Category Archives: memory

BEING HERE NOW

16. BE AWARE THAT YOUR GRIEF AFFECTS YOUR BODY, HEART, SOCIAL SELF AND SPIRIT.

Grief is physically demanding. The body responds to the stress of the encounter and the immune system can weaken. You may be more susceptible to illness and physical discomforts. Grieving parents often describe their grief as a pain in the chest or a physical ache. You will probably also feel sluggish or highly fatigued. Some people call this the “lethargy of grief”.
The emotional toll of grief is complex and painful. Mourners often feel many different feelings, and those feelings can shift and blur over time.
Bereavement naturally results in social discomfort. Friends and family often withdraw from mourners, leaving us isolated and unsupported. Mourners often feel out of place in a setting they once felt a part of.
Mourners often ask, “Why go on living?” “Will my life have meaning now?” “Where is God in this?” Spiritual questions such as these are natural and necessary but also draining.
All four facets of yourself are under attack. You may feel weak and powerless, especially in the early weeks and months. Only over time will you gain the strength to fight back.

CARPE DIEM:

If you’ve felt physically affected by your grief, see a doctor this week. Sometimes it’s comforting to receive a clean bill of health. (HEALING A PARENT’S GRIEVING HEART: 100 PRACTICAL IDEAS AFTER YOUR CHILD DIES, Alan D. Wolfelt, PhD, 2005)

Usually, I just pick a snippet from the page, but today, all of it grabs my attention. It all rings true for me. It’s a snowy day here in the northeastern US. I’m enjoying being in my nice warm home, with a blanket on my lap, and a cup of tea. My kids would laugh about “my nice warm home”. I keep it at 65 when I’m up and 60 when I’m out or in bed.

Grief certainly is physically demanding. It’s a full-body experience. As my rent heart mends back together, I can finally feel the grief and externalize it into mourning. I could always talk about Joseph’s death, but a part of me still didn’t believe it. I remember at the burial site, standing at the foot of his casket. I didn’t sit with the rest of the mourners. I stood opposite the Deacon, who prayed the final prayers at the head of the casket. We looked into each other’s eyes. “May perpetual light shine upon him…And may his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.” It was all so unreal.

My friend from Maine had driven me to the funeral home where I met my ex-husband, his wife, and our daughters, to make the “final arrangements”. Just as we were leaving to go there, a Deacon from my church and his wife came to the house. I told Deacon Steve and his wife, Lois, that I had called the rectory the night it happened. His response was, “Where was your community?” If only I had called them directly…The priest I spoke with only told me that the funeral home would call them to make arrangements.

The funeral director was a lovely man, who had also lost a child. Her portrait hangs in the entryway. I was okay while we sat at the desk in his office…or as okay as I could be. I don’t know that I said anything. When we were led into the showroom to choose a casket, I couldn’t enter the room. I backed out and went outside to be with my friend. I don’t remember if I went back in. It was that sense of unreality. That rending between what was and what I accepted. Again, I say that it is only recently that I believe he is really dead…through the process of working through this book and having been to Dr. Wolfelt’s presentation.

I am always in pain, in most of my body. I have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which was basically a rule-out of other diseases. I know, and I teach, that we carry our traumas in our bodies. This is the heaviest of the traumas I have experienced. The burden is made greater by my guilt and all the “what ifs” and “if onlys”. I have participated in various grief groups, in-person and virtually. They have all been helpful in one way or another. The suicide survivor groups have probably been the most helpful and I have made friends through them. No one else understands the depth of this particular loss. We see each other socially as well.

Social situations are very difficult for me. I prefer one-on-one get-togethers. Anxiety and a sense of just not fitting in anymore interferes with going to parties, celebrations, and group events, except for with the survivors, who feel the same way and give comfort to each other as a result of this understanding.

Day to day living can seem pointless at times. Heavy. But I have learned to Be Here Now, again, as Baba Dam Rass would say. There is a sacredness in each moment, each breath.

I GIVE MYSELF GRACE

SEVEN YEARS AGO

Eulogy for My Son

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I awoke from a nap one day when I was pregnant with my fourth child, and said to his father, “How about ‘Joseph Francis’?” True story. That’s how he got his name. Joseph for the dreamer of the Old Testament and, of course, the foster father of Jesus, and Francis for the Knight of Assisi. He was baptized at Mass – on the very altar from which his Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated – on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, as a demonstration for his brother Eric’s 4th grade religious education class.

I used to say that Joseph wore his nerves on the outside of his body. As a young child, his feelings were often apparent and intense…when he was joyful, he would flap his arms and jump up and down. When he was upset, he fell to
pieces.

