All the way down

All the way down

O that my words were written down!

O that they were inscribed in a book!

O that with an iron pen and with lead

They were engraved on a rock forever!

For I know that my Redeemer lives,

And that at the last he will stand upon the earth

And after my skin has been thus destroyed

Then in my flesh shall I see God.

–Job 19:23-26

There was a point in March, six months later,  when I walked in a downpour along the lakeshore in Chicago, crying for her. Lunatic, really. Too dramatic. In that moment, though, it was just how I felt. So full of grief that it was absurd to me. Grief in every pore and sinew. I was a stranger to myself, and could find no comfort. 

The lakeshore was closed then too, because of COVID. Not only was I wet and miserable, I was wondering if the park police on their soggy rounds were going to arrest me, or merely tell me to leave.

I needed to do it. The physical expression of my sadness from cold and sobs and soaked denim and shoes. Two miles in, the sky lowering and the rain unceasing, I realized that wet and miserable or dry and miserable I was going to be miserable until somehow I wasn’t any more. So I went home. 

Looking back on the time following the death of my daughter I can see it in different ways than I could see at the time. The tools I have for understanding the nature of the world and the way of her people have evolved over time. There was a god-drunkenness in my early days of ministry that gave way to something more human centered. Always incarnational. Always curiously held in the narratives of BIblical literature. But when I lost her I lost access to all these tools for a while. I wandered in the closed park, soaked myself, and cried. And sought a way home.

In the days before she died we were in our usual way. She came with me to visit my mother at the memory care center. Missed a refill of her new anti-anxiety medication but promised she’d get it the next day. That next day I woke up with a headache that exploded out of the top of my head, and spent the day resting. It wasn’t until later than usual that I texted her to see if she needed anything. No reply. I was at work when the bumps on the eyelid emerged that told me I had shingles, confirmed by a photo through the portal to the doctor. It had been two days since she’d replied. I texted my husband and asked him to check on her, to make sure she wasn’t sick and in need of something.

When he called I drove home in a fog. I knew the shock of it would get me there. Enough pastoral care experience to know how bodies and minds take in the words that my husband didn’t quite say when he called me. “You should come home” was what he said. 

But when I got to the house I walked into the basement first, by my daughter’s apartment, and so the police knew I was there before he did.

They confirmed that she was not just sick, or injured, but dead.

I don’t know what it feels like to have every inch of your skin splashed over by scalding water but I think perhaps it feels like this.

The shock I had deferred to make the drive safely. The strange dark places in  your head where words have fled and nothing comes to replace them. The tears, the sobs you can hear without quite connecting that you are the one who is sobbing. The dust on the stairs, the hapless young policemen whose job is not to care for grieving mothers.

They were as kind as they knew how to be, having not seen much yet, having not yet connected the brokenness of the world to their own brokenness. “Sit down,” they told me, and ducked in my direction under the heating pipes. The detective, when he got there, was more practiced. But there was no real need for a detective. The cause was plain enough. She was an alcoholic and she binged. We didn’t find her in time.

When you lose a child you lose all the hope for them that you have carried since they came into the world. When you lose them to addiction those hopes may have been dimming slowly for a long time but they do not ever really go away until the possibility of their ever being fulfilled is extinguished.

It is easy to think that such a loss will kill you.

My daughter’s death, and its immediate aftermath were complicated by the shingles, so the pain of those days was extraordinary, vicious, unrelenting, and, at my doctor’s insistence, accompanied by a visit to the emergency room to be sure I wasn’t going to lose the vision in my right eye. “You need to go to the emergency room,” the nurse said. “We’ve had a death in the family,” I said. “You need to go to the emergency room,” she repeated. It was as if my grief had manifested itself on my eyelid, and in a pain that exploded out the top of my head. I was struck like Job, burning in my skin, threatening my sight, and my child gone.

Job. That guy. What energy he had. The story is told sometimes that he challenges God, and he does a bit, until God comes out of the whirlwind and explains that in a world of such majesty no justification is needed. Fair, I have always thought. Job, though, is really just as much talking to his friends. Insisting that he isn’t being punished for anything - that he’s the same righteous guy he’s always been. The friends left something to be desired, honestly. “It must be you,” they kept saying. 

Your real friends will be there when something really indescribably terrible happens, and they will stay there telling you that they don’t know what to say, but that they’re coming by with soup, or calling, or sitting on your couch until you tell them to go. They will say stupid things out of love for you, and you will soak up the love and survive another day.

