Carnival of Grief, Part One

10/9/13

I wrote the first post for this blog just four months ago on June second, and on October fifth, my mother passed away. Her illness and rapid decline sent us all into a kind of tailspin. She’s always been strong, both in constitution and in spirit; she worked ceaselessly and never seemed to tire or burn out.  She was a force to be reckoned with, a formidable foe. But she was also a champion to and for so many. To watch her mind and body slowly deteriorate over these past few months was heartbreaking and disorienting. When I think of her now, it’s still hard for me to reconcile the woman that she was toward the end with the woman I’ve known all of my life; they remain, in some ways, two separate people. I keep waiting to see my mother—the real one—walk around the corner. And I have to keep reminding myself that the unfathomable present is our new reality. For you, as much as for myself, I’ve tried to keep track of this process, which has proven to be the most exhausting, the most difficult and the strangest thing I’ve experienced yet.

Monday, October 7

We arrived around 7:30 tonight and were picked up by two people from my parents’ church. We understood that my dad, as the widower, had certain funerary obligations to perform. As we drove from Seoul to Suwon, I was struck, as I always am, by the city. Like most big Asian cities, it’s a sleek and shiny thing to behold. Something always rises up in me to meet this place, but this time I felt, acutely, that my link to this place, to a part of myself, had been fractured. Straddling two cultures has never been a simple or easy thing; it means never fully belonging in one place or the other.  Now, it seems, I belong even less to this place where my mother was born and where she died.

I assumed that we would go straight to my parents’ house, but one of the men informed me that we were headed to the mourning center* instead; everyone was waiting for us there. I kind of knew what to expect, but unless you’ve experienced it, there’s no way to really be prepared. We were already exhausted from the trip and way underdressed, but since it’s not our “dominant” culture, they made a lot of exceptions for us throughout this process. We arrived, and two of our friends—my parents always joke that they are their adopted daughters—came out to greet us and bring us to our father. Because we arrived late on Monday night, most of the people had gone home and we weren’t expected to stay long. We said our hellos to the people who remained (some of whom I knew, most of whom I didn’t) and we left shortly thereafter to spend some time alone.

*The mourning centers vary in size. This one was big enough for two different families. They are large buildings, often attached to hospitals and hospices. Each family’s space consists of a receiving area, a large-ish dining area and another room—I’m not sure what it’s called, but my sister named it the "sad room"—where people pay their respects to the person who has passed away and the family. The body is never put on display. Instead, there’s a picture of the loved one and large flower arrangements. As people enter the room, they take off their shoes, select a flower out of the bucket and place it on the table in front of the photograph. The rituals, I assume, vary according to family preference, religion, etc. The family who occupied the front space was Buddhist, while, of course, my parents are Christian. People who visited us mostly prayed, though some sang as well and others stood quietly. And then, of course, the bowing commenced. I’ve never bowed so much in my life. Once we’d bowed, accepted condolences and offered our words of gratitude, we would invite them stay awhile and eat. In Korea, there are two things that people do at every major life event—they eat and they bring envelopes full of money, partially to ease the burden of feeding so many people. This mourning process begins immediately after the person passes away and it lasts for three days. Traditionally, the family remains in the building for the entirety of the three days so as not to miss receiving someone coming to pay their respects.

Tuesday, October 8

I woke up with a feeling of dread. Because today was the third and final day that we would spend at the mourning center, I knew that it was also the day that we would view my mother’s body. Our appointment (you have appointments for EVERYTHING in Korea and they are promptly kept—none of that waiting around business that we do in the U.S.) was at 3pm. We arrived at the mourning center around 9:30 shortly before the 10am service (they held services in the “sad room" twice a day at 10 am and 7pm) and began receiving people—bowing, accepting condolences, offering gratitude, inviting people to eat.* Over the course of those three days, I think upwards of 700 people passed through those doors, some came every day, some stayed throughout the day to help as needed or to simply be present.

*There were people who arrived before us every day and left after us each evening. They prepared food, cleaned up, kept the guest books, counted the money and did anything and everything else that needed to be done. These people were my parents’ friends and church members who took time off from their jobs and worked tirelessly so that we would have little to do or worry about. If you’ve never seen such love and generosity in action, it’s an amazing thing to bear witness to.

