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December 14, 2013

A Writer’s Block-Head

Christmas bouquet arranged and photo-shopped by PCS survivor

I’ve had writer’s block for about a week now. At least that’s how long I have wanted to write something but can’t. They say you should just write anyway, a defiant shaking of the fist at the blank page, like, “The blank page is beautiful” one hundred times or more. Personally, I would rather walk into the kitchen and find something to eat, or go outside into the freezing cold and walk around my yard with a small pair of clippers like I just did. I was going to make a wreath. Instead I clipped a few branches from three different trees and stuck them in a vase. It’s what my husband would call one of my hippie decorations.

My biggest fear is I’ve just run out of things to blog on. Someone asked me once why I couldn’t just post a good recipe. Why do I have to write about things that make people cry, or angry or maybe just confused? So I explained that spencersmom.com was primarily birthed as a place of resource and hope for those who have or are traveling through very dark places. I don’t expect my blog to be a glorious beacon of light. Only Jesus can do that. But maybe my words can point to the light, a place of reference for those that are lost with no map. A recipe really won’t help.

I smacked my head hard a week ago. I was skating in North Carolina, maybe showing off a little and my skates caught as I turned, throwing me backwards. Southerners really stink at ice-skating, so you can go down there and feel like Dorothy Hamill as everyone else clings to the wall terrified. But I was humbled. And I was in a lot of pain for about four days. I fall a lot actually because I am in denial that I am getting older and I should be more careful. Oh and I’m also clumsy. After I broke a rib a few years ago falling off a water slide the nurse gave me a little smug half smile and said,

“I guess you won’t be doing THAT again!” which made me say, “Yes, I will.” And I did.

Anyway, back to my head. I felt good enough to return to work Wednesday but I noticed right off that my brain was not working right; connections like short-term memory, multi-tasking and even long-term memory (like You became a nurse, Robin and you work in a hospital taking care of sick people) were not firing or they were misfiring. The next day seemed slightly better. But the whole week was stressful. Yes, I could’ve stayed home but I really felt okay. And all my patients looked happy and alive at the end of the day.

But…I did make some minor errors, two of them caught by physicians. I told them both I had Post-Concussive Syndrome and they seemed impressed. Not in awe, but at least silenced. It reminded me of when I was in high school and I was running out of standard reasons to miss school so I became more creative:

Robin was out of school yesterday because she developed a secondary infection from the strep throat she had last week, which traveled into her heart and then threw a shower of emboli into her brain causing multiple seizures. She’s better now.

They were impressed, or at least silent. They might’ve passed it around at lunch.

I have since read that Post Concussive Syndrome, or PCS, increases your risk for Alzheimer’s disease by 20%. That number seems a little unfair. One smack to the head and you jump to the front of the line of at-risk baby boomers.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is it’s an adequate excuse for floundering at Christmas crafts and writing a decent blog. At least for this week. So here’s a really good recipe:

Caramel Apple Cake

3 eggs

2 cups sugar

11/2 cups veg. oil

2 tsp. vanilla

3 cups flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

3 cups chopped peeled apples

1 cup chopped pecans

CAKE: Mix together in order above. Pour into greased, floured tube pan. Bake at 350 for 1 hr. and 15 min.or until done. Cool 10 min before removing from pan.

TOPPING: ½ cup butter, ¼ cup milk, 1 cup packed brown sugar, pinch salt. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and boil 3 min, stirring constantly. Cool slightly and slowly pour over cake.

This is an amazing cake. The sky won’t split open with a choir of angels but everyone who eats it will love you and love always helps.

Maybe next week I’ll write something more meaningful although according to the Mayo Clinic and other authorities like Wikipedia, PCS can last for months, even a year! Then Alzheimer’s. Well, stay tuned, stay warm and eat cake. I’ll be back. And yes, I will go ice-skating again.

