Resurrection of a Blog

It has been nearly two years since I’ve shared blog posts on here. Since March 2013 many things have happened in my life. I began work as the director of the Winthrop Library in December of that year, finishing up the final manuscript for my grief book within days of starting a new job. Three of my books were released since then; Chemo-Therapist: How Cancer Cured a Marriage in April 2014. Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace debuted in October 2014. Mary & Me: A Lasting Link Through Ink, co-written with Mary Jedlicka Humston of Iowa City, was released September 8, 2015.

I began a new job as reporter for the Manchester Press newspaper that same month when the local paper was bought out by the company that owned the Telegraph Herald, where I had reigned as Coupon Queen columnist for three years. For four very long weeks, I worked both jobs, spending weekends promoting our book. It was an experience I don’t wish to repeat anytime soon; learning a new job, training someone for my old position, and spending each and every weekend away from home with book-signings, presentations, and letter-writing workshops. My 12-year-old daughter said it best with her wry comment “It’s like we’re orphans,” and I cracked before I’d fully completed training my replacement, making it necessary for my co-author to cover for me at two scheduled events.

I’ve also continued to do workshops and public speaking engagements these past two years. The very first workshop I did was an extreme couponing one in November 2011, and by March of 2012, I’d added writing workshops to the roster of classes I taught through a community college. David was a part of all that, and my biggest supporter. He promised me it was just the beginning, and he was right. The very last coupon workshop I did was in 2015 at the library in the town David had grown up in. When I ran out of my huge stockpile of extra health and beauty items and down-sized from a binder to a purse-sized coupon holder, I decided to retire the couponing workshop.

Like this blog, the couponing workshop could be resurrected at some point, but the power point would need updating, and I’m not sure I have the heart for that; the majority of the slides are from shopping trips I shared with David. In the meantime, I have refined my writing workshops and added grief presentations and letter-writing workshops to my list of speaking topics. I am teaching both beginning writing and advanced book proposal and marketing workshops at a local café the next two weekends and at Hawkeye Community college in Cedar Falls this spring. You can find more information about those under “Upcoming Events” here. As for the grief presentations, I traveled to Dallas this past summer to speak at a Compassionate Friends conference and met a dynamic speaker, Mitch Carmody.  I plan on bringing him as a keynote speakerfor a Grief Retreat in Dubuque, Iowa, October 8, 2016.

I did five “Grieving Through the Holidays” presentations this past November. I have two “Finding Hope in Grief” presentations scheduled in the upcoming weeks, and am in the process of organizing that fall grief retreat and forming a local widow/widower support group. I’ve discovered I have a gift for touching the hearts of those who grieve, and I find it healing to utilize it. I believe we are all here on earth to help each other HOME.

I’ve settled into my new job nicely, discovering how much I enjoy hearing other people’s stories. I love being paid to do something that has been a part of my life for over 25 years; writing. I’ve returned to my writing roots as a reporter. In 1992, as a mother of four, I began covering stories for the Independence Journal newspaper, until my fifth child, Matthew, was approximately six months old in 1994. I’ve now come full-circle.

What has surprised me about this job is how often the topic of grief has popped up in totally unrelated interviews. When a distinguished older gentleman was being interviewed about an award he’d won, he waved off the honor, saying people were tired of hearing about other’s accomplishments. When I suggested we talk about his family instead, tears came to his eyes. “How long, and who?” I asked gently, only to discover he’d lost his wife six years before. It was clear he hadn’t expected or wanted the tears, as he brushed them away impatiently. Only when I touched his arm and said “I lost my husband in 2012,” did he relax and let the tears flow freely.

“Then you know,” he whispered with a slight smile.

Yes, I do, and I believe I am a better reporter for it.

It is grief that prompts me to resurrect this blog.