As the day wore on, we began to joke that we needed new phrases to say. The old ones already felt chewed up and stale on my tongue. “What else can I say?” I asked my sister and our friend. My comprehension is pretty good, but my speaking ability, not so much. They began throwing out random phrases that sounded good but meant ridiculous things: “They don’t expect you to know Korean anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you say. How about…juchajang?” (Juchajang is the phrase for “parking garage.”) It was one of those moments that probably felt funnier than it was because of the circumstances, but it became a running joke. There were times when I had to stifle the laughter that started to bubble up as I shook someone’s hand or bowed yet again and offered those old phrases while saying to myself, with all the solemnity of the moment, “juchajang.” It was, indeed, a carnival of grief—and we were the sideshow, somehow always a little too westernized in our enactment of these rituals: we chose not to remain in the “sad room” exclusively for the duration of the three days; we laughed too much; we deviated from the customs in small ways that marked our otherness, that signaled our half-belonging. As one woman who has known my parents for several years gripped my sister and began wailing and pounding my sister’s back, I stood by awkwardly. I felt like a character in an Amy Tan novel and, again, I had to hold back my laughter. It’s not that I found her grief funny, exactly, but she seemed more a caricature to me than a real person. It wasn’t a moment of shared grieving, but a display meant to signal her status as someone who knew my parents well-ish and therefore felt my mother’s death more acutely. It’s not that I doubt her affection for my mother, but it just felt excessive and meant to create a kind of spectacle. Whoa.I’m glad these displays were limited. 

When 3pm arrived, I felt completely numb and detached. The director of the hospital escorted us back to the room where they had prepared my mother’s body. He told us that he had taken care of her himself rather than having an attendant perform the job and explained that they had washed her body and wrapped her tightly in a shroud from the neck down. There were others in the building at that time who had been close to my parents and wanted to come back with us. I wanted to say no. I was angry that they couldn’t give us these last moments alone. They’d been there when she passed. They’d had time to see her go and to love her, but I couldn’t say no. My mother’s life stood before me—she’d given her whole self to these people and to others like them. Whatever anger or bitterness I felt, to be ungracious now would be to spit in the face of all of that. So I asked them to give us a few minutes alone before they entered and they complied.

I felt sick and terrified. I wasn’t sure what condition she’d be in, but she looked peaceful, as if she were only asleep. The day’s numbness slipped away, and I felt myself beginning to come undone. I wanted to scream and throw things; I wanted to hurl myself on her body like those Sicilian women I mentioned in my very first post. Instead, I wept silently as I touched her one last time and tried to imagine what my life would look like without her in it. The director began washing her face and finished the shrouding process by wrapping her head with care. I watched as they lifted her body into the box that would carry her body to the crematorium. I wanted to stop them. I wanted more time. But I realized that I would never be ready, not in five minutes or two hours or three days. I wrote her name on the box after they closed it, and then they wrapped it tightly with a long strip of white cloth, creating handholds for the pallbearers to use the following day. Though the rest of this carnival of grief had offered me little comfort, this moment of such careful and elaborate ritual, of such gentle caretaking of her body filled me with such gratitude for this strange and foreign process.

We returned to our duty stations and continued to meet people throughout the day. The transitions were jarring and exhausting. My mother’s family came and spent time with us later in the day and stayed until we left at 10pm. Grand aunts and uncles, cousins and others whose relationships to us were tangled and difficult to decipher. “Isanghe,” they murmured to us, “how strange.” Women in my mother’s family live long lives. How strange that she will be outlived by her own mother who is over 80 (though she is not well now and has some dementia) and nearly all of her maternal aunts. It didn’t take long for them to begin the typical Korean prodding; they wanted to know why I’m not married, whether or not I have a special “man friend,” and they urged me to marry quickly.  It went something like this: “We’re so sorry for your mother. We loved her; she was a good woman. Such a shame you’re not married! We’re going to pray for you to find a husband quickly. Eat. Eat more. EAT! You need to eat. Don’t get fat, though, or you won’t be able to find a good husband. Ah, you remind me of your mother; you have her smile. Such a pretty girl…why aren’t you married?” Welcome to the emotional carousel at the carnival of grief.  

