Angie Kinghorn

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.  

Libraries

           Libraries are magical places.  Walk into one and you sense stillness otherwise obtainable only through the regular practice of yoga or the presence of Jedi blood in one’s veins (unless you happen to go during toddler story hour, in which case a library can duplicate the hellish cacophony of a grocery store).  The children’s section has a bridge that leads to Terabithia, and a tricky wardrobe that sometimes opens to a snowy forest, a lamppost, and a faun.  Nancy Drew holds court in a corner next to the Hardy Boys, and the only mystery they can’t figure out has to do with something called a wrinkle in time.
            Some girls dream of being locked in a department store for the night.  Others imagine an evening stuck in a library after dark, alone with the characters that have taught us, the plotlines that have simultaneously appalled and inspired us, befuddled us to the point of madness during exam time, and ultimately, turned us into bibliophiles.  Books live and breathe; the proof is in the smell of crisp new pages at your nearest Barnes and Noble, but the most tangible evidence may be found in the weathered spines gracing shelves organized by call number.  These tomes sport covers cracked from the weight of hundreds of hands, bindings that flop open to ultimate fight scenes, pages stained where the dear reader was too absorbed in the story to bother with a napkin before turning a page—books are velveteen rabbits.  Once the gilt rubs off the leather and the pages become dog-eared and stick together, they become real.
Angst is palpable in the young adult section, where vampires and zombies slouch around shelves, secretly jealous of a young wizard with a lightning bolt scar but pretending not to care that he outranks them on the bestseller list.  Voldemort has a weekly poker game with the Volturi, while Dumbledore and Carlyle Cullen sit and muse about the nature of evil and adolescents over their respective cups of mead and Type O positive.     
            A few aisles over, there’s always a party going on in fiction.  Scarlett O’Hara sits on the same shelves as Carrie Bradshaw, Holden Caulfield, and that geisha who may or may not have written her own memoirs, and, while none of them get along well, the free-flowing libations during cocktail hour make for fascinating chatter.  That other Boleyn girl and the rest of the Tudors sip their ale and look down their noses at the bodice-rippers and Fabios who brazenly display the Harlequin logo, not even attempting to masquerade as respectable historical fiction.
            After the librarians leave, the hobbits on the bottom shelf join forces to reach the raunchy contemporary novels housed up top.  It wasn’t until they watched their own movie and saw Gimli tell Aragorn, “You’ll have to toss me!” that they figured out how to do it.  
            The lawyers from that infamous Firm keep trying to get tips from the Godfather guys, but Eliot Ness and his gang keep that shelf pretty well policed.   And if you miss any of it, don’t worry.  Jack Ryan and his CIA pals have got it all on tape.  And if they mess up, they’ll send Dirk Pitt out to fix it.  Just look for the explosions.    
            Over in Chick Lit, the gang is divided between New York City and London, but they’re too busy going after the wrong men to notice.  Bridget Jones is pissed, not only because of her worsening Chardonnay habit, but because she’s now considered the grandmother of the genre and must share shelf space with the likes of that shopaholic nitwit.
In the bathroom there’s always a fight brewing.  Dorian Gray won’t give up the mirror, but you know those Bergdorf blondes need to primp, too, and they’ve been listening to Kathy Griffin, so they can cut a bitch with one swing of a stiletto.  Ghandi sits perched on an outcropping of the stairs, and just wants everyone to get along, but is driven to the brink of violence by all the hedge fund wives badgering him to share his diet secrets. 
You might guess nonfiction would be about as exciting as talking to an extroverted actuary (definition: one who looks at your shoes instead of his), but it’s a wild corner.  Elizabeth Gilbert insists on yelling “attraversiamo!” while jumping from shelf to shelf with whatever poor soul she’s convinced to travel around with her in search of transcendent food.  Brooke Shields likes to sit on the cover of “Down Came the Rain” to rant about Tom Cruise.  The Freakonomics guys postulate theory after theory about the conspiracy that will bring the libraries down.  To date, their most compelling idea involves the East India Trading Company, the price of coffee, and the fact that I-485 still isn’t finished. 
            The audio/visual department is anything but boring.  That guy from the Cobra Kai is constantly shouting, “Get him a body bag!  Yeah!!!”  Johnny keeps trying to move “Dirty Dancing” from its designated spot, muttering, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” and Nora Ephron simply will not shut up about how badly she feels about her neck.  Late at night you can always hear Mel Gibson yelling “FREEDOM!”
            Mecklenburg County has just announced it will be closing 12 of its 24 libraries, including all of our favorite branches.  I practically live in the library.  I want my children to grow up in libraries and to love books as I do, to feel that there’s always a ready escape from this life in the form of a novel, or more information to be found in a biography.  I wish they would grow to love the characters who shaped my childhood, and I wish that would happen in our library, where those characters they’ll come to know and love will always be right there, shelved neatly and ready to pick up where they left off.   
I could give a million reasons that closing all these libraries is a terrible idea.  I’m sure none of them would be news to the county commissioners who bear the ultimate responsibility of finding a way to save these branches and their collections.
However, the most compelling thing that comes to mind is just about the one thing I’m sure the county commissioners have not anticipated.  God help the messenger that brings the news to our dear friends on the shelves after dark.  If you thought Voldemort storming the gates of Hogwarts was a sight, wait until you see what happens when he and Macbeth join forces.
It won’t be pretty.  

