Thursday, May 28, 2020

Wait And Listen

Wait for it.  Hold tight.  Sit silently.  Thoughtless and alone, listening only to your body, your breath.  There God will find you.  The idea of seeking God is a paradox; backwards conceptually.  We don’t find God.  He finds us.  The question is are we willing to be found?
Jeff and Val and Hanna Holtgeerts

Sometimes God finds us in a high school gym when a 6’7” gentle giant named Jeff Holtgeerts wanders up and asks, “What are you doing tonight?”  And you answer, “Nothing.”  And he replies, “We’ll pick you up at seven.  You’re going to Young Life.”

Other times He finds us when we sit alone, broken by life’s disappointments: a broken marriage, a wandering child, financial ruin or simply a dream continually dashed.  And we finally stop fighting.  We drop our act and listen to our body.  Our pain and disappointment have their own sound, their own place in our bones.  We choose to still the inner conversation we’re having about our failures, our unworthiness, our consuming self-contempt.  We choose to sit in the silence of the mind.  And there, having surrendered to circumstances, God appears.  

He has always been there.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Forget Him Not

Three months since Griffin passed away.  The hurt is indescribable.  Tears well even as I write this.  It is beginning to be a struggle not to deny my pain, push it down lest it own me.  I am trying with all my might to hold it in equanimity.

Griffin's 21st Birthday

The choice to deny or be engulfed is nearly instinctual.  And I find myself more often trying to forget.  Forget that Griffin died.  Forget that he won't be there when I get home tonight.  Forget that he won't be riding next to me in the golf cart, smoking a stogie.  Just. Forget. It. All.

But forgetting is tragic. In the forgetting Griffin is lost to me.

I feel I have to find some way to root my pain out of my subconscious so it doesn’t leaven every thought, every conversation, every relationship I have without me being aware.  Better that it be a part of my conscious thinking.  I can examine it, understand it and keep the pain from owning me. 

I must instead own my pain and let it remind me of my great love for Griffin.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Griffin's Favorite Stories, Part One--Tim's Window

Griffin was the most devoted member of our family to the idea of family.  He held all of his cousins dear to his heart and an enormous reservoir of curiosity about both Gretchen and my families and our growing’s up.  At dinner time on those too seldom occasions when we all sat down together at the family table and took the time to simply fellowship, Griffin invariably turned the conversation to stories from my childhood.  He found them hilarious.  Griffin had this stink-eye laugh where his whole face would contort as he would literally cry and sometimes even throw up from the laughter.

So in Griffin’s honor, I share with you over the next several blog posts the stories from my childhood that Griffin loved.

Our house on 143rd Street in unincorporated Snohomish County (the unincorporated is an important detail as you’ll see) was stocked full with kids we grew up playing with and the characters that raised them.  One such character was our next door neighbor, Bernie.  Bernie ran a rental car franchise in Lynnwood but his dream had always been law enforcement.  He talked about it for the better part of seven or eight years and finally did what most of us don’t do when we near mid-life: he went after his dream.  He went through the auxiliary police academy and became a part time cop on the weekends with the Lynnwood Police Department.

Kelley, Sean, Sheila, John, Tim and Laurie, circa 1984
Bernie’s shift started at 7pm on Saturdays and Sundays, if memory serves.  But Bernie would generally dress for his shift around 4pm just to let the uniform find its fit, like an old pair of shoes.  And he’d walk the street and visit with neighbors in their yards, gardening, his patent leather belt shining, his gun holstered and that beautiful Lynnwood Police Department badge gleaming.  He was a proud member of a proud force.  It was admirable.  But there may have been a little bit of Barney Fife inhabiting Bernie.  Here’s why I think so.

My brother Tim was a high school junior at the time.  Chronologically at least, because he certainly wasn't academically.   Tim had “hobbies” that tended to occupy time he could have been in class or studying.  Tim is by far the smartest of my mother’s children.  He’s got a genius mind for inventing and tinkering.  He was also the most independent of us, spending a few summers working in Alaska in a salmon processing plant.  He was an earner.  He bought his own clothes, bought his own motorcycle and largely took responsibility for himself from the time he entered high school.