As we drove home that night, my brother and sister were joking about the various things they’d had to cover over to be respectful and appropriate. My sister wore her hair down to conceal the shaved sides of her head. My brother wore long sleeves despite the heat to cover his tattoos. “Well," I said smugly, "I didn’t have to cover over anything…except my whole life, of course.” We all began laughing. My dad laughed the hardest. I think my mom would have found it funny as well. If she were here, she would have been grateful, I think. She would have felt half-justified and half-guilty, but grateful that we complied to save face. I would have been annoyed by all of the dissembling. Maybe we would have sniped at one another, because that’s what we did in these moments. But for tonight, we did those things out of love. And tonight, we laughed. 

How do you title a post like this?

I decided earlier today that I would blog tonight since it’s been so long and since I am, for this one evening, caught up (well, sort of, anyway).  I’d already titled the blog: “The Perils of People-Pleasing and Perfectionism: Alliterative Life Lessons.” Titles are fun, right? But the day has taken a turn, so I’ll have to save that for next time. And, curiously, I can’t think of a damn thing to title this post. 

For the past week or so I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot. “Isn’t that a given,” you might ask? Well, no, actually it’s not. Since they left and I began the new job, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to think about anything other than the day in front of me. There’s been some purposeful avoidance, too, I’m guessing. It’s not that I don’t think about the fact that she’s halfway across the world dying of cancer. That thought crosses my mind several times a day. But I haven’t really allowed myself to internalize that, to really think about what that means. Instead, I’ve been running from everything these days and feeling increasingly angry at everyone and everything in the process. I’m just pissed. I want to scream and lash out. And every time Bennett throws one of his massive toddler tantrums, I want to join him. Instead, I’ve been holding him, talking quietly to him, loving him through it—and it helps. It feels cathartic for me as well.

Over the past few days, however, my anxiety has been through the roof. I’ve woken up several times in the middle of the night thinking that I’ve heard my phone; I keep waiting for the phone call from my dad with bad news about my mom. But the last time I talked to my dad he told me that things were “about the same” as when they left. I didn’t believe him, of course, and that probably served to heighten my concern. He’s a reliably unreliable source when it comes to these things. So I wanted to check in again, but because of the time difference, I had to wait all day to call. By Bennett’s bedtime the feeling was so intense that I paused our book reading to call my dad. I never cease to be amazed by these strange moments of connectedness or knowingness that come upon us suddenly and strongly. My dad didn’t answer, but he called me soon after to tell me that my mom is in the hospital. For now, it’s just some fluid on her lung that they had to drain, but then he also came clean about the rest.  She can barely walk these days. She doesn’t really talk very much. She is having some hand/eye coordination issues. They hadn’t been telling us because they "didn’t want us to worry," which is what I suspected anyway. And then he dropped the bomb. He explained that he sort of regretted seeing his mother in her deteriorated state right before she died and suggested that he and my mother didn’t really want that for us. He did say that he would leave it up to us, but I can tell that they would rather we didn’t come.

I contemplated not going for a minute. I tried to imagine what that would feel like. Not going, of course, would mean that our final moments here would be the ones that I carried with me. In some ways, that appeals to me. I haven’t shared those last moments with anyone: not friends, not my partner, not my therapist, not my siblings. I’ve barely looked at them myself. I tucked them away because I couldn’t bear to think about them. Her last words to me were full of all the wistfulness, tenderness, and love of our lifetime lived together and all the regret, sorrow and longing for that lifetime unlived, both past and future.  There’s a part of me that wants to preserve that…but I know I’d regret that decision.

While cooking this evening, I put something away in the cabinet and saw the sesame seed oil that she bought while she was here; I was struck by so much grief and heartache that I could barely finish cooking. All of those things that drove me crazy—the way she took over my space whenever she was around, the way she rearranged drawers and cabinets to suit her needs—were suddenly deep losses. She’ll never be the boss in my kitchen again. She’ll never feed me again. She’ll never cook for my child. She found so much pleasure in feeding us—watching us eat, making us our favorites, relishing how much we love Korean food.  She was a fierce and formidable woman. She was wounded and short-tempered. But she was also mine. Now she’s weak and vacant. And soon, in that way that mother and child belong to one another, I won’t belong to anyone anymore. Whatever good, bad or un-nameable things have passed between us, when she gave me life she anchored me to the world, and now I feel like I’ve been unmoored from something and set adrift. So I’ll go, of course…to see myself off as much as her and to honor all that she has been to me.

