Tag Archives: loss

Sep 03 2020
4 Comments
bible, learning to live, on, social work, the calendar, to my students, what they are teaching me

In Memory of TuTu, the Firecracker

Donald and TuTu at ComeUnity cafe

September 3, 2020
TuTu’s Funeral
Eulogy

While it was expected, the news of TuTu’s death was loud and sudden. The hours after however felt oddly silent. Like the audible nothingness following a tornado or an explosion. It sounded as though had I dropped something, it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground. I found myself walking circles around my house, then driving aimlessly around town, as if I couldn’t figure out where I was or how to get home.

TuTu was the last of my living grandparents to go into the life to come. To have lived most of my life, adult life even, with all of my grandparents is a rare gift not lost on me. On my mom’s side, my grandfather and namesake Donald (or Dabo) was a polymath and my grandmother Mama 2 a fashionista. On Dad’s side, my grandfather TaTa was the quintessential American working man. And then there was TuTu.

I have been trying to think of the best phrase or word to describe her, Ohna Jo Jordan—known though to most children and adults as TuTu for at least the last forty years—since she went home on hospice several weeks ago. I’ve noticed over the last few days that the word I landed on in the knowledge that this very moment was coming is being used regularly by many others to describe her.

TuTu, my last grandparent, was a firecracker. She was a short, red, singing, smiling, blonde firecracker.

She was a firecracker at church, the only person I’ve ever known to be a full-time, go-to Sunday School substitute teacher after she “retired” from actually leading Sunday School programs and all kinds of other groups. When she was caring for my granddad in his last days, she would faithfully drive up to First Baptist with her tithe check in hand every single Monday, marching in and dropping it off, talking to her multiple friends in the office, then studying the prayer board while taking notes before she left.

And know this: if she added you to her prayer list, it wasn’t an act of southern kindness or religious best practice. It was in fact a very real and personal call to arms for her. In a passing chat, I would tell her about a friend going through hard times or waiting on significant news, asking her to pray for them if she thought about it. A year later she would call me specifically for the purpose of getting an update on how that person or family was, and how she needed to pray for them moving forward.

She told a story of being around 5 or 6 with some kind of degenerative eye issue that was rendering her blind and had resulted in doctors telling her she would live her life without sight. One evening in the 1930s she decided that a certain prayer at a certain place on that certain night would bring her sight back even though the Great Depression offered little expendable income to get the gas needed for her scraping-by family to drive her out of town for that to happen. Sure enough, someone had a car and was willing to drive her and my great-grandmother a few hours to the church she insisted on going to for prayer that very night. She explained why she was there and was prayed for.

Her sight returned in that moment as she tells the story. She would go on to describe staring at the brilliance of the car’s dome light as my cousin Paul remembers after insisting it stay on the whole way home, and eye doctors continued to tell her throughout her adult life they couldn’t believe she could see with all the scarring in her eyes. They didn’t know she was a firecracker, though. She was determined and no doubt had an impact on the people who took up her challenge to pray for that certain thing at that certain church that certain evening.

It seems apparent that this experience, one among many, shaped her view of what was possible in prayer as well as what determination and speaking up for what you wanted could bring to your own life and the life of others. It and her telling of it seemed to make both God and imaginative possibility remarkably real.

In flipping through her contact book a few days ago, I noticed she’s added several of these friends I’d once asked her to pray for with their phone numbers and email addresses to its pages. No doubt she followed up with them in case my update answer wasn’t generous enough with the information she needed for her war. She often shared a whole friendship for years with these friends of mine, adopting them as her own grandchildren and keeping pictures of all of us framed on her walls or desk. Their Christmas cards lined her tv cabinet year-round.

Just like those of her grandkids.

Soon after she was married at age 16, my grandfather told her she should drop out of high school and take on her new role as a housewife. In 1947, the firecracker was not having it. Absolutely not. Likely with a red face yet gentle tone, she let him know that would not be the case. She finished high school and went on to take college courses all the way into her final decade of this life.

I suspect that decades of the marriage filled with love they shared following this early incident also shaped what my grandfather TaTa knew she could do when she decided she was worth it and determined, whatever she was told by others. Firecracker. Perhaps this is why, in his final days, my uncle Tony says my granddad asked that she, not a preacher or deacon, himself, or anyone else, pray for him. He was wise to her ways and her firepower.

She loved Lifeline Blood Center, where she worked many years as a secretary for two different Executive Directors, and she would often let me come to work with her. Having set up an enormous desk for me (I’ve learned just today tfrom my cousin Amy who is clearly more intelligent and shared this same experience on her own, that this was merely the conference room and conference table) with Lifeline posters of blood cell cartoon characters and markers, making me feel like I was saving the world by spending hours coloring these posters in this office of hers (that I believed she ran… and in some ways she likely did) where she always made clear magic was happening every day.

In this way, she clearly shaped how I began imagining the meaning of a “job” at an early age. And those with whom she worked there continued to check in on and share life with her for the rest of her life… long after her retirement and everyone’s moving on to other things. She had adopted them as her own children and grandchildren, so they were sure that they were the most talented and important people in the world.

