little me - with big me

Can you imagine?

Life this week: interrupted by a devastating earthquake in Haiti.

After being sucked into media coverage of past tragedies around the world, I decided this week to only tune in on occasion, to see what is happening in Haiti. Up until this week my knowledge of Haiti was limited to the stories and pictures I had seen at my friend Kerry's house. Her son Ethan and her had gone to Haiti this past summer on a mission. They had asked if I wanted to go with my oldest son, but he wasn't interested. It wasn't meant to be, for us. Not at that time.

After serving us a luscious and hearty lunch that day, we settled in to hear stories and look at images of their trip. Kerry is one of my very favorite people - one of the most "whole" women I know. Trusting her completely, I take on her feelings as if they are my own. When she told us that at points the trip got so unbearable that she just couldn't partake in the activities of the day, I understood in a way, what she was experiencing. She told us that she just could not bare to visit the dump where people were living. Existing off of other peoples' garbage. Living in their waste. Not just staying for a period - living there. She showed us pictures of young children who spent the days sitting naked on concrete floors of their orphanages. And then she showed us some of the more hopeful experiences. A home where young boys and men were brought off the street and housed and taught to entertain. To dance. To perform. To find hope through the arts. And she introduced us by story to the wonderful old woman, Heidi (aged 85) who brought them to Haiti and guided them on their mission. But still, what she told us and how I felt at that moment, were in direct contrast with each other. A full tummy in a beautiful house with goodness and delight all around me made it hard to comprehend completely what she had experienced.

So this week when I heard of the devastating earthquake in Haiti I thought right away of my friends, and their friends. It turns out that Heidi and her group had just gotten to the island the night before the earthquake. They left Port au Prince and headed out to a village 30 miles away, to begin their work less than 24 hours before it happened. . . and thank God they are okay.

But with that good news, I have to wonder, why would they be any more important than the tens of thousands that died? Why would I care more for a woman I had never met, than a Haitian that met with untimely misfortune? What would make one body and soul any more selective than another? And why couldn't I wrap my head around ANY of it?

One of my goofy goals is to some day be able to watch a surgery. I think it's fascinating and have good friends that are doctors and nurses in the O.R. I love stories of healing and am intrigued by the whole concept of health. I watch television channels devoted to stories of illness and injury, and keep hoping that some day I will be able to watch the process of surgery. Each time I put one of those shows on, I watch intently intending to watch the procedure all of the way through. But for some reason I can't. Squeamishly I turn at the last second, slamming my eyes closed. Unable to force myself to see what is commonplace for people in the professions that work in those situations day in and day out. In my head I know that it would be educational - but I simply cannot get myself to watch it.

And the same thing happened this week, when I decided to take in a little bit of the pain and tragedy that was playing endlessly on the media. Purposefully I had decided to not overload and not become desensitized to the tragedy, but I wanted to try and comprehend what the pain would be like. I wanted to feel - to experience empathy by watching and by letting myself "in" to what was going on there. In small doses, I began to look.

It bothers me when the media pulls certain images that end up etched into our minds, accompanied by a name they cleverly create with some typography that somehow "brands" a cataclysmic event. I don't want to categorize tragedies with some visual rolodex in my head - like the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing illustrated by the firefighter carrying the little girl draped over his arms or the 9-11 events enhanced images of people jumping from the twin towers. I've limited watching news channels and seek out information on Haiti on my own time, when I'm ready to sensitively try to really open my eyes and my heart - and take it in.

So yesterday when I got an email labeled something like Horrors in Haiti from Life pictures, I thought I would stop - and really look - and try to absorb what was going on there. The night before I had seen commentators on a show, microphone in hand, walking down streets in Port au Prince, that were scattered with bodies. Dead people! Humans. Brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Friends. Children! Sons and daughters. Laying on the curbside lifeless and waiting to be picked up, like yesterday's trash. In fact, it made me wonder if their loved ones even knew they were there.

I wondered what it would be like to be that newsperson. What kind of shock it would have to take for a person to be able to walk through that - and not stoop down to mourn and grieve.

I could make sense of none of it in my own head.

When the Life email notification of the images of Haiti showed up in my email box, I decided that I would let it in and try to actually feel what was going on there. I opened and slowly went through the 20-or-so images they had compiled. Some were labeled with a warning that the picture was disturbing, but I couldn't help but wonder who had decided which should be labeled and which shouldn't. I wondered how we could not all be disturbed by what we were seeing. I wondered how we could become so desensitized to it that we could watch it while eating dinner or could casually listen to the stories on the radio as we drove to the store to go shopping. I wondered, looking at the pictures, how some people in our world have become so hardened that they could spew out hateful insults about the way people lived there instead of even considering what it would feel like to be a part of that devastated society.

