You will all wear black when I die

Day 2 of a challenge by @peterdray to take 30 minutes to write 250 words for 30 days.

Even the children. 

The penchant for wearing Hawaiin shirts and brights at funerals is anathema. Like wearing clogs on a marathon, or serving whisky at AA.

There’s a time and a place.

We’ve overwritten good grief with a neon glaze of celebration. Skipping the main and the dessert to go straight to coffee.

Let’s linger in black.

Soak it into our blood-filled bones.

Let it flood up our cells, till there are no pockets of breathing room left.

Allow it.

Permit it.

Lie back and let grief kiss our every living pore.

We’ll be changed by it, yet the heaviness is not for fearing.

It’s purer surrender to the stark honesty-box of our own endings. 

A high contrast, sharpened image of raw. Untouched. Filter free.

Death in my mother’s village was a rite of passage. A true coming of age. Each body tenderly bathed at home, prepared, dressed and laid out. An ever-burning candle lit and living company for the remains through dark night and welcome day. 

Visitors would pay their respects, tell stories, drink tea, wash dishes, serve dinner, say goodbyes and grant comfort and perspective in this altogether human community experience.

It was unavoidably real for all. 

Unhidden. 

An all-surrounding full stop in the timeline of a tribe. Punctuation, dark and circular without reflection of light or colour.

The acknowledgement that we all travel from life through the unknowable and into beyond.

You will all wear black when I die.

MenoPAUSE

DAY 1 of a daily practice inspired by @peterdray to write 250 words each day for 30 days… aren’t you lucky!

‘How is that even a word?’ I asked myself. 

There’s no pause. 

It’s menostop, menocease, menoverandone. 

Menofin, menogedoen, menofermare. 

The end of all meno.

At 4:42am I came to the conclusion no woman had defined it. So serene. Temporary. A gentle glide into standby. (Correction. No woman over 55.) Because she would know the rage, the thinning, the thickening, the drying, the mad-making of the end of her defining function in society. 

At 6:57am I brought my sleeping husband coffee. 

Bleary, he propped his head and began the slow rise into consciousness, unaware of the menolava broiling beside him on the satin pillowcase.

‘Why menoPAUSE?!’ I said to the ceiling (and him). 

No on-ramp, no ‘good-morning’, no ‘hello’, followed swiftly by a rocket-fuelled launch into the stupidity of a word that was not fit for purpose. The idiocy of underscoring a woman’s only apparent contribution to global humanity. I paused.

He blinked.

Breathed in, then out.

Cleared his throat gently. Then with a slow gravelly morning voice that had not yet uttered a word said.

‘My dear. It’s not a definition.’

‘What?’

Another sip from the warm blue mug. 

I waited.

‘Mmm. It’s a warning.’

I looked at him. 

He stared ahead.

‘I don’t believe woman can hear it, but to the rest of us it sounds like : Men! Oooooooh ….P.A.U.S.E.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘That word has saved lives darling.’ He smiled to himself. 

‘It saved mine three times last month.’

Outbreak

 

For my second trip out of isolation in 47 days, I chose the shortest route to the Emergency Room. [Spoiler alert: all’s well, turns out it there are unfortunate side effects to using your inhaler at full pelt.] But it was the journey that was taken, not any worrying destination, that caught me off guard. Bear with me…the learning is properly juicy.

The chest pain, wonky heart rhythm and dizzy spells had been fairly constant since the onset of the coronavirus breathlessness three weeks previous. Day and (particularly) night.

As it was the heart of Covid-19 peak-week for the NHS, I was loath to call the doctor. Phil had seen me in pain and having to steady myself once too often, and like the logical man he is, insisted I call. The doc took it seriously and so off we went.

The hospital was a hotchpotch of cobbled together precautions. Warning posters on the doors said to go home immediately if coronavirus symptoms were in evidence. Traffic cones (random!) and chevron tape kept visitors far from receptionists. Makeshift signs said ‘Stop! Do not enter!’ in the welcome area (the irony was not lost). All the while, every face was hidden behind a crisp white pleated surgical mask.

