Beading In Progress

So, I'm making headway on my little project here. I've decided it's going to be a bag I'm giving to a loved one. Since they don't know about it, I'll keep that part to myself for the moment. The front rosette is pretty much done, unless I decide to add a trim/border. And the back is the person's Cherokee name, and I'm just starting to add decorative beaded triangles as a surrounding border to the name. So far, I'm pretty happy with it, although it's hard to look and see the mistakes. Beadwork is something that once you get much past the beads you're actually laying down, it's hard to go back and correct mistakes without ripping out your work. So, it's all a learning curve, but I'm having fun with it. I'll post the finished bag when I get it finished.

Precious Things

  After writing about remembering my grandma the other day, I looked back at what I'd written in my journal during the process of her funeral. I don't normally blog very often about the intimate parts of my life. But, I think all too often we can get caught up in what we do, and not focus enough on who we are. And I am most definitely a real person, with a real life, and real intense, sometimes messy, emotions. This blog is so much about creativity and art, but we are complicated people, and cannot be summed up by any one thing. Our lives are multi-faceted, and in that, all of it comes out in our creative expression. So I thought, in my ongoing pursuit of transparency, I would share a peek inside my personal journal.


October 9, 2007
  I sit here now, three days after my Grandma's funeral, and I find that I'm unable to think about much else. Who she was, the impact she had, her strange (and some would argue crazy) habits, and every little thing that made her who she was. It's amazing how you can go an entire lifetime loving and knowing someone, yet still only seeing them from your own perspective. To me, she was just "Grandma." But at the funeral I saw her like never before. I saw her as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a friend, a daughter, a neighbor, and the list goes on and on. But I think the one title that matters the most, above all others, is she was a Believer. She knew the Lord, and taught her children, who taught their children to know and love Him too.

   As we were at her and my Papa's house we did the same things any family has to do when they loose a loved one. We went through her things, looked for her valueables, sorted official papers, divided a few assets to family she's left specific things for, etc. But my Grandma, being the unique woman she was, made sure our duties in her passing were as interesting as possible. Where as most people have to look through someone's possesions, Grandma still "possesed" everything she'd ever owned since 1953, leaving us a lifetime of dusty newspapers and magazine articles and such to sort through. A normal observer would say, "well just throw them all out." And they'd be right, if we were dealing with anyone other than my Grandma. When most people want to put their money somewhere safe, they consider things like, oh say, banks. But not this one. Nope. She found her financial safety in other places. Deep in piles of obituaries, greeting cards well over 20 years old, the oven, wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer, in between pages in books, coat pockets, and the list goes on and on. You see, most people would leave a bank account. Grandma left us a treasure hunt. And in her planning, our little treasure hunt had a map listing all the valueables and places she'd hidden things. But apparently in all her hiding, the map made it's way to a "safe place" unknown by the rest of us, leaving us searching blindly. Needless to say, Grandma made sure that all of her collected belongings wouldn't be thrown into a mass grave without a thought from the rest of us. Every page of every paper and magazine, every one of the hundreds of greeting cards and envelopes, every box, every pair of pants and coats and pocket books..... everything has to be gone through piece by piece. The unexpected joy in her legacy of surprises is that we've gotten a chance to peer into her life, through a completely different perspective. Hers. We found the list of people she was sending Get Well Soon cards to the week that she passed. We found her devotionals she did every single day of her life. We found her list of people she was praying for, and we were on it. We didn't just find cash and checks and travelers checks from 1982. We found her heart. What once looked like a pile of dusty papers turned out to be a stack of lovingly cutout obituaries of loved friends and neighbors who had passed on. What looked like a drawer full of random jewelry turned out to be pieces of treasure in things like her grandmother's ring, with all of her grandchildren's birthstones in it. She wore it because she loved and remembered us all the time. And what seemed to be needless boxes of collected things like pens, ended up being a collection of pens to send to a ministry for the elderly. She, elderly herself, was doing what she did best for them. She collected, and gave.

   Grandma was a keeper. No, she was a finder and a keeper. She found and kept most everything, much to our amusement. But now that she can't keep her things, it leaves me and my family with many questions. The hardest one being "what do we do now?" The intial answer to that question was an easy one. You see, Grandma's house has always been a sacred sanctuary for all things porceline and breakable. Because of this fact there has always been a list of unwritten commandments over the front door, that one dare not disobey. When you walk into her house, the very first thing you do is take your shoes off at the door. Food and drink are consumed, while seated, at the dining room table only. No exceptions. If you happen to find yourself in the living room (aka Precious Moments Land), you'd better have a really good reason for doing so. Do not use the upstairs bathroom for bathing as you might dirty the tub. Don't touch the walls with your dirty hands. And don't wash your dirty hands with the good soap. You might dirty it. To the common outsider this list may sound harsh and uptight and ridiculous. And they might be right. But this was just part of the charm of going to Grandma's house. All the rules were different in her world, and we obeyed them with fear and trepedation (at least we wanted her to think so). In reality, Grandma was far more relaxed and laid back than she would want anyone to know. And when we picked on her for her "exentricities" she loved it. She knew she was loved if we were giving her a hard time. So as to the question of "what do we do now." We did the only thing we could. We sat in her sacred living room surrounded by Precious Moments, eating pizza & drinking soda with our shoes on. Laughing and loving every minute of it, while mourning the fact that we were able to now. Yes, now we can touch the walls, but we don't have Grandma there to tell us not to. We can wash our hands with whatever soap we like, but it's not nearly as much fun as knowing she'd wash the "good soap" right behind us. And no matter how many pizzas we eat in her living room, it's still her living room. Full of hundreds of her much loved, and deeply cherished Precious Moments, referred to by all of our family as "Grandma's Precious Things" with more than a little bit of sarcasm.

