April 8, 2023 Pandemic Memoir Intermezzo

 April 8, 2023 

Holy Easter Vigil Saturday

or

Also - Happy Chocolate Bunny Day 

I decided to write this  BLOG POST INTERMEZZO about current events in my life to serve as a brief break from my emerging Pandemic Memoir. If you are turned off by the title because you believe in science and facts and are an unbeliever in Jesus/God - please stay with me and read until the end.  For I was once you, too - and that was only a mere four (4) years ago…which NOW seems like a lifetime ago to me.  Because ultimately this is a story about a reversal of destiny, redemption and living life in a new way…

Tomorrow is Easter and many families will celebrate in many different ways.  In America, our money-handler overlords like to blend our religious traditions with the unrelenting greed of capitalism to ensure the stock market remains robust for THEM come Monday.  Leave it to America to take the brutal murder of an innocent man and turn it into pastel eggs and chocolate. 

But I can remember the joy of being a child and excitedly engaging in the neighborhood Easter egg hunt.  I can also remember in 2012 when my birthday happened to fall on Easter Sunday and I spent the day FULLY MISERABLE because my former self-indulgent self could not be indulged specifically BECAUSE IT WAS EASTER AND MY BIRTHDAY.  I recall that I was spectacularly livid that literally every “nice” restaurant closed after Sunday Brunch that day. At the time, I was a night owl, so a Noon Brunch for my birthday was a hard no. And thus and so, I spent the day complaining, ranting, ruminating and banging on about the inconvenience of this stupid religious stuff crashing in on my birthday party…

Like yikes….

Full stop. YIKES.  For there is no defense to such idiocy….

  

Sitting here today, I can tell you I will forever carry the shame of my behavior that day with me all the remaining days of my life.  For there is literally NO EXCUSE for how entitled, selfish, self-centered and obnoxious I was that day.  I’m sure I lobbed many an F bomb at “those stupid religious people” that day, too.  The unmitigated nerve of their holy, reverent and important commemoration crashing in on the enjoyment of MY special day! 🙄😮

How deeply horrifying & mortifying if you are me remembering your former self - before God left the 99 to come save me.

By way of background, I was raised Catholic and attended 1-12 Catholic parochial school.  But it never really stuck with me.  Any of the “Catholic stuff.”  I walked away from 12 years of Catholic education as a devoted agnostic and not much more than a shrug regarding that branch of Christianity.  For I had the grave misfortune to land on some very ACADEMICALLY DEFICIENT parochial schools who forced you to engage in rote memorization of 50 pointless prayers; yet never told you the MEANING or SUBSTANCE behind any of it.  And the priests and nuns did not know math and science so they simply didn’t teach it.  Jeepers what a scam.  Both schools are now, fortunately, CLOSED so they cannot churn out anymore stupid students.     

To be fair, my Dad was the Catholic as my Mom was an atheist; and I guess he thought he was doing the right thing by providing a private school education for us.  My Dad was a good guy and was more “Christ-like” in his everyday kindness and compassion for others than most VERY VOCAL Christians ever will be.  After his divorce from my Mom when I was 15, Dad went to mass every Sunday and always invited me to go with him; but I declined as I “just wasn’t there with it all YET” and I still did not see the point.  For I had not yet personally had a Divine Encounter.  Curiously, my Dad stopped attending church the last 10 years of his 90 years of life.  I never asked him WHY and I would give almost anything to know the answer.  Something must have happened to <rattle his faith> but I know not what it was.  Aside from a stroke from which he fully recovered, he had a long, happy and healthy 30 year retirement. He golfed daily, ate ice cream every evening - insisting it was the key to his vitality and longevity - and he laughed a lot.  I think I miss THAT the most: the sound of his laughter ricocheting around the walls of his condo on the daily.          

      Sitting here today, I recall that Easter birthday of mine and I cringe with searing shame.  Yeah, yeah - I know The Good Book tells us we are forgiven for all of our past sins and all; but forgiving myself is another matter entirely.  Trust me - I’m working on it -but no one is harder and for longer on me - than me.  

