September and another day to remember

This is kind of a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago, “What makes a day sacred?” in that another big day for me has passed.

Not to highlight every day I have marked on my calendar for you all, but there are a few that come to mind in a significant fashion. As I sat here working at my local Starbucks, as I often do, the end of the school day arrived and the students flooded the building. It is the first week back to school, a very rainy Fall feeling day, and I took a moment to reflect on how that felt way back when. September 4th was significant for me and my family back in 1989 as it was the day my mom passed on. September was always special to me because my mom and I both had our birthdays in this month. Her passing was expected soon, but it always intrigued me that it would happen in our month, just days before her birthday.

The 4th was the Labour Day Monday and we had been holding vigil in or near her room at the hospital through the very early morning. I remember us young ones (Philip, Irene, and me, the siblings who still lived at home) driving home very early on the AM and picking up some Robin’s Doughnuts on the way. Not sure why that last part stood out to me, but it seems like Robin’s played a significant role in my upbringing! Anyway, I had just gotten cozy in bed for what seemed like minutes when the phone rang downstairs. I knew what was coming and it was confirmed when Irene came upstairs, knocked on our doors and simply said, “Mom died.” We drove back to Steinbach, sat with Dad as he made funeral arrangements, walked with some of the care workers that were close to us over that final year, and the end of the day just seems to fade.

The next day I got up, got on the bus, and went to a new school in a different town for my first day of high school. I casually mentioned to my English teacher that I would be missing on Thursday. He made a joke about it not being a good start to a new year and asked for a reason. I told him my mom died and that was when the funeral was happening. He was visibly shocked and I wasn’t sure how to make the situation less uncomfortable. It wasn’t until later that I realized how incredibly strange that whole scenario was, from a few different angles.

And then everything just seemed to move on.

As you might imagine, it is a day, a season, an era that stands out in my story line. I could vaguely remember how my mom lived prior to being sick, her testimony of struggle, and then of course navigating grief through my teen years…and beyond. I have often told people in later years that I did not grieve well. I would now say I did not know how to grieve and really wasn’t entirely sure how other people were grieving around me.

So, in keeping with the theme of sacred days, I thought I would share some things that hit me, have hit me in the past, and items I pondered over the years:

1. There is nothing better than a good funeral. Mennonites really like funerals and do them pretty well. It seems to go well with the culture of community and walking humbly together. There is always a lot of food, a lot of sharing, a lot of walking to the grave together. As Thomas G. Long would say, whatever you call it after the person has died, it is a funeral; we walk them to the grave.
2. Storytelling is a vital part of how we walk away from the grave. I often think of this as a picture of the early disciples after Jesus died; they still told the story of who he was. And then the movement that followed was all about telling the story. Growing up I took it for granted that our church tradition spent a lot of time in sharing testimony, the very act of telling the story of each person in the community. I realized over the years that storytelling, getting new perspectives on shared memories, made the people we mourned stand out more prominently than the stones we placed on their graves.
3. Keep visiting after the funeral. I had a friend warn me about how this would happen shortly after the funeral, and it did. In what seemed like an instant the casseroles, the random visits, the calls to see how we were doing, ended. I remember getting an open offer for lunch at one of my uncle and aunt’s homes near the high school, and that was precious.
4. Keep walking with the young person. That invite for lunch was wide open but I did not know how to be a guest. In many ways I still don’t. I felt like I was taking advantage of them so I only went a few times. I also felt strange as a young person just going to someone’s house that was not my own, and teenagers just don’t want to stand out for the wrong things. Weird. I’m not entirely sure how I would have responded at the time, being fairly independent, but the idea of a ‘grief mentor’ seems nice now. There is a strong pull to just keep doing life and feeling normal, but there is also something good about having someone help you notice what might not be normal.
5. Acknowledge that the person is absent and that there will be a hole in a lot of things, and even though it heals, the spot they left will always be felt.

Thanks for letting me share another one of my ‘sacred days’ with you. I hope it causes you to stop and consider someone in your life in a new way!