50th Confession

Well, here it is: the first milestone blogmark.  I had so much I wanted to write here: a piece about KBO, a bit about God and faith, a little maybe about the great mystery of synchronicity that I've noticed weaving about my life...

But I'm stuck. Again.

The words fail me. They don't come out. The thoughts and inspirations are there, and I don't believe in writer's block.

It's just that my words feel clumsy. Oafish. As though my thoughts are being interpreted into German, sent through Morse code to a Cocker Spaniel, and barked out to a chipmunk.

English is such a gracious, noble language. The way that a pun twists a word's dipthong until the listener feels the pain of a wedgie. The masterful laments of Prufrock and Josh Ritter. The power of the phrase "You Shall Not Pass," spoken in stentorian tones by an actor of the highest caliber.

But yet, it feels like this masterful tool, this glorious instrument on which I play, has become a tintinnabulation,  a cacophony of guttural lowing from a hungry herd of livestock complaining about their lot in life.

I've been reading more and more literature in the past few weeks. A lot more TS Eliot, listening to Josh Ritter a little more, crying inside a little more...I think it's a sign of another inward spiral.

Maybe the solution is in the problem: I've gotta rock myself a little bit harder. I've got to eat a peach. Let myself live a little. KBO.

I'm trying to live by a few principles: Love God. Obey the rules of the land. Honor my parents. Enjoy life.

In that order.

But some days, I'm just not...

I'm just not me anymore. I'm just a husk of Ryan's soul, biding my time, waiting to come to life again, like the storms down in Mexico. Spiritually, I'm just getting by, because I can't work in the confines of the box. My God is so much bigger than the box that many see Him as, and I don't want to be bound by the rules that others claim He wrote. The rules that leech life, stifle creativity, maintain the status quo - I can't see my God having anything to do with them, let alone writing them.

Is there not a prophet in Israel? Is there not a voice to cry out and change my future? Do they have to come from all over the place in order to revitalize a local body? If the body is going that way, won't there be someone local to be that way?

And after releasing all this, I hear a voice. It's only three words, spoken by my best friend. I can hear the warmth in his voice as he says it, although he's a thousand miles and five states away. But I can feel the power of them, resonating inside me, gripping the wildly vibrating tuning fork that has been my soul and giving it rest.

KBO, folks, because sooner or later, things will turn out right. Walk in tune with the beat that God hears, and soon you might see the dance steps you take, and learn to enjoy it as well.

Good night, folks.  Fifty-one will be better.

49th Confession

A long, long time ago, I promised to answer every comment that was listed on this blog, either in a post, or in the comments.  I didn't do that for the February blogs; I figured it needed to be done eventually, but I didn't have the strength.  Sitting up late when I should be abed, I suppose now is as good a time as any to address this.

In no particular order:

Emma - Not only do you win for the Most Dedicated Responder Award for your work on typing on a mobile, you also win the Most Likely to be Blog Stalked, when you write down your experiences. Let me know when this happens, and where.  While I do not envy anyone who shares our experiences, a burden shared is halved.  Some time, I'll have to blog about darling Livvy ("Mummy...Where's that MAN?")...Maybe I'll leave that one for you, though ;)  By the way? A doorway into the mind works both ways; ask Madame de Pompadour.

ConTom - Every post I write is theraputic in some way. Thank you for reading my soul.

grace/Grace - You were the first responder to this crisis, all these years ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for stopping in the bracing cold air, just for that moment. While I always do the best I know how, I never felt it was ever enough.

Interesting sidebar at this juncture: this evening, I dined with a father whose teenage son ascended about six weeks ago. Six weeks is about the time when the bottom drops out of everything: the prayer support seems to stop, you raise your head up out of your grieving pool for the first time to notice that the world has passed you by, and you get the paranoid sense that people are thinking to themselves, "It's been over a month; they should really move on by now." No one wants to say your child's name to you, lest they bring up something uncomfortable and not know how to respond; we wanted to talk of nothing else, lest she be forgotten.