The first wash of kindness was all from my husband, who attended to the immediate demands of rehoming cats and disposing of her badly neglected things. Shingles isn’t very contagious but I didn’t want to make a bad thing happen to any other living breathing thing.

Once I was a little in the world again there were cards and flowers. Soup in the kitchen. Prayers over the phone, and such kindnesses. I lived because of kindness. Though I lived tentatively for a long while.

THE PICTURES I HAVE AND DO NOT HAVE

On my phone I have one picture that I do not look at. It is my daughter, laid out at the funeral home. The table is just an aluminum gurney, but they draped her in some cloth, leaving her face uncovered. Her cheeks were pink against the whiteness of the rest of her skin.They did as well as they could with her. The ornament was in her hair. She wore the dress and shoes I had brought. She was icy to my touch. No embalming for cremation so they kept her cold after the post-mortem by the coroner. 

I took the picture because she died so very suddenly that my son could not come to be with us, and I knew he would need to see her. We need to see our dead in order to accept that they have really died. I shared it only with him, and because I will never delete it I do sometimes run across it in the photo stream when I am looking for something else. Each time it happens now it is a little less scalding than the last time.

It is true that time eases even this pain. 

I do not have the pictures of all the rooms before then where she lived out her spiral of pain and shame, neither of which I understood.

I have many pictures of her when she was young. Before she stopped letting me take them. She was a beautiful child. She would laugh until she got the hiccups. Funny, too. Early and voracious reader, and sharp on the details. When she was a young adult she dared to do things even when they scared her. Went to Memphis to see Graceland, went to school in New York. I think anxiety was a constant for her, and at a fairly high level. She was wired for it. I understand that, having known a fair bit of it myself, but I am also wired for joy, and I always thought she would find her way toward that too eventually. How could she be my daughter and not find it? But it went the other way.

My story is of having given birth to her, loved her and hoped for her, given her every resource I could think of to give her, and lost her. My husband and I  brought her closer at the end. The tough love we hear about is a way to cut strings, and for the life of me I couldn’t see how that would help her. Every card she wrote me as an adult was an apology and a promise that some day I would be proud of her. I was already proud of her. Putting her within the circle of our love seemed like the only thing we could offer her that might penetrate. Our love is good to have and she needed it. There were even signs of a different set of choices. Re-enrollment in college. Plans for a new career. The first steps toward mental health care. But they were not enough, in the end, to prevail. The claw of alcoholism came above the surface and swiped at her one last time, and it brought her all the way down.

Those other pictures, if they existed, would be hers. They wouldn’t belong to me.

THE REAWAKENING

This kind of loss, this worst thing that can happen, undermines your sense of legitimacy. At least it did for me. It went to my very identity as a mother, and a good mother (far from perfect, but the best I was able to be). How could I have been a good mother with this outcome? It was beyond understanding, and the worst blow to my sense of who I am that I have ever lived through, though it is not the only such blow I have experienced.

There were enough reasons to blame myself for what happened. In my twenties, with young children, no stability to offer them, having none myself. The violence and abuse in my family of origin made me determined to create something safe and loving for them, but I lacked any models as to how. Then divorce from my too-early marriage with their father. I had a career that tried to meet the expectations of others before finally turning to meet my own, and therefore took me down many roads of education and experiences outside the house. This fed my curiosity, but children resent their mother’s curiosity if it does not pertain to them. They didn’t choose any of it.

And for many years as an adult she kept herself away from all of us. It was all I could do to drag her out for a birthday dinner, or bring her over at Thanksgiving. She claimed to hate these things, but when I pulled up outside her apartment she got in the car. Sometimes she smelled of alcohol, and sometimes she didn’t. 

People do what they want to do. She wanted to be with us, whatever she said. And while there are innumerable books for the parents of alcoholics that tell you to cut ties and let them destroy themselves, my eventual conclusion was that less love wasn’t going to help her. So I pushed the door open whenever I could and made sure she knew that we loved her. We created a small apartment for her in our home, because we thought she might die on the street if we didn’t. I will not be persuaded that the decisions that meant that she died surrounded by love rather than dying in the street or in some nasty hole where no one would find her were bad ones. More love is more love, and it’s all we have in this world. We couldn’t make her get help, just walk her to the clinic when she was ready. We couldn’t make her tell the truth about how much she was drinking, not to us, not to the doctor, not to the therapist. But we could tell her every day that we were glad to see her, and counteract her inner narrative that said otherwise.

