There are no yellow ribbons on my car

When I lived in D.C., one of my favorite spots in the city was the west end of the National Mall, where the war memorials reside. In the pre-dawn hours, when I would go for my run, these landmarks were especially powerful. In the quiet, the rising light, they always served as stark reminders of the cost of the life I took for granted.

I can’t remember the first time I met Davis, except that it was on such a run. He was always dressed in the same clothing – faded jeans and old duty boots, a t-shirt and a worn field jacket. I stopped to tie a shoe one morning and he warned me off a particular path because of some suspect guys down the way. Part of the reason I ran so early in the morning was to avoid suspect guys, so I wasn’t entirely sure about the intelligence but I stuck to the street anyway.

When you see someone like that, you place a face with a voice, they become something more than just the background through which you observe the city’s failings. I started to see him more often. I suppose the safer thing to do would have been to ignore him altogether, but I am my father’s daughter and I cannot walk away from a good story. He never asked for money, anyway, he didn’t appear interested in panhandling or maybe he just waited to set up his operation until there was a better demographic, more uncomfortable tourists crowding the sidewalks around him.

It started to rain one morning, hard, and I looked for shelter. I ducked into the same entryway he’d occupied, and I ended up buying him coffee and a breakfast sandwich. He told me he’d served in Vietnam, that most of who he considered family was up on the wall and while he’d come back physically most of him had never really come back at all.

The story stayed mostly the same over the year or so I would (almost literally) run into him. He would never take money from me, though he was always glad for coffee, something to snack on. He never intimated that he had a physical address anywhere, and I never asked. Some mornings we would talk politics, some mornings we would talk about the war, some mornings we would talk about what it was like to grow up in Flyover Country.

He became part of the city, to me. The last time I saw him, a few days after 9/11/01, he came the closest he ever had to hugging me, a brief squeeze on my shoulder and a few murmured words about how glad he was I was alright. A few weeks after that I stopped seeing him in all the usual places, and a few months after that I was gone from D.C. for good.

“All this meaningless flag waving,” he said in one of our last conversations. “Just to keep anyone from feeling guilty or responsible about this madness. Just means more kids are going to die. At least in my time, with the draft, everyone had a horse in the race. Money could still save your ass, sure, but at least the folks in the middle couldn't ignore what was in front of their faces.”

There are over 21 million veterans in this country, whose collective experience encompasses over seventy years of combat and peacetime operations. Many of them are my family, my friends. We are, as a nation, doing horribly by them. About 13% of the adult homeless population are veterans. Two-thirds of our nation’s homeless veterans served our country for at least three years, and a third were in a war zone. On any given night, over 62,000 veterans are on the street, homeless. These veterans can’t find affordable housing, they can’t find jobs, and many of the factors that complicate their search for the same are compounded by PTSD and substance abuse issues for which they cannot find treatment or assistance. The VA system is already swamped.

We don’t spit on the soldiers that come home from war anymore. We learned our lesson from Vietnam in that regard. No, we love to trot out our soldiers for photo shoots in this country. We like to wave flags and deliver wonderful, inspiring speeches full of platitudes, expressions of gratitude for service and sacrifice so many of us will never know. But all these words without action, magnets on cars without boots on the ground, aren’t we really just metaphorically spitting on their service all the same?

Maybe, maybe not. There are without question people for whom the magnet on their car is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they do to try and serve this specific population. But on this Veteran’s Day, maybe we could all start identifying ways to thank our nation’s veterans in ways that carry a little more weight than a status update or a Tweet, a bumpersticker or, you know, a blog post.

Let Congress know that the VA needs adequate funding, and that access to quality healthcare, including mental health care that addresses PTSD, is critical.  Interested in a more active approach?  Here are some places to start. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs
The Fisher House Foundation
The Wounded Warrior Project
The Pat Tillman Foundation
USO
United We Serve
Blue Star Families
Operation Appreciation
National Coalition for Homeless Veterans
and more, just a phone call or Google search away.

Happy Veterans Day.  Thank you, to all who served or are serving.  Thank you.

Laying the Dead to Rest: The Katrina Memorial, Five Years Later

Five years ago. August 29, 2008. One of the prouder moments of my professional career.

Hurricane Katrina left a lot of damage and destruction in its wake. I love New Orleans, there is something about that city that feels like home to me, and my career took a very different trajectory as a direct result of the storm that devastated it so. I started working for funeral directors while the flood waters were rising, working at the national association, watching firsthand how funeral service responded, immediately, on the ground before federal operations had even really gotten a foothold. Being a part of that response is the kind of thing that changes how you look at the world, as clichéd as that sounds. The national association mobilized trucks of supplies, sent in teams of funeral directors to relieve the local men and women who were struggling to serve their communities when many of them had lost everything themselves, and I was really proud to be a part of that in some small way.

Eighty-five of the dead were left in morgues, long after the waters receded, and the rebuilding had begun. Unidentifiable or unclaimed, they seemed to me to be a testament to everything we promised we would do and failed. Plans were made to build a permanent memorial, a place to remember all who had lost in the storm and its aftermath, a place to finally lay the dead to rest. Fundraising was slow to start, until funeral service stepped in via the Foundation and became the largest single private contributor to the effort. The first large donor, it enabled the project to secure the site on the grounds of the former Charity Hospital Cemetery, and to pursue other funding. This is what funeral directors do, you see. Honor the dead while caring for the living.

