I am sitting in the waiting room of the Cardiovascular Lab while the spouse has a heart cath. I got to go in and see him long enough to make the sign of the cross on his forehead and kiss him. My legs almost buckled under me, standing by his gurney. More than likely this not a big deal at all. Just an extra precaution after unclear results related to the preop testing from last month. I know how to be strong. I know my privilege. Our house here is under such a great contract, with. Really great backup contract just in case. Early, early today, before heading this way, Sherod and I signed an interminable document because it’s closing day for the house in Alabama.

I know how to be strong, and I know my blessings. And my daughter is incredibly frail right now, my husband is in the hands of doctors doing an invasive procedure on his heart, tomorrow is the third anniversary of my mother’s death and on Sunday I have to say good bye to my beloved community. So though my legs did not buckle and in a bit I will go back to being strong, right this minute, right now I am falling apart.

update
Sherod got a stent and will spend the night I. The hospital. He is resting comfortably and I’m still flying. Sort of.

Our girl is holding steady but not at a great place.  That means we haven’t gotten to see her or talk to her since early last week.  That never gets easier.  We have, though, finalized plans for her to move to Tallahassee. In the end, her team and we agreed that it was simply too important for her mom and dad to still get to see her regularly and provide the kind of oversight of her care that she needs. On June 16th, she will be driven up there with her behavior specialist and two more folks to keep everyone in the BARC van safe.  I had so looked forward to a driving adventure with her but this is what will work.

After having the house on the market for only 5 days, and with two really good offers to choose from, we went to contract last week.  We even have a backup contract in place.  Inspections happen tomorrow and if all goes well, we close on June 19th.  We don’t have any reason to believe that won’t happen so the movers are scheduled to pack on Monday, June 16th and load up our household goods and pull out of here on the 17th.  After closing in the morning of the 19th, we’ll drive to Tallahassee.  We hope and pray we will be able to see Maria and also understand that may not be a good idea.  We’ll be up in Lowndesboro on the 20th and the, the moving van will arrive and that part of the move will be complete.  Sherod returns to Ft Lauderdale in the next couple of days after that and I will stay in Lowndesboro.  There is a whole lot of painting in my future.  The master bedroom is painted a Barney purple, just to give you an idea.  That won’t do…

And right now, what is front and center in my life, is the reality that I am facing into the last Sunday at St Ambrose.  We have baptisms scheduled and I love Pentecost Sunday.  But after the eucharist, we will have the Liturgy for the Leave-Taking of a Pastoral Relationship and then, just like that, I will cease to be a parish priest.  I can’t look at that too long or too deep.  I am trying to live in the gratitude for what I have been so blessed to be a part of.  And I am getting through each day taking care of what I have right in front of me.  Because looking out from the roller coaster car, it looks like a free-fall up ahead and there’s nothing gained dwelling on that or anticipating what it will be like.

After almost two weeks, we were able to see Maria today.  She was eating dinner when we arrived, in clothes I struggle to accept because they look so institutional and I still resist that notion at a visceral level.  In fact, the downward spiral this time began when I got her some pretty clothes for her birthday and insisted I get to put her name in them all so they would not make it into some sort of communal pile but would be hers.  Hers.

Our girl was wearing the more drab, more nondescript–and far more practical–clothes that work for her.  That included a purple hoodie jacket, even though it has been hot as all get out these days.  But as soon as she saw me, she took her hoodie off.  Her arms were so terribly damaged, large gaping sores all over her forearms–not just surface scratches but gouges, raw and angry looking, and so, so many of them.  I wanted to kiss each one, maybe from some deeply held shred of magical thinking that believes that a kiss of love can make it all better.  Her forehead was also bruised and lumpy where she hit herself against the wall.  And her eyes–those big, beautiful, eyes dulled and dimmed by medication I’m thankful for because it has kept her safer from herself, at least for today.