From somewhere in middle school and through high school (and maybe even now that it’s legal in Bend, Oregon) Tim enjoyed himself some marijuana. Well, not some.  A lot. And though he was an earner, summer money only went so far when it came to his habit.  Tim also occupied the one room in our house that faced Bernie’s house.  And lo and behold one Saturday there came a knock at our front door.  Well, not a knock.  A police rap.
My mom answered the door.  Bernie stood in the doorway, fully prepped for his shift at 3pm.  A little early for even Bernie.  “Sheila, I need to talk with you.”

“Yes, Bernie?” my mom replied, still annoyed by being interrupted by a police rap on the door.

“Uh, Sheila, we’ve got a problem we need to get addressed today,” Bernie said.

“Okay.”

“Uh, Tim’s got a plant growing in his window.  I think it’s a pot plant.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I’m going to need you to, ah, get it removed and disposed of by the time I leave for my shift.  If you could do that, I’ll turn a blind eye.”

“Bernie, I don’t know what’s growing in Tim’s room. Tim’s room is his private space and if he’s into horticulture then that’s none of your business.  And, besides, Bernie, we don’t live in Lynnwood so I think you’re a little out of your jurisdiction.”
And with that my mother closed the door, walked up the stairs in our split level 70s home and marched straight down the hallway to Tim’s room.  She knocked on the door.  Tim answered, the door open only as much as necessary to conduct a conversation.

“Tim, do you have a pot plant in your window?”

Tim paused as he pondered his reply.  Tim was capable spinning a story and I have seen him lie his way in and out of trouble more times than I can remember.  But he could not lie to our mom.  For whatever reason his moral compass, generally fogged by smoke and clogged by bong resin in most situations, found its true north in the presence of my mom.

“Yeah, I do,” he confessed.

“Tim, why are you growing pot in my house?  And why on God’s green earth would you grow it in the one window in our entire house that faces Bernie’s  house?”

Again, Tim paused and pondered.

“Well, it wasn’t doing well in the closet.”  And he turned, walked to his closet and revealed an elaborate operation with grow lamps and hydroponic equipment.

I’m not sure exactly how it ended, but I do think Vern Willard ended up buying the equipment.  Tim, I’m pretty sure, managed a way to smoke the product.

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Paradox

I miss Griffin.  I grieve the loss of him.  My tears come in large part from that place.  But if I am honest I would tell  you that my tears also come from a nagging guilt that I have: I am also relieved.

Raising Griffin as a child was a joyful burden. His disability altered where we lived, what kind of home we could purchase and for a time how much advancement I could make in my career as I felt (we felt) that being close to family in Seattle was important and promotions were in places like, well, Atlanta.  But he was a cute kid in a wheelchair, firecracker sense of humor, as personable as anybody you’ve ever met and a friend to all.  He. Was. Simply. Joy.

Launching Griffin as a young adult was something entirely different.  The arguments, followed by reconciliation and then another argument.  They were always about things that we knew were necessary to be done but that Griffin had control of.  And these things were about the only things he was in control of.  Deep down he knew we were right and wanted to please us but he needed his independence and thus the defiance, the arguments and the reconciliation pattern.

There was the depression, the loneliness, the isolation: all things we also felt with him. Our hearts broke daily for him.  Worst of all, seeing these things somehow made us feel like we had failed as parents.  It sometimes still does.

More than anything we worried for him and ourselves.  “If he can’t acquire the skills, the discipline and the desire to live independently,” the thought went, “what is this going to look like for us over the long term?”

We had spent years altering our vacation plans to accommodate.  Vacations to beaches were a no go when he got big enough that we couldn’t carry him (sand is not good to wheelchairs and 130 pounds of Griffin is not good on the back…ask my neurosurgeon).  Plane trips were a pain as he couldn’t get to the bathroom.  And each time over the past few years that Gretchen and I took a vacation with just the two of us, Griffin would invariably have some incident with his sisters that would result in a fun killing series of phone calls.

So, yes, I feel relief just as I grieve him and the loss of him.  A paradox only God can make sense of, and that I am called to hold in a balance.   My hope is that my vulnerability opens space for God to fill with his power and grace.  This is what I am understanding to be whole, to be holy.