24 Hours

Dear UD,

Too many times I reach for the phone to call you. I want to hear your voice, your deep, infectious laugh, and I want to hear your thoughts, your wisdom and insight. Or if nothing else, I just want to talk to you, to tell you everything and hear you say that it will be okay. To hear you say that I’ll be okay.

Especially this past week when I received so much bad news in such a short amount of time.

A sister left rehab and was living in a van (now sleeping in a laundry mat), homeless and ill on the streets of San Jose.

I didn’t get the full-time faculty position, even though I was one of the top two. One phone call and I’m right back where I started—an adjunct with no job security, no health insurance, no stability. I don’t know how I will make ends meet, once again, and I just have to trust God. Still, the stress presses on me, and I feel scared and alone.

One of my best friends had to go to the doctor for tests this week, trying to find out why she’s having attacks of intestinal pain.

A brother in law in surgery and a sister with a hurt back from a fall on Halloween.

Laina home from cheer practice in tears from her flyer’s leg slammed onto her forearm, maybe a torn muscle.

One of the family dogs run over. An accident. One of the grandkids left behind. For a moment.

It’s been so hot, even though it’s November, and my electric bill is, again, so high. I get my paycheck, pay the bills, buy gas and groceries, and the money’s gone.

Mizzou, in the news this week, with hunger strikes, protests, threats of violence, and racial unrest.

And then, Friday the 13^th and Paris. Horrific acts of terrorism. Hundreds of people enjoying an evening out with family, friends. Now over 100 dead, more injured, even more psychologically scarred.

The whole world in mourning.

What happens when there’s too much negative too quickly? When we are bombarded by bad? Boom, boom, boom.

Are we like a sponge? Do we soak it all in?  And expand, expand, expand? So that we are stretched so thin and stringy that there’s no room for something good? Does it become part of us or do we, eventually, explode? And what will that explosion look like? Who will it hurt?

How do we help each other through? Before, during, after such tragedy? So many bombs both personal and worldwide?

Perhaps we need to, every day, put on the armor of God as Ephesians 6:10-18 tells us.

I think of Mandela’s words from Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, “I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

Still, I wish you were here to listen, UD. To share the burden. To help process it all. To remind me that it will be okay. Or that if it’s not okay, that I can handle it.

Imagine that you’re walking through a storm, you’d tell me, but the storm can’t touch you. Or, you’d say, imagine that you’re walking through a pit of rattlesnakes, but you have on tall, heavy boots, so the vipers can’t bite you. They can’t hurt you.

I wish you were here to show me the way through with your spirit of love. To tell me: you’ve got this.

Love, Rach

Mooring

(To Uncle David, who was a safe haven for many)

Dear UD,

Don’t worry about the world ending,

you’d tell me,

but then my world ended three months ago

when you died suddenly—

it’s theend of the world as we know it, and I feel bad—

cracking your head on the marbled counter as you fell,

leaving a half-drunk glass of iced tea, lunch preparations, and a world that needed you.

Your heart failed,

they told us, and

unmoored, your beloved dogs Harley, OB, and Lucky ran so crazy outside that the neighbors wondered.

Three months before, in January, the ground was frozen and the chilled wind too cold to lower dad’s coffin at the graveside ceremony. But you were there, wrapped in your heavy coat, leaning on your cane. The arrangement of flowers (every single flower mentioned in Shakespearean literature) a testament to your generosity.

Then, in April, when the world is mud wonderful with celebrations and renewal of life, with the beauty of spring, and instead, blindsided, we had to return to a cemetery.

Don’t worry about some catastrophe,

you’d tell me,

as we talked for hours on the phone;

even though you lived on 85^th street in Manhattan that fateful September 11 when the twin towers fell, you’d say that the world is fine and that people have been predicting Armageddon for ages.

But you are not here, and the world is not fine.

I am not fine.

I think of the headlines, since you died, and I wonder what you’d say now, a mere three months later. The flash flooding, the church shootings, the fires, the murdered health care workers, the politics, the earthquakes, the list goes on, and today, the famous lion decapitated for sport. I wonder if you’d see it, apocalypse here now. Is that why you left us so soon? So you wouldn’t have to see it?

It'sbeen a long day without you, my friend, and I'll tell you all about it when Isee you again.

Three months. Only three months. Three neverending months.

It’s been raining every day lately, dark storm clouds blotting out the sun, keeping us cooped up, but an ocean of tears couldn’t fill the void inside, couldn’t make me feel safe or secure again. I throw out the rope, but there’s nothing to hold it. 

Unmoored. Unmoored. Unmoored.

I am adrift.

 

I cannot journal. I cannot read devotions. I can, barely, talk to God. I am depressed. I am bored. Facebook is boring. Everyone is on one extreme or the other. Everyone finds some proof that his or her belief is true—both sides 100% truth, so nothing is true, nothing is real, and nothing makes sense. All of this information at our fingertips. The whole world connected. Yet, no one checks sources or credibility. No one thinks.

Overwhelmed and alone.

Am I supposed to be the wise old crone now? Or can I simply say I am a bird, say that I identify as a bird and step off the cliff and fly.

I am adrift in an ocean of tears, and I cannot find my way home. I am adrift in a sea of words, and I cannot understand. I am adrift in an ocean of beliefs and facts that contradict each other.

Hopeless and alone.

Is this what the end of the world looks like?

I wish you could have stayed to see it with me.

Love, Rach