Paying Attention (21): remembering Margaret's mom

In this season that my time is called for in places other than writing new posts, I've been following an idea my good Father gave me to  ponder and notice again the words I've already written once.  I've discovered this practice allows me to keep praying the beads of memory in this sacramental life.

In the past few years, the first week of November has become a memorial week, appropriately ushered in by All Saints Day.  One year ago during this week we said good-bye to our dear friend Trey.  Five years ago this week I watched my friend Margaret say good-bye to her mother.  I am grateful for the lessons I've learned watching dear ones grieve.  Today's post is what I learned watching Margaret and her father say good-bye to Peggy.

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on grieving again (originally posted November 14, 2009)

I'm thinking about grief again.  In fact, the subject keeps coming up everywhere I turn. Several of my friends are mourning the loss of a loved one, some are mourning the loss of relationship and a few are mourning the loss of certain childhood privileges - for example unconditional love from a parent or ever hearing the words I love you from any trusted adult in their growing up years.

Our nation grieved the loss of thirteen soldiers last week.  We lose soldiers all the time, but we sit up and take notice when they are lost on our own soil at the hands of one of our own countrymen.  This waste of life haunts us and we try to figure out how to lament nobly and adequately without upsetting our entire emotional landscape.

My friend Margaret lost her mom this week.  For over six years since her mom's diagnosis of ovarian cancer she has tried to imagine what these days would be like -- when would they happen, how would she respond, what would moving forward without her mom cost her family?  I wonder if she'll really ever be able to answer those questions?

A week ago -- on a Friday morning -- we visited Margaret's parents, Toby and Peggy.  We arrived at their home and tried to enter the reality of their long goodbye.  We walked around their house and behaved as if we'd been invited over for a spaghetti supper -- noticing pictures on the wall, wandering around the space, making small talk.  To me the whole house seemed lopsided, almost dizzying in its architectural imbalance.  None of the weight of lovely furniture, books, china, or beloved piano could balance the floors that seemed to literally slope down the hall toward Peggy's bedroom.  For many long months the entire center of their universe was located in that bedroom, their energies absorbed in the tasks of comfort and homely care, love and unexercised grief.  It's as if the gravity of their weighty love drew us in.  We walked the long hallway into Peggy's room and encircled her with hymn-singing, small talk, Scripture-reading, prayer, laughter. 

We are rusty in our hymns, the four of us friends.  But we worked through The Church's One Foundation, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and others, trying to read the old black notes moving up and down between sharps, flats and naturals on the page.  We laughed to ourselves that we'd be in a position to sing these great old songs to the man and wife who'd mastered them their whole lives.  Peggy was certainly humble to receive our gift with no look of horror at our missed notes in her lovely, large blue eyes.  I noticed her eyes most when they were fixed on Toby while he spoon-fed her ice chips.  I'm not sure I've ever seen such naked trust in an adult face before. 

The whole love between this husband and wife -- its gritty, imperfect reality -- was far better than any movie story of love I've ever seen.  I'm thankful I got to tell Peggy how much I'd learned from her dying.  How much I learned about the value of long years with my husband.  About the charity that suffers through horrors as well as delights.  The charity that causes one spouse to sleep in a recliner chair next to his wife's bedside for night after long night.  I also learned -- again-- the violence of death.  The sturdiness of our insistence on living is one miserable bugger to someone who is suffering and ready to go to her true home.  Everything is ready, everyone is ready but that body that insists on trying to cope with suffering and go on living.  Eventually, death comes and does it grim work tearing families apart.  I learn each time to embrace the glory of Christ's resurrection more. 

I'm thankful for last Friday morning with Peggy and Toby and Margaret and Lori and Andrea and two-year-old Katie.  Eventually we swum back out of the gravity of that room and walked back up the hall toward the piano.  We sang more.  I'm thankful for my new friend Brian Moss who gave us his sheet music to the Psalms that have been sustaining Margaret all these long days.  We were asked again later that week to sing another Brian Moss song at Peggy's funeral.  Between that and an old Don Wyrtzen anthem that Toby requested, once again, we novices felt humbled to sing for this musical family.  And we slid back and forth between the extraordinary extremes of grieving and giggling at the absurdity of it. 

