Grace, Love, and Living

The paragraphs below are from a post I started writing in February.  It was my last effort on the blog for months.  It still represents a big part of what has gone on in my life since that time.  There were other things going on in my life that I wanted to write about in February.  A few days after this, a series of events began to snowball that changed the path that I thought I had been on.  I was working slowly and steadily on getting my house in order, as described below. And then the world became aware of the pandemic.  Within a month of writing the words below, universities were closing, businesses were closing, and well...you know.  I'll put a few more words from today at the end.

February 7, 2020

I want to take a break from heartache, drive away from all the tears I’ve cried.
I’m a wasteland down inside.
In the crawlspace under heaven,
in the landscape of a wounded heart, I don’t know where to start.
But the wild geese of Mary pierce the darkness with a song
and a light that I’ve been running from and running for so long.
As their feathers spin their stories, I can still cling to my fears,
or I can run, but they come along and we both disappear
just like all…
All these broken angels, all these tattered wings, all these things
come alive in me....
All these broken angels, all these scary things, all these dreams
are alive in me. ("Broken Angels," Over the Rhine)

I'm basking in the joy of a visit from David, my son of 33 years.  He has watched me struggle to deal with my boxed up life that goes back for a decade. Some of it got packed up at the end of our children's public school years, at the time we moved to Texas.  Other parts of it come from those years in Texas, which were interrupted by the time of Everly's illness and death.  Some of it is what I packed up there to move back to North Carolina in 2014.  When I moved to NC, I had an initial burst of energy to sort and organize all the gathered fragments of a life that had drifted away.  But it didn't last, and I eventually found myself walking the maze of boxes, bins, and bags that I could not face.  It has been my hidden shame as I closed myself behind the doors and walls of my house.

God's grace of children comes in many ways, and in this time, it is David looking on his dad and realizing that the parent sometimes can't cope without a loving, helping hand.  So at Christmas break, he cleaned the house, rearranged the living room, got rid of empty boxes stacked in the dining room, and began to scheme what it would take to get Dad on his feet in a home, not just a storage building.  Then he planned a trip to spend a week with me going through boxes, getting things sorted for giving away, throwing away, recycling, and as a last resort, for keeping.  We've been working on that for a few days now. 

As I started writing last summer (2019), I had arrived at a moment when it seemed it was time for something new to happen.  I could see glimpses of living a life that I had put on hold for almost ten years.  There was a book project that had stalled when Everly's cancer took center stage for all of us.  I had not seen a path forward, but took a big step in 2018 by working on the missing parts to give as a lecture series at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary.  A friend helped me get the book project moving by giving me access to a time share for a week last summer, and I produced a fully organized book proposal.  I took other opportunities to work on the project, and will soon be able to send a proposal with several sample chapters for consideration by publishers.

Another part of David's visit has been several very helpful conversations.  I had already begun talking with a therapist about my mental and emotional block when it came to the boxes in my house.  I had made tiny steps of progress, three or four boxes now and then.  But David's wisdom and love is blessing me in ways I could not have anticipated.  He commented about the things I was saying, "That sounds like a lot of negative self-talk going on."  Dang!  That's kind of what a Dad might say to his kid.  Of course, it was right on.

The next day I remembered an experience with my own dad.  In 1985, W.D. had landed his dream job.  Always a good fund-raising pastor, he was hired to work for his alma mater, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in the development office.  His duties were to work the Houston area, with special attention to the SWBTS satellite campus there.  He was loving the work, but his health was not responding well.  Finally, his doctor told him that the pollution in Houston was making him sick, and he was on the verge of a serious respiratory condition.  The doctor advised him to quit the job if it required him to be in Houston.  It broke his heart.  I went to visit, only to have him pour out his heart about the sadness he felt about both the health danger and about giving up the job he had wanted for so long.  He was 55 when that happened.  Now David is helping me through my challenges at age 62.  The leveling that comes with maturity has allowed a kind of give and take that I would not have imagined a few years ago.  The gratitude in my heart runs deep.

As my regular readers know, I often call on the poetry of song lyrics in these blog posts.  I'm not alone in being a person who often finds a soundtrack for my life in the songs of my favorite artists.  Anyone who has read my blog knows that Bruce Cockburn, Kate Campbell, Michael Card, Kyle Matthews, Darrell Adams, and Carrie Newcomer have been favorite poets of mine.  But in the past few months, the music of Over the Rhine has been on repeat.

A couple of years ago, I think I arrived at the conclusion that Bruce Cockburn's song, "Pacing the Cage" had become the best interpretation of my life.

Sometimes you feel like you've lived too long--
Days drip slowly on the page.
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage. 

I didn't see much left for me in life.  There were many things I had not accomplished, and I doubted I would ever have the energy to change that.  I still hoped there was more life ahead, but I just couldn't see it. I could still get energy in bursts and feel the old drive to work on issues and tasks that I had cared about for many years. I could be happy to be with my family and friends, so don't take this to mean that I hoped to die. But where my life was headed and what it might take to get started on a visionary path were seeming to be out of my reach.

At that point in the blog post, I was trying to find words to describe something new in my life.  I thought I had stumbled onto some changes that were revealing a sense of what could be unfolding. One voice had planted a seed in my mind and heart, "Mike, you are good enough." My next step in writing this piece was going to be to explain that I was thinking about how another song from Over the Rhine, "Days Like This," might speak to who I am beginning to imagine myself to be: "Days like this, you think about the ones that love you. All I want to do is live my life honestly....Every regret I have, I will go set it free, and it will be good for me." Six months later, I think it still speaks to my hopes, dreams, and possibilities.

But I was not seeing clearly how things would go and would have soon had to change my assessment of what was coming next. At least I wasn't alone in that. No one was seeing ahead clearly in the budding Ronaworld. Within a few days, my world had turned upside down in so many ways. 

