A New Moon

It was a new moon, an orange crescent smiling as it settled into an ink black flat lake.  It was the moon and a whisper from Marty that made me stop.  You should have been there.

On most nights at our lake home, after Marty has settled in bed, I go sit outside on our west facing deck to enjoy the night sounds and cool air (in the fall and winter). I almost always take my I Pad with me and let my mind check out as I play Spades or something else equally inane.

When there is not much of a moon and the lights are low in our house it is pitch dark on the porch.  You can see the lights on the docks reflecting off of the flat black water.  You can see the white, blue, orange and red lights shimmering on the bank across the lake, evidence of homes, boat docks, towers and pumps.  

This night the moon caught my eye.  It was a new moon, a crescent shape that looked like a brilliant orange and golden smile.  The moon light was cast across the smooth surface of the lake like an orange spotlight flashing from the far side of the lake to the shore on my side. 

 

Like I said, you really should have seen it.

Too often, much too often I have seen something notable then moved on to the next thing in my brain.  That behavior drove Marty nuts.  She would tell me, stop, look, enjoy, revel in the moment, be in the here and now and feel life at that moment.  She would say it’s okay to stop and feel content for a minute.  Mostly I didn’t listen to her.

This time I listened to my inner Marty voice (yes, it’s there, a lot), this time I put my I Pad down, I walked away from the sitting and the Spades and walked to the middle of the deck and watched the beaming crescent dipping  into the dark flat lake.  I looked up and saw the stars, the stars you can only see when you are away from city lights, the stars so far away the light you see is old.

It was cool, it was clear; it was so quiet all I could hear were the sounds God’s world makes.  An airplane made little noise as it blinked its way with passengers going from Houston to Dallas, oblivious to the moon I was watching.

Even when Marty isn’t right beside me she is still in my head, it’s really spooky sometimes. That night I could feel her saying, “It’s okay to feel content.  It’s okay to feel right with the world.”  

It’s okay to feel good.  In spite of what so many want you to believe this is an amazing world in which we live, there is beauty, light, and life all around us and we truly live in the most amazing, safest, richest time in history.  I know, I know, there are wars, rumors of war, hunger, poverty, and true tragedy all around us and we must confront all of that.  But life, today, in this era, while complicated, is incredible.

 Marty and I know a little about tragedy so I get a lot of the pessimism.  But that moon, that smiling moon the color of which I am at a loss to describe, that moment in time when Marty’s always present spirit told me to look, to feel, to breathe, to forget everything else but that moment.  

For me, moments like that shows me that a God is with us, my Christian God, your Jewish God, your Muslim God, it doesn’t matter.  It matters that in that moment that crescent moon was God smiling at all of us and saying it’s okay to feel good.

And Marty was there whispering in my ear to remember how important it was to see and feel that smile and be nowhere but in that moment.

2016.....Looks Like We Made It

Ours is not an easy life.

It is a life full of anxiety, fear, isolation, loneliness, intrusion, boredom, exhaustion, anger, abject sadness and grief.  It is a life that is physically and emotionally draining that can suck the happiness and satisfaction out of your soul.  It is a faith breaking questioning experience.

I wouldn’t wish this existence on anyone.

I know how we make it; I don’t know how others do it.  People in other countries, people in other states, people in other cities have strokes.  I don’t know how they survive.

We survive, we thrive, we live life because of our support system.  We have a good life because of that support system.  I don’t know how people do this alone.

We have four remarkable women who care for Marty and I every day.  Nykkie, Erica, Renee and La Shonda are an omnipresent part of our life.  They are with us every day, every moment, high and low.  These women make our daily lives better; I don’t know how people do this alone.

Our care givers, our family, parents, children, grandchildren, siblings have been remarkable in their patience and love.  Our health care support has been remarkable in their care, availability and love.  When you add it up, and I did, weird guy that I am, there are well over 50 people, 50 loving, amazing people, 50 family, friends, clergy, doctors, nurses, administrators who care for Marty, who care for me, who support us in our daily lives.  

How many people get to say they have 50 care givers?

I don’t know how others do it; I don’t get how they make it without the help.  Without each and every one of those people who care for Marty, who care for me, who make me exercise, who feed Marty, who play golf, who listen to her breathe, who get us into see Great and Wise, who offer comfort, who offer wisdom, who offer love our hard life would not be a life at all.