So tonight, sitting across Chipotle meals, we talked about his son. No teenage boy does everything right, especially one in today's liberal society. But tonight, I saw the fruits of a great father finally be revealed: that when his son was no more, other parents talked about his excellent behavior. Good parenting, like wisdom, is revealed by her children - especially in the absence of the parent.

Na - Honesty you may have in abundance on this place. Happiness, like heated leather seats, will cost you extra ;)

Tina - I am deeply honored to be among the best fathers that you know. In this world, we receive an ungodly number of teachers but only a handful of fathers: to know a good father is rare enough, and to be called among the best is a title that I strive to achieve daily, now. Thank you for walking with us on this path, in such a time as this.

Fremere - We all walk the paths that we create from our choices; while I regret some choices from long ago, I appreciate your companionship on the road right now.

Happy - Aye. 'Tis. <3

Mercy for Today - Sometimes, I walk by that picture frame, and I stop and talk with her for a minute or two. Also for you, a fable: A gecko and an elephant were walking together along a path through a jungle in the cool of the day.  The gecko, being quite small but enjoying the conversation with his friend, asked to ride on the elephant's shoulder; the elephant, being a quite kindly animal, obliged. Soon, they reached a giant chasm. Across this chasm, an exceedingly clever man had fashioned a bridge from several hundred thousand vines; don't ask about where the vines are from or how he fashioned the bridge - it's immaterial, and quite rude to interrupt the story like that. Do it again, young man, and I'll turn this van right around and not give you any pudding.

Where was I?

Oh, yes: the bridge. Across the bridge the elephant walked, with the gecko clinging for dear life to his friend's shoulder. The winds howled around them, the bridge swayed precariously from side to side, and the river roared below them. Creaking, popping, and snapping sounds were also in the audio mix, mostly from under the elephant's feet. This is a nice fable, so they both made it across in relative safety. After reaching the other side, the gecko whispered into the elephant's ear, "We sure shook that bridge, didn't we?"

Jessa B - Our footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose-garden. My words echo/Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose/Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves/I do not know. Thank you for listening to my echo; enjoy TED =)

Heather H - When we all get there, I'll be glad to make Josh's acquaintance. Until then, may our memories keep them close to us, even as they enjoy their new home. 

Aiight - that's all for now.  Next post is number 50 - not sure what to do with THAT.  Suggestions?

48th Confession

Well, here we are in March now, and I'll get back to answering everyone who wrote in on the last few posts, probably on the next post. But that's too much heaviness, for right now. We'll just leave that for right now and talk about interpretations.

Hermaneutics is one of those things that either scares people off or makes them look at you funny if you say that you're interested in it.  I mean, it's not exactly rocket science, but if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

But that's the thing: everybody DOES do it. Everything that you can sense, feel, consider - all of it - are interpretations of the world around you. It's all signals, constantly being decoded by your brain as it tries to make sense of the world around you.

For example: how do you know when a person is upset? Their eyes narrow, their voice changes, their body tenses up....all these things are able to be interpreted in a matter of seconds to interpret a person's mood. How much more is there to interpret in the world?

Which leads into the big question: what is a correct interpretation? Or are all interpretations equally valid?

It's almost like asking, "What is truth?" Abstract nouns have a funny way of being ephemeral at best, and poorly defined at worst. Love, truth, beauty, goodness- all are up for interpretation, and none have been able to be adequately defined or explained by science. There is no magic formula for being beautiful; no matter how much one moisturizes, makes friends, and is a general "good" person - which we shouldn't use, because "good" isn't quantifiable - there  is always, ALWAYS, going to be someone that can't stand them.

I figure, the same holds true for interpretations: for every thirty or so people who hold to a particular interpretation of something, there's gonna be at least fifteen - a very vocal fifteen - who will disagree. Loudly. Sometimes with rocks.

But that's not the issue: the issue is, can something be utterly true? I surely and truly hope that only one equals one, and evermore ought to be so. But we need more than hope to prove absolute truth. So let's look at a couple of things.