As March progressed, I began planning to uproot and go to Texas to care for my Dad, who turned 90 years old in July, so that I could help keep him safe during the pandemic.  I thought I would stay two months--so many of us fooled ourselves to think it would be over by summer.  I ended up staying three months.  I never came back to this blog post until today. I did quite a bit of writing, filling up a blank book with handwritten nearly daily reflections for several months.  I had a lot of magical thinking to talk myself out of.  Then I stopped that.  I spent about a month back at my house in Durham in July, making much more progress on cleaning out old boxes and making the house livable.  I didn't finish, but the changes are already dramatic. One person asked me the obvious question during that time, "When do you think you will get back to your writing?" I'm sure I mumbled out some uncertain answer.

Now I'm in Texas in the middle of a planned two month stay.  And I'm like lots of people dealing with COVID-19: wondering how this transformative crisis should change the way I expect to live the rest of my life.  I know that when and if Rona ever winds down, it's not going to be the same world I was imagining before. It's about time I started writing again.

Thoughts Before David's Wedding--Part 1

In a couple of weeks, my oldest child, David, will get married. He is 32, and we have all come a long way since that first day he joined us out in the air and under the stars on a night in 1986. Everly had gone to work like other days, planning to take leave soon. It was still at least a couple of weeks from the "due date," but David got ready to be born. She called, and I hurried to Nimitz High School where she was teaching so we could go to the Irving Community Hospital. It was a long afternoon and evening of waiting. The doctor was watching the Texas Rangers baseball game and joking that we had to name the baby for whoever was at bat when he was born, and the doctor was pulling for Oddibe McDowell.

All did not go as planned, and the medical staff decided to do an emergency C-Section. That meant I was not allowed into the room for the procedure. I was panicked, worried about the dangers of general anesthesia. But that process moves quickly, and soon I was brought into the operating room and shown this little, red, squinting, frowning boy and allowed to hold him briefly. Once Everly woke up again, all was well, and we started a long journey together in our sixth year of marriage. Within a couple of months, we were moving to Durham, where all kinds of wonderful things unfolded for all of us.

A while later, I somewhat reluctantly told Everly, that the moment I looked on that little baby, who came from our love and the heritage of our families, changed my self-understanding and my life more than any other moment in my life. Joy flooded and overwhelmed the room as I gazed upon little David. I explained that it was not a replacement or advancement over having met her. It was not more significant than knowing her, but at the same time it was more intense and systemically life-changing than anything else. I should add that David's birth was not more beautiful and love-filled than Naomi's reluctant and delayed journey into the world or Lydia's scheduled and efficient planned C-Section birth. The love just grows. But I was an experienced Dad by the time Naomi and Lydia arrived. David was a tsunami of grace that washed over us and our little home in Grand Prairie, Texas, and we continue to reside in that grace as he embarks on his own venture in making a family.

Shepherds, Why This Jubilee?

The Christmas season sweeps over people with wave after wave of emotion, a wide range of feelings that reflect the memories of family time, of fears, hopes, dreams, and disappointments.  I'm one of those people. 

I don't remember much mixture of emotions when I was a child. I think when I was a younger adult, part of the mix of emotions was being tired from finishing papers and projects in school.  There was the excitement of giving and receiving presents, and the inevitable disappointment that the long-anticipated presents were not going to actually make life perfect or even very different.  Eventually, the joy was in seeing the happiness of our own children, mixed with the nagging sense that we had sold our souls to the consumer gospel and had accumulated way too much junk.  Now as I look around at the boxes still unpacked from my move to NC from Texas, I still know that it is true.

So this Christmas Eve has been no surprise.  I've had the satisfaction that my adult children and I have agreed to cut back on the orgy of consumption and share time together without the pressure of last-minute shopping or checking off lists from the the tit-for-tat gift mandate.  For that reason, we are able to enjoy being together better, taking care of preparing meals and reveling in them together.  I hung out part of the day with brother-in-law Jim and Dad.  Most everyone relaxed and napped a while.  Jim played some Andy Griffith episodes to make us laugh.  Then our old man trio went to Black Mountain Presbyterian Church for Christmas Eve liturgy. 

Even while waiting and listening to the preparatory organ music, I was drawn to a beautiful hymn and prayer printed in the order of worship:

Jesus is our childhood's patter; day by day, like us he grew;
He was little, weak, and helpless, tears and smiles like us he knew...

God of the commonplace,
we confess that we have bee seduced by human wealth and power.
We do not expect to meet you in haggard faces,
cold barns, or lonely watches.
We are slow to receive your word when it comes from improbable places.
God of all creation, intrude on us this night.
Let the clamor of angels and the hurried steps of shepherds
echo in our hearts, until we, too,
spill with good news of great joy.

That waiting, that anticipation, those moments shared so many times with my beloved Everly and Hugh Delle, began to overwhelm me.  Sitting between my dad and a woman who sweetly greeted me when I joined her on the pew, my face clouded and tears flowed.  A knot seemed to swell in my chest, a tension formed of deep longing for what is out of reach.  In our first Christmas without Mom and now the fourth without Everly, I don't really think this kind of feeling is going to ever go away, until a day comes when I don't even know myself any longer.

When I looked ahead and saw the lyric line, "Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains?", it struck me as a summation of my thoughts and feelings in the moment.

My longing and discomfort in this season in inextricably tied to not having Everly and Hugh Delle in the room with me, but it spreads from there to many other things.  There is a great sorrow weighing on me because of the discouraging events and social uproar of this moment in time.  It is a time when people of my generation may have hoped we would see taking shape in our world some element of redeeming change, of movement toward overcoming the racialized structure of the world, of seeing an end to the centuries of Eurochristianist-Muslim hatred, of dividing and despising people for bodily differences. But if we are honest with ourselves, we have to recognize that much of what we hoped might be changed has remained a molten magma under the surface of false civility.  Granted permission and encouraged to set aside pretense of politeness, the fabric of social existence seems to be dissolving around us.