It was a like a GCSE version of Outbreak.

Staff were coming over all European. The unfamiliar use of hand gestures for reserved Brits was now in full force to aid everyone’s understanding of the muffled instructions.

I went in alone. For the record, the only other times I’ve entered a hospital alone was to visit my father, (massive heart attack), and my mother (massive stroke). (We don’t do drama by halves in our family). You could say walking hospital corridors alone is not my absolute favourite. Walking hospital corridors that are not actually 2 metres wide when social distancing is enforced, again, not my Top 10.

We were all at a distance. The booking clerk, behind her glass screen. The nurse, attempting to back step through the wall to keep contagen-free. The porter, attempting to move me down to X-ray. Me, a fully functioning ambulant adult now treated as contaminant, in lock down on an enormous shopping trolley of a hospital bed.

The body language on display was straight out of The Nightclub Bouncer’s Bible. Everyone was doing it. Straight arms, palms forward. “Step Back!”, “No further please!”, “Make Way, Coming Through!”. This whole place was unsafe. The enforcement of ‘Safe’ physically distancing, enforced that nothing was safe. We were swilling around in a pool of wild wet toxic danger. The wary look in people’s eyes was utterly unnerving.

It was a first. Total strangers were frightened of me. “Look” their eyes said, “I’m doing my job over here but I’m genuinely concerned you might accidentally kill me.”

Me, a 5ft2 white portly middle-aged woman. Kill them.

That feeling of being labled as lethal was horrifically new. (The leftovers of that experience are properly worth mining later).

The thing was, when it came to killing them, I actually had no idea if I would.

OK, back in the resuss room my glasses were steaming up – face masks have their dark side.

I’d been talking to the newly arrived doctor. Talking as best we could with masks firmly in place. He stood across the room in blue scrubs, gloves, apron, arms folded, leaning on the cubpoard. He didn’t touch me, examine me, or step within the 2 metre radius of me. For the best part of 15 minutes he asked questions, probed possibilities, gathered history. Him in his small corner. I in mine. He had a soothing voice but his presence on the fear side of the room belied his belief in a clear and present danger. Me.

To be fair, I wasn’t sure what he’d brought into the room with him either.

The first round conclusion was that bloods would need to be taken. He gathered all the necessary sharp pointy things from the cupboard, turned, paused, then finally moved to brake the perimeter.

One sharp scratch later the blood was being drawn. I felt the pull. I looked briefly down to my arm and through his thin plastic apron glimpsed his ID badge. I knew the name.

Really, really well.

I looked up and into the eyes of my friend’s husband. A man I’d seen once a week for years. I’d enjoyed dinner with him multiple times, had barbequed in his garden with our family, attended children’s parties together, had prayed with and for him, had sat long over coffee and had talked late about the deep stuff and the fluff of life.

I said his name and his eyes lifted to mine.

“No way! Is that you?”

The flood of connection rushed in, across the white masks, the blue gloves, the apparently contaminated bed, and the strict protocols. Nothing changed in that room, and yet everything did.

Suddenly I wasn’t alone in this weird moment of my life. I was with someone familiar. Someone who understood big chunks of my life, who understood who I was beyond a strange set of presenting symptoms. And I understood chunks of his life and history. We were together in the weirdness, figuring out the next step. Still with the potential to kill each other, but I’d moved in an instant of recognition from powerless, fearful and isolated, to empowered, confident and connected.

It’s a long story for a short but transformative lesson, which is this.

I wonder if finding the common ground with each human being around us actually determines our own sense of confidence in the world.

No-one can make us feel like we belong. That’s our own piece of work. But what if the common ground we find with another person, (especially even in the face of our own fear, prejudice and desire to remain isolated), could be the rickety rope bridge to the unparalleled joy of being known, seen and understood. Truly connected. Maybe even valued.

