My Anissa Post: Prayer Isn't Enough

[Background on Anissa Mayhew here or here]

Leave it to the widow to say what no one else will: Prayer and love are great. But they are NOT ENOUGH. Whatever happens with Anissa, and I hope as strongly as you do that the outcome is whatever is best for her, things are NOT going to be okay.

So I’m going to give it to you straight: Send up those winged hopes. But plant roots, too, please: add something like this to your prayers and posts and intentions: "Whatever happens, I will help her family for the long haul." They -- Anissa’s husband and three children -- are going to ACTIVELY need your positive energy (and time and money) for at least the next three years.

I’m not an expert on brain injury, but I can read between the lines of the latest post by Peter Mayhew, Anissa’s husband becuase I too wrote hopeful, factual, evasive updates to hundreds of “friends.” It was one of my many unwanted duties (we are not strong, we are obligated) during the two years my late husband was living with a stage IV cancer. So I can hear it in Peter’s voice: the best outcome is probably NOT going to be something you’re comfortable with. Some likely possibilities: temporary disability with a very, very long recovery, permanent disability, or death. Any of these means a long road of grieving for those that Anissa loves the best (yes, becoming disabled involves grief, too).

I’m sorry. Many of you know her well. I met her just once: I hugged her at BlogHer09. I loved her work. I admired her. I thought, if I were ten years younger, braver, stronger, I could have been doing something similar. A few days ago I told Mr. Fresh about Anissa: I said, she’s on an upward trajectory and she’s just the kind of person you like to see succeed. I was looking forward to working with her more. I still am.

What everyone says is true: that lady has more fight in her pinky finger than all of us put together. But you only get one body.

Yes, Anissa has your love, thousands of you, and if God is on Twitter, he’s seen many thousands of hashtagged prayers on her behalf. I know: it does count. These emotions are yours and real and valid.

Internet prayers are powerful, but they aren’t known for their durability. Not too long ago, you may have tinted your Twitter avatar green in honor of those protesting the elections in Iran; a few short weeks later we were all Michael Jackson, all the time. (I said “we.”) A day or two after the switch, Jessica Gottlieb tweeted (I paraphrase), “Hey, anyone know what’s happening in Iran today? Me neither.”

So I’ll tell you what usually happens in the case of long-term illness or death: people are real good at the beginning. Intense and generous. Widows, and sometimes caregivers, have a huge circle.

For a few weeks.

Then, if you’ve been there, you know: the supporters and care and casseroles disappear. It’s not that people are fickle, but facing something as awful as the loss of a friend (or the loss of a friend’s abilities) is heartbreaking for EVERYONE.

It’s easy to say that you aren’t the closest friends, or that family will help. But saying that creates distance and they can't afford distance from anyone.First of all, family and friends are not enough, even for a superstar like Anissa: the needs of a bereaved family are endless, their pain is hard to share. Second, those people who are closest to the sick person are grieving too and very likely, they have more responsibility and less time than they did before.

It's a long, hard, intense and often lonely path which no one chooses. The journey is not over when the person has healed, or when a surviving spouse remarries. (If you’ve read Anissa’s posts about what she went through with her daughter’s cancer, you’ll know it’s true).

THREE YEARS. Even if you weren’t close. Can you pledge to keep an eye on the Mayhews, no matter what shape their family takes? Can you swear to continue your generosity and outpouring of love after when something else comes up?

Will you pray for the compassion that comes from listening to someone in pain? For the strength to help them when they are weak? For the ability to stay and hold their hand even when you, too, are feeling overcome? Will you read up* on ways to help a grieving family?

Will you understand that full love and respect and unconditional support that Peter will require, no matter what the outcome of this illness? Because his wellbeing is the number one factor in how the children will fare. And he will need more than prayers.

If so, please pray for Anissa. And Peter. And their children, and all the rest of their family. If you do, I promise you will grow and learn from this love because it is great.