I'm not generally inclined to believe all is lost, but there are times when it is hard to see the hope.  A quarter century ago the long and deadly Lebanese Civil War which had divided a previously peaceful country into camps ruled by warlords, came to a tenuous peace, only to be followed a few years later by an outburst of violence among Rwandans that seared every conscience.  Bolstered by social theory that questioned the inevitability of human unity and highlighted the depth of disagreement as far beyond the conventions and capacities of rational agreement, I wondered if Lebanon and Rwanda might be the future toward which modernity is inexorably plunging.  Next came our family's heartbroken departure from a church in which too many members were asking, "What would be wrong with being an all-white church?" It was not a future I hoped for my children.  But I'm drifting that way again with Syria, deportation, Muslim registries, gun and weapon extravaganza, police killing, racial profiling....

Searching for paths toward another future, I continued to study and converse and experiment toward a new way of ecclesial practice in community that would form in the world a counterpolitics of beloved community.  In time, that led me into relationships with radicals and innovators--people who, unlike me, were not writing a story in academic language, but remaking neighborhoods and cities and race relations in their corners of the world.  Most of my direct work has been in community organizing, and I've supplemented that with relationships among those who are doing Christian Community Development, who are forming intentional new monastic communities, and who are crying out a prophetic word toward moving Forward Together at Moral Monday rallies.  I still can stir passion to teach and preach that these springs in the desert are the real path toward good news for the poor and despised of the world. I tell myself this is the new wave of Christian renewal. But if that's true, it's so slow. What I've had to accept for a long time, that this world is not on an upward path of progress, remains a painful lesson to learn again and again.

At Christmas time, when all my children who live in three different states have come together, and I sit in church without their mom or grandma still in the world, it becomes painfully, desperately, dismally slow. How have I and my generation of church people failed in our imaginations, in our strivings, in our comfort with this world, to live a gospel radical enough to be a sign of hope in this world? When my friend Chanequa Walker-Barnes asks whether those attacking "Black Lives Matter" can understand the "sheer horror of people objecting to the statement that our lives are valuable?", it drives home the disillusionment with the times. When the NC legislature, elected through illegal voting districts and voter suppressive laws, insists that the heritage of allowing harm to people because of their body differences is too close to their hearts to repeal, it dissipates hope. When people insisting on being known as Christians vote and cheer for the very things that Christians ought to oppose, it begins to clarify the world in which we live.  In an era when churches' primary de facto liturgical expression has become "where are the young people?", I'm feeling a bit lost on how to offer an answer of why young people should give a damn about the church.

Sitting in a church full of white people tonight, I was deeply moved by the liturgy, but it was not lost on me how the message of turning away from fear toward hope seems as out of reach as ever in that context and so many more. The pastor's remark, mid-meditation, that the church has been guilty of peddling fear in order to turn around and offer hope, hits very close to the core of the problem.  Churches of all sorts, having aligned with the tide of culture, are playing the same games. Promote fear, then offer yourself as the solution--sell your product, line your pockets, seek your own interest. I'm pretty sure that's the church my kids and their generation see. I know it has been sold to me many times, and I've willingly bought it. But I hoped I knew better. My friend Deborah Boston and I talk often about the difficulty of believing churches can or want to make the changes they need to make in order to be the gospel here and now. The chilling truth is how much that is true of my own way of being in and of the church.

The beauty of tonight's liturgy, to me, was in its recognition that this advent's waiting was not just pretend. The harshness, horrors, terrors, and struggles of the world are real. When false evangelicalism has told me, "You should not be living under the circumstances. Rise above them!", it was so much bourgeois claptrap. The circumstances are crushing and destroying the very people we claim God loves and wants us to love. Aloof discipleship that looks for a fantasized solution outside of human suffering does not fit with the story of this night. There have been too many times in this almost 59 years of living that I've been willing to let a spiritualized gospel replace the true gospel that took form in a shit-floored shed where a naked baby clung tenuously to life, surrounded by just his homeless, refugee parents and various domestic animals. As Steve Harmon reminded me tonight, the memory of that stable opens up a great mystery--it wasn't a gala party with dressed-up people, a sterile hospital full of highly skilled technicians, or even the comfort of home with family and neighbors helping and praying. The animals in the stable, not the self-important humans hoping for a photo op, were the first witnesses of Jesus in the world.

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio!
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!

By the next day, Joseph must have had to go out and hustle up some water, some bread, and whatever other food he could buy or beg.  Mary must have been exhausted as she relinquished from her very body's strength to carry, give birth, and feed the infant Jesus

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Jesum Christum.
Alleluia!
How blessed is [Mary] the virgin whose tender flesh
was deemed worthy to bear
our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

I started out talking about mixed emotions across a wide range.  Mostly here I've been dwelling on the sadness of this Christmas Eve.  I don't mean by digging deeper into the sorrow that I'm now fixed in one frame of mind and heart.  Yet it seems that I should at least feel the wave of sadness all the way through in this "get over it," "move on, already," "accentuate the positive" age. It's a world in which commercial interests aim to stir up happiness through encouraging mass consumption of trinkets and gadgets.  In the morning, Momma won't be getting me up to have breakfast.  Everly won't be organizing us to look in stockings and unwrap packages. Trinkets, gadgets, and positivity won't change that. And the epidemic of indifference, greed, and hate that has swept our world will still be convulsing all around us. It's not suddenly easy being born or giving birth.

With all the promise of joy that angels announced to the farm workers on the hillside, those marginalized workers still had their hard work to do.  Mary and Joseph, holding on to that tiny baby, still had to find a way to make a living, a place to live, and food to eat. "Shepherds, why this jubilee?" Can such a lowly, outcast moment two millenia ago make a difference now? Looking at the churches of this land, it seems unlikely. But it still seems there is enough good news in the holistic gospel that's worth fighting for. As my friend Matt Jantzen said this week, "I'm angry, and I can't stand to just wait around while things get worse, and not try to do something about it." I hear you, Matt. I can see only glimpses of the path in the dark of this midnight. Y'all who still hunger and thirst for justice gotta help me see where that hungry baby is calling for me to bring some milk, a blanket, and an arm and chest to rest on.

This Season Without Mom

I am back in the swing of the end of the academic semester, in between the family gatherings of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.  It was our first family gathering since Mom's funeral on February 20.  It's no surprise that grief is unpredictable, and this season has certainly been that way.