September 9, 2019

The Advocate

The door swings open, and I follow the young Victim Services Advocate into the parole hearing room. She’s young and pregnant with her first baby, a girl she said, after she realized it was okay to talk about everyday things with me. She had to keep me separate, in a small conference room with windows and a water cooler until the hearing began and there was not much to say although she warned me that I would hear details of my son’s murder.

David’s family and “supporters” are separated to the right of the wood paneled room, watching me enter. A rail runs down the middle of the seats that face the parole board, and I am ushered to the left, where I sit flanked by the nice advocate. I notice a large man with a square-shaped head, thick ruddy features, like he’s from Southie. He blocks the door, actually fills the door, then I look to the left and see three more guards, wearing sweaters, to look less threatening is my guess, but you can see the bulge around the belt from weapons and walkie talkies.

I lean back in my seat, to wave at David’s family. I had spoken to his mom for the first time ever, two nights ago. She called, nervous. “I was scared to call you – I felt ashamed.” When you touch murder, no matter which side you stand on, you get dirty. It has been 17 and a half years since we were all changed in some horrific way. I remembered watching David’s mom at his trial, the angry footsteps, the voice shrill and desperate. Then the father, slumped over on a bench outside the courtroom, the loss bearing down. I had my own pain, a demanding, consuming house-guest I could not shake. I had been treading just above the rising current of a dark and violent nightmare for over a year and i was exhausted. My son was dead, the innocent victim of a senseless murder. There was little else I could think about then.

David and Rodolfo, another teenager charged with Spencer’s murder, pled guilty to Second Degree murder. They had just watched their friend get sent away for life without parole and decided a guilty plea to a lesser charge was safer. They stood shackled, facing me, as I told them I forgave them. It probably didn’t count for much at that moment. Twenty years. That meant their whole life then – two boys from Cape Cod headed to a maximum state prison. Survival might’ve mattered more. I was numb with grief; my forgiveness was a reflex, an act of obedience I never questioned or pieced apart. I would not have had the strength or mental acuity. I just obeyed the same Jesus who forgave me.

The door on the opposite side of the room opened and more guards, then David wearing a crisp blue shirt with a tie and khaki pants. He was shackled, hands and feet. He told me he would be shackled and unable to look at me when we talked the week before. His father’s hair was white now, and his mother wasn’t angry anymore, but had the soft worry lines that carve across a mother’s heart. His sister tried to walk over to my side, to hug me, but was instantly blocked by two guards and I had to remember that a parole room is often a place of visceral and sudden rage. But today, God was there. He was Hope to the convict’s family, Salvation to the soul of the young man shackled. He was there to open the eyes of those who could not see.

I had five minutes to speak, the only voice of the Victim’s side of the hearing, but I spoke for Spencer’s family, and for Spencer too. I said we forgive, I said let God continue to use the ground where Spencer fell, bringing forth life from death. Redemption – only He can do this. I couldn’t see anyone except for the parole board, but I could feel my words finding a place to settle in each heart. When I stood to go back to my seat, I noticed the big square guard had become very animated. He was nodding his head at me, then he winked. A minute later, he gave a thumbs up. I could see the side of David’s face and it was wet from tears.

I was ushered back out as the Victim Advocate spoke to more guards on her walkie-talkie and then was led down the stairs. The big guard followed closely and waited as I checked out at the window on the ground floor.

“I’ve worked here for 17 years,” he said, then he paused, searching. “I’ve never heard anything like that.” His eyes looked puffy and wet. He smiled. “You are amazing.”

“No!” I shot back, shaking my head. “I’m not. God is amazing!” Then I noticed an older gentleman to my right, who I had not seen, with thick white neatly combed hair and sparkling clear blue eyes that matched his tie. He was nodding and laughing softly, pointing upward. Then the guard saw him too and said,

“Oh yes! Of course!”

I am not amazing at all. I am Mary Magdalene, or the woman sitting in the dirt, surrounded by outraged men with fists clutching stones as Jesus writes in the sand beside me. “He who is without sin…” Who can stand?

