Seven Years Between Haircuts

On May 20 I wrote about a hermeneutical flight of imagination.  I had realized that it was 70 months since Everly's death.  I had realized it had been seven years since Everly's first harsh and nearly deadly dose of chemotherapy, when her hair fell out from the poisonous effects.  Those numbers recollect biblical images of fullness, completion, and specifically the number of years associated with the exile of Israel after Jerusalem was destroyed.  I don't need to repeat everything I said there--you can go back to it.  But in summary, I said that I'm not claiming the verses of ancient texts are directly about me; rather, they interact with my life through imaginative comparisons and reflections.

I've continued to think about whether I should see this period of my life as marked by new beginnings.  Is there something I might learn about my own time and place by thinking about the end of Israel's exile?  "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

One thing that occurred to me back on that day was that maybe the time had come to cut my hair.  Some people know that I started growing it out to its full length when Everly's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  Since 2012, seven years ago, I have had only a few trims when my mom or kids urged me to get the ends cleaned up.  I've not been much of a hair stylist.  I just let it grow as it will, and tried to keep it clean and combed.

I've told that story to many people who might have wondered why the Baptist preacher had such long hair.  I've explained when people inquired about the old man's unusual non-fashionable hair style choice.  I would say, "I started growing it when my wife's hair fell out from chemotherapy.  After she died, I kept it.  So far I haven't thought of a good reason to cut it."  I'm not sure what I thought a good reason would be.  But on that day, I thought maybe a reason with symbolic sense had come to me.

A few days later, I was talking with a friend who told me she had a discipline of "harvesting" her hair.  She grew it out to a full length, then periodically cut it off to send to an organization which used it to provide wigs for cancer patients.  She had done this cycle many times.

I also had sent my hair to a cancer support group once before when I experimented with growing out my hair for few years.  It seemed to be one more reason to add to my hermeneutical reflection about possibly cutting my hair.  I started planning to get a haircut. I even leaked this plan in conversation with a few people.  One person, knowing my mischievous side, suggested that I wait to cut it until I made my out-of-state trip to visit my dad in Texas.  That way, when I returned to North Carolina, I could anticipate getting the "maximum shock value."  I settled on that plan.  Dad was extremely happy to be a partner in getting my long hair cut off, as he was never fond of it.  We took care of it right away after I arrived.

The shock value plan worked.  I've had a great time showing up to my usual activities and encountering people's amazement.  A few have felt the need to tell me I look younger, which is not my goal.  I'm proud of my years achieved.  I'm not surprised that many emphasize that I "look great."  I know that having that long, shaggy mop of hair was in part a way to make myself distasteful to people's expectations, of thumbing my nose at conventionality.  I didn't expect people to like it.  One fellow minister said that if I could get a haircut, it was another sign that "with God all things are possible."  The locally owned pharmacy staff, with whom I've been doing business every month for a decade or more, had to ask my name when I came in to get my refills.  It's been fun to reappear in Durham as a new person.

Aside from the shock value and the fun, getting my hair cut is also for me a symbolic change.  Growing my hair was a sign of solidarity with Everly when her hair fell out, and it continued to be that for the remaining months of her life over the next year.  After she died, keeping the long hair involved shifting from solidarity with her in her living to a symbol of grieving her loss.  From year to year, I did not see a reason to cut it.  Perhaps at some deep level I was wearing my hair like a veil of mourning.  I sometimes entertained that idea, but never formally adopted it as my rationale.  I simply could not bring myself to the point of wanting a change.

In May of this year, as we were approaching what I had come to call my "sad season" between May 24, my wedding anniversary, and July 18, the anniversary of Everly's death, once more the weight of grief pressed upon me.  But under that weight, I found myself in the midst of a complexity of emotional and intellectual ferment.

Intellectually, I had arrived at a moment in my research and writing that had been very slow coming.  About ten years earlier, Willie Jennings and Dan Rhodes had coached me toward developing a book idea based on thematically similar essays I had written.  Dan even helped me create a possible outline and suggested a title I might use.  Yet as he and I talked through the structure of the project, I realized that there were severe gaps that I would have to fill before an outline of the book would make sense to me.

So I started working on those particular tasks.  I wrote and presented papers in the next few years that took important steps toward filling those gaps.  In each case, when I reached the temporary end of an assignment, I realized that I still had more work to do.  My pattern of scholarship over the years would have meant that I would pick up these topics again and complete the research as I prepared to present at an academic conference.  That process was interrupted in 2012 when Everly was diagnosed with cancer.  All of my energy and focus shifted toward supporting her "in sickness or in health."  I stopped writing new essays for a number of years afterward.

