“Remember me as you pass by. As you are now so once was I; As I am now, so you must be. Therefore, prepare to follow me.”-Unknown

My husband and I wandered through one of our city’s oldest graveyards on a cold and gray afternoon. It was once outside of town, but is now surrounded on all sides by a University, in the shadow of a looming Football Stadium. A neon sign glows red through the 100 year old oaks and leaves its reflection in a puddle on the path. The buzz of life, laughter, music, chatter sounds faintly. But within, all is hushed and quiet.

We pass by stones bearing names that are now found on street signs and buildings in our town, Jemison, Hargrove, Van de Graf.

We walk by a family plot with a father, mother and 3 tiny graves before the grave of a child that lived to be an adult. Beneath the lamb on one of the little graves:

“How much of light, how much of joy, now buried with our darling boy.”

We pass graves of soldiers from every war and in one plot combatants on both sides of a long ago fight, now come to rest together, no longer enemies. The old conflict settled now, or perhaps as settled as it will ever be.

I see the graves of what must have been enslaved persons, buried with the families that enslaved them, not even allowed freedom in death.

I run my fingers over stones so old that the wind and the rain have rubbed away the names, and there is no one is left to remember who they were.

Yet, it is still and oddly peaceful. This vast sea of people stretched out before me, all their joys and accomplishments, their grief and sorrows, all over now. Brought to heel by time, the great leveler, with no more power to lift or crush. They have laid them down to sleep in the earth side by side.

Beyond the wall I hear a young woman shriek with laughter and the sound of feet running by. It is a Saturday night in a college town. These lay sleeping surrounded by those whose joys and sorrows lay before them. They too will one day lay them down and sleep, but not yet.

When I came into recovery, many years ago now, my home group had old wooden school desks for chairs. They had been painted and repainted through the years. You could see the timeline from the odd discounted paint colors, the battleship gray era, the pea green years, the ill conceived off-white phase, all peeking through in places.

As you can imagine, they had been defaced with all kinds of graffiti, most of which I will not relate here. My favorite was a desk that had a single word scratched onto its surface…STAY. When the desks were finally replaced, the old ones were sold as an anniversary fundraiser. They went in no time, and I have my very own cherished desk of many colors. (I don’t know who ended up with “STAY”, but I have a low key resentment towards them.)

Fast forward, to the other night, and my younger self wandered into a meeting and sat down beside me. She was so very young, so very skinny, eyes darting around everywhere, trembling so bad that the court paper in her hand rattled. I introduced myself and got from her in a whisper that her name was Cameron. I could almost see the spines come out as she turned away and made herself as small as possible.

After the meeting I helped her get her paper signed and said

“It was nice to meet you Cameron.”

She turned and left without a backwards glance.

And suddenly I thought of that old desk, and I wanted to say to her STAY.

I know you think it’s bad now, but it could get worse in ways you can’t even imagine. But it could also get better in ways you can’t even imagine. You could do this one day at a time and stay sober for the rest of your life. You could mend your relationships, maybe have some new ones, maybe bring some new people into the world. You could do good work, help others, watch miracles happen, and sometimes play a part in them. You could know what it feels like to be so so full of gratitude your heart can hardly hold it, to be in the Presence of such power that every hair stands on end.

You could lead a life of quiet purpose and leave this world with love and service rippling out in your wake for generations.

You don’t have to ride the train to the last stop. You don’t have to do more damage, get more damage, try to crawl back.

You could just stay. STAY.

In loving memory of C.M., who did in fact STAY, and who left for “the Big Meeting” this week, leaving beautiful ripples in her wake.

That’s a wrap for my Team in Training LLS fundraiser. Thank you to all who supported ME in supporting THEM for the great work they do.

https://pages.lls.org/tnt/al/yourway24/MLeach

Warning: Shameless Plug to Follow

This September will be 15 years since cancer came to our house. I am so thankful for all the joyful life we have experienced in those years. So, in honor of my favorite patient ever, I am going to celebrate by paying it forward to the ones who are still fighting! Join me if you feel lead. Thanks!

https://pages.lls.org/tnt/al/yourway24/MLeach

“Parenting is the only job where if you do it right, you work yourself out of a job.” -Unknown

This week we watched our youngest son load a UHaul, and a girlfriend and 2 cats and drive to his new home in a state far away. Very far away. We went with him, driving his car for him fretting quietly and hoping to smoothe the way and be helpful.

As we rolled past wind farms, and mighty rivers, and little towns getting ready for Independence Day parades and miles and miles of corn, it occurred to me that he is rolling even further away from me.

As the journey continued I began to see how mature and responsible he is, how competent and confident. He didn’t really need us at all. I saw him, fully for the first time, as the man he has become. A fine man.

I am at once relieved and proud, but I falter, no longer knowing what my role is. It is the middle of the play and I no longer know my lines.

