C'est La Vie
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What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be. Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy. And I use these words pretty loosely. There's so much more to life than words..
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Sunday, August 06, 2006
Two and a half weeks ago, I called my Auntie Jo in Boston to see about coming up for Thanksgiving.She said it just really made her day (she said it quite a few times) that I would be able to come up, that she'd finally see me for the first time in 15 years. I was so, so, so excited about going up there for Thanksgiving. She had been in the hospital, but when I spoke to her, she'd already been in the rehab part for a few days and would be home by Saturday. She sounded good, better than I remembered her ever sounding .. her voice wasn't as raspy as usual. We talked about who was whose Godparents (Auntie Jo and Uncle Bob were my older brother's Godparents, then their sons was Godfather to my twin brother and me) and we talked about some family news up there and my military career and some other chitchat. I started not being able to understand her too well at the end because the connection was crackly the whole time but getting worse at the end, and I decided that it was getting too frustrating saying "what?" so much and having her straining to repeat herself. So I listened as best I could and eventually it was time for her to go, and so we said goodbye and I went on being very, very excited about my plans to visit. Today, at about 0842, while I was sitting at my desk in my Working White uniform and settling in after my morning cup of coffee and my attempts to hit the ground running from the 0730 start of the workday.... I saw a new e-mail in my inbox from my mother (which was an e-mail from my father which she forwarded to me) with the subject line of Aunt Mary Jo. Auntie Jo passed away yesterday. I guess sometime before going home from rehab, she took a turn for the worse and didn't recover. Her husband and sons were with her, and I know she's done suffering now. But I burst out crying when I read that, and disappeared into one of the unmanned offices and it took a while before I was cried-out. It was made very clear to me that I could go home for the day, but I didn't want to because what would I do at home? The funeral plans were going to be made during the day, so I would just go home and cry a lot more and then sleep and then cry... and I was fixin' to have all evening and my two off-days to do that. So I decided it would be better to be there and give my mind a chance to focus on other things as a break in between, and be able to grieve more thoroughly not worrying about work had or had not been done. It hurts so bad. I was so excited about finally seeing her. Once, when I was planning on driving up there from VA, she said that since she hadn't seen me in so long, she just kept picturing a ten year old driving a car. She said even though she could hear my voice all grown up and she'd gotten several pictures and letters from me over the years, she just still thought of me as the little girl she last saw. I looked forward to being with her as a grown-up, having grown-up conversations. Having my Aunt there in person with me in real life, face-to-face, to bestow all the womanly wisdom on me that she'd been storing up all her life. She was always this really special woman to me, wise and peaceful and ... unbeatable. When my cousin told me she was in the hospital, I said that I could come up anytime, immediately, if needed. He said she was in the rehab section and doing better and I shouldn't need to rush. I kinda wish I had called a week earlier when she was still bad off so that I would have rushed up there just in time for her to be recovering... Maybe. I don't have many family members, and I'm losing so many of them.... I really think she was, in an odd way, maybe the one I felt closest to even with our infrequent contact. It was like, even though she still pictured me as ten, we could always pick up as if we were never out of touch. And even though all the trips I tried to plan never worked out, I always knew that I COULD go, that I was always very welcome and that I was a real part of their family. I wish I had gone there instead of DC in April.. or that I had made it work out before. I mean, I'm not beating myself up as if I just neglected to make the right decision, I just wish I could have not let 15 years and every moment of my opportunity to see her slip away. She's been sick for so long, and I've known for so long that I couldn't take that time for granted, I couldn't assume she'd be there in a few months to see when it was more convenient... but something else was always happening or whatever the case was. And when I put in a request to go up last year, that one got disapproved. The one chance I really made myself to see her and an outside force stopped it. Maybe God was protecting me from remembering her other than healthy and strong and peaceful. I'm leaving on Tuesday for her funeral, Lord willing, and I am so grateful to hopefully be able to go. At work today, I was thinking that I wouldn't go, because I didn't want that to be the way I saw my cousins and uncle for the first time in so long... I figured that I could say goodbye and get my closure at her gravesite just as well as at her funeral. But the truth is that I couldn't get the same closure, and I want to hear what everyone has to say about her, and I want to be there with my uncle and my cousins and even my father during this time. Sure, I haven't seen them in fifteen years, but like my Aunt, I always felt more connected to them than I could explain. I was so excited about going to Boston, finally, when I was making my plans for Thanksgiving... this was not how or why I wanted to be going. But I'm glad to have the chance, and grateful to be able to say goodbye.
