tacos are for the living
on remembering the dead while continuing to live
This post is dedicated to the memory of Amelia Faye Faulkner, the most hopeful troublemaker of us all.
misstep
When I was seventeen, my twenty-two year old cousin died from a brain tumor. He had been diagnosed with leukemia when he was 11 and had battled it twice and gone into remission twice, but as he rounded out his time in college, he began getting headaches. In for a scan he went and the tumor was found.
I can’t fully remember the details from there. Maybe he had treatment, maybe he took a leave of absence from school. What I do remember was at a certain point his doctor’s released him from care as the tumor had wrapped its way into the crevices of his brain. There was no radiating it and no chemo could touch it. It was just a waiting game.
Wes died before he could graduate and was given an honorary diploma from Texas A&M. His memorial packed out my aunt and uncle’s very large Presbyterian church. I saw his young, swollen body laid in a casket and found it bizarre that he didn’t try to sit up and crack a joke about how formal everyone was being. In my mind, it would have been the least uncomfortable thing about that horrible weekend.
Fourteen years later, I would be looking down at my mother in a similar casket, arms stretched out by her side in an unnatural position. I would back away and grab my friend’s arm, begging her to take me out of the room before my knees went out from under me. From there, we would drive to get tacos and grande margaritas and talk about how forlorn we felt as grown women who had lost their mother’s well before their time (my friend had lost her mother a few years prior to early onset Alzheimer’s).
You don’t really know the ache of grief until someone who formed parts of who you are as a person is gone. I often find it feels akin to that place between consciousness and restfulness, where your body thinks it’s missed a step and you are startled awake, thinking you are falling when you’ve been in bed all along. And what’s worse, that feeling never really goes away. You just get used to stumble tripping through life. It becomes your new gate, and you then must learn to become more wary of uneven sidewalks, but after a while, the grief dance becomes the only one you know. At least, for a while.
joy? i hardly know her
There was a while there after two of my loved ones died where it felt wrong to laugh. Like any joy was a slap to their memory. I should be draped in black, in the corner, sitting shiva, waiting for everyone to give me a look of condolence for the next year. But joy finds you, even when you are absolutely sure that it shouldn’t.
I have been older than my cousin was when he passed for nearly 20 years now and my hope is that one day, I will be older than my mother was when she died at 58. Passing the ages of the people who, in my mind’s eye, feel larger than life and timeless is wildly upsetting. Am I making decisions they would be proud of? Am I making good use of my time? Am I enjoying my friends and family enough? What is enough anyway?
It’s taken time to realize that both of these people would never want me to weigh and measure my life against the possible expectations they might have for me. I have not taken every risk or opportunity that has been handed to me and I have regrets, but I also know that they had them too. We all just live into the life we have until it’s gone and in my mind, the best way to honor their memory is to continue to do the same.
However, there are moments that I can feel both God’s favor and the smiling faces of my dear departed ones as I step into chosen joy. Because choosing joy is a learned skill.
So let me tell you the story of my 37th birthday party.
(mother of) dragons love tacos
In our last year in Portland, I had found pockets of friends. Church friends, work friends, neighborhood friends. Some of these women overlapped but most did not, staying in circles close to becoming a Venn diagram, but still not quite overlapping.
By my 37th birthday, I had lost my mother, gone through a pandemic, navigated the foster care system, become a mother myself and I was overly ready to let my hair down. I could not go quietly into 37. I wanted to rage. So, I made a plan and the worked on the guest list deciding that the women on this list had to meet four requirements:
1) they all had to be over the age of 30
2) they all had to be mothers
3) they all had to be a “good hang”
4) they all had to know at least one other woman who was not me on the list
I knew it was a long shot with schedules and families, but I sent out an invite thinking I might get a few in on the tom-foolery.
All but one came.
We gathered at a local Mexican haunt for tacos and margaritas (clearly this is my comfort food) and then went to a karaoke bar that had private rooms where we could continue to order drinks and sing our hearts out without being judged.
And sing we did.
A pregnant woman sang Britney, a preacher’s wife sang Dolly, one friend sang the longest Bob Marley song I’ve ever heard, and none of us could stop laughing. There was more mixing and mingling than you’d see at a college frat party, and by the end of the night everyone knew everyone else. They even started calling themselves “the dream team” and a dream team they were.
Other than curating the perfect grouping of females, I had also found the women who, while in different places in life, all needed a damn break. In our daily lives we slogged through hard things, but on this night, we were dancing queens, unbothered by the weights of the world, choosing joy.
It would have been easier to have gone to dinner with David and opened a couple of thoughtful gifts (which, spoiler alert, this also happened). It would have been easier still to let my birthday slide and go unnoticed but I knew that I couldn’t live another moment without a little sizzle. Because God loves a little sizzle and for once I wanted to find Him there rather than on my face in a heap of tears.
My mother and cousin would have been so proud of me and I knew it.
requiem for a butterfly
This past Saturday, one of those dancing queens from that past birthday party lost her youngest daughter to an aggressive brain tumor. We find ourselves doing the dance yet again. The falling, stumble tripping through life because as Anne wakes and finds a new day in a 40 year old body, her 11 year old daughter does not. Sweet Amelia turns back into the stardust from whence she came and somehow, Anne has to learn how to live without her.
I can’t speak on what it is to lose a child. I found out today that my child needs a minor outpatient surgery and my stomach dropped. While parents might be made to watch their children experience pain, but I don’t think they were designed to endure watching a child succumb to it. I recently spoke with Anne on the phone and somehow she was still fully herself—brimming with dark humor, hard facts, immeasurable sadness, and deep grief. None of it shocked me. She is a force of nature.
Before I knew Anne, I had the privilege to teach her eldest daughter Samantha who is one of the sparkliest souls to ever exist. In the past couple of years I have been upgraded from teacher to friend and am now blessed with sporadic phone calls and text messages from her. Late one evening this week, Samantha texted me and asked “What should you do if you’re looking for God’s presence but can’t find it?”
The heaviness in my chest was palpable. What if I said the wrong thing? She expected a reply, so I told her only what I had learned myself.
Lean into the silence. He is still there. He never left. Tell him how you are feeling and what you’re experiencing and know that He can handle it. He can handle your pain, your anger, your hate. But He has not left.
Our God contains multitudes. He is a God of great joy and His son was a man of sorrows, closely acquainted with grief. He is at the bedside of the dying, he is in the room at the karaoke bar. He is often quiet when we want Him to be loud and rarely does He come in burning bush form, but He does come. Because eventually, we brave saints learn that we haven’t actually had our knees cut out from under us. That we can walk. That the chasm we feel without our loves ones gives us room to allow others to grieve deeply. It becomes a canyon of love and wisdom, one that when you shout from one side, it echoes to the other with perfect clarity.
We were robbed of Wesley, and Teresa, and Amelia. But they now live in the midst of love and while we wait to see them again, we choose joy. Even if it hurts. Even if it takes years to feel it. Even when it feels like mockery. We can cry and we can dance. We choose it and we baffle Satan when we do. Because we’re nothing if not spiritual troublemakers.
Always,
Emily
P.S. Samantha, if you are reading this, I expect a report on where you went to get tacos and what tacos you got. Next time, I’m going with you.
God spoke through you. He truly is right here…