She helped open the doors at the very beginning of ComeUnity Café in downtown Jackson several years ago, then in her 80s. She would greet each visitor at the front door and explain the novel concept of a real restaurant offering healthy, fresh, delicious meals to all regardless of one’s ability to pay, and where labor counted as dignified and respectable cash in exchange for delicious and gourmet food.

She did this in between volunteering nearly full-time for several years at Area Relief Ministries answering phones and doing data entry in Excel spreadsheets to ensure Room in the Inn, a program that facilitates hospitality and generosity between local churches and those who are homeless in the community over a hot meal and warm bed, could continue. The staff at both of these incredible organizations adopted TuTu and she adopted them. “My girls” she would often say about Andrea, Nichole, Nicolé, Lisa, Brandi, and Annie. She talked to my friends in León, Nicaragua and Cape Town, South Africa without my knowledge or presence on multiple occasions. All were adopted as grandchildren, so they were from then on treated as such.

Volunteering at ComeUnity Café and ARM was likely ‘retirement’ number five or six for her. Before this iteration, and after she happily worked fulltime as de facto home health for her husband in his last days during her late sixties and her seventies, she had already audited college courses on the New Testament with undergraduates, complaining only that she couldn’t take the test (after reading the textbook the first time before class ever started). She ultimately adopted all the students in those classes with her—and often the professors—as her own grandchildren. She participated in other Geriatric Social Work classes as a requested participant to share her thoughts on the course material. (“It doesn’t feel as sad or lonely as they say it should,” she once confided to me about the stages of development covered in the course). These students—and their professors—were also adopted as grandchildren. So she saw them all as the most important people around doing the most important work imaginable.

When I was teaching university classes, she managed somehow to adopt nearly every student I’ve ever had in class, following them on Facebook and sharing—I’ve only learned in this last month––regular and private words of encouragement, prayer, wisdom, and support for them as their lives developed. Later on as her health started to deteriorate, at her request, I would hold blown up, life-size pictures of her face next to mine at graduations for students to see as they walked by since she couldn’t be there.

She would record inspiring videos for them for me to share before finals week (where she also sent multiple, huge boxes of chocolate for them), but I did not know of her ongoing communication with them until just the last month or so.

In reality, this has ultimately resulted in a decade of students moving into careers of human service and social justice adopted as grandchildren to whom she was secretly generous and faithful and present for critical years. And I’ve only just found this out.

These newly added grandchildren of hers have been sending messages of grief and stories of hope and impact from the work she did in their lives over the span of years. I’m learning why she would refer to Facebook as “work” when saying she “had to get back to work” these last several years before standing at her laptop on the kitchen counter to talk to her Facebook friends.

It’s true that whatever roles she played over her 89 years, the largest and primary role I ever knew was that of grandmother. She would sign Valentine’s Day, Birthday, Christmas, St. Patrick’s, Easter, Boxing Day—any holiday she knew of—Hallmark cards mailed like clockwork with a crisp five-dollar bill in each signed, “I Love you, TuTu. Your GRANDmother!” with all the letters of ‘grand’ capitalized and often underlined. I keep them in an easy-access drawer in the kitchen.

She made sure I had no question of her love and support for me, that I was her GRANDson as she would also write, and she my GRANDmother. I’m learning only now that she made sure a host of other people knew this to be true also. I’m learning her impact on me was true of most of her grandchildren, born to her or adopted by her.

      

      

There’s not enough time for the stories I’d like to tell. Like so many good Southern Baptists, she would go along with the pretense that alcohol was evil when she was in public. So when I would sneak over to her house while she was at her weekly beauty parlor appointment, hide a frozen Daiquiri or Piña Colada in her freezer, then call later telling her to check the freezer and pray… She. Loved. It. While I don’t think she ever actually drank any of them, she loved that they were sneaky and funny and she loved being in on the joke. “Somebody has been bad in my freezer,” she would say randomly, months later, making a sneaky grin followed by an innocent, ignorant, questioning face. Then that burst of red-faced laughter.

Another time we drove up north to see my youngest cousin Casey play the phantom on stage, and later that evening at a hilarious (as usual) family dinner with my family and my uncle and his family, TuTu ordered a glass of white wine, drank two sips over the multiple hours we were there, and then sincerely asked the server for a to-go cup so she could take it back to her hotel room.

I could go on and on and on about her laughter, her singing, her insistence on growing in knowledge, moving aggressively toward thoughtful racial and social justice, comments on the meanness at the heart of the current president’s policies, actions, and comments, making fun of until she finally cleaned my dirty garage, threatening another of her grandsons if he was mean to her great-granddaughter…but there’s no time as we would never be able to leave here today.

So know this: TuTu was a firecracker.

And know this too: truth be told, today is very hard for me. I grew up sitting on our “family pew” at First Baptist Church in between these four grandparents every single week for over a decade. One by one they have moved on and up into the next life, leaving a sharp absence and deep shadow in their assigned seats on that pew. First, the American working man moved on, then the polymath, then the fashionista, and now this week, my TuTu. The firecracker.

