mysterious strangers, rippples and life lately

“Who would do that?”

I was sitting inside the white sterile examination room at the cardiologist’s office and I kept thinking about the mysterious stranger, and the tiny, incredulous act of kindness I had just witnessed at Patrick’s accident site.

And I kept thinking, “Who would do that?!”

I mean really. How many times do we even notice those wilted flowers, or religious candles or those poignant pictures of someone’s loved one posted at a street corner or on a telephone pole as a tender tribute for someone’s death?

Most of us drive by with a fleeting glance if at all, or maybe we wince for a second, but we keep moving, relieved to get away from this tragic spot. And I can understand why.

And yet someone had stopped. And even now I can’t believe how much this has touched me.

I had been running late for my appointment when I stopped by the accident site to water the flowers.

Did I tell you?

In those early days when we were still walking around in shock, and numb from devastation, Jim and I had gone to the spot that had been marked with yellow police tape where Patrick had passed away, and we planted rainbow-colored flowers there.

Neighbors had already begun to drop off bouquets and a few candles, so the idea of planting these flowers at this dry, dirt-filled lot had seemed like the right thing to do, especially after the many unusual (dare-I-say-mystical) experiences we had here.

Seven months later these flowers have exploded into a little island of vibrant color, and it’s become a place that Patrick’s friends and family can visit whenever they stop into town.

But I won’t lie. Some days it’s torture to go there and I have to work hard to keep the agonizing details of that night from taking over my thoughts, but most days I’m Ok. I clip and water and tidy up and I do it with the same loving energy that I once tied Patrick’s little shoelaces, and I feel very motherly and focused and efficient while I’m there.

Every 2-3 days I’ll lug several jugs of water and my clippers to this empty lot to tend to these flowers as inconspicuously as possible, because the property owner was reportedly irritated when he saw them and even threatened to have them removed.

But that was a while ago now, and the woman from the apartment complex tells me that our mound of flowers is now respectfully ignored by the hired gardeners. But honestly, who knows?

These flowers have become another reminder to me that loss can strike at any moment and every time I drive up, I prepare myself in case I should see all my carefully selected sun-happy flowers gone. And each time when I see them still there, I’m so relieved, which I guess is the lesson I’m meant to keep learning.

Be grateful for the littlest things, Leslie.

heart-stuff

On this particular morning I had an appointment with a cardiologist because my physician thinks the prolonged heaviness and pain in my chest needs to be taken seriously, and so I shrug and agree, but I’m not concerned. 

Nothing about my death scares me anymore, although apparently there is such a thing as “heartbroken syndrome,” a condition in when the powerful effects of intense grief can trigger a heart attack. The cardiologist explains this to me and I must look surprised because he tells me to google it.

Which I don’t. But then I remember what Chaplain Joseph from my hospice program told us, when he met us in our living room following our visit to the funeral home. 

Jim, Michael and I were still stunned from the gut-wrenching trauma of crying over Patrick’s beautiful body that we had just seen covered under a bronze-colored sheet, hard and cold, and smelling like harsh chemicals.

“You’ll need to treat yourself as if you had just had open-heart surgery” he said about our traumatic loss. “You’ll have to go really slow and be gentle with yourself. And remember that others won’t be able to see your condition from the outside.” 

Remembering Joseph’s words reassures me.

And it also helps that my cardiologist doesn’t think my symptoms fit this dire condition, although he still wants to rule it out. And so there I am, sitting across from him explaining my chronic chest pain, which of course means telling him about Patrick and the accident and the horrific trauma of seeing the sheriff and coroner show up at our front door at 7:30 in the morning and so on. 

Only I can’t tell this story without crying, so he listens with extraordinary quietness and then tells me to come back for a treadmill test. 

Then suddenly before he leaves, he stops at the door of his pristine office in Newport Beach, and he looks so sorrowful.

“I can’t possibly imagine the pain you’re going through,” he says, “And I don’t want to even think about it because I have kids you know, and…”

And I interrupt him and tell him what I tell every parent who says this. Please. I don’t want you to even think about it (because) believe me, it’s the worst suffering imaginable. 

But his gentle sensitivity feels so comforting and it reminds me of the stranger. Back at the accident site.

