broken moments
broken things
broken heart
yet it sings
broken flight
broken wings
broken fall
still it stings
feathers here
feathers there
feathers falling
everywhere
who’s at fault
I can’t say
we’re all broken
in some way
fallen is forever
broken is for now
people aren’t angels
anyhow
glue for mending
desire to start
wells within
the broken heart
in breaking through
not breaking worse
from broken pieces
comes broken curse.
Photo: Forgive Me. eddie dangerous. CC BY
Yesterday I noted this reflection on social media: “All I did in 2019 was survive it.”
Why did I think of the pool of Bethesda and the legend of the angel “troubling the waters“? Was it the sense of just enduring? The lack of hope?
The words stirred my soul on multiple levels.
I can relate to surviving. In 2019, my husband almost didn’t. There is no control in the valley of the shadow of death, only submission. Each long, dark day must be endured; my boys and I waited for the ray of hope.
And the healing came.
It was a year of survival, of change, of pain and loss, of life being altered. But then, joy: On the heels of his father’s recovery, our oldest married, went into the ministry, became a father. This Christmas, our family is bigger. This Christmas, we have so much more life to celebrate. This Christmas, inside the typical clamor, is a deep pocket of stillness. It is like the branches of our tree, frosted silver, catching the light, glimmering with tiny iridescent fire.
We survived, but more importantly, we live. We love. There’s always more love to give, another ray of light just ahead in the darkness, another healing after the troubling of the waters.
Life and hope renewed. Is that not the message of Christmas?
On that note . . . those of you who know this blog will know that 2019 was the first year we were “dogless” for a while.
That aching void is now filled.
I shall leave you with wishes for a holiday in your heart every day that you live and three pounds of sheer joy.
Merry Christmas, loves.
Welcome home, Dennis
So this is Christmas
My boy Cadillac Man and his Dennis nestled all snug in their bed
Summer.
It brings to mind vacation. Travel. Beaches, ocean, sand. Rest. Living, loving, luxuriating . . .
Until the sands of life shift suddenly.
As they did it this summer when my husband landed in the hospital twice for a collective nineteen days and two heart surgeries. Existence as we knew it changed in an instant; just as we felt we’d gained a foothold, the sands shifted again. There was no time to think of the sun or even a chance to see it deep in the fluorescent-lit maze of tiled corridors and rooms. No taste of salt on the ocean breeze—oh, and salt is taboo from now on. Savoring life converged to a pinpoint, a prayer, many prayers, for staying alive, every day an uncharted vista with its own unfamiliar seas and long, long shores of loose, uncertain sands.
But he is home at last, convalescing. I grapple with new regimens—dressing wounds left by chest tubes, administering medications, a different diet, slow, slow walks in the driveway. Extra doses of patience. New priorities. The word traction comes to mind. We are on solid ground. We are moving forward, bit by little bit.
Perhaps that particular word returns to mind from childhood. My mother suffered with several health issues, one being injury and surgeries on her back. Her convalescence involved sitting in a chair beside a bedroom door with a rope-like contraption thrown over the door itself and a cup in the dangling loop for her chin. Each day she was to tighten this rope and sit in the chair for a given amount of time to stretch and align her spine. It was called traction.
I love words, their shades and nuances, so once traction got hung in my mind I kept spinning it to see its colors and facets. Traction as a foothold, as aligning, as momentum. Grabbing hold, finding a place of solidity, setting things in motion, in the right direction. I can say that my adventure this summer gave me new spiritual depth and traction.
And when I wrap myself in such metaphor I tend to see what else this blanket enfolds . . . school. I have missed the beginning of school, and while I wonder how I’ll gain traction with so many new programs and systems I’m expected to learn and teach this year, my mind doesn’t linger there. Perhaps it should. But perhaps not. I think of the children and the growth they’re supposed to make. They never will if all the sands keep shifting, if things are not aligned or set in motion in the right direction.
The lesson of my summer was restarting. My husband’s heart was restarted twice. Once during CPR which fractured his sternum and once after bypass grafts. The surgeon repaired his heart and his fractures. Healing is underway. We have new priorities. Life is restarted, with new traction. Why should it be any different for our schools, for our children? It is time to restart, to find a place of traction in shifting systems, opinions, policies, and priorities, and do what needs to be done for their sakes. Too much is at stake. It took a medical team—several, in fact— to save my husband this summer. And so it will be a collective effort to meet the needs of children on their educational journey. We shall seek and find solid ground. We shall move forward together, bit by little bit.