In those silent moments after I received the news of her death from my dad earlier this week—the moments after the tornado, the explosion—the imposing and thick silence felt particularly lonely. It felt as though I was now sitting starkly alone on this once-full pew as the last of my incredible grandparents had gone to whatever is next, all leaving incredible legacies, rich histories, and unfillable shoes. It felt like I was alone on this obviously empty pew, and that if I were to drop something it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground.

But in the hours and days that have followed that loud silence, it wasn’t quiet for long and hasn’t been at all since then. As I’ve been forced in my aimless wandering to look around and listen, read emails and texts, receive flowers and letters and cards and chicken salad and coke zeros, the pew I felt so suddenly alone on has become quite overwhelmingly crowded. The whole section is now full and it continues to spill over.

There’s been a growing swell of loud chatter on and around this pew I’ve come to realize is actually filled with all of her children and grandchildren, those few dozen born to her and those hundreds adopted by her. She is still very much here, still very much inspiring, igniting, booming, and encouraging as the firecracker she has always been in the lives of people her own age all the way down to her year-old great-grandbabies and the loved GRANDchildren raising them. Her presence is so deeply missed, but it is also incredibly, deeply felt.

The firecracker is still here and among us.

Because of her life and the way she lived it with great prayer, gratitude, musicality, laughter, spark, and determination, in her honor and memory, may her children, her grandchildren, and her great-great-great-grandchildren live in peace and hope into the beloved community of the kingdom of heaven.

Cheers to you, TuTu.

djordan
11:00am
Ridgecrest Semetary

Donald and TuTu at ComeUnity cafe

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Oct 19 2018
4 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live

the hollow chair

F619FE2F-DCF7-48E9-94B3-6B7EE35613E9

The chair isn’t just empty now, with its cushion recently turned back over to the “company side;” the chair is at present more like a shadow, hollowed out in form, a two-dimensional image in a three-dimensional space. A grayed out chair in an otherwise room of color that sits right by the door as I walk in.

+++

“Join me in the kitchen” was a command I thought would be funny to teach my new pup, Jacob, starting January 13, 2018, which was the day I drove his tiny little body home from about 45 minutes away, his pouting at and playing with me the whole way home. He learned that phrase quickly, and from anywhere in the house, if I was cooking, grading papers, watching the news, or showing him off to someone else when I said “Jake Jake! Would you like to join me in the kitchen?” he immediately appeared. Sometimes he used the ottoman as a step, but most of the time he leaped directly into the club chair in the kitchen, circled twice, and then sat on his hind legs with his face eagerly pointed toward me waiting for a good reason.

Having lost an incredible dog after twelve years, then soon getting a new puppy  only to lose him ten days after bringing him home to some rare disease, Jacob’s presence in my home became holy when he finally arrived following these losses.

I named him Jacob with the expectation that he would make his name true; I would become “laughter” as he would be “the son of laughter.”

When I came home every day, he would hear my car and be standing in the kitchen chair just inside the door with his hind legs on the cushion (not the “company side”) and his front paws on the armrest licking with excitement before ever making contact with my nose. If I didn’t stay in that spot long enough, he would jump off the chair then back on  repeatedly, pretending to pout until I gave him the length of time he required.

He pulled his thirteen-year-old sister’s tail between his teeth until she would wrestle with him.

He insisted on sleeping under the covers at the foot of the bed, often in the night ending up on his back with all four legs pushing straight up against the sheets making his own personal tent to include his body, my feet, and his kneck wresting over my ankles. I loved it, and it made me laugh every time.

My sneezes and farts were a matter of immediate concern and need for investigation, usually beginning with a jump as if we were being robbed and ending with a look of judgment from his tilted head, his nose to my nose.

Whenever he saw me cry, he got as close as he could, licked away a few tears, and then leaned in until it stopped. Me laughing sent him on a looping rampage through the house carrying whatever toy still squeaked.

These kinds of little things, on dark or heavy days, made the coming home worth it. On good days, they were reminders of some of the inherent good in life. He had made me laugh, and had become the son of laughter.

+++

I yelled “Jacob, would you like to join me in the kitchen?” this morning as I was making coffee before heading to work. He didn’t come running.

I knew he wouldn’t, but it seemed like I had to try. A magical thinking of sorts.

He didn’t answer two nights ago either after he had snuck out of the carport door as I was getting something out of my trunk. He didn’t answer when I yelled around the house for him the thirty seconds after I came back inside. He didn’t answer when I started walking up and down the street.

He didn’t answer when I saw his still, shadowed frame, left side against the glowing pavement in the very center of the intersection, lit in the yellow light of old street lights and shadowed by three college-age students, crying, asking me as I swerved into the intersection and lept out of the car, “Is this your dog, sir?”

I got down on my hands and knees in the middle of the intersection, things becoming slow motion, hearing but not having any idea what the college kids behind me were saying through their own tears.

I’m remembering now kissing the top of his nose and snout. Brushing the hair on his ears between my fingers and wiping bloody snot away from his nose. I cradled his head in my hands like I would first thing in the morning if I were to wake up before him. Nothing else seemed to matter.