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Hippie: (after hearing Max wants to avoid the draft)You still have options man. "So how do i do normal "It's been known for a train to jump its track. It's ok, so you'll know, most times they come back. It's ok to lose your life, when you finally see your birth. It's ok to say, "I love you," and figure sometimes it's gonna hurt. "As a comedian, you have to start the show strong and you have end the show strong. Those are the two key elements. You can't be like pancakes, all exciting at first, but then by the end you're sick of 'em!" "Hey, this is weird! I ordered one frozen yogurt and they gave me two. You don't happen to like frozen yogurt, do you?" "I love it!" "You're kidding! What a crazy random happenstance!" "Only one more trip," said a gallant seaman, "It was Flannery O'Connor who said that 'grace must wound before it heals.' Her words help me to separate what is most true about life from the things we want to be true. We want life to be painless. True grace is a hard sell because in order for the human heart to understand forgiveness and love, it must first experience darkness and isolation. A life lived under the rule of grace is a life of need which allows us to receive an appreciate the gift of the giver of grace. This is why we will always have the poor with us; this is why God will not allow us to ignore injustice; this is why we are called to a life we cannot handle alone, which can and will break us in the effort to live it -- because grace must wound before it heals." Regarding 2007: Should auld acquaintance be forgot, I thought Christmas Day would never come. But it's here at last, so Mom and Dad, the waiting's finally done. And you gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up, it's Christmas morning. O little town of Bethlehem, Walk humbly, son Strings of lights above the bed "In a little while I'll feel better "Please tell me once again that You love me. That You love me. Please tell me once again that I matter to You and You really care. Please tell me once again that You're with me, forever. It's not that I could ever doubt you, I just love the way it sounds. I just love the way it sounds." "Every once in a while, a bannerzen posts." "7:30. What kind of people have to be at work at 7:30?" have you seen my love Traveling is significant because it takes so much effort. Either you're going to some place you love, or you're leaving some place you love. Usually it's both. I think I have Bond's ability to get into trouble but not his ability to get out of it. Someday I'll be in some foreign country with 5 thugs with automatic rifles pointed at me, and I'll just.... fart "You had no alternative .. We must work in the world. The world is thus." --- "No .. Thus have we made the world." The summer ends and we wonder where we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And you both look so young And last night was hard, you said You packed up every room And then you cried and went to bed But today you closed the door and said "We have to get a move on. It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead, We push ourselves ahead." Looking out the bedroom at this snowy TV.. ever since commencement, no one's asking 'bout me. But I bet before the night falls, I could catch the late bus.. take small provisions and this Beethoven bust. I could find work in the outskirts of the city, eat some fish on the way.. befriend an old dog for a roadside pal, find a nice couch to stay -- a pull-out sofa, if you please!" Ooh! Get me away from here I'm dying "The trouble with folks like Brownie is they hold their life in like a bakebean fart at a Baptist cookout and only let it slip out sideways a little at a time when they think there's nobody noticing. Now that's the last thing on earth the Almighty intended. He intended all the life a man's got inside him, he should live it out just as free and strong and natural as a bird." "Life is a phantasmagoria .. It is a pell-mell of confused and tumultuous scenes. We try in vain to find a purpose - to bring an order, a unity to life. I suppose that is the appeal of art. Art is the blending of the real and the unreal, the conquering of nature. It is real enough for it to reflect life, but has the unity that life lacks." "in time memories fade. I've always had this feeling about Patty that she's complex and intriguing...I like Patty alot. She's got a good heart and tells terrible squirrel jokes. "Try to remember that world-weariness isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the book of Mark, I think its Mark, Jesus looks at a blind man and sighs. Jesus sighed before even telling the man he would be healed. He sighed, and I'm not sure that there's a much more human expression of frustration than this. Faced with the horrid picture of a cursed earth and looking into the white eyes of a man blind from the day he was born, He sighed. The Creator of the universe in human form was sad "of the evils of this world," the world He created. Your Creator sighed for you in the same way before He healed you and made you His." After the last secret's told After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone After the last child starves And the last girl walks the boulevard After the last year that's just too hard There is love -- Andrew Peterson, After the Last Tear Falls "when you most need people, you don't need perfection - just to know someone gives a damn" "A CALL TO ACTION: "My brother's always [telling me], 'You should be more mysterious--boys like that.' But I'm not good at that. It would just make me more uncomfortable." "Loners want to kill you, but not for any particular reason, and they'd probably like you if they weren't being guided by the violent voices in their head." "No one wants to oil a snake these days!"
