Reached

When my mom was diagnosed with melanoma I had no idea how important people I barely knew would become to me. I've always been one for rich, meaningful friendships and leaned toward having a small circle of close friends over a large gathering of more casual friends. It doesn't have to be one or the other, although for many reasons I found that I could enjoy a larger circle but felt more alive in a closer one. Mom's diagnosis came when I was about 21 years old and I turned to my family and a few close friends in that time. But when her disease progressed I discovered I was also leaning into the larger communities I'd become part of. They were rich, healthy communities, able to help carry the weight of reality in life...the joyous and the grave...for so many of us. It was a natural leaning for me because it was a relational one. I hold the memory of some dark days with the sweetness of those connections. I also saw how a bouyancy formed out of the hearts of people around the globe...people who simply heard a story and followed their hearts' responses.

Now I find myself in different but familiar circumstances with my brother Ned's cancer journey and see again how the comfort of established friendships and the rising of new ones form the love God meets me with. I usually have a lot of bandwidth for life's harder curves, but right now much of my capacity feels used up by the recent birth of my son and the play-out of some postpartum depression. At times I feel the ground in everything going on right now and at times I don't. In all of it I am grateful for friends and family who also live in light of love, shared love, love that embraces and accompanies. We don't usually know why new relationships enter our lives at certain times but I know that the advent of new circles in my life this past year is no accident. They widen my heart without diluting meaning...rather, enriching it. They carry part of my story, helping to remind me of what I know and marking pages for me to come back to. I am deeply grateful for friends old and new....in relating we can be for each other expressions of God's heart.

Ned's in surgery right this very moment and his post this morning shares a note he received from our sister Britt, a true illumination of the kind of love and living that most moves me....moves me toward desire for closeness with those I love and deeper appreciation for the massive host of humanity we are graced to be part of.

See the post here, click on his blog title for all of his posts:

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-consider-myself-luckiest-man-on-face.html?m=1

The Backward Glance Carried Forward

Ten years ago last weekend I boarded a plane in Seattle, competing with a winter storm all the way that blanketed much of Europe in snow and ice.  The haunted cold of lovely Prague matched my mood perfectly upon arrival.  I've loved that city and always will.  I met Megan in the train station where we hugged and cried and then rode the rails to Ostrava.  It was the last place I wanted to be.  I'd been living there since mid-November, the 2 weeks at home with my family over Christmas a welcome respite.  Those eight months in the Czech Reublic rank as the hardest thing I've ever chosen for myself.  I knew early on that I wasn't drawn to the venture so much for reasons of place or people or work, although those each had compelling elements in their own ways, but rather for God, and for myself.  My mother had died exactly one year before I moved to Ostrava...she was gone, and I needed to know where I'd gone.

We arrived four hours later, Megan taking a bus to her & Priya's flat, me to mine & Brooke's.  I walked to the apartment where my teaching director and her husband lived, had dinner, got my keys from them, and then wheeled my suitcase through the snow to my building across the street.  I entered the lobby and walked to my door on the first level, flipping to the right key...raised my hand to open the lock and stopped short.  The lock was gone, an empty hole all that remained.  In the darkness I looked up and saw crime scene tape criss-crossing the doorway with instructions to call the police department and not enter.  I literally felt like I was in a Law & Order episode.  I wasn't sure whether to cry from exhaustion and back away from the door as instructed or whip out my camera and start photographing something I'll probably never experience again.

Lest you wonder, as I did in that moment, who had been murdered in our flat over Christmas, it was simply that winter reared her head.  A window left open a crack wouldn't ordinarily have been such a problem but Ostrava had experienced near record breaking cold and our heat was turned down, causing a pipe under the window to freeze and then burst, flooding and spraying at least 50 years of gritty black radiator gunk all over the place.  It seriously stank to high heaven.  Messy, inconvenient, costly, thankfully not flooding anyone else.  But honestly, that wasn't what bothered me.  In fact, it potentially made for a fantastic story and I figured it would be a great one for the book someday.  What I struggled with were reactions that bubbled in the ensuing days...I probably would have been able to laugh it off had it not been for that.