Five years ago, as New Orleans was battening down the hatches to prepare for Gustav, I flew into a city still shell-shocked but fighting back to entomb the dead. Plans for a full jazz funeral were scrapped because of the oncoming storm, but there was something equally powerful about the lone trumpeter, who sang the bodies home. At 9:38, the time the levies had been breached in 2005, bells rang out in the cemetery, in the city. It was all you could hear.

It didn’t get much media coverage outside of the region. Why would it? The nation tried really hard to bury memories of Katrina, of a disaster made unspeakably worse because of human failure, not the wrath of Mother Nature. These were the abandoned dead, anyway, unwanted by family, or without any of their own or centuries old, thrown from their crypts by flood waters surging out of control. Funeral service didn’t forget. They put blood and sweat and hundreds of thousands of dollars into making that memorial a reality because they understand what it means to have a place to go to mourn. A place to go to remember.

Hallowed ground. If you’re ever in New Orleans, take a cab down Canal Street to where it ends at the old Calvary Hospital Cemetery. The city’s scars are still raw in places, pink in others, but this is a place of healing. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it.

For the full gallery of pictures I took that day, you can find the Flickr stream here.

Sorry's Not a Four-Letter Word

A couple of days ago a series of advertising materials put forth by the Episcopal Church crossed my radar screen.  I clicked over, and blinked.  And then blinked again.  I get that all churches are trying to combat declining memberships.  I get that it’s a struggle to find a message that cuts through all the noise and chatter out there.  These days, everyone’s hoping for a creative Powerball jackpot, that little piece of marketing that somehow goes viral.

Well, the marketing campaign went viral, at least within Episcopalian circles, but I don’t think it generated the response the church was looking for.  This isn’t about the ads, though if you are curious, both at what they were and why I, along with so many others, was both taken aback and, well, offended, you can find excellent blog postings [here] and [here] that sum things up nicely.  In short: easy sarcasm is not the way to go.  Humor and self-awareness play key roles in advertising, but I expect more from my church than cheap and cynical.

This is about how you respond when you fall on your face, as an institution, and what your obligations for transparency might be, especially when you are a religious entity, and not a corporation.

First things first: when I saw the ads, and had processed both what they meant and my reaction to them, I sent a tweet to @iamepiscopalian, expressing my dismay.  To my credit, they responded, and indicated they would pass on my concerns. This is how you use social media to make people feel like they are being heard, and I appreciated hearing back right away.

That said, the rest of their response is pretty much a PR failure.  A glance over at the page where the billboards/postcards/advertising materials were made available reveals that they are no longer available.  In their place is the following:

Many thanks to those of you who have given us constructive comments on the billboard and postcard suggestions we had posted.  We agree that the concept needs more work, and we are going back to the drawing board with your ideas in mind.  We sincerely appreciate your feedback and encourage you to keep sharing your ideas and, when appropriate, your criticisms.  We take them all seriously.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to be.  It’s not an apology, for one, to all of the members of the church who support and love the institution for a misguided attempt at an ad campaign.  It’s not public, in that to get to that page you had to know where the materials were in the first place.  There’s no acknowledgment that the ads were removed on the Facebook page, the Twitter feed, or the news feature on the website.

We’re going back to the drawing board, the statement says, but it offers no insight as to how that drawing board came to be in the first place.  I have to tell you, as someone who has been a professional communicator for the majority of her career, the series feels to me like something an outside firm was paid to come up with, something glib and hip and catchy.  I could be wrong, but I’m curious as to who from within the church and its various committees was part of the focus group that thought these were the kinds of messages we wanted to share about our church and its beliefs.  Was there a focus group at all?  How are you going to change your process for next time?  You encourage us to, when appropriate, share our criticisms?  What does that even mean?!

I’d love to give the public affairs team the benefit of the doubt.  It’s Friday evening, after all, and maybe they just wanted to get the material down before tackling this next week.  But this isn’t something you can do halfway.

In short, it’s the kind of non-apology apology I would expect from Wall Street, not the nerve center of the Episcopal Church.  But maybe being just a few miles down the road changes your perspective on things.  If so, I’d suggest coming out to Middle America and spending some time with folks who speak a little plainer, and see a little clearer.

There is so much the Episcopal Church has going for it.  I know that we need bodies in pews to keep the operation going, I appreciate and understand that.  But if you’ve been paying attention, there’ve been a series of articles [like this one] that suggest, in my humble opinion, that the Episcopal Church is better positioned that most to be able to capture the Xers and Millenials that are seeking a faith home.  Here you have a church that is rooted in tradition, with a beautiful liturgy, and a faith foundation that seeks to embrace, not isolate. 