Eventually I started to get back on track, but the great breakthrough came about because of the invitation to give lectures at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary last October.  They agreed to my topic for Baptist Heritage Lectures as "Baptist Ecclesiology After Whiteness."  The three lecture topics corresponded to three unfinished gaps in my research and writing.  The gift of a place to stay and focus on writing allowed me to bring all three topics to a satisfying point of development.

Building on that progress, I wrote an essay for a conference in May which further built upon the critical work necessary to write the book I was envisioning.  A month later, on a week-long writing retreat, I put together a full outline of the book, with chapter summaries, a new prologue, and a fleshed out proposal so that colleagues could help me refine it before sending it to a publisher.

Yes, something new is happening in this year of my life.  I am emerging from a season of intense grief toward what my buddy Willie has been pointing me for a couple of years.  He has told me a few times that he is seeing signs that "I'm still living."  In similar tone, Curtis Freeman keeps reminding me that I have important work to do and things to say that he and many more people need to hear. He told me that my presentation in May had him and the entire room "spellbound."  I'll take the complement even if it may be an exaggeration.  And my colleague in organizing, Tim Conder, keeps reminding me that there are things that I need to write that no one else he knows is able to say the way I can say them.  I'm not inclined, at least in my saner moments, to believe with Elijah that I am the only one left to do God's work, but I appreciate Tim's reminder that the distinctive person I am and the life that I have lived entail a message and calling from God that I need to faithfully carry out in my scholarly work.

Part of what is new in my life is also the rising up of joy after a long valley of sorrows.  If any of you followed my blog over the years, you know about the grief I have waded through.  It has not been only grief, but I have sometimes wondered if I would forevermore be known to many of my friends as the sad widowed man.  I wondered for myself whether I would have strength to be more like the visionary and committed servant of God that Everly once chose to share her life with.  Or would I be confined as the broken man who struggles to find the energy to finish out an academic career.  It's an exaggerated contrast, but it isn't lacking in truth.

In May, and June I started writing in this blog about the emotional transformations I was recognizing and working through.  I wrote about friendships, and about taking to heart my responsibility to enrich and expand those relationships with people who care about me.  I wrote about friends who were influencing me, encouraging me, and inspiring me to fulfill what they could see in me, even if I did not always see it for myself.  I'm not going to repeat what I wrote in those posts, but I will reiterate that I'm striving to live not only in the shadow of a great loss, but in the light of a community of friends and the hope of joy in sharing life with them. 

My deepest theological convictions tell me that we are put into this world to play our parts as builders of loving, just community wherever we find ourselves living and working.  We receive the blessing of those who come our way.  We recognize the failures of justice and love and commit ourselves to repair and restore the goodness that ought to be. 

I can't do that if I'm shrunken into myself and pulling away from the liveliness of caring for one another.

A few days ago I was looking through my Facebook account and noticed that it said I am married to Everly.  I guess I never felt the need to change it.  But now it seems as if the symbolic meaning of keeping my hair long aligns with the symbolic meaning of continuing to list myself as married.  My marriage with Everly brought fulfillment, gave us three children, and I believe blessed many other people.  It is okay to acknowledge that our anniversaries ended at 33 years, and the household we built did not continue as long as we had hoped.  I've been saying it for many years--I am widowed.  So I quietly changed it on the worldwide software platform, too.

Recently I was looking at some photographs in a blank greeting card display.  One of the photographs showed a trail through a plush woodland, thick with green undergrowth.  The picture showed the trail bending as it appeared more narrow, extending farther into the distance.  Around the bend, no one can yet see.  I can't be sure what is ahead, but I do believe this is a season of new things.  I've cut my hair after seven years (for now).  I'm opening my daily routines and my heart to build loving friendships here and now.  I'm in the midst of compiling many years of work into a book.  I'm looking ahead to see what might be next.  "From this time forward I will make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known."  I hope y'all will walk with me.

The Language of Grief and Loss, and Living in the Afterloss

I learned a new word from an old friend:  "the afterloss."  It's what he calls the new stage of life we enter after a loss, an era of grief and change.  I'll say more about it later in this post.  I've been doing some grief work lately--it's that time of year for me between my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of Everly's death.  In the process I've been thinking about some of the language we use to describe our loss and grieving, and maybe stretching and extending it to help me understand my own situation at this time.

