I started organizing again today, moving pictures on the wall and shifting books into baskets for a neater ascetic. As if a clearer surface or a cleaner shelf could counter the sorrow of your absence. You, who mediated often and stayed overly self-aware (a professional hazard for physiologists), may enjoy analyzing my actions to control the external factors of my environment in an effort to create beauty to offset the internal ugly out-of-control- helpless feelings the product of your suicide, three years ago. So, you gazing with green piercing eyes and stating in a rather know-it-all-bossy-big-sister-attitude-never-grown-out-of- tone how my OCD tendencies avoid feeling the intense grief. However, My grief O.C.D. simply stands for: Otherwise Cannot Do. For without such projects (massive unnecessary ones such as reorganizing and purging office supplies), I Otherwise Cannot Do my duties of wife and mother due to crippling sorrow of losing you in such a horrific way (as you stated when in the mental institution, “I’m living your nightmare.”). Despite my overwhelming need to do as the anniversary of your death date approached, only songs brought the tears watering. The first, listening to the lyrics of “King of the World”
“When did I forget that You've always been
The King of the world?
I try to take life back right out of the hands
Of the King of the world
How could I make You so small
When You're the one who holds it all?
When did I forget that You've always been
The King of the world?”
Natalie Grant
Only then, I looked inside my internal helplessness, that yes, God rules over your death, even your dark destructive departure.
Another hymn, which brought some tears, brought me back to singing with you while walking down from Montreat campsite, as well as at the altar on my wedding day in our choral voices of mediocre tone:
“He is jealous for me
Love's like a hurricane,
I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful You are And how great Your affections are for me
And oh, how He loves us, oh
Oh, how He loves us
How He loves us all”
David Crowder
The lyrics a reminder how you identified as “beloved” and how your legacy of faith reminds me that I to am a beloved daughter of our shared Father (though now you are there with him in the flesh).
So I sing while washing dishes, and prepping a warm cloth to wipe the sticky food off my soon-to-be-toddler’s cheeks, living out my Otherwise Cannot Do. Then my last memory of seeing you alive, changing four-month year old Matthew on our parent’s den floor, “I am SO HAPPY to see you, Matthew and Thomas.” An overly chipper statement for a simple family dinner, a situation I thought we would have many more of at the time. The thought inspires my own dirge:
ASHES
Oh big sissy,
I wish you were more than ashes
This side of Heaven
Alive in the flesh Holding that intoxicatingly soft baby skin at night
Watching the father of your kids wrestle and throw pillows at your toddler
Listening again to the sweet sound of a quick summer storm as the cicadas echo
An obnoxious buzz loudly
lounging on your avocado float
Pulling a hard lemonade on your flamingo one
A collision of past and future
Of summers seen and never grasped
The present of longing to give you the gift of presence
Oh to share the light-eyed giggling little men with their other aunt in the flesh.
The precious touch of littles
You longed for since kindergarten,
the shattered dream of motherhood shoved into a cedar box with your ashes
Due to my Otherwise Cannot Do grief, my desk was cleaned out, and the nursery room furniture rearranged while my heart wished to cleansed of the sorrow of your passing but not of your memory, singing worship songs while doing so.
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