Hey, bud. Yeah. Hey, it’s me.
I’ve got you.
That’s right, I’m here holding you.
I’ve got you, buddy.
I’m right here, my love.
I’m not going anywhere.

When I said “Hey it’s me,” I know I saw from the top of his still but still breathing frame a light in his eyes appear as he recognized it was me who was holding him, forhead to forehead, hands and knees on the bloody pavement beside him.

This moment was holy too, I suppose… I’m not convinced, though. I don’t want to let shit off the hook too easily with piety.

+++

A towel appeared. I wrapped him awkwardly and answered every bystander’s mumbled question, no doubt helpful ones, with silence as I climbed into the driver’s seat of my running car while still talking to him, now holding his bloody body in a bloody towel in my bloody lap.

I don’t really remember driving to the Emergency Animal Hospital, but I do remember slamming on the horn as I pulled in and parked just before slamming into the building. I opened the door as they unlocked it with the buzzer and met me in the lobby.

I looked down at my little ten-month-old lifesaver’s face for the first time since we were forehead to forehead in that intersection, looking for his eyes which have been an answer to prayer and promise of his namesake since January 13 as he has made me laugh and find gratitude more times than I can count. When I fund his eyes, he did not find mine. He wasn’t there anymore, and in that moment it felt like I wasn’t either.

“He’s gone,” I heard myself say. “He got hit by a car, and now we’re gone.”

As I’m transferring my towel-wrapped little buddy’s body to the tech’s arms, I hear myself saying, “Is he gone?” These last hopeful shreds rushed out as if were it simply offered out loud, the circumstances could perhaps change and the answer I already knew to be true would be reversed.

The vet’s stethoscope was placed on my little buddy’s chest once, twice, and the third time the vet looked up over the rim of his glasses as he shook his head “no.”

Jacob was gone.

And so was I.

They started talking or asking questions or telling me something…the two techs and the vet. I heard the words “or cremation?” which was when I stopped caring what they were saying. The selling in my eyes was blocking me from responding with either anger or answers. Reflexively, I shook my hands and walked back into the lobby, sitting down to see his precious blood on my pale legs and arms as my eyes filled completely with the red and white blurs of a tremendous loss.

+++

Two days later, after an unknown time of staring into nowhere, I find myself turning around to look at the chair hoping I was sleeping somehow, or had been dreaming something, and that Jacob is actually sitting there with me in the kitchen.

But he’s not, and the chair is more than empty.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Jan 13 2018
8 Comments
bible, learning to live, Series: Signs of the Kingdom, social work, to my students, what they are teaching me

not most hopeful

It’s been difficult to write.

I’ve not been hopeful.

And having experienced anything other than hopefulness, like wrestling with emotions and under the realities of frustration, anger, depression, sadness, isolation, grief, loss, and silence, there have been few honest words that could be defined as hopeful.

And to project a facade of hope is as offensive as the realities that attack hope itself.

So there has been and in many ways remains quite a season of silence. A season of either hopelessness or silent hopefulness.

Either way, a season of silence. On my end at least.

I’ve heard a great deal from the people in my world: from my history and my past and my world. They’ve been everything between furious and dismissive to piously, self-righteously, “prayerfully,” “worried” about me and my “soul.”

And yes, worried about my “eternity.”

When asked about the refugee, the immigrant, the oppressed, the poor, the person of color: they have no concern.

They’ve not been worried about the present-day life of the neighbor who doesn’t look like me (us), talk like me (us), explain religion like me (us), or… ultimately… the neighbor who is not white like me (us).

But I am a source of concern for these “brothers” and “sisters.”

It’s been difficult to write hopefully.

I wish I could wag a finger and wield a glare at myself for pushing beyond the truth to prove a point, but that luxury isn’t afforded anymore. When a president was elected to the highest office who began his campaign with racist, untrue, and hate-filled remarks about Mexicans, I was told to “chill out” about the response to this un-American position on diversity, human dignity, and individual initiative… I was told this only by those who identify as evangelicals.

When I spilled out concerns about a man who stated: “I hate the thought of black people counting my money” as well as “when you’re famous, you can do whatever you want; you can grab ’em by the pussy,” I was told to think about unborn babies. Told to think only about unborn babies. When I talked about babies born into poverty or what policies and practices actually reduce the occurrences of abortions, I was told it was “fake news” and the conversation had to move back to shopping or gossip.

When I struggled as Dr. Ben Carson was video/audio-taped saying that sometimes you have to put your faith and your Christian principles aside for the sake of politics, I was told I was being irreligious or simply lying.

When I said I could not stand or support or accept a man who celebrated sexual assault, proudly proclaimed his racism toward any human being created in the image of God whose skin wasn’t pasty white or bronze-tanned, or bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” I was told I could not possibly be a Christian.

To write hopefully, much less most hopefully, has felt impossible over the last many months.

And now in the last forty-eight hours, the President of the United States has suggested that we should only allow immigrants from predominantly-white, European countries to grace us with their presence in this country.

