Leisa A. Hammett

A Blessed New Year

Happy 2009 all of You readers out there. I love this time of year! Tonight I am going to the annual Burning Bowl service at a local Unity Church. Unity Churches all across the country observe this ceremony. Tomorrow, I am going to an annual Vision Board creation party.  I intend to write more about both of these here.  Right now I'm on major holiday mode...Which means I have extra time that ends up slipping through fingers with me asking: "Where did it go?"

Life is Good. Wishing you all of many blessings as the calendar revolves into the gift of...THE LAST YEAR?! of this exciting New Millenium's first decade. Wow! Where did it go? We survived Y2K (hee-hee) and eight years plus.

Namaste.

******************************

Oops! Just like this letters person to skrew up her numbers.  Erg. I sat down at the Burning Bowl Service before it started and all the sudden realized that this is not the last year of this decade. It's the next to last. Snicker.

The Land of Hope

"I know

it's hard to be reconciled

not everything is exactly

the way it out to be

but please turn around

and step into the future

leave memories behind

enter the land of hope

--Zbigniew Herbert from A Life

Sarah McLaughlin Makes Me Cry

Sarah McLauglin makes me cry. At least when she sings the melancholy pop Christmas carol: "Cry Like a River." Twice now as it's broadcast from my car's CD player, I've cried my own riverlet. Last time was Christmas Eve. Driving from the assisted living facility that's now home to my recently widowed father.

And that's when this thread of revelation about this fresh experience of Grief came.  The Grief, that is, (ad nauseum) over my mother's death two weeks before Christmas. Grief and I are friends. I've been blessed with a fair share lot of it in my life the last nearly 25 years. I've learned to embrace it and be open to what it can teach me.  When Mother died, I knew that this Grief would be different. Different from job loss, love loss, marital loss, offspring life-expectation loss due to disAbility....

Eyes strained and fingers combing, I've been searching for threads of meaning inthis yet another bitter taste from the bittersweet and complex concoction that is Life. The difference is that there's no opportunity for regret with this Grief. No coulda-woulda-shoulda. Sure, I can nitpick the annals of my past behaviors and I can name some "transgressions," like the long arm's length I held mother at especially after my Divorce. But. I. Choose. No. Regret. Yesterday is Dead. Tomorrow is not yet Born. All I have is Today and I Choose not to waste it's precious moments questioning what I did out of self-defense from a very strong woman who was generous on criticism.

It. Simply. Just. Is.  Death. Is. It is a part of Life. A part I've never really experienced. I never knew my paternal grandfather or my maternal grandmother. The remaining parents on each side were infirmed and passed when I was six. But, my Mother lived a rich and wonderful, long Life. This is a passage of Making Peace with a process that's as Natural as Life itself. It could not have been changed. It was Inevitable.

And, so, I pull another thread. I pour some more liquid emotion. I feel. And I have peace, albeit laced with sadness, in my soul.

All. Is. Well.

*******************************************************************

I wrote this Christmas Eve and saved it in order to post a personal take on the meaning of the season. The holidays have been fine if not just slightly emotionally vacant, like the empty place that my sister accidentally set at the Christmas dinner table last night. Overall, I have felt some dips of sadness, some moments when tears threatened to spill any moment. But, overall, I've been gifted with a lot of reminders of her joyful presence in the decadence of her antique furnishings, colorful oriental rugs laid everywhere about the hardwood floors of her home. Of her passion for colorful clothes. Mother was into Major Foo-Foo. And that Memory, and the reminders sprinkling the holiday in her home, has delivered me with Joy.  Thank you, Mother. I am reminded of my Love and Gratitude for You and the Immense Love You had for Me. Maybe that's the best Christmas Gift I could get, given the circumstances.  

