The Slow Way: All the Ones We Love, Gathered Up Into the Mind of God
A reflection on loss and All Souls Day
I planted a tree on my dad’s birthday last April and named it Little Mikey, the name my Memaw called Dad when she told stories of his childhood, how she didn’t care whether or not he wanted to practice that violin of his. Little Mikey sat himself down for thirty minutes a day and played, thanks to her. He also learned the value of hard work on his paper route, even though his feet couldn’t even touch the floor when he sat down at the table. She always assured me, when she wasn’t insisting that she toilet trained her babies at 3 months old and I should too, that all my dad’s talents and goodness came from her mothering success. She was a piece of work, and lovely. I adored Memaw for all the reasons she made us roll our eyes. Her confidence was something I strive for still. My mom joked in those last hours of my dad’s life, that when she told him it was okay to go and that Memaw would be waiting for him, she realized that maybe that wasn’t the best motivation for his letting go. We were sure Memaw had a long list of chores for him around her heavenly mansion, and a few lectures he would need to sit through.
My dad and I spent the long night of Memaw’s dying together, both of us sitting in her room in chairs on the side of her bed, telling stories and sometimes singing songs. That was only two years and two months before I would help usher my dad to the end. Too soon for him. I would’ve loved to see my dad as a bent-over elderly man, telling stories we’d never heard and fiddling with tools like his dad had done in his final years. Losing him in his early seventies feels like a true waste. I haven’t made peace with that yet. I know he lived longer than so many others who also deserved more time. But, still. I wanted to see him shuffle. And I wanted to laugh at his irreverent old man jokes. I wanted my boys to see him grow old. I wanted him to see them grow up.
The tree I planted, Little Mikey, has weeping branches, and in the spring, bright pink blossoms. It’s a tender tree still, and will be for a while, held steady by a piece of wood that travels with the three inch trunk all the way to soil. I talk to Little Mikey sometimes, not like a tell-it-all-my-secrets kind of way, but just as a friend. I remind Little Mikey about the season, and tell it about my garden. Sometimes I just say hi and give it a pet. When the pink blossoms turned to big green leaves, I told it how proud I was. It’s no small thing to make a body full of leaves out of nothing.
When Pawpaw died, my dad called me. I had just been with Dad a couple of days before, and even though we had been losing Pawpaw for awhile, my dad was overwhelmed by grief. His dad was his hero and probably, I realized later, his best friend. If Memaw was a piece of work, Pawpaw was the one making love-filled jokes about her antics in the corner. We all needed him and his big bass voice, and his lips that could whistle any song in the world. Pawpaw was the man my dad modeled himself after: gentle, stable, patient, creative. My dad’s skill with drawing came from Pawpaw, and all of our skill for storytelling was straight from Pawpaw’s DNA. I never met Pawpaw’s mom, Love, but if I had been given a girl baby, I had plans to offer her that old-fashioned and worthy name for Pawpaw’s sake.
When Pawpaw died my dad was there with him. He called me, hardly able to speak the words. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in Austin. It was 5 in the morning.
Honestly, when September showed up this year, I wasn’t thrilled for fall. Summer is my favorite and I’m never really ready for it to close. I love swimming and feeling like the sunshine is (for the most part) on my team, pushing out life all around me. Chris loves fall. He cheers on the first cold morning, and pulls out his sweaters with delight. I’m a little slower to take to the change.
Little Mikey’s leaves turned yellow last month. Honestly, I was a little disappointed they were yellow. Those gorgeous spring colors it sprouted convinced me that it might give me red or even orange leaves. Yellow is pretty but not quite as vibrant as the other colors we have around Jersey in the fall. And I want Little Mikey to be beautiful, to make me feel like this thing I’m growing in honor of my dad is perfect, is worthy. When I write that I know it sounds silly. But we grieving ones don’t always know where to put our love when the one we’ve lost has disappeared. Who can blame me for giving a little bit of that love to a tree?
I haven’t ever really celebrated All Souls Day. I’ve honored my dead in various ways in my own mind and heart. I wear my friend Ali’s sweatshirt on her birthday and on the day we lost her. I read Memaw’s journal she wrote to me. I tell my boys all the funny stories of Grandaddy and Pawpaw, and keep Deenie’s bracelet — the one I wore in my wedding — in a special box. I have one of my dad’s flies he tied for his next fly-fishing adventure on my vanity table. And the tiny pencil he kept from childhood, sharpened all the way to the eraser, sits among my special things.
This year, my friend Courtney joined the collection of souls I’ve lost from this earth. I worry about Courtney. She was my age and her life was so hard. She left us only a few weeks after my dad, and while I knew Memaw would find her and feed her some chicken and dumplings, I’ve tended to pray that she might find some comfort from my dad. He was the right kind of gentle for her. He would sit with her and look out at the mountain stream. And maybe that’s what she would need.
I don’t really know how to mark All Souls Day. I could take some wisdom from my Latinx siblings and make an altar. I thought about that, pouring my dad a cup of dark roast coffee and setting it next to his jig nymph fly and pencil nub. A picture of him with my boys, and the two of us backpacking together when I was in college. Maybe I’ll do that next year.