Margaret, I'm saving up some funny stories for you.  It's occurred to us that your mom might have been able to laugh along with our fumbling, stumbling attempts to sing for her family this week.  I know the day will come for you to laugh, too. 

In the meantime, tears.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (18): winning the Brian Murphy lottery

In this chronological remembrance, we're in the newlywed years.  Lord, have mercy (and thankfully He did!)  Today I'm re-sharing a poem I wrote for my husband's 43rd birthday last year. ...............................

43 years

A poem* for my husband on his birthday

Ninety-two, ninety-three, I most remember   

As the winter a blizzard shut us in and we are   

Broke from a hard two years as newly wed  

Where the meager provision of being   

Student, employee, father for our first born

Son and now another one on the way, we've

Neither a degree nor cash. Dreams die in   

Fatigue and bank accounts give way as you and your    

Muscle and sweat and hope fall in to make   

A loss. We lived in two bedrooms down the   

Hallway from kind friends in their nice  

Neighborhood. Or that has all really   

Happened and we go to Johnson City where,   

Thanks to Rick Jindra and Steve Conroy,   

You get a job cleaning cars at Dependable   

Auto Sales. It’s all a backwards dream, a slog

To get a life and home before the next

Arrival of another son, your dogged days 

Of honor. A church acquaintance  

Has encouraged us that giving when we   

Don't think we have anything to give keeps the   

Scarcity of our mindset overwhelmed by

The bounty. I love the mentors, at least I   

Think I do, in their wisdom, their attempt   

To find ways for us to find a living from the WIC   

Office. Otherwise the early years seem   

Like a country music ballad. A stunned   

Twenty-something man runs from school to work   

And home up three floors of the apartment house on Frederick Street,

Chasing a toddler with the second-born in hot

Pursuit where otherwise you sat up late writing  

Required lines, planning for your next degree  

And child, a daughter. We were waiting to get our   

First salary and listening to the Yankees win the pennant

On the radio. You worked, you dreamed, you wrote the   

Fifty-two pages of your thesis, the new baby  

Arriving near the end. I slept on the couch and  

healed and nursed and cried while you stayed up

Thirty-six hours straight, determined. Then that   

Summer there is the day of the great Teaching Job   

Offer, we move to Conklin -- Richard T. Stank

Middle School, beloved George Schuster  

Down the hall. You read “Goodnight   

Moon” to your children and Teddy Roosevelt

To your students, and Rick Patino for the team.   

Then it’s winter again. My water breaks   

And we head back to Lourde's Hospital   

And we welcome another daughter, and   

Sometime just about then you must have almost   

Seen yourself as others see or saw you,   

people like Dr. Jagger and Scott Gravelding, but could not quite   

Accept either their affirmation

Or their equally anointed naming. Uncertain,   

Afraid, you kept at it. A few years later
Crisis and pain and forgiveness fall in to make   
A calling. You lived into yourself, a man named.   

You are still the father, student, teacher, much the same,
but now also mentor, pastor, friend.
Now you are happier, I think, and older.
Those of us lucky enough to know you say
That we have won the Brian Murphy lottery.

*ADAPTED FROM "YESTERDAYS", 

A POEM BY ROBERT CREELEY

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (17): the time we got mac & cheese for a wedding gift

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I'm re-sharing a post I wrote as a follow up to to the short essay I wrote for Think Christian in response to Chipotle's viral ad.

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source

Twenty-two years ago -- and only a few months after our wedding day -- my husband and I knocked on the door of a church acquaintance’s apartment.  She’d invited us to join her and her three sons for dinner.  It was her wedding gift to us.  We were touched.  

We’d never been to her home before but we knew a good bit of her story.  Her on-again, off-again husband lived in prison.  Each time he got out he promised to sober up, quit the drugs and be her man.  Each time he left her jobless, pregnant and broke.  

Since her quiet invitation following service one Sunday I’d tried to imagine what dinner in her home would look, feel and taste like.  She weighed probably less than 100 pounds herself and I wondered what sort of food she had to offer.