To me the story is the same, no matter how you slice it or apply it. This is life. It all begins and ends with the heart. Start where you have landed and find your traction.
Sunlight. Blinding. Hotter than I expect after a week ensconced deep in the techno-bowels of the hospital. The netherworld. A parallel universe of tiny details and proportions. I remember a book where characters forgot the sun, were told it didn’t exist, that it was something they’d imagined, but I can’t think about that now, I have to get my husband—so uncharacteristically frail and fragile—out of this blazing reality and into the doctor’s office.
—Just wait there by your side of the car, I am coming, I’m coming. . . . Hold my arm, take your time across the sidewalk. I know every step hurts. I’ve got the door. Lovely waiting room, isn’t it. Near-empty. Relief. Maybe the wait will not be long and we can go home. He can rest. Except that he can’t rest. Cardiac arrest isn’t as brutal as being resuscitated. There’s a painful price for being brought back to life . . . .
—Sit here. I’ll check in. Two women behind the counter, working on computers. The woman on the left reminds me of someone but the one on the right is asking a question. My husband. He was released from the hospital two days ago. We were told to follow up with his regular doctor within seven days, thanks for getting us in. This woman on the right nods her head. Her hair is very black, long, pulled back. Over her shoulder on the wall is a sketch of the Buddha with the words GOOD VIBES.
Our chairs face the TV. El Paso. A woman seated across the room by the windows, sunlight streaming in around her, looks at us: When will it stop.
The woman at the counter, on the left: It’s racism. Clear, emphatic voice. I know who she reminds me of, now. Queen Latifah. Yes. Same face and eyes, shoulder-length hair. Younger. Less celebrity-ish but exuding confidence. She continues: This country . . . .
The girl next to the woman in the waiting room shifts in her seat. Must be her daughter. Pretty girl, hair in a soft bob of loose curls. Poised. Hard to say how old. Sixteen, seventeen? They’re the only other people waiting.
My husband: It’s white guys committing these mass shootings . . . .
Woman across the room (nodding): Yeah, they’re not black. We just shoot each other.
Queen Latifah look-alike: People don’t realize I am half black and half white. My birth certificate says Caucasian. My son is a lot darker and we can tell you plenty of stories about the different ways we’re treated . . . people don’t always know they’re doing it.
Me: Implicit bias. It takes a lot to go that deep in yourself, to see it.
Queen L look-alike: Exactly. It’s part of you, how you’re raised . . . .
The woman on the left with the Buddha over her shoulder on the wall hasn’t looked up nor said a word this whole time and I am thinking, in the end aren’t we all shades of each other, don’t we all bleed red, doesn’t it all flow from the same source if we trace it far enough back? My own largely Northwestern European DNA carries a fragment of Nigeria from generations ago, a story I long to know. Human genetics shows we’re all descended from one woman in East Africa. Mitochondrial Eve. “The mother of all living.” Genesis 3:20. My husband, a minister, is olive-skinned, a tiny percent Native American, although he’s awfully pale at present and the underside of both his arms is bruised solid black. We all bruise the same . . . .
The woman who reminds me of Queen L is speaking about needed changes and education, referencing a county nearby with a racist reputation; the woman across the rooms tells the story of her daughter’s car breaking down there, how her phone battery was dead, how she walked to a store at the crossroads and the white workers wouldn’t let her use their phones.
—What did you do? I ask the girl.
—I got back in the car and left it running, I charged my phone enough to call my mom, and I prayed.
—I prayed, too, chimed her mom, the whole way there. Not that county. Not that county.
I listen, heartsick. I do not say it but “that county” happens to be where my Grannie was raised. My Grannie, who took me to a store to buy a doll when I was really little. When I picked a black doll, she bought it for me. In the late 1960s. A white woman from “that county” . . . suddenly the girl’s mother smiles: But there are still good people everywhere. Thank God.
The front door opens. A man enters. He’s huge. Like an NFL player. Gripped in his big brown hand is a clear plastic jug of water; it gleams in a shaft of sunlight and I think Water of Life as another door from the medical side opens and a small man, black hair in a man bun, comes into the waiting area to greet him with a Spanish accent. They’re workers of some kind, dressed in similar gray shirts, khaki pants. They embrace each other and my mind is too weary anymore to wonder why, what the story is. I just marvel. This is how the world should be, like it is in this room, right now. Brotherly love, one human for another, kindred spirits. United in a common purpose. Heaven must be something like this.