We celebrate our unity in Christ while honoring our differences, always putting the work of love before uniformity of opinion.  I look at the website of the Episcopal Church and I see example after example of how the Church is doing good works, how it is working to bring people together in Jesus’ name.  ERD. Jubilee. Eco-Justice.  If you are looking for messages that speak to those seeking a faith home that engages the world around them rather than holds itself apart, you’re going to find a lot more meaty material here.  Maybe not in 140 characters or less, but then again:

Jesus lives. Come share the Good News.  There’s room in our tent for all of you.

We’re a forgiving sort, we Christians, we Episcopalians.  Hey, 815, have a little faith.  You can and should do better with this.

Five Years a Family

1st Corinthians was one of the readings at our wedding. You know the one, “love is patient, love is kind…” Five years in and I always smile bemusedly when I hear or see the passage. Five years in and yes, love is those things, but love - human love, anyway - is also tempestuous, it is needy, it is painful. Love is present, through everything, and that means triumph and tragedy. It can hurt you even as it sustains you.

Five years in and we have touched all the edges of that spectrum. It is nothing like I imagined it would be. Five years in and while I wasn’t sure at some points if we’d make it to one we are stronger now, stronger together than we are apart. This thing we are building, it’s going the distance.

The thing is, there’s nothing short about life. It’s the longest thing we’ll ever do, here, and while time moves quickly the years stretch out in front of us like a highway that goes past the horizon. If you find someone you want as your copilot, you’re pretty lucky. He is not perfect. I’m not perfect. We’re not perfect together, and this road trip takes a hell of a lot more than love to keep the vehicle in motion. "Some people’s wives," he sighs at me with great frequency, and I grin every time. He makes me laugh. He listens to me. He teaches me. He makes me want to be better. That’s what a partner does. That’s who he is.

You can’t give people advice about marriage, because no two marriages are the same, and we all have to learn from our own successes and failures anyway. But I guess I’d just say that the long-view matters, a solid work ethic matters because, yeah, the whole life-long partnership isn’t going to be a cakewalk. But if you’re committed to that, you find a way to get through even the times when you don’t like each other. You remind each other, especially at those times, that you love each other. You make space, and then the life you build together fills it.

Five years in, and it’s been worth it, every minute. Happy Anniversary to The Mister, my mister, my love, my best friend and co-pilot on this life’s journey.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Autism 101

Two hours this morning, at the center we’re on the waitlist for, another four months maybe before we can get Kid A in. What I noticed, in that room full of people staring awkwardly at their hands or paper cups filled with weak coffee, was that The Mister was the only other partner in the room. It’s terrifying enough to walk down this road, and I can’t imagine having to do it alone.

It was good. I mean, the psychiatrist who presented was engaging. It was not really anything we didn’t already know though I scratched out a few notes about resources or strategies that were approached from a different angle than I’d considered.

At the end of our row, a woman cried through the entire two hours. She was the only one who had questions, really, or was either comfortable or desperate enough to ask them. Fourteen years old, her son, and just diagnosed though the issues were always there. She was a woman at her end, that much was clear. I wanted to hug her, I wanted to hold her hand. I wondered how strongly you had to be in denial to go that long with a kid on the spectrum without searching for answers.

I bumped shoulders with The Mister as we walked out to the truck. “We’re really pretty lucky, huh?”

Yeah, we are.

The First Lady of the Press Corps

In the spring of 1999, Helen Thomas came to the Twin Cities to do a speech for the Center for Victims of Torture. I was a senior in college, fresh off a summer and fall in DC, and I got the chance to go pick her up at the airport. To say I was starstruck would be an understatement.

We sat at the hotel bar and talked over scotch and the stories that lady told, well. She was an original, alright, the definition of a trailblazer. I never forgot the conversation, or her words of encouragement as I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Her death was announced today. She lived 92 full years.

"[Reporters] are not there to curry presidential favor, nor can we respond to efforts at presidential intimidation. Our priority is the peoples’ right to know — without fear or favor. We are the peoples’ servants." She took that responsibility very seriously, and was deeply critical of a media that was complicit in advancing a war started under false pretenses. She wasn’t without controversy, certainly, but she believed in the best journalism could be. She’ll be missed.

Best Dad is Best

It isn’t often that you get a glimpse at the kind of father your partner is going to be before you’re even married. I suppose that’s one of the fringe benefits of being a single parent first. I’ll never be able to put to words in any satisfying manner how awed I am by the mister’s courage, and his patience, and the gentle and careful way in which he became a part of Kid A’s life. He’s the only father A has ever known, and he’s the one I would have picked if I’d been doing the picking.

I’ll save most of the mushy stuff for our anniversary post in August, but I’ll say this now: I’m so, so grateful and lucky and happy that my boys have this man as their father. This man, who does the dishes because Mama cooks, after all, and an equal distribution of labor is how this whole thing is supposed to work. This parenting thing, we’re in it together. We share the load. He’s the dad who does the laundry and vacuums and takes sick days, too, when they’re not well and cries in front of them (rarely, but with no shame when he does) and isn’t afraid to tell them, as often as they’ll tolerate hearing it and sometimes more, that he loves them. That he will always love them, no matter who they are or what they want to become. 

