Fall bike rides

Tour de Tugaloo, Toccoa GA

• 40.4 miles, 2,078 feet elevation gain, 12.3 mph
• some flat, some parts of the ride had lots of short steep hills

White Squirrel Cycling Classic, Brevard NC

• 40.7 miles, 1,115 feet elevation gain, 13.3 mph
• beautiful agricultural land along the river valleys, only a few hilly sections

Ride for Research, Anderson SC

•  32.3 miles, 1,622 feet elevation gain, 12.1 mph
• windy

Shalom House Ride, Anderson SC

• 43.5 miles, 1,513 feet elevation gain, 12.5 mph
•  some lovely roads

Ride to the Rock, Pickens SC

• 40.1 miles, 3,438 feet elevation gain, 11.1 mph
• constant hills, mostly relatively short but some steep

 Preservation Ride, Chesnee, SC

• 39.8 miles, 2,268 elevation gain, 11.9 mph
• lovely roads the last two thirds, first rest stop at 25 miles

Upstate Forever Preservation ride, 9/17

This was my first charity bike ride since I got back to riding in July. I was quick to sign up for it because it started from Strawberry Hill, where I like to buy peaches. I had worked my way up to a couple of 33 mile rides around Pendleton, so I signed up for the 40.

They started the 79 mile riders at 8 am and the 40 and then the 20 mile riders at 9. There must have been close to 100 in those two groups, looking more professional than the usual group when I was doing triathlons. I didn't notice anyone else with any kind of aerobars (used by triathletes but not by road bike riders--my bike is set up for both).

I put the cue sheet in my top tube bag, but I didn't look at it closely to know what to expect. For the first 5 miles I rode towards the end of the 40 mile group, passing people on the downhills and being passed on the uphills. But after 5 miles no one else was in sight. I saw a tandem fixing a flat tire and they later passed me, as did a few others who must have started late. By about 10 miles the sag car had settled in behind me, thankfully staying fairly far back but still making me very aware that I was bringing up the rear.

I fought with my feelings that they would be annoyed with having a slower rider and that I didn't belong because I had come alone and was slower than everyone else. The first 10 miles were on fairly busy roads with lots of sprawl, but after that it was beautiful. I didn't push too hard, I knew I was going farther than I had gone before and didn't want to wear myself out too early. I had folded the cue sheet in half and I finished the first half and so couldn't see what was coming up. It seemed forever to get to the rest stop--it was at 25 miles and I was running out of water. There were other people still there when I got there, which made me feel a little better--I wasn't horribly far behind everyone else. I filled up my water bottle and ate a banana.

There were times in the next 10 miles where I thought if there is another hill this bad (none were horrible) I will quit. I was struggling more mentally than physically; it was hard but not beyond what I was ready to do. I worried about things like whether there would be any lunch left when I got in. I was cheered by being passed by several groups doing the 79 mile ride, every one of whom said "good job" to me. Then the last 5 miles I caught up with three people, two of whom were waiting for their friend who was doing the ride on his mountain bike. I was so glad not to be alone at the end.

There was plenty of lunch left and it was excellent: green salad, chicken, corn and bean salad, and cut up melon. I sat down with some people who looked closer to me in age but didn't get into their conversation. Then they left and one of the people from the sag car sat down with me and told me how proud he was of me for completing the ride. Again I had to fight my negative thinking--was he impressed because I was overweight or looked like I was struggling that badly? There are plenty of riders my age and older, though the riders over 60 tend to look particularly fit. But I did hear the positive as well, that the people in the sag car had been thinking good thoughts about me and I was welcome even if I was slow. I averaged just under 12 mph, which is what I would expect on a long ride at this point. https://www.strava.com/activities/715515649

We are Strangers on the Earth (sermon)

I chose the passage from Hebrews in the lectionary today because the idea of being strangers on the earth seeking a homeland resonated deeply with me. But sitting with it led me to think about faith. So listen particularly for two things in the reading: what it means to have faith and the idea that at times we all feel like strangers on the earth, because we know that something better is possible.