   So now her precious things are our precious things. And all the jokes we've made about them and threats of dropping boxes of them, have mysteriously disappeared. Now that little porceline figurine of a young american indian girl doesn't seem so silly. I see her thinking of me. I see her wanting something that reminded her of me. The police officer with the doe eyes as she prayed for my dad all those nights of his carrer as a cop. Every single one of them is for, or about, someone that she loved. She didn't see porceline. She saw us. And now, more than ever, I want to see her. And as I looked around that room full of my family, I realized that what she left behind were not her figurines, porcline egg collection, or tea cups and saucers. What she left was a legacy of loveing each of us, no matter what. She was proud of every thing we ever did. She was our biggest fan, sometimes cheering all by herself. While Grandma had some crazy habits, the craziest of all was perhaps her tunnel vision view of how wonderful we all are. Her handmade sweatshirt declaring her to be "World's Proudest Grandma" bragged of a title that no one could dare take from her. And even now, though she's not here with us any longer, I know she still loves us, and is still proud of us. She's always loved us no matter what. So I know now, that that won't ever change. And even though we did defile the sacred living room with our pizza and shoes on, I know she's secretly laughing at us, like she always did. So I'm going to keep on laughing at and with her, like I always have. And in our laughter, she doesn't seem quite so far away. And the saddness isn't quite as empty as it seems. The place she's left in her passing is impossible to fill, but we will do our best. Fill it with stories and memories and jokes and hope of seeing her again. And when the day comes that I am able to see her again, I will run up to her heavenly mansion and throw my arms around her neck and laugh like we never have. After taking my shoes off of course.

Remembrance

  I think most of us have, at times, felt like our life was just zooming along and we do everything we can just to keep up with it. But there are those times and occassions that everything else has to hault for. Rememberance has always been important to me, and today is one of those days. Today is the three year anniversary of my grandmother's unexpected death. In the past few years my family has had to pick up the pieces of our broken heart and carry on together. Still, sometimes, it doesn't feel like she's gone, and I even forget in moments of excitement when my instinct is to call her. I learned several years ago a couple of very important lessons about grief that have helped me so much in this loss.


Here is what I know about grief:
1- It is patient. Grief will wait you out, indefinitely. Sometimes the intensity of sorrow can be terrifying and we try to run from it, distracting ourselves with other things, anything, just to keep breathing and trying to pretend that our lives haven't just changed forever. But grief will sit quietly and wait for you to be still, and then you will find yourself alone with it, no matter how long it takes. So it's better just to face it head on and let it do it's job.


2- Grief is a good thing. It seems backwards because it is so painful, but grief is not our enemy. We grieve because we love. And alot of the time we grieve hard because we love hard. When we loose someone, our love for them doesn't go away, of course. The grief we find ourselves in becomes a part of our love for them. When it's hard to remember, because we have that hole where they used to be, our instinct again is often to distract ourselves. But if we let grief manifest, we have a precious opportunity to feel the intensity of love and relationship that we were blessed enough to be a part of. We don't completely loose someone ever, when there is love between us. So, in grief, we keep them with us. And eventually we find a new "normal" where we start living again and we can remember without all the pain. And in making grief our friend, we bring them close to us again.


3- Grief is as unpredictable as the ocean waves. Just when you think you know what to expect, it surprises you. As we learn to move through it, it can sneak up on you at the most unexpected moments. There have been times when a random thought or smell or memory comes to me, reminding me of the one's I've lost, and suddenly I find myself in the full throws of grief as fresh as the day I lost them. It literally takes my breath from me, leaving me gasping, stunned by the unexpected attack. But, again, we need to not run from it. These waves of grief aren't permanent, and the intensity doesn't last.




   Learning about grief, I confess, is not my favorite lesson in life. It's horrible, and painful, and ugly, and messy. It's life at it's absolute lowest and it can change us forever. But it is life, and it does go on. And so we can embrace it, and set aside times of rememberance. I love my Grandma and I miss her terribly. I missed her when I went to call to tell her I was in love. And then again to tell her I was getting married. She would have loved that. And I missed her comfort when my engagement ended and we canceled our wedding. I could really have used her advice and mostly just her love. But I can feel her joy in my heart because I know her, and I can almost hear her voice. I would give anything to be able to share with her, and I miss her smile. But, in joy and in grief, I carry her with me. And I will carry her with me wherever life leads me.