I stumbled across a quote while pulling together a book for my parents that was something along the lines of, “small boys become big men through the influence of big men who care about small boys.” The mister isn’t perfect, he’s human, but he’s present for his sons, our sons, he is real and caring and setting all the right kinds of examples for how they should treat each other, treat women, engage the world.

Happy Father’s Day to my mister, the only man for me, the best dad my wees could ever ask for.

confessions of an accidental mother

I am a lot of things. A woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, an association executive, a political hack in recovery. A fan of punk rock and and drums and bad pop and magazines for men. I am not any one of these things, and I never have been.

Honestly, I never had any intentions of becoming a mom. Growing up, I never dreamed of wedding veils or baby showers. The world’s a pretty messed up place and that combined with no real burning desire to procreate left me in a grey area. I kind of figured it would be a conversation I would have with my partner, whoever that might be, and if they were down with building a bigger family I would be, too.

Kid A is the product of at least two (allegedly three) methods of failed birth control, a statistical anomaly so small that I have no qualms with referring to his existence as an act of God. Having him saved my life, in a lot of very real ways, but becoming a mother didn’t complete me. It added another layer to who I am.

I don’t think you need to have kids to have a full life. I think in some alternate universe somewhere there is a childless version of me who makes more money, who goes to lots of live shows and stays out late and doesn’t stay in a job because she’s obligated to. I think she’s pretty happy with her place in the world.

In this universe, my reality, I see a live show once a year, if I’m lucky. I pass out on the couch at 8, most nights. Date nights happen quarterly. I have a genetically-inherited sense of wanderlust held in check by a greater need for stability because of what I'm responsible for, who I'm responsible to. But damn if I don’t love those kids with an intensity that’s scary sometimes. I feel really lucky to be a part of their lives, to help them find their paths in this life. 

The thing is, neither of those realities is better.  The first doesn't have any more or less value than the second.  They’re just different. 

Mother’s Day is on Sunday, and it’s a conflicted day for a lot of people. I’m sensitive to that, to those for whom the day is a painful reminder of someone beloved lost. For those for whom it feels like an indictment of their choice not to have kids, as if their entire net worth is dependent on whether or not they’ve given birth. For those for whom It’s a wound reopened, all the people who were broken in places by mothers who weren’t there, or, worse, mothers that were. Family is so much more than blood and DNA, and parents don’t get that title by virtue of contributing genetic material to the creation of a life.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there, whether you came upon the title via childbirth or otherwise, who wade in it every day. Who muddle through the good, the bad, the ugly and the smelly, who do their best - and on those days when their best doesn’t quite make it til bedtime - try again in the morning. Happy Mother’s Day to the dads out there who wear both hats, because the media doesn’t turn its lens on you very often but there’s an awful lot of you out there. Happy Mother’s Day to the grandmas, the aunties, the cousins, the godmothers, the teachers, the next-door neighbors, the mentors: the people who step up in the absence of that maternal figure and help give a kid a sense of place in the world. 

I have no use for Mitch Albom as a rule, but someone sent me this quote once and I tucked it away: “But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.”

To better endings for all our stories, no matter what kind of beginning we had. 

Happy Mother's Day.

i stood there on a chair and watched you pray

Jacob Bernstein wrote a Sunday NYT piece about his mom's death - Nora Ephron's Final Act - that's part memoir, part writing primer, and I have been mulling over it for a few days now. There's a lot of material to work with in the piece, but the part I can't seem to get out of my head is where he talks about his mom's search for a good death. 

A good death. I'm not sure I believe that's possible. Maybe, maybe, approaching 100, at home in your own bed, from one sleep to the next. When you're ready to go. As if most of us are ever ready, even at 100, with everything failing and many of those we love gone before us.

I haven't known many good deaths. The deaths I've known have been the rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind, the gone-too-soon kind, ugly ravages of disease or caskets too small, mourners too young. Months or moments coming, it doesn't matter.

When I worked in the business of dying, I always counseled people to comfort the bereaved with a simple "I'm sorry." It's all you can say, really. Everything else is platitude, some of it benign, a lot of it borderline offensive.

My favorites were always "she's in a better place," or "it'll get easier with time." I'm a person of faith. I believe there's more to who we are and what we are than just the organic material we inhabit. But the first time someone said the former to me I almost leveled them. If there's a better place, I'd suggest you go find it, and get the hell out of my face.

You get the drift.

It's the latter that always leaves me wondering if the person who says it has ever lost anyone at all. It doesn't get easier. Never, ever. 

When my mom lost a kidney to cancer, the doctors assured her she would be fine, and she was. The other kidney picked up the slack, and she's healthy, doing great. But she's still missing a kidney.

Grief is like a phantom limb. You're missing something. It's gone, it's never come back and after a period of time you adjust to that absence, find ways to work around what you're lacking. But every so often, sometimes more often than not, you feel a twitching, an itch, you reach for something and realize in the reaching that you are grabbing with an arm that is no longer there. And it hits you all over again, as powerful as the day you first lost it, the magnitude of what you lost and how your life will never be the same.

Good again, absolutely. You can choose to adapt to your new specs, have a normal life but it will always, always be different. 