Even from a young age, logical explanations were comforting to him. In elementary school he was concerned that he might be kidnapped. While other children may have needed only to hear that it wouldn’t happen, Joseph needed a reason why. I told him the family wasn’t rich enough for anyone to bother. Oddly enough, this alleviated his fears.

Joseph was brilliant. When he was about 2 years old, maybe 3, he went for a walk with his Grandma Martha – my paternal grandmother – and, after a brief period, said to her, “Perhaps we should go home now.”

One day when I picked Joseph up from a summer computer camp, the instructor told me that he’d been teaching the kids how to program a musical scale when he heard “Ode to Joy” coming from one of the computers – guess whose.

Joseph was a thinker, an over-thinker, and a “make-you-think”-er. He had a way of asking questions that not only would make you curious as well, but would make you wonder why you never wondered why before. His sister, Jessica, said that while Joseph was living with her, she couldn’t help but turn to Google every five minutes to research things that came up in conversation.

He loved to draw. As a child, Joseph was inspired by the “Captain Underpants” illustrated series and began drawing his own comics. As he got older, his artwork gained influence from video games, graphic novels, and anime. The comics he
drew featured original – and usually fantastically absurd – characters and plot lines.

Family and friends could always count on him for silly, sweet, unique gifts for birthdays and holidays…and sometimes for no reason at all. Joseph was caring, sensitive, and kind. The time and thought he put into preparing those gifts were characteristic of Joseph’s love for his family and friends. He enjoyed creating presents, but not as much as he enjoyed seeing how happy they made everyone.

Joseph loved to experiment. Once he and his sister Christine stole Comet from above the kitchen sink and bleached the grass in the front yard. I was furious, but they thought it was hilarious. Suffice it to say that I found a safer hiding spot for the Comet after that.

He once kept a caterpillar in a bug box hoping to see it turn into a butterfly. It had made a cocoon, but the box was invaded by ants. They chewed a hole in the cocoon and ate the caterpillar. When Joseph went outside to find that his beloved test subject was gone, he swore vendetta against ants. He took his revenge by holding a magnifying glass over them in the sun with one fist raised high in the air.

Joseph believed that his father was the most successful person he knew. It amazed Joseph how much knowledge Frank has, particularly because Frank is self-taught. Joseph was impressed by his father’s business knowledge and admired Frank’s building and gardening skills. He respected his dad’s dedication to supporting his blended family of eight children and grew to love his second mother, Karen, who treated him as her own son.

George Carlin once said, “Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: ‘We are the proud parents of a child who has resisted his teachers’ attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters.’” Joseph’s free spirit and strong will contributed to difficulties getting through school, but his parents – and even the teachers he frustrated – loved Joseph for his creativity and passion.

Anyone who ever met Joseph loved him from the get go. His gentle, loving spirit will live on in the hearts and minds of all who knew him.

Memory and Human Rights

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The photo above is of the plaque outside the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, in Santiago, Chile. It is the only photograph I took, but what I saw and felt that day will remain forever vivid in my memory.

The museum chronicles the holocaust of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1973 to 1990. Our guide spoke only Spanish; our professor would translate as needed. Since most of our group understood Spanish, there was little translation done. My Spanish is not so good; and, in a situation that evokes strong emotion, I hear very little, even in my native tongue. As we entered the Museum, I already had an overpowering feeling of dread about what we were about to witness. The Pinochet era was filled with human rights abuses and many were tortured, killed and/or disappeared during his reign.

I tried to pay attention as we moved through the building, but one of the first exhibits we saw was a metal-framed bed with a large battery and electrical cables attached that was used as an implement of torture. I heard very little after that. We moved from exhibit to exhibit, from floor to floor. My breathing became more and more labored until, finally, I was close to hyperventilating and tears poured from my eyes. I dropped out of the tour and found a glassed-in area in which to sit with my feelings. As I gazed through the glass, on the wall across the way I saw an array of photographs, hundreds of people who had been disappeared never to be heard from again. And that was only a small percentage of them.

The awareness of unmitigated evil was all around me. I breathed in the bad and breathed out the good – a yogic exercise I had heard of before but never understood until that moment. Evil exists in this world. The German Holocaust was not an isolated blip in the history of the world. It continues. We must keep our hearts and minds open to seeing it where it is and confronting it.

In the United States it is more clandestine and insidious. It exists when corporations are considered people, children are allowed to go hungry and without healthcare, and millions populate prisons having passed through the cradle to prison pipeline. I will keep my eyes open and speak the truth.

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