I traveled to San Antonio for the annual circus of academic religious and textual studies known as the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, to which are attached dozens of other related groups focused around faith traditions, studies of a particular scholar's work, topical interests, schools, publishers, and most any kind of individuation of religious studies one might imagine.  I attended Mennonite and Baptist professors' gatherings as well as a research institute focused on trends in talking about God.  I went to a workshop on teaching, a panel on a new book, and an alumni gathering.  I hung out with friends, did lots of walking, and considered doing many more things than I had time to do.

Dad met me in San Antonio on Monday after visiting with his sister Mary McCombs, who also lives there.  My time was so short in town, I was not able to arrange to see friends living in San Antonio, to my disappointment.  Dad and I rested one night at his house in Salado, empty of its familiar central presence of Hugh Delle.  We left on Tuesday morning to make the two-day drive to Black Mountain.  Lydia's new job kept her at work through Wednesday and required her to check in and work on Friday, so she was not able to make the NC trip this year.  She went to be with Everly's family, Marie, Ruth, John, and Kenny, in Austin.  Michael and David would make the drive down from Ann Arbor on Thursday.  Jerene's chaplaincy job had her working at the hospital on Thanksgiving Day, so we all were converging to have our big meal on Friday.

The first long day's drive brought us into Tuscaloosa, AL, pretty late in the evening.  It was a day of plenty of conversations.  Without Hugh Delle, no one led us in a singalong.  No one insisted we play any road games together.  We just kept pressing forward to get the miles behind us.  The second shorter day included more conversations about how we were making it in these days without Mom around.  Dad is doing his best to reactivate some professional work and relationships.  While Mom's health was declining, he had little time between their medical appointments and her need for his support at home.  His focus around her care was a development that came gradually and without any regrets.  Of course, it was sad for him and all of us to see her growing weaker and needing more assistance to get through the days.  Now that she is free from those troubles, Dad has had some time to readjust and think about what he should do with his life.  I'm very impressed with the initiatives he is taking to do good in the world and become more active again.  We also discussed what I might hope to do in the coming years.  Thankful not to face much traffic, we arrived to clouds of smoke in the mountains of NC as the sun was setting.

For at least six or seven years, holiday gatherings have shifted from Mom's frenzied work to make everything happen to Mike and Jerene sharing in the cooking.  It used to be that Everly and Jim would take responsibility for the clean-up, and of course that Everly had us all organized in advance to enjoy our time together.  Now, without Everly and Hugh Delle, it was a more sedate group.  The majority has shifted toward the quieter personalities:  Jim, W.D., Mike, David, Michael, and Naomi.  When I am one of the most gregarious people in a group, then you know it's a pretty calm gathering.

Being a little brother seems to never get out of one's system.  So even at 58 and 61, I constantly find ways to pester or tease my big sister when the family is together.  Sometimes, I have to admit, I've gotten too carried away.  Moreover, with Hugh Delle in the house, it seems like I would feel even more permission to pick at Jerene and wait for Mom's reprimand.  I say this because one of the ways I felt Mom's absence this Thanksgiving was in a need to police myself and try harder to get along.  It struck me as somehow backward--it seems like I should have felt that way in Mom's presence out of respect for her.  Family dynamics are confusing and somehow not very transparent to us who are in the midst of them.

We talked about Mom, and of course Everly, throughout our time together.  There was not any clear moment of focus on Mom's absence.  Maybe it was most like being a collection of beads with no connecting thread.  Mom was a thread that held us together.  Now we were trying to figure out how to be together without her.  Nobody had any fights that I observed.  We all did the kinds of things we usually do, with less of the steering, coordinating, planning talk that Mom would bring. 

Just now it came to mind how whenever we would sit down to eat, within a few minutes Hugh Delle would turn the conversation by asking, "What should we have for dinner?", or lunch, or breakfast, or whatever the next meal would be.  Nobody was really pressing those kinds of questions.  With some effort, we agreed at one point to watch a movie together.  We shared meals.  Some went on walks while others napped.  The younger generation went out to meet friends.  The old fogeys sat around and talked, read, or watched TV.  Dad and I watched a very disappointing Baylor football game.

There were some poignant moments, but mostly these were private to each person.  Having been through such intense grief from Everly's death and absence, I wondered if that was going to repeat itself.  But grief is unpredictable, and it was much lower key for these days.  We made it through.  We loved each other.  We reenacted our family traditions. 

And now we are back to work.  For those of us in academic life, it's the high pressure time of wrapping up a semester.  Naomi will finish her dual masters degrees in social work and public health.  I will grade another batch of student work.  And all of us will think ahead about regathering for Christmas, with Lydia joining us.  It is also Advent, a season of waiting through trials.  We all have our trials.  Dad is shouldering his with courage.  He was raised well, and he learned through many years of marriage, pastoring, and organizational leadership.  He's doing all he can to make the world he touches better for the many souls God loves.  And so, we wait.

Mom's Death and What Is Lost with Her

I've written a few things about Mom over the past three months--mostly short comments on facebook.   For those of you who remember my outpouring of pain and suffering in dealing with the death of Everly, you might notice a difference in my grieving this time.  Some of you remember that the family has endured a series of losses, beginning with the long illnesses of Herbie (Everly's dad) and Everly, Everly's death in July 2013, Herbie's death in May 2014, Aunt Dot's death in June 2015, and Hugh Delle's death on February 15 this year.  Each death, each relationship, has it's own weight on our family members' capacity to cope.

I was not surprised by the incapacitating grief that overcame me when Everly died.  I was a little surprised by the different kind of grieving I've had since my mother died.  People's experiences of loss don't come in a standardized schedule.  As a child and a very young man, my grandparents' deaths happened at the stage of life in which it was not unexpected.  Through the sadness of losing them I somehow made sense of their deaths.  But there was a turning point in my psyche with Everly's death, a different understanding of what a human life is and what anyone can expect from living in the world.  Dealing with loss moved from the margins to the center.