Because, as us Christians like to say, God left the 99 to come save me back in February 2020 so I am now a practicing Christian - and I attend church twice weekly and began my own online deaf ministry.  I claim no specific religious denomination but my personal beliefs are rooted in the beliefs espoused by Martin Luther (he was right about almost everything btw) and Christian-science avoidance of things having to do with our corrupt government. I also believe that if Jesus DID come back today - He would weep at the fractured state of the one, holy, apostolic and UNITED church He told his disciples to go and create.  For there are an estimated 200 different and separate Christian denominations nationally and over 45,000 globally.  Weep indeed. 

And I am not writing this Easter Vigil blog entry to try and convince you to follow me into Christianity - although I’m happy to share my “saving grace” story with anyone who asks to hear it…Short version is: “I cried out to Him, He heard my call; He rescued me from my greatest fall.”  And since then - I’ve had a kind of inexplicable inner peace that I longed for all my life that was -  oddly enough, never found at my local Ulta/Sephora counter - though, Lord knows I tried to find it there. 

And THAT Divine Inner Peace has made all the difference for me. It’s just as Jesus said and how The Bible describes it: “I am leaving you with a gift - peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift this world cannot give to you.  So do not be troubled or afraid.”   (John 14:27 translated).

I wrote this wanting to share with you something that I have since learned.  The tenets of Christianity are often common sense, insightful and prudent life instructions for a peaceful and joy-filled life.  I understand how this likely seems absurd to the unbeliever.  But take for example, the state of our fallen World today.  It seems futile and without hope right now, doesn’t it? Yet who among us doesn’t think that our Country would be in far better shape if EVERYONE here was ardently working to expand and nurture within themselves: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, loyalty, gentleness and self-control INSTEAD OF BEING proud, arrogant, abusive, ungrateful, impure, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, brutal, malicious, cruel, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of self and lacking self-control!?

(1 Corinthians12:1-11 and 2 Timothy 3).  

Maybe if EVERYONE worked to improve themselves by removing the negative and replacing it with the aforementioned positive attributes AND work towards changing their own local community in this Country - life wouldn’t be so impossibly hard right now for so many. 

And life IS impossibly hard for so many right now. Cuz let’s face it: our government fully failed us during this Pandemic - spanning BOTH Presidencies. And THAT fact is what inspired me to write this Easter Vigil Holy Saturday blog entry - because of all the deeply traumatic suffering I see in our Country right now. 

In Christianity, Holy Saturday is sandwiched between the stark and brutal crucifixion of Jesus that happened on Friday AND the glory of His resurrection on Easter Sunday.  On Holy Saturday, Jesus’ mother Mary and His disciples awaited with a faithful stillness - believing that God would end their grief and Jesus would return in victory as promised. And if you have ever known grief of your own child, your beloved parent, a spouse or even a cherished pet - you instinctively can relate to what they must have endured in *the waiting* and the hoping….

This large and important part of being human is so often completely overlooked in America: Bereft grief. It is that seemingly ceaseless quiet and solitary suffering we all must endure when we’re all cried out, when all of our energy for denying, raging or complaining has been drained of us; and  the learning of how to manage this new permanent pain of loss that now becomes part of our everyday lives must begin. Everyone will likely have an experience in their life where they lived through something that felt unbearable and unsurvivable, when the trauma and our anguished suffering therein were so lethal that we likely survived on sheer shock adrenaline alone - until the ACUTE phase of the event was over.  

And then we went home….to the quiet and the stillness and had to face that seemingly unmanageable monster called bereft grief all alone.  Because make no mistake - as much as we TRY to care for one another at such times - the grief of a lost loved one is a journey we all must ultimately travel alone. 

In solitude. And quiet. And stillness.  

The event itself may be over but our internal suffering is just beginning. For me, there was lots of immovable *stillness* in the weeks & months following the death of my Dad; time just forever lost to the traumatic dark, barren emptiness that is “grief healing” in America.

I imagine this is much like Mary Mother of Jesus and the disciples all felt the day after the crucifixion: numb, reeling emotionally and the pain, at first shattering their hearts into a broken bag of glass, and then - a more dull, lasting pain like that of a broken arm just beginning to reset and heal in the aftermath of the break.  