I keep thinking of this poem by Rabindranath Tagore; I’ll leave you with it:

Peace, My Heart

Peace, my heart, let the time for


the parting be sweet.


Let it not be a death but completeness.

Let love melt into memory and pain


into songs.


Let the flight through the sky end


in the folding of the wings over the


nest.


Let the last touch of your hands be


gentle like the flower of the night.


Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a


moment, and say your last words in


silence.


I bow to you and hold up my lamp


to light you on your way.

Vignettes of Sorts: Beginnings, Endings and In Betweens

Endings

Tonight I sent my parents off to Indy; their plane leaves in the morning and the transition from Bloomington would have been too early and too difficult for my mom. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.  Of course, there are plans for us to visit them and plans for us to Skype, but we all know that there’s a chance that this is it.

My mother and I spent time alone today before they left, and we said our goodbyes. I don’t know how to describe that moment. Nothing has ever felt so unreal and so present. We had nothing left to say. We had everything left to say. I felt the magnitude of the moment—filled up with my mother’s love, filling her up with mine, sending her off with words that I hoped would stay with her and comfort her, as she did the same for me.  I ached for myself, for my son who will grow up without her, for my family. Mostly, I ached for my mother. As a parent, I can’t imagine what it must be like to hold your child, with all the heaviness of that moment’s finality.

As they drove away, I was viscerally reminded of a moment in my childhood when I felt such loss and fear at my mother’s departure that I ran crying down the street after her car until I couldn’t see it any longer. Today I held myself back as that same panic rose up in me. This time, I felt love and longing stretched between us like a tether. I let her go, as she has let me go so many times before, because it’s what’s best for her…even if it doesn’t feel that way right now. What else can I say? Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to cover it today. I’m not sure we have words for moments like this. It’s something beyond language—something primal in the torrent of tears that I don’t have time to cry. Not now.

Beginnings

Tomorrow morning at precisely 7:25 am, I’ll begin my new job at Bloomington High School North teaching English. I know, crazy, right? Well, it is. The whole process took a total of two days. They called on Wednesday of last week. I interviewed on Thursday, and they offered me the job an hour later.

When I considered whether or not to take the job I had a lot of really sound, really strategic reasons why it would be a good idea. Those things still hold true. But, well, have you ever seen an episode of Thomas the Train? Unless you have kids, and maybe even then, you probably haven’t. (Let me tell you, you’re not missing anything. I have A LOT of issues with the show, but my son is obsessed with trains right now so I’m making some concessions.) The trains are always concerned with being “really useful engines.” They derive their sense of self-worth (okay this is getting ridiculous…bear with me) from how useful they’ve been on any given day. Well, yeah, you see where this is going. I’ve always liked being useful, liked feeling purposeful about my life in the grand scheme of things but also on a day-to-day basis. I have a hard time being idle. So when we made the decision to send my mom back to Korea, and knowing that we’d already transitioned my son to full-time care to give him space from the sickness in the house—I freaked. What would I do? So I said yes.

Here we go. Six classes. 160 students. Perhaps thankfully, it’s a temporary contract for now, though there’s potential for something more long-term. On one hand, I’m excited to share my love for literature with these students (don’t worry, I’m not harboring any Dead Poet’s Society illusions). I often hear a lot of “ughs” and “yikes” about high-schoolers, but I’m pretty fond of them; I like them whether they’re earnest or belligerent. But on the other, I’m anxious about a lot, too. For the first time in two years, I won’t be with my son for substantial portions of the day, and I’m going to miss him enormously. I don’t know if the trade-off will be right or worth it for us. Luckily, I get to try it on, see how it feels. Either way, it’s happening—ready or not, here I come.

In Between Things

Can you feel it? The emotional whiplash? I feel wrecked. There’s no time to breathe, let alone process what I feel about semi-closing a chapter and, simultaneously, semi-opening another.  Here I am, in between. I’m flailing. I’m frantic. I’m uncertain how I’ll do any of what’s to come.  But I know that it all still has to be done. And somehow, I always manage.

