One Day at a Time
Nov. 1st, 2018 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947You've got to live your religion
Deep inside, when you try
For the kingdom on high
By His grace, by His grace
Open your mind to the wisdom
When you try for the kingdom, on high
By His grace, by His grace
Open your heart to the wisdom
In your mind when you try
For the kingdom on high
By His grace, by His grace
One day at a time, you got to try
Open your eye, it will come
By and by, when you try
By His grace, by His grace
By His grace, by His grace.
(By His Grace: Van Morrison – 1990)
Last year, when visiting my mother, or calling her on the phone, she always mentioned my participation in the Catholic jail ministry.
“Are you still going to the jails?” She would ask in Spanish.
After replying that I went regularly on Mondays, she would pause for a moment, as if considering the best way to respond.
“You know”, she would finally resume, “visiting people in jail is one of the Church’s Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. It’s a wonderful thing to do. I’m very proud of you.”
“It’s not a big deal” I always replied. “I just show up.”
October and November loomed as very intimidating months for me this year because of the emotional significance of certain days. October 17th was my mother’s birthday, when she would have turned 94. In 1971, my father died on November 1, celebrated as All Saints’ Day in the Catholic tradition and Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. It is also the day my mom suffered her precipitating stroke, which led to her death on November 22, 2017. I thought I was immune to the physiological effects that momentous dates such as these can have on people. I was never one to ascribe moods, or feelings of joy or depression to any particular date or time. In fact, Kathy has to remind me of birthdays, anniversaries, or commemorative dates, or I forget them. Somehow this year was different. I found myself feeling disconnected from people and events, and pondering the idea of grief, and how I have dealt (or not dealt) with it. In trying to get a handle on this subject, and putting words to my feelings, I sought out two sources – The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, and A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Although the things Joan Didion said struck closer to home (perhaps because of her more secular perspective on the subject), Lewis was remarkably concrete in his own descriptions, which sounded similar to many of the reactions and sensations I had experienced after my mother’s stroke and death.
There is a feeling that everything changes with the death of a parent – that nothing will ever be the same again. Foremost there is a sense of emptiness and loss because something is absent, or someone is missing. Despite our most determined efforts, we flounder at grasping the cause, or giving it a name – even when it is obvious: dad is gone, and mom is dead, and we are orphans. “The death of a parent”, Joan Didion quoted, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
I suppose I navigated the first tumultuous months after my mother’s death by surrounding myself and staying in touch with people I loved: Kathy, my children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends. They were real, they were concrete, and they grounded me in the present. I also continued a practice I started after my mother’s stroke. Once it became obvious that her worsening conditon required around the clock observation and care, I would call my sister Stela on a daily basis to see how she was handling the primary burden, and visiting her two or three times a week to allow her some free time away from my mom’s care. At first I thought I was doing this for Stela’s sake, but as mom’s condition worsened with the encroaching specter of death, being with Stela, and talking to her about what we were experiencing, brought me a great deal of emotional reassurance and solace. After the funeral, I continued the practice, which gave me the chance to stay in touch with Stela as she hunted for and found an apartment, and settled into a separate existence, independent of our mom. Visiting with Stela allowed me to speak openly about the uncertainties of correctly handling mom’s care and illness, the absence caused by her death, and how we were dealing with loss and grief. I even started hoping that this continuing connection with friends and family would act as my therapy in dealing with grief. The trouble with grief, however, is trying to figure out what it is.
“Grief”, Joan Didion writes, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”. I experienced these moments of “magical thinking” that come with grief for many years after the death of my father. Perhaps because I was so young at the time, and absent at the moment of his death in 1971, that I firmly believed I saw my father driving next to me in cars as I traveled to work on the freeways. I had to fight the impulse of following this car and confronting the driver, whom I was sure was my father. I assume these “magical” sightings did not occur after my mother’s death because I had been an active witness to her dying process, and knew that she was gone.
C.S. Lewis grappled with grief by describing it in metaphors. “Grief” he wrote, “is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” Then he shifted his view and described it differently. “For in grief”, he added, “nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?” Didion also employed metaphor when observing grief. “Grief” she wrote, “is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” All of these descriptions felt familiar to me as the months went by after my mother’s death, and I believed that the only way to survive the grief and sorrow I was experiencing, was to live through it. Paradoxically, assistance came in the form of four more sorrows.
The old superstitious belief that deaths come in threes didn’t quite hold up in my mother’s case.