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.

Blarney

         Today I wish I were in Savannah, looking at a green river while chugging a pint of green beer.  Actually, I’ve never had a green beer, but it sounds fun.  I’ll bet it ends up tinting your teeth a nice shade of mildew, though.  So perhaps it’s better that I am at home on this St. Patrick’s Day, doing all the normal mommy things I do.
            It’s just that even after three years of this, none of it seems remotely normal.
            Take, for instance, what happened when I picked the twins up from preschool today.  The kids spent the morning hunting leprechauns, but (shock!) came up empty-handed.   Leaving the school, we met a woman coming in with a double jogging stroller.  She had two babies who couldn’t have been more than 18 months apart, and one of them was clad entirely in green.
            My daughter saw the baby, and I could see the wheels turning in her head as she squealed, pointing at the green baby.  “Mommy, look!!!  A leprechaun!!!  A leprechaun!!!” 
            It always amazes me that my kids have such personality, and that they can talk and even make sense sometimes, but it’s when they say something so unintentionally or inappropriately hysterical that I want to look around and say, “Really?  This is my life?  This is normal now?”
            I’m far from Type B, but I no longer freak out when one of my kids eats a spider web.  I wasn’t super- happy when my son tried to consume a used rectal thermometer probe cover, but I didn’t panic.  When I found him gnawing on our dog’s favorite chew toy, I tried to think about the positives of more germ exposure.  Less allergies, right?  Then they ate two copies of “Goodnight Moon,” and my thought was, “Oh, good, at least it’s fiber.”
            Medical emergencies are commonplace.  I called poison control after my daughter ate a flower and learned that lantana leaves and flowers are ok to eat, but berries are not.  New Year’s Eve was spent getting my son’s scalp stapled shut in the pediatric ER after he went coffee table diving.  My daughter sledded into a tree face-first and I learned that snow makes a good ice pack in a pinch.  My son shoved a raisin up his nose one night and my husband and I got to perform emergency ENT style surgery to remove it using only a mag-lite and a pair of tweezers.  And lest you think all this mayhem is limited to the children, I have also had to call animal poison control.  Apparently if your baby is taking Prevacid, vomits, and the dog eats it, you should be worried. 
            An average day as a mother to boy/girl twins also finds me yelling things like, “No!  We do not touch penises!”  Things my mother said that I swore would never leave my lips have become gospel.  I say, “Because I said so!” and I consider that to be the ultimate valid reason for my kids to obey.  The other day I even yelled, “Don’t make me come up there!” 
I also lie, telling my children that for today, they can’t do anything bad because leprechauns are hiding all over the house watching them.  During Christmas I say it’s elves.  I tell them with a straight face that the dog chases all the monsters out from under their beds and that the shadow cast on the ceiling of their bedroom at night is a rocket ship, come to take them off to dreamland.  My daughter wanted Jordan almonds in a store and I told her she couldn’t have them because only people named Jordan were allowed to eat them.  When I’m out of parenting authorities to cite, I turn to J.K. Rowling, telling my kids that I can’t give them any more banana because we’re out of banana, and that food is one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration.  And to them, that makes sense.   
I wonder how long that will last?