Our visit was shy, a bit awkward, so achingly sweet.  Little hugs.  She wanted to bump foreheads with me, ever so gently, slowly, carefully.  She wanted me to sit and watch her finish her dinner at the end of the visit.  She showed me the fancy fake tattoo she earned for not hurting herself.  I could tell how pleased she was when I noticed she’d put on some eye makeup. After a short visit with her dad, she and I walked back towards A House and I croaked more than sang the little lullaby I composed for her in 2001:  Maria bonita, vestida de luz, tu eres mi hija, mi estrellita, mi amor–My pretty Maria bedecked in light, you are my daughter, my twinkling star, my love; she hummed along with me and held my hand, but loosely.

There’s a street in Boca that has always made us laugh, it is the one we turn on when we are headed to buy her new shoes for those little feet that are uneven by two shoe sizes–Butt Road.  We were up there not too long ago on a shoe run. The new shoes we enjoyed buying on what we figured was our last Nordstrom outing few weeks ago are stained now with blood.  Her blood.

It is one of my life-long responsibilities to grow beyond magical thinking and denial.  It comes by the hardest.  Today, to see her was one of the few acts of faith I could offer my daughter, offer a loving God who I believe does not will such pain. I had to refuse to flinch and look away from all that hurt.  I could love and be present even to all that wounded-ness.  So I did kiss those arms, and touch the bruises; I held my little one as close as I could for as long as I could.  The rest of my work is to see and not be overwhelmed, to hold but not cling, especially not to the sadness and the whys that crowd into my throat.

Before I let go for the night, I pause and think of Mary on that Friday. Of David at the news of Absalom.  Oh my daughter, Maria, my daughter, my daughter.  Would that I could carry your burdens and monsters, if only for a day.

When I lived in Nashville and Sherod and I were dating, we liked to go to the Bluebird Cafe, especially when Schuyler, Knobloch and Birckhardt, a Country music trio performed there.  One of their better known songs was “This Old House”–sentimental, for sure, which was always surprising because they were also very edgy performers and their banter during their sets was always cynical and sarcastic.  The raucous crowd always went quiet when they played the opening chords.

I can’t get it out of my mind. Our house went on the market on Friday and today we  received a clean and very serious offer.  The last time we put a house on the market here in South Florida 14 years ago, we ended up having two contracts fall through before we finally closed so there’s a long way from a serious offer to closing.  Nonetheless. Nonetheless, there’s a big lump in my throat as yet another piece starts moving into place for our move to Alabama.

Although usually, our real estate agent would have a photographer come and take the shots of the house to go on the MLS webpage, because of Sherod’s surgery and my travel schedule in the past two weeks, we delayed that step and I took some pictures of my own that she used until the photographer could come in later this week.

I have loved this house.  I will miss it…

A sign of the times.  Another one:  our girl is struggling so much that for the first time in 8 years, we are looking at a change in meds to try to help her.  We have had to stop and ask, again, if we should reconsider the decision to move her to Tallahassee.  We are trying to get some more information together.  Maria’s behavior is very much like what we saw in the days leading up to her move to BARC.  Without a way to conceptualize, to distance herself from or examine all the emotions that this move must represent for her, there is little left for her to do but act out.  Her care team and we are worried.

Sherod and I are also painfully aware that this woman-child of ours has been snatched out of one place and put in the next so many times now, had to start over.  When we moved her from the hospice where she was living when she found us and we found her, she was 3 years old and stopped talking for days and days.  I had a trip scheduled for soon after that.  Fortunately, I had taken a whole bunch of pictures from Casa de la Sal, the hospice, and made a little laminated book for her.  The sheer and absolute joy in that little girl’s face when I went to the orphanage where we had to place her while her adoption was completed.  She kept taking the picture book up to her face over and over again, naming everyone she recognized, giving them little kisses.

There are a long list of reasons for our move and an equally long list why we have considered that having her closer to us was the wise and best decision.  But as it always is with our children, I believe:  loving this young woman like I do means being willing to make the very best decision possible for her no matter what the cost or sadness for us.  I don’t want to be 14 hours away from her but if that is what it takes for her to keep making progress, that is what we will do.