We’re all different. That’s for sure. We have the capacity to be genuinely dangerous to each other in life, business and friendship. Yet, we also have outrageous capacities to help and heal each other. To protect and restore. To bring comfort and joy.

If I looked hard enough, through your PPE, I might be able see beyond your defences. (Maybe even if you were busy sticking needles in me). I might recognize your fear, your protective measures, your distancing as something that reflects my own. I could, if I was brave, choose to stand on the same patch of earth you and I have been gifted, and face the future together rather than alone.

It’s an option.

Keeping it Real

My father was a preacher. He used to say he’d rather speak at a funeral than a wedding. At a funeral he said, people’s real selves show up. Not the best version of who they want the world to believe they are. But them, unmasked.

That place of raw and true is where he felt he was able to communicate the best. Beyond the masks, to where people were when they weren’t trying to be who they though they ought to be.

Our awareness of our fractures and brokenness is the lived experience of humanity right now. In our other lives, (B.C.*), we powdered them over, concealed the gaps, covered them with pretty and paid to have someone remove them.

That illusion has been stripped by the reality of our communal brokenness.

We’re exposed to our actual reality. Not reality TV or reality gameshows, but real time actuality.

The real of the dismissed, underpaid, unrepresented, invisible parts of society that we now can see are in fact the most honourable.

Our bin-men and women.
Our hospital porters.
Our bus drivers,
delivery guys,
grave diggers,
cleaners,
health staff,
factory workers,
shelf stackers,
social workers,
dinner ladies
and caretakers.

Brokenness has unveiled we are not all equal. That some, (as Orwell said) are more equal than others. That where ethnicity, tax bracket, and access to shelter, space and facts are in limited supply, death rates soar.

Our poor.
Our refugees.
Our homeless.
Our elderly.
Our voiceless.
Our oppressed.
Our prisoners.
Our soldiers.
Our abused.

We’re looking in a true mirror and finding out what it is that holds lasting meaning for us, the human race. Without the camoflage of privilege & individualism, without the coverup of money, activity and pretence.

These broken days have shown ourselves true. Unguarded. And you know what’s winning?

Selfless love is what’s winning right now.

Perhaps it’s because selflessness is the eternal currency of lasting love. It’s the one unopposable fact that trumps the lived reality of our hurt and brokenness. All of our fears and failures. All of our disappointments.

Love, lived out at cost, for me.

It’s remarkably moving that someone, even someone I’ve never met, would give everything for my future benefit.

Even their own life.

That kind of love surely can’t be offered at this scale without the world being changed forever.

It’s the whole story of the first Easter, lived out loud into this one.

______

 

[*Before Coronavirus]

Not Getting Killed

Great psychological thrillers, combined with innumerable episodes of crime drama, have given me a healthy appreciation of the dangers of picking up hitch-hikers.

In sum; Hitch-Hikers Bad. First nicey nicey & uber-friendly. Then, stabby stabby & a cold shallow grave. Generally and basically, it’s not the way I want to end my life. So, up to this point, absolutely and categorically no picking up strangers along country lanes.

But then there was this week. This bright autumn week turned out unexpectedly to be hitch-hiker week.

It all started in Sunday’s sermon. I had a week to prepare, to dig into the calling of the disciples, to Matthew’s unashamed challenge to my complacency… “Jesus said ‘Come, follow me’ and immediately they left their nets and followed him”. The message? When Jesus invites us to follow, our only sane response is to actually and immediately follow Him. To literally get off our bottoms and go where He goes, see what He sees, do what He does. To expend our energies, resources and gifting following the person and practices of Jesus Christ. To become, like Him, a ‘Your will be done’ kind of person.

I hear you, (you sound like my mother by-the-way). “But that doesn’t mean being foolish and putting your life in danger Christine”. Well now, your loving concern is comforting, but I’m not so sure that Jesus’ call was a call to safety.