In the months following the death of my mother I was visited by the deaths of four friends and relatives. In December I learned of the passing of a dear friend and colleague, who had been an administrator and principal with me in the LAUSD. Johanna Kunes’ death was followed in March with news of the eminent death of my brother-in-law and longtime friend, Danny Holiday. Then I learned of the death of two relatives, my paternal aunt, Helen Delgado, and my last surviving maternal uncle, Eduardo (Lalo) Villalpando. Each of these deaths, following, it seemed to me, so soon on the heels of my mother’s passing affected me in very different ways. Johanna’s death filled me with a sadness that bordered on anger at the loss of such a close friend, confidant, and contemporary who had shared so many of the trials, frustrations, and joys of being an educator in Los Angeles. Danny’s surprising illness and subsequent death shocked me with the realization of the frailty of life and my own denial of the mortality of friends of my own age. Helen’s death was a reminder that my father’s siblings were quickly disappearing, but Lalo’s death, on the other hand, filled me with a tragic sorrow with the realization that the Villalpando family – my mother, and all her many brothers and sisters whom I knew in my childhood and youth – was gone. My response to all of these deaths was to write about these men and women so as to remember them and the times and experiences we shared. I took Lewis’ advice that “what we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends”. To alleviate the sorrow of loss and the absence of these loved ones, I wrote, and wept, and remembered.
Last week, at Kathy’s suggestion, we invited our daughter and son-in-law, Teresa and Joe McDorman, to come with their two daughters to share in a Dia de los Muertos activity. We invited them to bring photographs of Joe’s parents, and combine them with photos of Kathy and my parents to create family remembrance shadow boxes as “dia de los muertos altars” for Sarah and Gracie’s deceased great-grandparents. The activity gave us all the opportunity to share photos and tell stories of these recent ancestors who had passed away, but will always be remembered, as long as we make an effort to recall them. Didion concluded her book by writing, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” In the process, of that afternoon, with my wife, daughter, and granddaughters around me, I suppose, I finally said goodbye to my mother, with the resolution that I would continue to recall her and my father on the anniversaries of their deaths, and on Dia de los Muertos.
As to why I was leaving the jail ministry I was involved in for so long, the only conclusion I could reach harkened back to what I said earlier about everything changing after the death of a parent. Sadly, I think, many relationships and activities become casualties after a life-altering death. Routines are changed, habits are altered, and acquaintances drift apart. Yet, I also believe that although many things come to an end, we try to move forward, “one day at a time, by His grace, by His grace”.
Deep inside, when you try
For the kingdom on high
By His grace, by His grace
Open your mind to the wisdom
When you try for the kingdom, on high
By His grace, by His grace
Open your heart to the wisdom
In your mind when you try
For the kingdom on high
By His grace, by His grace
One day at a time, you got to try
Open your eye, it will come
By and by, when you try
By His grace, by His grace
By His grace, by His grace.
(By His Grace: Van Morrison – 1990)
Last year, when visiting my mother, or calling her on the phone, she always mentioned my participation in the Catholic jail ministry.
“Are you still going to the jails?” She would ask in Spanish.
After replying that I went regularly on Mondays, she would pause for a moment, as if considering the best way to respond.
“You know”, she would finally resume, “visiting people in jail is one of the Church’s Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. It’s a wonderful thing to do. I’m very proud of you.”
“It’s not a big deal” I always replied. “I just show up.”
I mention this interaction with my mom because I recently called Gonzalo de Vivero, the Co-director of the Office of Restorative Justice for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, to tell him I was ending my involvement as a facilitator in his Finding the Way program. I had volunteered for this program in 2009, when he was the Catholic Chaplain at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic. Gonzalo befriended me and guided my early training and involvement in working with the incarcerated men in jail. Over those nine years I met, and worked with, some exceptional and inspiring men and women, occasionally writing about our experiences in this blog. I discovered that the volunteers and the incarcerated men we worked with had much in common – we were all flawed human beings, searching for ways to change and be better people. My involvement was never predicated on my success in changing their lives. I simply showed up and spent a few hours talking with them about finding our way to happier, more satisfying lives. I believe I always benefitted more from these encounters than the men I served. I just showed up, year after year, Monday after Monday, until my mom’s stroke last year, when I asked Gonzalo for a leave to help my sister care for her. My most recent conversation with Gonzalo was awkward because I couldn’t give him a clear reason for not returning. He’d understood my need for a leave to care for my mom, and then more time to process her death, but now I was struggling to explain that something had changed in me during the course of the year and I felt the need to move on. I could not visualize going back to what I once did and who I once was, before my mother’s illness and death. What was doubly confusing was a nagging sense that there was a connection of sorts with my mom’s death and jail ministry. A connection I could not yet explain.
October and November loomed as very intimidating months for me this year because of the emotional significance of certain days. October 17th was my mother’s birthday, when she would have turned 94. In 1971, my father died on November 1, celebrated as All Saints’ Day in the Catholic tradition and Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. It is also the day my mom suffered her precipitating stroke, which led to her death on November 22, 2017. I thought I was immune to the physiological effects that momentous dates such as these can have on people. I was never one to ascribe moods, or feelings of joy or depression to any particular date or time. In fact, Kathy has to remind me of birthdays, anniversaries, or commemorative dates, or I forget them. Somehow this year was different. I found myself feeling disconnected from people and events, and pondering the idea of grief, and how I have dealt (or not dealt) with it. In trying to get a handle on this subject, and putting words to my feelings, I sought out two sources – The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, and A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Although the things Joan Didion said struck closer to home (perhaps because of her more secular perspective on the subject), Lewis was remarkably concrete in his own descriptions, which sounded similar to many of the reactions and sensations I had experienced after my mother’s stroke and death.