As part of the promotion of Mary & Me: A Lasting Link Through Ink, I established another blog, Mary & Me,  My co-author and I have strived to make that blog an interesting one to those who would also enjoy our book; blogging about friendship, letter-writing, the co-authoring experience, and book reviews on similar books or those that might include the same topics.  I recently looked into the statistics of our shared blog, and in doing so, stumbled upon this blog’s statistics. I was surprised to see I was getting just as many viewers on this inactive blog as I was on our new one. What one topic was uppermost in bringing viewers to marypotterkenyon.wordpress.com?  GRIEF.

So there you are. Since I am still speaking and writing about grief, it only makes sense to continue blogging about it, and the topic of grief, while discussed in one chapter of our Mary & Me book, most definitely is not what draws readers to our book or our blog.

I am a part of the Grief Diaries project, led by a wonderful woman I’d met at an Indiana Grief & Hope Convention, Lynda Cheldelin Fell. Fell is president of the National Grief & Hope Coalition, creator and principle author of the Grief Diaries anthology series, a radio/film producer, and an international bestselling author who found herself beginning the long journey through profound grief when her 15 year-old daughter died in a car accident in 2009.

My writing appears in Grief Diaries: Loss of a Spouse and  Grief Diaries: Loss of a Parent, as well as the upcoming Newly Bereaved resource.

And yes, five years after the death of my mother, nearly four after the death of my husband, and less than three since the death of my grandson, I do continue to grieve. I don’t know, never want to know, the particularly painful loss it must be to lose a child.

One doesn’t “get over” their grief, as is evidenced by the man I interviewed six years after the loss of his wife.

While I don’t expect this blog to be solely dedicated to grieving, it is evidently the topic that brought many people to an inactive blog, and I expect grief will be a frequent guest here. I will be interviewing grief bloggers and reviewing grief books, but I also intend to continue to pen pieces about faith and the craft of writing, as well.

 

Who Am I…Two Years Out, March 30, 2014

Who Am I… Two Years Out

March 30, 2014

“I have a confession to make. I still cry about your Dad. Every single morning.” The stunned silence of my daughters filled the room and alarm crossed each of their faces. In just a few days it would be two years since David died and Rachel, Emily and Katie and I were reminiscing about the particular horror of those days that followed his death.

I’d meant my comment as a good thing; that I wasn’t forgetting their Dad. I hastened to explain “Not a lot. Sometimes just a sob. When everyone else is asleep and I’m all alone downstairs, sometimes I just sit and cry for a few minutes. Other times it’s just a sob or two that escapes. Then it’s over, and I go about my day.”

Three pairs of widened eyes stared at me in apparent horror.

“I don’t think I wanted to know that,” one of my daughters finally commented, and the other two nodded.

Why hadn’t it occurred to me that my daughters might like to think their mother was completely and gloriously happy? Maybe because it had been obvious from our conversation that they weren’t “getting over” the loss of their Dad anytime soon, and I’d wanted to reassure them that was a perfectly normal response?

What is life like two years after the loss of David? A better question might be what am I like?

Who are you? I’d wondered just days before when I’d asked a stranger if I could hug her. She’d stopped at my library to ask if I was the one who’d written a book on cancer. When I told her that I was, she began telling me about her husband. As soon as she said the word “cancer” my breath caught in my throat. I recognized the waver in her voice and the tears glinting in her eyes. This was a woman in emotional turmoil.

“The doctors have told him to put his affairs in order,” she continued, and I glanced down at the tote bag near my feet as my heart lurched with her words. Suddenly I understood the compulsion to add one of my books to the tote that morning, despite the fact that I’d already added it to our library shelf. It was checked out, but I hadn’t planned on adding another. I had learned to listen to those “small, quiet urgings” of the heart.

“You don’t happen to have one of your books with you?” she asked, and I pulled it out and handed it to her.

