Safe and Holy Spaces

At eleven in the morning we created a holy space, a safe place for their grief to take the next step. They came together to cry, to laugh, to memorialize, to sing, to remember, to pray, to ask for God's strength, and to begin letting him go - letting him go after 80 years on this earth. We set the candles, made the music, helped the family into the grief-filled space they never wanted to enter. We served a lavish feast to celebrate his life and to give his children hope ~ the hope they'll need to get up tomorrow and every morning thereafter. We did the best we could to assist them through this most dreaded hour. The very same hour we'll all face one day or another.

At four in the afternoon I made my usual Saturday phone call. The morning's service in my heart and fatigue pounding in my body the typical greeting sounded, "Hi Mom, how are you?" and it went up and down from there. "Did you make that appointment and meet with that person?" "I did and he said everything is just fine." "Oh, you didn't make the changes we talked about the last two weeks?" "What changes?" My heart sank as my head exploded. She didn't remember. She didn't know what I was talking about. Her notes had failed her. All my efforts and certainty had been for not. I had to start over. I didn't have the energy. I could barely recount the situation.

In the morning I helped to create a safe and holy space for another family. In the afternoon I could barely stay within the fragmented, age-tormented space of my own family. All energy was depleted with no reserves save tears, my own tears. It was all I could do - cry out the uncertainty, my sadness, and my huge efforts to shape her life into something better between now and when I'll be the one in the front row of the church grieving my last parent. We've come to this moment in our little family after a million previous moments. All that we've said and done are the building blocks of what we have, or don't have, to work her thickening fog of dementia. Try as I might, I can't seem to pull the safe and holy spaces together for us. Even as I type these words I know how foolish it is to think that I can affect great change in the course of her life or anyone else's for that matter. It isn't up to me.

At seven in the evening the best I could do was to dig a small hole with my hands to get the tall stake in deeper. The dirt felt good. The young, red bark Aspen in the back yard was leaning. Branches were swooping towards the grass to hold conversations never intended. Pulled back straighter and taller with stake and string, the branches returned to their graceful splendor blessing the wind and heat passing through its leaves.

This day began with taking care of others and ended with stabilizing a tree. As for the middle of the day, my exhausted and only choice is to leave it in God's hands which hold my little family. Maybe God is pulling me back and straight, like the swooping tree, from conversations never intended. Only God's hands, not mine, can create the safe and holy spaces my family needs to make this long and difficult journey.