Two weeks ago, Jim had placed a purple pot of daisies at the brown telephone pole that is now the home of a collage of Patrick’s smiling pictures. Jim takes care of this pole. He rotates the pictures and is quietly pleased when he sees people stop to look at it, and sometimes he’ll attach a balloon and flowers to the pole. 

But when I saw the ceramic pot of daisies he bought at the grocery store, I warned him. Jim, I told him. That pot is so small it will need to be watered constantly in that direct sun. It’s probably going to die before we can get back there.

But he wanted it and so he bought it and placed it on the sunny sidewalk and ten days later when I poke my finger into the pot of healthy daises, I’m shocked to feel freshly watered soil.

Someone was helping us keep this little pot of flowers alive!

I stand there for a minute on the edge of the sidewalk while traffic hurls past me and I wonder who. 

Who does this? 

What person would take time out of their busy day to water flowers for someone they don’t even know? A pot so small at the bottom of a mountainous telephone pole, that it’s barely visible to a fast-moving car. 

Was it one of the neighbors who watch us make our visits here?

Was it one of the women who had kneeled next to Patrick on that dark night and whispered loving words to him, believing that he was still alive?

For a long moment I allow myself to feel the stunning impact of this singular act of kindness. 

Do you recognize the moments that resurrect you?

Even though the Easter holiday has come and gone, I’m still deeply aware that I am living out this year’s celebration of death and resurrection in a way I never imagined before Patrick’s loss.

On our first warm, sunny Easter Sunday without Patrick I found myself huddled under the covers and overwhelmed with despair. I had wanted to go to the youth-filled church that Michael took us to in the weeks after Patrick’s accident, with the great music, but when Jim came upstairs to check on me, I couldn’t get up.

“I miss him so much.” I kept repeating. “I can’t stand it. It hurts so much.” 

“I know.” He says and I realize he feels the same but he is so kind when I’m like this.

On his second trip he says, “You need to come down now, everyone’s up.” 

And afterwards Michael enters my room and says, “Come here Mom, let me give you a hug.” 

Then he tells me—the former queen of holiday tablescapes and homemade Easter baskets and basically any reason to celebrate at all--that holidays are going to be hard now. And we need to get though them whatever way we can. But we’ll get through them together. 

And honestly, I’m just so amazed by him.

Of course-I-trot downstairs. It was never in question.

 Only the idea of being swept up in the joyful celebration of the resurrection of Christ leaves me strangely disconnected. It’s like the equivalent of trying to go to a jubilant party when you’re still wearing your funeral clothes. 

Or to use a spiritual metaphor, it feels as if I’m still deep inside the dark tomb with Jesus. A place, Franciscan Richard Rohr calls the “liminal space between the waking and the unknown,” before the rising happens.

And I get it. I know the end of the story. I know the sun always rises after a dark night and that healing will follow even the most profound loss. But I’m not there yet. And so, I find comfort in Marianne Williamson’s belief that suffering and grief are a normal, human experience. And that one of the neuroses of modern life is to rush what should not be rushed.

Or in the words of my feisty 81-year-old Buddhist friend, this is the way it is right now, and that’s ok. 

Also, my parents were visiting at the time. And it’s not long before I’m smiling and making coffee and running to Home Depot with my Dad so we can build my laundry room counter. And later, we all eat seafood and laugh and talk inside the crowded bar at the Blue Wave Restaurant, where I can smell the salty ocean air.

On the outside, I look perfectly normal.

The important part

In fact, you would never guess that every day I wake up with a 50- pound weight on my chest. The cardiologist wants to know when I feel it. Oh, mornings are definitely the worst, I guess. 

And night-time too. Those are the quiet times when my mind is open to all my Patrick images and Patrick thoughts and I’ll see his face so clearly in front of me. And I’ll instantly long to see him and to hear his voice. And to be with him again. And the longing is so powerful that I can feel it inside my heart, like a loud, agonizing scream. 

Only I don’t tell this part to the cardiologist. Nor do I tell him that some days I wonder how I can possibly live my life this way. With these waves of pain. 

But here’s the important part.

Right when I think I can’t bear it one second longer, something will happen.