True Meaning

Tom Conley was always an irreverent reverend. Back 25 years ago, he was pastor of Northside Drive Baptist in Atlanta.  Then, the highest-per capita in giving in the Southern Baptist convention. Located in the southern mecca's wealthiest in-town hood. It was also one of the numbered and now vanished liberal churches within the convention. They actually did exist once upon a time. This is a church where the ministers wore robes and came down the center isle in a processional. Where the Bible was read from a split chancel. A liturgical church with occasional liturgical dance. Common in mainline Protestant denominations. Not in Southern Baptist churches. This was a church where two staff members were a gay couple. Tom, like his contemporaries, both in the pews and pulpits, left the convention -- some sooner than later. They left as the "Onward Christian Soldiers" March of the Fundamentalist powers munched like PacMen -- the video game that was popular in the mid-80s, the early days of the 10-year take-over quest. Like many, he became an Episcopalian, and last I heard, was the priest of a small African American congregation. (Tom is white.)

In my mid-20's and already having worked for the communications division of four convention agencies, I had already caught on to the hoola about inerrancy -- the linchpin with which The Fundamentalists intended to lead Baptist flocks in ousting "the LIB-ER-RULS" teaching in the seminaries, Baptist colleges (one from which I graduated) and state conventions and agencies. (Inerrancy, for the unitiated reader, means belief that the Bible is factually correct and contains absolutely no errors whatsoever.) The takeover succeeded in about 1988, as pronounced table-top, with "Victory in Jesus" lead by the annual convention palimentarian in Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans. Few realized the real motive was the salacious desire of Jerry Falwell & Co. and Criswell's Dallas Theological Seminary to have a part of the convention power and coffers. And lock and step they marched through the last 30 years since The Reagan Revolution outed "The Silent Majority" and "The Religious Right" became a mighty force within the national political arena.

So, there was Tom, the irreverent reverend, back in the 80s, jesting at Christmastime about The Virgin Birth. Huh? Whuh? Holy Cow! Er. I mean The Virgin Birth IS the Sacred Cow! I listened. I questioned. I discussed. And then the argument began to fall into place with how my world view was changing from one of White Republicanism to one of a kinder-gentler Jesus who's love could be radically personified through social justice.

The point here is not whether Jesus was born of a virgin. I won't argue that. And it was also in this climatic time of my life that I began to believe in the concept of Universalism -- rejecting the concept of only one Path of Truth. And Tom's point, that Christmas season, which eventually became my point is that we've been EMPHASIZING the miraculous birth, the immaculate conception, for years. Something the Early Church, perhaps, conceived (no pun intended) to make their God more special to the potential unsaved pagans. I never knew then anyone ever questioned it. Turns out lots have and still do.  Regardless, here's the point I keep saying I'm going to get to:

The Prophet Jesus could have been born at the Ritz, at the finest hotel, the most glorious digs royalty deserved. But, instead, being the radical he was, he chose to be born an immigrant of a scared, unwed teen in a stinky stall amid animals in a bed of scratchy straw. Meaning...this God came to identify with whom he'd later speak of as "the least of these," "the meek," "the mild," "the hungry," "the naked," "the poor." Would we, the people, all of us, really identify with a prince born in posh digs? I think not. The birth, virgin or not, I don't care.  That lowly, dirt-poor-and-stinking-barn birth symbolizes The Great Teacher Jesus' oneness. Oneness with the people. All People.

And that. To Me. Is. The True Meaning. Of Christmas.

Grateful

Screeching obnoxiously from the kitchen, the second cell phone alarm brutally grabs and yanks me from my morning's return to sleep. I wake up hurting. But. Oh. So. Grateful. Grateful for living. Grateful for all that I have. Grateful for the love of the mother I just lost. I wrote that I would stop writing about her death, but, hell, it's my blog. Maybe I'll drive away some and resonate with others as I navigate through this pain.

This Christmas, I'll join the remaining members of my family. A place at the table, empty. We'll hold on to each other this first holiday without her and try to hold on to the Love and the Good about her. I'll try to dodge the tensions between my siblings. And, we'll share the care of the rapidly aging husband left behind.

