A Remembered Loss
I know the season; I feel the heaviness begin to settle on my heart before I know the date on the calendar. I know that summer has reached its climax. Even while the heat of a summer sun still bears down on me, I feel it in the breeze that rustles the Johnson grass with its Auburn seeded heads towering on either side of the road. And I see it as I drive past rows of bushy, green cotton, and shaded rows of tall, tasseled corn.
I remember when my boys were very little walking at the edge of the field to look at the tall rows of corn that were tasseled and beginning to dry. And we would look for tiny green boles in knee high cotton that were almost as tall as my fair skinned blue eyed red and blond little boys.
And then I remember that missed summer in which our world stopped but somehow summer still passed without us. I had spent the summer mostly enclosed within the white walls of a hospital and rehab. It was Friday, August 7, 1992, when we brought Justin home for the first time after complications from open heart surgery left him severely brain damaged four months earlier. It was his sixth birthday, but there wasn’t much cause for celebration. Our happy and comical red headed little boy was forever changed. Our life was forever changed, our family was forever changed, and in a few years, I too, would be forever changed.
An Attempt to Ease the Ache
As the years passed, August would bring with it a heart heaviness that I could not explain. To numb the ache, I would throw myself wholeheartedly into gardening and canning. Picking vegetables in the morning and then canning until late in the day, I could avoid the late afternoon sunshine and anything else that would remind me of the season. Later it was back-to-school curriculum and lesson plans., which would keep me inside and prevent exposing myself to anything in nature that would renew my heartache.
It wasn’t until after Justin died that I began to realize this happened ever year at the same time and that hard work and busyness did little to appease my melancholy. It was only then that I began to be kinder to myself. I let the garden go and slowed down a bit. By then my children were middle school and high school students. And while I still spent time perusing curriculum and making lesson plans, we spent the month of August easing into school slowly. We read books aloud or silently on the porch, we observed nature and journaled, and we took time to enjoy the last days of supper often eating both breakfast and supper outside.
Now those days are gone as well as the days of farming and crop watching that passed before them. Today my August days vary little from the other days of the year as I deliver the mail. I am grateful to be out in the open country, but so many things remind me of the season from the position of the sun and the shadows it casts to the sound of cicadas and crickets. Ditches filled with tall Johnson grass and maturing crops often remind me of those early days spent walking down dust turn rows with my little boys, and I am filled with wistful nostalgia and an aching sense of loss.
A Salve for Soul Weariness
Not long ago I asked my friends on Facebook, “what do you do for soul weariness?”
One sweet friend replied, “To rejuvenate, I like to take a warm bath and listen to a good Christian novel.” I loved this response because that’s what I do too! A few years ago, after listening to Wendell Berry’s Port Williams series on audible, I began to reload those books as August approached. My heart still aches every year at this time, but these books are a kindness to myself. I also have the actual books, and so, in the evenings, I let myself stop yard work a little earlier and enjoy a lite supper on the porch soaking in the pleasures of nature and summer and reading the passages that I found particularly beautiful. The following is one of my favorites.
That Distant Land
Mat Feltner was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Saying it thus, I force myself to reckon again with the strangeness of that verb was. The man of whom I once was pleased to say, “He is my grandfather,” has become a dead man who was my grandfather. He was and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.
But the past is present also. And this, I think, is part of the greater mystery we call eternity. Though Mat Feltner has been dead for twenty-five years, and I am now older than he was when I was born and have grandchildren of my own, I know his hands, their way of holding a hammer or a hoe or a set of checklines, as well as I know my own. I know his way of talking, his way of cocking his head when he began a story, the smoking pipe stem held an inch from his lips. I have in my mind, not just as a memory but as a consolation, his welcome to me when I returned home from the university and, later, from jobs in distant cities….This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him. (Berry, 2004)
Forever Present
This passage reminds me that we are forever shaped by the lives of those we love. Their presence has left an indelible imprint on our hearts so that even in passing they are not forever gone but are present with our presence.
And whether it is in our body, our heart, or our soul, we remember them, and we remember our grief on a level far below our consciousness. When that happens, don’t try to ignore the feelings. Listen to them, remember, grieve, and be kind to yourself. When we treat ourselves kindly, we increase our capacity for empathy and compassion towards others who are grieving. When we love ourselves, we expand our hearts to hold a deeper love for others. And as we hold the past in our present, let us also hold each other with the same kindness and eternal love.
Berry, W. (2004). That Distant Land. Berkeley, CA: 94710 Counterpoint. www.counterpointpress.com