Usually it’s something very tiny. 

But it will feel like relief, a refreshing sip of water in the middle of the blistering desert. And I’ll think, wow, this is a miracle. Whether it’s a loving text message or a quick conversation or an intriguing line I hear from a Ted Talk or someone’s unexpected kindness that’s so wispy and modest to anyone who isn’t living in this darkness with Jesus’s body, that you would probably miss it. 

Hopefully you would be laughing. Or maybe just happily engrossed in your busy day because you haven’t just lost someone precious whom-you-just-can’t-live-without. 

I think it’s perfectly understandable that you might not see these tiny miracles. 

But they are there. Happening all the time.

And I’m so grateful for each ray of light that comes my way. 

In fact. I wish I could tell the mysterious stranger how much their incredibly sweet gesture lifted me up on a day when my heart was being examined because it hurts me so much.

 Boy, I wish I could thank them.

Does profound suffering offer us some inexplicable insight into the transcendent world beyond this one?

I don’t know. 

But I do know there are things I’m learning right now that I never want to forget.

Like this one; I never want to forget the astonishing truth I learned about the power and reach of a simple, unseen act of kindness. It’s the anonymous part that blows me away and makes me think of ripples in the water.

Yeah, ripples.

Could this be the simple truth of why we’re all here?

Because at any given moment, we’re each sending ripples out into this world. 

But what powerful ripples we can be.

(mom's b-day dinner)

 sending love to all my dear readers,

please know I read each word of every one of your comments and sometimes I respond and sometimes everything feels like it takes so much energy now that even while I mean to, I might not. Please know that I value the precious time you take to stop here and read my words and share yourself

with the me and the world. 

You are an amazing light.

xo

Leslie


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Home and Garden Thursday

Imparting Grace

Surrender

People ask me how I’m doing and I never know how to answer.

I do know that on most mornings I wake up and I’m surprised that I’m still here. Stunned really, how I am enduring the most devastating and unrelenting pain I could have ever have imagined—every second of every hour of every day, and that somehow, I’m still breathing.

But more than anything I'm just shocked that Patrick is not here.

I'm aghast. Astounded every time I allow the sheer horror of the accident to seep into my awareness, and to realize in that split second that I am still living ---but my precious, extraordinary son is not. 

I am still here and my child is not. 

This is a peek into my quiet mind where this one sickening thought pops into my head at random moments, like the mumblings of a trauma victim trying to grasp the enormity of their experience; although honestly I still cannot believe it. 

If you were lucky enough to have traveled in Patrick's orbit you know what I mean. He was such a force of exuberant energy and light in this world, you can't believe he's gone. He was the kind of person you gravitated to in a crowd. Even in his most absurd and funniest moments he exuded a raw goodness from every cell of his body. And Lord help you if you ever heard him laugh--in his husky, loud voice-- because you were instantly captivated. 

There are no words in a mother's language that can explain how perverse and wrong and shattering this new world feels without him in it, no way to describe how it feels when everything you thought you knew about life --is now annihilated in pieces at your feet.
 
I don't say this to make you feel bad for me, it's just a statement of fact.

Because one thing I’m learning about surviving the most devastating trauma of my life, is that truthfulness is everything. Not just honesty with others—but honesty first and foremost with my Self. 

I've learned. When you're standing in the middle of a black tunnel with no end in sight, truth becomes that flicker of light that shows you where to place your next wobbly step. And unless you make space for all those staggering emotions --without judging or hiding or pretending--you'll remain in darkness.

This is why I write...some of which I share here. Writing for me is a way of scavenging through these numb-minding moments. I pick them up. I examine them. As I try to make it through to the next moment. Although strangely, it's this ragged commitment to showing up and being present for whatever is coming at me--that seems to offer me some skeletal roadmap.

One foot in front of the other. One breath. Then another. This is how I live right now.

And I guess I have some flimsy hope that if you can see me  surviving this---a loss I once thought would kill me-- that maybe it might help you someday.

Today, on the six-month date of Patrick’s accident—six agonizingly long months of not hearing his voice or seeing him in person—I thought I would tell you about this in-between place I find myself.

