all. What we found was another teacher, an older woman whom I’m sure was a lovely and gifted teacher, but on the first day back to class that frosty January, we were told simply, “Mrs. Peterson is gone and this is your new teacher.” End of discussion. No questions allowed though you know we had plenty. In my child’s memory, our anger and questions were dismissed, sent to the corner, not allowed.

Now, if any of our parents heard about this from us or if any of them knew what had happened or reached out to the school with their own questions, I don’t know. I don’t remember if I had any conversations with my parents about this either. I can reliably tell you that they were not advocates of my budding proclivity for questioning everything.

It would be decades later when some of that memory came into focus for me; I would realize, belatedly, something must have happened to Mrs. Peterson’s husband. Perhaps he was injured, or killed; we could hope, even, he simply returned home to the states and they were transferred or moved. We never knew though and no one ever told us, which meant our imaginations would have been allowed to run wild if it hadn’t been made so clear that there was no room for that. For me, those banished questions would not surface again until, as a Campus Minister, I began working with students who were combat veterans.

(Lazarus Project, which started as The Lazarus Project, became Soldiers And Families Embraced. The free counseling program began in 2010 as a United Methodist Campus Ministry project to help combat veterans and their families who were attending Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By that time, the US had been at war for nearly a decade, but much of burden of fighting was borne by less than 1% of the US population and felt then quite keenly by their families.The program expanded into the entire community as we began to hear from veterans and family members from all eras who needed to process their pain, grief, anger and ask their questions.)

The name “Lazarus Project” was inspired by the idea that when the biblical Lazarus emerged from the tomb he still had the trappings and stench of war on him and the community is told by Jesus to “go to him” and unbind him that he might live again, rather than wait until he asks for help. See John 11, especially John 11:38-44. We started with peer support groups for veterans and their families and evolved into a full-fledged counseling program offering free counseling still to those affected by wars of all eras.

One part of the program for several years involved joint retreats to find healing from war, and one of the first activities in those retreats involved introducing yourself by sharing some symbol of your experience with war.

Back to the Second Grade

As I prepared to go to my first retreat, I was at a loss to share any personal experience with war until I was cleaning out a drawer and stumbled upon an award I received at the end of sixth grade from the American Legion. It was not until I was holding that award that I realized my own experience with war began in second grade with Mrs. Peterson.

It was not until I was holding that award that I realized my own experience with war began in second grade with Mrs. Peterson.

Certainly, this award, which, I was sure was going to my classmate, Karla, did not – in my sixth-grade mind – have anything to do with war.

American Legion Award given each year to one boy and one girl in the sixth grade of each local Elementary school for “Courage, Honor, Leadership, Patriotism, Scholarship and Service.”

Holding it all those years later, however, gave air to a mass of memories. To my surprise, the memory of Mrs. Peterson and her Soldier were near the top. Processing those memories in that retreat, sorting through the confusion and child’s anger, I am grateful to say, helped the Lazarus Project and then SAFE become community educators about the effects of war on children. The first thing we taught was that children DO know about war, whether we adults want to admit it or not, and denying their experience has both immediate and longterm consequences.

Already, one of our first clients for counseling had been an angry child, a six-year-old, who had been expelled from school for stabbing other children with pencils. Her grandmother came to us asking for help. The child’s father had been deployed into combat three times for a year at a time since she had been born and her mother had melted under the stress, grief and fear of all those long deployments. All that the child knew was that now Mommy also had “gone away.” The child was angry and she had lots of questions no one could answer. We learned quickly that she was among the many children of that war and so many other wars who wake up wondering if Daddy was still alive, if Mommy would be able to come home, and if, when they did come home, they’d be “all right.”

“You lied,” he said. “You all lied.”

A ten-year-old client of our program.

One of the saddest days of our program was when a child whose father had sustained a serious Traumatic Brain Injury declared that all the adults around him were liars because they had all told him Daddy would be okay, and he did not need to worry. You lied, he said. Like most of us adults who want to protect the children, the adults in his life underestimated his ability to grasp the seriousness of the situation and discounted his need for honesty and his right to have the chance to grieve the possibilities and air his fears, too.

All of us at Lazarus Project were amazed, though, at how much it helped the six-year-old just to have an adult hear her and assure her that of course she was angry and rightly so. She desperately needed someone to normalize that anger. Being able to ask her questions without upsetting everyone else around her didn’t fix the situation or mean she wouldn’t need more counseling to understand and name her feelings but it did help her stop stabbing other children with pencils. Allowing her space to air her questions likely had the added bonus of helping her process them before they became jumbled fragments tossed into a backpack that might not be opened for decades, if ever.

As the wars continued, more and more resources surfaced to help talk about war with children. Sadly, as those wars continued, there were children who had spent their entire school experience, twelve years or more, with one or the other parent deployed into combat zones. The questions they have and the feelings they need to process will continue throughout their lives.

Our questions don’t always need answers, just air, the air to breathe, the chance to be counted.

