Angie Kinghorn

The pause before screaming

            Today I forgot my father was dead.
For one glorious second, standing in my bathroom, digging through a cosmetics bag while ruminating about something ridiculous the kids had just done, I thought, “Wow, I can’t wait to tell Dad.  Wonder what he’ll say about that?”
            And then memory hit with a physical pain, and I stared into the mirror and saw a figure clutching her abdomen with one hand and the counter with another.  The abrupt pain of it was such a shock that I actually gasped.
            After a minute or so, the adrenaline drained out of me, along with all my energy, and I felt the familiar, heavy pressure of grief in my belly.  The eyes in the mirror looked old and tired.
            This is not this first time this has happened.  Several times I’ve had the phone in my hand, ready to dial, before I’ve remembered.  I catch myself referring to my father in the present tense or talking about “my parents” instead of simply saying, “my mother.”  Usually in the morning I wake up with the sense that something’s not quite right, but unless I’ve had a nightmare specifically about Dad, it can take me a few minutes to remember why my sheets are tangled from a night of running through buildings trying to find something that isn’t there.
            My father was a sentimental man, though he wasn’t raised to talk about his feelings, preferring instead to stick with small talk about his oral surgery practice, his golf game, or any number of topics that fascinated him throughout his life.   He held his fears close as well, a habit which infuriated me.  I wanted to talk about his cancer.  I wanted him to talk about his cancer.  Because when I’m afraid, that’s what I do: talk.  God made my brain so that it best handles fear by imagining and then speaking about the worst possible scenario, so I can prepare for it.
            My father was wired differently.  He handled fear best through denial.  I wish I’d come to understand this before he died.  Ironically enough, I’ve come to understand the beauty of denial now, as I grieve, experiencing it in those beautiful stolen moments, those unexpected split seconds where my synapses forget to fire and I remember my father as whole, and healthy, and where for just a moment, I can hear him laugh.
            But for me, I’m not sure this denial is worth it.  When the realization hits, it’s like the pause before a baby’s scream, that horrible moment when you know what’s coming, you can hear and see the great intake of breath, yet you can do nothing to stop the onslaught of sound and fury.  That moment finds you cringing, flinching away from an inevitable blow.  Sometimes the anticipation, the pause, is worse than the scream itself.
            In 2000, three years into his cancer battle, I was searching desperately for a present for my father.  Perhaps it was his birthday, or maybe Father’s Day.  I don’t remember.  The usual gifts of cologne, books, magazines, or DVDs didn’t seem appropriate.  I wanted him to have something to hold close, a source of comfort in the dark moments he surely had, even if he didn’t share them.  In short, I wanted him to have the peace of God.
            But how do you put God in a box?
            You can wrap up a Bible, which I did, years later, after he saw me with mine and asked for one.  But without a spiritual Sherpa to guide you over the steep hills and around the treacherous ravines within, the Bible can become an object of frustration rather than comfort.  When I first tried to plow through my beautiful, leather-bound King James version, I started with the first chapter of Genesis and didn’t even make it to Exodus.
            After much thought and research, I bought a silver pendant of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer.  I made sure it was on a long chain so Dad could wear it under his clothes without it showing, and so it would hang close to his heart.
            Never in my wildest dreams did I think he would wear it.
            But he seemed touched by the gift and put the necklace on that day.  He didn’t take it off again (except for MRIs) until the chain broke.  My mother either had it fixed or got a replacement, I’m not sure which.  It remains the only gift I ever gave him that I’m sure he loved, that he didn’t want to be without.  Perhaps the idea of an intercessor was a comfort, or maybe it was the idea that Peregrine had suffered as he had, and had, through a miracle of Christ, been healed.  I don’t know, because though he wore it constantly, Dad never did talk about it.
            In the emergency room, the doctors and nurses removed his necklace as they worked feverishly over him.  Someone handed it to me in an orange-topped plastic container, and that’s when I started to cry.
            Later, after Dad was stabilized, he asked for his glasses, and to my surprise, his necklace.  The doctors agreed that it was ok for him to wear it, so we fastened it around his neck, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.
            It was there the night we stayed up together watching television and found out that neither of us were smarter than a 5th grader.  It was there when my husband drove to the hospital so he could say goodbye.  It was there, visible on his chest, when his breathing turned agonal, and I can still see it on his pale, waxy skin, heaving up and down with each breath as he fought against leaving.
            After he died, Mom gave me the necklace.  I wore it to his funeral and for several weeks thereafter.  Then it became too painful to wear all the time.  I didn’t need a reminder that he was gone.  Every heartbeat pounded it out.  There was no escaping it.

            Recently I’ve started to wear the necklace again, hoping that the slight weight of it resting above my heart will be a comfort to me as it was to him, a reminder to pray, a reminder to hope.  But I also wear it to help me remember that he’s gone; to protect me from the pause before screaming that follows those exquisitely beautiful moments of forgetting.