The imagery of a "broken heart" is powerful to describe some of the struggle of dealing with loss through death or broken relationships. The heaviness in one’s body, the dark cloud invading one’s thinking, and the erratic welling up of tears all give the sense of something broken. Difficulty thinking about what comes next and the inability to focus on plans or complex tasks are all features of grieving that imply brokenness in my experience.

Of course, figurative language of this sort has its limits. Literal breaking usually applies to solid, rigid items or to machines or processing mechanisms of some sort. While the image of breaking does fit well enough with what loss and grief are like, it also seems that mixing the metaphors is common and helpful.

Grief as a "wound" is another image. This language makes a more direct connection to the organic, fleshy nature of our humanity and its bodily experience of grief.  In this case, rather than breaking, the image of ripping flesh, or a deep cut into our bodies speaks vividly about the pain and trauma of loss and grief. A loved one’s death, or events or conversation which change or end a beloved relationship, can feel traumatic as if tearing open a wound in one’s body.  In the same imagery, we often think of the healing process as stitching a wound and forming scars on our hearts.

I want to riff on what may be another aspect of this image of a wound. Beyond the initial ripping or cutting, there is often also a slow, subsequent, repeated tearing that extends our woundedness.

Very common for people who suffer loss is the experience of turning to speak to the loved one who is not there anymore. Or it may be the thought that constantly pops up, “I need to talk to her about this,” followed by the remembrance that it will not be possible.

The constant little tearing may occur when the grieving person remembers plans already made. There may have been a trip planned, tickets for a concert, dinner plans, a party, a hike, or some other outing. But these will not happen.

Longer term plans also rip the wound a little more. For me, Everly’s untimely death meant she would not be present for our children’s future graduations, and even more painful, their potential marriages or birth of children. In all losses, people lose not only concrete plans, but also imagined futures.  These are dreams of a joyful future which have not always even been expressed.  Perhaps buried in one's hopes are dreams of times spent in travel, in couple time not available during the hectic middle years of life, or seasons with family or friends who have been out of reach in the midst of one’s work life.

My friend Benjamin Allen, whose website and Facebook sites both are about grief and healing in the afterloss, insists above all that we not try to think of grief as a finite process. To be in grief, especially but not only after a death, is to enter a life era that he calls “afterloss.” In this era, we learn and adapt to a new stage of relationship in which who or what we have lost is still present to us and in us, but in new ways. At least this is how I’ve interpreted what he is saying. I walked with him for a short time through the horrific tragedy of loss from illness that eventually took the lives of his wife and two children. I was very young still--in my mid twenties. It was difficult for me to comprehend the depth of his pain. I remember times that I said awkward things to him out of the pat answers I had overheard while growing up, dumb cliches that it took me many more years to unlearn.

This stage of living in grief while also healing brings many complications. It's the era in which those smaller, later ripping events revive and repeat grief.  My greatest loss, the death of Everly, means that all of my remaining years include her presence in making me who I am and in shaping my dreams. Her absence and losing her affect my work and my relationships, and in a way the pain of her loss is mixed with all the other losses, small or large, that follow.

The painful failure I went through in my mid-thirties as I saw a church breaking apart around me and myself impotent to make a difference also lives with me.  In that time, I lost the naïveté that told me I could be a leader whom people would enthusiastically follow because of my "brilliance," my skill in speech and writing, and my sincerity in presenting my vision.  Naïveté both overstated my talent and understated the struggle that we have in our communities when we try to see truth together in the midst of our divisions. That loss makes me less sanguine about leading change, less confident in my gifts, and rightly less messianic in my self-estimation.

The variety of losses one endures are intertwined. Thus each little tear of the heart intersects the ones that preceded it.  All my memories of leadership failure are linked with the ways that Everly held me up when I was stumbling and helped me see when I was blind.

Part of the afterloss, for instance in my era of widowhood, is recognizing what is lost and stays lost. I do not have the same yokefellow that Everly was to hold me up when I stumble. I don’t mean that there is no one. Many friends have been present to keep me from staying on the ground when I fall. My adult children have had to learn that their daddy needs them in ways they previously did not have to face. 

Besides help when I stumble, it is also clear how deep the loss of Everly's discerning eyes and insights is for me.  I am constantly reminded how I miss those gifts, and that I do not have a clear way to replace them.