The President of these United States is suggesting that those who save us in emergency rooms, those who fight for us in the US military, those who rush into burning buildings and die rescuing our families, those who teach our children third grade math or senior-year Oncology and graduate school public health, and those who operate on our grandparents are from “huts” and “shithole countries.” And we don’t want any more of them here.

And then the decision to dig in to and spin these comments rather than confess the hateful, lymbic, ignorant shadows of them and beg for forgiveness. No need to beg for forgiveness; those who claim to follow the human being of table-turning and death-defying faith work hard at defending or excusing these realities. The more common response is a cloudy blend of eye-rolling, huffing, “waiting-for-proof” for the hundredth time, and pretending that obvious fact is a shadowy conspiracy.

The most common response is, “Well I don’t know about all that, I haven’t paid any attention, but I support him.”

These “shithole countries” are the same places I’ve been asked by Sunday School teachers and youth ministers to visit on ‘mission trips’ and to donate to for “missionary campaigns.” I grew up with photos of these––in the words of the President of the United States––I grew up with photos of these folks from “shithole countries” taped to my wall and fastened to my neighborhood lemonade stands as both an attempt at advocacy but more an attempt at guilt-driven capitalism (in the name of Jesus, of course).

The last I’ve heard from old Sunday School teachers and youth ministers was that the promoter of this hatefulness was the person their Jesus wanted and insisted that I vote for. Local and national evangelical, particularly southern baptist, Christian university professors and “theological” or “ethical” polymaths worked hard to find ways to excuse, explain, or defend standing with something and someone who more explicitly than almost ever before acted, spoke, and believed against most of the sermon-on-the-mount ways of Christ…sadly, or opportunistically…in the name of that very same Christ.

So yes, it’s been difficult to write hopefully, to write anything about hopefulness, much less to write with a sense of hopefulness above and beyond anything else. I cannot lie.

And of all the things I feel, I’m not most hopeful.

So what does it require to remain most hopeful when the loudest, self-proclaimed Christians blindly or apparently-blindly defend a sexual assaulter and racist xenophobe who says he is “Christian” and promises economic growth for the richest among us? What is there to do to hold out hope when old friends claim over late night beers around a fire that “blacks” should get out of the country or “everybody should get over it” when the highest office in the land spews racist and Christ-antithetical hatefulness toward anyone who can consider being “other” before heading back to an emotional worship service the next day?

Presidents of “Christian” universities waste no time in the courts, in the papers, or on social media outlining who is not accepted by the king of the heavenly kingdom for their loves or their politics, but have a hard, pressured, or “I don’t recall” time saying anything definitive about much less against the KKK, white supremacists, racism and classism, or those who teach, live into, and most dangerously love and therefore fear the blasphemy of a celebration of wealth, power, and accumulation rather than the hope of a doxology, generosity, and shared abundance.

I’ve wanted to, and have worked to find the ability to do it, but it’s continued to be difficult to write hopefully, much less hopefully more than heartbroken or harrowed.

Youth ministers have posted, spoken, and confirmed support for sexual assaulters and racist pedophiles.

Friends have let me know, via distance and disembodiment, that I can’t be a Christian.

Old family friends have pushed (privately and publicly) piously-decorated support for a human being who is, in all ways of both word and action, antithetical to the king and his coming kingdom. But my own religious ancestors-in-present of evangelicalism are the pale group who put him there, work to defend him, and spiritualize his hatefulness toward the least of these.

And they have all continued to push, or “prayerfully encourage” me to fall in line.
Or at least be calmer or quieter if I’m not in Orwellian-step with the rhetoric and propaganda.

Hopefulness has been a distant courtier; but hopefulness has been a persistent courtier.

And so to honor the best of my youth ministers, my Sunday School teachers, my old friends, I’m obligated to keep seeking Christ and his kingdom––the kingdom of the least of these and the last in line––I’m pushed, in honoring a memory of those relationships that are apparently no longer based on the same values, to believe what I was taught by those very folks at their best about a new way of living and being in the world.

The world does not go well, but the kingdom comes.

So for me, it’s for Christ and his kingdom. Hopeful or not, this is what I, at my best, am called to follow and working to lean into. Difficult or not, we bend the arc toward the beloved community.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

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Jun 29 2016
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grief and trauma, learning to live, poems, what they are teaching me Image

but listen now to what happened

mary-oliver.hurrican

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Jun 12 2016
1 Comment
grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work, to my students, what students are teaching me, what they are teaching me

an open letter to my students

i-also-remember-this

An Open Letter to My Students on the Eve of the Orlando Shooting.

June 12, 2016

Dear Students,

You likely woke up today as I did: late. You may or may not have turned on the news as is my morning wake-up custom, coffee in hand and multiple snoozes later. Within moments it became clear that there was yet another mass shooting while we were sleeping. This morning’s shooting at a gay night club in Orlando. Over 100 dead and injured.

I remember thinking ‘My soon-to-be godson is to be baptized today. My responsibilities seem yet-again larger now.’