I had been chatting with a woman for several minutes before she mentioned that she had tried to kill herself in the early months following her 23-year-old son’s death.

This is the messy, raw world I live in now and honestly, it feels relieving. When you’re a mother who has lost a child, you walk around completely stripped to your barest core. No more glossy ego and silly worries about what others think of you. 

In fact, you crave realness. 

Sometimes it’s as simple as running into someone else whose life has also included some profound tragedy. Only instead of the typical awkward moment that others might feel in that conversation, you edge closer. And you feel right at home.

 In fact, you welcome the details of their story, if only to be in the midst of that mystical hint of hope dangling in front of you. 

You survived this unbearable thing too? You silently think.

And even though you can’t possibly imagine clawing your way to that emotional ledge they now rest on, you want to bow your head and have them touch it with some magical energy. 

You want them to look into your eyes and tell you forcefully: Yes, you will survive all this horrendous pain. At least that's how I feel.

The interesting thing about this woman—whose name I didn’t know—is that I was instantly drawn to her warm smile and her upbeat energy. 

I would never have guessed that she had once swallowed too many sleeping pills and awoke hours later vomiting, and with her son’s voice in her head telling her, “No mama—it’s not your time yet.” 

But suffering brings mysterious powers. One minute you're talking about your child and the next second all those polite boundaries that separate one mother from another, have melted away.

Of course I felt a thunderous kinship with her.
And-- no, not because I’ve thought about killing myself.

But because I could relate to the unbearable pain this mother had felt on that one night, when she couldn’t imagine living in a world one second longer without her son. 

Of all the books I’ve received since Patrick’s accident, one of the most comforting books to me has been a memoir by an author named Mirabai Starr. 

On the day that Starr’s first book was published--a translation of the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross ---her teenage daughter Jenny was killed in a car accident. And despite her decades of living a life of contemplative prayer and meditation. And decades of studying the lives of religious mystics and saints, and years of giving international talks about her well-traveled life, she plummeted into darkness.

She could no longer pray. She could no longer sit through a simple meditation. And she couldn’t stop her outrage and anger at God for this inexplicable loss of her youngest child.

She was in fact, like any other mother after losing her child, completely devastated and inconsolable. 

Yet the reason I kept coming back to her memoir, was because she was the first person to talk with cringing honesty about her despair, and things no one else talked about.

 On page 234 she wrote:

"I have never met a bereaved mother who did not, at some point anyway--maybe in a place so secret that it is even a secret from herself— crave death."

And no.

She doesn't mean that every mother literally struggles with suicidal ideation, she means that when you lose your child your entire world is cracked wide open and one of the most dramatic changes is this sudden and new allure you have with the Other World.

Heaven.

The unseen dimension.

The luminous spirit world.

The Afterlife.

Whatever you call it, it is now where your missing child lives.

And tell me. What loving mother doesn’t want to visit her child? What loving mother doesn’t feel the urgency to check on her child herself?  Make sure they are truly ok and (please-dear-Lord) confirm that they are in that promised light of peace and happiness.

This is the reason I've noticed a strange detachment to my physical body right now.

This is why for months after the accident--every time I got on my yoga mat in a gentle child’s pose, with my forehead resting deep in the earth,  loud, piercing sobs would pour from my chest. 

This is why I have not gone to a single yoga class since Patrick’s accident.

This is why I struggle to sit through the silence of meditation.

This is why I have not returned to the gym again.

The reason is simple. All of these actions involve my singular attention to my breath.

All of these actions require my awareness of life’s vibrant energy flowing through my physical body and it’s this stunning awareness that I should be inhaling and exhaling precious air when my son is not---that feels utterly unbearable to me.

To me it makes perfect sense.

Do you remember that feeling of oneness that existed between you and your baby? That would allow you to hear the subtle differences between your baby's cry of hunger vs tiredness?

Do you remember wanting to feed your baby before yourself when time was an issue? 

These are deep, primal instincts that simply don't disappear with chronological age.

Or with Death. 

And I wonder why nobody talks about this inner struggle I feel as Patrick's mother. It is an agonizing dilemma, to make that pivot toward Life when every guttural impulse in my body is pulling me toward my missing child.

