On Death and Dying

Melissa was not much older than I.  They diagnosed her with stomach cancer, and 4 torturous months later she was gone.

We hadn't lived life together in nearly five years.  If she were alive and well, we'd be lucky to see each other once every few years.  And yet, when I finally got the message--the one I knew full well was coming--I broke.  

Grief is such a bazaar sensation.  It's as if your heart completely deflates, but the aching fills the whole of your chest.  You feel empty, crushed, yet so full of pain and longing your ribs creak with tightness.  Being true to form I first tried to deny grief by analyzing it.  What a short analysis it was!  I soon stumbled upon the shard of a broken world.  He never meant death for us. 

The death we face every moment....the chasm between eternity and our temporal....that is not what He wanted for us.  That's why this hurts so, so badly.  This world is now fallen, and man, crooked and depraved.

The aching does not subside.  It only swells to bursting and my heart nearly disappears with the realization that this is the world my children will also know.

To live is Christ, to die is gain, finally starts to make flesh and blood sense.  I've been taught it 1001 times, but no one can teach you something you're not ready to fully know.  Brokenness is often the only way we find something not of ourselves.  

We took a road trip to Virginia for her funeral.  The whole time I wondered why I felt like I HAD to go--or else I would be missing an inner-working part.  As far as I know she is ill concerned with what is going on here--who makes it to her funeral or what the ceremony looks like.  She has much bigger fish to fry these days.  I spent half of the ceremony wondering if she would have liked it.  Is it the way she would have wanted?  Then I realized it didn't really matter.  Funerals are not for the departed.  They are for the ones who need to say goodbye.  And that is why I HAD to be there.  I needed to see her face devoid of her spirit.  I needed to see the casket close and leave for burial.  I don't know why, but I needed that to know this really happened.

She loved the beach and champagne, so that's how we said our own little farewell.

Standing as close to the water as possible, I stood and stared.  She loved this water so much, and I wanted to touch that part of her.  I started to feel the water pushing in...pulling out.  I felt it in my chest, my back, my legs.  The power of something so great, I could feel it pull me without even getting my toes wet. I longed to stretch my arms out and somehow understand that power.  Feeling that, I was struck dumb: Melissa can.  Now she can.  This power is from God, and there is no longer a chasm between her and His eternity.  And then I felt utterly and completely left behind.  I was not sorry for myself.  I was simply sober with the realization that we who stand here grieving her death....we are the ones still in the process of dying. 

Keep Dreamin'!

B.daddy and I are very blessed to have similar style and taste.  Either that or he's just very agreeable and doesn't mind my style.  In any case, we both love old things.  Old stuff is so much more interesting--even if it creaks all the time and breaks every once in a while.  We're weird like that.  And we like small spaces.  I know.  How totally un-American of us.  When I recall places we've visited and loved, they are small, well-appointed uses of space and resource.  This is how I knew our house was a good choice.  It is both old and small.  Small is a relative term; we have four main rooms downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs.  But none of the rooms are huge with lofty ceilings.  At times it feels smaller than our old 2 bedroom apartment which had slightly bigger living spaces and much higher ceilings.  But our present space is perfectly adequate to meet our family's needs. And we actually like adequate.

But I'm not about to tell you I'm perfectly content all the time.  Often the amount of work we need to put into this small-house-that-all-of-the-sudden-feels-HUGE is daunting.  I wonder why we didn't just compromise on this thing or that thing so we could have gotten a ready-made house.  At these times I have to remember The Dream.  I visualize how the yard will look in 3 years when my cottage-style garden is well underway.  How will the kitchen look after we gut it and turn it into the most adorably functional, old fashioned kitchen?  How serene will our bedroom be when we rip up the carpet and paint the floor white? (Well, I haven't okayed that one with the boss yet.)

This weekend we finally started to make a key part of our dream a reality.  We--and by we I mean my husband--pulled the living room ceiling down.  I want to expose every ceiling downstairs, because 1) it is awesome and 2) our ceilings are very low.  So, here's the play-by-play of Saturday and Sunday.  MUCH more work to come!

Here I am actually remembering to take a before picture.  Yay for me! (It's the small things.)

Ladybug is helping to show it off. See the shadows on the walls?  That's from puff-backs.  The previous owners did not care for the boiler properly and the exhaust system was very poor.  We remedied those two problems as soon as we moved in.  But everything still has a nice layer of soot on it.

The ceilings were about 7 feet high.

I actually love the center of this floor with the faded blue-gray paint.  But the edge of the floor is not so cute, so we'll get the whole thing sanded and refinished--and they will be gorgeous!

B.daddy has already started to strip the paint.  The trim has about 5-7 layers of paint on them.  We want to get it down to the wood, so when we paint it will look much better.

Just an example of our sooty window sills.

Multiple layers of ceiling covering trim and waisting precious head space.

All emptied out and ready to cover w/ plastic.

The couch is so big and our doorways so small that we have to take out the big living room window to move it.  And sometimes that window doesn't want to go back in. ;)

Our makeshift living room in the school room.  Good thing we're off for the summer!

And the bulk of it is down!

My poor husband had to do this all by himself. I was inextricably humbled to realize that I actually do not have the strength to either slam a hole in our ceiling or pull it down once a hole has been slammed for me.  Thankfully my husband is very strong and enjoys hard physical labor.

The kids would come to the window every once in a while to see what all the noise was about.

Those trash bags were my job.  I picked up the broken ceiling and put it in bags.  That is a job my husband would have hated to do, since you know, he had to rip it down all by himself to begin with.