I’m late to the service by a few minutes this morning; I know you’re not surprised. I stood too long at the television in my bedroom, clenching the wooden ledge on top of the dresser left in the room by my great, great-aunts who were the unusual of their era; they were highly educated, remarkably fashionable, and unusually independent women from a time where that was not allowed. No doubt they were recipients of both celebration and judgment. The dresser left in the bedroom of this house they used which I now sleep in has new fingernail marks as of this morning, left accidentally as I should have been dressing for a baptismal service but was instead being washed again in the blood of others.

“I also remember this, and wish I did not,” as Didion once said. I remember that I was not surprised.

Yet another killing, this time the largest mass shooting in our states’ history and the largest terrorist attack on US soil since my freshmen year of college when I sat in a lecture hall of Blanchard at Wheaton and watched the towers fall before my eyes.

I remember this morning thinking that I was surprised that morning as an 18-year-old hopeful, but that I am not surprised now as a 32-year-old hopeful. And it is the hopefulness of my better wiring which has been wanting to talk to all of you all day long today, even though you’ve managed to sneak away from me for the summer. I’ve managed to talk to you in one of our random, side conversations all day long in my head regardless. Then I decided that I hope you might hear it.

Many of you value your faith deeply; I do as well. Because of this, those who believe differently from you are owed your love and honor. The faith you claim has told you so; the faith leaders you are bothered by have challenged this. Follow your faith.

Many of you think
public policy,
issues of social policy and social welfare,
wealth and poverty,
emails to your governors and senators and representatives
(unanswered as most of them go…which you will remember),
childhood development and influence,
family structure and complexity,
group norms and roles,
mob mentalities and social capacities,
and research formulas and findings
aren’t connected in any real way
to your deep desire to help those who are in need.

The crimes of today should remind you that these things are all connected.

The language and now law signed in by Governor Bill Haslam in Tennessee that allow therapists to legally hate and discriminate by refusing counseling to those of the LGBTQ community affected by today’s mass shooting is an issue of policy, welfare, wealth and poverty, legislators who listen and those who ignore (and are paid to do so, which you will remember), legislation and its [silent] funders, biological development and its influences, structure, complexity, norms, roles, mob mentalities and social capacities, research and its findings…

This language and this legislation and these legislators and these voices are the authors of the men and women who will come into your offices and onto your caseloads wounded, orphans of those killed by this morning’s violence, orphans of those who had parents who lived lives of silence or submission to a norm, or stood silently in the back of your sanctuaries on mornings like these as you went to church and thought it was a regular Sunday morning.

I felt the need all day long today, now pushing the clock to make it honest, to let you know that I expect the world of you.

I am pretty sure I have told you this. You will be the best.

I expect a whole other kind of world from you. I expect you to wake up on days like today with the news of the moment and the heart of a saint that is both willing to break the rules and willing to break the norms to dig your fingernails into the wooden ledge on top of the dresser and be late for something planned and appropriate because you decided you had to stand up and speak out for something possibly inappropriate because it puts all of our humanity at risk.

So in class, when I hound you and harass you and rap at you and sing at you and yell at you and take points from you and even when I feed you in an effort to buy you, please know this: I do all these things so that some day, some Sunday morning when someone is waking up and committing to go to church and pledge gratefully to be a godfather for a young man or young woman who has not yet learned to distrust the world…

I do all these things so that you will remember that it will never be okay for us to not be surprised at this kind of hateful news that greeted us this morning.

I’m counting on you.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

 

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Feb 21 2016
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grief and trauma, learning to live, on, social work, what they are teaching me

we all will

ann-livingstone-funeral

I watched my own mother file in, first in line of the four women. The two directly behind her I know well and have a heavy respect for as game-changers, rule-writers, integrity-definers, and culture-forgers. The fourth I’ve never met in person and somehow now in this moment feel embarrassed because I know her name and legacy well. These four women together are the honorary pallbearers for Ann Livingstone today, a funeral that is unwelcome and too early for her lifetime and her influence in our own. They are each dressed in black, of course, as they filed in St. Luke’s historic building, but with a sharp and intentional splash of red as Ann had instructed.

I picked up flowers later that afternoon for the tables and counters and surfaces at Mom and Dad’s house later that night. I was looking for all white blooms, and then remembered the instruction for a punch of red. So all white was chosen, and a punch of red per Ann’s request. A southern dinner for family and friends, and in Ann’s case…students, was held at Mom and Dad’s house the evening of the funeral.

The door I came home late through nearly two decades ago as a teenager I was now opening to one-time students who had become Ann’s students either officially in a classroom or practically in the world because she instilled in them this deep longing to work excellently and brilliantly and faithfully and daringly in their respective fields, whether political science or peacemaking or religion or community development or justice or healthcare or human rights. They were arriving on our from porch from California and Canada to who knows where paying respects and mourning the reality that Ann was now, whether she wanted to or not, offering the ultimate assignment: taking on the work that had now been stolen from her far too soon.

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A few days ago, a good friend of mine posted online an image of our high school English Lit teacher Lisa Kee. She was too crazy to categorize, and too sincere to discount. She was diagnosed with cancer before our eyes as we watched from the desks in her classroom. She proceeded to teach us new ways of being honest with our own humanity, our own fears, our own faith, and our own responsibilities to read and write. She instilled in us the responsibility that by doing so we were shaping the world around us. She told us about the horror of waking up to baldness because of chemo, the value of fresh air and moon beams when you’re trapped in a sterile hospital room, and the fear of knowing that death is closer than it had been invited.

