anxiety, friends, grief, letting go, loss, memories, panic attack, prayer, spiritual, widow
“I’m going to come sit with you tomorrow. I’m good at hospitals,” she said. It was September 28, 2008, the night before my husband had major surgery to remove his cancer and his esophagus along with it. I’m not sure what I was thinking by not planning to have someone sit with me that day. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking at all. Thankfully, Laurie and the rest of my book club came to the rescue. Laurie arrived in the waiting room that morning and presented me with a cute book bag with giant polka dots of blue and green. It was filled with items I didn’t know I would need: tissues, water bottle, lip balm, lotion, hand sanitizer, a shawl for cold waiting rooms, a starter kit for knitting, a small spiral-bound notebook with pen and more. Others wandered in before work or after kids were seen off to school bearing hot drinks and cheer. Team Ken was formed. These women I had known for a decade or more by then made me laugh and forget why we were sitting in those uncomfortable straight back chairs in tight rows across from cartoonish prints that had us inexplicably looking out castle windows to other castles beyond. The distraction was complete until it became too late in the day and the surgery was taking too long for the news to be good. Some had to go; it was time to get kids from school and think about dinner. Our pastor arrived. I noticed the surgeon the second he walked through the door, his eyes on the ground, legs propelling him toward a...
Creative Grief Tool, gratitude, Kairos, landscape, memories, National Parks, Photograph by Ken Gehle, Photograph by Tamara Beachum, Photography, prayer, quest, tool
“Let’s go to Death Valley,” he said. This was in response to my question about where we should go for my husband’s forty-fourth birthday and our first vacation away from our two small children in several years. I laughed, “No, really where do you want to go?” “Death Valley!” he grinned looking over the top of his glasses and that’s when I knew he was serious. Death Valley National Park is a place of odd beauty. Compared to what I perceived as the lush landscape of the Southeast, most of the vistas in Death Valley could best be described as simply, brown. To an inexperienced eye, such as mine, the ridiculously vivid blue sky was met only by tones of sepia. All the same, once Ken had convinced me to be there, I found it a place full of wonders I was eager to experience. We hiked and explored everywhere: salt flats, enormous sand dunes, a salt creek, abandoned mines, steep trails leading to surreal rock formations and even a ghost town. After days of exploring the park mostly at sunrise and sunset a curious thing happened, my eyes adjusted. One evening Ken set up for a shot in an area of the park known as the Artist’s Palette. Our trip was almost over. Faint hues of white, verdigris and deep red were visible on the range in front of us. As the sun approached the horizon behind us the colors of the arid earth began to reveal themselves. The mountainside was luminous with yellow, green, blue and even purple. The variety, there all along, was subdued and unappreciated...
grief, Kairos, Photograph by Ken Gehle, prayer, spiritual
I have a confession. I’m a life-long Presbyterian who went to Catholic school (that’s not the confession but probably enough to make one crazy right there.) I am currently an elder in my church which would make my grandparents bust with pride. My grandfather was a stalwart Presbyterian church elder and my grandmother was the quintessential church lady and official silver communion plate polisher. Not a meal was taken in their house without grace spoken before it. Sandwich over the sink? Say grace. So here it is: I don’t know how to pray. My grandfather and father were the official family grace sayers and used a standard prayer. Check. In school we had the rote memorization of the rosary prayers. Done. None of those prayers felt like a personal conversation with God though. Don’t get me wrong, I have spoken to God quite a bit in the last five years but I’m not sure begging counts as prayer. My prayers sound a lot like wishes to my ears: that my husband would live, that my father would live and before that that my grandfather would live at least long enough to meet the great-grandchild I carried. He did not. My timing is off. The futility of when I pray has led me not to do it so much. It seems I’m always asking for the thing I so desperately desire after the conclusion has already been reached. “Please let this test be clean,” I pleaded. Too late, the cancer was growing. The test was just there to show the foregone conclusion. This was the case with my father. I...
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