We arrived to her hot kitchen, children and their toys cluttered bare floors.  She stood over a pot on the stove, stirring bubbling water.  On the counter a blue and gold box, cardboard lid ripped open, stood our entree:  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  

Frankly, I was relieved.  We knew this food.  It gave us something in common. Turned out the entree was the entire meal, we sat where we could find a seat, television blaring and enjoyed creamy noodles and awkward conversation.

It's one of the best gifts I've ever received.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (16): my family line of honeymoon babies

Apparently I've not written much about my high school years in this blog. I seem to be skipping from middle school era to marriage and motherhood.  Let's be honest -- that era was pretty short.  Today I've excerpted a post I originally titled Flying a Kite in a Hurricane and posted in August 2008 and again at Micha Boyett's One Good Phrase series:  One Good Quip (You Trust God to Keep You Safe at Night, but You Still Lock the Doors).

three generations of wedlock -- all 3 of us brides giving birth to our first baby about 9 months following the moment this photos were taken

My parents' parents didn't talk about sex. My parents began the conversation, but either they weren't speaking above a whisper or I wasn't listening. I managed to have my first son three days shy of nine months from the first time I ever had sex. When he was born I still wasn't sure I'd ever had it. I didn't care. I flew the kite of that beautiful baby boy for all the world to see.

We have a history of honeymoon babies in this family. It's pretty much legendary now. Possibly all this hushing up about sex has something to do with it. So I called my mother-in-law, the medical professional, from my honeymoon hotel room. Possibly we should know something about birth control, we thought. Of course, it was most likely too late by this point. Brian and I had spent about a half hour discussing it once during our engagement. He'd heard somewhere that the Pill could be dangerous so I blundered my way through my first ob/gyn visit and left holding some oddly-shaped doo dad that I was too embarrassed to let the family doctor know I hadn't understood the first thing about. (that thing is supposed to go where?)

During my growing-up years, the oldest child of six, my parents continued silently in their quest to limit the number of mouths they brought into existence. My dad's pastor/pauper paycheck and my mother's exhausted bouts with clinical depression probably had something to do with this. As far as I know now the only people offering advice were radical feminists and post-war baby boomer pious surbabanites. Not a lot of help. God kept sending them new kites of their own to fly. 

There comes a point when kite flying in stormy weather scares the hell out of you, but sometimes you know you're not the one controlling the string.

On the verge of being a mother myself, I had my first experience with mixing theology and sexuality. Experience is probably a gentle word. More like got bashed over the head by it. It was the era of the Pro-Life Political Movement and the Homeschooling Revolution and Operation Rescue and all that. 

The rhetoric blustering around me was heavy on the ideology, light on the theology. In this fear-filled cocoon, the Church had taught me that sex could be shameful.  Not only was losing one's virginity the unpardonable sin, paradoxically so was limiting the number of one's offspring. 

Soon enough we'd figured out how to "plan" baby number two, all without the aid of chemicals (or weird-looking doo dads), thank you very much.

Now I had self-righteous rhetoric on my side and I felt like I'd stumbled into the right "camp". Sometimes, you just get lucky and the storm's blowing the other way, you know? 

But idealism about family planning doesn't mean a speck when you've spent the day laying aside your every need as a human being to meet the needs of the arrows in your quiver and the nights sleep-walking from marriage bed to crib to toddler bed, only to end up slumped over a nursing infant and waking up thankful you didn't smother it to death. 

Idealism did not last through the storms of reality for me. And then I had baby number four. I'd been married six years. I was 26 years old. We'd been making a real salary for less than a year. I was tired.

So we, Brian and me, got interested in science real quick-like. The information was easy to come by, even before Google. Of course, we covered Theology, too. It consisted of getting sage advice wrapped in euphemisms from my grandmother and mother. The same women who didn't talk about sex were full of wisdom when they saw me teetering on the edge of the looney-bin. I am grateful to them to this day. 

You trust God to keep you safe at night, but you still lock the doors. 

I was more than relieved to agree that this must be true, even if it wasn't terribly deep. When you're teetering on the edge, sometimes a quip will do.

So we blundered and bumbled and stumbled our way through these ideas and truths about what it means to enjoy sex and to create children and to avoid creating new children and in the middle of all that uncertainty and shame and hushed and unspoken questions, I was schooled in the deepest theology of all:  that God is sovereign and full of grace and forgiveness. That it is not my wisdom or understanding that brings out the best in God. His expectations for me are surpassed by his delights. 