For me, and for many, she was the first person who ever made it clear that my voice was worth using and worth being heard, and therefore worth being trained and challenged because our shared humanity was at stake.

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When Mrs. Kee died, her funeral was the biggest of any class reunion I’ve ever been to. To invoke her name shapes the conversation that follows, and raises the bar of what we expect among each of us. Ann was never my professor, but I’m the recipient of those she taught, both officially as students who are now my friends and colleagues, and unofficially as friends, like my parents, who have been shaped and challenged and pushed to live wholeheartedly because of what she has taught them.

Death is bullshit.
Unwelcome.
Unnatural.
Untimely.
Unreasonable.
Unacceptable.

But shots of red, unexpected and insistent fugues, the filing in of these four pallbearers, and images of the past wrestle hard against it, fighting honorably against grief in making way to the surface insisting the work must continue. To live with honesty, teach with integrity and urgency, and die with dignity are a sharp lesson and challenge.

Justice waits for us to fight for it. Peace waits for us to make it. Goodness waits for us live into it.

And in the loss of our larger-than-life teachers who have now been stolen by the fight, we find ourselves pushing a little harder to pass on the imperative of living in ways that are worthy of the human spirit.

To Lisa Kee and to Ann Livingstone, I will do my best. And I will push my students with all I have to do their bests.

We all will.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Sep 30 2015
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grief and trauma, on, the calendar, what they are teaching me

Lord willing, we won’t keep growing

Our Jackson Home posted a piece I wrote reflecting on this year’s Remember Me Walk for survivor’s of homicide loss. This group is astounding to me, and I’ve copied some of the post below with a link to read it in its entirety. And if you have not yet checked out Our Jackson Home, you should probably get on the ball.

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The crowd was larger this year than any crowd the past seven. The Carl Grant Events Center at Union University was filled with tables surrounded by people of all kinds, ages, colors, and worlds held together by the sad reality that someone they loved has been murdered—some of them fifty years ago and some five months ago. The reality that no one truly understands this grief is echoed in the camaraderie across the room. “Lord-willing,” they say, “we won’t keep growing. We don’t want other people to know what this feels like.”

Grief is breathtaking. All have experienced it, and we know the deep-down grumbling in our guts that must be an echo of the deep-down grumbling in our souls.

A life is lost. A story ends. …

Click here to keep reading on Our Jackson Home…

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May 13 2015
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learning to live, what they are teaching me

an end to preludes

boyond-preludes

There is a rumble of insistence for
an end to preludes without their symphonies.

Beyond announcements and proclamations,
beyond ceremonies and unveilings,
crowds of regular people gather
who are still working and sweating
to raise their families
to help their neighbors
to reimagine their surroundings
to dream their futures
and to build into their communities
into something a little more whole.

Beyond the prelude
the people are still waiting
for the movement to begin.

Beyond the prelude
we are waiting and clamoring,
we have become restless waiting and clamoring,
for the movement to begin.

There is no longer an acceptance of only preludes;
we’ve learned the movement is supposed to follow.

We don’t expect it to be played for us;
we’ve been learning to play for quite some time now.
We expect to add our own music to the work.
We don’t expect it to ring without error;
we’ve been learning from our errors for quite some time now.
We expect to mess up, tell the truth about it, and continue to play.
We don’t expect to hear it immediately;
we’ve been learning how long it takes for good music to be born.
We expect to see it both in small pieces and suddenly in finished products.

But let us be clear;
we will no longer accept the preludes without their symphonies.
If there is intent to impose again
an acceptance of the status quo
of all prelude and no movement
of all proclamation and no production
of all appeasing and no activity
of all explanation and no substance,
hear this:
We do not accept your offer.

We’ve waited.
We’ve traveled.
We’ve worked.
We’ve trained.
We’ve sweat.

You will not scare us into silence.
You will not threaten us into acceptance.
You will not bully us into appeasement.

We know that the prelude is only the prelude;
there’s music to be heard.
And we know that while terrifying,
it is the music of the kingdom.
And we will play it together.
And we will hear it together.

And whether or not you join us,
we will move beyond the preludes.
There’s music to be heard.

djordan
Chicago, IL

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Oct 23 2014
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learning to live, on, what they are teaching me

the era at hand

photo 2

At about a hundred miles an hour it came crashing into my chest this morning, moving up quickly to my throat where it stole my breath and then my eyes which began to pour. In the wind, behind sunglasses and under one of my grandfather’s many straw fishing hats, I was skimming quickly to our next drop in spot with three buddies as the sun was coming up over the gulf where we’ve been staying these last few days. The boat’s captain letting us know how far in to drop and what was likely on our line before it ever came into site was scouting out our next most likely location.