The morning after we got there I am having breakfast in the hotel. An older man is trying unsuccessfully to get his young grandson to hurry up. Finally, the little blond boy turns to him and says:

“You’re not the main character here!”

I chuckle to myself and it comes to me that it is a message for me too. I am no longer the main character in my son’s story, if I ever was, and never will be again. My job is done, and has been for some time. I just didn’t realize it. He has taken flight out of the nest and is gone. The story is his from now on. From now on I will be at best a supporting character, and that is what I will do. And I remind myself that after all, if they play their parts well, supporting actors get Oscars too.

There are days of doing, followed by days of seeing and exploring, and then suddenly he is driving us to the airport. He gets our bags out without being asked. He hugs his Dad for a long time. The last hug is for me. He says:

“I love you Mom.”

And I say:

“I love you too son and I’m so proud of you.”

And then I turn and walk into the airport, and he turns to get into his car and drives away into the big adventure, the main character in his story.

In twenty two years as an Oncology nurse I’ve said goodbye to a lot of people. The real goodbye, the last one, when you look each other in the eye and know you will never see each other again on this side. It takes some real emotional grit to allow it, to allow them to do it and not try to deflect it because of your own discomfort.

The first time it happened I hadn’t been an Oncology nurse very long, and she was one of my favorite patients. She was a spunky, bright Mom of two, with a vicious cancer. Every time she came for treatment she had everyone in the infusion room laughing. She was full of light.

When she was first diagnosed her husband saw the lay of the land and immediately left her for another woman. As she endured one failing treatment after another, he refused to pay child support and fought her the house. But you’d never have known it.

And then one day there was nothing left to do. She would go home with Hospice and finish her days surrounded by family. On her way out I flushed and deactivated her I.V. port. It was just me and her and the elephant in the room. She was quiet for a moment and then she said:

“You know I won’t be coming back anymore. I just want to thank you for everything you did.”

I was just so young, and my heart was broken, and I couldn’t let her do it. I made some response that she’d come in for port flushes and I’d see her then. The moment passed and she was gone. And I never did see her again.

I wish 50 year old Mary could reach back across time and tell 29 year old Mary to just let her do it. That it would be the last thing I ever got to do for her.

I’ve had to say goodbye so many times since that day, and my heart has been broken so many times that it’s a roadmap of scar tissue. I’ve learned that you won’t die of it and that you won’t be sorry.

So, today I heard that a long time patient was in the hospital. Nothing left to do, going home with Hospice, at the end of a long, hard fight. So I went to see him.

I walked in and saw him there in the bright overhead light someone had left on. He was shrunken in his hospital gown, any sense of who he was or dignity removed.

When he saw me, his face crumpled and he began to cry. And the years fell away and he looked someone’s scared little boy. I hugged him and called him by name and pulled up a chair, and in so doing, handed him back his humanity.

We talked for awhile, then I asked if I could pray with him. I did, we cried, we hugged and as I stood to leave he looked me dead in the eye and said:

“Goodbye. Thanks for everything.”

And I let him.

Originally published June 5, 2018

Memorial (n.)-created or done to honor a person who has died.

I have a friend whose Father was killed in Vietnam when she was a little girl. Forty eight years later she can still tell you everything about that day, about that moment, when the soldier came to the door with the envelope in his hand.

She can tell you what the weather was like, what she was wearing, the way her baby brother’s foot looked hanging from her Mother’s hip, about the strangled sound her Mother made and then the wailing.

She wonders what she was doing at the exact moment her big, strong Daddy laid down his life in a rice Paddy far away.

She tells me all of it, with tears in her eyes. Her tears are frozen at her eyelids as that moment is frozen in time. Her shoulders drawn in as though to ward off blows on a place still tender. After all these years.

Today, maybe even at this moment, somewhere in the world, someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s friend, someone’s someone will die for our country. It will probably be in a desert rather than a jungle, but still, alone, afraid, miles away from anything that feels like home. We will be eating BBQ when this happens, or lounging by the pool, or binging Netflix.

May we all stop for a moment and remember that somewhere in this country, a soldier is coming to the door with an envelope in his hand and drawing a line of demarcation down the middle of a life, across which all events will now be placed in time as either “before” or “after”.

And in a moment, I will send my friend a text, as I always do on Memorial Day, to let her know that I am thinking of her…and that I remember.

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“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.”-Ps 84:5

In the great dining hall of our hotel the day is beginning. Pilgrims are everywhere, eating strange foods, drinking coffee and tea, checking backpacks, chatting in every possible language of what they’ve seen, what they will see, eyes wild as they try to assimilate what they’ve already learned before another round. As a woman from Kansas says to me:

“It’s like trying to take a drink from a fire hose.”

As good a way as any to describe the complete assault on the senses, on the spirit, on the heart, that is the Holy Land.