Atheists and scientists employ empiricism and logic. But it's theoretically provable that two equals one, which proves that logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority. And we're expanding our range of senses at an alarming rate, so empiricism cannot be the be-all, end-all either. Plus, we're dealing with something that is above senses: you can see a woman be sawed in half, but it doesn't mean she has been, for example.

So what CAN we rely upon? Science can be fooled, humans can be fooled, anything can be faked...So perhaps the answer is, truth cannot be absolutely proved or disproved.

But let me show you a different approach.

Truth must come from outside ourselves; if it comes from within, it is nothing more than delusion. However, truth needs to be verified by several outside sources; if it's too narrow of a field, that limits what you can accept as true. It needs to come from several conflicting people, and if it's scientifically provable, all the better.

But even that cannot help with the big question; is there a God? I've seen Him proven through the existence of moral code, sentience, high-level communication, the genesis of the universe, a trifecta proposition, and seemingly no-loss bets...and I've seen the secular humanist atheists attack each and every of these arguments and rationally (logically?) disprove each of them.

So is there a God? I cannot prove Him for certain; if I could, I wouldn't need Him. If I could understand Him, I'd be like Him; I can only catch glimpses of his thumbprints here and there. I see enough circumstantial evidence to make my faith a part of me, even on my worst days. And, as CS Lewis once put it, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

47th Confession

This coming Saturday, four years ago, my daughter looked on the beautiful face of her God, and it took her breath away.

There are wounded places in a person's life which poets say that only time heals. With due respect to poets, that's either a whole lot of time or a whole lot of crap. Either way, it's not something that happens overnight, nor has it really happened in the past few years.

There is a room in my house that I don't go into anymore. There are things I don't think about my child, or other people's children, anymore. There are times of the year that I feel just a little colder. There's a lot fewer things that seem important, and a whole lot of conservative ideas that I've thrown out entirely.There are songs whose lyrics I now identify with a whole lot more closely, and nod a whole lot more.

I suppose that, one of the things that I've heard the most often is, "I can't imagine what it must have been like/must be like to lose a child." Most often, I answer, "I pray you never find out."

There's nothing but numbness and loss for the first week, maybe week and a half. You really don't FEEL anything, be it pain, loss, hurt...There's just this emptiness, kind of like an echo fading. It's fading, and you know you'll never hear that sound again, so you keep listening to it, finding ways to etch it into your memory. Little things, at first: cradling her, because you'll never get to again. Stroking her hair one last time. Holding her and praying - just one more time, silently - that she'll come back.

Then come the "life" things: the somber dismantling of her crib. The getting rid of some of her clothes. The wholesale dumping of the medical supplies. But all the while, still smelling her little baby smell, all through the places where she spent her time: the couch, her room, the hallway, her car seat, the van...

And then, just when you have this whole "getting back to life thing" almost figured out, you look around and realize that other people have either forgotten about it or moved on. And that's the worst shock of all to come to grips with: that life has moved, and you haven't.

All through it, for the first month, there are just these waves of grief and guilt that paralyze you when you're engulfed. Between waves, you can function fairly well, I remember. I remember even getting a bit prickly when feeling okay, thinking, "I'm not a doddering old man, I can really function for a bit." But for every time I felt fine, there were times I wanted to just break down.

And here is the crux of this confession: I probably should have broken down in those times. I probably should have taken some time to truly weep for my loss. I probably should have used a little more down time to process what happened.

But I didn't.

I had a boy to raise who needed his Daddy. I had a house to support. I had a set of vehicles to maintain. I had to keep moving.

And in that moving, there were nights I could feel the emotional granite that was in my core grinding against itself in cracked places; were I to put it another way, it was emotional arthritis.

Maybe another time, we'll explore that. But for now, I think it's time to put this back to sleep, to set this jewel to rest again, and look forward to something a bit more palatable. You've eaten the bitter green salad; now it's time for the meat course, I think.