“You can have it.” This was the third copy I’d given away in a week. It was occurring to me that perhaps this was going to be a book I would be giving away more than selling. There are a lot of hurting people in the world, a lot of cancer patients and caregivers. I immediately nudged away any lingering worries about how exactly I would pay for those books I was giving away. People above material, I reminded myself. It was then I asked the woman if I could give her a hug.

“I was going to ask you for one,” she sheepishly admitted as I came around the desk and put my arms around her. A single sob escaped her as I tightened the embrace. Just two years ago, I’m not sure I would have known to hug her. Before my husband’s cancer in 2006, the possibility wouldn’t even have crossed my mind. I rarely hugged anyone back then, outside of my own family, and even then the hugs sometimes felt forced and awkward.

After she left, I sat at my desk and cried a little, considering the very real possibility that this woman in her 40’s would likely need my upcoming grief book by the end of the year.

My daughter Elizabeth snorted with apparent bemusement when I related the encounter to her on the phone that evening. “You hugged her? A complete stranger? Who are you?”

Exactly. Who am I? Who is this woman who lived most of the first fifty years of her life not trusting others, particularly females because they had been her biggest tormentors in elementary school? How did the woman with only a hand full of friends outside of her siblings become the kind of person who would reach out to hug a stranger, and then shed tears of empathy for her?

I think of my mother, who on bus trips would come home with names and addresses of strangers she had befriended, and my husband, who during and after his cancer treatment would casually fling his arm around someone’s shoulder or tell them that he loved them. Loved them! I remember feeling envious of the ease in which he said those words. A mutual friend of ours in line at his wake told me how much it had meant to her that the last time she’d seen him he’d thrown his arms around her and blurted out that he loved her. Loved her, as if she didn’t hear those words often enough. I’d been standing next to him that day, and I remember clearly my thoughts: the initial surprise at his words, then the immediate understanding (she was sweet, caring, and seemed very alone in the world), followed by a swift and sharp envy.

“That is so nice you hugged her and told her you loved her,” I’d told him in the car on the way home. “I wish I could be more like you in that way.”

And now I am. I am saddened that it took the loss of a special man for me to become more like the best in him.

“I love you. I am so glad you are feeling better,” I’d said on the phone to my assistant librarian a couple of weeks ago, after she’d been gravely ill for several days. I meant it. I love Ann. I no longer care if it is socially acceptable to express that emotion. I’d heard fear in Ann’s husband’s voice when he called to tell me how ill she was, and I certainly know how quickly someone can be taken from us, when unsaid words can haunt us. As uncomfortable as my words might have made Ann feel, I do not regret them. At the same time, I am surprised that my normally reticent self has become so effusive. Losing David and Jacob has truly refined me. The woman I have become is a much nicer, kinder, empathetic one than the woman I once was. It occurs to me that I am now who God meant me to be all along.

During those initial dark days after the loss of David I felt as though I was stumbling around in darkness. How do I do this? How will I go on? How can I stand this pain? I didn’t yet know how to search for answers to those questions in the Bible so I grasped onto the words of others who had gone down this path before me: C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, H. Norman Wright, Joan Didion. I read a dozen books related to grief in those first weeks, jotting down passages and pertinent words in my journal.

And I prayed. One answer to prayer came in the form of a writing assignment for an upcoming Grief Bible. If I were to write devotions to be included in that Bible, then I would have to learn how to study the Bible for answers. Notes like these poured from my pen:

Those words were the seeds planted: words that sprouted and blossomed in my soul. I can see that now. Looking back on the last two years I clearly see the instances when God reached out through others to touch my life, to help me through loss:

The immediate “surrounding of the guard,” in the form of sisters who were at my side within minutes of my returning home from the hospital where David was pronounced dead.

My friend Mary Humston, who somehow knew exactly what to do and what to say to help me through.