Hebrews 11: 1-3 and 8-16 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV and RSV) 11 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3 By faith we understand that the ages were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. 8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. 9 By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 11 By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore. 13 These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. 14 For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. 15 If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

 

The chapter starts by describing faith. I struggle with what faith means--different people have such different ideas. I went to the funeral of a friend’s mother yesterday and the family’s faith that their mother is now in heaven greeting her husbands is admirable but foreign to me. I worry also that some Christians seem to be saying if only we have enough faith, bad things won’t happen. I believe that understanding of faith causes a lot of harm by encouraging people to blame themselves. The description of faith in this passage is more positive. The author of Hebrews says faith is first an assurance, something firm to stand on. Second, it is belief or conviction about things not seen. But we don’t have to do that without help--the author gives the example that the creation we see around us was made by God, by what we cannot see. We aren’t simply expected to believe in things we can’t see--we can see the results even if we can’t see the cause. 

 

A friend told me a story last week that I am carrying in my heart as an example of how the things we can see that testify to the things we can’t see. My friend grew up in Clemson, and his family had a house on the lake in the Calhoun area. One afternoon as a young teenager he went out on the lake alone in a canoe, and he came unexpectedly upon a peninsula that was full of orange butterflies, thousands and thousands of them, resting on the trees and getting ready to cross the lake. He had come upon part of the east coast monarch butterfly migration, which was following a path further west that usual that year. I imagine it felt like being able to see God. The kingdom of heaven is not something distant that we will reach after we die, it is all around us and in us. We experience the kingdom of heaven when we experience such things as joy, love, justice, mercy, and shared hopes. 

 

On the other hand, it can be hard to have faith that the kingdom of heaven is here when we see so much pain and hatred in this world. But that is where faith as assurance of things hoped for can help--faith is still there when our optimism fails. I’m not someone who believes that everything that happens is God’s plan, but I do have faith that God’s love is working in the world. What I can see is that the arc of history bends towards justice.[i] We have a long way to go, but we have seen such significant progress for African-Americans, for LBGTQ people, and in care for the environment in my lifetime. To take an even larger arc, forester and philosopher Aldo Leopold said that ethics originally included only how we treated people in our family, then only how we treated people in our tribe, then only how we treated people in our nation, then the whole human race, but now we include non-human nature as well. He called that the Land Ethic. It is in that larger arc of justice that I can see the world as prepared by the word of God and slowly and irregularly moving towards living into God’s love. It isn’t easy, but it wasn’t easy then either. 

 

Hebrews was written to a congregation that was tired and discouraged, as some of us feel today. Frederick Buechner, in his book, Secrets in the Dark, says this about faith in the midst of chaos: “By faith we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to last truth... It is God who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of God’s peace to live in peace, out of God’s light to dwell in light, out of God’s love to be, above all things, loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world.”[ii] Faith is a foundation that leads us into the unknown—the arc of history is not a marked path. Our discomfort with the way things are going leads us--we belong in a world that lives out God’s love, so with God’s help we do what little we can to bend the arc of history. 

 

I wonder in what ways the author of the letter felt how hard it would be to live out the teachings of Jesus. We don’t know who that author was--the Letter to the Hebrews is anonymous. It was accepted into the canon attributed to Paul, and the King James Bible lists it as one of Paul’s letters. However, modern scholarship thoroughly rejects Paul’s authorship. The style is different and the letter includes the author’s conversion story (Heb 2:1-3), one completely different from Paul’s. No early manuscripts name the author. 

