Tagged with grief …

Apr 12 2013
1 Comment
learning to live, social work, what they are teaching me

worried about big legos

worried-about-big-legos

During a week filled with worries about class schedules, family illness, nonprofit fundraisers, big decisions, and tax nightmares, I found myself most concerned Wednesday afternoon about whether or not I would have a chance in the “intergalactic battle” being created at my feet with enormous legos.

I needed to type out a quick note for his grandmother on letterhead before our session was over, and I asked him if he preferred I do it at the beginning or the end. He said he would start building his army while I typed the letter, and then I could build mine, and then the war.

Halfway through the paragraph-long letter, I caught myself looking down at my feet and thinking, “How am I going to beat him? He’s built a fortress around his robots, and he has soldiers lining the wall on the inside and outside! I need to get finished with this letter so I have a chance at all!”

He was talking the entire time I was typing, which was adding to my stress. “You know I’m going to beat you, Donald. This wall is impenetrable. And these robots can break through all of your walls. Are you getting scared yet, Donald?”

And I WAS getting scared. I found myself trying to type faster so I could get to work on my own fortress and walls and robots.

So for about fifty minutes on Wednesday afternoon, I was laying on the floor in my office with an incredibly brave nine-year-old, who recently found his mother dead in her bed and called the police, worried about whether I had enough mega blocks to make an army big enough to contend with his.

I didn’t, of course. He won, not that I was trying to go easy on him; I wanted to win, but he beat me. We began to talk about his planning, his bravery, his skill, his initiative. These were all the things which led him to beating me in our intergalactic war on the bamboo rug in my office.  There were all the things which also led him to cope in miraculous and hope-affirming ways with the loss of his mother and a world turned upside down.

And it would be his lesson in these things which made me consider my class schedule, family illness, nonprofit fundraisers, big decisions and tax nightmares with the eyes of a nine-year-old who is much braver and stronger than I.

Every conversation is  privilege with answers waiting to be found by all involved. If it doesn’t feel that way, our arrogance is leading.

djordan
Pine Tree

About these ads
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 16 2013
1 Comment
grief and trauma, learning to live, the calendar

a people who tell the truth | thoughts on ash wednesday

from dust you came, and to dust you will return

It occurred to me while getting a cross of ash smeared over my brow, hearing the words, “from dust you came, and to dust you will return,” that one of the things I appreciate the most about the faith I’m finding myself leaning into more and more is that we are a people not only allowed to tell the whole truth, not only even encouraged to do so, but ultimately demanded to do so.

We must tell the truth: the good, the heartbreaking, and the completely unexplainable.

And so we operate in a season of lament and reflection. We begin it by marking ourselves with the dust we come from and the dust to which we will return. We take time to fast from things to remind us of our desperation and dependence on the king of the coming kingdom for anything to be worth telling in the end.

And even when shiny churches and slick preachers grin and tell us how to be happy, we must tell the truth that the world goes not well. Injustice abounds and work toward justice often feels like tiny drops in an enormous ocean. Hearts ache with broken families and open wounds. Loss stings years later like the day death stole life from our fingertips.

And so we tell the truth. All of it.

The hope of the kingdom coming is only truly hopeful if it is the refrain after the we see the deep gray all around us, and admit that we are both broken by it and perpetrators of it.

Until all is made new.

And so, for lent, we remember that from dust we came, and to dust we will return.

djordan
Washington D.C.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 01 2013
Leave a comment
Quotes, what they are teaching me, learning to live, grief and trauma, social work

and once again we sing

Vietnam B-52 Bomb Craters

Throughout my last two jobs, I’ve had the same folded-up xerox copy of the first page of a memoir which has the following lines attributed to an anonymous Vietnamese poem taped to the wall above my desk:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.

These words struck me when reading the memoir, but these days I don’t remember why. Over the last three years, I’ve thought a great deal about trauma and grief. First motivated to begin understanding it more while working with the survivors of homicide-loss, and then through my own personal journey through difficult work days, and now in the context of the lives of my individual clients as well as communities in which we work for transformation and development.

The notion that suffering and pain, while seen to be inherently private and uber-personal, is in reality communal and fundamentally social, the words are becoming more and more haunting.

