How Far Gone

As I experience it, grief is a consuming state of existence.  I would say "state of mind," but it is not merely mental.  It fills the body and more.  In its moments of intensity, it expands to fill the griever's universe.  That intense state, however, is not sustainable.  Sometimes it lasts a few seconds, sometimes much longer, with an aching that erupts physically.  The tears, sobs, body movements, catching of breath, moaning sounds--these usually bring a measure of relief.  They may also leave behind a residue of cloudiness, of fatigue, and of distraction.

What I read in books, and what I hear from friends who have lost spouses or children or other beloved ones, is that grief can make a kind of progress.  My friends bob and mj patterson-watt are insistent that it is not what some people want to call "moving on," which implies that their daughter or my wife becomes less relevant or central to who we are.  Rather, I think it is that the freshness of the would can begin to heal as one adjusts to the new situation.  My relation to my beloved has entered a new season, dominated by memory and memorial rather than by touching, seeing, smelling, hearing bodily presence.  This does not say that Everly is not still in my life, even in me, speaking in my thoughts, singing and dancing through my imagination, pointing me in the right direction as my partner and guide.  But admittedly, this presence is now muted and even more thoroughly mediated through my perspective on who she is.

Sometimes disturbing, and sometimes to my relief, is that this progress seems to include longer periods of coasting along within my day-to-day affairs.  Frankly, I need to be more consistent in carrying out my responsibilities and duties at work or in family business.  People are very gracious on this matter, respecting what I have given in the past and honoring my current inability to focus as well.  What I am trying to explain here, and simply to understand for myself, is the slow evening out of my emotional road through sloughs and valleys and potholes and pit-traps.  At first, every day was a struggle.  Then there were more level days mixed with sad days several times a week; then, maybe once a week.  I'm not saying that every day does not bring its moments of tears, but over time they have become less likely to dominate the days.

If we call it progress, it is worth noting that it is not exactly inevitable.  The leveling out of emotions may not always be a sign of improvement.  It can also be a superficial dampening, a deadening of the loves that drive humans toward the good.  Our language is filled with imagery about what keeps people going, what urges people to action.  There are the motion words:  motive, motivation, what moves someone, e-motion.  Words like passions and drives speak of what stirs a person and draws a person forward.

Augustine sometimes employed the word "loves" to convey this idea.  The "loves" for Augustine are about our desires, our longings, what we want, what we need.  Rightly directed, they draw humans toward, or push toward, the good for which human life is intended.  Most famously, he speaks of this in the opening lines of Confessions, saying, "Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts find no rest until they rest in you." 

Thus, to have dulled emotions, lessened hopes and aspirations, diminished joys and sorrows, may not indicate progress.  It can sometimes be a diminishing of desire and love for what is good.  It can be a forgetfulness that hides the beauty for which one rightly grieves.  Forgetfulness is a dangerous pattern of life in many ways, covering over good and evil from the past and how they should shape our living now.  Forgetfulness is a favored stance in a culture such as ours, whose wealth is founded on slavery and sustained through oppressive neo-colonial economic systems.  We don't want to remember those things.  They create too much dissonance in the midst of prosperity. 

Personal forgetfulness allows a person to think, "I am self-made.  Look what I have achieved, all on my own!"  But no one is self-made.  Anyone's success emerges from a network of relationships and help from others.  Forgetfulness is the opposite of what I want from grief's progress.  It is in remembering well that I believe progress will come.  Remembering the blessings poured into my life from knowing and living with Everly--this is what I hope will continually grow and take the foreground in my mind and body so that the memories of losing her, though present, take their place in the background.

