Monthly Archives: August 2015

Don’t waste my time

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“You’re too damn patient with people, too stupid loyal,” a friend of mine told me, though he used a word different than damn.  He continued: “Former friends, an ex or two , and family members who haven’t acted like family members in God knows how long, and you, Mister Loyal, keep the door open to them! And even worse –  I mean I love you, brother and I’m not saying this to hurt you but to wake you the hell up –  but even worse, you even reach out to some of these folks from time to time and let’m know you care about them and what do you get back? Squat! Stop wasting your time!”

My friend was right – is right still. Recently I’ve been thinking about his heart-filled diatribe, I guess you’d call it. The words, Stop wasting your time, seem to strike a deeper chord. Maybe they always ran that deep did and I’m just now getting it. Wouldn’t be the first time I was slow on this kind of uptake. This kind of uptake being, in part, that who you believe someone is may be entirely wrong. That we sometimes really believe someone to be someone they never were, and never will be. Or, we were right to believe someone’s initial presentation of self,  but the real intimacy that comes with loving bonds in life were too much for them, so they engaged in the age-old art of sabotage. In many if not most cases, the reason they never will be or can’t get back to being themselves is because they are so twisted up in their own unhealthiness, often caused by their history-wounds, they are unable to break free and get the help they deserve.

Some people can’t face the journey that comes with getting free of your history, which is tragic because the freedom to be who you are is a truly wonderful place to be.

Don’t waste my time

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“You’re too damn patient with people, too stupid loyal,” a friend of mine told me, though he used a word different than damn.  He continued: “Former friends, an ex or two , and family members who haven’t acted like family members in God knows how long, and you, Mister Loyal, keep the door open to them! And even worse –  I mean I love you, brother and I’m not saying this to hurt you but to wake you the hell up –  but even worse, you even reach out to some of these folks from time to time and let’m know you care about them and what do you get back? Squat! Stop wasting your time!”

My friend was right – is right still. Recently I’ve been thinking about his heart-filled diatribe, I guess you’d call it. The words, Stop wasting your time, seem to strike a deeper chord. Maybe they always ran that deep did and I’m just now getting it. Wouldn’t be the first time I was slow on this kind of uptake. This kind of uptake being, in part, that who you believe someone is may be entirely wrong. That we sometimes really believe someone to be someone they never were, and never will be. Or, we were right to believe someone’s initial presentation of self,  but the real intimacy that comes with loving bonds in life were too much for them, so they engaged in the age-old art of sabotage. In many if not most cases, the reason they never will be or can’t get back to being themselves is because they are so twisted up in their own unhealthiness, often caused by their history-wounds, they are unable to break free and get the help they deserve.

Some people can’t face the journey that comes with getting free of your history, which is tragic because the freedom to be who you are is a truly wonderful place to be.

Remember to say I love you

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I woke up this morning to learn a friend of mine has suffered two strokes and is now, as I write these words, in a drug-induced coma.  Right-sizing experiences like these remind me – and I would hope and pray they would remind anyone – that holding off on letting people know you love them is a tectonic mistake in judgment.

Grudges over  past missteps and “bruises” – real or imagined – impede far too many people from letting people know they are loved.  When you let someone know  you love them,  you will not always hear or read the same in return. Please don’t let that stop you from telling them they are loved. Who knows what wounds live in the minds of others, and impede them from saying I love you too? And then again, maybe they don’t. And that’s okay too.

Life happens to us whether we like it or not. We have say in how we respond to it.

Pray for my friend, please. He’s a truly good man. First thing I’m going to tell him when I see him is, “I love you, brother.”

Where are you?!

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Where are you?

On this, the twenty-third anniversary of the day you committed suicide, I ask, where are you?

You are missed by many (me!) beyond words, beyond the reach of creativity, beyond the reach of thought and emotion. It is your being, you, that we miss. You were and are loved, more than you knew, because, as you said, you did not believe anyone loved you. You were as mistaken and as flatly wrong in that believe as those who believed, with every honorable fiber of their being, that the world was flat.

I have slept a great deal today. When awake I find myself remembering the day you left this world, and I am immobilized. I remember being on the phone with someone and hearing my poor sister – your daughter! – in the background, wailing in agony. My little sister shattered. I could not rescue her.  And, God forgive me, I could not rescue you.

In our hours and hours of magical conversation those last ten years I told you once that the day you died would be one of the biggest blows of my life. You were utterly baffled. “Why?” you asked.  And in that moment I knew that you really didn’t understand, believe, how much I loved you and how much my sister and her children and my daughter loved you. How much your brother’s wife and children loved you. How much so many people loved you. Love for you was a foreign language you’d never learned. It was, I believe, your undoing.

Your son and daughter are doing better than anyone expected. You would be deeply proud of your daughter. I am. And we both know you loved us. And while I can’t speak for my sister, I think it safe to say we both wished you’d been able to not just believe, but fully know, that no son and daughter ever loved their mother more than we loved you – and still love you.

I miss you, Mommy.

Where are you?