Sometimes people say, “How could you do that? How could you forgive?” Because murderers stand under the same fountain of Grace that I do. The black grime and stain of my sin was not a better or easier sin. It costs Jesus the same price.

Outside the breeze rattles the tired late summer leaves, David’s family and friends gather in a loose circle, relieved, breathing in hope and the sweet cool morning air. I hug some more people then leave, relieved to be alone. I have an hour before Rodolfo’s hearing and I have to eat.

I pick a small table at Wendy’s with the most sunlight streaking across the top and open up my salad and chili, thinking about the parole hearing, how God has again kept me and I’m grateful, so very grateful.

He shall cover you with His feathers, And under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. Psalm 91:4
The tables around me fill with office workers, sales clerks, old men who eat slow and look out the window and a young mother with a stern voice and small children who don’t pay attention. I thought of the pregnant Victim Advocate – how her life would change soon and it would be a good thing to be away from the violence, the outrage, the wounds that never heal.

Then I thought of the little man with the blue eyes, almost turquoise it seemed and how they danced. He never spoke, I realized; he didn’t have to.

I wonder if he was an angel…I thought as I finished my lunch and got up to leave, to head back to the Massachusetts Parole Board. It would not surprise me one bit. He was a spark of Joy in the midst of an endless sorrow, pointing to Christ, the true Advocate – the One who sits on both sides of the rail. I am not at all amazing, but my Jesus surely is.

Beautiful song by Selah : There Is a Fountain

July 20, 2016

Old Nurses Never Die; They Just Have Surgery

Left on the whiteboard by an elderly patient I cared for.

Robin. I had penned the letters over silk tape and stuck it to a locker 7 years ago. I caught the corner and pulled it off, closed the empty locker door and headed out, taking one last look at the small break room.

The room is tucked away, off a hallway used by everyone from Risk Management to Interpreters to Float Pool, but is seldom used at all. There’s no TV in it; just a small table and 3 chairs. But it’s a room I’ve used every work-morning to pray in, as I watch the steady flow of workers crossing the parking lot and the sun edging up over the bog. I slow myself down, making sure Jesus leads before I jump into the unknown world of the sick or injured. The room also provided a small respite at many lunch breaks, allowing me to reflect in silence, away from the din of alarms, phones, call bells and anxious families.

I entered the world of healthcare 30 years ago by answering an ad in the paper for a Personal Care Attendant, or PCA. If you had asked anyone who knew me then, I would be on your Least-likely-to-become-a-nurse list or just least-likely-to-care. I had little patience for sissies with sniffles, and my sons will tell you I had Zero Tolerance for whining.

“Go to you room if you need to whine,” I would tell them, and they quickly learned that whining to yourself is absurd.

So I answered the ad. The wife of a 40-year-old quadriplegic needed help. Jimmy had broken his neck drunk on a motorcycle and now depended on someone else to feed, wash, dress and move him. It was the first time I had to push past the awkwardness of a helpless human body, so vulnerable and frail, and learn to care for the soul within it as well. This was a huge learning curve and there were days where Jimmy and I both wanted to quit.

It was no coincidence that Jimmy’s wife, and reluctantly Jimmy, were born again Christians and I was not. This man, with just enough strength to push out the air to argue, caught me in the middle of his beef with a God that would lay him up in bed for the next 20 years, at the mercy of clueless people like me. Oddly, it positioned me in a place of wanting to know a few things too, and before I left Jimmy’s for nursing school, I too had surrendered to this beautiful and terrifying Father who could woo us with cords of boundless love and mercy yet love us enough to let us go, even if it meant crashing into a telephone pole drunk.

As I walk down the deserted hallway from the break room, the rooms behind the closed doors come alive in my memory. I first worked on this floor as a “student nurse” in the late 80’s, then hired as an RN when I graduated. I remember caring for a 90-year-old woman here, my young face startled by her pale gossamer skin and network of tiny blue veins threading up her arms. She was amused by my innocence.

