Sitting Shivah, Singing Gospel... Good Grief.

♪Amen! Amen!♪ A aaaa men ♪ a-men a-men!

We’ve all heard that Negro Spiritual at least once in our lifetime. (Yes, it is called  a Negro Spiritual. History is not always PC.) :-P 

Amen means “So be it.”  “So be it” does not consistently translate to “Hallelujah everything is wonderful”.It’s an agreement, an acceptance to the prayer offered, whether in jubilation or despair. Ancient counterpart to today's ad nauseum, "It is what it is." 

My half-siblings are half way through their required week of Jewish grief in Northern Israel. Sitting shivah in an Orthodox home means covering the mirrors, lighting a single candle, sitting on the floor, no shoes, no showers,  reciting the Kaddish - the mourner's prayer, for a seven-day period of mourning. (No doubt the grieving is exacerbated by the grieving, guilt, and mild gall of my former ‘stepmother’, who may be coming to terms with the journey she shared with a man twenty years her senior, her contribution to his alcoholism, and missed opportunities. She shouldn’t be so hard on herself… we all make Big Mistakes.) 

As utterly miserable as they may be, at least they are together, and there is finality to the passing, and some sort of closure.

I lost a dear friend this summer to something similar… infection, surgery, infection, body succumbing. He was 34 years younger than my dad, and we held his hand at the hospital and told him we loved him…and a week later, sat in church and cried and laughed and cried together. I'll not soon forget the anguished face of his youngest son turning back to look at the casket one last time before recessing out.

There are moments of my day when I have that anguished look, only it’s a dull ache in my chest. I get misty every couple of hours, and at night, I cry for all the stupidity of years lost, stubbornness, stoicisim, and persons who do not allow themselves to publicly mourn, for their own reasons. Ironically, if my dad were here, he’d tell me to “save my tears for something important.” Hmmh.

I wish I had a funeral to go to. 

I wish I could force myself to get dressed formally and drag myself to a church or a synagogue and be put through the torture of facing the loss of a loved one.

Instead I am here, alone in my grief, unable to mourn him with any one whom I have a shared history, since his departure from my family basically perforated it all those years ago and it has never been quite the same.

I used to have dreams of seeing my dad in a random place and just hugging him, and finally after a twenty year absence, I got to do just that, in sort of a random place, an airport terminal. Same place I hugged him good-bye a week later, knowing it would be the only time that would transpire. What a wonder it is that the dream even ever came true at all.

I wish I could have an end date to our mourning...and wish there was someone to mourn his loss with me. My Jonathan told me it tore him up to not be able to rush home, to be here with me. I wept, and then told him 'soldiers have to stay at their posts,' even though I wish he were here, too. 

On Sunday morning, I shared with my fellow choir members that the music we sang would have been cherished by the Daddy I knew back in the 60's...jazzy gospel and classical praise. We grew up listening to the Robert Shaw Chorale, Mahalia Jackson, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Glenn Miller. He would have been tapping his toes at the "Jazz Gloria", and teared up at the Saint-Saens "Oratorio". Through the same stifled anguished ‘look’ I trilled "Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord our God who cometh" on the day my father was buried.  I mentioned tearfully to some that the service we had this was the funeral service I always would have imagined for my father, Christ-centered and full of glorious sound. 

I sat stock-still as the Christmas Toccata was masterfully offered by our Juilliard-trained organist, Kiyo Watanabe. Filled with familiar strains of ancient hymns, it also has a melancholy and dark air woven to the last few measures, and then a resulting gentle finale.

The dynamic of the Toccata IS the dynamic of Christmas. It’s joy and strain and darkness and hope and sorrow and frenzy and peace and beauty, in rapid succession and intermingled with each other.

Sounds a little Hebraic? That’s because it is… but the end of the Story is not mourning at the death of the grown Christ. He came to live among us that we might have hope beyond sitting shivah, beyond no funerals, beyond this finite world.

