February Nineteenth

It is February nineteenth today.  This makes sense, as yesterday it was the eighteenth and presumably the twentieth will follow.  It seems so inconsequential.

But it's always funny that dates mean something, isn't it?  Society decided that January 1st begins a new year, so millions of people dress up and kiss each other the second it comes and begin diets the next.  There is power in observing dates.  Creating rituals.

Eight months ago my mother died.  This time eight months ago people were slowly trickling out of our house and I finally got somewhat dressed and sat in heavy sunshine for a while.

A year ago, however, my mother was cheerfully clacking away at the computer, updating her CaringBridge site.  She had exactly four months left on this earth--how inconceivable!  But, as she mentions in her post, she knew she was 'mainstream in His Ways.'  

Going Deeper Written Feb 19, 2012 12:51pm by LeMei Littlefield

Hi there, dear friends -  Rejoicing in Him with you this day! 
This past week has been a very good one of rest and recovery. There  were two painful bouts of reaction to meds and injections but they have since resolved and I now have increased energy and appetite-:-) !  Looking forward to this next week of strengthening before round 3 of hospitalization begins February 28.  

As we move deeper through this progression of weeks, the Lord continues to pour out His amazing presence and comfort, His Life and Love without limit. We are completely undone by the joy of knowing Him!   And there is the sense of being in the mainstream of His Ways, so much higher, wiser, more loving than our own. How infinitely worthy of our worship and trust is our Creator and Redeemer, LORD of all history, all peoples, places and times! 

The gift of your fellowship and prayers is one we can never adequately express our thanks for. It's like a current of life flowing through our days.  We bless you in His Name!  

P.S. And, Very thankful for answers to prayer -- we have arranged for an excellent place for my Mom to move to once she is out of rehab, within the next couple of weeks!  A HUGE thank you to JoLene who helped us scout out the possibilities!    

I was going to share some more of my story of 2012, but it is more macabre.  I don't want to dishonor Mom by distorting her five and a half months of victory into a petty story of oh look how hard my life is, woe is me!  Or even a, feel sorry for my mother's suffering, it's hell!  

Mom was given the strength to suffer and still rejoice.   

Our suffering is slower than the 600 hours of maximum strength chemotherapy.  It hasn't, so far, made my eyelashes fall out.  Hair's as thick as ever.  But we live on this earth and miss her like our hearts were cut out, and so we suffer.  

We too have a chance to rejoice in our sufferings.  

God help me, that still seems like blasphemy written by the insane (well, it was Paul).  But after witnessing Mom with that same insanity, I believe that we're the crazy ones.  There really IS grace for this.  


And it ends in hope.

"...we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."  ~Romans 5:3b-5

Hairy tales

I interrupt your normal blog-casting of deep, heady morose fare for....

                                             HAIR TALK WITH STACIA!

I have thick hair.  In fact, I may have the thickest hair of any girl I've met.  It bursts hair ties and shatters claw clips as a matter of course.

Typically I give some warning to my hairdressers, the students at Paul Mitchell school.  And typically the lucky student nods naively, greedy to get another haircut closer to graduating.  She gushes over how beautiful it is and how lucky I am.  All is happy-smiley.  But then she starts washing it and wonders what happened to the shampoo.  My hair swallows shampoo by the bottle.

The girl, still perky, giggles nervously and guides my dripping locks back to the cutting chair.  She pins it up.  It instantly falls with impressive weight, cascading down like the Niagara Falls with mighty aplomb.  The poor girl then tries several other clips, each one bigger than the last with stronger, sharper teeth.  As the long task ahead becomes apparent, her frustration begins to jab at my skull with copious hairpins.  I close my eyes to avoid wincing.

She cuts one layer and unwinds another.  I breathe out, calculating that at this rate, the ten tidy twists on my head will be shorn in good time.  She sniffs, grimaces, and pins back half of the hair twist.  Too much.  We share a suppressed sigh.

There is then: a long time.

In which not much happens on my end, but my valiant little haircutter chips--er, snips--away at Mt. Vesuvius.   My girl keeps casting dark glaring glances to other, happier, students with thin-haired clients.   She mouths, Look how thick!  I KNOW!  Can you BELIEVE it?  The other students quickly look away as from a bloody corpse, their minds reeling in horror.

