When grief just won't come, part three: Erika

Left to right: My mother Erika Maurer, me, great-grandmother Jenny Christine Maurer, my sister Ellen, my aunt Ada DenBraven, and, finally, Ada's brother, my father Harald Maurer. Evanston, Illinois. Late 1950's.

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When grief just won't come, part one, part two. A dream of my mother. My father's guns. Do I really need to forgive?

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I've written before about how difficult it has been to grieve my parents. That inability has left a hollow place in me.

A little over a decade ago, at a retreat center for international workers, I promised a therapist that, after our month at this center ended, I would continue to work on this grief. 

It's taken some time, but I'm glad to report that I'm finally saying goodbye—first to my mother. It involves speaking to her and my father directly, in the presence of a therapist (a trained and trustworthy witness is important to me)—that is, looking at the place in the room where I imagine my parents to be, asking them the questions I wish I'd had a chance to ask when they were alive, and saying goodbye.

I spent my earliest years with my father's parents in Oslo and then my mother's parents in Stuttgart, before going to Chicago to live with my parents and the two-year-old girl they'd had in my absence—my sister Ellen. Hence this sample from my questions: 

"Did they send you photos of me? What did you think?"

I won't list all my questions here. My final questions to my mother: "How would you like me to remember you? What would you like me to remember about you?"

You may be among my readers for whom this kind of therapy is familiar territory. Maybe you've used a similar approach to address painful relationships or unresolved grief. In my case, even though this was my own initiative,  I'll admit that I had to overcome some skepticism about the play-acting that seemed to be involved. To my surprise, the longer I stuck with the exercise, the more real it became.

I plan to continue.

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I began the day thinking that today's blog post would be personal, and I could take a rest this week from the unfolding calamity of a rogue presidency. Then I saw the photo of five-year-old Liam Ramos, a photo you might also have seen in today's news. I first saw it in this article by the Washington Post's art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott.

There was more shock to come. Asked about this case, vice president J.D. Vance said, "So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. What are they supposed to do? Let a five-year-old child freeze to death?" (Quoting from the CBC report.) 

Did it really not occur to Vance or to ICE that there was another obvious option?—not to make the arrest!  ... To use their better judgment. To have the humanity to leave these people alone! For God's sake, make a moral calculation (after all, you know where the family lives!!) in favor of the child and family and due process rather than an artificial urgency that inevitably leads to blatant public cruelty.

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Canadian prime minister Mark Carney's remarkable seventeen-minute Davos Conference reality check. (And, sorry, PM, your invitation to the Board of Peace has been canceled!)

Crystallia Lastala reads about Maria Skobtsova and "when faith stops being a cage."

What strikes me most is how clearly this perspective exposes the spiritual sicknesses we too often mistake for holiness. As someone who loves Christ deeply yet hesitates to call herself a Christian because of how distorted the faith has become in practice, I feel this tension painfully.

Another perspective on distorted faith, from Peter Wehner: In case you were still wondering, "MAGA Jesus is not the real Jesus."

Jeremy Morris on Russia, Ukraine, and the "Western-culpability thesis," with Richard Sakwa as a case study.

Becky Ankeny on "chaos, hope, and meaningful action"—highly recommended.

John Calvi "had a small miracle occur"—see his year-end letter.

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Blues from Canada: Whitehorse's version of "Baby, Scratch My Back." 

Slim Harpo's original classic (including the chicken scratch) lives on! I've probably posted more versions of this song than of any other, but so many musicians find it irresistible. (More in coming weeks.)

On not waiting for a brush with death

If I had ever had a near-death experience (NDE) of my own, I would be leading with that story in this post. Since I have not, I'm going to make some second-hand applications of ideas that came to me during my reading of Bruce Greyson's book After.

The author's selection of near-death experiences in After is not remarkably different or more dramatic than earlier compilations by other authors. Nor does he come to startling new conclusions. The power of his book is in its almost plodding attention to classifications, statistics, comparisons, and the careful examination of mechanistic "explanations" for the mind's continuing ability to function when the brain is apparently disabled.

Over and over Greyson documents the experiencers' frequent testimony to the sharpness of their memories of being out of their bodies (often observing things as if from, above as rescuers pull their unconscious bodies from danger or doctors labor to revive them -- even observing things that they could not possibly have seen while conscious), meetings with dead relatives, the sense of being enveloped by love, accompanied by an unseen guide, and then coming back to normal consciousness with a renewed sense of purpose and perspective, and a conviction that death is not to be feared.