The last of the lath; B.daddy pulled it down on Sunday.  He was exhausted!  Almost all of the original lath and horsehair plaster was already removed, so that's good.  It was replaced in the 50s? with a more spaced out grid and what is basically cardboard ceiling tiles.  And THAT was covered up by a plaster ceiling.

B.dawg kept all of these old boards so we can use them somewhere else.

 

Of course there is a wound to show for all this work.  (No worries, he got his Tetanus last Summer.)

So!! Here we are with all the boards down.  The contraption in the center is holding up some electrical.  When we figure out what we want to do about a light, we'll take it down and make it look better. And the silver chimney thing behind it was a heating element that probably ran from a wood stove and went straight through the second floor to radiate heat. (It's capped off.)

Notches were cut for the lath, but I kind of like them.  My husband and I are not yet in complete agreement about where to go from here.  I assumed we would paint the exposed ceiling white, and I assumed I had communicated this with him.  Apparently not. He wants to leave them bare, and though I've fought it, I'm starting to come around to the idea.  We can always paint it later, but we CANNOT get the paint off once it soaks into this old, old wood.

Our biggest beam which sits on......

Yep. A great big, exterior beam with serious softness issues.  The very last board B.daddy removed, and he found this.  That pipe runs the steam to the girls' radiator above, and I'm guessing the softness is from condensation over the years.  Which maybe would mean there's nothing to worry about now that it's open and can stay dry?  I don't know.  May be wishful thinking.

So, that's that!  We'll see what happens from here...

Third Person

Sometimes the cards are simply not in ones favor.

One might wake up at 5 a.m. to take the new puppy out to potty.  She'll notice the dirty dishes and the day-old coffee in the pot on her way out the back door.  When she comes back in praising the properly peeing and pooping puppy beyond all reason and self-respect, she'll warm up the day-old coffee and glare at the three-day-old laundry sitting on the dining room table.  As if glaring at it will make it go away.

She'll take her stale coffee to the living room.  Instead of going back to bed only to wake up and go through the above process twice in one morning, she'll snuggle with the adorable shih tzu and listen to a very awake Beth Moore imploring women to be confident and courageous.  Halfway through, her half naked children will descend upon her expressing their chronic hunger for that magically delicious cereal.  She will pour the cereal and the milk and strategically place them between stacks of clean clothes.  She will make it very clear that they WILL NOT get cereal and milk on the clothes.

While they are eating and listening to scripture on her smart phone, she'll frantically straighten up the school room to prepare for the second to the last day of "official" lessons.  She has done nothing to improve her appearance since she left her room at 5 a.m.  And she smells kind of funny.  Nevertheless, just two more days of lessons.  

She'll survive the morning.  The oldest one will whine about her seat work until headphones are popped on her ears and she can hum through it all.  The middle one will prove yet again he has surprisingly stellar handwriting skills.  The littlest one will run around, sometimes listening, sometimes not--all the while succeeding in wearing three completely different outfits in as many hours.  The puppy will pee on a blanket.

The kitchen is finally getting cleaned when her husband--who is working from home and bearing witness--will tell her one of his team will stop by for a meeting.  In the house.  The messy house.  With the messy, stinky wife.  She stops all work to don a bra, make-up, and grown up clothes.  And deodorant.  Then she'll get back to work.

By 11 o'clock the kitchen is clean, the laundry stacks have gotten one load higher, and she's starving.  She'll start preparing lunch for her husband and his guy, and she'll have the bright idea to have a backyard picnic.  Her oldest hostess will happily help her get things in order, and after not too much work the men are fed and the picnic is ready.  She'll carry her pee-happy puppy in one hand with a Dr. Pepper and a glass of ice in the other.  When she sets down her glass he will knock it over onto the grass which has served as his urinal for the last four weeks.  She'll leash him up out of reach and get clean ice.  Her three children waiting.

She'll finally sit down and pour the blessed, caffeinated liquid and remember that she forgot books.  She'll send her oldest in to pick out the very best ones, which proves to be a task for all three.  However, the littlest one will pout about something and have to be retrieved by a grown up.  When all four are finally sitting down with drink, food, and books to enjoy, the oldest will hold up a hand and foot covered in the puppy's poop.  The mess that makes everyone cringe will be expediently cleaned and all involved parties thoroughly sanitized.

Finally, mother and children will sit on their clean blankets with their clean food and clean hands.  The middlest and littlest ones will pray their sweet prayers, and she'll wonder when they'll tell them that the friend they're praying for didn't make it out of Syria.  

Alas...for now, they eat good food and read good books.  And that is one dang, good Dr. Pepper.  The littlest one will keep spilling the contents of her Bean Salad Wrap.  Most of the beans will be salvageable, but one chick pea in particular is not.  Sitting facing her mother the little one will attempt to throw it over her back for the birds to peck from the yard.  Instead it will flop two feet in front of her.  Directly in her mother's Dr. Pepper.  Her head will drop, and she'll immediately realize she has won a hundred tiny victories in only seven hours. 

In these seven, absurd hours she has not yelled at anyone.  She has not thought hateful things about her husband.  She has not felt sorry for herself or doled out the typical round of mental self-battering.  For the most part, she's gone with the flow and done the best she can with what she's got.  Her kids' feet are dirty, the house is still a wreck, and that deodorant isn't going to make it through the day.  But she is basking in a new and unusual sensation: to laugh at the days to come.  And, oh it is so fleeting, she knows it is.  A day like this can still undo her before she realizes it has.  

But it hasn't today.  And that dear friends is a victory.