Measured only by the outcome, our approach didn’t work. I still feel convicted that it was the correct one - the best course we had. And knowing that in the last year of her life we had done everything we could do to show her a more life-filled path and to assure her as much as anyone outside her head could assure her that it was still available to her gave us immediate and lasting comfort. 

At first I was determined only to be kind in response to her death, or at least not to be unkind. I was barely navigating, hurting and raw, and knew that I could have slipped into meanness and bitterness. So at first I just tried to be kind in my encounters with others. I softened my raw edges and my tone, and tried to speak gently to the people around me. Especially to root for the children of others. To treat them the way I wish that the world had treated my daughter.

In time, through this rehearsal of what my life would look like were I capable of living it, I could imitate the motions and patterns of delight, without the actual feeling of delight.

That is, I went looking for spring, for migrating birds, throughout the first spring of the pandemic. I did my job, which felt purposeful, and the people there were kind also. I read Richard Rohr every morning, because someone suggested that I do. I thought about the beauty of the world.

For a long time this was an exercise with a rigid shape and no substance. I saw the birds with a hollow feeling where delight had once lived. Sometimes, for a moment, I would feel the lift toward my former lightness. It could persist for a moment or an hour, but when it passed off again it drained me. Our loss came in October of 2019, and the pandemic in 2020, so we were isolated in more ways than one. The parks, as I said, were closed. There was nowhere to go with my grief. We were locked away from each other, and locked into a household with a cavernous hole in it.

And then I started to be able to ask myself what I believe in. What is reliable? I came back to some sense of the fundamental things I hold.

That the world is delightful in its variety and novelty, and in the consistency of sun and season. It is beautiful on this planet, and we are lucky to live here. 

In my life I’ve been driven by a deep hunger for the true nature of things, and by a recognition of the numinous everywhere.

When I lost her I felt as if she had suffered because my hunger was so much for the world, not just for her. If you are a woman you may recognize this. I was so hungry for my children, but not only for them. Also for the whole world. And I supposed that this was part of her burden.

And so for a long time as part of my penance, I suppressed that part of myself that hungers for the world.

As if it were illegitimate, or had caused her undoing. As if my choices had compelled her choices and so I should punish myself by living without them.

In recent days I have remembered my hunger, and felt it reassert itself. This hunger for the heat and beauty and terror of the world is part of who I am. It is allowable. It is more than allowable. It is good. It has propelled me toward others who are similarly hungry for a world that is a better, more humane place than we have yet made.

Children may resent their mothers if we are hungry for anything other than them, but that is because children do not yet self-differentiate from their mothers. When we grow up, if we do, we learn that each of us is alone in the universe, even as we are all part of a single woven fabric of mercy. I may be who I am. Joyful in the rising of the new day. If only she had found that too, but she didn’t. I can’t undo that, but I do not have to recreate it in myself, or live in its shadow for the rest of my days. That would be the last thing she’d have wanted for me, and it is not what I want for myself. What I want for myself still matters, because I am still here.

WHAT I KNOW IS TRUE

There are things we say about the world in theology that are meant to describe deep and fundamental truths. They are axioms in the mathematics of God, unprovable but evident in themselves. 

There are frameworks within the process school of theology that are like a necklace on which the pearls of the universe are strung. They have a mathematical permanence in a universe of impermanence, and allow for the preservation of value in the face of perpetual perishing. I believe in them because they resonate with what I see before me every day. Alfred North Whitehead describes the God of this reality as having two intertwined natures: primordial and consequent. The primordial is the first mover - the cause of all being, but because God is also within all things the consequent nature responds with the rest of creation to everything that passes. Whitehead says that “The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.” [Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press 1978, pg. 346]

Whitehead lost one of his own sons in World War I, and had to reconstruct a sense of meaning himself from that loss. His was a pilot in the war. A different order of tragedy, that leaves a similarly shaped hole.

People say well-meant things in the face of death that are really quite terrible. “Nothing happens without a reason.” “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle.” These are the empty statements of the denial of despair. The promise of process theology is more simple and more complex. The world, set in motion, will do as it must. Each choice narrows the available range of the next suite of choices. But every single thing that transpires passes into the is-ness of Godself, and therefore flows back into the world in a loving way. Chance, not reason, and no great irreversible direction from above. But the value of all things is held in the being of God, and held forever. Nothing is ever truly lost.