Holy Saturday allows us to feel something very real and very human - it goes to the depth of who we are - people who carry the loving MEMORY of those who have gone before us preceding us in death - now (hopefully) without the jagged sharpness of the cutting broken glass swallowing us up whole into that ball of screaming, unmanageable pain we were certain we would never survive.  After my Dad died, I used to tell people: “My Dad left but never taught my heart how to go on without him. I feel like I died that day too - but they just forgot to bury me.”  

Mostly people would look aghast at this shockingly rare & candid OPEN DISPLAY OF VERY VOCAL & ONGOING GRIEF and quickly flee from me. 

Why? 

Because, in my opinion, America does literally EVERYTHING wrong about the grief and grief healing process. But that’s a blog post for another day…😉

   Now, sitting here today on this, my birthday, I have at least progressed in my grief journey to the point of: “No one knows how much unimaginable & solitary pain I was in that year of his death in 2018. And the worst part about that is: no one really cares either 🤷‍♀️

But I will always keep talking about you, Dad, because you deserve to be remembered. You fought for our Country during the Korean War and you fought to keep me safe my whole life. Your legacy deserves my words of honor.

They say the greatest gift we can give to those who have gone before us is to live more fully in their place.  If true, I can honestly say I have done my level best.  Because as many of you know who have been reading my emerging Pandemic Memoir, since my Dad’s death, I have taken on greedy leechlords/tenant rights in 13 States, and I have taken on and started to dismantle the corrupt corporate grift game existing in the for-profit, Medicaid nursing homes, the homeless outreach system, the domestic violence system, the inequities in the criminal justice system and the overt healthcare inequities - both medical and mental - in the Adult Medicaid System for the poors in America.  I will have my first book about my Pandemic experiences publishing next year, I became an ordained minister and I just received a full scholarship in a year long Program to be a Mental Health Crisis Intervention Specialist with Clinicians and Clergy.  I have my own Ministry where I try to just sit with people and listen to them tell me what would best help them and then connect them to resources or people known to help. I do pro bono legal work and social justice advocacy. I volunteer at my local cat rescue. I try to do good works helping the homeless, the poor, the abandoned and forgotten, the widows and those folks in need - as Jesus instructed us to do. I do far, far more in that regard than I ever did in my life prior to my Dad’s death when I was flush with cash and had so much more financial ability to help others in acute need. I didn’t help much back then; but I like to think that I am making up for my shortcomings in that regard NOW. And so I like to imagine my Dad is up in heaven polka dancing with all his friends (he was an unrepentant flirtatious ladies man in his day 😉); but then every once in a while he looks down here with his friends all around him and he’s pointing proudly at me and saying: “ See that one? She’s mine.  Look at her go, would ya?” 🥹

So on this Easter Vigil Saturday and this coming Easter Sunday, however you celebrate - either with religion or with brunch and ball games or some combination of things - I hope you carve out some time to truly feel BOTH important emotions: the (sometimes still sad) beautiful memory of those cherished loved ones who have passed AND the joy that we still inexplicably <can> experience despite their absence in our now very different lives.

As for me? The dogwoods and cherry blossom trees always bloom for my birthday so I will be taking some time to commune with nature and take some pictures of my most favorite flowering April trees.  My Dad used to call them God’s birthday gift to me every year.  This year, THAT memory of his reverent  designation of my favored trees rings especially true and profoundly meaningful to me; whereas before when he remarked upon them, it always seemed hollow and hokey to me - like something a witty Dad full of groan-worthy “Dad jokes” WOULD say.   

Turns out, you were right, Dad - about literally EVERYTHING.  The older I get, the more I realize this now. And regarding my favored trees blooming just in time THIS week for my birthday today, I can only say “I am so blessed. Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees sing for joy.” Psalm 96:12

Happy Joyful Easter from my heart to yours….

  

Epilogue: For everyone continuing on my emerging Pandemic Memoir journey with me thank you all for being the amazing miracle in my life that you are. ♥️