* One of my favorites is "What Grieving People Want You to Know" [MS Word document] by Dr. Virginia A. Simpson.

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Widows' Index

One of my many Big Ideas is a site that puts all the widow bloggers’ content together through an index.

It started after I left support group and started reading the huge variety of blogs produced by widows and widowers, especially the young ones. Despite our diversity, we share many of the same experiences so there tend to be common topics:
-- When they removed their wedding ring.
-- Their feelings at having to check “widowed” on a form, or God forbid, “divorced.”
-- When they sent their spouse’s belongings to the Goodwill (on my blog, this very casual post that is among my most visited).
-- And of course, the ever-popular, impossible-to-beat, post about First sex after death.

And then Michele Neff Hernandez told me about her project of interviewing many widows, asking the same set of questions, some of which were similar. See, that’s how I can tell she’s a genius. (Too.)

An index that connects our entries by the topics widowed people are looking for would generate traffic and share the commonalities more easily. For those of us writing blogs, it would be a great way to continue the conversations we all have informally, non-linearly, without interrupting our own narratives.

And it feeds into my other hypothesis: that young bereaved people are an underserved group, socially, economically, with certain needs that could be identified and dealt with. But that’s a Big Idea for another day.

I’ve started a list of the topics that might be included in a “widow index” of blogs – a “W-Index,” if you’ll forgive me. (No one ever does.)

I won’t bore folks with the logistics or technical details. The project could be self-building or we could each index other blogs as we wish.

This is probably too many topics, but what do you think?
Advice
Anger
Anniversaries
Anti-depressants
Art
Being single
Birthdays
Blogs and bloggers
Career and job
Church
Communities
Dating stories
Dating, online
Death
Depression
Divorce
Faith
Finances
Friends and friendships
Grief counseling
Grief, anticipatory
Grief, competiveness
Grief, complicated
Grieving Kids: age 0 to 3
Grieving Kids: age 4 to 5
Grieving Kids: Grown children
Grieving Kids: high schoolers
Grieving Kids: K-5 gr
Grieving Kids: middle schoolers
Grieving Kids: over 18
Home
Loneliness
Losses during bereavement
Loss of a child
Loss of a parent
Love
Marital status on forms
Meals
Mental Health other than depression
Milestones
Movies
Moving house
Music
Neighbors and neighborhoods
Other culture
Parents, yours
Parents-in-law
Peers
Practical advice
Religion
Remarriage
Sadness
School, your children
School, yourself
Sex
Siblings
Siblings-in-law
Skin hunger
Step parenting
Stuff, spouse’s
Support groups
Survivor guilt
Therapy
Time management
Triggers to grief
Wedding ring
Writing
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6+

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Kid Theology, Part 2

My daughter will only listen to women vocalists, and I make mix CDs for the car every few weeks so it’s not All Pink, All the Time. At 5, she comes up with some funny ideas about the songs, like in “Dancing Queen” she heard the lyric as “Cheetah girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing Queen” so we had to play along and refer to ABBA as the Cheetah Girls for about a year. (We did tell her it was ABBA at first, and she got angry. So PEH! And I kept the lie going, partly because it would save me from even being tempted to buy anything by the Disney act. We lived in dread of the day she’d find us out: sing “Mamma Mia” and come home pissed. That day never came.)

Like all kids, she’s very musical. And like all kids her age, she’s starting to wonder where things came from. Since age 2 or so she’s been fascinated by inventors, robots, and how things work. Now she’s beginning to ask what made the seeds that made the grasses, flowers and trees: “Mommy, I came out of your tummy, but where did the world come from?”

“A lot of people have questions about that,” I straightened up, pleased to have a “teaching moment” just show up. “And so they study science to learn about where seeds, and water, and even the earth itself came from.”

“Wait, Mommy! I know! God maked the whole earth!”

I shuddered involuntarily.

“Well, no one really knows the answer for sure, but that is an interesting idea. Yes, many people study religion to learn about how the world was made. So people can do work using science or religion to answer these questions,” I offered, without giving her creationism, I hope.