This wordy prologue is my way of trying to say that it seems to me that I have been coasting for some weeks now.  In one way, it is a kind of drifting that means I have reached a point in grieving where the next steps will be a challenge.  In conversations with friends, I have been wondering how to discern the path God has for me in the remainder of my years.  Up until now, I have believed that the path of my life was united to the path of Everly's life.  God's leading of Everly and God's leading of Mike were one and the same leading, and our discernment was worked out in an unending conversation about our faith, hope, and love.  More than thirty-three years of that process leaves me unprepared to go on with her now present but muted voice.  She remains in and with me.  Her words and deeds are etched upon my life.  Our joint destiny is embedded in the genes, faces, and hearts of three extraordinary, marvelous young adults.  But the conversation is harder.  I'm trying to circle around to its echoes by talking with friends who have known us and share many of the convictions Everly and I have lived by.  Some are telling me it's time to go deeper with grief counseling, and I think that is right.  I am not above seeking help where it can be found.  So one part of the leveling out can be seen as drifting as I consider how to keep going.

Probably another aspect of coasting is my pulling back.  Sometimes, pressing into a struggle is too daunting.  So I've tried to put my energy into work as I can, although that's not yet up to what it should be.  I've had some spells of working on a couple of research projects.  I've been trying to carry water on some things my Dean needs done and for which I am well-suited.  I think this also means that I have pressed into the grief struggle a little less.  That may be a kind of self-preservation.  My emotional energy capacity has never been very high.  In graduate school, I remember confessing to a colleague that I was feeling a lot of anxiety.  His incredulous response was, "Mike, what would it look like for you to be anxious about something?"  Part of the reason for being even-keeled is that I quickly get worn out by intense social interaction and emotional investment.  So I tamp down the emotion to keep myself going.  That may meant that I'm probably dealing with some grief fatigue.

I hope, however, that some of the difference is also that I am making some progress.  I am too inexperienced to know what progress in grieving should look like, but I suspect it includes a kind of wound healing that allows a person to experience the loss of a beloved without becoming constantly or steadily overwhelmed.  What once manifested as days and hours of deep sorrowful longing seems to come over time to reappear as sharp moments of poignant grief, a few tears, a mixed memory of loss and blessing, amidst more usual day-to-day experiences.

I am describing the process of my own experiences.  My three children are in the same time capsule in which I live, under the shadow of death cast by a powerful, enchanting, winsome, loving personality whose manifold tendriled threads append themselves to, even invade, every moment and space we inhabit.  How they find this process unfolding, whether they see progress or stasis, differs in each life.  It is clear that we are not all on the same schedule, that our setbacks are different, and that our sense of progress, or lack of it, varies with our times and places.  One of the heartaches of being their dad is wishing for them to have the gifts of their mother in their life, gifts that I cannot replace.  Everly and I were drawn together by our common loves and our fascinating differences, and in her absence I am left offering the loves we shared, my differences without hers, my brokenness and learning to mingle with theirs.

This week was the week in which the 18th of the month came and went.  That marked eight months since Everly died.  There was a heaviness around me for days.  Moments of painful grief kept cropping up.  So Friday morning I made a point of doing something that often helps me focus and uncover thoughts and feelings just below the surface.  I turned on some music.

This time it was an album by Kyle Matthews, See for Yourself.  One song began with lines that hit me hard.  It is written from the point of view of Lazarus, the friend of Jesus who died and whose life was given back when Jesus went to his grave.  It begins by referring to his sister's grief.

Mary's anger could not be denied,
'If you'd been here, he would not have died.'

While anger has not been a dominant emotion of my grief, I don't deny that it has cropped up at times.  But rather than anger, the response I have to such an image of this sister's grief for her brother is more like that of a child who feels helplessly deprived and wishes intently for any way to recover the loss.  The words awakened this helplessness buried just below the surface.  The song goes on to describe Lazarus's thirst to know the stories of God's deliverance, coming to the statement, "Guess I never knew just how far gone I was."  Whatever it means in the framework of this song, it struck me as describing the depth of my sense of helplessness, my aimless drifting, my intensity of sorrow.  The awakened emotion began to stir as a storm in my chest and throat.