46th Confession

If you were to find about thirty of my friends and ask them, "How judgmental is Ryan McBurney?"...

Well, first you'd have to find thirty people, and THAT is a Herculean task in and of itself....

But, were you to do it, I'm fairly certain that they'd probably say that, on a whole, I'm fairly easy-going, with a strong sense of what I like and dislike, but mostly open-minded about people.  Accepting to a fault, except if they happen to be in a boy band. Or completely, irrationally obsessive.

I try not to judge people, as a general rule. But the downside of that is, I judge myself harshly.

I never meant to turn out like this. I never set out on a self-destructive, obsessive path about learning everything I could from my mistakes. It's not even that I do; it's that I brood on them, like a hen on her eggs.

I think about what I could have done differently. I think about how I can make amends for my errors. I think about how not to make the same mistake again.

And this kind of thinking paralyzes me, sometimes. It hobbles me and shackles me to my mistakes, and no matter how many times I forgive myself, it all seems to rush back as soon as I mess up again.

Today would have been my daughter's fourth birthday. During her brief year of life, I was finishing off college, I was trying to hold down a stressful job, I was juggling a wife and two kids and a mother in law and a dog and a house and repairs and a lawn and a van and....

I know I did the best that I could. I think I did the best that I could. I'd like to think I did the best that I could. I tried to do the best that I could.

My inner demon tells me I should have done more.

I could have read more to my daughter. I could have let a couple things slide, just to spend a little more time with her. I should have prayed for her more, I should have had stronger faith, I should have...

I forgive myself, and look to avoid my mistakes in the future. I pick myself back up and keep going. Next time, it'll be better.

Next post will probably be about grief once more - the day Abby went home and everything that followed. After that, I promise to have some more light-hearted happy blogs. :D

45th Confession

TS Eliot, my favorite poet, once said that "April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain." He talks about the mysterious teasing of life from death that happens in April - the slow, creaking growth that comes after the dormancy of winter, painful and so very slow.

February is the cruelest month. My regrets, compounded by another year of experience and growth, come creaking to life on the first of the month. They lumber around like trolls, smashing and destroying for the sake of destruction, until about the end of the month. Then, troll-like, they go underground, hiding from the rising sun, until once again in August I hit a patch of regularly scheduled self-reflection.


Four years ago, February was a cold month. As I drove my wife to our midwife, I passed a car turned on its roof in the median on 270. I don't remember much about that day...fragments form a patchwork in my mind when I try.

Joy being unresponsive in the bathroom....a red sedan, on its roof, as I desperately try to head north, without flipping my own...the cold, professional nurse..Joy not responding again...being shoved into the waiting room...watching something about true crime, not knowing what's going on...hearing medical terminology that I understand, knowing that it applies to my wife and child...being told to get someone, cold nurse turned somber...

I hear that they're both alive, and it takes my breath away. I hear the mortality rate of what happened, and I lose my breath again. I'm wandering the halls of the hospital late at night, unable to call anyone. I'm hearing that my wife might still die. I saw her, and she scared me. The Who's Tommy is not the thing to watch in the ICU.

Finally seeing a coherent wife. Getting to see my daughter for the first time. Having faith for her future. Praying against fear. Stubbornly refusing to believe what the Groucho Marx-esque Pakistani doctor says. Believing, and seeing the fruit of that belief blossom.

One year, nine days.

Getting The Call. Driving to the wrong hospital. Getting to the right one. Believing for a miracle. Releasing her.

Calling my folks to let them know she's passed. Hearing my sobs mingle with my wife's in a cold operating room, as though they came from some other people.

February is the cruelest month.

44th Confession

It's happened again. The terrible, incredibly painful tragedy of death once again rears its head too close to home.

When there's nothing to say, say nothing aloud, but let your actions speak volumes.

Hug your children more. Model wise choices, as far as you are able. Above all else, let them know that you love them.

It's February. Next time, a February recollection.