R.I.P.

Driving through cemeteries used to be one of my favorite things to do.  No, really.  They are so calm and peaceful and it's so interesting to read tombstones--interesting in a way that nothing else is.  They are beautiful too.  

I remember the cemetery in Chester, NH.  It's my favorite.  There are stones from the 1700's and they are covered with moss and there are huge trees.  I've always said I wanted to be buried there.  The cemetery in downtown Boston where Paul Revere is buried is cool, as is the one in Plymouth.  I loved the Jewish cemetery we visited one year in Dallas.  We took the kids there for memorial day.  All I remember about the cemeteries in Hong Kong was that they were all concrete.  We spent one of my first days, in the heat of August, weeding between all the cracks in the cement.  That was possibly the hottest day of my life. 

I  never used to wonder if the people under those granite markers in the cemeteries were cold, or damp, or afraid, or lonely.  Putting your child in a cemetery does weird things to a person.

Today, on a blustery, dreary day, we drove through cemeteries trying to decide on a color and shape for our son's tombstone.  Mikey was with us, so we kept it together pretty well.  We don't like Maroon and we do like flat square tops and smooth sides.  The black ones get so messed up with the hard water.  We think we want just the numbers, not August written out.  We talked about things that could go on the back.  "That's All Folks"  "Thanks, Come Again"  "No Vacancy" There were many of them.  I can't remember them all. 

We saw one epitaph online we liked.  "Forget I died, just remember I lived."  It's nice when you think about it hypothetically, but how in the world can people sum up a life in 25 words or less--especially a life as special and unique as Ian's.

Who knows what we'll put on it.  We can only stand to think about it in tiny spurts.

My 3 Words

I've seen it on Good Morning America and read about it on the internet.  Maybe it's a twitter thing.  I don't know.  I don't twitter.  I haven't been able to find the beginnings for the 3 word craze.  I read a "3 words to live by" blog today and it made me want to puke.  It was a Mormon writing for a Mormon audience and they were all great things--inspirational things--words I shouldn't want to  puke at.   I just wasn't in the mood for it today:

Faith, Hope, Charity
Love One Another
Lengthen Your Stride
Choose the Right
Or the 50 others that followed.  Sometimes what I hear is Blah, Blah, Blah.

Here are my words to live by:
Don't Let Go

When you do what's right, you don't always prosper in the land. 
Even though there is a blessing that follows every obedient act, you may not get to see it. 
If there are angels to your right and  your left, chances are you can't tell they are there, so,  Don't Let Go. 

Karaoke

Some days, I just need a happy face to look at.

Metaphors

After Mikey finished rock climbing today, we still had an hour before Lucy was finished with guitar.  While he was busily doing his homework,  I saw his language assignment was about finding the similes and metaphors in poetry.  I thought as long as I had an hour to kill maybe I could write something.  Here is a rough, rough draft of what was in my head:


Grief makes me brittle--
Like toffee that comes with a hammer.
He pounds on me,
over and over.
I crack and fracture and shatter.
Some days I stay in big chunks;
Other days I'm dust.

Grief stands in front of me--
With his arms out.
Not letting anyone past
To touch me.
Not letting me step around him,
Or push him over.
He smiles, because he knows--
He's winning.

Grief is a robber--
Wearing a disguise.
He breaks into me, and steals
My sleep, my confidence and my ability to reason.
He siphons the faith
Out of my tank
A little at a time.

Grief startles me--
With sound.
He's transformed music and laughter
into weapons he can throw at me,
At will.
His favorite though, is silence.
It's the loudest sound of all.

Yoke

How many times have I heard the scripture:  "Come unto  me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;  for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."?  About a thousand.

I have to say I got something new today--not from anything anybody said, just personally in my own head.  I think I always pictured the Savior being the one with this big, heavy,  I have to say, awful thing strapped onto him--Him with all the burden, asking me to join him in the yoke and trying to convince me that it would make my life easier--like the commandments.  They seem restrictive and heavy, but they actually ease the burdens of life.  I never saw it as me with the load, even though that's exactly what it says.  How could I see it as my load when he was weighed down with that once already?  Should he really have to help me pull it now, when he already pulled it for me by himself once?

Taking on Christ's name (yoke) isn't an easy thing though.  There's a lot of responsibility that goes with giving him my cares.  There's humility and trust, not to mention all the time and hard work involved with trying to be enough like him to even keep up when he starts pulling. 


I drive a widow in our ward to church every week.  She was telling me a story this morning which I was thinking about the whole time we were discussing yokes and loads.  She said when her daughters were in young women's many years ago, they fund raised all year and took a trip to Hawaii.  She said how great it was and how much the girls loved it and what a treasured memory it was.  Then she told how they raised the money.  They had 5 girls whose fathers worked for an airline, so they could fly free.  She then said that those girls still  had to raise the same amount of money, thereby spreading the load evenly and lessening it for the ones that didn't have an advantage.  It was a simple, practical example for my literal mind--much closer to my realm of thinking than oxen.

Brotherly Love

Mikey needed that arm around him today. 

Keith started watching a movie that I knew wasn't a good idea and Mikey got inerested too.  It was "Jack" with Robin Williams.  He has a rare disease and ages really fast.  At the end he is graduating from high school with his friends as an old gray-haired man. He is the valedictorian and gives a great speech about life.  Keith was crying, which I expected, but what I didn't realize was Mikey was too.  He sat on my lap and cried for quite a while.  I assured  him that Ian misses him just as much and loves him just as much.

If only that would fix things!

No Shoes to Wear

No, this isn't a photo of Lucy's closet

I had 2 situations today that made me think how incredibly frustrating it must be to be a heavenly parent. 

1st, every Friday Mikey has a lot of homeschool work to do and he gets really upset about it and makes it take twice as long and be twice as hard.  This morning I called him in on my bed and said,  "Do you remember when you loved homework?"  I explained that it was because he worked fast and didn't get all caught up in all the distractions of why it was assigned or whether it was just busy work.  I told him to go downstairs, have breakfast and finish up the week's math and language.  At which point, I made an hour long phone call.  When I came down, he was reading a book.  He hadn't started his homework and when he saw me the emotion on his face was obvious.  Now we had to deal with not only frustration at the amount of homework still to do, but also the guilt of not doing what he was asked.

Hmm.  That sounds like me and God.  I've certainly been told a zillion times what to do and how to do it to make my life as good as it can be.  And as painless as it can be--what things to avoid etc.  Do I choose any better than Mikey does at 10?  Sometimes, but sometimes I'm just as oblivious to the consequences I'm setting in motion as he is.

2nd, Lucy's closet was such a mess today she couldn't find a pair of shoes.  (There's a lot more to it than that, but that'll suffice for this anecdote.)  I lost it.  Absolutely lost it.  Finally in the post-blowup discussion we got to the point that where I told her that I had been ignoring how bad her room was for weeks and trying to keep my cool, but I couldn't stand it one more second.  I asked her why she only feels like doing what she's supposed to when I lose it and otherwise she's great living in a mess.

Hmm again.  That might sound like me too.  Not that God loses it on me, but sometimes I don't do what I'm supposed to until I can see how far I've let things go.  What I'm supposed to do hasn't changed.  I have just put in all in the closet where neither I nor anyone else can see it.  Maybe that's why we're supposed to pray in the closet.  It's God's way of nagging us to clean it out.

It's no wonder our understanding doesn't compare to God's.  He has to figure out how to deal with all of us and our quirks and problems and weaknesses.  Whew, are we really supposed to want to become like him?