 

Anonymity is very unusual for ancient letters, which like Paul’s letters started with a greeting giving the names of the author and recipients. In 1900, Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack proposed the explanation that the name of the author was suppressed because the author was a woman, Paul’s co-worker Priscilla. He makes a two part argument: the letter is clearly by a member of Paul’s inner circle but there is evidence that disqualifies the other members and authorship by a woman is the best explanation of why the author’s name was suppressed.[iii] The argument has been taken up more recently by Ruth Hoppin, who points out that the author of the letter also credits Ruth’s faith and names an unusual number of women as heroes of the faith elsewhere in chapter 11. [iv]

 

Scholars will continue to argue the point, but I like the idea that the author of Hebrews was a woman. I imagine that as an educated woman she felt particularly not at home in her world. She knew how difficult it would be to make the world more just. She has faith in a future she could not see and she could see similar faith in the heroes of past, which led them to not feel at home in the world they lived in. A world in which her writings could be accepted as sacred text under her own name would have felt very far away. 

 

The words that we live as strangers in this world resonate very personally for me. I remember feeling that so strongly when I was young, and yet the world has changed around us in ways that give me more hope for feeling more at home and more faith that the kingdom of heaven is present even when we have trouble seeing it. When I was in college, studying science and learning to repair bicycles, I wanted so much to be one of the boys. Feminism saved me from my dread of being a woman; I didn’t have to be limited by gender roles. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I ended up married, though only with the agreement that we would share household tasks equally. It helped that I was the better handyman. But I still felt a stranger to the women’s roles that others enjoyed. 

 

Years later, I read with great fascination several books on the history of hermaphrodism, what is now called intersex.[v] Perhaps 5% of the population is not biologically simply male or simply female. Can you imagine being female in all visible respects until you are tested, perhaps as an athletic competitor,[vi] and discover that genetically you are male, your chromosomes are XY, but you have a genetic defect that means your body does not respond to testosterone and so externally you developed as female. Or perhaps you have mosaicism and some of your cells are XX while others are XY. I have always wondered why I was so gripped by those stories, when I am not biologically intersex. I think they captured for me how strongly I felt I didn’t fit in to the categories around me, my sense of living as a stranger. And I think many of us have ways in which we have felt almost that strongly that we don’t fit. 

 

I have wondered whether if I had been a teenager in today’s world I would have decided I was transgender. I did know a transgender person in graduate school, but at that time it seemed a choice only for people whose feelings were much more extreme than mine. I don’t regret not having that path; I had a wonderful experience of biological motherhood. What I find exciting about today’s world is that we are moving away from having to fit everyone into rigid boxes—maybe someday everyone won’t have to declare themselves to be either male or female. I took a survey recently with some scholarly basis that characterized my gender role as 75% male and 64% female.[vii] And I had that feeling of momentarily finding a home, finding a description that fit. One place where I see the arc of history bending towards justice is the much wider acceptance today of all kinds of variations of gender and sexual preference. God loves everyone; it has taken western society a long time to catch up and we aren’t done yet. 

 

A more just world must have felt very far away to the author of Hebrews. The heroes of the faith desired a better country, a heavenly one. Part of what is going on in the passage is a reinterpretation of Jewish history to point towards a heavenly kingdom rather than a political one. Yet there is another theme in that re-interpretation, that even before the teaching of Jesus those heroes of ages past had faith there was something more, and so God is proud to be their God. I appreciate the writer’s hope that people of different beliefs share a sense of moving towards being with God, though we may understand that differently. 

 

In our UCC belief that God is still speaking, I will take the liberty to take that idea further than the author intended to the idea of Universalism. Bruce recently wanted to describe Peace Church as Universalist on a poster, but some of us worried that would be confusing and many people wouldn’t know what it meant. Universalism is the idea that God saves everyone, of all races and cultures and no matter what wrong they have done. Universalism rejects the idea that the only way to salvation is though Jesus. The author of Hebrews says of the visionaries of the Hebrew bible: “God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” None of us see clearly, and we use different words, but we have faith that there is a better world inside this one. 