There is an Edna St. Vincent Millay quote that I stumbled across in late October, 2001 that I have carried with me scrawled on the back of a fading photograph ever since. "Where you used to be," she wrote, "there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."

That is grief. It does not leave you, it walks beside you. Even when it's but a shadow, it is still there, in the corner. It waits. And you learn to try to anticipate the times it decides to stand and stretch and reach, but it still surprises. 

You move forward, not on. You keep moving because the alternative is to lie down and become part of the loss yourself. But you don't get over it. 

I wish people would stop saying you should.

the war is over and we are beginning

“After you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”

― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

I am perpetually fascinated by our ability to reshape our pasts into something better than they were. I spent a good portion of my 20s in the seat of power in our nation’s capitol, working 12-hour days and getting blackout drunk, passing out for a few hours and getting up and doing it again and the hell of all that is I actually miss it, some days. I did really amazing things, I did really fucked up things, I watched history happen, I helped make it and then one day someone I cared a whole hell of a lot about got killed by a plane flying into the Pentagon and suddenly I didn’t want to do any of those things anymore.

I was never happier than to be done with my 20s and yet some days I look around at my life and think, wow, what the hell, you are so far from where you were supposed to be, from what you were supposed to be doing, who is this person and what have you done with your dreams? Consciousness is a pretty messed up thing. Memory’s the greatest liar of them all. I was lonely and miserable and strung out and I don’t want to go back.

I am a week shy of entering the second half of my 30s and I have not done most of the things that I thought I would do when I was 22. And I probably won’t. Not ever. I probably have more failures in my life than victories, even, but at some point you realize that pretty much the only person in your life that’s keeping score is you.

Yesterday I sat in a public market and wrestled with my kids and drank mango juice and talked about how you make gyros with the eldest. We ate cupcakes and looked at Somali wares and argued about Star Wars backpacks and finished each other’s sentences. We read comic books and talked about the weather. Five of us, out in the world. Whole.

Dear 22-year old me: You can have Kilimanjaro, 1600 Penn is all yours. I have love. I am alive.

courage, he said. chin up. soldier on.

The first thing you should know about my oldest son is that he’s really bright. I tell you this because it’s almost always the first thing people tell me. From the moment he was born he had a curiosity, a way of looking at the world that kept me scrambling. Barely three, I teasingly handed my son a book and asked him to read it to me. He did, word for word. Then he wrote his name. In the narrative I constructed for how his life would unfold, this is exactly how everything started. I make smart kids, of course I do. Nobel laureates, maybe, or Pulitzer winners. The stuff of Lake Wobegon.

It’s part of the promises you whisper against their skin when they’re born. You are amazing, you say, you will be amazing. Anything you want in the world, it’s yours. We don’t admit to ourselves that few of those promises are in our power to keep. That we can’t give them happily-ever-afters, no matter how hard we try, because life is made of twists and turns and curveballs, no clues as to how any of it is going to end.

I was so excited when he started 4K, knew he would love school as much as I did. Except he ended up in a class that was massively overcrowded, kids learning their letters while he tried to negotiate Internet time with his bewildered teacher. He seems overwhelmed, she said. He’s acting out, he interrupts, he can’t relate to the other kids in his class. I went home, sobbed in the kitchen against my husband’s chest. It’s not him, became my mantra. It’s not him, it’s them.

He’s got an eidetic memory, have I mentioned that yet? Which basically means that he retains what he sees, what he hears verbatim, whether he understands the context or not. Think about that, about everything we hear and see in a day and all the various things a kid can overhear that you don’t actually want repeated.

Anywhere.

Ever.

There was the time he lectured a totally baffled looking kid in the candy aisle at Target about the Easter display being “a commercial perversion of Pagan fertility rites.” Or Election Day, when I got a call from a weary administrator because he’d been lecturing everyone about politics. “If your parents don’t know who to vote for,” he told his classmates, “you should tell them to ask themselves What Would Joe Biden Do?” “C’mon,” I said to his principal. “It’s a little bit funny.” She didn’t see the charm.

We started therapy, grudgingly, because I was worried that he would get branded a troublemaker at age 5. He started telling me he was stupid. He would curl up with me on the couch at night and tell me how badly he wanted friends to play with. He got so anxious about going to school he made himself physically sick, more than once. I decided it was the school’s fault, and looked into open enrollment elsewhere. The classes were too full. The teachers were subpar. Those were the only logical explanations.

“Your son is such a bright boy!”

I think I physically cringed the first time I heard this from his first grade teacher. We weren’t even a month into school before the first of these conversations happened with her, an educator who is amazing, and wonderful, and who I kind of wanted to reach through the phone and strangle. He won’t do his work, he’s hiding under tables. He won’t work at all if there’s a sub.

I hated how absolutely helpless I felt during these conversations, like there was something I was missing, something I was doing wrong. Why aren’t you doing your work, I would ask him. I don’t know, he’d say with these big, mournful eyes. I stopped asking.