I do not deserve these four divinely created images of the one true God -- Andrew, Alexander, Kendra and Natalie. I do not deserve to be living in joy and harmony with my amazing, unplanned siblings and their own burgeoning families.

I will hold the end of the string - flying the beauty and hilarity of this gift of family that came down as lights from Heaven.  I'm hopeful for my own kids to know better than Brian and me the Church's better nature, the language of welcoming life founded in the nature of the Giver of life.  All of this while retaining a child-like trust that refuses to take our ideals too seriously.

And, in the middle of the blustering hurricanes, I will laugh as Abraham and Sarah at the holy absurdity of it all.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (15): mourning friends

there was the time you called me up and met me with your tandem bicycle 

we rode eight miles back to your house then

picked out all the rocks in the yard by your swimming pool

because your father wanted it.

only then we collapsed on the grass

and I cried next to you because he had broken up with me.

there was the time your uncle died

and I couldn't find the Polish church and almost missed

you singing at the funeral

but I walked in right in the middle of the song.

when you sat back down in the hard pew

next to me I held your hand

because I didn't know what else to do.

there was the New Year's Eve our house

caught fire and my babies' clothes

all smelled like smoke.

you said come over and bring your laundry.

you took the bags from me at your front door

and told us to sit on your couch and take a nap.

you covered us in the red and blue quilt.

there was the Sunday night at church

i was so mad  i banged the door handle 

to leave the room in the middle of the meeting.

when I came back to my seat even though I didn't want to,

you reached your arm back through the crack between the

maroon and metal chairs and touched your hand to the top 

of my shaking knee. and then i sat still.

there was the Friday morning we drove to your

parents' house instead of sitting at the dining room table

in Endwell to pray.

we brought sheet music and you brought out the 

hymn books and we tried to find all four notes in the harmony

while we stood around your mother's bed.  she smiled at us and 

craned her neck to the spoon your father held out with ice chips.

we played her piano and the toddler plunked extra notes.

that was the last time I saw your mother
before she died.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (14): All Who Enter Here

In this chronology of paying attention, I've entered the middle school years.  Oh, joy.  I haven't actually written much about that yet, except for pages and pages of uneasy prose in the diaries I've locked away in a Rubbermaid container under my bed.

Certainly one of the very best parts of my middle school and high school years were the sunkissed pond days we spent at my grandparents' cottage.  I've written one of my all-time favorite essays about that place here.  I'd love to share the words with you again. 

All Who Enter Here

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.

A Chronology of Paying Attention (13): the preacher's family is a dancing family

*I first wrote this post for the Dance issue of Catapult* Magazine, May 2013*

“From the oldest of times, people danced for a number of reasons. They danced in prayer or so that their crops would be plentiful or so their hunt would be good. And they danced to stay physically fit and show their community spirit. And they danced to celebrate.” And that is the dancing we’re talking about. Aren’t we told in Psalm 149 “Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Let them praise His name in the dance”? And it was King David — King David, who we read about in Samuel — and what did David do? What did David do?

-- Ren in Footloose (1984)

One night when I was about 16 years old, a late-winter snowstorm closed down the streets.  You’d have to live through a blizzard to understand the silence of snow.  At the time, I could barely see past my adolescent angst to notice my brothers, sisters and parents.  But this night the snow fell, Dad built a fire under the mantel, my brother baked chocolate chip cookies and someone put a Beach Boys cassette tape into the player and cranked up the volume.  Then my preacher father danced like we’d never seen him dance — maybe because we turned off all the lights or because we felt isolated by snow, like the only family on the earth that night.  All I know is that for the accumulation of good memories my parents gave me, very few moments captured my imagination like the night we danced on the living room rug in the firelight.  I’m pretty sure I went back to being perpetually miffed with all of them the next day, but now, tucked into my sensory memory, was the knowledge the preacher’s family could dance.

1989: Footloose

I remember everything about the night perfectly. After 12 years together at a Christian school, my best friend enrolled in public school her senior year. I tagged along to the first dance for moral support because neither one of us had ever been.  