How deep is the loss?  There is no clear answer.  It goes as deep as I have existence.  It's not like losing an object or a possession, something that is not part of oneself.  So reflecting on "how far gone" I am points to the absence of the one who was united to me, in whose life my life participated.  "How far gone I was" reminds me that it is not only Everly who is gone, but it is the "us" that is gone, or at least demolished so thoroughly that it requires a rebuilding under new conditions of existence.

The other song that touched me most deeply is one of Kyle's most well-known compositions, a reflection on baptism called "Been Through the Water."  It links three episodes in the life of a man, from his youth, his young adulthood, and his old age, and examines the significance of baptism across the long narrative.  The final stanza depicts the man with his grandson, gone fishing, and commenting on his old-age pains, "Soon I'll be free from these pains."  Now this is, of course, an aspect of Everly's death that is very present to me.  She spent the last years of her life struggling with a great deal of pain.  The last two months seem to have intensified her pain even more.  The words reminded me that she has been set free from her pain, the pain in her stomach, her back, her arm, her hip, her leg, and just about any part of her anatomy.  For this, I have tried to rejoice.  I would not have her back with me only to again suffer great pain.  She deserves to be free of it.  Yet it seems I would have her back at any cost.  So this thought both reminds me of the price she paid to continue loving us, and the reason I ought to be happy for her not to endure any longer in this world.  It's a joy mixed with hurt, a mournful joy.

The refrain of the first song again spoke to me in those moments.  It has Lazarus telling what it is like to have life flow back into his body.

'Cause I feel my heart start to beat again
'Cause your word is life.
Your word is life.
Your word is life to me.
And I feel my chest start to breathe again
'Cause your word is life.
Your word is life.
Your word can breathe the life back into me.

Now a narrow baptist reading might take "word" to strictly mean the Bible, but that is not the primary use of the term theologically.  It is a way of describing the movement of revelation from God to humanity, whether in creation, in prophetic proclamation, in the Spirit's quickening, or in the incarnation.  It is a way of saying that God has come to humanity with good news.  James Evans argues that the doctrine of revelation and the doctrine of liberation are united, for to begin to know who God is, is already to be liberated from the false gods and ideologies that justify domination systems and enslave human beings.  This word of hope rang true to my sense of helplessness.  However far gone I was, God's word brings light, life, liberation, and restoration to my predicament.  Because Everly now rests in the loving presence of God, I also may receive the grace of being in the presence of God with her.  For God, the Hound of Hell, pursues me to whatever depth I might dig for myself or fall helplessly into.

So Friday morning was a day to find myself immersed in the work of grief.  Rather than coasting along, I was pulled back into the intensity of loss that is Everly's death.  But the very way that it happened is a reminder that I am not alone in it.  It was the words of a song, shared by many people, written by a friend, and infused with life by the Spirit, that stirred me to this important work.  I can't say for sure if it is progress or stasis.  But I do know that as I grappled with these matters, the same Spirit stirred another friend to invite me to get out of the house, take a walk, and converse.  That crisp morning among the trees and hills of north central Durham helped me frame my inner life in the larger realm of creation and redemption.

I am wounded, perhaps broken.  Healing is possible, and in fact seems to be happening in tiny steps.  And I am not alone.  Somewhere in there may be some progress.

Everly's Blessing

 Originally posted on CaringBridge.org

Today our pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr., took his text from Isaiah 44:2-3.  It is a promise of water in the desert, of the Spirit of God upon the people.  He pointed out a significant distinction that many of us may miss.  When God blesses us, the blessing is not for us.  God blesses us that we will bless others.  This particular text says that the blessing will be for the offspring and descendants of those who first receive it.

The sermon sent me to thinking about the blessing of Everly.  A little more than thirty-six years ago, in the fall of 1976, Everly arrived in Waco, Texas, to start her higher education at Baylor University.  Within a few days we met one another as part of a leadership group recruited and sponsored by the Baptist Student Union.  Everly had been recognized by her peers and teachers at the very large J. Frank Dobie High School as perhaps the strongest leader in her graduating class.  She was expected by them to go far and accomplish great things.  I was a small-town boy with an over-estimation of my importance in the world.