Pain

Pain is natural, a byproduct of our human condition.  We sinners are blessed with free will, and with that, license to hurt each other, both physically and mentally.  Our mere existence in this world invites pain.  These frail, human bodies cannot escape the laws of biology and physics, nor their companions, illness and injury. 
If we think about it at all, most of us struggle to place God’s role in our world of pain.  Does he cause us to suffer?  Or does he merely allow it?  If he merely allows it, isn’t that the same thing as causing it, since he has the power to stop it?  Does he punish us with pain?  We watch as bad things happen to good people, and we want to know what God has to do with it.
According to self-help books, people in the psychology business, and what you sometimes hear from the pulpit, pain is God’s way of refining us.  
            Hearing that can flip your world on its head, and if you’re not careful, it can make you angry with God.  It makes more sense that pain would tear us down, and when we turn to the Lord for comfort, we don’t want to think of him as having anything to do with causing our suffering. 
I’m not sure I can form words and sentences sufficient to encompass the experience of losing my father.  The pain was and is multi-faceted, and felt differently by everyone.  The pain of his diagnosis tasted like fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of the known in the form of twin specters of my grandfathers, both of whom died of prostate cancer.  My mother’s father died a mere two years prior to my father’s diagnosis. My maternal grandfather fought the disease for sixteen years.  I do not remember a time he wasn’t sick.  I do remember the side effects of his treatment, and how it chilled us all to see my father begin to have those same hot flashes and sudden sweats.
            After my father’s surgery, we found out he didn’t have clean margins, meaning parts of the tumors were left in his body.  That pain tasted like dread.  He began radiation therapy, and we felt the pain of hope, but not for long.  Then came the long-term hormone therapy, the pain of watching him suffer as the cancer spread to his bones.  The memory of my grandfather’s metastatic bone pain echoed around my head every time I saw my father wince, and I wanted to weep.  But Dad didn’t want us to cry, so I held back the tears while I was with him, only to dissolve every time I got to the interstate on my way back home.
            Anger.  Oh, how I was angry.  Looking back, I’m not sure the anger had an object.  It was amorphous, the result of my Type A personality trapped in a situation over which I had no control.  I felt the opposite of refined.  I was ready to throw open the window and yell to God, just as I had countless times before, “I’m refined enough already!  Just stop!  I have plenty of character, you don’t need to build any more!”
But the truth is, way back when I first started yammering at God about not needing any more character, thank-you-very-much, I was too young and stupid to realize exactly how much strength and character I didn’t have.  Whenever pain struck, whether in the form of death, illness, depression, or family strife, I found myself shattered, bruised and battered, unable to comprehend how there could still be weddings and parties and newborn babies.  Didn’t people know the world had ended?  I’ve lost count of how many times the world has ended, and yet here we are.  One Sunday I gave my anger to God on an offering plate, and I have never wanted it back.  Instead of anger, I want to understand.  I want to put a reason to suffering, for it to have counted for something.
In total, we spent twelve years watching my father caught in the grip of cancer, edging ever more rapidly and painfully downhill. During this time I never turned away from God, but it took me years to learn to turn towards him.   Six years into Dad’s illness, I married, and it was then I began to study God.  The thirst to know him has been a constant in my life since I was quite small, but in that journey one needs a guide, and I didn’t know enough to go looking for one.  Now I have the blessing of being married to my spiritual teacher, and through Bible studies together, Sunday school, and our own conversations, I began a relationship with God that wasn’t limited to Sundays.
The end of our time with my father came abruptly, with an early morning collapse, an ambulance to the hospital, near death in the ER, and then two weeks of hospital Hospice.  Those two weeks redefined pain for all of us.  I reached for God while bending over the hospital bed, holding his hand and trying to offer comfort and amateur nursing without crushing the central line.  During the nights I spent in his room, on my knees by the bed, I tried to pray but ran out of words, listening to his breathing grow ragged and rough, sprinting to find a nurse every time the pain pump beeped to advertise its emptiness.  I implored God to fill me with strength, and envisioned the Holy Spirit standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder.  As he lay dying an agonizing, traumatic, uncontrollable death, God strengthened me enough to hold his hand and talk to him.  The nurses told us that even though he was unresponsive, he could likely hear, and so I told him it was ok for him to go.  I told him not to be afraid, that God loved him, that through God’s grace he was saved, that he was going to a place where there was no pain, not to worry, that all of us would be ok.  For hours I talked to him and to God.  His agony was so great that I implored God to take him, to release him from his broken body.  I implored my father to let go.  As the hours wore on and the pain seemed worse, I even told him at one point, “Daddy, if you see a light, please, go towards it.  It’s ok.  Please, it’s ok.  You can go.”    
Do I think God caused my father to suffer?  No, I don’t.  Physical pain and illness are a part of life here.  Do I think God used that suffering to produce something positive?  Absolutely.
All this is not to say the pain has been fun, or that it’s gone or ever will be gone. I’ve learned not to run from it, but to face it.  My goal is not to get past, but to get through.  My therapist calls this part “the work of grief.”  It’s horrible work, and there are days when I want to retreat, to pretend it didn’t happen, to hide in that familiar warm place we call Denial.  But when I turn towards the hurt, confront it over and over, it gets infinitesimally less painful each time.  I don’t like this place of grief, this dark, cold place with its stream of images flashing before my eyes, the cruel pictures vivid no matter how many Xanex I throw at them. I know that God will not leave me here forever, but I also know, after grieving for a mere half a year, my stay is far from over.
This week marks six months since my father’s death, and every time I begin to take a breath and think, “ok, I’m fine, it’s all going to be fine now,” something happens.  It’s usually something small; playing ball with my kids outside on that first crisp spring day, the smell of one of his old shirts, or reaching to dial the phone before remembering that I can’t call him anymore.  I had a crisis of grief upon the death of my electric toothbrush, because I couldn’t call my father (an oral surgeon) to ask him what type of replacement to buy.     
Here I have to give God credit.  He has made this pain a gift.  Peeling off the wrappings of suffering, I have uncovered a personal relationship with the Lord and forged a better relationship with my earthly father.  And then there’s the ultimate gift: the certainty that he’s in a better place.
I bought a new toothbrush.  I try to tell my kids about their grandfather.  And sometimes the smell of those old shirts makes me smile instead of cry.  