As I write this, I think of my granddaughter who is only seven and, while she seems quite young, she does know about death and she has dealt with the losses of animals and people she has known. Thankfully, she is blessed to be surrounded by adults who allow her to ask questions, even if they don’t have answers for her.

It’s not easy to hear her questions some times, but it IS simple. What we are learning by listening is that our questions don’t always need answers; they do need air, the air to breathe and the chance to be counted.

Wrestling with God

People often assume that, because I am a pastor, my relationship with God must be bucolic, nurturing, all green pastures and peaceful waters. They are surprised then when I tell them that my relationship with God, in fact, more closely mirrors the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. (See Genesis 32, or better, go back and read the whole story of this trickster who became the father of the 12 tribes of Israel.)

I refer them to this story because while I would love to say God and I are just great buddies and I, like Mary, sister of Martha, spend my days sitting at God’s feet listening and learning, the reality is much more that I wrestle with God and often, the wrestling feels like a life and death struggle.

The “Before”

Rapids

About five years ago, my two sons and I went kayaking on the Harpeth River on a rainy 4th of July. We were the last group of people allowed to get in the water because the rain had been coming down so long that the river was starting to rise. Those who ran the kayaking and canoeing outfitters were concerned and so they stopped letting other people get in the water. It was still manageable when we got in, and all three of us have a lot of experience with canoeing and kayaking, so we felt quite comfortable–even if we were soaking wet.

Almost immediately though, really before we could even get settled in our kayaks, we had to make a quick decision at a split in the water – a stretch of rapids either way but we had no time to think and no time to weigh the two and find the safest. My youngest son went right and my oldest and I went left. Within seconds, I watched in horror as my oldest son was sucked underneath a pile of brush that had collected on the side and then, almost as quickly, only had time enough to take a breath before I also got sucked under the pile of brush myself.

I remember being clear I did not want to be carried any further under that brush pile, because, well, there did not appear to be a way out on the other side. I, of course, immediately lost my paddle and kayak and just focussed on not being pulled any further under. I did know which way was up and managed to grab onto a branch, but I was not strong enough to pull myself to the surface. I remember that I kept holding onto the branch and was especially grateful when I realized it was living and attached to the riverbank. I could not find any way, though, to push myself up and get my head out of the water. I remember kicking and kicking and holding on until quite suddenly I found a foothold and pushed up until my head came out of the water and I felt a hand grabbing mine.

I was not underwater for a long time, but the time that I was underwater went by slowly while I was struggling, and I remember two thoughts as I was kicking and searching for a foothold and trying to push myself up: the first thing that I was thinking was I didn’t know where my oldest son was and I was really scared he was underneath the brush; and the second thing I was thinking was honestly that I might not get out of this alive. I was under water and struggling long enough to have time to think I might not make it.  

As it turns out, I was not the only one thinking that, though, because I found out a bit later that my youngest son — the outdoorsman and most  experienced of the three of us, the one who has survived several brushes with death that mom doesn’t want to know about, that son apparently had enough time to stop trying to retrieve my paddles, to yell to his brother, “Mom is not coming back up” and to start sprinting for where he’d seen me go under.  

Apparently, though, his brother, who I’m so grateful as able to quickly surface, was already trying to reach me and when I finally found a submerged log with my foot and was able to push up and reach up, that son grabbed my hand and pulled me on up and out.  And that all happened in five minutes or less of putting our kayaks into the water! My heart still races just thinking about it!

Praying, Not Praying….

Now you might hope that, in the midst of chaos and a frightening situation, that a preacher would be praying, right!? And, I’d really like to say that I was praying but I don’t remember that.  I do remember being calm, even when I thought I might not make it.  I remember being focused and I remember doing what I knew to do, focus on finding a foothold to push myself out of the rushing water. I remember being fully present in each moment.  I remember pushing again and again and I remember hoping it would work.  I remember that I kept trying and that I kept reaching. And when I felt that hand grab mine, when my sons pulled me out of the water, absolutely soaking wet, I remember taking a really deep breath. 

Afterwards, once I felt the relief of seeing both boys safe and sound, I think I felt worse for my oldest son who — Poor guy — had just given up cigarettes a few weeks earlier.   He looked like he needed one.  As for my younger son, well, he got a taste of what Mom had felt so many times with him and his brushes with danger and death.  I remember registering that it must have been serious because it was highly unusual for him to be worried but he was so worried, he ran!

How it felt….

I remember being grateful that my oldest son was above the surface trying to get to me the whole time and grateful to see his face when he pulled me out. Quietly, with little conversation at first, we set about trying to retrieve our paddles and whatever gear we had. Much was washed down the river and gone. We found what we could see in the rain, secured that gear to the kayaks and got back on the water because, as drenched and drained as we might have felt, there was no going back up the river – there was only one way home.

I remember we floated in silence for a bit until my youngest son turned to me and asked, “Don’t you just feel so alive right now, Mom?”  

Well, yes.

And No.  

I was far more exhausted than I normally would have been, considering we really had only been on the water for a few minutes.  But I also could say I could not remember many times in my life when I have felt that present, and that much in the moment, and that keenly aware of and focussed on what I needed to be doing.  