Women at the breakfast table during a writer’s conference, women, who when they discovered it was my first wedding anniversary without my husband, immediately clutched each other’s hands and surrounded me with prayer. A simple paper sign posted on a tree on the path back to my room, a sign that was not there just an hour before: “If a tree does not suffer great winds and storms, its bark will not grow thick and strong. The tree, thin, naked, and weak, will fall over and die. Storms will bring strength, majesty and growth. God brings storms to build us. When he builds us, we will go forward.”

A young woman who knew our family, not knowing exactly why, but feeling led to, writes out Bible verses on notebook paper and drops them in the mail. “I felt called out to write some verses down for you,” she had written, and the verses were exactly what I had prayed for, had actually requested from someone else, but never received. “I need Bible verses that will comfort me. Can you help me find them?” I’d asked. Within days the Holy Spirit prompted this young woman, a young woman who two years later is to become my daughter-in-law, to jot down verses that would help me.

This is how God has worked in the last two years, through others who have followed those inexplicable urgings of the heart and reached out to me. It is how God is now working in me.

Bring another copy of your book to work, I heard, and not two hours later a hurting woman who is caring for a husband with cancer walked into my library and asked for it.

Metaphor of the Cake, March 17, 2014

Metaphor of the Cake

March 17, 2014

“Help! I don’t know what to do!” the urgency of my daughter’s voice propelled me from the couch to the kitchen. I’d promised my oldest son a birthday meal on Sunday and one of my daughters (who shall remain nameless) had offered to help out by making the cake. My girls knew I was exhausted after a busy week of work and workshops.

I groaned at the sight on the kitchen table. The cake had stuck to the pan and come apart during my daughter’s efforts to remove it. I did the only thing I could think of to do: I dumped it upside down onto the other layer. My daughter and I stood there for a moment, staring at the mess before us.

“And just how do I fix this? I wondered, balking at my daughter’s urge to just “throw it away and buy a new one.” It was impossible to apply frosting to the debacle before us, but we tried. Valiantly.

“Maybe it will look better with the sprinkles,” my daughter suggested helpfully.

It didn’t.

“It is an abomination before God,” another daughter added when she saw it. My three daughters agreed that I should head to Walmart on Sunday morning to purchase a replacement cake for their brother.

I came face to face with my failure to make even the simplest cake for my son when I opened the refrigerator door Sunday morning to get milk for my coffee. I stood there for a moment, coffee cup in hand, scrutinizing the cake. Then the realization hit me: The cake is a perfect metaphor for my life.

Saturday marked the two-year anniversary of my husband’s heart attack. The two-year anniversary of his death fast approaches. My “perfectly formed” life with a loving spouse broke into pieces on the morning of his death on March 27, 2012. For awhile, I wondered if my life, if our family’s life, could ever be put back together. A two-parent household suddenly became a single-parent one. An eight-year-old girl lost her best buddy, the daddy who’d held her hand, read her books, rode bikes with her, fed the birds, pulled weeds, and worked on math with her. Seven other children of varying ages faced a future without a Dad. Life did not look too pretty without David.

I have tried to put our life back together. Valiantly. I have frosted over the hole in my heart, sprinkled love on the wounds of my children. I look back on the last two years and know I have sometimes failed miserably in making the “cake” of our new life without David palatable: a Christmas dinner sans the ham and a subsequent emergency trip to a Kwik Star, my inability to babysit grandchildren during a time when my daughter needed me, so many grocery store runs that ended with me bolting out the door in tears because the peanut butter aisle was too much to handle, and so few math lessons because it was Daddy who handled the math. Those days our “cake” wobbles and the layers nearly slide apart. My feeble attempts at parenting alone fall far short of ideal.

My son Dan chuckled a little when he saw his birthday cake. There were no candles, but we did sing. Our attempts at cutting it into pieces produced what could only be called a “chunk” of cake. We hesitated only briefly before enthusiastically diving into the mess of cake. It turns out that how the cake looks has little to do with the taste.

My life now is that cake. It isn’t always pretty and it can crumble easily.

But life~my life~ sure is good.