It was a couple of months before Everly and I began to get to know one another.  She endured what women in our culture often endure--listening to men talk excessively about themselves (in this case, I was the blabbermouth).  Even with that, she detected something in me worth sticking around to discover.  I was especially drawn to the joyfulness she brought when we were together.

As we grew to be a couple, we had lots of long talks.  One of the early memorable conversations had to do with Everly's calling to teach.  She did not begin her university studies with plans to be a teacher, and some important people had steered her away from it because they thought she could aim for something "better" or "higher."  However, her first year of studies was leaving her with a feeling of something missing.  She was becoming sure that she should be an educator.  Everly did not see a need to separate high achievement from a vocation that would allow her to serve the community and use the gifts to teach that had already appeared.

Most of us who have lived long enough know that the actual path our lives take is far more complicated than we might have imagined at the outset of adulthood.  Everly finished Baylor with little inclination to ever go back to school again.  She immediately became a teacher, and in the course of a few years taught math at most levels from middle school to high school seniors.  It only took about a year of teaching--a year of wondering how it is that some children learn a concept and others don't, puzzling why some strategies work with one child and not another, reflecting on the processes children develop on their own to figure things out--before Everly started recognizing her drive toward further study.  A masters degree in math education from the University of Texas followed.

Then more years of teaching took Everly through Irving, Texas, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Durham, North Carolina.  As a lead teacher, a department chair, a Presidential Award Winner, and a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Everly's vision of better classroom teaching expanded and began to make its mark.  Eventually she moved to district-level curriculum leadership in Durham Public Schools, gaining national recognition for her work, including the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from Baylor University.  And during those years she began work on her doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina.

From Durham she advanced to state leadership as the Director of Mathematics for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.  Having made a lasting mark on that state, she most recently moved to lead mathematics curriculum for the Texas Education Agency.

This is a story that many of you already know.  But for me it is a way of showing how Everly has understood deeply from a very young age that the blessings she has received are for others.  She had dedicated herself to understanding young minds, developing strategies for instruction, and uplifting all students to realize success in mathematics.  Her bountiful intelligence, enthusiasm, organizational insight, and compassion are blessings she received to share with others.

Another way of saying this is that Everly is our blessing.  We have received her into our lives as she has poured herself out, doing good.  She has done good to teachers by recognizing their centrality and power in education.  She has done good to students by never giving up on their capacity for higher math.  She has done good to bureaucrats and politicians by helping them direct their ambition and power toward better curriculum and schools.  She has done good to her colleagues by finding their best qualities and helping them to grow in those ways.

I guess I got the best of the blessing.  I got to live with Everly and share my life with her all of these years.  She is my supreme blessing.  From the time of her first years of teaching, the two of us have had an unending conversation about math teaching.  She has hammered out her ideas, her experiments, her theories, and her resolve in long talks as we drove to work, did the laundry, picked up the kids' toys, sat down in the evening, and just about any time or any place. 

As I said earlier, I probably started out with an over-inflated sense of my own importance.  We intellectual and academic types are prone to such delusions.  I have had a very satisfying and enriching career as a professor, so I'm not belittling that. 

But I also have come to understand that God blessed me with Everly not to have her only for myself, but so that I could play a part in giving her the strength to bless the world.  Reading so many of the comments on CaringBridge has further confirmed this is true.  Everly's influence is deep and wide, and the people she is touching, working with, and serving are blessed beyond measure.  Wherever she has gone, people and institutions have changed for the better.  I'm thankful that I am sharing in such a powerful life of blessing in this world.

For I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour my spirit upon your descendants,
and my blessing on your offspring.

I am a witness.  This is what God has done and continues doing through Everly.  All praise and glory be to the Holy One of Israel!  Amen.