I sit down with my plate and look out the big window to my left and see that the sun is clearing low clouds on the horizon to come up over the Sea of Galilee. I go to the door and step out onto the balcony, into the Tiberias morning. As the door closes the din of pilgrims becomes a murmur that bleeds into doves calling to each other in the Mimosa trees, and workmen below me arguing good naturedly in Arabic, school children running by calling to each other in Hebrew, somewhere in the distance laughter, the Universal language…that and tears. There is a gentle breeze that brings me the smell of baking bread and flowers and garbage and the scent of lake water. A heron goes low and skims the water in search of breakfast. A calico cat grooms herself on an overturned crate. Everything falls away and it’s as though the dial of my senses turns all the way up and I am completely here in this moment, in this place, rooted to the ground as though I were born here. And in that moment I feel the “Beautiful Land” gently sink her teeth into me, and I know I will leave a piece of myself behind in this holy and tragic place. That for the rest of my days I will be a little homesick for a place that I’m not from.

And then, like all transcendent moments, it’s over and I step back into the dining room. I step into the tide, into the song of pilgrims going forth to seek the holy. From the four corners of the earth we come, under many flags, speaking many tongues to file onto buses that will take us to stand on ground soaked in blood and tears, settled by Canaanites, to look at ruins left by Romans, to sing hymns in churches built by Crusaders, to run our fingers over mosaics laid by Byzantines. The old and the new, the past and the now, the conquered and the conquerors, the beautiful and the ugly, all jostling each other for the same patch of ground. Like tired children with nowhere to go, elbowing each other in the backseat on a long car trip. A very long car trip. Are we there yet?

30 years.

3 Bridesmaids, 3 Groomsmen, only one of each not carried away by time and distance.

1 Rental house with brown shag carpet where we learned to be married.

1 Tiny yellow house, now painted gray, where we started our family. We drove by it the other day and smiled and agreed that we were happy there. Happy in the way that you are when it’s all before you and when you’re too young to understand how happy you really are.

3 trips to the hospital for 3 boys, now 3 men. 3 Christenings, 3 Confirmations, 3 Graduations. All the noisy, messy, goodness that is raising children, the joy of seeing them starting their own lives. The sweetness and the bittersweetness.

5 funerals, 1 for a life short and tragic, 4 for lives long and wonderfully lived. Our teachers all.

Trips, too many to count, to the ball field, to the beach, to parks, to the hospital, to camp and so many happy hours in the woods. When I fall behind on the trail, I look up and see him looking back to be sure I am coming. And he waits for me to catch up. Always.

Meals and holidays and laughter and tears and science projects and flat tires and trips to the grocery store and taxes. The best moments of our lives and the worst, and every moment in between, we stand, sometimes apart, sometimes very close, but always side by side.

30.

Brave (adj.)-having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty: having or showing courage.

For a time I worked on a hospital unit that primarily took care of patients that had had OB/GYN surgeries. One of our functions was to care for patients that had had “poor maternal outcomes” as it was put, or otherwise needed to be on a unit where they wouldn’t have to listen to someone else’s baby crying.

During my time there I cared for several of those women. Obviously, that usually meant that they had lost their babies and had stillborn infants, but there was one other circumstance where they came to us, and that was when the Mother was putting the baby up for adoption.

She was 18, a freshman in college, the boy involved long gone. I don’t know if she didn’t have family or they didn’t know, but she was utterly alone. It was a private adoption and the couple adopting her baby had been kind to her. They were there when the baby was born. She held the baby girl once and then came to us. The couple came to see her once after and cried and thanked her. After an awkward goodbye they left, radiant, delirious with happiness, trailing joy in their wake. She sat there with a very blank look on her face and then picked up her book and began to read.

The next day as I walked down the hall, the door to the small conference room on our unit opened and a woman stepped out. She stopped me and said she was a Social Worker and they needed a witness for the consent for adoption. I walked in and she was at the table surrounded by official looking people. She looked very small and very young and very alone, her narrow shoulders drawn in. The Social Worker had kind eyes and gently explained the form and process to her. Then she said:

“Do you understand that once you sign this it’s permanent? You cannot change your mind in an hour or a week or a year?”

She said:

“Yes, I understand.”

Then she picked up the pen and signed her name, and as she did a single tear slid down her cheek.

I walked back to her room with her and helped her back into bed. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say and she said nothing. She asked for something for pain, took it from me and then turned her face to the wall. When I came back on shift the next day she was gone.

I’ve thought about her so many times through the years, and that baby girl would be a grown woman herself by now. I thought about her when they placed my own babies in my arms and I got to see every milestone of their lives. It was only then that I could understand what she gave up, what she missed and what courage she had.

I hope she has had a wonderful life. A life that included meaningful work, and a man that would stay when the going got tough. I hope she had children, and got to know the joy of that, and maybe got to reunite with the one she so bravely let go of to have a better life than she could give her.

I hope time has healed or at least a scar that she could live with, and I’m grateful for what she taught me about love and about what it means to be brave.

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