Gray With Bright Colors

Last week, in the middle of the crazy, I found myself telling someone new in my life about the death of my friend Kari. 

I lumped it into the teaching category of my life because this all happened at school.  This conversation with a new friend, though.....this was not like teaching.  And it got shuffled behind other papers and perspectives about conferences and the quarter's end.  But today it came back.

There were aftershocks that followed that conversation.  I knew right away that there would be because she wanted to give me a hug after we talked, and I hadn't thought I had said anything very definitive.  In retrospect, I DID, but grief has a way of becoming common.  It wasn't until today that I realized that she was the first person to openly ask me what has been lingering for a year.  

After something like that, what is different about how you live? 





Great question.  I don't have a succinct answer to it.  But there are beginnings.  Here goes.

There is a very real theme in my life called 'story'.  The stories of others and my own.  This is the easiest way for me to relate to God, and knowing him as Beginning and End and Author makes sense.  As a history teacher, I think about other peoples' stories all of the time.   It is easy to empathize with the characters and their story.  At the same time, I wasn't there.  I will always be isolated from the depth of pain involved in previously difficult things.  I can only imply long-term effect.  Heck, long-term effect is usually what students are required to consider when writing essays on my tests. 

This does not work for my own life. 

I don't imagine that I will understand why Kari died, and I honestly don't think that part of my long-term struggle with this grief is needing to know this.  I do believe that God is good always, and mysterious and faithful too.  But I live differently now.  And I have reckoning moments with God most often when the phone rings.  In those moments, life is uncomfortable and gray instead of anything solid and sure, like black and white decision making.

Current fashion states that gray goes with most of the other colors.  And that's why if we're talking colors and emotions, this comparison works.  Since May 24 of last year, there has been an undercurrent of sadness, gray with bright color, in everything I've experienced.   Every single thing. 

Holding babies and driving cars, sirens and news stories about accidents...those are obvious connections to missing her.  But it shows up in other places too, and that is where grief surprises me.  I can be brushing my teeth or talking in front of students or just doing something soul quieting and life giving and it all comes back.  Again. 

I didn't really know that life could be like that.   It's why this statement feels true...

 

And yet, I'm living intentionally and God is still good and I know that I can see how the weight shifts when something truly awful and tragic unfolds. So the difference in telling the story to this new friend (who is really a lovely kindred spirit already...we both feel the same way about recycling, and by that I mean that we HAVE to recycle and will carry things with us until we find the proper receptacle...weird)...the difference is that this is the first person who did not know me before but wanted to hear this story.

 
I shared things with her in a brief way, and there were no tears because now the tears can come in private.  But what I discovered is that even when I became systematic, the raw pain of missing a friend was still showing up.  I thought I was covering it because I didn't cry and I was saying logical things that mixed appropriately with what I have learned American culture says about grief.  Or what Christians in America say about grief.

But I think she hugged me because she saw through that.  (And because she is a good listener, and used her secret super power counseling skills on me.  I thought about that later too.)

The best way for me to explain missing my friend Kari is probably that it feels like I have the wind knocked out of me.  I was not a risky kid, but this experience did happen to me at least once.  We were visiting people my parents knew better than I did.  (This was a theme when I was 4, I know, but I remember feeling uncomfortable with them.)  I had to play with random kids in the back yard, and I fell off of a swing.  For a moment, I felt the whoosh and painful surprise of not being able to sort out the sky from the ground.  And that's how it feels to miss my friend.  And the excitement of her baby.

When I actually stopped today and thought about all of this, I also saw that sometimes I have tried to outwit grief.  I didn't expect a friend to die when she was 24.  And my thinking had to change in order to accept that that actually happened.    

In 2010, I read books about grief so that I could understand patterns that might come up and give myself some space to notice grief in a lot of ways.  But I didn't think I'd try to outwit it.  Logically, we all know that you cannot.   

But the answer to the question about how you live...?  That's not, I am finding, always a logical answer.  I desperately want it to be, but it's not a surefire thing that how I initially reason will make sense.  My biggest issue is with the phone.  That's what I told my new kindred spirit in recycling when she asked that question.  

I don't answer the phone unless I know that I am in the frame of mind that can take care of myself if I have to be alone and once again hear life-altering news.  I type this and feel alarm...'Really?  That is what I do every time the phone rings??"  But this helps me understand what I mean by 'everything'.   

This might just be, to date, the most honest thing I've written in this blog.


I don't answer the phone thinking this is what anyone really will say.  But this is the deep down, soul response to a very guttural reality from May of my life last year.  I picked up the phone and I wasn't ready for it, and the wind got knocked out of me, like I was 4 years old again with the swing spinning crazily above me and the burning feeling in my lungs.  But it was way worse than that.  I hate that I know how to do this now, especially when I am by myself, but that is now just part of the story. 

This business of answering the phone?  It seems I am still working on that.  However, as usual, there is also the business of the meantime.  In that, I feel grateful for new friends who ask these questions, the grace to finally place the answers, and the continual provision of colors that go along with gray.