This month’s newsletter is called “Strange Praise” and we’ll get there in a minute. But here’s the part of the story when I quietly let you know, dear reader, that my book will be published on Tuesday, April 15th.
The title: Monochromatic Heart: on grief, love, and still being here
This book has come at a cost I still would not pay, had I the choice. I would have all four of my kids here, growing up. If I could trade my daughters’ brother, Luca, for this book, I would. But, as Nessa Rapaport writes in her poem, Suffering:
If we could choose our lot, who would not say: Woman, when you see suffering, run, flee from it. But we cannot choose.
That is the tension of life, huh? Often we cannot choose. And we can never choose what has happened, past tense.
Recently, I was giving a message at church, really pouring my heart out. I decided to drive home a ridiculous point by rapping it. I had a friend come up and beat box and everything. It was risky, imperfect, and also funny. People laughed. Directly afterward, while still in what Brené Brown refers to as a “vulnerability hangover,” a friend said, “Sorry if you saw me cringing during that.”
“I wasn’t actually looking at you,” I replied (never would’ve known, hon!).
“Yeah,” he said, “What you did was so embarrassing.”
But see, it was already in the past—I couldn’t change it. That whole exchange really wasn’t about me—not about serving me, at least—it was about him feeling bad and needing me to know. But I couldn’t go back and not rap, and spare him his discomfort. All I could do was decide what to do now (which is the choice all of us ever have, really).
After Luca died, I had to decide what to do now. And, in part, this book is that. When my grief was fresh (imagine the first fall of snow. But you’d never experienced winter, never heard about spring, didn’t know that something that falls so relentlessly—so thick—has the capacity to also melt, to change forms), I needed a book that didn’t try to sugarcoat how grief mercilessly cuts into you, but also doesn’t paint you with the message that you’ll never be okay (which is what a lot of people told me, in a lot of different ways). I hope this book feels like what I needed.
This book is also a way to mother Luca. I don’t get to fold his clothes (okay, who am I kidding, I barely fold anyone’s clothes). When it comes to Luca, I don’t get to do the thousand normal tasks that motherhood demands. Motherhood is general, I suppose—a large umbrella that many women fall into. But at its heart, it’s dangerously personal. We are never just mothers. If one is a mother, she is a mother of someone. This book is about that someone and my relationship to him, even in his absence. I get to write it down. I get to write about how you can love a person who has died. I now know that how the world forces us to use past tense when describing our love for someone beyond the veil is wrong. But I didn’t know this until I birthed Luca, birthed grief, birthed a mother whose baby was buried rather than came home. And I didn’t know that I could still feel all this—and also, somehow be okay. Live wholeheartedly. Not be afraid. Taste gratitude on my tongue; find the fire in the sky kindled by a setting sun at golden hour no longer a haunting beauty because Luca can’t see it, but assurance that beauty is still mine to behold. That Luca is also part of the beauty.
Honestly, I could go on, but this was supposed to be an introduction telling you that in a few weeks I will officially be a published author and you can officially read my book.
Recently, I was at a bagel shop with two of my daughters. I looked up and, to my surprise, saw a familiar face—albeit someone I hadn’t thought about in years—placing an order at the counter. He wouldn’t know me, but I instantly recognized him. Over fifteen years ago, I walked into his office. A young, heartbroken woman, who, despite no longer caring about much of anything since my husband left, still needed my taxes done. (The IRS stops for no one. Cue the cliche about death and taxes.)
He told me his name was Robert, told me to sit down. “I’m going through a divorce,” I told him quietly. “I’m not sure I have everything I need,” I said, the sound of both an apology and uncertainty in my voice.
With compassion, he smiled.
He told me we’ll sort it all out together.
Together.
Like I wasn’t horribly alone right now.
Like I had all the help I needed, it just looked different now.
“Just put everything you have right here on my desk,” he said gently, clearing a spot for my pile of papers.
As he read through the stack I gave him, intermittently asking me questions, he took breaks to make eye contact. He made me feel like life wasn’t as overwhelming as I feared. He told me exactly what I still needed and acted like it was the most normal thing in the world to walk into his office missing a few important tax documents. To be fighting back tears. To be skinny enough and suddenly-husband-less-enough to make people wonder things about a person they don’t say out loud.
“It will be okay,” Robert told me and I had the feeling that we weren’t strictly talking about my incomplete tax forms anymore.
“Dear Robert,” I wrote to him in a letter I dropped off this morning, “You were right.”
It became okay. I got strong again. I’m no longer deeply hurting. Nobody thinks I’m too skinny. My husband loves me well; he takes care of our taxes and is so good with deadlines. He never makes me worry. Isn’t that amazing? I know you never knew him, but my first husband made me worry a lot. Now that I don’t, the contrast is startling. People say things like, “the difference is day and night,” which is so cliché—but sometimes that phrase really lands the meaning of how different life was and now is. Day and night. Light and darkness.
But like Nessa Rapaport writes in her profound poem, Suffering—
“All happiness is dappled, and even bleakest tragedy has moments of strange praise.” (A Woman’s Book of Grieving, Nessa Rapaport)—
Maybe it’s not as black and white as day and night. Or maybe it is exactly that. Maybe it was a kind of nighttime that, with time, and as my eyes adjusted to the new darkness, I saw a few stars. Some pale light that I couldn’t deny. Light is light is light, right? Even Eddie Jaku, Auschwitz surviver, writes about this in his memoir, The Happiest Man On Earth (that title. Paired with that history. It makes a person wonder about the absolute steely power of a person’s will, perspective, the choice to love, to live, to go on and really live, despite the evil you’ve witnessed and endured). Eddie describes the few kindnesses done to him in the cruelest of circumstances; how those small kindnesses kept him hoping. And hope kept him alive.
I don’t mean to compare myself to a holocaust survivor. I was simply suffering heartbreak at the hands of a long list of men who could not or would not love their woman well (I have long since given up figuring out which it was. Thankfully, it’s no longer a mystery that is mine to solve. I am at peace with not knowing, with regulating it to a story, that every once in a while, I discuss with friends. A story that I am at peace with calling my own, now that it no longer eclipses the sun).
I was simply suffering.
And an accountant was a soft place to land. It was, in the words of Nessa Rapaport, “a moment of strange praise.”
And seeing him in the bagel shop made me draw my breath in sharply. Mostly at the contrast between the last time I saw him and now. I held my girls close. My life is so full. The word together is everywhere. Together with my husband, TJ. Together with our girls. Together with my family, my friends, my church, my community. Together even with my dogs (every morning, walking outside, watching the world wake up, awakening the dawn with our praise, as the Psalmist says).
May you find moments of strange praise over and over again. May they convince you that the burden of hope is worth carrying. And may you be astounded by the grace of God in spaces as dull and ordinary as accounting offices. And may your accountant take pity on you and give you a discount, just like mine did (amen).
This month I’m sharing a preview of what my newsletters look like with my audio narrations. When you upgrade your subscription for $5/month, you’ll get an additional essay each month (with narrations that I’ve been told feel like very very miniature audio books). This month, I also included a song I wrote and performed last month at a beautiful event called The Wren—a collective space for creatives to come together. At this particular gathering, I was the featured musical artist. And I was lucky enough to convince a band to play with me. You can upgrade your subscription here any time! Thank you for reading.
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