And so what do I do, Mirabai?
How do I choose to move forward without Patrick?

And I found comfort in her words:

  "It’s just unbearable anguish" became my mantra which I uttered silently and with an ironic smile whenever the pain came at me like a freight train. Then I lay down in its tracks and investigated what it felt like be run over.
And.... a realization began to grow in me:
You are shattered, said my inner voice. Do not be in a rush to put the pieces back together. Go ahead and be nobody for as long as you can."

And so here I am. Surrendering to it all.

Six months into our catastrophic loss of Patrick and I have no idea how I've survived 182 days without him. Nor can I imagine how I will endure living the rest of my life without him.
It's simply too unbearable to contemplate.
But I do know this.
I know that I can survive this one moment. 

And today, that's enough.

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Imparting Grace

Modern Cottage staircase. How to.

Well friends. I offer this humble staircase makeover as proof that if you keep moving along--even in slow, torturous baby steps--eventually things get done.

The week before Patrick's accident we hired a stair contractor to finally begin work on our new staircase. He had torn it apart that week, and needless to say it stayed that way for a long time.

Despite my usual DIY chutzpah this was one project I had no intention of trying; I had a clear idea of what I wanted and I knew if I wanted it done before 2025 I had to hire a pro.


Here is the staircase that comes with our 1964 circa neighborhood. 

Clearly enough room between the metal spindles to practice sky-diving. Here's Stella showing you that this staircase was definitely not up to current codes.

Thankfully German Shepherds are so darn smart. And unlike small, curious children we never had problems with Stella getting too close to the edge. I had to call her a few times to get her to take this shot.

I say this to all my friends who dread the million-little-decisions involved with house renovations: Find some great inspiration photos that capture your look! And the more the better.

I found this photo from one of designer Lauren Liess's homes and although hers was completely custom--(translation outside-my-budget) it helped me define the clean, simple look I wanted for my stairs.

After the stairs were taken down to the bare bones we discovered a pin-hole leak in the pipes underneath. Which meant a call to the plumber and additional time for the wood to dry.

During this interlude we were walking around in shock and as you can imagine everything came to a standstill.

Slowly. After weeks of postponing and shaky phone calls that happened during foggy periods I barely remember, the stair contractor came back to our house. 

This is the part that might help you.

If you're interested in having a stair runner with a surged edging but don't want to pay additional costs of having new wood treads installed on each stair, listen closely.

As you can see I went with the more affordable choice: partial treads (means, only on the ends). And I kept the plywood in the middle where the runner would cover anyway.

Here's one of my inspiration photos showing a runner with the added edging on it. I was undecided about a black canvas edge or a surged edging in a darker shade of the runner. Eventually I decided against the black canvas because of the dirt.

But here's what you should know.

Because I wanted that darker edging on the runner, I would need to elevate the middle plywood area so that it was the same level with the end tread pieces. 

Are you following? I had to explain this to the stair guy.

Eventually he attached pieces of MDF (if I was in my right mind I would've asked for real wood) to the center plywood with wood glue and nails but he had to come back to re-do it, because he didn't line up the edge of the middle wood with the edge of the outside treads. 

Yes, it was awkward.

But according to the rug installer this was a key mistake.

Finally it got done. 

I think white paint on the risers and the treads lighten the look.

Here's a close-up of the newel post I had made. 

Close up of the surged edging and the pattern of my runner.

I toyed with the idea of an herringbone pattern because it's a classic, but frankly I was seeing it everywhere on Pinterest so I opted for this miniature diamond.

I chose a semi-gloss finish in black along with white shaker spindles and I'm happy with the contrast.

 Yes those are smudges on the rail, evidence of real life. :)

I hope this post helps you with your own design decisions if you're considering re-doing your stairs.

I try not to get too obsessed with each little decision, in the end the creative process should be a joyful one. For me especially now...I realize that using your right side of the brain and tapping into one's creative energies can provide a comforting distraction when you're going through an agonizing time. 

Enjoy each moment of your renovations. And realize that if you're able to do anything to your home--big or small-- consider yourself blessed.

love to you all,

Leslie
(p.s. sorry about the weird font changes. Blogger is behaving poorly this morning)


Linking up:
Amaze Me Monday
The Scoop 365

on being a Soul instead of a Role

The other day I picked up a book by Richard Rohr and opened it up to some random page about Jonah.