Because we have people who draw blood who wipe chins who offer God’s blessings who watch over us who pray for us our life, our life is an actual living breathing miracle.

If you ever ask yourself the question, “How does this amazing Marty’sHusband do it?”  Well, first you have a warped sense of amazing and second it’s a matter of support, it is all of the people who do it, it’s the family, the friends, the care givers who do it, that’s how you make a life livable in difficult circumstances.

On this first day of a new year I want to say thank you.  I want to say thank you to Nykkie, Erica, Renee and La Shonda.  I want to say thank you to Matt, Erin, Lyle, Sarah, Noah, Lily, Emma and little Lucy.  I want to say thank you to Larry Sr. and Bettye Lou and Martha, Jeb, John, Liz, Ken, Kate, Lee, Will, Jerry, Luan, Kelly, Bill and Berkley.  I want to say thank you to Great and Wise, Melissa, Jessica, Angie, Annetta, Patsy, Pey, Maydee, Keith, Leslie, Ann, Steve, Dee Dee, Gretchen, Robbie, Skip, Pete, Dean, Sheryl, Tom,  Dick, Sue, Elizabeth, John, Andrew, Leah, David, Amanda, Jackie, Bob, Aemelia, Joe and the countless others who love us, who pray for us, who think of us and who in so many ways support us.

Our life, at times, is full of really bad stuff.  I spend time afraid, unrelentingly anxious, isolated and angry. 

 My personal faith does not allow me to believe God put us here to test us, to make us feel this way, I don’t think God was leading us to this spot.  I do believe, my faith demands that we understand that God has put all of you in our lives to give us faith and show us love.

Our life at all times is full of love and I got news for you, love really does make all of that other stuff manageable.  

Thank you for making a difficult life better, thank you for caring for my bride, thank you for caring for me.

God Envy

I have God envy.

No I’m not envious of God though the whole omnipotent omnipresent thing does have its appeal, especially during football season.  Red Raider and Cowboy fans would be happy happy. 

I am envious of how some people are able to live and accept the trials and tribulations of life by their faith in God.

I have good friends, friends who I admire, friends who I respect, friends who have gone through stuff, who have had trials and tests in their lives and I envy how they can grab hold of their faith, turn to their God and lay their burdens at God’s feet.  

I sit in a combination of admiration and envy of those fellow travelers, fellow Christians, who can really “give it to God and let go” and they are able to really let go.  I don’t know how to do that, maybe my faith, my understanding is too weak, maybe I’m too much of a narcissist to think its okay for me to let go of my obsession.

I don’t know if my friends really do let go and then blithely walk away unburdened and unstressed but the simple act of letting go for God seems to help them through their own tribulations.  I envy that; I can’t find a way to let God have my burdens, I can’t turn over my angst and anxiety to God.

I try but I can’t turn off my head, I can’t stop the adrenaline.   

Marty gets sick, Marty seems tired, Marty coughs, Marty says “oh”, my ears perk up like a dogs and my adrenal glands sputter and cough and kick into gear and the juices flow and anxiety awakens and I can’t turn it off.  

I look at my wife, I look at where we have been and what we have been through and then I find myself looking at the road ahead and my nerves start to rattle and hum.  I feel it, I feel it all over, and to quote the Troggs “I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my bones.”

My anxiety about Marty’s condition(s) is without a doubt my steepest climb to normalcy and the ever elusive contentment.  It makes it hard to focus on anything, it makes it hard to live a fulfilled life, it makes it hard to be nice.  It is a complete pain in the ass.

I’ve tried, I’ve tried to say, “Okay, I’ve done everything I need and can do, it’s now up to …..Whatever.”  I take a deep breath and walk away and try and make a conscious decision to turn my worry meter off, I then turn around and walk right back into Marty’s room where I start going over her medicine, checking her machines, checking everything to make sure we are not causing a problem.  

I am going to cure her, I know I am. 

I know I am not going to cure her, I also know I am not going to shed my role as an anxiety ridden, worrying, hovering caregiver.

It’s clear to me, I know I don’t have the faith of some of my friends, I’ve been aware of that most of my life.  It’s a hard thing to admit, it’s a hard thing for me to understand.  At times I’m afraid of my doubts and I think that if I admit those doubts then the scary God some want us to worship will rain hell on my head.  At times I think that my doubt is why I can’t “give it to God”.

