Part 1: What happens when you stop

waiting to feel better.

Remembering the Joy of Warmth 

"I lose a friend. But then
all this swirling life gives me a headache. And what is the price to feel 
joy? Ecstasy isn't joy."

Excerpt from L. Thomas

“The price of feeling joy is sadness. Can’t I just snap myself out of this? Am I not powerful enough to shape how I feel?”

These are my own words that I wrote after a prompt with my regular Monday night writing group. It was back in February, a few days after a close family friend’s funeral.

“Would I feel joy always, if I could? Not likely. Isn’t that a dead end street?”

During that previous week I admitted something that felt shameful to my husband Wes, “I feel like I am going through a midlife crisis.”

In true form, he asked me, “Do you want to buy a sports car?”

“No.”

He continued, “Because I’d be ok with that.”

“No, it’s not like that,” I sigh.

I wonder how to describe what it is feeling “like”.

When there have been many more funerals than celebrations.
When there has been more disappointment than victory. When fear needs a calling out, a talking to, a change in perspective. When I attach my self worth to success, but everything I do feels less than, so I dread the future.

Maybe it was the most recent funeral that happened the Saturday prior to that Monday night. I remember sitting alone in a room, logged on to a Facebook virtual funeral streaming site. It wasn’t my first, or even my second time. I know many of us encountered the virtual funeral world in the past four years. I cried the entire time. It was as if I was sitting, muted, in the same room as the deceased and his entire family. I wanted to hug the two sweethearts - two old, old childhood friends - the ones eulogizing their father - my dad’s truest confidante - Gerry. I wanted to know the feeling of being Gerry’s child. I then waited for my own father’s voice as he eulogized his lifelong friend in a pre-recorded video eulogy sent to his daughter Shelley and set to play after they were finished their own. I saw visible grief in my father that I’d never seen before and it made him more human, more soft than I ever remembered.

It seemed like all the grief needed to be felt and passed through my body, and so I let it. I wondered if I could set everything free, would I? Even if I could? What about the ones who don’t want to be free? But don’t we all want to be free? Is death just a passageway to the next best thing? If God, who has power to set us all free from whatever tortured world we may find ourselves in, why doesn’t God stop the loved ones from dying and why doesn’t God stop the war killing all the children, and why doesn’t God heal the sick. Like my close friend’s baby sister whose body was ravaged by cancer for three years before she passed away, leaving two motherless babies.

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry?
While everything you know passes?  

Listen to full song "Change," by Big Thief                                          

I mourned along with them, remembering his eternal smile, the one that could never be wiped off his handsome face. His daughter, while memorializing her dad, recited his famous words to live by:

“They can’t help how they are. They didn’t choose their personality. Be kind to everyone.”

He modelled this even when he became a landlord in his later years. When potential tenants asked how much the rent would cost, he’d say something like “How much can you afford?”

No wonder I was crying through Gerry’s entire funeral. I always remember his unique kindness. It felt foreign to me and at eleven and twelve and fifteen and sixteen, I sang hymns in uncle Gerry’s living room. My parents along with Gerry and his wife, Cindy sat on their pleated couch, singing along while I belted out the lyrics of “The Old Rugged Cross” and “I’ll Fly Away,” while pounding the keys of their piano. They applauded me. I was playing to please. Who was I aiming to please?

I began singing in front of the church when I was fourteen. One Sunday morning, Gerry drew a long-haired stick figure standing behind a microphone, on a small piece of white paper. He handed it to me after church. He smiled and said, 'Keep singing.” I smiled back, my heart growing two sizes, planting those words deep into my soul.

For days after the funeral, I felt sore. Agitated. Crawling skin. My emotions were getting the best of me and I seemed to cry over anything and everything, hence the conversation with Wes about going through a midlife crisis. The thing is, grief seems to obscure itself in everything. Sometimes it is clear where my emotions are coming from and sometimes it is not. It is becoming obvious to me that any grieving brings up all grieving and I’ve been practicing how to do it, coming up short, for a very long time.

I kept waiting to feel better. To be heard by God, in my scattered prayers. Maybe I was still angry with God. For not giving Wes and I a bigger family. Maybe I didn’t understand enough about any of it. (Do we ever?) I wrote in my journal on February 6th: “Can I be real with myself? How much can a heart endure before it loses its natural rhythm? Is the pendulum swinging back and forth between my life, my death and my resurrection?”

I gave up food for a day and asked God for some help in learning how to be here, in all of my messiness, in my crisis of grief and disappointment and unanswered prayers. I wanted to know how to go about accepting my world for what it is? I decided the focus of my prayer was to shift my perspective in some way. Shift it to what? Not to the myth that joy is found in ecstasy. Not to the belief in more positive thinking or that it could solve my problems and make me happy. Rather, to the yearning for discovering the purpose behind it all, the desire to be present in my life, and the ability to let these emotions take me through and toward wholeness.

I read a verse in Psalm 25 in the Message translation.

---

“My heart and kidneys are fighting each other; Call a truce to this civil war.”

---

I didn’t know what this meant on a biblical or conscious level but I sure knew there was a fight going on inside of me. It was burning me out. It was breaking my heart. I was fighting grief. I was fighting the end of life. I was fighting letting go of anything and everything that wasn’t going my way. And I was losing the fight.

So I wrote and prayed this prayer, which is loosely based on various lines found throughout the Psalms. It seems like my unconscious mind had been holding them, waiting for exactly this time.

True to your promise, let me catch my breath. 
Send me in the right direction, and barricade the road that goes nowhere.

Help me heal these grief conundrums.
Help me accept these answerless questions.
Let the answers - the ones I do get - settle me. 

Turn my faith leaf over, not the blind faith that aimlessly walks in different directions, but the faith that yields hope - the kind of hope I want to participate in. 

Turn my eyes to see your light and love everywhere. 

Call a truce to the war my heart and kidneys have been fighting. 
Calm my liver eyes; the angst; the lack of balance, the anger.
Let these laments grow fruit; fruit that is sweet and ripe and puckers my lips.

Let me find my hiding place in you, God.
Let me draw my energy, my wholeness, and my healing from your unending source of bravery, strength, nourishment, and rejuvenation. 
Lift my spirit, so I cannot miss the delights you have given me.

Amen. 

P.S. If you'd like to know what happened after I prayed this prayer and what transformed during the happening of such things, I would love for you to follow along and stay tuned for the next blog.  More journal prompts to come. 

Sending you my best,

Jaclyn
xo