This is the way my life seems now. I stumble on real life moments and random words that somehow make me feel like I’m a character in some cryptic mystery. That’s odd, I’ll think later when I reflect on the synchronicities at work; the weird timing, my own openness, and the curious message that ends up in my head.

On this day I scanned the two pages that tell me that I’m living in the belly of beast.

And since I don’t know anything anymore, I keep reading.

According to spiritual teachers the story of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale and taken to places he never wanted to go — is a biblical metaphor. A way to understand those dark, traumatic periods in our lives and a way for me to make sense of this bottomless pit of motherly despair that I live with now.

The tale of Jonah surviving inside the black pit of a whale’s stomach is supposed to be a story of death and rebirth. A reminder to all of us, that Death sneaks into our lives in the many forms that include the disappointments and endings and letting go that we all experience. And that these terribly lonely, depressing, overwhelming times in our lives are actually our teachers in disguise, waving us down a pathway towards transformation.

I don’t know.

Possibly.

What I do know is that when your heart has been cracked wide open and you’re walking around under a fallen sky in a world that no longer makes any sense— anything seems possible.

Maybe someday I’ll be like Jonah. Spit out on to a new shore, spiritually awakened and no longer upset with the Blessed Mother, or wanting answers from the Holy Spirit about why my son—with his extraordinary Light and Goodness-- is not here and I still am.

Maybe someday I will be living a life without Patrick here, and the thought of not hearing the sound of his voice when he says, “Hey Mama,” or watching him throw his head back and laugh while he flashes his amazing smile, won’t make me crumble under the weight of my broken heart.

But truthfully? I can’t imagine that time. That’s how dark this part of my journey is right now.

Although in the words of my eighty-two-year-old Buddhist friend Gale, who lost her son to suicide forty years ago, this is the way it is right now and that’s OK.

Maybe that’s why I keep writing.

I’m like a blindfolded traveler at the edge of a harrowing cliff, sensing that there is something for me here. Something to record. Some precious learning to be found when there is nowhere else to go. When there’s no last-minute escape or way to avoid this horrific reality that I’m faced with each day:

I open my eyes and my son is gone.

I close my eyes and my son is still gone.

Recently I was listening to a beautiful story by Frank Ostaseski, an American Buddhist who has spent over 30 years working with hospice patients. He was helping a mother tend to the body of her seven-year-old son who had just died from cancer. She was bathing him tenderly as part of their goodbye ritual, counting his toes to him and talking to him lovingly and every so often she would look over at Frank with beseeching eyes as if to say, “Can I survive this?! Can any mother survive this?!”

“And my job,” Frank says, “was simply to hand her another washcloth. And direct her back to her son, because that’s where the healing is always found, in the heart of the suffering.”

Somewhere deep in my soul I know this is true.

But like this mother, I’m still grappling with shock. I’m still wrapped in that mystical connection I’ve felt with my son the moment he left my body. It is powerful and otherworldly, this bond with him. And my mind simply cannot comprehend the idea of a permanent separation from Patrick. His body, his face, the sound of his voice. It’s all so unfathomable.

When I heard Frank’s story I felt like those mother’s words were my words. Her anguish is my anguish. Because I too, know how it feels to suffer over your son’s lifeless body. I know how it feels to wake up each morning with a pain in my chest so unbearable, I wonder how I can still be alive.

Yet here I am, still breathing.

And looking pretty normal on the outside despite the changes I feel within.

Grief strips you down to your most unguarded self. It’s a wall of pain that washes over you and leaves you wrinkled and raw and gasping for air. And then it repeats itself. Grief from the loss of your child will leave you stunned and walking around feeling strangely unprotected, in a universe you no longer trust.

This is the person I was on that sunny, October afternoon--only weeks after Patrick’s tragic accident—when I told the lady at the cleaners about Patrick.

And this is what I learned about miracles.