I felt quite shaken, I told him, but grateful though I was very clear that it never needed to happen again!!

All that is to say, I felt like most people do in a terrifying situation. While scary movies are quite popular with many of us, most of us do not actually like being in danger.  In fact, we have a high need to control that kind of chaos; we certainly do not like it.  As far as most of us are concerned, it is God’s job to make the chaos stop and God’s job to restore safety and help us feel comfortable again.

Wrestling is Biblical, Turns Out.

In Gospel Medicine, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says, we think that’s how we can tell when God is present–when the danger has been avoided.  When your heart stops pounding and you can breathe normally again? That’s when God is present, right? We believe we know that God is there when we’re not afraid anymore. “It is an appealing idea,” says Taylor, “but unfortunately the Bible will not back it up. As much as we’d like to think God is in the ‘keeping us from danger and chaos’ business,” in fact, she says, “much of God’s best work takes place in total chaos, while we are scared half out of our wits.” (Taylor, Rev. Barbara Brown, Gospel Medicine, 107-8.) Great. 

In the Genesis saga where Jacob is wrestling with an angel, Jacob certainly did not want to be fighting for his life.  But this story is where he does exactly that.  When we find Jacob there, it is twenty years after Jacob left his family because he cheated his older brother, and lied to his father, and took his older brother’s birthright, inheritance, AND blessing and then had to flee. 

“Likely he only knows which end is up because he can feel the dirt on his back or the gravel in his face as they roll and tumble and cling to one another all night, apparently evenly matched.  We know he felt afraid for his life, thought he was likely going to die, in fact, which means he was keenly present and aware of every moment and every move because the next move, the next moment, the wrong move, could mean the end of his life on this earth.” (Taylor, Ibid. )

Jacob refuses to let go of the angel until the angel gives him a blessing and the angel changes his name to Israel, which, of course, will be hugely important, but also leaves Jacob wounded, limping for the rest of his life, which means always vulnerable in that day and time.

This story is perhaps my favorite story in the Bible.  In fact, when folks ask me to explain my relationship with God, I tell them this story because while I would love to say God and I are just buddies and I, like Mary sister of Martha, spend my days sitting at God’s feet listening and learning, the reality is much more that I wrestle with God.  Sometimes I question God, sometimes I get angry with God, sometimes I am grateful and feel blessed. But it is not usually a serene and peaceful relationship. I also love this story because it describes so well how so many of us experience life: crises, and relationship troubles, and illnesses, and accidents, seem to pounce on us when we are not looking. and all we can do is hold on tightly and try to come up for air when we can. 

Faith, For Me, is Holding On, Ever Hoping.

Rachel Naomi Remen, an oncologist and author who struggled all of her life with her own Crohn’s Disease, and who has endured lasting, debilitating pain and multiple surgeries, talks about Jacob and striving with God in her book, My Grandfather’s Blessings. First, because she was a child when her grandfather told her this story, she says she was puzzled and wondered how anyone could confuse an angel with an enemy.  Her grandfather pointed out, though, that the wrestling was not the important part of the story.  The important part, he told her, is that everything has a blessing for us, and we can receive blessings even–and perhaps especially–in the times when we are clear we are not in control.  Our task is to keep striving as best we can to understand, keep striving to learn, and maybe even, like Jacob, keep negotiating but we keep holding on.

Rachel Remen says, “How tempting to let the enemy go and flee.  To put the struggle behind you as quickly as possible and get on with your life.  In fact, though, it turns out that very often the struggle IS your real life and all the time we spend quietly, serenely, calmly is just the quiet before the storm that is our life. Perhaps,” says Remen, “the wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and as courageously as possible and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything.” (Remen, Dr. Rachel Naomi, My Grandfather’s Blessings, 27. ) 

This kind of wrestling is not pretty, though. Most of us shy away from this kind of struggle because it is so embarrassing to be so clearly overwhelmed by our lives. I am sorry to say I have struggled a great deal in my life, sometimes because of tragedy or trauma and sadly, just as often because I have allowed trauma to set the rules and too often closed myself off from healing or relationships.

Soaked and Tired

When I do struggle, and it seems that I do nearly every time there’s a change I need to make, I have found it necessary to forget about how I look or how I present to others, as much about whether or not my eyes are swollen and red as about whether what I say makes sense to someone else. I have learned not to expect myself to sound rational or even be able to defend what I am feeling or thinking, only to hold on and not worry about frogs in my pockets or mud on my forehead or if anyone else understands right now. Every attempt, every time I push or grasp for words to explain what feels life-giving and what doesn’t, every move is more proof I am alive and I do care and still hope and, God willing, will reap a blessing from the effort.

As my sons and I floated down the river that day, I’d love to say I felt somehow triumphant, that I had gleaned some grand lesson the world would want to hear, that God had spoken to me and sent me back the land of the living to share some great wisdom that would make all of our lives better or more meaningful or help us cure cancer.

Instead, I was drenched, defeated and deflated but that didn’t matter because I was just grateful to be near enough my boys to touch them, to call to them, and to hear them call back to me for another day.