We’d started seeing a psychiatrist before school had even started, a summer’s worth of social awkwardness and anxiety and bullying and I’d looked for someone ostensibly to help work on his self-esteem, but. If I’m being honest with myself, which is sort of the point of this exercise, there’s a reason I looked for a psychiatrist and not a therapist. We’d been seeing her for maybe a month when she mentioned, with heartbreaking casualness, an autism spectrum disorder. I couldn’t breathe. I started researching, irrationally reassured because most of those kids didn’t sound anything like mine. I found all the things he wasn’t in a desperate attempt to ignore all the things he was.

And then.

The day before Christmas break, I stopped at his elementary school and I could hear him, from two hallways away. Shrieking, crying, and I almost tripped over myself running to his classroom door. There he was, between two teachers trying to calm him down. He looked up and saw me and I froze as he started to cry harder. I’m still not sure if his reaction was born from embarrassment or relief.

“Love,” I said, reached for him, dropped my forehead to his like I had when he was a baby, held his hands. “Sweetheart, can you breathe with me? Baby, please, in with me, yeah? Now out, slow and steady.” In and out we breathed together, forehead to forehead until his breathing matched mine and he could steady himself again. I went home and cried, my face pressed into the pillows. I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.

The next phone call from school was about interventions failed, about the need to meet, parents and teachers and the special education team leader.

I am embarrassed about my reaction to that, the rush of shame and disappointment and grief at being forced into a room to acknowledge what everyone else had seen but me; I have a special needs child. He is smart, and he loves politics and comic books and Clint Barton, computers and bugs and Legos and his baby brothers more than just about anything else in the world.

I’m scared. This isn’t something he’s going to grow out of. It’s not going to magically get better and the reality of that is exhausting.

I’m terrified, because I would give anything to make this easy for him and all I can think about is how long this road is going to be, how bumpy, and how there’s so much I can’t do to make this better. Welcome to humanity. Welcome to motherhood, to the dirty secret that no one is actually capable of fixing it all.

I can’t keep kids from picking on him. I can’t sit next to him in class and try to keep him on task. I can’t make friends for him. All I can do is accept the reality of where we are and do everything I can to be patient, to be steady, to help him figure out how to harness that powerful mind and find the balance that enables him to interact with the world around him. I hope I’m up to the challenge. I have to be.

He is my beautiful, bright boy, and maybe I cannot protect him from all the things that hurt, but I can still try. I can be there, forehead to forehead and hand in hand, breathing alongside him, giving him all the courage and strength and tenacity he can take. Because that’s what we do, we mothers. We’re not perfect, and neither are our kids. I don’t know how this story ends. I’m working really hard on accepting that. But moms don’t give up, right?

Our kind of love doesn’t have that kind of vocabulary.

my heart's outstanding bills

My mom is 65 today. 

Relationships are complicated things. I’m lucky, though, that for all the twists and turns in my life she’s become part of my bedrock, one of my best friends.

She’s a pretty amazing woman. When A was born, she was the one who held my hand in the delivery room, she was the one who cut the cord. When she had a kidney removed to rid herself of cancer, it was I that curled up in the chair next to her in the hospital that first night, counted breaths and watched machines.

I wouldn’t be the person I am - the parent I am - without having been able to watch how she continued to push forward even when life did its best to drag her under, and I am so grateful for that. We haven’t always understood each other, we haven’t always agreed with each other but always, always there is love.

When I was little, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and many, many moons later, that’s still true. Every gray hair, every line on her face and her hands a testament, a battle scar, a story.



This picture was taken on my wedding day. A walked her down the aisle.

Happy birthday, Mom.

“believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

I’m super behind on the OneWord posts, which is disappointing but not surprising. If my math is correct, which is questionable on a good day, then this week’s word is faith. Mmm. Baggage.

When I was in sixth grade, I think, I read Stephen King’s “It.” Besides reinforcing a life-long and occasionally paralyzing fear of clowns, it also provided me with the best, most logical description of Creator I’ve come across. I’m sort of amused in thinking about how Stephen King might react to that. In the universe he creates, there is the Turtle, the creator of all that is, who does his work and then pulls inside his shell, wanders off into some vast corner of the cosmos and lets what will happen, happen.

There’s a lot of life that’s happened between then and now. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Jesuits and sung in gospel choirs with Baptists and thrown shade at Unitarians and knelt with Episcopalians, spent years away from organized religion and years inside it. I’ve read everything I can put my hands on and some of it feels more organic than others.

I don’t have answers, but that’s the whole point, right?

I look at my kids, I look at this world, I look up at the stars and even when I feel like I can’t believe in anything else I still see the Turtle out there somewhere, beyond our reach, that thing that set all of this in motion, all the things that even the most brilliant of our science minds can’t entirely explain. I look at my kids and I think about the way my capacity to love grew and shifted and metastasized in one horrible, awful painful push and think yes, okay. I have faith in creation. I have faith in love. I believe. I have faith that no matter what happens when I am not here the love that we are born into and that we bend and shape during the time we live it continues to wrap its arms around this world and every other, even after we’re gone.