In the almost six years since I have been without her, I have faced numerous difficult life decisions. I usually feel that I am walking blind. I do my best to call on people who know me and care for me and believe in me for guidance and help.  They do help.  And I habitually work through comparisons of options to try to weigh what is best.  But I have yet to press forward into such important decisions without finding myself surprised, even disappointed or shocked, perhaps misled by my self-focus or by my rosy-glasses vision.  I have convinced myself that I have a glimpse of what may come next, only to find out I am blind to what probably should have been obvious.  These new losses are among the continuing tears at the wounds of the heart.  At this point in my life, at my low points, it sometimes seems the best description is that I have become an old fool.

Now let me qualify that. I'm just sharing a feeling I have had, but not the general stance toward the world in which I live.  Most of the time I feel highly competent and able to offer a great deal to my family, my friends, and the world. So I’m not saying that I don’t ever believe in myself. I’m not asking for people to call me up to remind me how much of a blessing I have been to them. I fully believe that it is true that my life blesses others and is fulfilling for me; therefore, I press on toward the high calling, to take hold of that for which I was taken hold of. So no need to get worried about Mikey today.

However, in the afterloss, I would say it’s pretty much expected that low times will come. I reckon that's true even for people who have never endured a great loss, but in a different way.  And it seems to me that in the struggle to restore some equilibrium, to find some new path, and to fill in some of the holes in one’s life, the era of grieving can often seem to be repeating what already happened. New losses overlay the old ones. To revert to the wound metaphor, old scars reopen, and pain returns to the very place where it was most intense.

I’ve had almost six years of widowhood. Throughout my life, I’ve known many women and men whose widow years have meant they stayed alone until they died.  My dear grandma lived 29 years after the death of my granddaddy. She moved around to stay with family members, mainly her two daughters and her sister. That meant she lived in our home part of each year the entire time that I was growing up. I was a kid and never gave much thought to what her loneliness might have been like. Now I wonder more. I was her darling, and we often sat and talked while she rocked in her rocking chair.

She found a way to share her life with others that gave her a level of satisfaction that I never really questioned. Partly, it seems that her generational outlook of being a mother who cared for a household found some fulfillment in still using those gifts and that calling toward her children and grandchildren even after her beloved husband had died too young.  She cooked and cleaned and cared for us, and she also spent her time reading, traveling, and doing what she wanted to in her "retirement."  I don't recall her talking about wondering what comes next.  Now I wonder what she would have said had I asked those kinds of questions.

In my years of a widow's grief, I find myself regularly wondering and questioning what comes next. That’s what got me started writing again last week, as a beloved colleague and I were discussing her own search for direction in the next season in her life.  Every once in a while I think I may have uncovered a treasure what will fill some of the space that grief and loss have opened up. I think that maybe I have discovered a salve that will help scars continue to heal.  I think I may be looking down a path that could calm my restlessness and make me feel more at home.  So far, it’s mostly still more stumbling, a glimpse of beauty that remains just out of reach. The beauty is real. The treasure is priceless. The path was a possibility. Yet I had expectations that were too great for what could happen.

I’m probably describing what the current cultural memes call first world problems. I do remind myself that a steady job, caring friends and colleagues, healthy and happy children, opportunities to study and write—all of these are graces far and above what one person should expect.  Knowing and affirming that truth of grace abundant does not, however, take away the longing that is part of what living in grief and loss carries with it. 

Some might say that the longing itself is what I should set aside.  I'm not sure I can agree, nor that I think it is possible.  I do recognize the danger of lustful cravings, and I don't think that is what I am describing here.  I believe, and hope I am right, that what I'm calling longing is an embedded passion within humanity to be in relationship, to love one another, to find fulfillment in the beauty and richness of creation, and to rest in the divine presence.  It is the notion that we have been made with purpose and meaning that calls out to us and presses us forward. 

At the same time that I embrace the longing as part of what urges me on toward being what I am made to be, I also acknowledge and affirm the Apostle Paul's claim that he has learned to be content in whatever circumstances he finds himself.  I am moderately good at living that way, but maybe not as good as Grandma was.  Somewhere in between longing and contentment--that has to be where I strive to live.  I don't want to settle for less than the good that awaits me, nor to be grasping after what I do not need.

In her novel Lila, Marilynne Robinson narrates the inner thoughts of the title character as she tries to reconcile her fears with the possibility of two people caring for one another, with these words, "It felt very good to have him walking beside her--good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without, but you need it anyway; that you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it."  That's a good description of the slow and partial healing that accompanies the ongoing tearing of our hearts in the afterloss.  To close out this ramble of more words than I intended, I thank you for your time spent reflecting with me.  Let’s all of us keep walking forward together, thankful for every companion who is willing to join us on the journey, learning not to miss the goodness that their lives bring to us.