Tomorrow in the Revised Common Lectionary, we start moving into what someone else has described as that ‘exquisite ambiguity’ that comes as the Eastertide ebbs into the growing season after Pentecost. In John, as Jesus prepares his disciples for loss, he keeps promising that he will send an Advocate who will abide with them.  I love that the Greek word for Advocate has more than one meaning.  Yes, it has the meaning of legal counsel.  And it also denotes one who walks alongside another.  No matter how close or how far away she is from me or I from her, as long as there is breath in my body, I will be walking alongside my daughter.  Praying for gentler days, asking for mercy and goodness and blessings upon our Luz, our little light…

Quite brilliant, quite beautiful and so apropos…

I tried to figure out how to start a new blog and keep my current address. It was all too complicated so this will have to do.  And that is sort-of right.  After all, I don’t get a new life.  I don’t get to wipe the slate completely clean. Even though already, something fundamental has changed.

What’s the same is obvious–it is still me, I haven’t even gotten to Alabama, though I am now less than a month away from leaving.  The stories aren’t that different, at least not yet.  But a couple of days ago, I knew with great certainty that it was time to start writing again from a new place and perspective.

So what is this new blog and new place?  I have been met with varying degrees of astonishment, incredulity, some out-and-out disdain and untempered disapproval and disappointment, when I have told people I am moving to Alabama.  Many have a hard time pronouncing Lowndesboro, and a surprising number have flat out told me they will never come see me in Alabama.  That’s caught me by surprise and I’ve been thinking about that.  Why Alabama, even if Sherod is from there and that is where we were married?

I don’t know how to explain how much I look forward to getting there.  The most I can say right now is that at night, I will be so far out in the country that I will be able to see the stars, really see the stars. I will have the velvety silence of the country.  I find myself staring at the pictures of our new house.  The interior is actually quite a mess–we will have major renovation work to do starting with the fact that the master bedroom is painted a Barney purple.  My work will be far more modest than it has been for 30 years and after the events of the past few weeks in my life, this is an acknowledgment of my limits.

There is something else as well.  A couple of weeks ago, my ECF colleague Ron, and I, went on a listening tour, making several stop in New England.  Our trip included a visit with a member of the leadership of EDS, the Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, MA.  Somehow, in the course of the discussion, I mentioned our move to Lowndesboro, and how Sherod and I would be living 10 minutes away from Hayneville, the place where Jonathan Daniels, an EDS seminarian, was killed, during the Civil Rights era.  Turns out that every August, EDS sponsors an annual pilgrimage to the site of the memorial that marks the place where he was killed.

I was simply thrilled to be able to extend an invitation to Diane that included telling her that I could probably receive about 15 people in the house and if there were others who brought tents, they could camp on our property.  The profound affection I have for Alabama does not erase what I know about the ways in which some of the worst of our humanity has expressed itself in that place.  As much as I love academics, the rigor and discipline of higher education, even the most highly educated and social-justice attuned people who have never been there just don’t know Alabama.  I dream that my home will be a place where it is safe to dwell in the both/and of these times.

It’s also like this for me these days:  I loved the notion of vectors and vector analysis at some point during my schooling at Colegio Bolivar and I got to think about that recently. I loved the elegance of how an arrow and a few numbers described an “entity endowed with magnitude and direction”.  I am keenly aware of a multitude of vectors with strange intersections that result in strange angles, sometimes horrible collisions, and some incredible displacements, and disruptions that crisscross the church I love and despair over these days.

There are also vectors of enormous magnitude the life in of these United States, that are going in directions I don’t understand and leave me unsettled as they intersect with my faith, itself motion and magnitude and direction as well.  That little place, those four acres out in Lowndesboro that hardly deserve to call themselves a farm–just 10 minutes from a place where forces crashed into each other with horrible cost–represents a still point, a point not so much of escape as of definition, a place to try to know and understand.