One day at a time, right? That’s what people say. Except one day at a time is impossible. There’s always what-came-before and what-comes-after. Those things are inextricably bound up in the present. When I think about it that way, this in-between feels a little less terrifying. We’re always in transition. We are always moving away from and moving toward something. At some point, of course, there’s finality; there’s no more in between. Death, that is to say, is inevitable and we are powerless to stop its approach.  But until then, this flux is what ensures us, I suppose, that we are still caught up in that process of living, in the “do not go gentle…” and in the “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Good or bad, that’s something to hold on to. 

Comings and Goings

I hadn’t anticipated writing again so soon, but over the past day or so we’ve made some big decisions regarding my mother and her care: we’ve decided that she will be more comfortable in Korea for whatever time remains. I know…it feels big and shocking. At least it does to me. I guess I hadn’t anticipated this happening. But nothing is easy or predictable about watching a loved one die or, for that matter, being the one who’s dying. It’s hard to foresee what the needs—be they physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.—will be.

I’ve sensed for some time now that my mother is homesick. For the past decade, my parents have spent time building a life in Korea. Their faith community, their friends, and their possessions—all of this is in Korea. Beyond that, however, I think Korea has simply become home again for my mother in some more meaningful way. For a long time, that wasn’t the case. After marrying my dad and leaving Korea, she rarely had cause to go back. Her mother and brother followed her to the US shortly after I was born, so she spent nearly 28 years away from Korea before returning ten years ago. But all that has changed over the past decade. She is, we joke, a “real” Korean now.

When we made the decision to move her here, I think we were all in a state of panic, uncertain about what kind of time we had and how quickly the cancer would progress. And we all needed some time with her to find closure, to make her feel loved and to feel tangibly loved by her. We feel good about the fact that she has spent her most well and able-bodied time with us. She’s held her grandchildren, watched them play, and loved them. 

As she gets less well each day, I began to imagine what it must feel like to be away from everything that feels comfortable and familiar. We are limited here. My skills and resources limit my ability to provide her daily with the kind of food, the only food, that she seems to stomach well. But we are limited in other ways. I’ve given all I have to offer—my time, my home, my love, my compassion, concern and companionship. It has been, I feel, enough for her in many ways. In other ways, though, there are parts of her that I cannot feed. The places from which she derives, and has always derived, the most comfort and peace—God, church, faith community—can’t be found here with us, and I can think of no more important time than now for her to surround herself with those things.

Making the decision to let her go was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve had to be a part of making thus far in my life. It’s incredibly agonizing, unbearable even, to watch one’s mother die slowly. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some sense of relief that I no longer have to do that. The alternative, though, is not watching one’s mother die, and it’s an equally agonizing prospect. The fact that I won’t be there to care for her, to anticipate her needs—it feels wrong. Yet, as wrong as that feels, the decision to let her return to the place where I know she will be the most comfortable and peaceful, feels right.

There are no easy decisions here. Either carries with it some unmanageable weight. In the end, though, it seemed clear. We did our best to release her from the guilt of leaving us. She feels torn, I know, but the time for worrying about us...well that has passed. It’s our turn now to take on some of that worry. 

The week ahead feels daunting. How do you cram it all in? How does one make space for all of the past, the aching present and the tenuous future? How does one make someone feel loved enough to go? How does one say goodbye, knowing that it very well might be the last time? I want to get it right. But I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know if I’ve done any of this right. I’ve done my best, and I hope that when I look back on this moment five years from now or ten years from now, that I’ll still feel like we made the right choice. But just in case I don’t, I’m reminding that future self that at this moment in time, we made the best decision possible in an impossible situation.

If you think of us this week, we’d be grateful. 

The Things We’ve Carried

In Letters To a Young Poet, Rilke writes: “For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” In the almost two years since my son was born, I’ve thought about what it means to love another person. In some ways, loving my son is the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I look at him, even in the middle of the most frustrating and difficult moments, and I know what love is. I know it in the palpable way the air shifts between us, in the elation that springs up in me at his sweet smiles, in the gut-wrenching pain that I feel when he is hurting or inconsolable, in the way his absence tugs my mind constantly back toward him when we are apart, and in the fullness I feel when he’s in my arms. I love him, simply, because he is. But here’s the rub, loving him in that way and making him feel loved in that way are two very different things. And it’s the latter part of this endeavor that makes loving someone the “most difficult task.”  