And like bits and pieces of our DNA, a genetic code that tells the stories of who our people were and who our people will be, it stretches onward through time, eternal. And if when we sleep, we dream, well. That’ll be some adventure, too.

the essay that wasn't

I finished a draft a few days ago for Listen to Your Mother, sent it off to a few people to pick apart. One of the topics I considered was trying to tackle how working in funeral service had changed how I parent. 

It’s two in the morning, and I’m not sure this is that, but I couldn’t sleep so I wrote. I’ll throw it behind a cut because there is talk about dying, and kids, and talking to kids about death, and loss in all its iterations and there are a lot of people for whom that is all ridiculously uncomfortable and I respect that.

It’s the middle of the night or early morning, whichever. I can’t sleep. So there’s this.

If you’ve ever watched Six Feet Under, you’re familiar with their conceit - each episode opens with a death. I often think about how those writers must have scrambled, especially later into the series, to come up with something different for each one.

There is an episode, fairly early on, season one or two, I think, that opens in a nursery. The picture is blurry, the perspective is from the inside of a crib. You see a mother and a father, peeking in, then leaving. There is a mobile hanging above. The screen goes black, then opens to the mobile again. Black, mobile, a repeated sequence until there is just black, and then a name, and you realize what you’ve just watched.

The first time I saw it I was a single twenty-something. Wow, I thought to myself. They went there.

The second time I saw it I had a baby, several months old, and I put the meat of my palm between my teeth to stifle any noise I might make as I ugly cried my way through it.
*
I was five months pregnant when I started working for funeral directors. Six weeks on the job and the highlight of our national convention, for me, was getting to work with some producers doing a project that would be included in the bonus material for the final season of SFU - a documentary on how the American view of death had changed over the course of the series.

They interviewed several funeral directors for the piece. One of them, a past president, is a tremendous man and funeral director based out of Connecticut, and I may be biased but he’s one of the best in the country. In one of the more moving segments, he talked about the funeral of a child. Young, very young, and he described putting the child in his mother’s arms, letting her rock him one last time, giving her that time to say goodbye and I thought, Jesus, what the hell have I gotten myself into?
*
Back maybe two weeks from maternity leave, I travelled with some colleagues to tour a funeral home in a different part of the state. We walked into the casket showroom and there, in the corner, was an infant display (please to note: this is not something you ordinarily see in a showroom - fact of life or not it’s not something most funeral directors call attention to). I turned around and walked right out of the room, trying to catch my breath.
*
You probably don’t know it, because they never talk about it but many funeral directors will donate their professional services for the funeral of a young child, asking only for payment that covers things like the casket, the vault, etc. Someone rolled their eyes at me once, said something along the lines of “of course they should, those funerals shouldn’t happen to begin with ” to which I responded, “so basically pediatric hospice should only bill for medicines delivered, then? Doctors should comp billing on cases where kids don’t make it?” I’m saying. These are good people.
*
Another funeral director told me about a service he’d done, a family friend whose teenage son had killed himself, shot himself in the head at a range and with ammunition that did a pretty horrific amount of damage. He worked, nonstop, pulling out every trick he knew, everything he’d been taught to reconstruct the boy’s face so his parents wouldn’t have a closed casket as their only choice. So his mother could touch his cheek one last time and say goodbye.
*
There is an organization of volunteer photographers called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. They go in and provide remembrance photography for parents that have lost a baby. If there are angels on earth, these people have wings. Ours is a society that cannot process the notion of infant loss and so we don’t talk about it. At a time of unspeakable grief they help families and give them something tangible to hold onto, after.
*
When Newtown happened, my first thought was of my kids, my second for those parents, those families. Then it was the funeral directors, because those are my people, even still. The Connecticut funeral director who was a friend and mentor. He has all boys, just like me, all grown up. All his grandbabies are all girls, and some of them, no doubt, the same age range as those kids. I have a pretty good idea what those kinds of rounds do to a body that size. I know all too well the lengths to which those men and women - whose calling is all too often dismissed as “creepy” - served those families, how they worked untold hours amidst that horror to make sure those families could say goodbye whatever way they needed to.
*
If there are angels on earth, there are innumerable funeral directors walking around with wings of their own.
*
They became part of my family, these men and women, and they taught me about how we care for our dead. They changed my vocabulary and they changed how I think about mortality. Whether you believe there is something more than what we know while our hearts are beating or not, we have this time, now, and this time is finite. There are no promises about how long we get, about who gets to go first. I have been to funerals for babies and for grade schoolers and for teenagers, for parents and grandparents and crazy old uncles.

I look at my boys and every day I am thankful for more time with them because I know there are no guarantees.
*
It was always something of a running joke among some of us on the staff, about how much funeral directors love to hug. Six years working for funeral directors, gone from that work almost two years now and I’ll be damned if I’ve not become one, too. Hug while you can.
*
I make no promises to my kids. Our pets don’t go to sleep, they die. Death is a part of life, and everything dies. I will die, they will die. The concept is mostly abstract to them now. They’ve been lucky enough that except for a pet they haven’t had to deal with the loss of anyone close to them. It is never a comfortable conversation to have but it’s an important one and I think I would have avoided the hell out of it were it not for my funeral directors, for funeral service.