I want to give this worry, this constant sense of dread to God, hell, I want to give it to anyone, it makes me tired, it makes me grumpy, it makes me less than what I want to be.  

I guess it also defines me as human, as a concerned caregiver who loves his wife and who wants to believe in something greater.  It makes me a man who has a very tenuous hold on his faith, but ultimately believes God wants us to fully live and that part of fully living and loving is, we worry, part of how we keep faith with each other is that we feel pain, hurt and anxiety when another of us is broken.

I admire the ability to set things aside  I can’t get there now, I can’t get over the fact that I feel responsible, that I feel the need to control, that by paying hyper attention we will get through the next day.  I think that’s what God really wants from me today.  

I wish it were different.

Who to Blame

She didn’t do it.  It wasn’t really her fault, really, I’m serious. 

God didn’t do it.  She didn’t have strokes because God wanted that, really, I can’t believe that.

We have to learn to quit blaming the broken, quit blaming God for the brokenness.  Some things just are.

It’s a pretty natural condition, assigning blame.  I call it natural because it’s what I naturally want to do and I am Joe Average so I know and understand everything.  When Marty had her first stroke I badly wanted to blame someone, I wanted to hold someone accountable, I just couldn’t find the right person.

When Marty had her second stroke I was still looking, looking for someone or something to blame.  It just seemed natural that someone or something did this to her and I wanted to be angry and shout at the person or entity responsible.  I just couldn’t yell at the right person, it would have helped if knew who that was.

There is the crowd that wants to blame this on Marty.  She has to have some accountability and aren’t we all about the accountability.  She was overweight, she smoked, she didn’t exercise and she had a family history.  I thought about blaming her for this whole mess, it made sense and it would be easy because she feels guilty about the burden she has cast upon her family.  She feels like she is to blame so why not just blame her.

The only problem with that theory is that there are lots and lots of people walking around who made a lot worse life style choice than Marty and they have not been afflicted with this disease or any other disease.  I see them every day, I know them, I know their history, I wonder every day why not them instead of Marty.  There is no answer.

Is Marty to blame?  Maybe, partly, I suspect the strokes would have come regardless of her life style choices.  The ruptured aneurysm that almost killed her was congenital.  That’s not her fault.

There’s the fundamentalist religious crowd that wants to blame Marty and her sins.  Their view is this is God’s wrath visited upon an abject sinner.  She made mistakes in God’s eyes; she has to pay God’s fee for the mistakes so God takes those things she most prizes as payment.  I’m not sure I buy this theory of blame either, aren’t we all abject sinners?

Maybe it’s my fault.  If I hadn’t worked so much so far away so much of the time, maybe I could have made a difference somehow.  Maybe it’s my sins we are both paying for now, maybe God smote Marty to teach me a lesson.

Then there’s the whole test your faith Book of Job kind of thing.  If this is a test of my faith, I’m losing, if it’s testing my loyalty, I’m doing okay, if it’s to teach Marty and I a greater lesson, I ain’t seeing the point.

There are those that will say this is part of God’s entire big plan for Marty and me, that everything happens for a reason and some day we will see the reason.  Maybe, I have a hard time with that.  I’m a pretty big believer in free will and I just don’t believe in a God that jacks with you like that. 

I’m sorry to all of you who might be bothered by this view but I don’t think God’s plans included Marty being stricken like this.  I believe we have all been touched by God for our very existence but after that, I frankly think God has a much more Laissze-Faire approach to his creation.  God kicks the rock down the hill and then watches it roll, God lets us live life.

What I believe is… we break…. and to quote Gaga, “We are born this way”.  We are created a miracle, a delicate, finely tuned miracle built with remarkable strength and fragility, we break. 

It’s like the old Mouse Trap game, the game where you built a series of triggers, like balls rolling into a basket, to finally drop the trap on the mouse; if one thing in the chain is missing, if one element is out of place, the trap wouldn’t fall and catch the mouse.  In this miracle of a human body we break if the smallest of things gets out of sync with the rest of our body.  We are breakable, we were created breakable, God doesn’t have to proactively break us, it just happens.

None of this means we can abdicate our responsibility in life that we shouldn’t take care of ourselves and those around us.  I understand the role we play in breaking ourselves and others.  I understand it is natural and human to want to lay blame and fix accountability in an effort to ensure some things never happen again.  