As the men vanish (for I don’t notice how or where), the quiet woman on the left at the counter calls the lady and her daughter up. They’re finished with whatever it is for which they came. They’re free to go. The woman comes over to us on her way to the door: It is very nice meeting you. I wish you the best. My daughter, she’s going to college.
My husband reaches his hand, his bruised arm, out to her: It’s a pleasure.
She shakes his hand. There’s only one thing I know to do. I stand and hug the woman. Her embrace is warm, tight. Genuine. Her daughter stands by, smiling, so I hug her, too. She feels small in my arms. —All the best to you, too. One day I will see you on TV and you’ll be helping to fix all these things and I will remember that I saw you here.
Her smile widens. So radiant. —Maybe so.
I watch her go with a pang of hope, bright as the sunlight, when my husband’s name is called to check the progress of his repaired, restarted heart.
So much pain, yes.
Gonna be a long, long process.
But healing.
Dearest…
Long, long ago, your mother sat by your hospital bed, not knowing if you would live or die. Acute bronchitis, emergency tracheotomy, impossibly high fever… I can almost envision your little four-year-old self inside the oxygen tent, packed in ice to get your temperature down, and your mother in the chair, wiping her tears as she wrote you a note. Her beautiful penmanship remains vivid on the inside cover of the Bible story book she bought for you:
4:00 a.m. In hospital.
Dearest . . .
When you are well and safe at home again, I’ll read you this little note I’ve written to you during the hours I sat by your bed and watched you sleep so soundly . . . Mommy and Daddy have been so scared . . . We love you so much, our little son . . . Little angels have been all around your bed since you have been sick and Jesus sent them to watch over you and keep you . . . soon all the suffering and fright you have had will pass from your little mind but Mommy will always remember and thank God for giving you back to me.
Your Mother
*******
Five decades later, Dearest, I sit by your hospital bed, typing this note in my phone. When you are well and safe at home again I will tell you how the EMS responders were angels sent to save you, how the doctors repaired your heart, how the nurses watched over you and kept you safe, how – for the second time in your life – your body was chilled in an effort to save your brain. The boys and I have been here with you the whole time. At last you woke and knew us … we will always remember what the doctors said, that everything, everything aligned for you.
At 4:00 a.m. in the hospital – today and every hour of every day hereafter – we thank God for giving you back to us.
❤️ Your Wife
Update 8/6: After a week in the hospital, five days of which were in cardiac ICU, he is home. Weak, sore, struggling with memory, and amazed by his own story. We tell it to him over and over again.
Medical professionals continue to describe the actions of EMS responders – who administered CPR for twenty minutes with defibrillators – as “heroic.”
One of the kids in our Harry Potter club, a third grader, wanted to know:
“Mrs. Haley, if you could do any of the magic, what would it be?”
That’s an easy one.
“Healing,” I say.
The children think I mean “episkey,” the little mending of a broken nose or split lip (its name coming from Greek for ‘repair’).
But I mean the healing song.
The one without words, that puts the maimed, the mortally wounded, back together; the song that knits gaping wounds closed.
In the books, the strange song, invented by Professor Snape—perhaps the ultimate antihero—heals devastating physical wounds. They’re obvious; the injured people lie around bleeding profusely.
So many people walk around in the real world just as wounded, emotionally, spiritually, mentally.
Sometimes it is obvious.
Sometimes it is not.
I am not a magical character in a fantasy series nor a trained medical professional. I am no alchemist, apothecary, or angel. I cannot dispense healing.
But I write.
My words don’t grant healing, but maybe they can stir hope of it.
I can listen.
I don’t have a healing song, but I can have a hearing heart.
I can be still.
I can be a pocket of calm inside a world of clamor.
It’s not in my power to fix broken hearts, broken spirits, broken minds, broken families. If I could, I would have done so for many I’ve loved.
I can only be a presence, a voice, an encouragement to be strong in the broken places.
—Yes, healing.
—That is what I wish, children.