"Crazy American girls," some said. "Who leaves in winter with the heat turned off?!"  "But it wasn't like that," I wanted to protest.  It's my blog so I can set the record straight and say that in truth, it was not off, just low, and if the window was open at all it was seriously barely open, and it wasn't like Brooke and I had wanted to spend a couple nights sleeping on a kitchen bench waiting for the men in haz-mat suits to give us the all-clear.  We'd never lived with radiators -- the house I grew up in had walls ten inches thick and triple-glazed windows and was so energy efficient that we heated rooms simply by turning the lights on and off.  But I didn't say any of that, I just apologized and tried to be gracious and understanding.  I didn't feel like there was space for a different conversation, and all things considered I wasn't sure how to make the space myself.  And besides, that all sort of side-steps the point.

A few years later I met a woman who'd heard the locals' side of the story and laughingly relayed it to me as such.  I ground my teeth a bit and called her a mean name in my head but a grace also occurred to me in that moment, I'd been so busy trying to be open to the new around me that it never occured to me the locals experienced a certain culture shock of their own in having me there and they might not have known it.  When we're the main cheese most of what's around us is familiar, or at least our tacit knowledge trumps, lulling us into a deceit of ease and located normalcy.  And for the most part, we tend to think we're the main cheese, regardless of where we are and who we're with.  All I could do was wait and deal with the moment.  Which we did.

They say that when you move abroad there's a honeymoon period where everything is great for about 3-4 months.  Then, what was new and exciting becomes just frustrating and irritating and from there you start working your way to a new kind of good.  It didn't go quite that way for me -- for me, it was hard from day one and I just slowly moved through it.  Cultural navigation had only a little to do with it.  Having been through the previous year, I was far from expecting a large Czech city to provide the solace and renewal I needed.  Mine was an internal process of adjustment that occurred in a foreign country, supported by a small circle of incredible women who loved me deeply in shared experience, buttressed by the long-distance care of family and friends far away, given local color and interest by good Czech people with whom life intersected for a brief while.  It couldn't occur anywhere else or in any other way.  And I felt a fundamental ok-ness regardless of what was happening around me.  Which, truthfully, was much good.

I tell that story partly for the fun and memory of it but also because I was thinking about it when I awoke this morning and it's not entirely unrelated to other things I'm thinking a lot about right now. You've seen in the last 3 posts that my mind has very much been in another part of the world, one that is new for me, one that is also 'a place where peace is not the frozen silence' ... related to issues that I have worked nearby in different ways over the years and can't stop thinking about ... where my understanding is experiential and storied ... where alteration comes only in time, being in and seeing as much as we can of what's actual and hoping for better, all in the same moments.  By the time I came home from the Czech Republic in July 2002 I was good, and I was better for it. Those months made for a difficult time.  I would do some things differently now but I don't have that choice for the past and it's a past that I would never give up, a time that I innately knew would move in beauty....a movement that I carry in me still, unto the ends of the earth.

So I crawled out of bed and found my old journal to see where my thoughts were on this day back then, after I found my flat a disaster, wanting the mess to go away and for people to be more...well, more of whatever all I needed them to be at the time.  I'm not entirely sure whether the words would be what I'd turn to today, but there is surely still a resonance with what I inscribed in my journal ten years last night, January 6, 2002, as I settled even then, as I try now, into what I was chosing, dealt with what I wasn't chosing, words that helped me to meet the now-ness that is life at its widths, be that relaxed or strained:

Peace is the centre of the atom, the core

of quiet within the storm.  It is not

a cessation, a nothingness; more

the lightening in reverse is what

reveals the light.  It is the law that binds

the atom's structure, ordering the dance

of proton and electron, and that finds

within the midst of flame and wind, the glance

in the still eye of the vast hurricane.

Peace is not placidity: peace is

the power to endure the megatron of pain

with joy, the silent thunder of release,

the ordering of love.  Peace is the atom's start,

the primal image: God within the heart.

-- Madeline L'Engle

©2012 Mindy Danylak (for all original content; not including Madeline L'Engle poem)

Poison & Wine

Yesterday was Mom's birthday.  She would have been 63.  It lands 7 days after the anniversary of her death.  I felt peaceful this year around the 11-year mark, wondered how her birthday would feel...all that's predictable is unpredictability.  I woke up at 5:30 and sat down with a cup of coffee and my laptop.  Turned on Christmas music and started writing an email to a friend and had breakfast and Jonathan left for St Spiridon's and then it hit me like a mack truck and drained me out like a newly slaughtered animal.