Our Father

Prayer has never been my strong suit, but I talk to God a lot these days.  Throughout my childhood I thought prayer had to be liturgical or some childish rhyming thing at the dinner table, and for the important stuff, definitely something lofty, weighty, and memorized, or read out of the Book of Common Prayer, vetted by those who know better so that it would be worthy of speaking to God. 
I grew up Episcopalian and married a Southern Baptist.  In church math, Episcopalian + Southern Baptist = either Presbyterian or Methodist.  We’re not big on that whole predestination thing, so we joined the Methodist church.  My husband grew up in a much more religious household than I did, and one of the things he learned was how to pray.  I was startled the first several times we prayed together, at the way he seemed so comfortable with God, the way he spoke to Him as a friend—a lofty, revered friend, but not some far-removed authority figure.  My prayers began to emulate his, and gradually, I’ve come to think of God as someone to talk with, not someone to whom I should throw a prepackaged speech with an “Amen” tacked on the end.  But I still find myself guilty of that most common of practices, of being a fair-weather friend to God.  Maybe it would be better to explain it as being a bad-weather friend to God.  We all tend to do it, to ignore Him on the beautiful sunny days so that we can go out and avail ourselves of his bounty.  But the minute something goes bad, we’re on our knees, begging Him to fix it, pleading with Him that if He will just do this one teensy thing this one time, we’ll never do X, Y, or especially Z again.
I’m guessing this is not His favorite form of communication, because it’s not communication at all when you just talk at somebody, when you never listen, and when you only come to them in time of need.  I’ve tried to listen, but I’ve never heard a big booming voice, and no burning shrub has ever spoken to me, either.  Sometimes I think God may be speaking to me, but it’s hard to know whether that’s my little Jiminy Cricket chirping or whether it really is the voice of the Lord.  It always seemed to me that if God were to talk to you, it would not be something you could miss.  But now I think we miss it all the time because we can’t or won’t listen properly.  I’ve tried and tried to listen, and for someone who’s always been the consummate blabbermouth, it’s very difficult to shut up and quiet your mind enough to let God’s voice, however whispered, enter your head.  Most of the time, I fall asleep.
Somewhere along the line, when life got busy, my prayers became complacent.  I’d start to pray as I was drifting off to sleep, and all God got was “Dear Lord, thank you for this day and all the …..”  Then my father’s health started to slide rapidly, and wham, there I was, back on my knees with the fervor of a nun.  I didn’t know what to pray for.  Obviously, I wanted my father to live, but not like he was—not in agony, unable to rise from a hospital bed.  But could I really pray for him to die?  Was that right?
In the end I ended up on my knees, chanting “Your will be done, your will be done,” over and over again.   
There was a chapel in the hospital, a small, simple room, with rows of chairs and an ancient piano.  There was a makeshift altar, and on it was a notebook, filled with anonymous letters to the Lord from people kneeling there while their loved ones lay dying in the rooms down the hall.  Some were heartbreaking.  Parents lost children, leaving their pain behind, palpable in the ink.  Siblings wrote in broken English, praying to a God they may or may not have known, their words hesitant, their fear radiating from the unsteady chicken scratch in the low light. 
Then there were others, the letters that saw joy through the pain, even through extreme suffering and death.  Parents thanked God for the privilege of having their child in their lives, if even for a short time.  Others thanked Him for merciful release of their loved ones, and managed to have their joy at the thought of Heaven radiate through their pain and loss.
When my father died, I was downstairs in the cafeteria with my sister.  We had just ordered pancakes after spending a long night sleeping in the room with our father.  We sat down at the table, and a nurse walked through the door and came to us.  I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth.
“Oh, my God,” I said, as I read her face.  “He just died, didn’t he?”
She nodded.
The first thing I did was look up, and I for once I didn’t have to labor over what to say. 
“Thank you, God, oh, thank you.” 
Later, I found myself at home alone in my childhood bedroom.  I couldn’t get my husband on the phone, and the nap I was supposed to be taking wasn’t happening.  Perhaps it was shock, or plain exhaustion, but I couldn’t think of what to say to God then.  So I reached for the Lord’s Prayer.  “Our Father…” I started, then stopped as it hit me. 
Now I have two fathers in Heaven.  I hope both of them can hear me when I pray.