I had gone there to pick up some clothes; it had been the next robotic errand that had emerged out of the thick soup that was now my mind. Clouded by shock and grief, my ability to think at that point consisted of piecing together questions in order to figure out what I needed to get done. And with the Memorial Services approaching, I heard myself asking.

Could Michael fit in Patrick’s jacket? Did I have anything red to wear? Was Jim’s suit in the cleaners?

So-to-the-cleaners I headed.

The woman who always waited on me was also the co-owner of this busy shop, along with her shy husband.

I liked her. With her ebony colored hair and powdery skin, she reminded me of a middle-aged geisha, dressed in sensible slacks and polyester blouses. Only instead of warm tea, she offered chatty, kind words to her customers.

“Tell him good luck on his job interview,” she had said one March day when I picked up Patrick’s black suit, and in that brief moment we had forged a bond. One mother seeing another mother’s hopes and blessing them with optimism.

The woman had barely walked up and greeted me when I knew I couldn’t pretend. After all, she had touched Patrick’s clothes; this act alone felt like a kinship. But I hesitated. It was the first time I’d be sharing my catastrophic loss with a stranger, and the delivery of these words out into the open air felt like another layer of trauma.

 “My son. I wanted to tell you.” My voice was a whisper and she leaned forward to hear me. “He was in a terrible accident. I wanted you to know. He…he didn’t make it.”

I don’t remember how she came through that wall of counter. Or how her arms got around me so fast.
But she was holding me so tight I had to inhale. Was it seconds or minutes? That I stood there smelling the waft of white gardenia, and feeling the intimate scratch of hair on my face that wasn’t mine. This alone should have jolted me back into my role of polite customer, but I didn’t move.

The world had stopped, the other customers had vanished.

And then something happened inside our frozen hug because we both began to cry. I felt our bodies soften into muffled sobs. And afterwards—with quick precision, she scooped my clothes off the metal rack, took my hand and led me toward my car.

Out in the bright parking lot I could have been a ragged, lost child, squinting in the noonday sun and being led to a shelter, that’s how fragile I felt. Too broken to revert into my typical Miss Capable role, I watched with curious detachment as this soft-spoken woman took my keys, unlocked my door and hung my clothes carefully in the back.

Afterwards she took both my hands and asked me how to find the accident site, only minutes away. She seemed hesitant to let me go, promising me prayers and insisting that I keep my faith. “God will get you through this,” she assured me.

Then she was gone.

Miracle-workers

In the few months that have passed, I’ve had time to think about this powerful experience. And what I will never forget is how it felt to be out in the world so broken and vulnerable, and so unlike my usual Self. And how miraculous it felt to have a stranger—react without a second’s hesitation to my pain.

Only she didn’t simply observe my pain, she risked doing something. This shop owner –whose name I still don’t know—saw me the way that I truly felt, as a crumpled body on the floor with a shattered heart, barely getting by. And she literally held me, long enough to shine a light into my darkness and remind me that I was not alone.

Marianne Williamson calls this woman a “miracle-worker,” and says that at any moment we can choose to either judge someone or bless someone, it’s that simple.

We also can be this force of light in the world.

But it does require that we "see" outside our comfort zone.

It means being aware that the same roles that give us our sense of identity and help us feel safe-- whether it's a job title, our neighborhoods or our politics, are the same roles that create illusions of separateness. That help us erect an US and a THEM, that closes us off from the pain of others.

When the truth is, that we’re all a part of larger whole.

I think about that hug with the shop owner, and how it would never have happened if I had been operating from my stronger self. Or if the shop owner had been more logical and reserved about maintaining her profession boundaries.

And the farther I got away from this experience the more holy and miraculous it appeared.

It’s seems ironic. Here I am at the darkest time of my life, and it’s my grief that is opening my eyes to the way that grace and love suddenly appear out of nowhere, when I’m most in need.

It’s like Anne Lamott said about our really bad days. “There’s no magic cure and God is not a cosmic bellhop,” but if you’re spiritually awake and paying attention, you’ll see HIM in the eyes of some kind stranger, holding your hand in the middle of a sunny parking lot.

They’re always happening, these little miracles.

Today, I hope you see yours.

seen on the sidewalk

on my way from the beach when I was really sad

sharing this post with friends: Grace at Home
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