This year, I had a writing deadline. I had youth group to lead and needed to fill the cooler with ice and drinks, and get my older boys and myself to New York City. So instead I walked over to Little Mikey, and found that all of its leaves had dropped. A small yellow pile in the circle of dirt.
Grief, I’m learning, is less a line and more a spiral. In and out we circle around the ones we love. We ache for them and let our hearts and bodies lean back toward our other relationships. And then we return again to find them still missing.
Sarah Bessey wrote this week about how, as she has processed the loss of her friend Rachel three years ago, she has been learning to befriend her ghosts:
It’s eventually time to integrate the loss and the grief and trauma with the laughter and the love and the gratitude, to learn to hold all of it within your soul, to become the haunted and beautiful landscape yourself. That’s the shift I’ve felt the past few months, I guess, the metabolizing and integrating of the whole story into my body and soul.
These sorts of ghosts are very patient with us. They’re never in a hurry and so when it’s time, it’s simply time.1 The love of God is kind and patient towards us, there is never a rush even for our hauntings. Our landscapes are part of how we are formed, how we view God, where we lived together, and so how we heal.
How do we heal? On All Souls Day all the leaves fell off, right on time. I don’t necessarily believe in signs, but I do believe in small graces. And this felt like one.
Hi, Little Mikey said. I’m here, living this season with you.
In one month we’ll mark my dad’s death day. I bought my flight this week and will head to my mom’s house and spend that week with my siblings, nieces and nephews. Winter is not my favorite season, even with the delights of Christmas. As soon as the holidays move through us, we are left with months of ice and darkness. And Little Mikey will have to stay strong to survive the winter. I know trees know what to do with snow, but I can’t help feeling protective, as if in an ideal world I might dig his little roots up and bring him into my warm house.
I read a remarkable passage from St. John of the Cross yesterday morning. It was about the soul and its union with God: “So the understanding of the soul is now the understanding of God; and its will is the will of God; and its memory is the memory of God; and its delight is the delight of God.”
As much as I imagine my Memaw putting my dad to work in heaven, or imagine him fully himself sitting with my whole and thoughtful friend Courtney beside a mountain stream, I don’t really know what I think it means to be a soul on All Souls Day. But I like to think that somehow, all the ones we love are gathered up into the mind of God, so close to the Divine that their memories are God’s memory, their delights are God’s delights.
Whether or not I ever build them that altar this year, put on Ali’s sweatshirt, read one of Courtney’s poems, or place, delicately, dad’s pencil nub on display. Whether I pull out Pawpaw’s painting, slip on Deenie’s bracelet, or read aloud one of Memaw’s childhood memories she wrote down in a journal particularly for me. I will hold them, all of them, in the sacred space where we hold all our blessings. All those souls we carry on All Souls Day and all the days that follow, gathered up in the cloud of witnesses, the cloud that shares its understanding and will and memory with the soul of God.
Here. Living this season with us.
A Slow Practice
In her book, The Cure For Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief, Jan Richardson offers a blessing that I’d love for us to sit with today. Whether you have a long list of souls you’re holding close this week as we remember our beloved dead, or whether your list is small, I hope you’ll take a moment this weekend to remember, to light a candle, or make a stone cairn, or write some words down to mark this moment in the year.
I don’t want to infringe on copyright laws so I’ll only share a portion of Richardson’s blessing, and invite you to find the rest here on her instagram account. Her books are gorgeous and if this speaks to you, I hope you’ll consider any of her books, which combine poetry, liturgy, prayer and art.
Wherever you’re sitting right now, I invite you to take a deep breath. And as you breathe in imagine your loved one’s face. As you breathe out, invite the presence of God to come close to them. For some of us who grew up in a tradition that looks warily on praying for the dead, it might feel strange. But know that praying for your loved one is a gift for you. And though we don’t know what life looks like for those souls who share their memory with the memory of God, we can imagine that the God who loves us loves them. That the God who loves us lives outside of time, where they are as fully themselves as you are fully yourself. This is a mystery, but it’s one we are invited to enter into.
Breathe in: [Imagine your loved one’s face]
Breathe out: Spirit, come close to _____.
Pray this breath prayer for as long as you need.
Let’s close with part of Jan Richardson’s poem:
Enduring Blessing
What I really want to tell you
is to just lay this blessing
on your forehead,
on your heart;
let it rest
in the palm of your hand,
because there is hardly anything
this blessing could say,
any word it could offer
to fill the hollow . . .
Let this blessing
settle into you
with its hope
more ancient
than knowing.
Hear how this blessing
has not come alone—
how it echoes with
the voices of those
who accompany you,
who attend you in every moment,
who continually whisper
this blessing to you . . .
To read the rest of this poem, you can find it here.
Take some time to receive the blessing you are being offered.
Such a beautiful post. I loved reading it and learning about your Little Mikey tree. ❤️
I lost my dad to dementia about two years ago. It was a very hard and unsettling death, for him and all of us who loved him. Your words brought some comfort today, Micha. Thank you.