There is a feeling that everything changes with the death of a parent – that nothing will ever be the same again. Foremost there is a sense of emptiness and loss because something is absent, or someone is missing. Despite our most determined efforts, we flounder at grasping the cause, or giving it a name – even when it is obvious: dad is gone, and mom is dead, and we are orphans. “The death of a parent”, Joan Didion quoted, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
I suppose I navigated the first tumultuous months after my mother’s death by surrounding myself and staying in touch with people I loved: Kathy, my children, grandchildren, siblings, and friends. They were real, they were concrete, and they grounded me in the present. I also continued a practice I started after my mother’s stroke. Once it became obvious that her worsening conditon required around the clock observation and care, I would call my sister Stela on a daily basis to see how she was handling the primary burden, and visiting her two or three times a week to allow her some free time away from my mom’s care. At first I thought I was doing this for Stela’s sake, but as mom’s condition worsened with the encroaching specter of death, being with Stela, and talking to her about what we were experiencing, brought me a great deal of emotional reassurance and solace. After the funeral, I continued the practice, which gave me the chance to stay in touch with Stela as she hunted for and found an apartment, and settled into a separate existence, independent of our mom. Visiting with Stela allowed me to speak openly about the uncertainties of correctly handling mom’s care and illness, the absence caused by her death, and how we were dealing with loss and grief. I even started hoping that this continuing connection with friends and family would act as my therapy in dealing with grief. The trouble with grief, however, is trying to figure out what it is.
“Grief”, Joan Didion writes, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”. I experienced these moments of “magical thinking” that come with grief for many years after the death of my father. Perhaps because I was so young at the time, and absent at the moment of his death in 1971, that I firmly believed I saw my father driving next to me in cars as I traveled to work on the freeways. I had to fight the impulse of following this car and confronting the driver, whom I was sure was my father. I assume these “magical” sightings did not occur after my mother’s death because I had been an active witness to her dying process, and knew that she was gone.
C.S. Lewis grappled with grief by describing it in metaphors. “Grief” he wrote, “is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” Then he shifted his view and described it differently. “For in grief”, he added, “nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?” Didion also employed metaphor when observing grief. “Grief” she wrote, “is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” All of these descriptions felt familiar to me as the months went by after my mother’s death, and I believed that the only way to survive the grief and sorrow I was experiencing, was to live through it. Paradoxically, assistance came in the form of four more sorrows.
The old superstitious belief that deaths come in threes didn’t quite hold up in my mother’s case.
In the months following the death of my mother I was visited by the deaths of four friends and relatives. In December I learned of the passing of a dear friend and colleague, who had been an administrator and principal with me in the LAUSD. Johanna Kunes’ death was followed in March with news of the eminent death of my brother-in-law and longtime friend, Danny Holiday. Then I learned of the death of two relatives, my paternal aunt, Helen Delgado, and my last surviving maternal uncle, Eduardo (Lalo) Villalpando. Each of these deaths, following, it seemed to me, so soon on the heels of my mother’s passing affected me in very different ways. Johanna’s death filled me with a sadness that bordered on anger at the loss of such a close friend, confidant, and contemporary who had shared so many of the trials, frustrations, and joys of being an educator in Los Angeles. Danny’s surprising illness and subsequent death shocked me with the realization of the frailty of life and my own denial of the mortality of friends of my own age. Helen’s death was a reminder that my father’s siblings were quickly disappearing, but Lalo’s death, on the other hand, filled me with a tragic sorrow with the realization that the Villalpando family – my mother, and all her many brothers and sisters whom I knew in my childhood and youth – was gone. My response to all of these deaths was to write about these men and women so as to remember them and the times and experiences we shared. I took Lewis’ advice that “what we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends”. To alleviate the sorrow of loss and the absence of these loved ones, I wrote, and wept, and remembered.
Last week, at Kathy’s suggestion, we invited our daughter and son-in-law, Teresa and Joe McDorman, to come with their two daughters to share in a Dia de los Muertos activity. We invited them to bring photographs of Joe’s parents, and combine them with photos of Kathy and my parents to create family remembrance shadow boxes as “dia de los muertos altars” for Sarah and Gracie’s deceased great-grandparents. The activity gave us all the opportunity to share photos and tell stories of these recent ancestors who had passed away, but will always be remembered, as long as we make an effort to recall them. Didion concluded her book by writing, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” In the process, of that afternoon, with my wife, daughter, and granddaughters around me, I suppose, I finally said goodbye to my mother, with the resolution that I would continue to recall her and my father on the anniversaries of their deaths, and on Dia de los Muertos.
As to why I was leaving the jail ministry I was involved in for so long, the only conclusion I could reach harkened back to what I said earlier about everything changing after the death of a parent. Sadly, I think, many relationships and activities become casualties after a life-altering death. Routines are changed, habits are altered, and acquaintances drift apart. Yet, I also believe that although many things come to an end, we try to move forward, “one day at a time, by His grace, by His grace”.