As the church moves into communities of violence, systemic injustice, stigma, poverty, materialism, greed, addiction and isolation, we are often afraid to sing songs that the people waiting for the kingdom have sung for hundreds upon hundred of years…

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
    when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 
(from Psalm 137)

As a people waiting and working for transformation, before we fill the craters, before we take on life again, we must tell the dirty truth about our loss and despair and all that is wrong and evil and messy and undone in the world, in our private and personal worlds, and in our communal and social worlds. If we, those who hold the promise that life never surrenders, can’t tell the truth about the mess of it all, then we aren’t yet ready, aren’t yet brave enough, to sing and sow once again.

2013-02-01_16-01-42_735

djordan
Summar Dr.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 22 2012
2 Comments
grief and trauma, on, poems, Prayers, Quotes, the calendar

on advent | before we sing the song of Christmas

Screen Shot 2012-12-22 at 9.06.20 AM

My house is actually clean because I threw a party here a week ago.
The Christmas tree has stopped shorting out with the help of an extra extension cord.
All the gifts are in and waiting to be wrapped.
Money is in the bank, and a job waits for me when I return from the holidays.
Evenings and meals with candlelight and laughter are planned nightly for the next week.
There is plenty to be joyful for in the days approaching Christmas for me.

But couples wrestle with miscarriage.
Clients wrestle with families falling apart.
Participants wrestle with utilities being shut off.
Loved ones wrestle with pressing in depression and hopelessness.
Men wrestle with finding a bridge under which to put a pillow for the night.
Strangers wrestle with missing six-year-olds for Christmas morning.
Friends wrestle with the murdered son, husband, wife, daughter.
There is plenty to be broken-hearted for in the days approaching Christmas for me and others.

Enter the truth of advent.

Beyond flashy Christmas programs and shiny Christmas cards
taken twenty times until we liked the way our chins looked,
Beyond rhetoric over guns and entitlement and taxes and “wars on Christmas,”
sits a spinning world that while some goes well,
much goes not well.

Enter the truth of advent.

Skipped for Christmas morning by many churches and Christians
following in line behind consumers and the mighty dollar,
Advent waits in the dark nights before Christmas morning
telling the truth
allowing the tears
holding out hope
that while the world goes not well
the kingdom comes.

And when advent is allowed to enter
and linger under candlelight,
the words of the old hymn make a little more sense,
and make Christmas morning a little more important,
because we were allowed to wait for Christmas.

O ye beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old,
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold,
When the new heaven and earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Until the new heaven and earth own their King,
May we tell ourselves the truth of Advent
before we sing the song of Christmas.

Amen.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
Oct 02 2012
Leave a comment
grief and trauma, learning to live, what they are teaching me

the class who shows up | on the 5th annual homicide-loss walk

After five years of standing in line watching men and women, propped up babies on hips and grandparents escorted with walkers, this year was different altogether.

It is both encouraging and discouraging to see the crowd grow year after year at the Commemorative Walk for survivors of homicide-loss. It’s been my privilege to listen to and learn from these men and women in a weekly support group, but to see them walk through candlelit paths holding photos of their murdered husbands, sons, grandsons, wives, mothers and grandmothers is altogether horrifying and holy at the same time.

And it has been every year these last five years since the very first walk. It is always holy in the way honestly telling the honest truth is always holy and almost always horrifying.

But this year, there was something new for me as I stood in the evening’s mist.

Looking into the line of men and women with faces barely glowing from the candles in their hands, I saw my students. The clock strikes nine every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and my students are faithful to be patient with me in class as I dance onto tangents, threaten with grades and bribe with food. They have listened to me grow awkwardly teary about the histories of movers and shakers from the margins of the field whom God has used to bring kingdom change across the globe. They have held on as we’ve acted out counseling sessions, as we’ve debated the reasons for poverty and welfare, and as we have pushed the questions of power dynamics and our goodwill to the limits. They always show up.

But this night, lining the sidewalks where women and men who have become dear to me walk through their glowing candles and make clear that their murdered loved ones will not be forgotten, my students showed up. As tears filled my own eyes, I lost my breath in thinking that these very students were standing physically and symbolically right on a dangerous line. They were being both witness to the hard and horrible and hopeless truths like rampant homicide in a community, and were also making a symbolic promise that as social workers who are Christians they will join in the kingdom work to make peace on earth as it is in heaven.

My prayer for those students and any of my students, is that some day in the not-so-distant future there will be professors of Social Work or Theology or Education or Business standing up in front of their own classes telling the names of my students, and talking about how they pushed in from the margins to make peace and to change the world with and for Christ and his kingdom.