I wore a shiny, white, polyester blouse (mock neck and capped sleeves) and pastel pink, pleated pants, pumps, dangly earrings, moussed-up bangs.  I’m sure we danced with people a few times — some of Lori’s new friends — but mostly I remember the throbbing music touching off some inner pulse I didn’t even know I possessed.  To borrow a line, “I had the time of my life and I’d never felt this way before.”

2001: Play that funky music

My husband and I didn’t dance at our wedding.  Truth is, even if it would have been permitted, we wouldn’t have known how.  We didn’t drink then, either.  It took ten years of keeping vows — some years, just barely —  before we figured out we really needed to dance.  We celebrated our anniversary on a free Caribbean cruise, found the dance floor and the frozen fruity drinks.  We closed the club each night, dancing off our pent-up piety.

2007: Foxtrot

A few years ago, while two or three dozen of my extended family still gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, an ambitious relative cleared the far side of the fire hall for a dance floor.  One by one a few cousins, especially the littlest ones in the fourth generation, an uncle, an aunt began to twist and spin.  Without much coaxing, Grandpa and Grandma took their turn on the floor.  The fox trot never looked so good.  Before this November afternoon I’d only ever seen my grandfather’s eyes shine this shade of blue during heated volleyball matches at the cottage or banjo-plucking sessions to old gospel tunes.  Standing along the wall, my mother whispered to me, “All these years, he thought he wasn’t supposed to dance.”

It’s one of the saddest epigraphs I can imagine.

2009: Polka

My friends Lori and Chris are great dancers. Firsthand, I’ve seen them swing, waltz and polka. For my thirty-eighth birthday party, they taught us to polka.  Seriously, that was my birthday present — can you possibly think of one better? We rolled up the rug, moved the living room furniture and gathered round to watch them demonstrate — to the tune of “In Heaven There Is No Beer.”  We watched and clapped and laughed. Then we tried to dance to “Roll Out the Barrel” and some of us did a pretty decent job.

Some of us, not so much.

2009: Thriller

Summer of Thriller from Tamara Murphy on Vimeo.

One night during summer vacation on an Adirondack lake, we reached back into that family snowstorm memory,  lit lanterns on the deck and threw a full-out, shake-what-your-momma-gave-ya dance party.  The party became a tradition we repeat every summer when all 20 of us vacation together.  It’s always summer now, never a snowstorm.  The feeling of isolation is about the same because we tend to vacation at conservative church camps.  This means we have to close all the curtains and keep the speakers away from open windows.  We stomp and twirl and sweat through our summer clothes until we can’t take it anymore.  Then we  end the night jumping off some forbidden dock lit by an upstate New York sunset.

No one dances harder than the preacher (even though, on occasion, he makes us take an intermission for family devotions).

In 2009 some of the younger family members prepared ahead of time, learning all the steps to Thriller.  They performed it flash-mob style in a vacation town parking lot, the King of Pop singing back-up through my brother’s mini-van speakers.  

2011: Texas Two-Step

In July of 2011 we danced our hearts out at my sister’s wedding.  In August we moved our four kids 1,700 miles away from everyone we’d ever known.  Three months later, the newlyweds came to visit — our first guests from back home.  We’d planned a perfect itinerary for a Friday night in Austin:  country-fried steaks, cheap beer, cowboy boots and learning the Texas Two-Step at the advertised “last of the true Texas dance halls”. Problem was we were too poor to pay for lessons for all of us.  Determined to dance, we went back to our rental house, cleared the dining room floor and let YouTube be our guide.  Round and round the unlit fireplace we stepped, air conditioning blasting because outside felt like the surface of the sun.

We stamped out that grief like Jesus dancing on His tombstone, soles of our feet recalling that the preacher’s family is a dancing family.

What did David do? "David danced before the Lord with all his might, leaping and dancing before the Lord.”  Ecclesiastes assures us that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to laugh and a time to weep. A time to mourn and there is a time to dance. And there was a time for this law, but not anymore. See, this is our time to dance. It is our way of celebrating life. It’s the way it was in the beginning. It’s the way it’s always been. It’s the way it should be now.

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In this season that I do not have time to write, this is the idea God gave me:  For me to ponder and notice again the words I've already written once, to keep praying the beads of memory to discover this sacramental life.

Won't you join me?  

I'd welcome your company along the way.