Lately, the almost-4-year old has asked about it. I don’t want to die, he says and I tuck him up and tell him that I know. No one wants to, but it simply is part of our human experience. It’s okay to be afraid, but there is no need to linger on it. No matter what, no matter when, we will always love each other and that’s what gets you through.
*
Love. It’s not true that funeral service taught me to love, but I don’t think I fully appreciated what a gift it is until I spent my time around people whose life work is to care for the dead. You can’t do that and not have love. You can’t do that and not understand that what we are will one day be stripped away, ‘til that’s really all that’s left.
*
I learned that I can’t control when I go, when the people I love do. But I can love them, and I can tell them, and so the last thing they hear before they go to sleep, the first thing they hear in the morning is “I love you.” We can yell at each other and go to bed angry but no one leaves the house without those words to carry them on their way. Because you never know.
*
Whether we go first, or we go last, at some point what we love here, in this life, is lost. Six years in the trenches with the caretakers of the dead, and I’m a hugger, and I say “I love you” more than I ever did before. There is nothing dark or creepy about that.

what remains

The room is bright and sterile, like a doctor’s office, except more barren. There are none of the posters on the walls here, cheerfully telling you to check your moles or the benefits of HPV vaccinations.

There is table in the middle of the room, but it’s not for examinations. It’s for preparations.

A body lies on it, an elderly woman. She has already been embalmed, but she is awaiting some final touches. Some tissue filler, to smooth out her face, perhaps. I watch as the funeral director massages her extremities, easing the tissue, and at his nod, I step forward and together we dress her. He is business-like but gentle, impersonal but tender. He speaks softly while he’s doing it, talking me through the process, what he does and why. He’s done this job for a long time.

Afterwards, I watch as the family comes to see her. There are tears, there usually are. “She looks so good,” they say. “Not sick at all.”

That night I sit with my host, and ask questions. In the old days, it was family that washed the body, that dressed what remained, sat with him or her through the last steps of the journey. These days, we stay as far away as we can from our dead. A choice, conscious or otherwise.

I fly home a couple of days later, sit on a couch tucked in with my son, my mother in a chair across from me. She’s always said she doesn’t want a fuss. I roll my eyes and tell her it’s not about her, when she’s gone, but about what remains. That I will wake her good and proper, when the time comes, and if she doesn’t like it she can come back and haunt me.

She smiles, and watches the baby wriggle in my arms.

“I will take care of you,” I say. “I will wash you, one last time, my hands, not a stranger’s. I will dry your hair and dress you. I promise. If I can do nothing else for you then, I can do that.”

She tilts her head and studies me for a minute before she sighs, smiles and wanders off. The baby is asleep in my arms. “This is what we do,” I whisper, “for our own.”

the music as remembered.

The 400 Bar closed. 

I feel like I must have been living under a rock or something, because when they started talking about it on The Current this morning on the drive in I almost went off the road. It’s not old news, I guess, having done a little Internet searching when I should actually be working, happened in the last week or so as I’ve been off in family-induced oblivion. And I’m kind of at a loss for why I’m so bummed out about it, honestly, but I’ve spent the morning in an emo funk over a shitty little bar that’s tied up in so many of my memories of college and after.

I mean, that’s why, obviously. Seventeen years isn’t an epic stretch of time, but it opened about the time I came to the Cities for school, and I saw so many shows there, the Jayhawks, an epic set by Elliott Smith, Jimmy Eat World and the Promise Ring, Semisonic and the Supersuckers, Whiskeytown and Dr. Dog. So. Many. Shows.

The drinks weren’t great and the acoustics were mediocre but it was a great place to see a show all the same.

It’s Chris Whitley I remember most, though. He played there more than once, but this is what I remember. October, 2004. The last show he would play in Minnesota. I was helping out with merch for that show, got there early and he was running late. His mom had died, that morning, the day before, I can’t remember but I do remember how much sadder he looked, how soft his words were. I remember sitting in the basement of the 400 Bar, signatures lining the walls, sharing cigarettes and drinking coffee out of paper cups. He played this gorgeous, gut-wrenching set that night to a crowd that was nowhere as big as it should have been.

We packed up the van afterward and he told me a few stories that made me cry. I gave him a hug and he was gone, one moment to the next. He was staying at the Holiday Inn up the hill from the bar, and I remember standing at the street corner watching him, his shoulders hunched as he walked, braced against the wind and he was probably sick even then, certainly heartbroken and it physically hurt to watch him move. It was the last time I would ever see him.

It was the last time I was in the 400 Bar.

I moved away and then moved back, but with kids in tow and too old for unannounced 11 pm shows anyway, not on school nights and maybe it’s as well that I haven’t been back since. Nothing is ever like you remember it. Except the music, in my head, in my heart, just a click away.

There was a kid there that night taking pictures, scrabbled down his name and a website that I’m not sure exists anymore but I found a picture he’d taken the next day that was everything about Whitley I remembered and everything about the 400 that I loved. I saved it, and it’s traveled with me ever since. The photographer’s name was Joe Cunningham, and this picture is his.


Hope you’re resting easy, Chris. Thanks for this memory and so many more, 400.