I go to this effort to write and post about grief, as I have said before, because many of you have told me that you appreciate thinking through these things with me.  Some of you say it helps you grapple with the confusion of grief and loss in your own lives.  So what follows is some storytelling about the past few years with Mom, with particular attention to her declining health.  More than any other reason, I write about this to help myself gain insight into how to live through loss and grief as a follower of Jesus.

Hugh Delle and I were privileged in the past few years to be together more than we had been since I left home for college.  Everly and I moved in to W. D.'s and Hugh Delle's home in 2010 to share life on a daily basis.  During that time, we developed everyday household routines as well as working through big decisions and life changes.  It was planned to be a short stay while Everly and I worked out housing, but it dragged out longer because the real estate market made it hard to sell our house in Durham.  By the time that finally happened, we were seven months into cancer treatments, and buying a house did not seem like a wise next step.  Mom and Dad welcomed us to stay, and we continued in our habits of living in one house that branched off into two wings, each with our private retreats when needed.  The common space for meals and conversations was a blessing to us all.  After Everly's death, I continued living with Mom and Dad for another year while I sought the direction for the next steps of my life.

Going through so much together built a mature kind of intimacy of mother-son relationship.  Growing closer, we knew much more about one another's lives than before.  Closeness brings blessings and warmth.  It also can give opportunity for disagreement or conflict.  We had our share of both, but I guess even the disagreements and conflict are a kind of blessing.

While Everly was so sick, Hugh Delle played down her own health issues, always claiming that "everything is fine."  Yet it was not fine, and long hospital stays, times of being near death, and the ever-present yet hidden matter of her chronic heart failure made it impossible for the rest of us to ignore her tenuous condition.  One of the pitfalls of living with one's parents is that too often adult child and aging parent revert to patterns of relationship that hark back to the child's adolescence.  In my own way, I sometimes reacted resentfully or critically toward Mom, especially about her health.  It frustrated me that she could not openly accept that her shortness of breath represented an underlying health issue to confront directly.  I could confess a whole range of my shortcomings of kindness in communicating with her, but let it suffice to say that our closeness included both harmonious times and painful times.  I suspect that is true for many of us.

After I moved back to Durham in August 2014, our time together was drastically cut back.  I had hoped to be able to continue a cycle of long stays in Texas with Mom and Dad, but as my faculty responsibilities returned to normal and my community involvement increased, I found it harder than I had expected to get away for more than a couple of weeks at a time.  Consequently, each visit met me with evidence of advancing health issues and change, and not much time to try to deal with the newness.  Mom became less able to do the things she wanted to do.  We would discuss options for making things better, and we added some support and help. 

For the most part, she continued to treat symptoms as passing acute illness rather than declining abilities.  In retrospect, I can't be sure whether her approach of proceeding as if things are fine while continuing to seek medical answers led to any different results than if she had done as I imagined her doing and aggressively pursued solutions to her heart failure.  As her heart grew progressively weaker, it may not have mattered whether she had been more aggressively attentive to that problem.  So probably part of the disagreement we had was about how to handle the grief of her decline. 

She preferred not to accept the idea that she was in rapid decline and hope that things would reverse and improve.  That's not such a bad approach, in that she could without much effort keep herself in a fairly happy condition at least part of each day.  Maybe she saw my perspective of admitting the progress of the chronic condition and dealing with it "head on" as a form of giving up hope.  I can't begrudge her her own way of facing challenges, of dealing with the grief of her declining health.

One result of her way of facing down the struggle was that most of us did not see the rapid decline she was in for the last eight months.  Only W. D. and Lydia were very aware of it.  After graduating form Baylor, Lydia had moved in the room where Everly and I had lived.  She was job hunting, and interviews were slow to get started.  She was glad to be able to offer some care for her grandparents, and she became increasingly concerned for the advancing pain and weakness Hugh Delle was displaying.  Remotely, the rest of us did not get the full impact of the night and day pain and struggle she was having.  Hugh Delle could usually muster up her happy and hopeful self for a phone call.  Sometimes she let us in on the harder parts of her life.

When the doctors began to tell Mom, at the beginning of 2016, that her heart condition was so far advanced that she should not expect it to improve, the seriousness of the condition became clear to all of us.  Jerene made the first trip down to see her.  At the end of a hospital stay for tests and decisions about next steps, it became clear that all the interventions that the doctors had considered were too risky for Hugh Delle's weakened condition.  They thought she probably had a limited time for her heart to continue working.  Already heart monitors revealed that her heart had brought her near death, and sometime in the next few weeks or months it would finally give out.

As we made the decision to bring her home and begin hospice care, I was able to go and stay for a while, with the cooperation of my employer and students.  I went back to teaching my North Carolina classes from Texas for an indefinite time.  Mom was glad to have her two kids home, and we helped organize her medications and treatments with the expectation that she and Dad would continue the routines with assistance from the hospice team and their fellow church members.  Almost as soon as we would make decisions and get the house in order, Mom's situation would change.  Spending many hours sleeping, she would sometimes become alert and join us for meals, only to get fatigued and go back to sleeping soon after.  Every few days, the obvious changes made clear to us that she was growing weaker and losing ground.

Eventually, she became confined to bed.  She did not have the strength or muscle control to help us get her up and move her around.  She stopped wanting to eat.  She was less and less able to communicate.  Her niece and nephew, Pat and Tim, both came to stay and help care for her.  All of my children made their way to Texas to be with their MeeMaw.  They sang to her, sat with her, talked with her, did everything they could, as she held on for her last days.  She lived to see her 86th birthday.  She was no longer very communicative, and she was not really eating.  The best we could do was touch her mouth with a little bit of cake and icing.  We read the scriptures, sang to her, and prayed with her.  On her last Sunday, we shared communion around her bed and offered prayers.  The next day, she died, surrounded by us.

I was very worried about Dad and Jerene.  I knew how I had fallen apart with Everly's death, and I felt some kind of responsibility to try to hold them up in the immediate crisis of Mom's death.  So I was feeling the emotions of losing Mom very differently than I had expected.  Grief is a strange thing.  It is not well scripted, although liturgical and poetic scripting can be a great help in uncovering thoughts and feelings that are hiding just below the level of consciousness.  The funeral service, planned by Hugh Delle, was filled with beautiful tributes and familiar songs.  Mom was beloved, and many people came from near and far to honor her life.  That day was an emotional day for me, and the structured events served me well in drawing out my pain and ministering to me.