And for me, the overlay on this of the Gospel of our brother Jesus tells a very human story of how to live in a world in which everything perishes but nothing is ever lost. However bad I am at it, I am still practicing toward understanding that we live only in the present, with the enlivening breath of the created universe in our lungs. As our brother Paul says in Romans 8:38-39, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height,  nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God….”

Beneath the great waves of history and the will to power, we inhabit each moment, an opportunity to love the world. There is no other stability but that. Everything is incarnate. Every incarnate thing is holy. Everything known is known through the body. All suffering comes through the body, as does all joy. God comes to us in human form so that we can be assured that our suffering is not unaccompanied. It is not a sign of God’s desire to punish the flesh but an understanding that by our mortality and our temporariness, we will suffer. That having a body means that we must, at some point, experience suffering, and that when we do we will not be alone.

The incarnation of Jesus is our instruction that God’s nature is both primordial and consequent - it is a real thing both causing and being with us. And the suffering of Jesus is a story that Unitarian Universalists generally don’t much like, but I have not been able to avoid suffering in my life and so I understand it as a fundamental truth about God-with-us in suffering. God on the side of the sufferer. 

The things I hold as true I still hold as true in the face of this loss. When Job says “For I know that my Redeemer lives, And that at the last he will stand upon the earth And after my skin has been thus destroyed Then in my flesh shall I see God,” he is not speaking of some next world in which we will have individual consciousness but this world. Then in my flesh shall I see God. In this world - in the real, corporal, inhabited world. 

Job went on to be restored some thousand-fold to all the sheep and houses he’d ever lost. His wife went on to bear dozens more children. Lots of energy for both of them, I guess, with all the hustle on her side. Although for most of us by the time your child is 36 you’re unlikely to have another one. If you’re a mother. Absent one of those extended lifespans of the Hebrew Scripture, and direct intervention by a much more personal walking-around kind of pre-Jesus God than I am able to believe in.

One of the many kind friends sent me a novel about a year later (Peace Like a River by Lief Enger, if you’re curious). It’s a beautiful book about a father and sons and certain magical powers that includes a substitution at the end that allows the father to see his dead child again in Heaven. When I read those chapters I felt tears falling down my face with a kind of painful joy. I would love to believe that I will see her again some day, but I don’t believe that will happen in any individually conscious way. I can’t find my way back through a  hope for that kind of restoration. What is broken is irreversibly broken.

But the time since she died and the exercise of making myself think about it has brought me back to a different, more abstract kind of confidence in the goodness of things.

Nothing of value is ever lost. That is at the heart of what I know to be true. Every struggle has value and that value is undiminished when the struggle is lost. Her life had value, and that value continues to feed into the world even though she is not here.

God’s job, which God does absolutely, is to hold all that value so that none of it is wasted, however the wreckage may appear. The universe evolves, life appears, complexity winds its path, and with each addition there is an addition to the value of God. And our brother Jesus came so that we could understand this truth deeply, and personally, and humanly. Because we’re a little thick, and probably wouldn’t have understood it without such a concrete example.

THE FALL

The wheels seem to be coming off the world these days. Pandemic, dissent, anger and violence, the clear manifestations of climate change in weather events of such disastrous scale that they must be driven by the gradual unhinging of the system. Economic inequality has pushed us so far apart that the poor are more than half the world, and eight people at the top hold as much of the world’s resources as half the people at the bottom. We have sown the wind, and the whirlwind is coming.

Authorities act in their own self-interest, more interested in power than the well-functioning mechanisms of democracy, and it has been this way throughout our whole American history, though at times some of us (me included) have steadfastly refused to see this. 

It is hard to have confidence in anything at all. But I find a few things to be reliable. The world is still full of beauty and delight, uncaused and the evidence of a functioning grace. And nothing of value is ever lost because that value, once created, will continue in some defiant corner. What is ventured in love is not wasted. It is an offering toward the entire balance of love in the world, and will be preserved. And its preservation is the assurance of that grace.

The way she was living we all understood that there was a good possibility that she would die. We gathered as close as we were allowed to, but the decisions were hers, and they were moving in both directions. 

Even so, when she did die the shock of it was deadening.

I could only sit in my grief for a long time.

When she fell in the end, all the way down through the sky to the bottom, what did she find?

The arms of God.

The ceaseless co-creation of the universe.

The love that weaves all things together.

My love for her.

Love.

Rev. Dr. Clare Butterfield