We can’t forget the Newtowns, the Auroras, the Katrinas, the Iraq war, 9/11 and all of the other more minor issues that fall on all of us.  We must learn, that’s part of the process too.  I’m just saying that sometimes we should spend more time dealing and understanding the aftermath of the event than blaming the victims.

The right Reverend Leslie of FPC confessed to God the other day in her sermon she needed to quit trying to figure out why bad things happened, why blackness befell good people.  I agree.  It’s not natural to not wonder, but there are no real answers.  Sometimes stuff just happens.

A Prayer for Marty

Before the strokes Marty had an active prayer life.  We talked about it, she talked about it, she wondered about it out loud, we talked about why she prayed, what it did for her.  She always felt that somehow prayer helped center her and helped her understand the life she experienced. 

For Marty, for me, prayer was very personal, it was a very personal way to connect with God, to connect with what we both hoped was divine inspiration, to what we both hoped was something greater in our world.  

It’s why she chafed at the spectacle of public prayer, the prayer at the ball game that was more of a sermon than a prayer, a prayer at the meeting that wasn’t a personal and intimate conversation with the One who knows you the best.

I don’t suspect she had the traditional pray-er pray-ee relationship with God, Marty wasn’t a big religious traditionalist.  I wouldn’t even say she was deeply religious, she was deeply spiritual, she believed in something larger than herself and worked at trying to find the key to discovery of how that worked and how it impacted her life and the world.

Right before her first stroke stole part of her ability to think she found a book of prayers, Guerrillas of Grace, by Ted Loder.  She loved the book and read from it and quoted from it often with some of the prayers touching her soul.  

I’ve read it, focusing particularly on the dog eared prayers, the ones that touched Marty before the strokes, the ones that spoke to her life.  The prayers speak to her desire for God to bring her ever close, to soothe her anger and judgment, to help her let go of the pain of loss. 

When I read them I am touched, touched by the way my wife moved through her life, touched by her prayers then and what her prayers would be now if she had the clarity of thought she once possessed.    

I asked her other day if she still prays.  She said yes but when I asked about what I was met with silence as her brain tried to retrieve that information from pathways that are blocked by damaged brain cells.  The thought, like so many disappeared into the wind. 

I am narcissistic enough to think I know Marty’s prayers; we talked and if I were to give her a bit of a boost, a running prayer start so to speak, I think it would go something like this.  (We already know the beginning from a previous prayer event)

Dear God,

Hello, it’s been awhile.

I’m still pretty pissed about this whole stroke thing.

I don’t understand why the God I love would allow this to happen to me.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like not being able to think clearly, I don’t like not being able to say the things I want to say when I want to say them, I don’t like all of these people touching me, rolling me over, poking me and prodding me.  I hate the lack of control.

I’m thankful I survived, but I wonder, so often, I wonder why, why did I survive, why did I end up like this, why did the things I most prized in myself, my thinking, my talking, my humor,  have to go?

My God, I believe in you as a God of love, as a God of gentleness, as a God who gentles my spirit and my heart.  I don’t pray for a cure, I don’t pray to be able to walk once more, or hold my husband or comfort my children or guide my grand children.

I simply pray that you help me know that I am not too much of a burden, too much of a hardship, too much for those that I love.  Mostly I ask that you give me the strength, grace and patience to live the life I have and to accept and embrace my life as it is today.

I am thankful and blessed by my family.  It’s not often in our life we get to see how much we are loved, I have and knowing the depth of their love fills my heart.  I am forever grateful I have been around long enough to see my family live their love for me.

I am grateful I have seen more days, more blue skies, more rain, more clouds, more babies’ smiles.  I am grateful I have seen my daughter married and become a mother, my son grow into a wonderful husband and father and I have had the privilege of seeing and touching my true legacy in this physical world, my grandchildren.

I will always wish I could be more of who I was,  wish I could cradle those babies in my arms, wish I could  teach them about life and all the pain and beauty it holds.  I wish I could sing to them, I wish they could know me, know me for who I am inside, know me as I was.

God, there are days I wish I could sing my thankfulness loud enough for all to hear and there are days I want to beat my chest and cry and curse everyone and everything.

With all these things, I am here today and for those blessings and curses alike, for all of the small blessings I see every day, I give you my thanks.

And, with all that said, Amen, Goodbye and have a nice day.