Then in this room, my first young guy, a diabetic, handsome and flirtatious, and how I flushed when I had to give him an IM injection in his left buttock. And room 27, where I saw my first dead man, sitting up in bed like he was watching TV, but he was gone, just a body that I would help wrap and pull the zipper over his face. I have never grown used to that. And I remember an older nurse, like me now, telling me “No matter what, take a break. Get off the floor!” And I’ve held to that advice, 26 years later.

But I’ve always loved nursing, to be face to face with sickness, and the despair and fear it can bring. To be there, to join in, has been as natural for me as breathing and I recognize it as a particular gift from God, made more perfect after I lost my son 14 years ago. “Deep calls to deep,” the Bible says. When you have gone through some things, others will trust you with their pain.

I have an old nurses body now; the shoulder has been injected, the hip scoped, the back MRI’d and I think the knees are next on the chopping block. So I’ve taken a step back from the bedside into the IV team when I return from surgery. I will still see many patients, but I will not be washing them, hauling them out of bed or whispering in their ear when they are trying to die. But I know my God, and I know He never takes back His gifts, He just changes the scenery from time to time.

I’m glad nursing has never defined me, and I always feel a little sorry for nurses who do try to get their sense of purpose from a career that doesn’t often give back in the ways we want – few kudos from the upper echelon, often yelled at by a patient long before you get a thanks (You want me to get up?!?!) and spending a lot of time in places with “output” that I won’t describe here, although if you see a group of nurses together laughing until they cry, it’s likely over the things we can’t tell anyone. “Fine,” is what I tell my husband at dinner when he asks how my day went. As all the faces and images flash before me, I know Fine is safe and enough.

Neither do I define myself by being a wife, mom and a grandma, roles I cherish way beyond nursing. I would drive them all crazy if I did. As it is, I have a husband who still adores me, two beautiful daughter-in-laws who apparently love me, but more importantly love Jesus, my sons and grandchildren. I simply can’t ask for more.

Delight your self in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 ESV

Many of us just use Jesus as an add-on, like a rabbit’s foot charm.

If I do this, then I get that.

It’s in our Promise Book, conveniently alphabetized for a quick look; Children, Health, Wealth with a coordinating scripture we can chant over our own selfish wants. But delighting ourselves in Him means our lives are hid in Christ and He in us. It is a posture of submission that grants abiding and oneness, so that our desires will always align with His will. Obedience becomes a joy, not a hard task. And what I think I really need may be the precise thing He will remove or never give. Can we trust this Jesus, this God-man who says we must hand over all, including our plans and our identity?

Corrie Ten Boom said “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” This was a truth I discovered after Spence died, and that pit seemed bottomless. As a nurse, I have had to stake my career on it; that in the despondent alcoholic, the cancer ridden mother and the cries of a parent who lost a child, whether that child is 6 or 60, I can share that place of overwhelming darkness because Jesus has gone before us.

My nursing career is not done yet, just transitioning once again. And my hope and prayer is this:

God, use whatever I have in every new place, in each new day. Give me manna for today that I may share it, giving glory back to you. Your crazy daughter — Robin

September 24, 2015

The Day God Came Into My Kitchen

I plugged in the iron and flipped the small cabinet open in the kitchen, releasing the ironing board. It was one of my favorite things about that house in Yarmouth. It was the first house I ever owned, bought with a small down-payment of borrowed dollars from hopeful family and friends. It was God’s gift – I knew that much, and it could’ve been a Newport mansion to us. In a display of reckless joy, Miles spray-painted his name in orange graffiti across the basement wall. It was all ours, no more crazy landlords, no more packing up like refugees and moving on. I was a single mom with three boys; 14, 12 and 2 and I asked God to make it a place He could stay and He did, in that small cape we all fit together; one lonely mom, two wild teen-boys and a chubby toddler who made us all laugh. God was there, and some angels too, keeping watch.