Readers: Thank you for joining me as I've recently launched into the waters of the blogosphere. I'm still terribly lost here. At least I know how to write. And I hope that is what will bring you back.  I booked another conference yesterday that promises not to ignore me as a rookie this time. And I'm negotiating on another that aims to help artists, writers and musicians.

If you wish to subscribe and have not been able, don't give up.  The top RSS Feed on the upper right hand corner should be your entry ticket.  The other, below it, I discovered, is still not working, despite my allusions that it had been.  At least, not for email. I dingled around a few last night trying to remove it and couldn't remember how.  So, here's to learning better how to navigate these foreign waters in 2009.

Life Is Good.

'Tis the Season

"Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love." -- Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Redemptive Nature of Crisis

"It is easy to understand how a person who identified herself as a wife would feel that her life were over when her marriage ended. A successful young entrepreneur loses her job. Who is she now? A crisis forces you to create a new life, one that responds to your deepest needs....A crisis shakes up the status quo, spurring you to reevaluate your life and to make the corrections that lead to joy and success." -- Laura Day in Welcome to Your Crisis: How to Use The Power of Crisis to Create The Life You Want (Little, Brown)

Read more about how I dealt with crisis when my marriage ended, I lost a job fresh out of college, my only child was diagnosed with autism: http://www.hernashville.com/her/leisa-a-hammett.

Life. It's Rich. Ripe. And Juicy.

************************************

I wrote this post, the three paragraphs, above, before I got word that my mother was on her death bed.  I still embrace all of what I have written here. I've just found myself, yet, again, maneuvering through another new passage of my life. I think it can best be summed up in the title of former Georgia legislator and wounded Vietnam Veteran Max Cleland's book: Strong at the Broken Places.

From these wounds of life, from the act of living, I grow stronger.

I've backed off from writing about my grief in the last several days. In part, this was because it's Christmas and I lost 10 days of the month. Seven in South Carolina and two spent in my flannels afterwards. I will continue to back off from writing about my mother's death here. I don't want to lose my readership! After my mother's death, I reached for the epilogue of a book by my bedside table: The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers, Looking After Yourself and Your Family While Helping an Aging Parent, Barry J. Jacobs, PsyD. Jacobs writes about how family and friends are supportive at the time of the loved one's death but quickly go on while the one who has lost the loved one may still be reeling. Monday, I met with an Alive Hospice counselor. She confirmed this.  That many people do not understand the gravity of death if they have not experienced it.  And, she added, the loss of a mother is probably the hardest.

Growing. Stronger. At. The. Broken. Places.

A Writer Bares All

A writer writes...because s/he can. A writer writes...because s/he must. It is a compulsion of sorts. A form of self-talk soothing-therapy. Only, the navel gazing can be instantaneously broadcast the world wide web over. And so I must. And so I do. And so I obsess here aloud about the loss of the only mother I ever had. The only biological mother I ever had. I write while I search for meaning. I write while I turn the the scrapbook pages of my life, as I examine the split ends of my emotions. I write to understand. I write to communicate. I write to maybe help someone else understand.

And here is what has been written to me thus far. I am sure there will be more. There have certainly been so many, many acts of overwhelming kindness, of outstretched arms of love and support to me and my family. But Emma, the mother of a college buddy expressed it perfectly. In her later years herself, having also lost a mother, Emma knows:

"I have found that there is no love greater than your mother."

And then from local artist Suzanne McDermott, whose LandscapeIntoArt is listed in my blogroll. I'm unsure if we've met in my two years as a local arts reporter or not. But I resonate with this woman if for no other reason than the weekly watercolor landscapes that grace and bless the eyes of my soul when I open my inbox. And then there's this comment from her as we finally connected through the web yesterday:  

"Losing our mother is one of the great passages of life."

