Grief Demands an Answer

"Grief demands an answer, but sometimes there isn't one." I was watching House of Cards when a character said those words. It was Friday night, February 14th. The new season of the show released that day, and I had decided to enjoy my VD--uh, Valentine's Day--by marathoning some of Frank Underwood's devious dealings with a French press of Dominican coffee, chocolate chip cookies, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's Half Baked. Living on the edge.

Grief demands an answer.

The words made me pause; they landed not too far from some truth in my life. Not because it was Valentine's Day, and there I was by myself. Ironically, despite the saturation of red-themed everything or the flood of romantic tributes on social media, I've felt no ill will toward the holiday at any point. It doesn't matter to me what the origin of the day is or how commercialized or overplayed it is--I like it. I like what it can mean and can be for people who make the most of the opportunities it presents to love each other.

Even if I have little to no role to play in it these days.

99% of the time, I walk around in a pretty good mood for your average guy. But there have been moments, flashes, in which my jaw tightens. I may have been in the middle of humming to some happy tune, or reading an article about people going to live on Mars, and suddenly, grief is there with me.

It wants to know why. Always why. Not how. I know how; I've studied it. I have a phd in how. Grief grips me, desperate and confused, and demands its answers.

Sometimes I entertain grief. I wonder aloud with it. I draft up long, complicated conspiracy theories, and everyone is a suspect. I concoct interpretations that would take Peter Jackson more than a trilogy to tell on film. I write epic tales that skip with a scarecrow, tin man, and lion down the road to a happy ending.

No matter how fanciful or rational an explanation I develop, no matter how scared I am or how hopeful I am of the real answer, I always sober up and face this reality:

Grief demands an answer, but sometimes there isn't one.

Or, at least, there's no way of knowing for sure.

How do you satisfy the burning queries of grief, then? How do you learn to walk after loss cripples you? How do you get back what was stolen from you? How do your eyes adjust to the light after you've been held captive in a dark cell for years?

For me, three things:

Time.

Forgiveness.

Trust.

Sometimes one feels more important than the other. Sometimes I hate one or all three. But I need them all. More importantly, there are no easy answers found there.

They may not be enough to keep grief at bay once and for all, but they are enough, for now.

Fortress

I woke up this morning with the image of a fortress burned in my brain. It wasn't Minas Tirith, but hey--any chance to go to LoTR, and I'll go there.

The fortress was fitting. After a terrible night's sleep full of unsettling dreams and a pretty rough two or three weeks overall, it was like God was reminding me of something I needed to know.

In times of heartache, in times of pain, despair, and trouble, we sometimes have the tendency to try to bear it on our own. We attempt to carry the weight of grief or sorrow, to handle the burden of our situations by ourselves. And we end up driving ourselves into the ground.

There's a story in the gospels in which Jesus and his disciples are on a boat. While they're out at sea, an intense storm comes on them. The waves batter and break into the boat, even to the point where the boat begins to fill with water. The disciples are freaking out.

Where's Jesus?

He's in the stern. Asleep.

It takes either a man supremely confident in faith beyond what's going on around him or a really heavy sleeper to keep snoozing in that situation. The disciples, terrified and unsure of what to do, wake Jesus up.

I like to picture Jesus waking up as if from a beauty sleep, stretching a bit, and yawning as he tells the storm to stop. And it does. No big deal.

After the storm dies down, the waves subside, the clouds clear, and only a gentle mist remains in place of hammering rain, Jesus asks the disciples why they were so afraid.

It's because they forgot who they were with.

On days like this, it's good for me to remember that in the middle of whatever storm, I don't have to be the strong one. God is with me to carry me through a storm I don't have the power to navigate.

God, my peace.

God, my hope.

God, my strength.

God, my fortress.

I Am in Need of Music.

I have a pretty demanding and stressful job running sound for my school district's main auditorium. Despite the many complaints I could easily spew, one of the great privileges I have is to be exposed to some amazing people and amazing music that I'd not know of without this job. Last week, I ran sound for the high school chorus/choir concert. The first night of rehearsal, I was so busy and preoccupied with making everything sound okay that I hardly paid attention to what was actually happening. It sounds funny, but as I worked to make the music sound good, I completely overlooked...the music.

The second night, show night, I actually sat back and enjoyed the music. The choir began singing one particular song that pulled me in and really blew me away. I've been obsessed with it since.