The disciples followed Him into danger, prison, shipwreck, hunger, poverty and beheading. They followed Him into amphitheatres where they were torn apart by wild animals for the sport of the baying public. They followed Him into homelessness and injury and job-loss. They were only following their Jesus. Hounded by criticism, unjustly tried on trumped up charges, flogged, stabbed and crucified.

I reckon a choice to see the world through His eyes and respond, in-spite of my fear, might not be such a stretch of obedience. It is the pain and privilege of following.

Teaching Jesus’ call turned the dimmer switch way up to bright-white.  I started to see need. On the afternoon school-run a boy stood by the side of the road, hitching. He looked half frozen by the bitter wind. He was shivering, and thanked me over and over for turning up the heating. He stared ahead, arms wrapped around himself, hands buried in his armpits, knees drawn up, shrunken. I imagine he was quite tall for his age, but the chill in his bones made him small and vulnerable. He was matter-of-fact. The bus-fare for the 8 miles home from school was too much. Four days a week he got a ride with a neighbour, but not on Tuesdays. He’d been trying to get a ride for 40 minutes he said. I asked if he’d forgotten his coat today. “I don’t have one” he said.

I had no words.

I could hear him, deliberately inhaling the warm air. Then slowly and quietly, as if the thought had crept out into the warmth, I heard him wish to himself… “I just want winter to be over”.

The longing was tangible. The lump in my throat was large. I drove him home, but the poverty lingered. Probably enough to see the next need.

A few days later, in the pelting downpour on a country lane I passed a man walking. He looked just shy of 60, but then, age is difficult to determine in this neck of the woods. Hardship often adds a decade, sometimes two. I slowed, rolled down the window and met Mark, who hitches the four miles to town once a week to get food. He used to get the bus, but 6 years ago when the fares went up he took to walking (or hitching on a good day). Summer is better, more traffic in the lanes. Winter, he says, isn’t much fun.

We talked first of places he had traveled, then people he’d met, and afterwards spent time discussing the food he’d tasted on his travels. After a while, he sighed and said “God, I’m so hungry, I know I started it but can we change the subject?”

Nature and seasons took conversational precedent until I dropped him where he wanted to be. Again, the poverty hung in the air long after he’d shut the car door.

I’ve a lot to learn. Much of it is about love. Seeing the need and thinking of others before myself, living out of a place that honours those in my community who are eeking out a life at the edges of polite society. The margins. Where Jesus lived.

I didn’t ask either of them if they had faith, didn’t preach a sermon, didn’t give a tract, didn’t switch on a worship CD as we traveled, didn’t say I was a Christian, didn’t preach Good News to the poor. But what I did do, was follow the person and teaching of Jesus through my fear into His goodness. Along the way, I made the journey a little easier for a fellow human being, and caught a glimpse of the real needs of my community and God’s heart for the people of His pasture.

And I didn’t get buried in a shallow grave. Which you have to admit, is awesome.

Tell

Dearest. What I’d like you to know is this. Love is back.

I couldn’t even tell you when it left. Three months, maybe four? In its absence I learned my tell.

But its return, its return was a quiet little ta-da!  As our builder was going through our old yellow door, I heard myself call out “see you tomorrow love”. And there it was. Love. My end-stop, my punctuation of with-and-for-and-together, the last fond suffix between you and me. My love was back.

It’s been a habit, occasionally along with darling when the occasion called for it (though never a darlin’ quite as sticky sweet southern as my friend from NC). This love is not cosseted nor restricted to family and friends, it’s a matter of course, offered to the child passing the gate, the postman, the wiseguy on the bus. A generous custom, warm and open, of Yes-And, not No-But. Absentmindedly practiced. Like breathing in the cold wild air or wiggling toes in fresh summer grass. Second nature even.

However at the edge of summer, my first nature was ambushed by vampiric exhaustion. The kind you hear sneaking up in the alley but cross fingers and hope it’s your imagination. It wasn’t.  A two year concerto of transition, poverty and pastoral need, framed by glorious isolation, bled me out. It was all I could do to open my eyes, maintain coherence (I’m being optimistic here), and crawl wearily to the daily finish of my unchanged unmade bed.