I fleetingly consider charging money to my own freak show or perhaps supplying goods to yarn stores.    There's got to be a better use of my abounding tresses than $10-a-pop public humiliation.

An old Asian hairdresser with feverish eyes randomly flits to and fro between the shearers.  She stops abruptly at me, doubles over and starts hurriedly collecting shorn scraps of my hair.  I forget all manners and roundly stare at her.  Shouldn't I sign some waiver or consent form?  What could she possibly want with my hair?  Is this voodoo or something?
She explains in broken English that she is doing a hair color project and needs samples of red virgin hair.  Well, I do have both the red and the virgin going for me.  Take it away, strange hair lady.  Just don't take my soul.

At long last the deed is done.  Never mind the blow-drying that took the better part of an hour.  Never mind that my girl's arms are about to fall off from heavy lifting.  My hair is shining, laden with product that I will never slather on it again, and I am about just about to leave  my chair when...

The girl's supervisor sweeps by and does a final check-up on the cut.  I smile wanly and nod, Yes, yes, it's great, fabulous, I like the back, yes...  I say nothing of hairpin stabs or smarting remarks.  That kid owes me big.  All I'm thinking about is my snappy exit.
The supervisor then leans in gallantly, delicately lifting layer upon layer of pampered hair.  He is a tall, regal and strangely bald African American with a flashing wide smile.  Motioning to the mass of butchered hair lying sadly on the floor, he comments sweetly, "I'm going to take your hair and glue it on my head, and then I'll be as pretty as you."

I nervously chuckle, picturing little patches of auburn hair pasted on his dark bald head.  Was that a compliment?

As I pay up and leave, I am reminded of a roommate's comment; she and the other roommates love my hair.  She laughingly warned me that one day I might just wake up and find it shaved off, and the girls dancing around with little Stacia hair wigs.
Talk about a disturbing visual!  Although...I suppose there's more than enough to go around.


Notes:
~All of these things really have happened over multiple visits to the illustrious Paul Mitchell School.  There's actually more that I've witnessed there, including random dance parties and a marriage proposal.  I am so serious.  Men: do NOT, I repeat, do NOT propose to your girlfriend in a salon.  I don't CARE if she cuts hair.  It is beyond tacky.
~I actually love getting my hair cut because I get a head massage.
~Oh, and virgin hair really is a thing--it just means that you've never colored it.  It's rather rare these days, and every single time people are shocked that I'm still a virgin.

Grief is glass

Happy New Year!  2013, what an awkward little assortment of numbers.  I'm still putting off writing, so here are a few poems.

The day Mom came home for hospice I went out for errands, after waiting hours at the hospital for details and the right oxygen tank.

I knew I had to get colored pencils and journals, and Mom wanted plain yogurt.  I bought a set of three slim journals, my pencils, and two enormous tubs of yogurt.

I always bought her copious amounts of food; I think it was in hope that she'd live long enough to finish it.  Anyhow, one of the journals I turned into a poetry/prose journal.  

There are not as many poems as there are deranged scribbles, but a few stanzas survived.  I don't want to always be sad, but do want to be honest.  That's why I'm posting all the sad ones (they're not all sad) now so I don't have to prolong the process. 

Grief is glass

Grief is glass

shattering shattering

pieces get hid

glimmering glimmering

stuck into toes into fingertips searching

into nostrils inhaled clogging up lungs

some of it’s noble, knighted, sainted—

colored and carved and placed in

cathedrals

most of it’s dusty dirty sneaky grenades

private heartthrobs and breath catching sighs

yearning

   waiting

for something to shift, to resolve out of

            augmented diminished tritone agony

                        but

my hope is in another world

            my heart

my treasure

            has lifted off

and flown away

what is here for me except dusty glass and empty decades?  Life lived just so 

all can be at last at last at long last

finished…          and real life can start.

come.

Jesus—

come.