And when I hear those stories told, I’ll remember the way their faces glowed this night.

djordan
Pine Tree

RELATED POSTS | what they are teaching me | what they are teaching me 2 | when others tell their stories

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 22 2012
Leave a comment
from the archives

from the archives | loss as loss, not as lesson

 

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience.

Below is the most viewed post from the blog over the last year, the first year of the blog. Thanks to the friends, families, and clients who have helped me grow in understanding and practice as it involves those grieving, and for helping me learn that we are all learning how to live in a world that is not yet whole.

+++

View the original post and comments from March 12, 2012

 

loss as loss, not as lesson

 

Loss as loss, not as lesson

Maybe it springs from our own deep need to protect ourselves when we know we cannot.

When a tragedy happens of some kind, especially the loss of a son or friend to a kind of accidental death, it is our nature to jump to working at meaning-making. When someone is lost to old age, or even long-term illness, there are many bedside conversations that make space for meaning to be made.

I am sorry for this.
I want you to know this.
I wish we had this.
I want us to do this.

You mean this to me.
You taught me this.
You are loved.

But when an accident happens, or a sudden death, or a suicide, or a crime…
There is no time for words to fill the space.
No hands touching hands.
No way to know they know.

And so we end up stuck on this side of the sleep, trying our damnedest to make sense of the whole thing. We look into every question we could possibly ask to make meaning, and there is none to be found. Often those closest to the loss are stuck spinning in the losing itself, until they can solve it, keep it from having ever happened, get those last words in.

Which of course, proves meaningless as well.

And then there are the onlookers among us, tucking our children in at night, kissing our spouse, patting our buddies on the back, and wondering what we would ever do if we were to lose them.

That’s when we find ourselves making the loss a lesson, as if that makes it worth happening. As if it protects us from it happening to us or those we love. We begin to talk about how “it has taught us …”

And there is an illusion to our nature of doing this that suggests there is meaning as long as we learn something from it. If we make a tragic loss a lesson, it won’t be meaningless anymore.

But I don’t want my dead son, spouse, buddy to be a lesson; I want them to be my son, spouse, buddy. We want lives to be meaningful, not deaths. We want to say their names and images of life, not tragedy, to be conjured up. And when they are gone, especially when I didn’t have time to make meaning with them, I want to grieve. And I want them to be remembered for what their lives taught others, not their meaningless, untimely, horribly tragic death.

The meaning is in remembering who they were.
The grief is in losing them to begin with.

The loss is a loss.
Meaningless.
Void.
Empty.
It is not things as they should be.
It is before all things are made new.

There is, however, meaning in remembering.
And grief is not our enemy, but a sign that we have hearts full of love and woven with connection.
In our caring for the greiving, may we, like our God, be close to those whose hearts are breaking.

Breaking hearts are not a lesson; they are breaking hearts.
And they, in themselves, are worth all the world.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 19 2012
Leave a comment
from the archives

from the archives | a time for everything

 

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience. This post is especially important to me, as it was a moment of honoring the pain and struggle of the year before, and then celebrating––in advance––what waited in the year ahead.

There were conversations that evening about how we would learn from the ridiculous pains and struggles of the year, and move toward the kingdom with new insight, and new scars, into the future.

A few weeks after that party (talked about below), I was sitting with in Stellenbosch with some of my favorite people in all the world, and I began talking with a friend from London, living and working in Cape Town, about how victories and happy memories are honored with parties thrown and anniversaries given, but the painful experiences and struggles are only valued once we come up with “reasons” for why they happened.

She mentioned, feet in the chilly water at a campsite in Stellenbosch, that we ought honor the painful landmarks in our history as well as the ones we naturally celebrate. The party thrown at the beginning of this year was an opportunity to celebrate and to mourn what had been, and to look with great expectation toward the future, knowing that God is working through his people in his world toward the kingdom.

So, another top-viewed post from the archives…

+++

View the original post and comments from January 8, 2012

 

a time for everything

 

It is with great joy that I enter 2012.

2011 was filled with pain, loss, struggle, sadness, anxiety, and anger.

The year overall was one of seeing the best of circumstances end up as the worst of possible outcomes.

And yet through each season and struggle, there has been tearful laughter, growing community, deeper honesty, brave introspection, and tenuous hope.

And it all feels a little closer to the truth. A little closer to telling the truth.

To others.

To myself.

To the part of all of us that tries to close our eyes to what we know the painful truth is sometimes.

There are times when everything in me wants to arrange my circumstances in ways that hope for the best; those same times, if I were being honest with myself and those around me, I would instead be anticipating the worst. Before this year, I think I’ve tried to push everything, no matter the truth, into a single season.