On Easter weekend, March 27, I was surprised by grief.  If you go through our family's photo collection, you would find that year after year, there are family pictures taken at church on Easter Sunday.  For many years, David, Naomi, and Lydia are wearing outfits sent to them by Hugh Delle.  Easters were family days.  Even if we could not regularly spend them with Hugh Delle and W. D., there was a kind of presence of the whole family.  As I walked into church on Easter Sunday I felt overwhelmed by the loss of my mother and my children's loss of their mother.  It was a very tearful weekend for me.

I was feeling a new kind of loss for the first time on that day.  It has recurred on most Sundays since that day.  I was trying to explain it this week to Ruth, Everly's sister, and to a friend and fellow minister.  The experience of no longer having my mother living in this world with me seems to have opened up a space of loneliness that I did not know before.  For a long time, when I went to church or to a restaurant or some other place familiar to me because of being there with Everly in the past, it was as if Everly's palpable absence was my companion.  Her absence somehow took on a kind of presence through memory and familiarity of her having been there so many times by my side. 

Yes, that is a form of loneliness, but in recent weeks the loneliness has changed.  I found myself in the foyer of the church wondering whether I would have anyone to sit by.  Now inside, of course, were pews full of people.  I know most of them and would, as an act of fellowship or ministry, gladly sit on any pew with any person.  There is a kind of joy and purposeful satisfaction in doing that.  But it was not that kind of question my mind was pressing on me.  The question came from a lack, an empty place, a need.  I was feeling the need to sit with someone to whom I am already beloved, someone whose presence already speaks to me of their care for me.  My first thought was to look and see if Willie and Joanne Jennings were at the service.  Because they were out of town  that day, I found myself looked around for others. 

The point is that with Mom's death, I am finding myself again in a new place in the world.  Even living far away from her for most of my adult life, there lurked in my consciousness her presence to me at all times.  The one who had nurtured me, believed in me, prayed for me, and done all that she could to seek the best for me is no longer in the land of the living.  Where does that leave me?  Without Mom, I am alone in a new way in the world.  She had borne on her tired shoulders all of the burden of Everly's struggle with cancer and our family's grief at her loss.  And now she who held us up is also gone, leaving me alone in a new way.  Of course I am not absolutely alone.  I have my family and friends.  My church and coworkers look out for me.  God has never deserted me.  Even so, God's presence mediated through my mother's love has been muted by her absence.  I will need to recognize new habits and different relationships in which God's love will be manifest in my life.  It took some time for that to soak in, and I'm just now figuring out how to describe it.

Family Memories of Herbie

Since Herbie's funeral on May 10, not quite two weeks ago, I've spent lots of days either driving or trying to get over a really bad sinus cold.  There has been lots to think about, with Herbie's passing, my kids starting to make plans to scatter around to different states, and the tenth month since Everly died.  I've meant to write, but the time has simply not been right for getting it done.  So now that I've got a minute and I'm catching my breath, it's starting to flow.

After Herbie's funeral in Houston, the family that was available gathered for a meal and conversations.  We enjoyed the time together, and it ended fairly quickly as we all started to leave Houston to get back to our homes stretching across Texas and Mississippi.  I was blessed to have all three of my children to ride with me back to Austin and Salado.

They started off telling stories about Grandpa Herbie.  There were various stories about riding and driving the golf cart.  Apparently Herbie was not a model instructor for driving the cart.  Lydia in particular, but all of the kids, noted that he would drive directly toward an obstacle, such as a tree, as if to run into it, then at the last second steer suddenly to avoid the crash.  Herbie never tired of the same routine, and David said that when he let them drive, they did not know any other way except to go fast and make sharp, sudden turns.  Once, he says, he was driving and found himself about to steer them down a steep hill, and Herbie had to intervene to avoid a bad crash.  Although they were not "allowed" to drive the golf cart, they all had their turns.  When Herbie's back got so bad that he couldn't enjoy playing golf any longer, he sold the golf cart.  That was, for all the kids, a very sad event that meant the end of one of their favorite Grandpa activities.

They also remembered various games he would play with them.  David emphasized the "sack o' taters" game which involved throwing the kid over his shoulder and carrying him or her around, calling the kid a sack of taters.  Then equally abruptly, he would toss the kid off his shoulder and onto the couch or the bed.  I recall this game from my childhood and from playing it with my kids, but it was Herbie that played it ad infinitum.  As I mention below in the remarks, there was a game called "couch" that involved sitting on the kids, a game of pillow baseball in the living room, and lots more roughhousing.  "Toast" was a game much like couch, and we are all a bit puzzled by what the name was supposed to mean.  I think it probably had something to do with how toast pops up out of the toaster, and the kids were trying to pop up while being held down by Herbie. 

They remembered with their cousin Kenny that Herbie would grab them when they walked by.  Kenny would intentionally go by Herbie's chair to incite him to grab him with his legs, as pincers.  Naomi remembered doing that as well.  I can imagine my little ones grinning, walking by slowly, terrified and hopeful all at once that Herbie would grab them and cause and outpouring of giggling.  As Emily emphasized, Herbie loved to tease her in whatever way would create the most distressful fun for the two of them.

These stories went on for some time.  It makes me realize that their memories of Herbie are of active fun times.  They remember going to the swimming pool at the clubhouse in Country Place, where Herb and Marie retired.  They remember going to NASA repeatedly and seeing the rockets and spaceships and the places where Herbie worked.  And they remember slowly outgrowing the roughhousing kind of play, so that visiting Herb and Marie involved a different kind of enjoyment, including going to CiCi's Pizza, which Herb liked at least as much as the kids did.