-- Her mom: "We're all safe." -- Jamie Bevill and her mother during Christmas-Decorating dinner, December 20, 2002 i'd throw out all my shoes i'd set up cans for friends to dump their shoes senseless shoes a pioneer of callouses lordy-be and bless my soul i'd be a barefoot spaceman the first you'd ever know" "The best way to have God's will for your life is to have no will of your own!" "Generations circle and each one atones. The sins of the father are seperate from my own. In Pilgrim's Progress, it's forgiveness that makes whole, and as time levels and consoles, I place the daisies in your bowl." "For a moment he just stared at her. Then, with an urf-urf-urf of laughter, he turned back to the controls." "It's on the internet.. so, then, it must be true." "Be at least as interested in what people can become as you are in what they have been." Blessed be the rock stars!" Get up for the shower.. wash and scrub and scour every part as if a cleaner man could better bear the shame.. "She was eating gnarly amounts of calcium." Homeless man to girl trying to give him money: "No, thanks, ma'am. I never work on Sundays." "Wow! I never thought I'd need a radar-guided spatula!" "Isn't it great that I articulate? Isn't it grand that you can understand? ... I can talk, I can talk, I can talk!" I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know... I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: "You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten. When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "No answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand." CCM: You've spoken a lot more about crying than I ever thought you would. "Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccuptaions, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good, and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic, and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man's soul." ""Don't go matchmaking for me, Ilse," said Emily wit a faint smile... "I feel in my bones that I shall achieve old-maidenhood, which is an entirely different thing from having old-maidenhood thrust upon you." "I wish Aunt Elizabeth would let me go to Shrewsbury, but I fear she never will. She feels she can't trust me out of her sight because my mother eloped. But she need not be afraid I will ever elope. I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art" "Tomorrow seems like a long ways away. But it will come, just like any other day... Deep inside, where the wounded creatures hide, I am afraid. Maybe I got lost somewhere along the way somehow. Please rescue me... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the dark shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me... Though I fear, though I am afraid, You are with me. Though I'm angry, tired, broken down and confused, You are with me. Though I sin like I've never sinned before, lose myself right out an open door, You are with me." "The invisible people agreed about everything. Indeed most of their remarks were the sort it would not be easy to disagree with: "What I always say is, when a chap's hungry, he likes some victuals," or "Getting dark now; always does at night," or even "Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?"" -- C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader "When People object... that if Jesus was God as well as Man, then He had an unfair advantage which deprives Him for them of all value, it seems to me as if a man struggling in the water should refuse a rope thrown to him by another who had one foot on the bank, saying, "Oh but you had an unfair advantage." It is because of His advantage that He can help." "But, you know, as a Christian, one of the big questions you always ask yourself is, "So we believe in Jesus, we believe in the teachings of the church, but what does that look like when it's lived out?" Because surely, one of the things that Jesus said that I think we often overlook is, "The person who hears my words and does them is like the wise man who built his house on the rock." He didn't say "the person who hears my words and thinks about 'em" or "whoever hears my words and agrees with it." But he said, "Whoever hears it and does it." "find that which gives you breath and grants you more to give "I have packed all my belongings. I don't belong here anymore. This pair of sandles, one pack to carry, this old guitar and this tattered old Bible. And I know I won't be afraid. 'cause I know, I know Home is where You are." "Open up your weepy eyes, everyone is dancing. Angels peer through sweet disguise, through a fire of cleansing. "Long hair, no hair; Everybody, everywhere:
Breathe Deep, breathe deep the Breath of God!" "You may be bruised and torn and broken, but
you're Mine!" "I don't deserve to speak, and they don't deserve
to hear it. It's makin' me believe that it's not
about me." "Kickin' against these goads sure did cut up my
feet. Didn't your hands get bloody as you washed
them clean?" "They say God blessed us with plenty. I say
you?re blessed with poverty. ?Cause you never
stop to wonder whether earth is just a little
better than the Land of the Free" "Computers will know everything in the 21st
century. They'll be like me in the 20th
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