“No! God did it.” Sensing unnapped, late-afternoon ferocity on the horizon, I let her idea stand. That week, I think her image of God was an old man with a white beard that she’d heard about at school.

But come Sunday, I knew she had options. This year’s religious education program in our Unitarian Universalist church is about world religious traditions. In the past few Sundays she’s colored in Ganesh and Shiva, made a “stained glass” chalice out of tissue paper, and created a camel (part of a lesson on Islam) out of two humps of a paper egg carton and some pipe cleaners. And the questions, as you can imagine, are bound to keep coming.

And when she heard this song last week, she got very excited.

“If God had a name, what would it be
and would you call it to his face
if you were faced with him...?”

I’m pretty sure she thought the CD was reading her mind. “Mommy! What she singing is EXACTLY the same as what I am thinking!”






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Kid Theology, Part 1

When Short Stack was less than 2, with a vocabulary under 50 words, she learned to blow kisses.

And one winter night at bedtime she was gazing at the stars out her window. She smiled, brought the pinched fingers of both hands to her eyes and burst them out toward the sky. She laughed, facing the glass with open palms.

She had blown kisses, with her eyes, to the stars.

I still don’t have words to express that feeling more eloquently.


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Good Bye, House

Good bye, house.
Good bye, mouse ... traps.
Good bye, closet door that you can’t open unless the bedroom door is closed.
Good bye, single water line that means you can’t flush if there’s laundry going.
Good bye, crack in the wall that has the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.

Good bye, improperly installed storm door that moans with a cold northwest wind.
Good bye, hot water toilet that we fixed eight years ago.
Good bye, potential for that toilet to explode in an unheated bathroom (we added heat five years ago but I’m still bitter).
Good bye, giant hatch in kitchen ceiling that can expose the second floor plumbing.
Good bye, feeling that I ought to fix everything.

Good bye, dining room non-acoustical ceiling with unexplained hole.
Good bye, unfinishable basement.
Good bye, huge sunny garden a mother can't make time for.

Good bye, house with many expensive problems.
Good bye, busy urban street in a mostly sweet residential suburban neighborhood.
Good bye, bus stop across from living room windows, community gathering place, facilitator of loitering nuisances.
Good bye, frequent route for ambulances and fire trucks.

Good bye, incredible equity accumulation.
Good bye, future development as multi-family housing opposed by the neighborhood.
Good bye, uphill battle.

Good bye, Benjamin Moore 963, lovingly applied to the hallways.
Good bye, brand new, extremely expensive roof.

Good bye, house which I bought as breadwinner in my first marriage.
Good bye, first home I created for my child.
Good bye, house I came home to the night my husband died.

Good bye, house where I felt trapped with a crazy toddler.
Good bye, house I left each morning to go to work, a blessed distraction and relief.
Good bye, house where I learned to walk again, built up my strength, and hosted new friends.
Good bye, house where I rediscovered my bliss and found out some new joys, too.
Good bye, house that I left, hand in hand with my daughter and my second husband.

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Do You Have "The Pan?"

I am working on a funny post about this stupid idiot roasting pan, the one in the left sink above, the one that you’re not supposed to use because it’s a piece of crap but you have to keep it because it goes with your stove. You know “the pan?” You’ve got one, too, I’m sure. It came with the house.

But I can’t publish it because Mr. Fresh and I are having a fight about the move. He's upstairs in a huff. He doesn't read this, but no need to stoke flames with the universe.

Anyway, "the pan" is covered in chicken grease because someone didn’t know you are not supposed to ever use that pan.

I’m hoping the post will pass for Bloggess material when it’s done, at least in the amount that it threatens the author’s marriage, but in the meantime, you can look at the pretty picture.


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A Milestone in, or toward, Life 2.0

The milestones pile up, big and small, three years' worth, and they are all linked to loss: When I removed my wedding ring. The anniversaries, birthdays, child’s birthdays, ritual vacations. First Thai food without Gavin. First Mom, and 4-year-old, at a playdate who didn’t know I was a widow. First trip to the grocery store where I didn’t buy a lot of cookie comfort.