 

Another way of describing universalism is to say that if God’s law rules supreme then the forces of destruction will eventually be overcome and Hell will be empty. I was surprised years ago to hear an Episcopal priest say that a survey was done of Episcopal priests and the majority of them believed that everyone would go to heaven. For those of you who grew up in very judgmental churches, that may be a radical idea. And it is tricky, because most of us believe God gives us freedom, including the freedom to reject God. But we can also believe that God’s invitation to us is infinite, that everyone will eventually come to accept that invitation, if not in this life then after death. To me one of the greatest strengths of this belief is the spur it gives us to love our enemies. It moves us away from hate if we believe that everyone, however much we disagree with them, will ultimately be with God. This suggests another way of understanding faith, one that we can use immediately. We can have faith that everyone is loved by God. 

 

So why do we feel we are strangers on the earth, desiring a better country? In some ways we can see what we know by faith in the world around us, in other ways the world seems far from what God intends. The ideas in this passage used to be understood as a rejection of the physical world around us in favor of a focus on a distant heaven that we will see after the last judgement. I have been using different words because today many of us understand the kingdom of Heaven as something already present all around us and in us, if we can only open ourselves to embrace it. God has prepared a city for us not in some distant heaven but right here, if we can see it and live into it. 

 

If we are seeking a homeland, what would that look like? One answer is that it would be a place where we are not judged for being ourselves. No one is excluded in the kingdom of Heaven and that place is all around us and inside us if we can only embrace it. Faith is assurance of the things we need, a foundation. It is about trust in something more, while facing the difficulties of the present. We are restless, looking for a place where we can feel at home and at peace. We can do more than wander and hope; we can seek to envision and work towards the kingdom of God right here. We see the pain of the world, yet we also hold the conviction of things not seen. Faith leads somewhere that we don’t know, it calls us to move forward into the unknown to make more visible that God loves everyone.

Faith leads somewhere that we don’t know, it calls us to move forward into the unknown to make more visible that God loves everyone. 

 

Peace Church Clemson, 8/7/2016

Spring Tangine

1 large bunch mustard or other greens, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 tblsp. olive oil
1 teasp. salt
1 large fennel bulb, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 lbs. ground lamb (or stew meat would work also)
2 teasp. ground cumin
1 teasp. ground coriander
1/2 teasp. cinnamon
1/2 teasp. ginger
1 lb rhubarb stalks, sliced
2 tblsp sorghum syrup or other sweetener

Boil the greens in a large pot of water for 2 minutes for a milder flavor, drain and set aside.  Brown the onion in the olive oil, then when half cooked add the fennel.  Saute until the fennel starts to soften.  Add the garlic and saute a minute or so longer.  Set aside the onion/fennel mixture and brown the lamb in the same pan.  When the lamb is partly cooked add spices, then add the onion/fennel mixture, the greens, and the rhubarb, and stir.  Cook in 300 degree oven for 30-45 minutes.  Sweeten to taste.

Beet Kvass

I started from this recipe http://www.homemademommy.net/2013/08/how-to-make-beet-kvass-that-actually-tastes-good.html

But I changed it so much that I will write down my own.

A Quart Jar of Beet Kvass:

Cut up a small wedge of cabbage into one to two inch chunks, enough to fill the bottom couple of inches of a quart jar

Add a couple of small slices of ginger

Add two medium sized beets (scrubbed in cold water but not peeled or cooked) cut into 1 to 2 inch chunks, enough to fill the jar 1/2 to 2/3 full

Add 2 teaspoons of natural salt.  I use fine ground Redmond Real Salt, which is reasonably priced and not purified

Fill with well, filtered or spring water to 1 inch from the top of the jar.

Cover (see notes below) and let sit at cool room temperature 3-5 days, then strain and drink the liquid.  The beets can be used a second time (I filled the jar back up with water and added 1 teaspoon of salt) or cooked.

The salt and the acid produced by the fermentation mean you don’t have to worry about botulism.  The way this kind of ferment will go bad is that it will grow mold, and if that happens it is safest to throw the whole thing out.  Things that help prevent mold:

•  Make sure there aren’t little bits of cabbage or anything else floating on the surface (keep your cabbage pieces large and put the beets on top to hold them down)

•  If you have problems with mold you can increase the amount of salt to a tablespoon, particularly if you are using kosher salt.  If you want to use less than 2 teaspoons of salt try a tablespoon of raw honey and one teaspoon of salt, but be aware that a sweeter ferment produces more alcohol.