As if allowing ONLY a season for birth, and then trying to translate death into birth in order to make sense of it.

As if allowing ONLY a season for building, and then trying to add on to things that needed only to be torn all the way down.

As if allowing ONLY a season for embracing, and then awkwardly trying to embrace when I should have refrained from doing so.

As if allowing ONLY a season for speaking out, and then trying to explain why I couldn’t be silent if I had wanted to.

The pain of 2011 has made important room for fall and winter. There is a need and space for dying, for tearing down, for refraining from embrace, for remaining silent. A season for these things.

And in the spaces made from telling the truth about our winters, spring comes on the heels. The ground is made soft, the legs become limber, the imagination becomes ready, and things begin to take root, people begin to dance and build again.

And so here’s to the new year, filled with possibilities for both celebration and mourning. Life and death. Dancing and weeping. Building and tearing down.

And an insistence on the holiness of both––on telling the truth about both–to ourselves and others.

For everything there is season.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 18 2012
Leave a comment
from the archives

from the archives | a little help from his friends

 

 

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience.

+++

View the original post and comments from April 2, 2012

a little help from his friends | guest post by Rayna Bomar

 

rayna bomar guest posts

This is the first guest post here on mosthopeful.com, and I couldn’t be more convinced of its appropriateness. Hugh and Rayna Bomar have become friends of mine these last few years, and their ongoing journey of remembering their son Sam has had an impact in my own life. I hope you glean from Rayna’s words about what has helped and what has not helped as she has been on her own very personal journey with grief. 

In August 2009, as my son Sam started his senior year of high school, I happened upon an essay by a woman named Mimi Swartz entitled “Empty Nest: In a Week He’ll Be Gone – And I Can’t Stand It.”  Her son, also named Sam, was leaving for college a year before my Sam would leave, and I read her words to prepare for what, I thought, I would be experiencing the following August. And, the following August, I did share some of the life changes described by Swartz – dinner for three became dinner for two, my schedule no longer revolved around the school calendar, and the “mundane rituals of child rearing,” just as Swartz had predicted, were gone.  But my role as a mother changed for a reason not anticipated. My Sam didn’t leave for college. Instead, he died on May 4, 2010, ten days before graduation.

There are many things that I could say about the past almost 23 months, but what I would like to do now is share some of the ways that others have helped us get through those months – and a few things that have hindered us.

My husband Hugh and I quickly realized that all grief is personal. What you have experienced losing a loved one, even a child, is not the same as what I have experienced losing Sam. My experience is not the same as Hugh’s experience. Therefore, things that I mention that have helped (or hindered) us may not help (or hinder) you.  I am an expert only about my own grief.

We have been most touched by the kindnesses that have been shown by Sam’s friends. We are in awe of the young men and women who are so naturally compassionate and who have put aside their own grief to help us with ours. They have taken us out to eat on Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, visited on holidays, designed t-shirts and bumper stickers in Sam’s memory, mowed our yard, shared stories about Sam (what we love the most), written letters and sent cards, laughed with us and cried with us, helped with chores, preserved Sam’s spot in the high school parking lot, invited us to their celebrations- I could go on and on.  We are greeted with open arms and a hug. Sometimes we get more than one hug. They tell us that they love us. They share their lives with us and allow us to be part of their future. Their actions are drops of water on parched ground.

What they don’t do is, perhaps, more important. They don’t tell us that it’s almost two years since the accident and it’s time to “move on.” They don’t give us any advice.  They understand that our world changed when Sam died and that we will never be the same. They don’t expect us to be the same because they will never be the same after losing their friend. They don’t try to “fix” us. They don’t make any demands on us. If we feel like a visit, that’s great. If we don’t, they understand, and they don’t take it personally.

Maybe because of their relatively young ages (late teens to early twenties) they don’t have any preconceived ideas about how we should act or feel. Therefore, they don’t think they know what’s best for us, and they don’t try to impose their own feelings on us or try to dictate what is appropriate behavior.

Instead of trying to make us be who they think we should be, they already know who we are. We are Sam’s parents, and we always will be. That’s good enough for them, and it’s good enough for us.

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.” Robert Benchley.

One of the upcoming ways you can join the Bomars in remembering Sam is by attending the 3rd annual Sam Bomar Night at the Jackson Generals. Half of each ticket pre-ordered with the promo codeSamBomar goes to the Sam Bomar Scholarship Fund. Click HERE to learn more, and to buy tickets for the event on June 23.  