Apparently it was about then that I ended my sentences with words and not love. I tired of connecting. Open was sappingly unsafe. Hatches were battened down. Love went unused.

Perhaps I fell into my dark self. Perhaps I lived in a shrunken closed world in order to protect the precious little love I had left. Perhaps I forgot that I was flesh and blood, and that the people of the world are as wonderful as they are complex. Perhaps I forgot that I was not alone. That I, body and soul belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. That I/ you/we, are all created for and fueled by one supernaturally natural propellant. If I had only remembered love and it’s unquenchable source.

Ladies, gentlemen, scholars and thieves, my tell is my love. Because in health and well-being, with rest, prayer, laughter, Jesus, and a few monumentally amazing friends, I add love to living.

Lath

It turns out money does grow on trees. But it takes blood, sweat and a few misty-eyed moments to get it out.

Right now, we’re ripping some crumbling walls and ceilings out of our home. For those who don’t know, that means no matter how much duct tape and plastic sheeting you use, life gets dirty.  And by dirty I mean there’s plaster dust in my knicker drawer.

But behind the plaster is gold.

Because nature’s ticking hides inside the walls.  Elegant thin wooden strips of lath, pinned neatly in place by a gagillion rusty nails. The end of each day holds a waist-high Pick-Up-Stick heap in the yard waiting to be tended to.  It’s up to me to spend my nights harvesting the gift.  Seize the day, or the walls, whatever my friend. Poverty makes opportunists of us all.

Just so you know, I’ll be making attractive vintage labels expounding the beauty of antique, hand split, twine-tied firewood [because  ‘vintage’ now reads 15% mark-up].

So far, I have sorted, de-nailed, broken and tied thirty-two bundles of kindling. I reckon that’s at least two big pots of creamy white paint. So while breaking and binding each evening, I’m fueled by the imagined view of a flat dustless painted ceiling from a crisp clean bath.

Hard work never looked so good.

Dust

Today I went to King’s.  It’s a tall white secret kept by solitary well dressed octogenarians. Which is why I. love. it.

Hiding in plain sight was the objective. So I sat quietly, ordered a pot of breakfast coffee while waiting for the view to soak into me. The five cathedral sized windows overlook the craggy jaggy black rocks and the silver sparkle of ocean. The sharp morning light made the air glow bright with shiftless dust.

One of the blessings of this patch of slow, is that I have given myself permission to purely, absolutely, unquestionably BE. To simply breathe.  In.  Out.  To inhabit each moment. This means, on occasion, I watch dust float. Don’t judge, it’s a choice for good.

In this dust-gazing-place I noticed an old soldier shuffle towards the light-shafts. His white cane tap-tapped to his familiar seat. He sensed me there, quietly breathing and turned politely to say hello. It was just a pleasantry, but, being unfolded to the world around me the pleasantry became an open door.

His cloudy eyes and white hair belied the colour he brought with him. A life of travel, ambition, adventure, wartime romance and a deep abiding love of the woman who gave him two children and 65 wonderful years. My eyes grew foggy too as he looked toward the bright ocean and said softly, “I miss her. Each and every day. Every hair on her beautiful head”.

Her name was Peggy. As each moment was unwrapped and cradled, her image glistened, crisply embossed on the screen of his memory. I listened long as constancy and devotion lapped around me.

When I went to leave he stood like the gentleman he was. Then called me gently over, thanked me for the kindness of the conversation and impressed the gentlest of kisses on my cheek.

We are indeed but dust and shadow. Yet our animated clay is bathed in love’s light. Enough to make even angels jealous.

Sycamore Hill

Before I go any further, this moment needs to be logged, marked, highlighted and breathed into the crevices of this restoration season.