•  Use a lid that lets the gasses produced by fermentation out and doesn’t let oxygen in.  My current favorite is: http://www.masontops.com/products/pickle-pipe.  You can also get plastic mason jar tops drilled for a beermakers airlock or just use a two part metal lid and screw it down firmly but not all the way tight (or a clamp style lid that isn’t extremely tight).

•  Put the jar in a dark place like a cabinet.  The ideal temperature is in the low to mid 60s, but warmer or cooler temperatures will mostly affect the speed at which it ferments—taste it and see when it is to your liking

• A thin whitish layer on the surface, if it is not fuzzy, is ok.  That is kvam yeast.

John's last days

I haven't written here in a long time, but I want a place where I can share this less publicly than in a Facebook note, and let a few friends know it is available.

Starting in September I was braced, feeling John could die at any time, but he continued to decline slowly.  I read a lot about death over the last year, and it led me to wish very much to be able to talk to him about our years together and have some closure.  He didn’t want to talk about anything that seemed like a recognition of death, but we did have one conversation in December with the help of his friend Debra.  He understood more that I had tried to help him grow with me, and I understood more that it had broken his heart when I healed from childhood trauma because I no longer needed him in the ways I had.

John with his Aunt Florence (age 104) December 2015

John was getting thinner in January and early February, but the main way that he was losing more quality of life was that none of us could understand more than a few words of his speech, even with the amplifier I had bought him.  He had a bed sore that wasn’t getting better, but he wasn’t in pain.  Our daughter Elizabeth visited for a week in early February and then went back up to Boston in time to spend Valentine’s weekend with her boyfriend.

On Feb. 14, I was planning to go to a dinner at the Rensing Center after Peace Church, and I had a cheesecake in the back of my car for that dinner (using up leftover ingredients that Elizabeth had bought).  But when church was over I found a message on my phone from John, just silence, and also a message from his friend Peter Sparks, whom John had called but Peter hadn’t been able to understand him.  I called the nurse’s desk and they said John was ok, no change.  But I was concerned enough to decide to stop and see him anyway.

He told me that evening that he had decided to stop eating and drinking and stop all medication except for sleep (and for pain if needed, but he wasn’t in pain).  His explanation was in the form of several stories about how the care had not been as good at Clemson Downs since they expanded.  There were times when the nurses had been impatient with him or tried to pressure him to have his pills crushed, which he didn’t want.  It was very important to him for me to know all this; I think he needed a reason and wanted some good to come out of his death that way.  He seemed a little scared; I think he thought he would die soon.  I told him that it would be three to five days (that was my incorrect memory of what I had read—it can be 5 days to two weeks).  At that point he wanted it to be over as soon as possible.  I got him some ice chips, which he liked.

I wasn’t sure whether his decision of that evening would hold, but when I went back Monday afternoon after my classes he was taking only ice chips.  He was peaceful, in no pain.  I called his oldest friends, and one, Mary Lou, said she would come from Florida to be with him the next day.  Elizabeth was uncertain about what to do but decided to come Wednesday.  Mary Lou arrived on Tuesday and she and I struggled to understand something he wanted to say Tuesday evening.  We first figured out it was about a party, and then to our surprise realized he was saying he wanted to have a goodbye party that he could be at, that weekend.  His friend Cynthia went forward with organizing a party with the Drinking Liberals and his movie group for Friday, but there were some people who couldn’t come Friday so I organized a second party for Saturday. 

When I was with John he wanted me to tell people his decision and tell him stories of our earlier days.  I did not feel that he gave me a blessing, but he did want my care again.  Pastor Bruce from Peace Church visited several times and John said yes to prayer and anointing.  The hospice chaplain sang for us with his guitar.