The ache comes and goes. The hope remains that I will hug my dad again, because I believe what he believed, that the end of the Story is not mourning and gnashing of teeth, but glory in the presence of the Father.

So be it.

♪ fa la la la la, and Kalamazoo

So last night we decorated our tree, with my Jonathan Gilbert on Skype on my laptop, having gone to dinner to raise a glass in the memory of my boy's other grandfather, whose first name happened to be: Gilbert. Life is funny sometimes.

   I went to bed happy as a lark, tree lights twinkling in my spirit. 

   Jonathan called me this morning, around 8:30 a.m. and via Skype I got to see him drape golden tinsel on a tiny tree, in his apartment in Kuwait. :-) He was pretty happy with himself! I was sleepily overjoyed to see my boy celebrating the Season in a tangible way!  We signed off, both needing coffee and food, at different ends of the same day, and I checked my e-mail and Facebook before having a shower and calling him back before he went to bed. Then I learned that today was The Day.

   My younger half-sister, Daniella, had apparently left a message for me at 7 a.m. which I did not get, having been asleep and then awakened to the sight of a tiny Kuwaiti "tannenbaum".

    " Just got a call from the hospital to come right away"... Oh no. This is it.  My long estranged and now suffering from dementia father had a leg removed two weeks ago today, and had been battling blood poisoning since. 

    I had to recharge my cell phone twice in the course of the day, in between calls to Daniella and my half-sister Kfirah, having to talk to my dad's second wife for only the second time in 14 years ( the last being when my Aunt Yvonne died, and my illustrious father had been placed in an Israeli detention/detox for a drunken rampage,  unable to receive the news until he finally sobered up), breaking the sad news to my father's only surviving sister, and then calling my cousins, and the rest of my family who are in varying stages of grief, and then calling Jonathan's mom after sniffling through an end of the day call with him, to debrief. 

   See, when after your parents get divorced and your dad moves to Israel with his second wife and then disowns you and your siblings for ten years while in the meantime he has a whole other family, it gets a little convoluted. Even after 30 years, after you have you made peace and move forward as adults and allow grace to enter in and heal over tender scar tissue, it gets a little twinge-y... simply due to lost years, lost life, lost love. 

  As I write this, it is morning in Israel, and the second set of Bailor kids, minus one or two, are making preparations to attend the burial of their sometimes manic, once-upon- a-time marvelous father. Daddy plowed hard through life, whether in a mad rush to score a basketball goal, deliver an exam that gave people migraines but never let them forget the subject matter, disciplining a recalcitrant child with a knuckle thump on the head or taking one to lunch or for ice cream-- with a drink in his hand, and either a joke on his lips or an angry scowl on his brow. Nothing in between.

   On this day that we have all been dreading for years, The Day We Get The Call About Dad, I'm wistfully sad. 

    Tonight is not any different in my life than any other day... Daddy has been absent from my life for the better part of 27 years, 10 of them being disowned by him and his family. (I broke the ice on my 30th birthday, calling to talk to him as if Nothing Bad had ever happened, and didn't lose track of him for very long at a time in the fifteen years hence.)

    My heart is not sad because he died, as I am relieved that he is with my grandparents and aunt and uncles and reunited with his best friend, Uncle Jerry, Aunt Donna's husband who has been gone for 40 years. 'Bout time those two caught up. 

   My heart is not sad for me, or my kids that didn't know my dad save for one Christmas vacation five years ago, when we were all together for four days. 

   My heart is full. Full of relief that he can be with Uncle Jerry and the rest of our loved ones that have gone ahead, full of wistfulness that he missed so many years wandering the streets in a drunken stupor, full of questions of why he jumped the track of a successful youth leader and college professor to lead the life of an Israeli emigré at age 43, full of happy memories of me and my dad, my dad and us kids, especially at Christmas when he would get fairly silly and make us giggle a lot when he was not knuckle thumping us, in church, to get us to stop giggling. HA. 