It was Sunday morning; my mother was there too. She had driven up from New York because Spencer was in trouble again and she was mad. She wore a money belt around her waist, concealed just under her shirt, and she patted it gently saying she brought some cash to bail Spencer out “just in case”. This was how she loved me, instead of hugs she got mad; but she would rescue my son because she knew I was scared of losing him, and that was something she understood.

It was Sunday morning and the spring sun was reaching through the window across the kitchen table where my mother sat reading. We were going to church, and it would all be okay. I threw my green silk shirt over the ironing board.

The iron spit and hissed while big and small feet thumped across the floor upstairs.

I picked up the iron and worked it across the shirt. Then it came – I would say suddenly but it was so quiet, like a cloud it came over me and I could barely stand under it, but I felt not weighed down but lifted up in it. My mind raced to identify something I had never felt before…then I looked up and heard my mother simply say:

“He’s here.” Her voice was soft and her face had a look of child-like wonder as we both stared into…the air?

The air in the kitchen. You don’t really see air but I could, it was vibrant and translucent, like it was made of gold. I couldn’t speak, I could just look and then I couldn’t look any more. I wanted to laugh or shout but I couldn’t make noise. I closed my eyes and bowed my head. Then it was gone. Joy, my brain finally spoke. It was joy unspeakable, like the song we sang…”and full of glory”. Love had tipped the pitcher and let a few drops of heaven fall upon a tired single mom and her skeptical mother.

For a long time I thought God did that for my mom. It was fun to see her face light up, and the earnest way she would tell people about how God came into my kitchen. The cynic, the intellect who would look at me with disdain and say with the chiding southern drawl,

“Surely you don’t believe everything the Bible says is true.”

We were each other’s witness and we never lost the wonder of that moment, that morning of the Visit.

Amy Carmichael wrote, “I want to live in the light of the thought of His coming, His triumph – the end of this present darkness, the glory of His seen presence.”

Now I know it was also for me. A compass for the swirling darkness, and pain so relentless and exhausting, God would whisper, “I am close, remember?” And hope for someday, when Love will call me up and say Now. Come home. And the small drop of glory will become a river of Life.

Shortly after I lost my son, a woman came up to me in church and said,

“You must feel God so close to you!”

And I said, “No. I don’t feel God at all. I don’t see Him or hear Him either.” And she slowly backed away. I was getting used to having that effect on people.

Actually, I knew He was there, even when my son was murdered. But the pain was so intense; my senses could pick up little else for quite a long time. I would search the sky, waiting for a cloud to shift to the side, or for the black sky studded in stars to split open and.. and what? For Spence to wave at his mother?

“Hi mom! I’m OKAY!”

Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:29 ESV

The One who sees the beginning to the end, knows just what we need as we navigate through our lives, but we will only find it if we are following Jesus. Sounds simple and it is, but we are easily distracted. We wind up on a dark dead end in the midst of a haunted forest and say “God where are you?” It’s comforting to me in a twisted way that Jesus’ closest disciples didn’t always get it; the ones who ate and slept and brushed their teeth with the King of Glory. He knows we are blockheads. Matthew 15:16 we find Jesus in a moment of apparent frustration with them.

“Are you still so dull?” NIV. But I think The Message is more on target:

“Are you being willfully stupid?”

Shekinah: A Hebrew word meaning “He dwells there”. The first sign of His manifest glory was in the cloud that led and sheltered the Israelites by day and the fiery pillar that lit the night. As if this wasn’t enough, he had them make a huge tent, and he lived there with them, there in the desert, while they griped and groaned and reminisced of Egypt and slavery.

Now, he chooses another plain dwelling – us; you and me. More whining. For several years after Spence died I became so obsessed with heaven that my pastor had to talk to me. I told him I didn’t want to be here any more, I meant on Earth, and he smiled sadly.

“Neither do I sometimes, but here is where God wants us.”

Here, in my home, getting ready for church, or at work, whispering Jesus loves you in the ear of a dying man. In prisons, in darkness, in despair – in a single mom’s kitchen, at the door of the skeptic, He dwells there, and He wants to show us the way, even when we are willfully stupid.