Elizabeth arrived on Wednesday, and her first priority was a Skype conversation on my iPad so that her boyfriend AJ could speak to John.  AJ asked John’s blessing to marry his daughter.  John couldn’t say anything understandable by that point, but he smiled.  We used that picture on the invitation to Saturday’s party, which went out to everyone at Peace Church and his wine friends and on Facebook.

People who saw John Thursday commented on how much more peaceful he was than the week before, though he tried to say a few things that we had great trouble understanding. He was able to nod and shake his head and was clear he was not in pain.  I called several of his old friends and held the phone to his ear so they could speak to him.  Nurses had very different ideas whether he would live only a few days or a week or more.

I had gone to the local funeral home to talk to them about alternatives, as John preferred not to be cremated but I was worried that burial in Massachusetts in February would be impractical.  The costs were indeed unreasonable, and so Elizabeth and I had talked with Bruce about whether or not to discuss the issue with John.  We came up with the idea of asking him which wine bottle he would like his ashes to be buried in, but by the time we brought the bottles in on Friday he was so much less aware that we did not ask.

On Friday he was much weaker.  In the afternoon I thought he was napping, but eventually I realized that he had woken up and was hearing but with his eyes almost closed.  I sat with him and held his hand.  Our son Paul arrived and told John that he loved him and thanked John for all he had done to support him, and John smiled at him.  We put John in the reclining wheelchair and took him into the common room for the party Friday evening.  His eyes were mostly closed but we could see a small smile as people told stories about him, which varied from how much they admired him to jokes about John meeting Scalia at the Pearly Gates.  

I had brought clothes thinking I might spend the night in John’s room, but I was so tired after the party and he had so clearly been aware of what was going on that I decided to go home.  He took his sleep medicine, though he struggled to swallow it.  I told the nurse to call me if his breathing changed.

At 4:30 am Saturday morning Feb. 20, I got a call that John had died.  I asked if they had notified hospice and the brain donation people, and I was told they knew I wanted to be there so they called me first to give me a head start.  I woke Paul and Elizabeth, and Paul said he wanted to go.  When we got there John was still completely warm.  I emailed his friend Cynthia, who gets up very early, and she came over.  I called Pastor Bruce but he didn’t get the message for about an hour.  Elizabeth called to say she had decided she did want to come, so Paul went home and she came.  I made up a little ritual saying goodbye to John’s body and then Elizabeth and Cynthia left the room and the hospice nurse and I wrapped John’s body.  He didn’t need cleaning, so I simply swaddled him in a soft sheet over his clothes.   

We then left the room so the hospice nurse could wrap his head in ice.  Pastor Bruce arrived and we sat in the common room waiting for the brain donation transport.  When they arrived they put him in a body bag and Bruce and I and Cynthia walked behind the stretcher following him until he was loaded into the transport vehicle.

Elizabeth and I went out to breakfast because I knew that I needed to not get too low blood sugar, and then we called people and also got out word that the Saturday party was moved to my house.  The main snag was reaching someone at the Cremation Society of South Carolina, but when I finally did, I was content with the conversation. The body had been taken to Charleston for the brain donation, so they just had to make the arrangements to receive it when it was transported back. I had realized after talking with the local funeral home that I didn't need a funeral home to do anything but the cremation, and the Cremation Society was less than half the cost of cremation at a full service funeral home.

At least 30 people came to the party Saturday night, bringing food, and we felt very surrounded by community.  Elizabeth had found pictures of John and put them up all around the living room.  I kept saying that John’s death had been so peaceful and we had had such a good chance to say goodbye that most of all I felt grateful.  I did not get to say goodbye to my father who died in a car accident when I was small or to the stepfather who raised me, who died while traveling, so it meant very much to have had a peaceful goodbye.

The next day Elizabeth and I went to church at Holy Trinity in the morning and felt embraced by community again. We worked particularly that afternoon on an obituary to share, with a much shorter form for the newspaper.  At Peace Church that evening there was a same-sex wedding as part of the regular Sunday service so the congregation could be family to two young men who had been rejected by their families.  Elizabeth was happy to be their photographer.