I missed her so much I could scream.  Hard, wracking sobs that make me just gag.  Tears that burned away my skin like sandpaper, scraping away delicate layers around my eyes, leaving the raw exposed.  Lonely & unsure & lost.  Trying so hard to access her ontology, to know really that once upon a time there was actually this woman in the pictures, and she did know me and she did love me.  So angry at God that death exists and that any of this can possibly be ok.  How does right even begin to prevail in this??  Trying so hard to get to an actual, felt remembrance of her having been alive, of her having been my mom, for her life to seem real.  And even when approaching that place, feeling sickeningly dizzy in my head, disoriented in my body...like all that's real is this loss and it's everywhere in me...and what's real of her just feels illusory in the worst, trickiest way.  This year it was way worse than the one right after she died.  For that one I was numb.  This is much harder.

And better.

Scott Peck says that if it's not paradoxical it may not be true.  My entire life feels paradoxical sometimes.  It's what helps me know I'm real.

So was she.  The battle and the heart's reach help me know it.

When he came home Jonathan folded me in a hug.  "Let's make coffee and you can tell me about her," he said.  It wasn't what got said that mattered.  We had Common Ground last night.  The auditorium was cold but most of the quivering came from inside me.  He put his arm around me and I felt stillness.  Presence matters.

I've been coming back to this for the past month or so as we prepared for last night's program.  It speaks to all kind of things in life.  It's prayer.  The band did it live last night and yes, the tears that fell still stung my skin a little even hours later in the day.  Thank God.  I had skin.  And could feel.  And could welcome the tears.

She's still gone.  And I'm still ok.


©2011 Mindy Danylak

Grounding

I'm crying again.  Eleven years ago I was crying at this time, late morning, on this day, November 10th, as I flew to Walla Walla for Mom to die.

The anniversary of Mom's death doesn't hit me the same way every year...some years it's full of struggle, other years it's poignant laughter.  A different kind of struggle for life.  You know...the way life is.  I'm glad it's that way.  But today I'm on the phone again.

Every year I work on a project at Thanksgiving and again at Christmas that involves phone calls to around 100 of the patients/families I work with.  And every year those calls inlcude women exclaiming how they'd forgotten it's nearly Thanksgiving.  They are so consumed with their spouse/parent/child/friend/ex's process through transplant, serving as the 24/7 caregiver these patients require, that loving toward life takes over the mundane things, like holidays.

The week after Mom's funeral was Thanksgiving -- we spent it with our neighbors, Truman and Nina, celebrating Thanksgiving a couple days after marking what would have been Mom's 52nd birthday on Nov 20.  God she was young.

As I go into this weekend, I remember...that flight back to Walla Walla, the yellow begonias at the front door that held on through the frost until Monday morning when she finally died, the smell of the bedroom, the cap on her hairless head...the laughter of Mom's voice as she talked on the phone, the reliability of her green car on the corner when school got out, the notes and lists as she planned holiday meals, her diet Coke on the desk in the kitchen, the beautiful papers at Christmas, the fuzzy black coat that now hangs in my closet, the box i keep of letters and cards she sent over the years, her brilliant blue eyes & glorious red hair.....

And so I'm crying again, talking to these patients because I know why remembering Thanksgiving is unthinkable, is not even on the radar, and how much the call from someone who does remember brings me back to earth.

And I welcome the ground.



©2011 Mindy Danylak

Good-bye Robin

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
-- Emily Dickinson

A few weeks ago I stood in the foyer at College Place Presbyterian Church on Easter morning, reading a letter my mom wrote over a decade ago to our pastor and his wife, Robin & Kriss Peterson.  "They thought we should have this," Mel said, handing the envelope to me.  "Do you want to read it?"  Mom's handwriting spread across the paper expressing her gratitude for Robin & Kriss's kindness and care, how she felt about her upcoming treatment process, her resonance with him as the two of them moved through cancer diagnoses together.  Several months later he & Doug Barram together led my family down the aisle at her memorial service.

I handed the card back to my sister, thinking about him.  Mom was not alone...there are thousands of people whose lives are peppered with these kinds of stories, who Robin walked with in their life and whose casket he stood by in their death...many kinds of aisles people do not want to walk alone...the moments that mean "to live."

Robin Peterson died yesterday.

Walking will continue but it does feel like the earth takes a brief pause to re-adjust itself when people die.  The very lilt of a day is altered by breath, our own and others'.

I am grateful to have known this man who lived the kind of startle that is awakening...who tended hearts and animals with equal passion...who cared for his land and prayed for his community...who saw and who was with and who recalled...who spoke the language of the soul...who sang joy and whispered peace...who rained kindness and lived generously...who was honest about himself and grieved his losses...who understood and entered the story...who pursued love.