I am finishing this blog as I fly towards New York for work again, already not where I am as I write this.  And here is my same old blog that is no longer, that is now new.

There have been some times since I started this blog in 2011, when writing a post has made the difference between utter despair and life for me.  There have been other times when it was just plain fun.  I have treasured the sense of connection and community that blogging made possible with folks literally around the world.  WordPress provides neat statistical information about a blog so as I write this last blog, I know that there were over 18,500 views of my blog during its ‘lifetime’, that people from 101 countries stopped in to ‘visit’ and I posted 354 times including this one.

Now, my life is heading in a very different direction and it is time to stop.  After I settle in Alabama, I have some other writing projects I am looking forward to immensely.  It may be that there will be another time when the call of blogging tugs again.  In the by and by, may all grace, goodness and mercy be with you and yours.  Thank you.

I have finished preparing the last Easter sermon I will preach at St Ambrose.  It surprised me. This was a week of self-protective detachment for me.  I’ve been systematically working on a to-do list that cycles through tasks for my leave-taking from this ministry, preparations to get our house listed in mid-May, gathering all the documentation for the purchase of the Finquita, and a major project for my ECF job.  Today, I went into a corner of some of the cabinetry in the garage that I’ve ignored probably for 8 or 9 years and had one heck of a cleaning job to do.  One of the rats that we eventually got rid of obviously made a nest there many years ago.  It was not fun cleaning that corner, though strangely reassuring.

This evening, my girl came to me and for the first time wanted to know about her biological father.  We know nothing about him and I tried to explain that to her in the simplest clearest terms I could find.  When it became clear I had no answers, she came over, sat on my lap, put her head on my shoulder and wept.

Somehow, the determination to clean out that corner of my garage, the weight and sorrow of my daughter on my lap, these were Holy Week brought into a single day of intense breaking open.  And so my final sermon on resurrection is printed.  The reality of what I am letting go of and trying to say yes to, all at once, undeniable.  The tomb is empty.

Our friends are headed back out on a cruise and the call and response of shared commitment to our canine friends has Duke staying with us for 10 days.  Just last week, when we headed to Alabama, Boo stayed at Duke’s and our first night gone, we received a text that Boo had arrived at her host’s house with intestinal worms, visible intestinal worms.  Dogs and kids–you’d better have a significant capacity for living with mortification if you are going to tend to them in community.

We had geared ourselves up for a long night when we brought him home yesterday evening.  Last time he came, he paced and wailed all through the first night, made us crazy.  This year we knew what to expect–we thought.  No, there was no pacing and when Sherod and I crawled in bed, Daisy took to her robin’s egg blue, Martha Stewart bedding, Boo to her new, much deeper dog bed that is more comfortable for our girl who is getting old and arthritic.  Duke got on his own bed right next to hers–all five of us in the bedroom, Sherod and I giggling at our menagerie.

We turned the lights out, and still: all was quiet and peaceful.  Then, five minutes later–a most ominous sound.  The sound of liquid hitting floor.  A lot of it. Quite gushing, pardon the detail.  The Mallowman, who has been moving slowly for a long while now, was out of bed like greased lightning.  Lights went on. Investigation ensued. It could have been far worse.  Actually, Duke was quite civilized.  He chose to take a leak in our bathroom, on the tile floor which mercifully, is easy to clean up.  Some mild cursing and fussing later, lights back out, everyone back in bed and good night.

This morning Duke and I went out for our morning game of catch.  Daisy and Boo have their times of fun  but nothing quite like the pure, joyful playfulness I get caught up in, at 5 in the morning, throwing the ball with the Dukester, who is still all gangly, all dopey and floppy eared—and remarkably graceful–silliness.  He’s been following me around everywhere this morning and now that most of my work is at home, I suspect he will be stuck on me like white on rice for the next ten days.  Boo and Daisy look at all this askance, but with some resignation, and stay out of his way.  Damn it Duke–I still like you…