Monday we started emptying his room at the nursing home and met with the funeral director at the Cremation Society to start the planning.  We had already penciled in Saturday morning for the memorial service so that Paul and AJ could get there more easily.  Tuesday we met with Pastor Bruce and roughed out the service, with Elizabeth clearly wanting many Episcopal words, which felt like familiar, comforting ritual to her.  We decided to sing Swing Low Sweet Chariot because John sang it as a lullaby to the kids and Joyful, Joyful because we sang it at our wedding.  I normally print the bulletin for Peace Church, so we did the final design later in the week and printed it on Thursday.  We also decided to do our own flowers, with the initial idea that we wanted masses of daffodils we could get at Trader Joes.  When I called Trader Joes early in the week they were out, but when we went there on Friday they had them.

The funeral home had not wanted to promise for sure to have the ashes before the service because the paperwork can be slow, and they hadn’t called by Friday morning, but when we went by we were able to pick them up.  Elizabeth and I drove to Charlotte to pick up AJ and then got some takeout dinner to share with some family who came into town by dinner time—my aunt from Washington DC and her son and wife who drove her down.  They supported us while we faced putting the ashes into the wine bottle (which fit less than half).

Saturday Feb. 27 we went to the church early to decorate the altar.  Bruce had suggested glasses with the bottle, and Elizabeth had found a table runner woven by John’s grandmother that fit the altar like it was made for it.  We had bought both daffodils and Japanese iris, another favorite of John’s.  We put the irises in the vase John had given me as an engagement present.

My youngest sister had come in from California late Friday night and stayed at our house and helped us in the morning.  My middle sister and her husband and kids were with my mother in Florida, and our rich Florida relatives had arranged for a Lear jet to fly them from Florida to the Clemson/Oconee County airport.  They arrived at the church about 9:30.

Elizabeth did a reading during the service, but other than that it was Pastor Bruce doing it all; I hadn’t wanted eulogies.  He read the obituary and talked about how he had known John in his last days.  There were about 90 people there—we had realized over the previous week how large our community was and were somewhat expecting that.  

There was a reception at the church and then a lunch at the house for family and closer friends, all with food people had brought.  One of my sisters had suggested that my mother could pay for catering but I said no, you don't understand the south, people will want to bring food.  I didn't even organize that part, a friend from church did. We felt so supported by so many different communities.

My family left around 3 and Paul and Elizabeth and AJ and I took a walk in the botanical garden and I napped a little.  On Sunday I drove Elizabeth and AJ to Charlotte to fly back to Boston.  I was so happy we had done so much of the planning and organizing the funeral ourselves; it felt like a concrete saying goodbye and just the right amount of time focused on that before I started back to work the next Monday. 

This is hard

I am struggling so with my lack of control in the process of John dying. No one knows whether he will live for weeks or many months longer. He feels he still has his mind so he still has some quality of life, though it is increasingly difficult to understand his speech. He can no longer enjoy wine and sold his collection.

 

I want reconciliation and closure; John doesn’t want to talk about anything that involves paying attention to the fact that he is dying. We talked today with the help of his friend Debra King and he understood better that if he wants me to talk about my feelings, he is going to hear my grief. He asked if I could talk about what is going on at work and I said that doesn’t feel very real to me these days, I am caught up in the intensity of his dying. We did talk some about our lives together.

 

I am powerless to have any effect on the situation. I keep looking for something I could do that would help him accept dying, but he doesn’t think he needs anything, he is convinced that not thinking about it is the approach that works best for him. There are choices he could make to have some control, such as refusing antibiotics, but he isn’t ready to make them.

 

The feeling of powerlessness and lack of control brings up childhood trauma for me. It is a panicky feeling of not being able to protect myself, not being able to have any effect on the situation. I remember in my gut what it feels like to blame myself because that is less painful than being powerless.