The four-word refrain came to mind. I followed it just under my breath to see what song it was connected to, and then, the crashing. First chest. Then throat. Then eyes.

sad fruitful broken true
sad fruitful broken true

I didn’t realize until this morning out there on the dramamine-calmed water that this is the first trip to the beach I’ve been on since losing both grandparents who taught me to love traveling here, feeding the birds, chasing the fish, eating out, cooking in, and laughing hard. As time passed, so did their health, but the beach would still happen. Moves from porch to den to restaurant  became slower and slower, but each still an important move worth taking the time to make.

This morning, out there on the water, still burning by the sun under his straw fishing hat, I realized that it has been the years and years of family and storytelling and value-passing that makes me fight, over and beyond fighting for meaningful work and meaningful impact, for meaningful friendship and meaningful experiences. To see and to feel and to taste the holiness in clinking glasses in my own home or half a world away. To honor and to savor the time spent with and the time spent where.

And in the hurricane of memories that stormed perfectly over and into me this morning, I was at once overwhelmingly grateful and overwhelmingly heartbroken. To have the privilege of three decades filled with enough love and honor and legacy to miss so deeply all at once left me exceedingly grateful and sad. The era of those kinds of gifts has passed. Forever. It’s almost too much to take in.

There is, however, the era at hand. It is in these days, then, that reveal the ways in which I choose to remember all these good things that have in no way been withheld from me. It is in this era that I will either wake up before the sun and meet my buddies to fish deep in the ocean, or I will only mourn the loss of the days that have already passed. To truly mourn, to truly grieve and to truly honor all that is lost must, in the truest of ways, involve making deep and rich meaning of all that is ahead.

And must acknowledge the ripe and possible realities of the present moment. Crashing in and all.

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The words I found after chasing the refrain are from the Sara Groves’ song This House are listed below:

it took me by surprise
this old house and these old feelings
walked round and looked inside
familiar walls and halls and ceilings

where I’d dream and plan
every moment of sunshine
this was my whole world
it was all I knew
like the hull of a seed
this old house cracked wide open
as I grew

hadn’t given it much thought
hadn’t been back here for a while
everything looks so small
seen through the memories of a child

who would dream and stare
from that second story window
that was my whole world
it was all I knew
like the hull the of a seed
this old house cracked wide open
and I flew

sad fruitful broken true
sad fruitful broken true

memories for miles and miles
summers falls winters and springs
Ruby you take it in
see he’s withheld no good thing

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djordan
723 Whiskey Bravo
Seagrove Beach, FL

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Jun 12 2014
2 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, Series: Signs of the Kingdom

the funeral laugh

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You know it.

And please.
Don’t act like you don’t know it.

Don’t act like you don’t know what the funeral laugh is. If you pretend that you don’t know it, I’ll know you’re lying and that’s an entirely different thing to address. We’re together here, you and me.

We all know what the funeral laugh is.
And we’re all guilty.

That inappropriate laugh in the moment where we are faced with the reality that the clock stops ticking one day. The clock stops ticking and the reality rushes in that we are more time-limited than we are prepared to admit. And we don’t know why things happen the way they do, why pain and progress get shaped and honored and forgotten the way they do; why pain lasts and hope lasts; why the possibility of something different for the future can operate with larger and stronger and broader strength than the reality of the way things have been in the past.

That completely inappropriate laugh that surprised us as much as anyone who heard it before we muffled it with a cough or choke or some other lame cover.

We can pretend as though we are wired for money or wired for sex or wired for love or wired for prestige.
But we can’t pretend for long.
Because once we catch anything we chase,
it sheds its skin
and we realize that we are naked and selfish,
insecure,
hopeful,
and powerless in more ways we care to consider.

And that’s when in stings.
It’s gonna be the funeral laugh or the funeral wail. One is coming out and we can’t help it.
We are at the funeral. We know that the person in the casket is highlighted by a story that now has defined lines of what was and wasn’t accomplished.
And we are terrified.
And rightly so, because we are afraid of what the present reality means for us when we shove it up against the reality of the future.

But, it’s that laugh that comes out. And in the same way it’s poorly timed and poorly placed, it’s also unexpected and sends a surge to the abdomen which sends a surge to the brain. And the surges remind us that we are, today, in this moment, alive. And we are alive in a place that is filled with people on the edge of laughter or tears, people ourselves included, who are still making the little choices one after another because our clock is still ticking. Our story still has options.

So we remember our inside jokes and laughs.
So we send cards to the mailbox with stamps and seals that say thanks again for everything.
So we let the other person in front of us in traffic, in line, in thought.
So we pause and raise a glass to make a toast that’s more a prayer than the blessing would have been.
So we make a decision to risk admitting we are powerless and hope that something rises to catch us.
So we wear party hats when making grown-up decisions that aren’t fun because we are alive and here to make them.

So we decide to choose the laugh at that inappropriate time that’s marked by real and gritty silence and seriousness. We know that we will wail again in a moment, and we know that both are actually fine.

But right this second, we choose the laugh. And then it won’t stop. We can’t stop it.

At this funeral, in this thin space where we are asked again that huge question about what it means to move forward in the world we will stop moving in, for a time, one day, we choose the funeral laugh. Because we can. And because we must.

djordan
Pine Tree

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