7.11.12  three days before Mom’s 54^th birthday

There is a soft sadness

There is a soft sadness
that sinks in-between
the everyday notches and watches of life

It curls up precisely
where it's hard to reach
and doesn't envelope until all is ripe

But when conversation's
the most ordinary
and when I would certainly rather not weep

The silky soft sadness
seeps up to my stomach
and creeps, how it leaps and it heaps.

8.5.12

And, to not end on a thoroughly heavy note, a little poem from God to me:
open your eyes

open your eyes, my love, my love

lift the lashy veils and colored muscled
     pools of soul
              to me, to me

the agony within will not cannot
            destroy me
for I am deeper still within
     the cloying hurt

8.6.12

Thank God for coagulation

Wouldn't you know it; the week that I was being held accountable for writing in this thing was the week that I stopped blogging.  Oh my poor accountability partner!

For the sake of forward motion, I will cheat and post a poem that I wrote a few months ago.  At least it's something, right?
(Note to readers: My favorite part of poetry is rhythm; yes, even with irregular meter.  I just picture irregular meter as unusual time signatures, like 7/8 or 5/4.  The best ones.  All that to say, please read it out LOUD.)

Thank God for coagulation

When the skin tears from its sleeve, when the rip is long and deep

The body whitens, puckers in horror,

And the Blood takes its own sweet time seeping out

Darker than a red red rose

By rights it bleeds and bleeds and bleeds

Shocks, laments in crimson tears.

And now it runs its race with zeal

Bursts bandages trying to cotton the shrieks

Don’t smother the sorrow that must be heard

Don’t beat back the Blood that must run down

Don’t say it is not when it clearly is The—

Is it not The End?

But now the red flow thickens

Slows, loses heart, is whisked into peaks.

The Blood brittles.  The wound littles,

And gradually closes its mouth.

The fire is buried in ash, in scab

The scab is vetted and fretted away

And only a long strike of lightning stays

That memory may always remain.

8.14.12

Really loving her

I used to think I loved my Mom.
Now I believe that I genuinely thought I loved her, probably actually did a smidgen, but largely just needed her.  I received her love as a child, guzzled it down.  Which is fine and dandy, but now I'm twenty six and slowly bumbling out of the heavy sweater of childishness.  {I'm growing up even as I'm growing younger.  Maybe by the time I'm fifty I'll know the feeling of being a little child.  Childlike without the prison of narcissism}

God gave me lots of chances to really love her this year.  I tried.  That's a whole other post.

Grief has a really obnoxious way of uncovering the heart when it's most naked.  Exposing disease.  I realized that I wanted my mother here WITH ME even more than I wanted her happiness.  And God's plans?  Screw it, I need her.  Here and now.

{I need her to believe that I'll finally get married and have all those kids and see all those beautiful    dreams and prophecies, the ones that are soft and frayed from daily praying, actually materialize into gloriously messy reality.  I need her to explain her recipes.  She never measured.  I need to tell her about Micala's wedding and Aaron leaving for grad school and my job imploding in the same three days, how well friends have loved me and how people can say really dumb things.  How I've hidden and tried not to hide, how I can't even talk to one of my closest friends on the phone because I just can't talk.  How my heart has finally been beaten into submission but I'm afraid I've beaten too viciously; it doesn't work very well now.  How I'm worried about not being worried that the old burning ache to see China worship has been covered in ashy sediment.  How I saw the ocean, saw the mountains, found a new artist and a new musician, that it all poured life on my soul.  How death is now a personal enemy and I feel power coursing through me when I sing, "Death where is your sting?" I know the devil hates it.  I have the authority to lord it over him, ha!  I will always keep singing.  If I can't today, I will tomorrow.  Just because of Jesus and lots of prayers.   How I've written ten songs this year, but too many of them are slow and in the key of A.  How I have no f-ing idea where my life is going.  How I'm in the mists; like when we hiked rain forests.  How darkness comes early and winter is breathing heavy like a wolf.  How days are bathed with the sheer exhaustion of being alive.}

A few months back I was hovering, wandering about the water cooler at work with an empty head and brimming eyes.  A coworker who had lost his Mom when he was about my age asked me something about name badges, and I stared stupidly up at him, a couple tears bleeding out.  He roughly gave me a side hug.  Advised me to remember that whenever I'm feeling selfish and want her here, just to remember how happy she is up in heaven.

