The blessings of our elders

Dear God,

You know I don’t pray much. I am just fine leaving prayer to my mother and a few others.

But yesterday, God, the whole day was a prayer.

On Saturday, we gathered in a common space intended to comfort, teach and protect. St. Anne’s is an old church in Detroit. Founded in 1701, it is the second oldest continuously operating Roman Catholic parish in the United States.

Its roof is crumbling on the east side, but its interior is spectacular. Stunning stain glass mirrors edge the walls on all sides. The light is rich and gentle and the pews are worn. The central altar is complex and formidable. I believe this cathedral style church was built in the late 1800’s. Today’s parish is largely Hispanic.

We were there to remember one of my great-aunts, and the morning was filled with more laughter than tears. I gazed at the Guadalupe candles lit before us for a moment too long, and then I looked somewhere else to avoid the memories of my sister’s memorial service.

As the priest talked about my great-aunt, it was impossible not to think about how her big brother, my grandfather, lay dying in a hospital not far away.

Later that same day we went to see him. Surrounding his sanitized bedside, we hoped for and received a smile or two. But as I stood in the room I grew increasingly aware that I was present as a human being prepared to take his final breath.

There are too many words to describe the tremendous life force that was my grandfather, and few words to acknowledge the painful reconciliation of knowing he was ready to go. It was a privilege to be at his side this weekend.

I didn’t have the opportunity to say good bye to my sister, and I struggle deciding whether it would have made things easier after she died had I done so. Probably not. At one point during the weekend I expected to cry for my sister, because she always comes to mind during times of intense emotion, but I realized my tears weren’t for her. Every single tear was for my grandfather, because he had a way of looking at you (me) and saying “you are so beautiful” and you believe him.

I should also note that my grandmother is a gift. She is my grandma 2.0. My first grandmother died when I was ten years old, and I remember her gentle, busy spirit as she bustled around children and grandchildren. My second grandmother, widowed like my grandfather, gave him a second season of love. I was fine until she started crying yesterday. Experiencing heartbreak right in front of you isn’t easy.

I got to hold my grandfather’s hand the day before he passed. I kissed him, and he kissed me back. Two days ago he commented that I was wearing “a very heavy sweater”. What a thing to notice. He asked for cream in his coffee, and one of the purest, most powerful things I’ve ever witnessed was watching my father feed his father with a spoon, nourishing him patiently and simply until he shook his head, he wasn’t hungry anymore.

The next day was different. The air in the room seemed changed.

I had to go home about 12 hours after I said good bye. Surrounded by family, he took his last breath.

After I told my husband that my grandfather had passed, he had to leave to pick up our dog at the boarding place. He hugged me close, and I went inside, sat on the steps and sobbed. I was alone, and yet not alone. My boys were waiting upstairs for a story and a song. The youngest, super-tired due to a nap-free weekend, was asleep before I left the room.

The oldest asked to play with Legos upstairs with me while I did some writing, and I said yes. It felt so normal. It’s a good feeling to have one’s children at home with you and know they are okay. A few minutes ago he reminded me that we “forgot to do our gratitudes” before dinner and suggested we do them tomorrow twice – at breakfast and at dinner.  It’s a plan.

I am heartbroken and heart-filled. There is so much love in our family. The love grows stronger than one even thinks possible. Cousins meet after decades apart and are immediately friends. Children mix it up and babies keep being born. We’ve got kids ages 1 – nearly 90 in the family now. There are personalities and relationships that flow like a current in the river, over rocks and tumbling logs, around tidal pools and across smooth stretches of clear water to where you can almost see the bottom. We swim, float, and struggle to make sense of the rising water and the power of the river. I’m trying to say — we fight, we cry, we make up, we love. We may not forget, but we try to forgive. We are a family.

The patriarch of this family was my grandfather.

Love you, Grandpa Padilla. I sure am missing you tonight.

Long Time Gone

When my sister was born, I’d been led to believe that I would be the recipient of a brand-spanking-new, ready-to-play-on-demand girlfriend.

I was almost three years old.

She came home with my parents at Christmas time. They tell me I looked her over, and she tucked into herself, teensy, wrinkly and perfect.

She can’t play!

I walked away, unimpressed.

What kind of a playmate can a newborn be?

I do not remember this scene, of course, but according to credible sources that’s what happened when Elizabeth Kasulis Padilla joined me in my great big three-year-old world.

I do not remember another moment being unimpressed with my baby sister.

Three days from now she will have been gone for eight years. More than a year after the accident, I wrote,

I either want to live here: that is, here in time and space and being, creating and contributing to love, health, and happiness within my family and myself. Or I want to live there: where she is. But I do not want to linger anymore in this peripheral life that has forced my every thought into such a dark and empty space.

