Grateful

I was in Target a few months ago, repeating the much-needed mantra, "You do not need new throw pillows. You do not need new throw pillows." I was there for groceries and toilet paper, but of course I had to check out the fall home decor section they were in the process of setting up.

As I pushed my cart past the cozy plaid blankets and metallic gourds, something caught my eye-- a throw pillow of course. It was off white with one word written on it in lovely gold script:

Grateful

I didn't buy it, but I did notice what I was feeling as I read the word. A rush of gratitude for all that I'd been given in life. Gratitude for life itself. There was no asterisk in my thoughts, no bitter coda, and that, in itself seemed notable to me.


It was NOT:

Grateful, except for the part where my mom dies far too young.

Grateful, except for the loss of an amazing son whom the world needed, and I still NEED.

Grateful, except for big and small disappointments, disillusionments, slights and betrayals.

Grateful, except for a sense that I want to do more to follow God's call on my life, yet I feel lazy and stuck.


Just grateful.

This would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

I remember the horrible first Thanksgiving just a few tortured weeks after Jack's death. When I passed our striped Thankfulness Notebook around the table, I wondered what the hell I would put in it. My sister looked similarly lost. She finally settled on being thankful for modern transportation so that we could be together during hard times.

These years later, I don't want to put on a false smile and act as if everything is okay. I don't want to imply that I don't feel sad often and bitter sometimes. Jack is dead, I'm 46 and pregnant, pretty much everything irritates me on some level, my body and my heart hurt, and this is not the life I wanted.

But oh, the GRATITUDE!

It seeps in unbidden. It travels on memories of a brother and sister playing together in their own little world. Of friends who chose the hard path and kept showing up. Of a God who paints the leaves the most brilliant yellows and reds. Of a looking outward at others who may need an infusion of HOPE. Of new life growing inside of me. Of day lilies ready to be planted today to surprise us anew next summer.

I don't want anyone telling me to be grateful, and I'm guessing you don't either. But oh how wonderful it feels when gratitude comes!

The Words of a Stranger: The Power of Writing

I don't know who wrote the words on the yellowed pages that fell from the book I pulled off the thrift store shelf. At first I figured they were study notes, or maybe a simple to-do list, but after a few seconds of reading the nearly indecipherable handwriting, it became clear that these were the private thoughts of a troubled soul.

What should I do with them? Tuck them in my purse? Put them back in the book and leave it on the shelf?  It was not a current title and might never be purchased. What was the next stop on the journey for unwanted books?

I bought the book and the pages along with it and became their steward and a witness to the pain of one hopeless morning in the first week of 1996. The thoughts and feelings of a man who felt disconnected from family. Marginalized at work and in community. Who craved recognition and acknowledgment, but got neither. Who wanted to be valued and to make someone proud. Who recognized his deepening depression but wanted to try to tough it out without medicine. Who understood how some people, including the protagonist in the book I now held, would turn, on their darkest day, to suicide. He wrote of his one great love, a woman whom he had cast aside "like garbage" and the one he was now with, even while knowing there could be no future together.

I think back to my own life in the early days of 1996. It was a time of personal and professional promise. In a few weeks would come a rare Virginia blizzard, and Tim would purposely get snowed in with my roommates and me. There would be parties, card games, a snowy trudge to the local movie theater, and cooking together in the big, drafty kitchen. We were so young. A few months later he would propose, and the promise of a future together as a family became real. In the waning hours of that year, on a strangely warm December day, we would marry.

In the almost 18 years since, it's clear my life has not turned out the way I would have imagined or planned. Not that I did that much planning anyway. We had two kids not because that was the magic number, but because that was how many we had before the thought of having more frightened us. I stepped off the career path because I was able to stay at home with Jack and Margaret, but I had no real picture of what my second or third acts would be. And my own family relationships chugged along with varying  levels of beauty, pain and sometimes dysfunction. We stayed in my home town because it was all I knew, and the years kept moving past and we grew settled. Life happened.

And then the creek happened. And we were dragged to the depths of a despair and pain too deep for us to have ever imagined. And now, almost 2 1/2 years later, we stand again on dry land. Not because we are healed. Not because it's all okay, but because we have hope. It could be that our survival is just one more form of settling, more trudging forward without a plan, because that's all we've ever known how to do. But maybe it's more. Maybe it's a peace that doesn't come from us and our plodding, or from our strong wills, but from God and our love for Jack.

I wonder about the man who wrote those pages. His mind and heart felt no peace that day. No shelter in the storm. Has he kept going for all these years? Did he find help in the way of needed medical attention, acknowledgment, and healed relationships?

I don't know.

But I am hoping he found some release and relief in the writing itself. In turning his thoughts over in his mind. Of getting them down on paper. On seeing what parts of life he could change, and what parts he couldn't.

I don't think writing is THE answer, but it is AN answer. I know it has been for me.