   How he loved Christmas! Loved the seasonal sweets, and the holiday spirits, the faculty parties, the church parties, and the lights on the houses and the celebration of the Christ Child being born in a messy manger. He loved the beginning of the Story, because back then he ascribed to the End of it, where the Christ Child returned in full glory to redeem those who knelt at the cross where He ended his human tenure. Daddy loved the Candlelight service, and the Christmas hymns and silly Christmas songs of his childhood, equally. Just as my brother and sister would sing, 'to save us all from Santa Claus when he was on his sleigh' instead of  'to save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray', LOL, Daddy would putter through the house, singing "Deck us all with Boston Charlie fa la la la la and Kalamazoo..." He loved to put the Christmas lights up on the house, not primly along the roof line like everyone else, but in a Star of David to celebrate Jesus' Hebrew lineage. We should have known... :-)

   My heart is full. It’s two hours into the day that my dad will be buried, in Israel. We cannot be there, and yet we are there. There are traces of us American-borns in the faces of the Israeli-born, and on their children, too.  (My son Craig has strong personality tendencies of his grandpa's, and they spent all of four days together.)   

  There are traces of him in each of us, strong-willed, bright-minded, resolute, passionate.

  My heart is full of the wonder of God, for allowing grace and time to put together the pieces of broken lives and make something new out of them.

   Like my brother eloquently stated this morning, Dad is Home for Christmas. My heart is full.

  

   

♪ Daddy's Little Girl...yeah...♪

When you are three, this is how your daddy sees you, and you feel like a princess...


"You’re the end of the rainbow, my pot of gold.
You're daddy's little girl, to have and hold.
A precious gem is what you are;
You're mommy's bright and shining star.

You’re the spirit of Christmas, the star on our tree.
You’re the Easter Bunny to Mommy and me.
You’re sugar, you're spice, and you're everything nice
And You’re Daddy’s Little Girl

You’re a treasure I cherish, all sparkling and bright.
You were touched by Holy and beautiful light;
Like the angels who sing, a heavenly thing;
And you’re Daddy’s Little Girl"


...and sometimes as a bride you danced to this in your daddy's arms. Some girls feel this way their whole lives. Lucky lucky lucky ducks... Sometimes Life doesn't let the fairy tale turn out just like that... and we carry on. Just like my dad always told us to. Hmmmph.


My big strong daddy could speak and read seven languages, play basketball and football, got tenure at a college at a  young age, and was the toast of the town. When I was three. 


Alcohol literally consumed him during my childhood. We didn't dance at my wedding...


I talked to my sister, Daniella, today, for the first time in our lives. She has a beautiful, soft, Israeli-accented voice which matches her beautiful face, and we both wept and sniffled the whole time we were on the phone, and I got to tell her thank you for being there for Daddy, and that I loved her.


See, after my parent's divorce when my sisters and I ranged in age from senior in high school to second grader, my dad went on to have six more kids, a total of three sons and seven daughters in all. ( My mom was pretty funny after she found out that he'd had a passel more children " Boy am I glad he left!", as she jolly well should,  but deep in her heart she still mourns his leaving.)


Through a Series of Unfortunate Events that would make a Lifetime movie instead of a comical jaunt with Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, we were disowned and estranged from my dad for ten long years. During that time I had my three sons; my brother and sister-in-law their fourth child, my dad as well. Both girls, one named Danielle, and one named Daniella. Through a Second Series of Unfortunate Events my dad's second marriage ended, and he spent a lot of years living a sad lonely life -- except for Daniella. She would visit, and she had pictures of us, her American family, up in the room she stayed in. She would write me notes and I wrote back, glad to know that my alcoholic father had something to focus on besides his past turbulent vodka consumption.