After a recent outpatient procedure, as I secretly celebrated waking up from anesthesia and not dying, my husband drove me home down the back country roads. Through the passenger window I idly watched winter-brown grass, trees, and old gray outbuildings zipping by, noted a small clearing with a tiny pond nestled in wood-strewn ground, an eagle sitting by the wayside—
—wait—
We said it simultaneously, my husband and I: “THAT’S AN EAGLE!”
Just a quick impression, sitting majestically, facing us, huge, white head gleaming atop the dark body, not ten feet away . . . .
We were past it as soon as the sight registered on our brains.
“Go back! Go back!” I pleaded, grabbing my phone, opening the camera.
A sssskkkkrrrrttt! of a turn-around at a dirt driveway, and we were back in a flash.
It watched us, unmoving, as we neared, but when we slowed, the eagle grew suspicious. It took off. Within a millisecond, into the bare, gnarled oaks.
“No! Wait! Wait!” I cried, snapping as fast as I could.
We rolled a little farther, but the only good shot I got was of its back, soaring away.
Gone. I missed the moment. Failed to capture my encounter with the wondrous. I have never been that close to an eagle in the wild. I’ve hardly seen any free ones at all, in fact. I’ve heard them calling in their high, haunting, piercing voices, have seen one perched on top of a streetlamp, but never anything like this.
I grieved my loss: It would have made such a great blog post, too.
I got home, got into bed.
Couldn’t rest.
The image of the eagle wouldn’t leave my thoughts. It stayed, motionless, watching me. Cocked its head, affixed me with its eye, its penetrating gaze.
—Why wouldn’t you stay so still just a little while ago?
It ruffled its feathers. Kept right on staring at me.
So I looked it up.
There are few things I love better than symbolism, and few are better-known than the eagle: The national bird, on the Great Seal of the United States. Revered icon of ancient times, civilizations, people. Mascot to numerous sports teams—even that of the school where I work.
But this is what got me about the eagle:
It is a symbol of healing.
It is a symbol of transition, some element of life or creative endeavor, about to take flight.
—Dare I see it as a sign that all shall be well, that some new venture, personal or professional, lies just ahead?
It was just an eagle sitting by the wayside, as eagles surely do, somewhere, every day.
Only this time I happened to see it. In the blinking of an eye.
It blinked.
I blinked back at it.
So, I told it, you wouldn’t stay put for a real picture, but now you linger as a mental one. If you’re going to hang around portending something, then let it be my creativity and insight taking flight. Let it be about thing I love to do most—let my writing be courageous and free, with clarity of vision. Let it fly, let it fly, on and on, higher and higher.
Only then did the image fade; only then did I rest.
I fell asleep.
And woke in the morning, renewed, resolute.
No more missed moments. There aren’t moments to lose.
—I’m ready for whatever lies ahead. Lead on, eagle.
My best shot
Gazebo at Night. Lori L. Stalteri. CC-BY
At first he thought he never wanted to see it again, the little gazebo on campus.
How perfect it was when he last saw it.
He couldn’t have orchestrated things better than they’d played out: the June sunlight just beginning to wane after dinner, shining in a deep, golden slant through the magnolias, the fragrance of the last blooms heavy in the air.
And her.
At last, and again, for they’d broken upon once. This time he knew it was meant to be. Side by side they sat, and he gave her the ring.
She started to cry.
“Will you marry me?”
She wiped her tears, laughed, hugged him. “Yes!”
Perfect. That one afternoon, in the whole of his life, was perfect.
In two weeks she was gone.
Not ready, she told him. They were too young.
That’s it then, he told her. Not now, not ever.
His friends consoled him: “You ARE too young. Just enjoy life before you worry about getting tied down.”
Trouble was, he didn’t know how.
For days, all he wanted to do was sleep. He slept the rest of the summer away. He ate his way through autumn into the winter until he decided (while standing on the scales) that enough was enough.
He started walking, counting his calories. He lost seventy pounds.
He reconnected with old friends.
One asked, “Whatever happened, exactly?”
He told her all of it, just as they were driving past the campus. On the spur of the moment, he said, “I’ll even show you the gazebo where I gave her the ring.”
It was getting dark. He parked the car. They got out, walked the magnolia path. Lights in the lampposts flickered on. It was chilly; he hadn’t thought to wear a coat but he hadn’t planned on strolling to the gazebo tonight, or any night. He shivered as they stepped into the clearing . . .