I lingered in that dark space for a long, long time. It’s just recently that I’ve been more fully present in my life, in a good way. Those of you who haven’t experienced immediate loss of a loved one may puzzle why, why it takes so damn long to get over it. The thing is you just don’t get over it, you get through it, tumbling beneath its weight, pushing against its intensity, cringing from its cruelty. You find yourself living a new human experience, one that you didn’t expect nor ask for. You make yourself and your world anew because the old one is a long time gone.

Wondering what the angels are up to today and every day, I imagine my sister as the quintessential angel organizing force. She could lead a union of good will, and everpresent and inclusive prayer, and initiate the transformation among us from a place of sorrow into unsorrow, and then support the work of we survivors as we march heavily toward joy.

A born leader and organizer, my sister was persistent, sensitive and smart. Above all she was a hard worker.

The work of healing is real, but more subtle for the bereaved than I’d expected. When I watched footage of the final survivor of the Boston Marathon bombings leaving the hospital, I was tearful and yet mindful that she was able to take physical action to heal. One of her legs was amputated above the knee and the other is severely injured. As insensitive as this may sound, I am a little envious of the survivors. I hurt for them, but wish my sister had been able to heal, too.

Despite what the DSM says, bereavement isn’t depression, not exactly. It’s more like coming to truth. It might be a coming to Jesus moment, except I don’t believe anyone can save me but me. It’s coming to heartbreak and getting up in the morning and painfully realizing that a measure of joy of your own life has been stolen not only from you but from everyone who knows you. And among them in my case was included the person who promised nine months before her death to love me ‘for better or for worse’.

And then ‘for worse’ happens and that really sucked.

It’s so real, believe me, it’s the realest, darkest, angriest, most terrible thing you can know and know and know it’s real.

It’s real and she’s dead and the next day she’s still dead.

The grieving process feels mean sometimes. It’s that bitter old man who tells everyone who will listen that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Then you wake up again and a piece of your bleeding heart is still beating, but threatening to destroy you so all you want to do is sleep and self-medicate and forget. So you do so, for a long time, and work a little in between the space where the sun rises and slips away, another day done and done.

It’s been a long time since she’s been gone.

For so long I couldn’t give up grieving, because leaving the grief felt like leaving her.

I know I’ve felt sorry for myself. Others have lost children. I haven’t. Others have lost their partners or parents. I haven’t.

Others have been touched by absolute horrors, so much more appalling and more terrible than my own, here in my own community and my country. Across borders and oceans and through lines of people waiting to show passport and greet bored and suspicious people who work in customs.

In the year 2004 I was stopped twice in Miami because the FBI was looking for a woman whose name matched my own. They wouldn’t tell me anything other than she had a scar on her stomach.

I wasn’t her. She wasn’t me.

Finally they let me go. I pissed the border control guy off by switching to English after several minutes of being very nice and cooperative in Spanish. Upon my release, I inquired as to how I could prevent this situation from happening again.

Get married, he said. Change your name.

I was married. Seriously?

During the year after my sister’s death, I wrote this:

Do I have regrets? Yes, absolutely. I feel cheated, brokenhearted, devastated to have lost my sister. People who tell you otherwise are lying. My regrets, however, are not for the past. They are for the future. I took for granted that my sister would be, at the very farthest, a phone call away from me, until we were very old, withered from the sun and rain and adventure of many decades. I looked forward to holidays and birthdays and regular days of no particular significance, other than it was a day and we were there. I wanted to be an aunt to her children, and of course, expected Liz to be Aunt Liz to mine. Yes, I have regrets.

But still. I’m here for something.

I still rise in the mornings.

There’s a lot of wonder in our wonderful world, after all. Maybe even more than before.

I’m thinking of those whom my sister greets in her space within the universe, small children from Sandy Hook, old people who are ready to go and middle-aged people like me. Certainly people who never intended to meet her there, like the eight-year-old Boston spectator, the children who died when a tornado in Oklahoma showed no mercy, and the friends of my parents who have lost their lives since hers was taken.

Given her enthusiasm for life and people and care packages, I know she is capable of providing the most perfect welcome for anyone who crosses her path.

Especially the children, I think.

That said, I avoid looking at the bestsellers at the airport that scream Heaven is for Real… stories from those who emerge from death to tell the tale. I’m not sure if they frighten or offend me because I think they’re simply a fraud or because miraculously they might be true… and in that case why didn’t my sister get to write her own bestseller?

Clearly my handle on what happens next and after and forward is vague. But I do believe in the spirit of my sister. I am filled with gratitude, and yes, joy, at having known her for 28 years. And for knowing her still.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

~ Henry David Thoreau