He got sober finally, but not until every one of his kids except for three -- me, Daniella, and my big brother  -- wanted to have anything to do with him.  The last fifteen years have been an exercise in perseverance, as my dad has  slowly declined into an advanced elderly state and into dementia. The once brilliant athlete-scholar wore himself out with his self-destruction.

I think he felt his dementia coming on, and five years ago he called and said he wanted to come home for Christmas. He spent time with my brother and family up north, and then my mother offered to have him stay with her so we could all be home together. It is the only time we have been  with my parents,both together, since 1978, and the only time I have seen my dad in person since 1986, and the one and only time my sons, nieces and nephews will ever know their grandpa.

Daniella wrote today and said that Daddy had surgery, and that the outcome wasn't clear.  He's 79 years old, with a 40 year alcohol abuse history. We cried together when we later spoke on the phone. See, she hasn't had the extra thirty years to distance herself from being 'Daddy's little girl'... and even though I have, I still cried.

None of us sister-siblings has felt much like Daddy's little girl... but the memory of those long-ago princess moments with him might carry us through what comes next, and allow some grace to soften the not-so-princess ones.

Peace and comfort to you, Dad. Peace and comfort.

♪ Easy to Be Hard ♪

From the musical, "Hair":


How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold


How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no


And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?

I wandered around this morning, getting ready to simply get out of the house after a looong Monday of Adventures in Dogsitting..but taking Zeus to the vet for personal issues will not be the basis for this blog. Oye no. He's better... and at home with my oldest son today.

While I blow-dried my hair, I thought of texting a friend to go have coffee, and my thoughts wandered to  how I used to go have tea of a Saturday. I started to get wistful, and then remembered that every Saturday was a whine fest about life, church, and church. We rationalized it as venting until one day I said to the person I happened to be with," we've been having this conversation for  a year." 


It took me another year to distance myself from all of those relationships that were based on 'faith'. They weren't based on 'faith'...okay maybe a few. But most of that fellowship was bi-polar in nature.We were either at a party -- or -- helping someone in a crisis. Nothing in between...and it's not just that church, or those people. 

Bad news makes for good gossip. Just think of any news broadcast...we read the ticker across the bottom of CNN and make a judgement on the story, out loud, before the end of it makes it across the big screen. It's easy to be hard, easy to be cold, easy to write a check for tsunami relief and pack shoeboxes for needy children at Christmas, easy to show up at a grieving widow's home with a casserole. It makes us feel good about ourselves. We are helping the less fortunate, the needy the hurting, sometimes in the name of God.

So many churches have this country club mentality, this birthday party/funeral attention deficit dysfunction. If you go twice a week and give of your time and money, you are a member in good standing and get a gold star on your membership card. 

So many people have turned away from organized religion for just this reason -- that little song "the church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is the people". 

The Church is not a people... it's not decorating for Christmas and Easter and vacation Bible school and Sunday School. It's about worship, reverence, homage and service to a Creator God, who chose to live as a human being.  

Friendship, true friendship, is not based in crisis or celebration either. Authentic friendship is not bi-polar. It grows and curls around your life and heart like a vine, sometimes dormant in 'winter', but the roots are always there. Kind of like faith... true faith in a Higher Power. Waxing and waning with the seasons, sometimes, but the root never dies,and the tendrils reach out to everyone, not just eligible 'country club' members or poverty-stricken afflicted folks in need.

♪ Silent Night ... by Taylor Swift?

In my weekly missive to my Jonathan's family, I mused on celebrating Advent.  As an adult it seems a little passé, sometimes, since baby Jesus was born all those years ago and hasn't decided to come back as He promised, thus so far...and yet...

...within the mystery of why He chose to become incarnate is the reason for the annual liturgical observances.

No other god, no other deity, no other supreme being walked among mortals. Why would they need to? They were SUPREME beings. No need for mortal sustenance, mortal relationships, mortal interactions. Why demote yourself to this planet if you are a Greek or Roman deity, an female goddess, a  Creator God? No need, no interest. 