Thankful tears fall for you.
Good-bye, Robin.

Remember

Last Saturday, Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton was shot & killed as he sat in his patrol car on the side of a neighborhood street. His funeral procession was yesterday morning. The two-hour procession covered several miles & involved over 1000 vehicles and law enforcement officers from across the continent. Images from along the procession route are very moving...saulting boy scouts, grieving citizens, honor guards, drums and bagpipes, dark vehicles moving slowly through the morning drizzle.

I always feel a momentary pause well up from my deepest heart when I see funeral processions. The ritual and tradition of acknowledging death has been a powerful thing for me, ever since early childhood. I honestly do not remember the first funerals I attended - I was probably still a baby. In the religious group I grew up in (which my family left in May 1995 when I was 20), we went to lots of them. There were a lot of old people in the group, plus that's one of the things the people in that group just do a lot of (funeral-going). There was plenty about the content of those funerals that was lacking, preachy, and frustratingly impersonal; and there were plenty of funerals we went to simply because culturally in the group that was what you did; but all the same, funerals became very normal and non-frightening for me. In the year or two before we left the group and since then, funeral-going has become a very different thing for me.

My mom's name is Marion Diane Dahlin Abenroth. Everyone called her Diane since Marion was my gandmother's name too. She was born November 20, 1948. Next week marks the day my she died, November 13, 2000. Ten months after her death, I checked into a small hotel in a little town a couple hours north of Seattle and proceeded to write down every detail I could recall of Mom's death and the days surrounding it. The writing process I went through was highly intentional, ultimately good, very relieving, and wrenchingly excrutiating; and remembering it all...those days around her death & those days when I wrote...is painful. There are books to write about all those days, and each day leading up to & following them. But for purposes of this writing, I'll simply share pictures I carry from the day of her funeral. Her funeral was November 18, two days before her 52nd birthday, at the Presbyterian church my parents had been attending for a few years. My sister & I watched through the windows as car after car drove into the lot. Over 500 people attended the service. I bodily remember walking down the center aisle to the front pew of the church...Dewight, Melody, Me, Dad, Ned. I distinctly remember the five of us standing up in that pew at the end of the service while each person filed past Mom's rose-covered casket. In the midst of our own grief, I think my family were the comfort-providers, simply in standing there, acknowledging reality, looking each mourner in the eye and holding their hand momentarily as they walked past.

Although the two are intertwined, I think sometimes I feel more myself in moments of mourning than I do in celebration. I could stand being better at celebrating - that's one of the things the group I grew up in was not good at. But I'm grateful that marking death & grief feels organic for me because in our culture it seems the harder part. I remember the day we picked out Mom's casket...it was a Wednesday morning & I had a raging headache...standing in that room in the funeral home, feeling utter disbelief at what we were doing...I remember telling Dad, "We should NOT be doing this." We had to but everything in me resists having had to. The week seemed blurry...sort of on auto-pilot, but the day of the funeral I felt grounded until the end when I just wanted everyone to leave my family home and go away. But after that... I felt like the world should stop. My very mother had died and everyone was just going on with life. There were a blessed handful who remembered, who mentioned, who waited, who spoke...who still do that.

I didn't want to wear black for a year but I understand something of that tradition. It's difficult for Americans to be present in mourning. It is granted such a brief allotment of time in the rhythm of our days, and it's relegated to the realm of privacy. I can relate to people's confusion around what to do, what to say. But the failure to even simply say that to one who is grieving bothers me because more often than not the default then is silence. Not expressing uncertainty, not acknowledgment, but silence.

Last month I attended my uncle's funeral in Spokane. The funeral home is next to the cemetery where my maternal grandparents and other family members are buried so before the service Jonathan & I drove into the cemetery and made our way quietly to their section. I got out of the car and walked to Grandma's grave. I stood there in the barren, freezing morning and felt profoundly grateful that, even with the inadequacy of our efforts, we humans do this kind of thing. Every culture has its way...varying of course from people to people...but we humans do not fully just ignore death and the dead, and when it does happen that way we feel like something is very wrong. Life matters. Death is real. Pausing helps. Traditions can be supportive & healthy. These kinds of rituals and observances always make me feel the fundamental beauty and sacredness of mourning & remembrance.

©2009 Mindy Danylak