A beginning

Like the commercial says, everything changes when you have a baby.  But nobody really talks about the seismic event that shakes your life to the core when you have more than one baby at the same time. (My guess is that mothers of multiples are simply too busy chasing after their children to sit down, much less put pen to paper).  When you have twins, your world narrows to the twilight zone between half-sleep and the fugue state of waking fatigue.  Days are indistinguishable, and you’re never sure whether the baby you hear crying is real or a figment of your remaining brain cells.  Decisions are an impossibility, pain and a hospital grade breast pump are constant companions, and your skin shines taught from swelling and is constantly sticky from night sweats, leaking breastmilk, or spit-up.
            My friends and family thought I had it all together.  Postpartum depression felt like a shameful secret that I only began to share when the worst of it was over.  During those dark days, I cried with no provocation, suffered from panic attacks, felt like a failure of a mother, and was ashamed.  What right did I have to be miserable when I had two beautiful, healthy babies?  I learned to put on a pretty good show and act like the supermom I thought I should be, but most days I felt like a mosaic of my former self, held together by caffeine, Touche Eclat concealer, Spanx, and Valium.  I suspect at least some of my friends, even those with singletons, were in the same boat, but admitting that mothering is difficult to the point of tears is to feel inadequate, so no one talks about it.  It is disconcerting to suddenly find yourself fat, leaky, blurry-eyed, and at the beck and call of tiny infants that seem to excrete ten times their body weight a day, and with no one to talk to about how, while wonderful, this experience is incredibly hard.  We are the daughters of first wave feminists, raised to believe we could do anything and everything we wanted, raised to expect that we could have it all, do it all, achieve it all.  To stumble seems disrespectful to our mothers’ generation, who fought so hard to claw their way up corporate ladders with business plans in one hand and baby bottles in the other.
To be honest, the first month of my twins’ life is a sleep deprived blur, punctuated by vivid memories in which I can smell the sweet warmth of their silky hair and milky breath as they were cradled to my chest, but I can also still feel the pain of a fresh c-section incision and the mental agony of a traumatic birth with complications.  My body felt alien and the engorged breasts and constant pumping left me extremely sympathetic towards and slightly jealous of dairy cows.  They at least had someone to clean their pump equipment!  My feet were so swollen that I had to wear slippers to my follow-up ob appointments, but I hardly noticed—I was too busy trying not to cry when my doctor asked me how I was doing.  I was shocked at the blast of icy air that greeted us when we left the hospital.  Thanks to three months of bed rest and a week in the hospital after the birth, I had no idea fall had given way to a harsh winter.  The world had gone on without me, and from that moment, I felt a little bit behind and totally unprepared.  What followed was a year full of the highest highs and the lowest lows.  Somehow, we got through it.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
            During the first 18 months of their lives, writing (not to mention a saintly husband, antidepressants, and a very good therapist) saved me.  When your baby dumps the dog’s water bowl on the floor for the fourth time of the day and he, his sister, and the dog end up soaking wet again, you can cry.  Or you can laugh.  Mostly I chose (or at least tried) to laugh, but it was often laughter through tears.  Each time I found myself in the middle of a twinfant crisis, I’d get through it by thinking how I could transform it into a funny story to email to my family, or in letters I wrote to my babies.
            Now my “babies” are three years old.  I have been flogged by postpartum depression, but in the end I’m proud to say I kicked its ass.  But my father died in September, so now I’m in the business of dealing with grief so that I can one day kick it to the curb.
            My tools are assembled:  I have my husband and family, my faith, my writing, a therapist who pushes me to rip off the band-aid by writing more, and last but not least, I have bourbon.
            God is good.  All the time.