I sniffed self-righteously and thought,  It's not selfish to want your mommy.

That's true.  Death is an obscenity to which we were never meant to become desensitized.
I've also argued with God since then, bringing up how hard Mom fought to stay on this earth.  Clawed for life.  Even with so much death around her, she would not acknowledge her dying body but fought the good fight.  But I know that she is adoring heaven.  I believe that she has assignments from Jesus that she's partnering with Him in, and also that she's part of the great cloud of witnesses.  If God is all around, maybe she's not as far away as I thought.

I hope that one day loving someone won't mean letting them go.  It will mean vowing to hold on, hold close.  {And even with Mom, I am not letting her go.  I am letting myself live.}

But at least for now, loving my mother, loving my friends, etc. means blessing who God has formed that person to be.  It means blessing them to go where He leads.  Even if it's not where I want them to be.  Even if I need them here, closer.
I get to love them the way God has given me to love them.  It's just frustrating that so often this means bitter, freezing pain.
{The buck always stops at God's character.  Always.  He's so brave that way, letting the root of every accusation slowly trace its way back to, Who do you say I am?  Because, naturally, he could have changed his plan so that my mother didn't die.  Just like he could have prevented so many things.  It's a gauntlet thrown down by the devil and God too--Will I still trust him?  Do I still say that He is overflowing with loving-kindness?}

But now I have the chance to really love my mother.  Not for what she can do for me, but to just LOVE HER.
To bless God's taking her.  To twist my lips into a half-smile after doing another batch of weeping when I think of her dancing.  I hear the overtones of her laugh sometimes, feel the life of her smile.  Her obstinate joy that conquered lymphoma.  I love her by getting up and living.


After all, she's only as dead as Jesus is.

file://localhost/Users/Stacia/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Karla%20Adolphe/Honeycomb%20Tombs/08%20When%20I%20See%20Him.mp3

a few thoughts on fear, and The Beginning

It computes, I suppose, that Christians tend to be the most fearful people I know.  We are called to higher things, to fling ourselves headlong into Love himself.  And so of course our adversary would pinpoint us with fear like a sniper, shooting until we collapse.

I know that the opposite of fear is love, that perfect love casts it out, and that God = Love.  But  living this truth is akin to breaking out of chain mail armor lashed with bolts and locks galore.  It's the sort of thing you can pour your lifeblood into, burst a lung over--a real battle.  The journey from fear into Love.  I want to write without fear.  I want to live without it.  I want to run so far from fear that I crash heavily into Love, again and again and again.

My mother taught me the most about not being afraid.  I do not remember her being afraid this year, not once.  Not when her hair was falling out.  Not when the prognosis was 9-11% survival (that just annoyed her, and she would not talk about it).  Not when chemo was making her old.

During my forty days of wearing black I haphazardly wrote the story of how she died, frantically finishing just before I reemerged in color.  It is extremely unedited and unfit for anyone to read--I'd have to kill ten people at least.
Nevertheless, it is honest.  It is called My Vanquishing Vanishing Mother (I can never resist alliteration).
I may occasionally post slices of the story; here is the beginning.  It relates to fear:

           My mother, LeMei Carolyn Moore Littlefield, celebrated the New Year 2012 with gusto.  She always did, praying and reflecting and celebrating.  A few days into the year I was getting off work and about to go to Zumba class.  I saw that my sister Micala had called me four times and had texted me that Mom was in the hospital.  My Dad had also called.  I quickly called my father, panic rushing to my throat and stabbing my gut.  He told me that Mom had never gotten over her cold of three weeks and that her cough was worse.  She had gone to the local clinic that had immediately taken her to an ER in Denver, at St. Joseph’s hospital.  I was not to worry.  They were running tests to see what was wrong.