This one was new and it snuck up on me. I had my first parent-teacher conference this week with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher. First her speech teacher came in and summarized progress toward her goals. I had some questions (Should I correct her diction when she’s talking to herself? Which is about 2 hours of each day. “No.”) but overall the teacher said Shortie’s doing really well and may not be referred for services next year.

And then the teacher and I went through evaluating all her little successes: reading simple words. “Understanding statistics at a kindergarten level,” WTF is that? Social adjustment, managing her food allergy, etc. She is especially enthusiastic, as I know, about art, and excellent with scissors. In all things, my daughter looks to be flourishing. I smiled.

“Now, Short Stack has mentioned that her father died. Can you tell me some more about that?”

I hadn’t told the teacher.

A milestone that went unmarked at the time: The first time I didn’t mention the loss, at ALL, in meeting someone really important to my child.

I was shocked, sad, happy that I’d gotten away with it: and surprised it took me this long to see that back in September, there was at least one occasion when I didn’t need the attention devoted to a widow.

I blabbered my spiel in incredible surprise: her father, his illness, my general state, basics of grief in kids her age, support we’d gotten. I reaasured her that we talk about him and I’m always honest, and while experts have told me all her reactions so far are typical, she should feel free to let me know if she has any concerns. And I told her about other changes in Short Stack’s life: the death of one grandma, our move to a new neighborhood, Mr. Fresh joining the family. How she refers to him as “Dad” but also says, “I’m a artist like my Daddy,” meaning Gavin.

Everything was OKAY. I’d again escaped injuring my child despite incredible flakiness. I was again grateful for sensitive teachers who have to cope with all our parenting gaps. Grateful I’d avoided a single-Mom breakdown for three years and am now out of those particular woods (breakdown is still possible, but I’m not single ☺).

Is this a milestone of loss, or of Life 2.0? It’s a mark of the absence of loss, the mark death doesn’t leave, of me TRULY living with it and beyond it. Maybe a hint, if not the first, of defining myself as something other than a widow.

I’m just plain happy to be here. And I feel a little less skeptical to, maybe, call a life, at some time, a “New Normal.”


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What Is Grief?

Grief is a monster. It rips and roars. It has a thousand eyes and eight kinds of fur. It’s furious and it bursts into your home. Grief rapes and pillages, it spends you, but it never leaves you alone.

Grief is an embezzler, green-shaded and officious, sapping you from a back room where he carries on vital aspects of your business. You’re not sure exactly what he does but everyone seems to trust him. The first day he doesn’t show up you find you’re hollow.

Grief is a saboteur, a pickpocket, a bastard. A hurricane, an elevator shaft, a muddy puddle, a pie in the face. Grief stains you, breaks you, kicks you when you’re down. Grief surprises you and changes constantly.

But we often forget that early on, Grief is also a companion. Grief is true, constant, honest. It won’t run if you stare or yell. Grief is always up for a conversation or a really juicy fight. Heck, Grief even shares jokes, some of which must be kept just between you two.

Grief is your intimate, your confidante, your own.

It takes, but it gives back, too. It plays Good Cop, Bad Cop. You have no defense.

You think maybe Grief protects you from worse things. It’s hard to say.

Grief feeds you and slakes your thirst. It embraces you when no one else will. It will never leave you alone. It helps you feel special and keeps you apart when, sometimes, you need to be distant from the rest of the world.

Grief can be an object. It’s easy to blame Grief, and satisfying to beat the shit out of it.

It will step back a bit over time, and you two will grow apart. It never looks the same the same two days in a row. Like you, it learns.

But gradually your life will recruit new characters and more feelings. When you are busy with them, Grief begins to starve. You gain strength.

Grief is not the thing that hurt you, it's made out of you, so it will always be there for you when you need it.


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