mercy triumphs over judgment

Above: Incense in a teacup (because Pip decided his censer was only for pretend), about as high church Episcopalian (with an Eastern bent) as you can get.

I have felt fragile the past few weeks.  Not like a bag full of eggs fragile, but a giant pillowcase stuffed with ripe pears fragile.  It's not that all would be lost if I didn't go carefully with myself, but I also didn't need the bruising, weeping, and spoiled bits.  Our life flows in metacycles: monthly supper club, weekly church, bi-weekly museum trips, library every third week, Mondays off please to recover from the social weekends (unless it's art group week), letters on Thursdays if not snuck in before.  I find myself watching batches of cloud dough make their way throughout the house, stuck to hair and soles of feet, wondering if there's a pattern to the depletion of the bin.  (There isn't.  Food fight inspiration strikes three year olds randomly.)  Should I plan for when to replenish the supply of pink paint, or just go on the fly?  

The good thing about living with small children is that problems might grow loud, insistent even, but are rarely serious.  I have time and space to observe, through the cracks in the light them permeates these days of joy with small growing persons, the grief that flows so near.  Grief looks like an innocent stream - gray as ages and redolent of leaves.  But then I make the mistake of stepping into it.  You never step into water if you cannot see the bottom.  Everyone who grew up in the country knows this.  And I am clinging to my prayer rope, which has snagged on a very important tree, and I take great gulps of air until somehow I am tossed ashore.  

We never grieve for just one person or just one thing.  I think of all the wasted years taking anything personally.  I gather up all my stones, not to throw, but to lay gently in the hands of those I love to anchor them here with me.  If I shed all my stones, will I be able to hold onto them?  Bargaining is the silliest part of grieving. 

I read recently that the usually reported stages of grief are actually better descriptors for the dying, not the survivors.  Survivors tend to cope in a different set of ways.  My way seems to be the way of the memorialist, with seeking and activism mixed in.  I found the new set of descriptions helpful, especially because the old categories seemed too facile.

I started watching that show Lie to Me on Netflix, mostly because it's comforting to see other people who can read body language extremely well.  They notice some things that are so seemingly rare that I don't even feel I can talk about them, such as the fact that people like me go around every moment seeing all sorts of stuff communicated that we are not supposed to let on that we know.  Social interactions are a discipline of trying not to respond to most of the cues being given.  It's exhausting, especially around people who are both extraverts and unaware of their body language.  (For instance, the woman who grimaces and fake smiles constantly, when she's not accidentally flashing contempt faces that let you know how much better than you she thinks she is.)  I shop for Christmas in the middle of the calendar year so I do not have to face the legions of fake happy but actually largely anxious and depressed crowds in stores.  

The show also pointed out that one of the characters has a natural ability to detect the meaning of gestures and facial expressions due to her past with an abusive parent.  I really like that that strand was brought up.  I know that I would not have had to learn to read body language so well if I had not been so afraid of my dad growing up. 

I think that some people probably think that I should just ditch my dad and not be sad that he is growing more and more paralyzed day by day.  Those people think that if he did the things he did (the emotional abuse, the beatings, the threats, the beatings of my mother, and especially the insults and rejection), I should be over him and just let him die, good riddance.  Those people probably think I should ditch my extended family full stop.  But those persons are wrong, living in the fragile state of self-justification that requires them not to delve into the humanity of those they deem inferior.  Those persons probably want to be normal, not holy.  Because holiness requires mercy.  Mercy sees straight through all the crap and grabs the pearl out of the muck.  There was love there once, and it sits like a jewel in the compost of the past.  Love: the weed that will always grow back and grab onto the edges of broken lives.  

What I mean to say is, even the bad things have been turned (or are being turned) to good.  (I have not forgotten all of the nights of horror or the mealtimes laden with insults and abuse.  The stupids, fats, lazies, uglies, disgustings, arrogants, not good enoughs still ping as loudly as the measuring spoons dropped on the side of the stainless steel bowl.  I can hear them whenever I wish, and they sometimes come to tea unbidden, a stranger at my table demanding why I would be so lazy and stupid as to make a 91 when I could have made a 100, and did I know how fat I am and I should not eat dinner to make up for eating lunch? Sometimes I get the shakes a little when those thoughts call, but they are the shakes of adrenaline from confronting them head on, not shakes of fear [usually].) If nothing else, I am not easily intimidated.  Having survived my childhood and adolescence, I feel far less vulnerable to most attacks.  But then there's the fact that my dad has actually changed in the past several years.  He has gone out of his way to show me he loves me, though, as I expected, he has not been able to bring himself to admit the things he did when he was drinking.  

Certainly a scale would still weigh the bad heavier than the good, though.  Unless someone were tipping the scales.  Perhaps there is a woman somewhere with baby stains on her clothes and dirt under her fingernails, an anxious face in the mottled light, rush, rush, rushing to a small prayer station.  She digs out from her pockets muddy stones, and by the handful puts them on the side of mercy.