As I was driving the other day I began to wonder if it was possible to love other people in this way—without condition or expectation. I’ve been programmed, like many of us, to believe that the terms of love are conditional. Parental love or divine love—at least in the way I grew up understanding them—can be costly at times. So the version of God that I like most to believe in, if I’m in a believing place, is a God that loves and values people simply because they are. I like to believe in a contract between the Divine and human that is unburdened of those hidden clauses and rigorous demands that we are likely not to meet. I like to imagine that grace, mercy (and all these other buzzwords people like to throw around) are offered to us freely and abundantly, not tied like a carrot to the tip of some proverbial stick. I like to hope for an extension of love that is disentangled from our pettiness, small-mindedness and brokenness and is marked by its unlimited capacity for compassion and understanding. I’ve been fortunate enough, lately, to find some loving and kind people who help me believe (or at least believe, themselves, when I’m feeling skeptical) that this version of God exists.

In this process with my mother, I’ve sometimes struggled to find compassion. I’ve been alternately angry, frustrated, heartbroken and numb (I know, I know…the Kübler-Ross model and all that).  But it’s more than just the grief of death. I’ve spent a large part of my adulthood coming to terms with and working through some deep woundedness. Those things feel so thoroughly entwined with who I am: I grew up around them, pushed through them, made space for them, and perhaps, eventually, even found some comfort in the familiarity of their weightiness. I suppose I’ve been waiting a lifetime to hear certain things from my mother. Naively, I thought that hearing those things from her would ameliorate my wounds. So, recently, when she returned from a week away and began this very conversation, I braced myself. Anxious and uncomfortable, I waited and listened.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, when I was angrier, when she was healthier, when everything wasn’t what it is right now, I might have felt some sense of satisfaction. I might have felt validated or vindicated. I might have done I-don’t-know-what. I probably wouldn’t have been able or ready to receive what she had to say. Instead, what I heard her say simultaneously changed me profoundly and made no difference at all. I discovered, as is so often the case, that the cycle of woundedness hadn’t begun with me, or even with her. As I sat across the table from my mother—who was broken not only by her own wounds, but by the fullness of the knowledge that she had replicated and allowed those cycles of pain and loss to be repeated in me—my anger slipped away.

I think that so much of my mother’s reluctance to acknowledge her approaching death is grounded in her deep sense of regret and her desire to go back. It’s not that she’s afraid of what’s to come. I think she does have a sense of peace about that. She doesn’t, however, have peace about what was. It’s an impossible place to be in because, of course, there’s only going forward. I recognized myself in that moment with her. I’ve spent years trying to go backwards, scrambling over the debris of time, digging until my fingers were bloodied, to undo what was done, to rewrite history. I used to think that healing could be found back there somewhere. But it can’t. There’s only more pain—the pain that comes from the frustration and futility of that effort.

What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t find the healing that I imagined I would over the course of our conversation. Instead, I found the kind of compassion that allows me to love my mother simply because she is. For the moment, she was more than just my mother. She was also a whole person: a person with her own scars, regrets, and untold stories; a person with her own life; a person dying her own death. I suddenly felt like a bystander, like someone passing by who’d just discovered deep pockets brimming with compassion that I could offer to salve her wounds a little. Whatever we’ve carried between us all of those years, well...the tension went slack. I felt her putting down her end of the rope that we’ve held tautly between us. After all, in a short time it will be mine, alone, to carry. I wish I could say that I laid it down on the table as well and didn’t pick it up again when I stood up, but that’s not the case. No, I found that my own wounds were unchanged. They were still there tangled up in who I am.  But I realized that it’s my job to find healing for myself somewhere in the here-and-now or in the what’s-to-come; I can’t foist that responsibility on her any longer. So I let go of my anger and loved her instead. Because there’s only going forward.

As we got up from the table my mom looked at me and said that she felt such a deep sense of relief when she watched me with my son: “You aren’t like us. You’re doing it better.” I’m not perfect. Some days I’m short-tempered and impatient, but I’m ever-aware of that old cycle spinning its wheels in me. I wake up every day vowing to listen more closely, to show my son that he is unconditionally loved, and to be as fully present for him as possible. Indeed, loving someone is a difficult task, but I think it’s like anything else. Practice makes…well, perhaps it doesn’t make perfect, but it certainly makes us better. And maybe in the attempting-to, we find something divine.