And then from another writer friend on the death of his father:

"After my dad's death a few years ago, I was forced into one of the most introspective times in my life."

And so I write.

In Perfect Order

Order. Order is returning to my world. Slowly. Almost feels like more order than I've had in months. My mother's death forced me to suspend my life as I knew it. To stop. To slow down. To think about people and relationships that I had not seen and thought about in decades. To return to something basic. A nuclear family that hasn't been nuclear, again, in decades.

This was to be the weekend of holiday parties. Six of them lined up. An impossible schedule. A childless weekend. A weekend with The Boy Friend in the evenings and projects by day. Instead it's a weekend of sleeping in. Flannel and fuzzy wear all day. Bandanna head. Of me and my daughter slowly eating a half hour before closing time at City Limits Cafe and then dancing alone to XM piped easy rock amid empty tables before we left.

Back home, the winter night's full moon glow snuck in between the blinds. The flames of honeysuckle scented candles danced in the darkened room as I soaked in a hot, skin-crinkling, soul-nurturing bath. And now I will lay me down to sleep with Oprah, reading how she and I will renew our lives in the New Year.

The timing of it all, oddly, could not be More Perfect. Life. Has a Way. Of Doing. Just. That. Thank you, Mother. Guess you can't turn off those protective instincts. Even. In the AfterLife.

Mamaloves

A window into this special kind of grieving. That is a gift my long lost friend, Kris Schleicher, gave to me. We were comparatively happy-go-lucky twentysomethings living in Atlanta. Only, I'd lost the love that I thought would be for life. (I'd eventually reunite with and marry that love. And then divorce 20 years later.) Kris had lost his father to cancer. Throughout the year as we compared notes on what would, at least for me, become The Perfect Storm for my quarter-life crisis, he told me how the Grief for his father would break through amid ordinary, everyday Life. Like, he'd be driving down the highway, he said, and out of nowhere, the tears would sprout. His throat would close. He'd let out a gut-launched cry.

Mother died one week ago today. I seem to be climbing out of Zombie-dom. Maybe. I'm still relishing the comfort of fuzzy socks and flannel garments. The suitcases are finally unpacked. Today's task is to wash and fold the garments that were once jammed into them. The washer and dryer are churning and purring, respectively. Today, I will scale the Mount Everest of wadded laundry, and rifle and sort my way through an overstuffed inbox of emails.

But in the meantime, as I go about my day, and as I went about the other preceding seven days, I am reminded around the bends and corners of my home, my mind, my wonderful life, of Mother: the Bath and Body Warm Vanilla Sugar Almond hand soap I just used to wash my hands. Almond was one of her favorite scents and she had given me the now near empty bottle of the moisturizing blend. Until I put it away, my teen offspring, also a lover of lotions, thought she'd hit the jackpot with the silky texture of the Paloma Picasso body potionthat I snatched from mother's vanity and took home to mine. I'd introduced mother to the scent and it had become hers, too. On the social media site for which I moderate here, we discussed yesterday the stuff of Christmas stockings. I felt compelled to share that growing up ours aways included unshelled pecans, walnuts and brazil nuts, an orange, an apple and two, three or four melt-in-your mouth old fashioned peppermint sticks. It was more about Mother reliving the sparse yet sparkling holiday joy of her depression-era childhood than our appreciating or understanding the oddity of our stocking contents. Recently, she'd explained to me that those now everyday items that are stashed in my pantry and refrigerator were rare commodities growing up in the 20s and 30s.

When I cut a grapefruit in half, take the knife and slice into each section and then scoop out the contents into a bowl, I remember the mother who taught me to do this very thing. When I wear the lambs wool green, orchid and cerulean blue car coat she purchased in England when she, too, was in her 40s, I will think of her. And how much she loved that coat.

I guess it's called savoring. A way of hanging on to the love, the oddities, the bits of Mother that will always be here even though. She. Is. Not.