I still remember every thing about the Visit, but earth has no words to describe heaven. You will just have to see it for yourself.

Shekinah – lead us with your Pillar of Grace, until the day you say, “Now!”

August 3, 2015

The Jesus Tree: A Backyard Metaphor

Grapevine climbing onto Rose of Sharon

This blog turns four years old this month and I wonder: Have I run out of meaningful things to say? Am I repeating myself? I told a friend I had writer’s block the other day, and she said I should write about having writer’s block. And I replied:

“I already have.” (A Writer’s Block-Head)

Writer’s block is like catching a cold. You’re miserable and you wonder where it came from. I just went to a speaker/writer’s conference, because I wanted to learn how to speak well, and to jumpstart my writing. At the airport I looked at the writer’s seminar outlines and took a deep breath in. As usual, I’m doing everything wrong, and I closed the book that I paid hundreds for. Did I catch it there?

I also suspect that general summer malaise has much to do with it. Having a fan blow on high two feet from your face so the sweat doesn’t drip onto the keyboard while you dream of the frozen food section at Stop and Shop, is distracting. And when it’s nice out, like when the humidity dips below 90, I want to go outside, instead of sitting hunched over in my study in front of a blank page, while the fan’s white noise obscures every sound of life.

Most people I know are in the middle of some tangled mess. Not a crisis maybe, but life has stalled or derailed. The kids are sick or in trouble, the money flow has dried to a trickle and dreams roll off towards the horizon…going, going, all gone. I watch people I love settle for so much less than what I believe God wants for them, because we just get lost and wonder, “How did I end up here?” At one time pulsing with new life straight from the vine, the Life-blood of Jesus Christ, fruitful and filled with creative spark; now the branch has withered, or shot off into obscurity, becoming frail and impotent. So we say, “Well, maybe I was a little crazy for thinking God could do that, or that I could ever be used in that way.” Like when I go to conferences. I compare myself to others, all the other women that seem to be so connected with lots of friends and published books and clever marketing tools. And I feel my branch begin to wither.

In my back yard, which I see from my purple desk with drawers that stick shut when summer comes, I watch our own grapevine sprout from a gnarled gray trunk into a magnificent plant that explodes 30 feet to the left and right. A lot of pruning the last few years has trained it to bear fruit, last year perhaps 100 lbs. of Concord grapes. Behind the fence, which holds the massive vine, is a Rose of Sharon tree, twenty feet tall, with a cascade of white flowers from each branch. And every year, right about now, the vine reaches out for the tree, latches on, and begins to merge its crazy branches into the white flowers and the strong arms of the Rose of Sharon. I call this my Jesus Tree; the wayward branches of the Vine reaching up into the arms of the Rose of Sharon, another common metaphor for Jesus. It makes me smile and remember what I need.

According to the Blogging list of Do’s and Don’ts I’ve already failed by exceeding the 500 word limit and using a blatantly simple metaphor. I should stop here but I haven’t made a point yet. Or maybe I have. Dreams…they don’t have to disappear. Just return to the Source and make them His, not yours. Nobody likes to be pruned.

Evan Hopkins noted, “The true life, that which triumphs over sin and ‘does not cease from yielding fruit’ is a life that springs up out of death.”

So as Spencersmom.com turns four, I yield my soul, my words and this blog to Him. And wait. For you, precious reader, who may be faithful to this blog or maybe brand new, I will depart by following a suggestion from the Bloggers list of Do’s – sorting out 10 of my most favorite blogs I have written over the last four years. Enjoy, dream dreams then release them to Jesus. And wait with me, dear sojourner. He is about to do something way beyond our very wildest dreams.

A summer reading list:

1. Rosie the Rescue Dog

2. Poor in Spirit

3. And Wonders of His Love

4. Grumpy Old Men

5. Bruno’s Birthday

6. Staying With Your Feet

7. Gorillas and Tea Parties

8. The Visit

9. Fear No Evil

10. True Love 101