I listened to a new version of Silent Night this morning with a little Appalachian influence, more plaintive, quietly reflective. Funny that it would be from a teen-idol pop star, the flaxen-spiral-curled Taylor Swift, who is this generation's crossover Olivia Newton-John. ;-)

Yes she's a pop star...and a musician who writes her own music in response to what is around her..Silent Night. When the organ pipes failed and Franz Gruber wrote a song that Father Mohr played "unplugged". He wrote in response to what was happening. God did the same thing, in deciding to show up here, incarnate.

That particular story of the manger sums up God to me. A Creator of galaxies, the universe, and this silly planet with all of its wonders decided to go through what we do.

 Glory in spite of mortal failure.

Birth, childhood, adolescence, single adulthood -- living with his mothah until he was 30 ( in Jewish cultchah,  when he should have been mahrried at 20, oye, the shame ) -- in a primitive barbaric oppressed nation, and then choosing an agonizing death. 

Glory in spite of mortal failure.

God cares about us silly stupid stubborn people, who live in poverty like He did, or comfort like King Herod did just up the hill from the manger. He cares, far beyond enough, about us to literally go through this life.

I got to watch Brett and the other Youth hang banners proclaiming joy this morning, in spite of my crazy life and achy off-balance existence without my grey-haired blue-eyed boy. A group of families came to lay garlands on the altar rails, and another couple placed huge poinsettias on the chancel altar. Little kids hung gold and white Chrismons on a sparkly tree. Not just tradition, although some take comfort in that, but a big vivid Thank You because He, Jesus, chose to live this mortal life.

You've seen the adage 'only two individuals give their lives for you, the American soldier and Jesus Christ". True enough...but the American soldier didn't choose to be born. Only one person ever did, and His birthday is celebrated at the end of this month.

♪ Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ♪

I wrote this on the plane today, instead of sleeping. :-) 

Waiting. 

 Just a few moments ago we were waiting on the runway, under gray skies at O’Hare, waiting for clearance to take off…and now we are cruising at 30,000 feet in the sunshine, above the clouds.

Funny how life alternates like that.

Lots of life passes waiting for wonderful moments… when you are 5 waiting to be 6, or at least tall enough to ride the good rides at Disneyland without a parent… waiting in lines AT Disneyland… yearning to be 16…18…21… anticipating high school/college/grad school graduation… counting down the days to the wedding… waddling through the days to the baby… crossing off days to Christmas/vacation/retirement…

…and conversely, waiting for moments that you wish you just skip… dozing in a crowded airport, wishing for a shorter delay…sitting in traffic when you could be home…when a marriage ends and you have to pick up the pieces… tensing up for the lab results when you just haven’t felt ‘right’… holding the hand of a loved one while they transition from this world to the next.

Life seems to rush by, but consists of many chapters in limbo, wondering what comes next.

Waiting.

I waited thirty years to see a friend again, and after that time, he fell in love with me and I with him. We’ll see each other face to face every six months for the next two years while he covers overseas assignments…and Skype and Yahoo chat in the meantime.

Waiting.

Stretch marks the size of the Grand Canyon by the time my first child decided to get here, and then took 29 hours of labor and a C-section before he felt like hanging out in the hospital instead of pressing on my bladder.

Waiting.

Twenty years’ estrangement with my academic alcoholic father, and then found myself sitting with my sisters and both of our parents in their dining room, for Christmas, with my sons.

Waiting.

Two years after a mastectomy, five surgeries and an aberrant infection in irradiated tissue… still waiting to see if marginal wholeness will ever be attained.

Waiting.

I’ve learned that waiting can be good, even if often agonizing and generally tedious. We have no control over anything so if we plan, if we don’t plan, life goes on anyway. Marriages end, babies are born, earthquakes happen, friends reunite -- the ebb and flow of the tides over the sands of time.  