It is this. The Quiet green of this ‘away’. Twenty minutes from home there is a piece of verdant heaven that’s open every Thursday to the ones who know it’s here.  A narrow gate among the dappled trees, the dew still on the grass. Sheep bleating and nudging in their pasture, and every now and then a feisty young cockerel exercising his right to crow.  I would if I lived here too.

The homestead is old, but far from dilapidated, it is honoured like the wise old gentleman it is. Wise enough to know you need boarders on flower beds, but yet that the world will keep turning if blossoms bosom over onto the path.  Each old and broken thing is reused, repurposed, refreshed into a catalogue of easy beauty, a clubhouse of the angels where hot tea and cold ginger beer is served with worn vintage style and without apology.

Thyme and parsley grow in cookie-jars, centering tables peppered by the marks of creativity, love stories and learning.  From the summerhouse the view is into the lichen-covered apple grove where a table stretches out long.  Overhanging branches are stippled with jam-jar fireflies in readiness for long summer evenings of candlelit conversation.

This is rest. This soaking in the wash of warmth and light and clean. This breath from the open window.  Hearing the tide of leaves waltz above. This country mumble of life that reminds me of the good.

I write here, closed eyed. Free. Seen and unseen. Alone and not. Silent and yet encircled by vital noise. And I feel my shoulders drop. My jaw unclench. My breathing deepen. And I realize the whole of me is present now.

Seeing Thestrals*

While clearing out my old files I found this…in this season of grieving new things, it seems right to revisit the true.

Now forgive me for being morbid, but for the last month or so there’s something I’ve wanted to process out loud. It’s something that will make most of us not want to read any further, so ingrained is our avoidance of the clear reality of each of our lives. It’s about facing grief, loss and the inevitability of the universal constant of ‘the end’.
Death’s not all bad. Don’t get me wrong, it’s painful in layers that i never even knew were there, but I’m coming to see that it adds lavish depth to the colors of our lives. I’ve been thinking of it as an intensity, a vibrancy even, in each life-picture that comes as a result of including the sumptuousness of rich dark shadows. Without the shadows the image is flat, lifeless almost.

These thoughts don’t come out of nowhere, obviously. I’ve just navigated another first. Father’s Day without a father. It also happened to be his birthday. Not an easy season. No standing in the card aisle for me this year, awkwardly trying to pick just the right phrase that said not too much or not too little. There’s a strange kind of loss even in foregoing sad little rituals isn’t there? And then there’s coming home yesterday to a mum who’s had her double bed moved out and is now sleeping in a single surrounded by photos of together times. It hurts my heart. But it’s not just our family’s pot of loss, there’s more.

Every Wednesday morning I knock on the doors of people’s crisis. I enter a time-locked moment where they no longer have control. Somehow a giant PAUSE button got clicked without their consent. It seems to have caught me off-guard, but I have not yet met a patient who believes they ought to be lying in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. The light-box of hospitalization simply highlights their confusion. No-one deserves their lot. I’ve lost track of the number of bedridden people that insist they are really healthy. Shocked that their bodies are not behaving according the the script they made up in their heads. Illness, injury, accident, death are entirely rude. Inconsiderately spontaneous.

But here’s the thing.

Here’s the benefits of seeing thestrals. We are fast-tracked into reality without the option of remaining unthinkingly impassive to the fact that we are physically temporal, limited beings. It astounds me how I choose to navigate life with the made-up notion that the universe exists for my personal happiness and benefit, and that I am in control of my destiny. It doesn’t. I am not. Ask anyone who has stared at a ceiling with an IV in their arm, or who has followed a loved one as they’ve been wheeled down the corridor into ICU, or who has picked up ‘that call’.

We do have every right to ignore the thestrals, to live in a make believe world of our own choosing. It’s probably paler (in a pastel colors kind of way). But then we also have the right, if we’re brave enough, honest enough, to maybe choose to live every day alive, right into the corners. Shadows and all.

*thestrals – for those who haven’t read the Harry Potter series, are magical creatures that can only be seen by those who have watched death in action. To all others they are invisible.