I looked at each picture carefully, trying to absorb what I could - knowing that with each bit of sensitivity I could nurture in myself, I could help to make the world a better place. A bit more caring and compassionate, simply by caring.

But looking back though - I realize that I wasn't able to really take it in. Just like I haven't been able to watch a surgery even though I know in my head I want to see how it works so I can better understand the human body, I realized that I wasn't able to really look at the pictures I saw of the tragedy in Haiti. Today I still cannot understand what happened there. I cannot wrap my head around the pain and suffering the people of Haiti are experiencing. I realize now that even though I thoughtfully and consciously looked at the pictures, I was still protecting myself by not truly letting the images into my soul. Apparently they call this "emotional intelligence." Our emotional intelligence tells us what to do when we feel empathy, and it decides what to do when
experiencing too much would not be good for us.

So - I can wonder what it would feel like to be in Haiti this week. I can wonder how 85-year old Heidi feels, and I can wonder what it would be like to be a camera man or news correspondent, walking down a street filled with wounded and dying and dead, but I cannot imagine what it really feels like. I guess that's a good thing. God doesn't give us more than we can handle, but I can't imagine how the people of Haiti were given what they were. How can anyone handle that? And what can we do, to understand and to help? How do we grow our emotional intelligence?

For now all I can do is to pray for understanding, knowing that when one person hurts, all of mankind hurts. And when one person cares, it affects us all. And when the time is right, I know that my capacity to feel will grow. Unless my husband is right, and we're just not meant to feel that. None of it makes sense to me. Why?

2

They said that whoever got to my mom first was the one that kept her alive.

I guess that was a good thing, because that meant that the whole big family could come in and say their peace to her as she laid in the hospital bed with cotton balls taped over her fluttering eyelids. A stroke. A blood clot at the base of her brain. They had to keep the blood thin apparently, to keep more clots from forming, so they couldn’t operate. And they hoped it wouldn’t dislodge from where it lay and go to her brain.

I think.

Doesn’t really matter. That’s how I understood it as a 16-year old, anyway. ­­She was gone - but she was somewhat still there for people to come and say good-bye. And people liked to make me feel good about doing CPR, since whomever it was along the way that supposedly got to her first, made it possible for her to still be however alive she was for those days for people to come and sit vigil. It gave us time to prepare for her inevitable death, I suppose.

It was a powerful time in my life, but as I look back, I wonder how such important things can be treated with such ignorance. I wonder how we as a culture came to handle such big things as death, with such little preparation on how to live through that. Interacting with my mom’s body at the moments of her death, you’d think would take great consideration. But instead, I went back to school the following days as if nothing had happened. “Good girl!” people would say. “You’re handling this so well!”

I learned quickly that “good girl” was awarded when I ignored the feelings of hurt and pain, and the natural inclination to mourn and grieve. I was applauded by going back to school quickly and learned to not talk about my mom’s death, and that by handling things that way I was “doing so good.”

The quicker we all learned to not talk about it, the better we were doing, I guess.

So life went on.

At age 16 most girls aren’t getting along with their moms. Most are fighting with their moms. They’re yelling “I hate you” and slamming doors and hurling ugly insults. My mom and I hadn’t had that relationship, though ours had its own ugly side. Balanced with a saint-like acceptance for me and an almost smothering acknowledgment of her love for me, was my mom’s alcoholism. Now that I have teenagers of my own I understand why my mom drank, but I didn’t back then. It was embarrassing to me as a child. It was pathetic and it was an ugly secret that just a few of us carried. It was another of those things that I learned you should just ignore and pretend wasn’t there. Years later it made sense when I heard people describe family secrets as the elephant in living room.

People LOVED my mom. Everyone loved my mom. The community loved her, the church loved her. Old friends, new acquaintances, neighbors, relatives. She was intelligent and giving. She was stylish in her own crazy way. She was talented. Driven. She fought hard for what she believed deeply. She knew right from wrong and how to treat everyone with dignity and respect. She fought for the underdog and for peace and social justice. She volunteered to help the handicapped and sewed to help the underprivileged. And in her last years, she drank herself silly.

I’m guessing that most people didn’t know the extent of her drinking. Not even the older kids in our family. Being ninth of ten kids that survived (she gave birth to 14) there was a big gap in our rearing even though there had only been 17 years difference in the ages from the first to the last.
The older kids in our family were surprised and miffed years later, to have me make that accusation. They had no idea the extent of the discomfort and embarrassment it brought to the last few kids. It was our ugly secret. One of my sisters brought it up first. “Mom was an alcoholic,” she said, and the words sat ugly in my mind. I denied it in thought though it rang true in my heart. I struggled with the acknowledgement. I had lived it out firsthand, but because my mom had lived so sweetly and with so much love, it was like an awful betrayal to admit that she could have had a drinking problem - especially after she was gone.