Eventually, my kids returned to a familiar conversation about all the terrible foods I made them eat when they were growing up.  Nancy Bumgardner says any time that at least three of her kids are together at her house, they start in on the same thing.  Everly and Eric and Ruth did the same about their parents.  Jerene and I do it, too.  Parents are so mean and hateful, and it's great fun to act that way.  We secretly know they love us more than they resent us.  It was a good ride home with my beloved chirrens.

To shift back in time a little, the last time I sat for a conversation with Herbie, he had a lot to say.  In the last months, it was sometimes a struggle to figure out his words.  Once in a while, he seemed to be talking about a world that was not quite the same one his listener could see.  But other times, it was just the difficulty speaking after the stroke.  On this occasion, I concluded that he was talking to me about how he started to be called by his official birth certificate name, Herbert.

I have been told that when Herbie was a boy, he decided that he wanted to be called Billy.  His real name, Herbert Spencer Estes, seemed to him to be an embarrassing name for a kid.  He wanted to be an athlete, a cool guy, so he chose a name suited to his preferred identity.  Apparently he was called Billy all the way through high school.  Later in life, when he would return to Port Arthur where he grew up, if someone referred to him as Herbert Estes, his old friends did not know who people were talking about, until someone said, "You know:  Billy."

On that day when I sat with Herbie, he was telling me that he did not go by Herbert until he joined the Army.  As we would know, the Army would call him by his official name.  So he was Herbert S. Estes to the Army.  Now Herbie was known for being hard-headed, independent, and not very keen on being told what to do.  Most of us who have heard something about being an enlisted member of the Army know that these are not the characteristics most cultivated among privates and foot soldiers.  So as Herbie told me that day, the Sergeant was often calling out his name.  He said the Sergeant gave him speeches most every day about how he should behave as opposed to Herb's tendency toward being rebellious and independent. 

Herb says he came to go by his birth name because of the daily speeches from the Sergeant.  And he added a bit of information that the family may not have known.  He said the Sergeant called him by his full name with the middle initial.  But he changed the middle initial a bit for emphasis.  Herb said the Sergeant called him "Herbert Ass Estes."  I'm sure it made him mad back when it was going on.  Or maybe he laughed inwardly way back then in the same way he chuckled to tell me the story a couple months ago.  From Billy to Herb and Herbie, via a loud-mouthed Sergeant calling him Herbert Ass Estes every day.  That's a funny story of how he learned to accept his name.

I'm sure I could think of plenty more stories about Herb if I kept at it.  But let that be enough, with the addition of the ones the family shared with me to tell at his funeral.  I wish I had the remarks of two other friends, Larry McSpadden and Coach Newcomb, who really had all of us laughing with the typical antics of our beloved Herbie.  If I get those later, I'll post them.  In the meantime, here are my remarks from his funeral.

Herbert Estes was a man who made an impact in the world.  Much of that impact came through his family.  As I looked at the collection of photos from that his daughter Ruth put together for us to view.  I noticed the inward strength, even swagger, that the young man Herbie displayed, or should I say “Billy,” (his chosen name when in his younger years he preferred not to be known as Herbert). He gave the appearance of a man in control.

It was an independent streak that remained visible throughout his life.  Herb had confidence in his intellect and his strength to be able to do whatever he set out to do.  An athlete, an exceptionally careful and clear thinker, Herbie was not waiting for others to tell him how things are or how they should be.  Ruthie says that he passed this characteristic on to his children.  He let her know that she should stand up for herself, whether it be in so small a matter as getting the order right at a restaurant, or in dealing with a teacher or supervisor whom she felt had been unfair.  Ruthie says she thinks Everly, above all, learned this characteristic from him.

Herbie liked to do things his way, and the children had to learn the way to influence him.  Everly said they had to make a case for how buying shoes or an outfit at this particular time was going to be a big savings over waiting until later.  If they could make it through his third degree, they could usually purchase their desired item.  Otherwise, it was back to the drawing board to try again another day.   

On Sundays, the kids loved to get to eat at the cafeteria.  But Herbie was strict in his requirements.  If the line had reached a certain length, they would not be able to eat there.  The kids would hope and pray for church to let out on time, and hope for no traffic, and then one kid scout would be sent inside to check the line length.  Sometimes, they had to drive on to the hamburger joint which was the backup.  If they were blessed to get to go to the cafeteria, they obeyed strict rules about drinking water and not the colored fruity drinks.

When Herbie started to face living his life with heart disease, he did not let it simply defeat him.  He took on the best available science of diet that medicine could offer in each era.  That, as we know, changes about every decade.  But Herb eventually harnessed some dietary strictures along with exercise and reduced his weight, and probably also lengthened his life.  He would have a big bag of some food--it might be bread, or celery, or popcorn--when he sat down to watch a ballgame, and he would say, “I can eat all of this I want.”  So he would eat, and stay with his diet, and it did all the rest of us good to change some of our habits, too.

Ruth mentions how she came to realized how brilliant Herbie really was.  It happened when she was a college student and was struggling with a physics class.  Herbie told her to bring her textbook and work home for the weekend to see if he could help.  She says Herb took her textbook and looked it over for about an hour.  Then, for the time they had available, he worked through all of her assignments, tutoring her through the entire course.  It only took him an hour of refreshing his memory to get her through college physics.

Marie remembers him as a good husband in so many ways, always providing for the family and making time to be with them.  She says he was always so proud of each of his kids.  All three are like him in many ways.  All have good mathematical minds and have applied their abilities in different fields of work successfully.  I have also watched Marie shake her head when she talks about his efforts to keep the cars and the house in good repair.  I must say that in many ways it was Herb who inspired me to try to work on household repairs and car maintenance.  And I sympathize with him in having worked on a project only to find that my efforts did not achieve the goal.  

Now I can’t say that I have ever put my foot through the ceiling while working in the attic, something Herbie did more than once.  And I don’t remember ever finishing a project on the car only to find several remaining pieces I had somehow not reinstalled.  Everly says she remembers him methodically taking apart the car engine, placing nuts and bolts and parts in little paper lunch bags, arrayed around him in the garage.  As she remembered it, usually there was a bag of parts left over after he had put things back together.  Surely she exaggerates, but maybe not too much.  I never had that happen, but probably it is because I did not try to do such ambitious projects.  Herbie believed he could figure out how to fix most things and saw no reason to pay an exorbitant fee to someone who might do no better than he could do himself.  Then again, the story of the Volkswagen bug headed down the street with the engine on fire is still a cautionary tale.  As I said, Marie shakes her head.