And he does all this with no doctrinal axe to grind. For every experiencer who cites an encounter with "Heaven," he can quote someone else who doesn't apply that label to the reality they experienced while near death or clinically dead. He lists the evidence that the mind is not simply a function of the brain's known chemical processes, but grants that we don't yet have a coherent explanation for how this is possible.

As I said, I've not had such an experience myself. Nor have I ever had other forms of supernatural experiences, although within my family such experiences have certainly occurred. But Greyson ends his book with a challenge: does the evidence that such things occur, and that experiencers gain a more humane and purposeful outlook, have implications for the rest of us? To put it in my own terms, which of these good outcomes (including lack of fear of death!) would I reject simply because, up to now, I haven't had own close brush with death?

One of Greyson's case studies gave me particular pause. Here's an excerpt:

Barbara Harris Whitfield had an NDE at age thirty-two when she suffered respiratory complications while immobilized after back surgery. She described a life review in which she reexperienced abusive childhood events from the perspective of other people involved....

"I could hear myself saying, 'No wonder, no wonder.' I now believe my 'no wonder' meant 'no wonder you are the way you are now. Look what was done to you when you were a little girl.'

"My mother had been dependent on drugs, angry, and abusive. I saw all this childhood trauma again, in my life review, but I didn't see it in little bits and pieces, the way I had remembered it as an adult. I saw and experienced it just as I had lived it at the time it first happened. Not only was I me, I was also my mother. And my dad. And my brother. We were all one. I now felt my mother's pain and neglect from her childhood. She wasn't trying to be mean. She didn't know how to be loving or kind."

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I describe a fair amount of family dysfunction in my growing-up years -- violence, alcoholism, racism, and then the tragic story of my sister who repeatedly ran away from home to escape those things, and was murdered by a drug dealer. In telling these stories, I've permitted myself a number of unflattering descriptions of my parents. Should I repent of those descriptions?

For years, I've angrily rejected the cliche "your parents did the best they could," partly because they seem to have made deliberate choices that harmed us children. But reading Whitfield's story made me wonder how an experience like Whitfield's would change my perspective. For example: what if I could have experienced, for a NDE-like moment, what it was like to grow up in Japan during World War II, as my mother did? What was it like to see her city bombed by waves of American bombers? What was it like to be brought up in a Nazi-influenced school? What was it like to be formed by, not just one, but two cults of obedience -- to Hitler and to a divine emperor?

In the absence of a near-death experience, could I voluntarily undertake this exercise in empathy? Can I pray for God's help in doing so? I'm not giving any quick answer to this, but at least I'm asking myself the question.

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Several of Greyson's cases refer to a specific contrast between our limited perspective in ordinary life and being on the edge of eternity, as in a near-death experience. The contrast: while in that near-death zone, experiencers report a total and complete awareness, an ability to see, or know, in all directions simultaneously, whereas here our bandwidth is extremely limited. Our brains serve as a filter, providing only the more or less linear stream of data we need to function now. Even with the best of empathetic intentions, I cannot deliberately open up this kind of channel.

How would such a perspective help me understand, not only my parents, my childhood, my own good and bad choices, but also disruptions in relationships that puzzle and frustrate me? One painful example: how would it help me to cope with people in the Donald Trump personality cult? -- especially those who are otherwise close to me? Would some kind of undifferentiated "it's all good" acceptance be demanded of me? If not, what lines do I draw? What fresh connections are required of me? Here, too (barring an NDE of my own!) I know I will need God's help.

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W. J. Astore: We're mad as hell ... and fighting each other.

America needs an anti-imperial party, a “Come home, America” party, a party that puts domestic needs first as it works to downsize the military and dismantle the empire. Yet, in the spirit of Orwell’s 1984 and the Two Minutes’ Hate, Americans are always kept hating some putative enemy.

On the other hand... Matthew's Gospel, Abba Joseph, and Micah Bales: You can become all flame.

Speaking of flame, sales of internal combustion cars in Norway may end as soon as April 2022.

Yet another Ted Lasso opinion piece, but it's one I like.

October 16 and 23: Quaker Religious Education Collaborative online workshop, Creativity and Design for Teen Sunday School Resources.

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A delightful glimpse of the Tedeschi Trucks Band rehearsing: