March
19, 2013
“I
don’t normally get drunk,” the yellow-eyed, missing-toothed older man said as
he sat next to me on the plane. “But oh,
boy, did I ever get drunk last night!” I
believed him. As I heard his story and
that of his grieving daughter with him, I felt only compassion. As soon as Tim and Kristi sat down, I knew
they weren’t doing well. The last to
board the plane, they reeked of cigarettes.
I could tell that they needed those last minutes to suck down their
smokes in order to last the trip from San Jose to Seattle. I was going to see my sister who was going
through some real shaking with her health.
Tim and his daughter were going through their own shaking.
“We’re
here to remember her mother, who died a year ago this week. It’s been hard.” He didn’t need to tell me. Her silent,
hurting eyes that stared far away, and her father’s frequent kisses told me
they were still in the thick of grieving.
“We needed to go back to Morro Bay to be where she last lived.”
Morro
Bay. How did I know that town? It hit me: the landlord of our condo in Kona
had just died of a sudden heart attack at his home in Morro Bay. What
are the chances? I asked myself. Two sets of families grieving at the same
time in the same small town, coincidentally both intersecting our lives.
Or was it coincidence? When Tim
plopped down next to me on the plane, a friend immediately came to mind. She died a few years ago of liver
failure. I remembered how this friend
couldn’t go more than 30 minutes without a smoke. When some of us took a road trip and were
jammed into a hotel room, it was more than she could handle. She had to step out often for a stiff drink. I remembered her pain and the relief she
turned to during that time. It helped me
understand Tim’s actions as he remembered the death of his ex-wife.
“We went to the shell shop she
loved to frequent. I put my feet all
over the mat on the floor. I wanted to
step where her feet had walked.”
Shaking. Suffering. Loss remembered.
As the flight continued, I tried to
give these two the space they needed. Tim pulled out a movie player and put on
a flick from the 80’s for comfort food:
Dirty Dancing. I stared out my window and listened to my
ipod. Snow capped volcanoes formed a line
with Mt. Shasta. One peak went directly
under our plane. I marveled at the pure
white top and radial pattern of powdered sugar that ran down the pine ravines.
“
I will open up my heart,
Search
me in the deepest part,
And
I will stand in cleansing fire
Of
you my Purifier,
Of
you my Purifier.”
Thus
sang Michael W. Smith from his Worship album.
Man, can I do that? Can I stand and let my heart be purified like
the snow below me? My sister was doing
it. This hurting man and his daughter
were doing it. Whether or not we welcome
it, shaking comes.
“Turbulence,” Tim informed me. “More turbulence.” The plane jolted a few times. “Ping!”
The light lit above our heads. Confidence came with the captain’s voice
over the intercom: “Please return to
your seats. We are experiencing turbulence. The seatbelt light is turned on. Please make sure you are strapped in.”
Tim hastily closed up his movie in
anticipation. I was strapped in. Was I ready to face the turbulence in my
sister’s life? I wondered what I would
see when I got to her home. She had been
very ill--so ill that she had been flown to the Mayo Clinic by our father to try
and get answers a couple weeks before.
She found none, and in fact encountered more hardship from reactions to
meds-mixed-with-meds. Jo had lost 30
pounds and ended up in the E.R.
She was thrilled that I was coming
though, and happily met me at Sea-Tac, a warm coat ready to be shared with her
Pacific Island sister. In the week that followed, I would follow my sister to
wherever a life-with-shaking would take her:
to doctor appointments, sitting by her on the bed while she rocked back
and forth in pain, learning just the right spot to rub up under her skull,
super hard, to bring her pain down a notch.
It was not easy. When her pain reached Level Nine after she took a bath, she cried
out for me to bring in her clothes from the bathroom, and then kept crying
while her husband prepared to give her the pain-killing shot. Many people were offering suggestions for
help and treatments---some welcomed and not-so-welcomed. Shakily, exhausted from three years of three-four
hour stints of sleep per night, Jo and her husband move forward, clinging to
each other, their close family, and to the hope that God is good and that this
“will not be unto death.”
I do what I can, bringing cold wash
cloths, cleaning a bit, gardening some, and just being with Jo in her
shaking. She is suffering, driving
errands that need to happen, but with her hand pressed tightly over her right
eye. She tirelessly teaches her youngest
son his math, and helps Jacob with his paper for Bellevue College. She teams up with Rich to make the
killer-scratch mac and cheese our mom used to make, and then asks if I want to
join her in bed to write and read while Rich sets up Caleb’s new sound system. “It will be fun!” She says with a twinkle in
her eye. I join her, until she turns
over and sleeps, exhausted. Glad to see
her drift off asleep, I turn the light off, happy to see an end—however
short-lived--to the turbulence.