            I cried a few frightened tears and my roommate Nicole hugged me.  She advised me to still go to Zumba, which I did.  The next day I went up to the hospital after work.  My beautiful Mom was there.  She looked so vulnerable in a flimsy hospital gown, but wore a calm, reassuring smile.  I hugged her, and after a few minutes couldn’t hold back the tears.  She held my hand and told me that I don’t have to be afraid; fear is never of God.  She had some painful procedures, and asked me to step outside while the nurse took a bone marrow sample.  Afterwards she mentioned that it hadn’t been that bad; I probably could have stayed.  The early days seem like such child’s play in contrast to the end, where she couldn’t hide the pain anymore and held my hand so tight.

_____________________________________________________________________

Mom told me not to be afraid, and she also commented that worry was a form of fear.  God had been talking with her about that.
I have not lived that well this year, but her words sank like granite to the bottom of my soul.  Now I'm not quite so easily swayed to worry.  I've got a bit more weight of glory in me.  Precious little, but I can feel it.  Maybe it's from her.

{On a side note, that first day was the only time I cried in front of her in the hospital.  
Fitting, surreal, nauseating.}


I was going to wrap this thing up with a few pithy takeaways to avoid fear but the words taste false.

Honestly, 2012 has left me with more, not less, fear.   I don't have more separate fears, but rather a heightened foreboding of their fulfillment.  The worst thing really can happen.  It does, all the time.  In another six months, who else will slip away?  There seem to be no rules.  The ones we have, that keep our universe bolted into place, have ample room for horror.
Remembered pain grows into an evil tsunami, lurching over me as it grows and shadows the future.

It really is true--only one thing remains.  Jesus.
Love himself.  He is with us.  He died to make that happen.  And whatever horrors happen, there is grace rippling alongside.  That's all I got.  It doesn't feel comforting, it doesn't feel kind, it doesn't feel good.

But He is more real than feelings and He is enough.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofgybd5coQE

Praying for people

Today I prayed for women who came into a free healthcare clinic connected with my local church.  I am now part of an intercession team that offers prayer to women who desire that before or after their doctor's appointment.  Some come back solely for the prayer.  

And I suck at it.

I used to know how to do this--I have been on countless prayer teams, formed a college prayer group centered on dessert (if there's ice cream, they will come), gone through a prayer internship, and been a full time intercessor for years.  You would think I could pray for people.

And I can.  I do.  Prayer happens.  Worship happens.  God is glorified.  But secretly I think it's all a joke--me, who can barely get out of bed, offering people prayer!

But I hobble to and fro in absolute exhaustion, worship, feebly ask women if they would like prayer, and am shocked if they say yes.  

And I am jarred out of my selfish grief world.  And thank God that I have a car and not an abusive ex-husband.  And I continue to pray for them.  And start to ache for them, but then my heart saltily reminds me that I'm in way too much pain as it is, and to shut the hell up about these other people (my heart often has a potty mouth).  And I'm disgusted by my myopic self-centeredness in a helpless sort of way.

I've never been this weak before.

Today I arrived just as a mother, grandmother and little girl were being prayed for.  Afterward, as they waited for a prescription, the three-year old girl spied a stash of children's books and greedily grabbed an armful.  Girl after my own heart.  

She looked around, and caught my eye.  I smiled and offered to read them to her.  We read through a couple, and I became increasingly concerned by her lack of engagement.  I always try to involve kids as I read to them, and she would not point out where the crab was, turn the page, or really do anything.  She didn't say a word.  I know it doesn't seem like much, but I knew something was wrong.  From her eyes and a half dozen other things.  She was not in a good situation, and I could do absolutely nothing except pray for her.

I cannot relay how horrible it is to see children shut down and lifeless, and know that abuse is happening RIGHT NOW but that it will probably be years before it stops, and more excruciating years before God addresses it and they slog through the awful miry bog toward healing.  If at all.  I told another lady, and we prayed, and I'll keep praying.  Who knows what is going on.  Who knows what God will do because we prayed.

Oh but it grates on my soul.   Kyrie eleison.  Christe eleison.  

Jesus, you have such a brave heart to refuse to give up on this place where we live.  

Jesus, rescue the little girl with the old eyes.   Do your thing.  I love it when you do (actually, that's a complete lie.  I love it afterwards).

Gentle knead her soul into breathing.