And Marie was often heard to say, “Herbie, you are worse than the kids!”  Herbie loved to play.  He loved sports play, he loved board game or card play, he loved roughhouse play, and he loved teasing play.  One game he played with his grandkids was called “Couch.”  In this game, he would find a kid sitting or lying on the couch, then sit down on the kid.  When David or Naomi or Lydia tried to get up or escape, he would hold them in place and say, “Couch. What’s wrong?  Why won’t you be still?  Couches aren’t supposed to move.”  They would play baseball with the pillows and chair cushions, eventually knocking over a lamp or decorative item.  “Herbie, you are worse than the kids!”  She would shake her head.  

Herbie enjoyed being with kids.  I remember when I was first getting to know the family, there were always several more kids around the house than just the three Estes kids.  Herbie liked having them around.  The family would make popcorn often in the evening, play games, watch a ball game, and the more the merrier.

Emily says Herbie showed his love through mischief.  He would steal her prize possession, her stuffed bunny rabbit, whenever he got a chance.  She would spend what seemed hours searching for it so she could go to bed.  She tried preemptively hiding bunny rabbit from him, but usually he would find her hiding place and rehide the rabbit.  It kept her on edge, this constant battle of teasing and mischief, of getting her feet tickled, of playing roughhouse games.   

Kenny learned that when he walked by Herbie sitting in a chair, Herb would reach out and grab him, often locking him between his two legs.  Kenny would try hard to get away, and eventually when he did, he would come right back because he also knew what Emily said.  Herbie’s mischievous play was his way of showing love by sharing a good time and laugh with his grandkids as much as possible.

He loved kids athletics, and that meant being involved with Everly's and Eric's, and maybe Ruth's (although she can't remember that) Little League efforts as well as any other kids in the neighborhood or church group that needed a Dad around.  Ruth says he would go gather up her friends for sports or church or whatever.  He liked being around kids, and especially liked ball games.  Many of us know the rumor that circulated that Marie and Herb must be having marital problems because the gossip columnist of the neighborhood paper kept seeing him alone at the little league park.  But it was just his enthusiasm for games, sports, and kids.   

He loved watching Emily play softball.  She says he was her biggest fan.  But Herbie would wander off from her game if she was not playing or it got uninteresting.  John said they had to make sure he wore a brightly colored shirt so they could find him among the fans at the multiple ball diamonds where they would play.  He was an independent soul.

Eventually, as Herbie had to give up some of his hopes for becoming a champion golfer, and as he had already far outlived his life expectations after three heart surgeries and a carotid artery blockage, Herbie again adjusted his diet.  Ice cream became the priority.  And chocolate.  He was going to enjoy his last years eating stuff that he had avoided for so long.  Kenny remembers when Herbie fell in the kitchen with a broken hip; he was lying on the floor waiting for the EMS to arrive.  Kenny went to sit with him.  What did this injured man want to talk about?  Herbie told Kenny to go get him some chocolate nuggets to eat while he was waiting.  When the family went on a cruise to the Panama Canal, Kenny and Herbie made four trips a day to the deck where the free ice cream cones were.  It was special Grandpa time for Kenny, and all you can eat ice cream for Herbie.  He was enjoying his final years.

Herbie loved Marie.  Before they were dating, she had heard that he was not the best behaved young man.  But after his army service, when he went back to college with a new seriousness, he set his eyes on her.  His sister Ruth remembers his coming home from a date with Marie, saying, “I just went out with a woman who could be Miss America!”  He loved her from the beginning to the end.  He depended on her in so many ways.  In his hard struggle this last year, when he felt most distressed or alone, he ultimately would call out “Marie!"  He called her name because he knew she was his rock and his shelter.   

We all miss him.

The Post I Wanted Never to Write

My last posts in March 2013 came at a time of increasing hope in our family.  Encouraged, I was hoping to become more regular with this blog again.  Everly's cancer had responded so well to chemotherapy in 2012, but then over the winter tumors had started growing and spreading again.  We were beginning to participate in a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson in March, and the initial results were very good.  This trial focused treatment on the liver, where most of the cancer was active.  This treatment was very demanding on us, with trips to Houston every few weeks and lots of clinic visits.  In May, we took a cruise Everly had been wishing for, and it was a wonderful time for our whole family.

While we saw initial good results in the liver, little by little the cancer began to grow in Everly's backbone and spread elsewhere.  In June, we changed directions to try to treat the cancer in her backbone, but during that time the rest of the cancer, especially in her liver, grew rapidly.

In the short span of a month, we went from hopeful about steady progress to realizing it would not be beneficial to continue treatments.  The Everly and I explained this to our children on July 10, and at the end of that week she came home to hospice care.  All of us were able to be with her during those days, and we spent many hours sitting, talking, singing, and hugging one another.  Everly grew less communicative as her liver was failing and the toxins in her body began to make it harder for her to move, speak, or do anything.  She had made peace with her life and her death, and she told us she was ready to go on.  As hard as that was and is for us, we did our best to love and comfort her through that trial.

After only six days in hospice, Everly died at home on the morning of July 18, with all the family present.  She was able to leave behind her pain and struggle and to gain blessed rest and joy in the presence of God.  We are grateful for her life that continues to shape and direct us as we seek to go on with the lives she so thoroughly blessed.

If you want to read more about those days, my reflections, and other people's appreciation of Everly, you can go to the CaringBridge site where I did my writing for the past few months.

Buy Nothing Day Report

We had a good Buy Nothing Day in the cold gray weather. We had coffee, ate leftovers (including pie), ran into friends, slept late, did some organizing, walked around in downtown Asheville and made a visit to the grocery store, where we did buy something (we're not legalists).

A few friends in Philadelphia got together to announce the good news of being together and caring for one another. Here is a video they posted. Enjoy it.