The gazebo wasn’t there.
For a minute he thought he was dreaming. He looked every which way—yes, this is where it was. This is where it stood.
“It’s gone!”
“Gone? How could it be gone?” asked his friend. “Are you sure this is the right place? That you haven’t made a mistake?”
“I made a mistake here, all right, but it wasn’t forgetting where the gazebo is. Was. I even used to ride my bike past it when I was little. Right here.” He scratched his head. “This is like something out of the Twilight Zone.”
His friend laughed. “Well, it’s twilight anyway. And maybe that gazebo didn’t disappear. Maybe it never existed at all, and maybe you never made that mistake because it’s been erased. It just never was.”
To this day, he hasn’t asked anyone who might know what happened to the gazebo, because, as far as he’s concerned, his friend is right.
Although he still occasionally checks, when he happens to think of it, which is less and less often.
It’s not there.
As if it never was.
*******
(True story)
The Healing Field. Randy Heinitz. CC BY
Out of the blue
a student asks:
“Mrs. Haley,
if you could have
one magic power,
what would it be?”
Other students
look up from their writing
to listen.
I think of suffering
of strife
of festering
scars and stripes
visible
and invisible.
Broken bodies
hearts
psyches.
The children watch
and wait.
What power would it be?
“Healing,” I say.
They absorb this
without a word
their young eyes
looking far away
or maybe far within
to make
their own meaning.
They nod
as they return
to creating
their own stories.
“Help.” James Johnstone. CC BY
As I entered the darkened cinema auditorium, an attendant handed me a pack of tissues.
Foreshadowing at its best.
The tears come at various points throughout the viewing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?—the lovingly documented life and work of Fred Rogers.
Mr. Rogers operated from a profound wellspring of love and empathy for children. At the outset of the movie, he’s young, seated at a piano. The film is black-and-white. With his hands on the keys, Mr. Rogers speaks of modulations: “It’s fairly easy to go from, say, a C to an F,” he says, playing each chord. “But to go from an F to an F-sharp,” he models, “you must navigate all sorts of things.” He saw the new medium of communication, television, as a means of helping children navigate the modulations of life. Fears. Changes. Questions. Emotions. A country at war. Hatred. Not understanding. Divorce. Illness. Death.
I watched and listened with the ears of an educator and the heart of a writer. This is my work, too, I thought, only my medium is paper and pencil.
Then, after having helped generations of children through the modulations of life, came 9/11.
Mr. Rogers, then retired, was asked to help, his voice, his presence, once again a ray of light, this time cutting through incomprehensible darkness. In the documentary, the sorrow is etched on his face. He spoke of being tikkun olam, “repairers of creation.”
With his words I saw the world in all its brokenness, violence, despair . . . and thought, It begins with the world inside us. Repair begins there, within each of us, before we can work on the world without.
I thought of children I’ve known through the years, finding their voices through writing, facing their fears, overcoming them, gaining strength and courage. Children who have suffered loss and grappled with it in their own words. I’ve read the haunting account of a child being tortured in another country and celebrating his new life in the United States. I thought it was fiction until the third-person changed to first near the narrative’s end; the teenager was writing about himself. A second-grader whose mother was remarrying and her fear: “Will my stepfather like me?” A fifth-grader lashing out at her mother in the very first line of her memoir over how many times they’d had to move, and how it hard it was to have any friends.
And with the words that came from within, anger eventually melted to forgiveness, fears pointed toward hope, insecurities gave way to confidence and validation. With the writing, the stories became those of enduring, of overcoming, of celebration.
Repairing within.
I thought about how some educators look at writing only as a means of retelling what you know from what you’ve read, or a standard to be delivered, assessed, and crossed off a list. No time for this “touchy-feely” kind of thing . . . yet the one thing that best helps children understand themselves, the world around them, and their place in it, is writing. Freedom versus constriction. Discovering potential, seeing possibilities, problem-solving. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Why is the goal “college and career ready?” How about life ready?
For the modulations don’t end in childhood, do they, Grown-Up.
Mr. Rogers spoke of his own childhood and what his mother told him whenever there was a catastrophe, or news of tragedy, on the air; she said “Look for the helpers. There will always be helpers, even if on the sidelines . . . because if you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.”
Look for the helpers. Repairers of the world.
Then be the hope.
And . . . write.