While we were on the tarmac just now, a little kid in the back belted out “twinkle twinkle little star, <murmuring next line and then crescendo> up above the world so high like a diamond in the sky” cut off by his mamma before he could finish the verse. HA!

Check out the scenery while you are waiting for whatever you look forward to, and find something beautiful to focus on. Look carefully at the loved ones waiting with you, and mentally jot down what you love about them. Belt out a song that you love.

Fill the moments while you wait… and gray skies will give way to brighter times eventually.

♪ I Hope You Dance

     I dunno if you saw this, but today when I saw 'Where in The World is Matt Lauer?' and his piece about a tribe of Namibians who live the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago, in dung huts and with little water, living on goat milk and goats' meat -- I got a little wistful.
    Wistful?? <she has definitely gone over the edge, you say>. Wistful. These people are herders.They have no phones, no computers, no electricity. The men wear western dress now, but the women still wear goatskins garments and use a mixture of ocher, ash, and grease to protect and beautify themselves. To make of for lack of water, the women cleanse themselves with smoke from burning a local herb, so they smell pretty.  
     Every evening they sing and dance in front of the holy fire, as the sun goes down, thankful for another day. The sheer joy on all faces is what made me wistful.
   There is an undercurrent of malaise among us these days. Nothing seems right, like when you are a little kid and one of your parents goes away on a business trip or an extended visit, and the house isn't the same until they come home. We have fleeting happiness, but rarely know that sheer joy.
    Most of us Westerners certainly would not  in front of a small fire -- before retiring to a dung-covered hut to sleep on the ground for the night.
    That is all they know, and ergo, all they need.
    I am looking at my laptop, a TV remote, my 3G cell phone, a flat-screen TV, XBOX 360, DVD player, and a cozy living room full of stuff that I have acquired, arranged, and adored for quite some time. Not saying that I wanna go live in a dung-covered hut anytime soon, but the pang of near envy I felt for that thankful face in a desert sunset near a fire really grabbed my consciousness.
    Similarly, yesterday morning in church, I had that same longing for simplicity and peace, and it was answered in a manner most removed from the Namibians' day-to-day existence. I sing in a church with great gleaming organ pipes above each side of the chancel where the choir sits, and we face each other instead of looking out to the pews. Every Sunday, the organist plays the prelude while people straggle in from the parking lot, the restroom, the classrooms, wherever. My section sits and chats about the events and folks listed in the bulletin, and there is a pleasant buzz of fellowship and conversation throughout the sanctuary.  I tuned out yesterday, and just listened to the music.
    The combination of the soaring rich notes of the organ emitting from those gleaming pipes, the sight of 10-foot stained glass windows arching high above warm stone walls, and the intricately carved woodwork gracing the tops of the pipes like a mahogany curtain somehow removed me from the chatter and the crowd. I didn't move, didn't consciously tune out, but the glory of what I was seeing and hearing took me to a place where sheer beauty and I existed alone for just a few moments.
   I struggle with what I don't have. I can't point to a long and lucrative career, my body has been attacked by cancer and cancer-related surgeries, I haven't had the same 'regular' life as my peers, and have yet to 'catch up' with the ones I deem successful. I struggle with the fact that I feel the same way I did in high school, present but not really part of the scene. LOL
   God has a way of yanking me out of the doldrums. The wondrous sight and sound of the prelude yesterday evenly matched the wonder of the joyful faces of those simple people this morning, and then a friend posted this from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
      "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
    Joy can be found in rich, sumptuous experiences -- and in sparse simplicity. Your spirit can dance beneath mahogany woodwork in a cathedral, or on a desert floor. We are all minutiae in the story of the universe, but we can dance while we are here.


I hope you never lose your sense of wonder 
You get your fill to eat 
But always keep that hunger 
May you never take one single breath for granted 
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed 
I hope you still feel small 
When you stand by the ocean 
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens 
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance 

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance 
I hope you dance 
I hope you dance 


Lee Ann Womack