It's called "I Am in Need of Music." I believe it is originally a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, arranged into a musical piece later on.

I had a really in-depth post I was going to write about this, but the poem just speaks so much more than all my words can say. The song does something to me, too, that I can't put into words. So here is the poem, and a video:

"I Am in Need of Music"

I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on my head, And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody: A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep To the subaqueous stillness of the sea, And floats forever in a moon-green pool, Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Pip and Self-Loathing.

I'm teaching Dickens' Great Expectations for the first time to my 9th-grade English class. We've reached the point early in the story where Pip, the shy, modest, and simple boy, meets Estella, the beautiful, proud, and cruel girl. Estella goes out of her way to make Pip feel ashamed of his upbringing. Here are some of Pip's thoughts after this interaction:

I took the opportunity of being alone to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now...

I set off...pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and that I was a common laboring boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night; and generally that I was in a low-lived, bad way.

These words resonate with me. I still remember exactly where I was when I realized I was skinnier than the rest of the kids around me. I was about eight years old and at a lake near Pittsburgh, digging a hole in the sand of the lake's beach. Water from the lake was lapping into my little work of excavation, and with sand all over my hands and legs and my best friend sitting across from me, I couldn't have been happier. My friend's sister was sitting nearby, watching us dig and scoop the dark, gray muck of wet sand.

"Paul, why the heck are you so skinny? Look--I can see all of your ribs. Nasty! Don't you eat anything?"

My hands stopped scooping. I looked down at my torso, as if for the first time. I looked at my friend. Wow, he does not look like me. The wet sand slid down the crevices between my fingers. I never thought of this before. I shrugged off his sister's question. "I don't know." It would become my patented response.

And like Pip, I felt like I had passed from one world to another world and now saw everything in a whole new light. And since that moment, I've spent countless amounts of time, energy, and dollars to right this wrong, to repair this defect of a body. At one point, I was so convinced I was a freak that I forced my mother to take me to multiple doctors and had my blood tested at Quest Diagnostics for thyroid, hormonal issues, anything that would indicate abnormalities with my metabolism. Surely something was wrong with me.

I do still remember every comment made about my chicken legs, or my bony shoulders (or my eyebrows, or nose, or eyes--the list goes on) like little clips saved on a playlist that I can recall at will (and sometimes against my will). I've cursed this body I have. I've stayed up at night fuming about being given the short straw. I've even pounded much larger people into submission to try to prove I wasn't inferior.

After graduating from high school, I became much more comfortable with myself, and I've all but stopped caring about battling my God-given genetics. I don't secretly boil underneath anymore when someone goes out of their way to point out my flaws. (Note: I do, however, still find it curious the backwards social etiquette that allows someone to say to me, "Man, you're so skinny. You should eat more," in a public setting. What happens if I ask the question, "Wow, you have two chins. You should work out more," in front of a crowd of people?)

I think we all have at least a few of these moments where we we have been jolted out of blissful ignorance into a painful realization of some perceived shortcoming.

It makes me sad when I see how much we're still grappled with those insecurities and the ways we continue to deal with them. I'm sad that so many women are horrified at the thought of ever appearing in public without makeup. I'm sad that many women have to have their hair done, have to look tan, have to strive for some made-up aesthetic standard. I'm sad that people have equated "being in shape" with being model-esque or super-muscular.

I'm sad for Pip at this point in the story because I know how it begins to transform him. I'm sad for my students because several of them are now experiencing their first, dark "A-ha" moments and will go through the same battles that Pip will, that I have, that many of us have.

I wish I had a magic formula that could take away the sting of social comparisons for my students and for my friends. And for me.

In the meantime, I can only keep pressing with the little things: Reading in a silly English accent with my students to show I don't care about embarrassing myself. Looking at each one in the eye as often as I can and remembering to smile at them, even on my bad days, to remind them that someone sees them. Remembering that they play the violin and making them feel awesome about it. Praying that they don't lose themselves trying to meet the misguided standard of their peers.

I pray that for all of us and still for myself.

Seattle, Day 3: Carkeek Park.

My Seattle trip, as told through my iPhone 3G’s pics, videos, and my ramblings. On Thursday morning, while Jake was at work, Archer, Syrahav, and I went down to Carkeek Park. Carkeek is this cool little park right on the beach of Puget Sound. The few hours we were there seemed to be the only real overcast weather I had during my whole trip. The clouds and gray actually created this cool dreary backdrop.