For other most hopeful posts on grief, loss, trauma and resilience, CLICK HERE.

 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 15 2012
Leave a comment
from the archives

from the archives: closing the book

In reflecting on the upcoming one-year anniversary of mosthopeful.com on August 23, I’m throwing some of the posts that readers have looked at the most back into the mix. Thanks for allowing me the space. It’s been a most humbling experience.

+++

View original post from January 17, 2012

closing the book | Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I cannot remember the last time I’ve fallen so deeply into a novel. I’ve said for many years that I’m not grown up enough to read fiction, so I mostly stick with memoirs and textbooks.

After finishing Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I’m sticking to my guns and saying I’m not grown up enough for fiction,

but that it is surely time for me to start growing up.

A better summary can be found HERE, but in a single swipe of great injustice, I’ll try: it’s a story of a young boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks. It is his parallel journeys through finding a lock that a mysterious key of his father’s opens, and through a child’s honest and sharp grief of losing a father on “the worst day ever.” I often found myself with tears about to break, just after a laugh would suddenly erupt. I felt more human while reading than I’ve felt in a very long time.

What I noticed the most were the dozen times that I would find myself shielding my eyes from the upcoming lines, often closing the book in the middle of a conversation, an argument in motion, a story in telling, a memory in recollection.

I knew I wasn’t ready for it.

I knew I couldn’t bear to go on. Yet.

So I shut the book; I looked around to wonder why no one else was as worried about the impending outcome as me. And then finally, after the not-knowing would outweigh the not-wanting-to-know, I would flip the book back open, hold my breath, and …

***

I read books and journal articles constantly about clinical and community work because I want to do justice with the beyond-generous people who offer me their beyond-personal stories as we look to do hopeful and honest work together in therapy.

But I’ve never closed a text on grief and grieving because I couldn’t bare to read what came next. My heart doesn’t bleed out onto the pages of an article about responses of communities to children who lost parents on September 11. A text can name and normalize complex emotions, but the voice in a well-written novel can make me feel it.

Make me feel it so much that I have to close the story and catch my breath.

And you can close the book and catch your breath until you know that you must find out what happens in a novel. And precisely in those closed-book moments, I think we are being honest with ourselves, and the teller of the story––and ourselves when we are the teller of the story––honest in that we simply can’t bare it anymore, and we must take a breather if we are to remain human. The thickness of our humanity is often more than even we can tell or hear or feel about.

Textbooks make it clean. Novels make it raw. Living voices make it true.

So we have to do whatever it takes to finish hearing the stories.

The stories of poverty.

Of abuse.

Of abused power.

Of arrogant leadership.

Of selfless givingship.

Of painful loss.

Of ridiculous loss.

Of silent suffering.

Of resilient sufferers.

Of global conflict.

Of über-local conflict.

Of the conversations and stories of the flesh-and-blood people who are acting in those roles as antagonist and protagonist and an(pro)tagonist.

If it takes closing the book for a few moments to catch our breath before we say, “Go on. If you have to tell, I have to know…”

***

I’m a better person for feeling what the book invited me to feel. I’m sure I’ll keep reading textbooks and articles, but it’s time for me to grow up into a deeper humanity and brave the world of fiction for all that it can help me see and feel. For all that it can help me hear. And then listen to.

It feels necessary as part of living and leaning into the kingdom.

Even if it takes closing the book multiple times over to catch my breath before losing it again.

djordan
Cape Town, South Africa

RELATED POSTS | Fahrenheit 451 and Mrs. Kee | Narrowing the Voices

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jul 30 2012
Leave a comment
art and photography, grief and trauma, what they are teaching me

the truth in aspirations

One of the guiding tenants of my profession, social work, and what must be a guiding tenant of the Christian faith as we are made in the image of a creative and compassionate God, is one of the lines from Saleeby’s strengths perspective which suggests that we must take the aspirations of others seriously.

We are trained, of course, to allow this to shape our imaginations in our work with clients, families and communities, no matter what the problem at hand is. At all costs, we take seriously the aspirations of those we serve.

In the case of this story, they are beautiful aspirations which allow others the opportunity to live when they are realized. It is, for me, a reminder of the serious truth in the aspirations of children, and it is a a challenge to take seriously every child’s aspirations, even if they are small, because we can also, as the guiding strength’s perspective says, assume that we do not know the upper limits of the capacities of others.

Enjoy.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,108 other followers