So I let it roll around in my head for years, while I went on about life. I had learned to perfect that facade of perfect control with chaos fighting it out inside of me. I had learned how to carefully project a life of happiness and ease, while burying pain and secrets deep inside. I learned very quickly after my own mom’s death that alcohol was a great escape - and that drinking not only washed away the pain but that it made life so much more fun! I developed courage of steel and found that I was afraid of nothing.

So how then, did I come to this point?

My phone rang a bit ago. My 14-year old, asking me if I can pick him up tonight, from the ski hill about forty minutes away. “I don’t do winter driving,” I reminded him.

It’s cold and sunny today. 15 degrees and bright blue skies with an occasional snow flake. It could be perfectly clear tonight. I don’t know. The last time he went skiing, he was driven home in a viscious snowstorm by a mother who had lost her 17-year old daughter in a car crash exactly three months earlier, to the day.

I’m not sure where people get their strength, and I’m just working to understand where I got my fear and more importantly, how I can overcome it.

One of the hardest things is dealing with peoples’ stabbing comments of “get over it.” “Quit living in the past.” “Don’t blame your family.”

“Get over it?” Really? How come so many people feel that way? That used to make me crazy-mad, until I realized that anyone that could make such a comment had obviously never dealt with the realities I had. I could no more “get over it” than I could change my eye color from blue-green to purple. The worst part of hearing those kind of comments is that it actually put me years back in terms of healing. Not only had I experienced the pains I had, I was made to feel crazy about it, and on top of that - GUILTY! In some odd way I was being told that I had done everything wrong. I had twisted my experiences to somehow misshape them so I could blame my life for my discomfort when I’d grown up. When I finally started accepting some of the real truths it was not only good for my own healing, but it helped me become a really compassionate person. And you know what I think? We’re really too damn hard on each other.

My mom was right. Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. (and speaking of sins - well there’s a whole other story.)

It’s all so deep. It’s all so complicated - this simple, flowing thing called life. It just keeps coming faster and faster. I reach out and grab at stars along the way hoping to learn some new truth to make it all seem better.

It’s getting there. I’m getting there. But then I have to wonder what comes next. What if when you figure it all out - it’s the end?

The Illusion of Control

I realized today that part of why I haven't written here is that the thoughts I have are either totally fleeting - and lost before I'd post them - or they're huge, rich, deep - and way too tangled to write about. But part of my goal for 2010 and beyond, is letting go. While I know that has to happen on many levels, as I go along I'm realizing the depths of some of the issues that keep me hanging on for dear life.

Life lessons. That's what I think we're here for. Mine are so twisted. . . and when I think I've figured something out it just seems to end up going deeper.

Things seem unsettled right now in an odd way that I can't exactly pinpoint. But then on the other hand, as I feel like I figure certain things out, things seem more settled than before. So as I work on letting go - and as my first instinct is to freak and grab onto life tighter - things seem to be getting more comfortable with the acceptance that control is totally an illusion. And I feel like a young child teetering on my two-wheeler for the first time without training wheels. Will I succeed and ride along forevermore? Too bad in reality the first time I had my bike out for a spin as a child, I took a bad spill. Left my bike around the corner from our house to run home for some nurturing, and my bike was ripped off. I have a hard time now realizing that life doesn't always turn out that way.

I want to hold on tight and pretend that as long as I hold all dear to me very close in my arms, all will be well.

This morning as I took my 14-year old to a friend's house to head out snowboarding, I had a thick, but kind of brief conversation with his friend. His sister died tragically at age 17, just three months ago. She was killed in a car crash when she skidded around a corner and rolled her car. I asked if it would be okay for me to ask a few questions, since her death is one that keeps creeping into my head. I wonder how it would be to be her parents. His parents. Maybe if I can write some of these things out, I can help myself figure some of these things out. I got stuck along the way and while I feel like I had let go years ago, I'm realizing that until I really fully do, I will be trapped forever by that illusion of control.

For me, the story starts with the crystal clear slice of a vision that will be forever trapped in my mind. My bedroom door flung open and my dad frantically yelling "Go do that emergency stuff to your mom!" He, standing there in his Jockey boxer shorts. Me, suddenly just half awake wondering what the hell he was talking about. "That stuff you learned in school!"

In a heartbeat I went from fast asleep to another world. I flew out of bed and ran into their bedroom where she lay on her bed. Quickly, I moved for the next however long, trapped in some kind of a time-warp that seems like both a matter of minutes balanced with a life-time.

My mom really should have been moved to the floor, to a hard surface, but he had been awakened when she rose from bed and fell to the floor, so he put her back on the bed. I didn't have the heart to tell him that CPR needed to be done on a hard surface. He had sweetly put her back on her bed, to comfort her obviously dead body.

As I heard him in the other room fumbling to call for an ambulance, I started to do what I had been taught the year before in health class. What was pretty routine on a plastic CPR dummy was another whole thing on a real person laying in their real bed in your real house. And especially when it's your mom.

The pre-cardial thump, I think they call it. You slug the person. But how hard? If you slug them too hard you can break their ribs. But if you slug them just right you can bring them right to life! Much easier on the dummy, it just didn't seem natural to slug your mother. My heart was racing and I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. The vision of my dad and his skinny legs in his boxers. . . the pain in his eyes. . . the way he called out "Momma! Come out of it!". . . all still haunt me.

As he spoke in the other room, I began. The thump. The clearing of the airways, my fingers in her mouth and throat. I pulled up on the back of her neck to open the passageway. Listened for breathing and heard nothing but an ugly gurgle which I pretended may be life. I checked for a pulse again and again not sure exactly what I should feel and thinking that I hopefully just wasn't doing something right, and then I began.

Alone, my scrawny legs in my red and white striped footie pajamas, knees knocking. I found the spot which I thought was below her sternum and started compressions. Again, on a dummy it was easy, but in real life found this surreal. Too hard, they had told us, and you puncture the lungs. Too soft and you do no good. I am not sure if I went through the actions or if anything I did was doing any good - but I went on for what seemed like eternity.

Time couldn't move any slower in that blur which was eventually broken up by the sound of the neighbor's dogs howling. My mom used to laugh about the fact that they'd hear sirens long before anyone else and I was grateful to hear their piercing howls. Seconds later, I think, there were paramedics by my side. I was happy to turn the work over to someone else, but was thinking suddenly that the house was a mess and was unhappy to be hosting them at that moment. They got her onto a stretcher and pulled out all sorts of things that I had seen on TV. Bottles and needles and hoses. They needed more light, so my dad grabbed a lamp and pulled it over for them. It all happened so fast. Within minutes she was outside and was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. My dad climbed in with her and off they went, lights flashing and sirens soon to follow, off into the dark of the night and into a deep, deep fog.

I was standing alone in the dark in the middle of 79th Street. And I stood there for a minute. Or forever. Wondering if that was all real. Knowing it was, but wondering how. And what to do next.

tiptoeing in

hmmmmm.
It's been so long - and I have ideas - and not so much time.
Or, the time I have, I've been using in other ways. I can't complain about time even though it seems to be flying so fast. I still make choices about most of it.

Hi k and hi h and hi l.

Ask for help. . .

I don't have time to write all that I want to here, today. (or ever).

My brother died about 24 hours ago. My heart is breaking, though I'm doing so much better than I was a day ago. Part of what helped me so much was the outpouring of sympathy I received on facebook. While each person handles their grief differently, I've learned the importance of grieving out loud. My family's tendency in the past was to buck up and stand tall. "Get over it" and "Move on."

Not this time. And not the time before. I'm learning to say out loud "I'm hurting." "I need help."

The outpouring of love directed at my family because of that cry has been so heartwarming. I feel like I'm supported - held up - and like I'm growing because of it. I think the healing will be quicker and more full.

The sad thing is that my brother would not be gone right now if he'd learned how to ask for help.

Specifically, he may have died because he had no insulin to treat his diabetes. And he wouldn't ask for help. Or couldn't? Where does that stubborn pride come from and why do we serve it?

He died an alcoholic that suffered for years and years. I understand that struggle and felt his pain for a long time. I know that trap.

Why is it so hard to ask for help? It's the simplest thing and the most complex thing, all in one.

If only he could have asked. . . If he could have humbled himself to accept that there is a loving God that could have helped him. And family and friends that cared so much about him on so many levels.

May we all learn from lessons like this - we are never too big, too small, too important, too wrecked, or too whatever-it-is-we-think-we-are, to ask for help.

All sorts of things I want to write

Why is it that all during the day and night - except when I'm sitting here - do I think of a million things that would make great blog posts. I create these fantastic episodes in my head, and then poof - they're gone.

Sometimes I realize that - that I'm going to forget - so I create them as lists. And poof - those go too.

Maybe next time?