Like most citizens of the United States, I remember where I was and what I was doing when I got news that we were under attack on September 11, 2001.
They say history is written by the victors (or seeming victors) and there’s so much truth in this.
Narratives and story lines.
While collectively we Americans (and many who unite the Bible with the flag) speak to others of forgiving people and just letting go, at the same time on this day in particular, many proudly display memes and other forms of communicating to our nation and the world that we will NEVER EVER FORGET THIS.
For a moment, I pause to consider what would it be like for Atlanta to yearly proclaim on November 15 to “Never Forget.” Or, what would it be like for Hiroshima to yearly proclaim on August 6 “Never Forget.”
Please don’t miss my points. These are horrific traumas, tragedies, losses and extreme pictures of the brokenness and struggles for the Shalom of God of this world.
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Divorce, and all that comes with this, is also a trauma and a death of dreams and much else.
And, many other mounting personal losses constitute a lot of deep struggles, obstacles and distresses. So I would always pause at least a moment to try to understand those who keep coming back to certain things, trying to navigate the past, present and find a way of hope forward into the future. So in a very real sense, it is understandable and even appropriate to never forget various significant parts of our lives and stories.
Endless monuments are made to commemorate legitimate and deep, deep losses personal losses and deep, deep acts of selfless courage and bravery and rebuilding of ruins. It would take a lot of nerve for someone to suggest that those who have directly suffered immense and horrific losses are making some type of monument to their trauma.
While I do believe it is both wise and necessary to navigate difficulties with circumspection and avoid pitfalls of unnecessarily keeping all forms of spiritual/emotional/psychological violence(s) in circulation; at the same time navigating this terrible terrain amounts to both seen and unseen very real battle(s).
In a sense, I personally believe part of our never forgetting 9/11 arises from our privilege in the United States and our collective insistence that we are always entirely in the right. USA, USA, USA… we collectively chant as some even hold Bible in their other metaphoric hand. “How dare they” seems to be something way below the surface of this truly horrific tragedy and the various responses to it all.
The messiness and fog of why another human might perpetrate such horrendous assaults becomes lost in the blinding rhetoric.
So I wonder, are there people groups of humans that God made in His image everywhere on remote areas of this globe pausing to acknowledge they will ‘never ever forget’ this truly horrific day and act?
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I remember where I was on September 11, 2001. I was still a fairly young mom, I suppose, and I had arrived to drop my older son off at the location where his homeschool classes met a full day once per week.
Mrs. Goff was there alone in the parking lot turning students away, as I recall, and said everything had been canceled and basically there was a national emergency and to go right home.
I was already in the midst of my own form of emergency since my mother had been put into the geriatric ward of the Delaware State hospital mid-July after a series of events and had been diagnosed with dementia.
I was trying to navigate aspects of an increasingly difficult marital situation with ups and downs, and this time period, thankfully, was a time that my first husband did show huge amounts of support in a number of ways.
I was homeschooling both children who were in second and seventh grade.
I was running my art business and teaching art part-time, which of course was a side source of income at that point for our family but did, needfully, consume major amounts of my time; and I was navigating Medicare and nursing home facilities and so much more, concerning the massive cleanout of my childhood home and its sale.
I was thirty-eight years old in 2001, had been married sixteen years, and had two sons ages 7 and 12 years old, to put things in perspective.
My mother had been transported at one point to St. Francis Hospital with an infection in September of that year, I believe (it was the weekend of the festival on the Green in New Castle, I can recall leaving my booth several times to call the hospital on a pay phone), and then returned to the state hospital.
I would come to the basement of one of the many buildings on the grounds of that facility, in that mental dungeon of a place that I had been intimately acquainted with since my senior year of high school, in regards to my mother’s need for intermittent hospitalization.
I would hear the wailing moans and groans and Alzheimer-Dementia expressions of people who had either had no family to care for them, no resources, or had otherwise been institutionalized there into their old age.
I would walk past all this and into the basement room where my mother was, sit next to my mother’s bedside and listen to/try to converse with her as she interspersed moments of orientation to my presence and then slipped into verbally reliving random parts of her life.
A life which inherently touched mine and touched upon the same memories.
There was one particular conversation where she said “Rodney fought that raccoon all afternoon with a shovel” and it triggered my recollection of that actual event which likely involved a rabid raccoon that was trying to get into my father’s kennel of English Setter hunting dogs midday. I remember I was probably about 9 or 10 years old and watched from my bedroom window, after he shouted to me to get inside and don’t dare come out.
So the day of September 11, 2001, I drove quickly home with my sons in the vehicle and turned on our television. I tuned into Fox News for the unfolding story and images, even though I was way too busy in my life to follow news or politics. I had my hands full with my children, my husband, my work, my mother, and on top of that I actively participated in various church activities.
Like many of us, and especially those who will cling to the words never forget, my sons and I watched with shock, horror and fear as the thing unfolded. I do remember sending Jonathan out of the room at points and I don’t recall whether Jim came home early from work or not. We were glued to the TV for days and longer…
During that time, I admit acquiescing to the voting advice that directly or indirectly permeated churches of those who wanting to follow Jesus. At that time, GW Bush became such a voice of trusted leadership to me and I still respectfully think that he handled the situation – at least in the initial onslaught – quite well. Though now, I am at the point of distancing myself somewhat from a number of over-political thought. It is all just so messed up, and I would rather put my energies and focus elsewhere at this point in my life.
Many of us recall the scene when the President was informed, while reading stories to young children (and especially I do since I had worked in classrooms myself from the time I was a high school senior until that current day in September of 2001), his composure and circumspect handling of that situation which deserves and has my deepest respect.
I will not comment here as to other aspects that flowed out of that fateful day and continue until now. Yesterday I sought prayer as I feel I’m in a fog of spiritual and personal War/battles. That term comes from one of my favorite documentaries about War.
The idea that on the ground in the midst of battles, terrible mistakes can be made, is an important one.
Assumptions can be made.
Misinformation and Disinformation can come to us.
Regretful actions taken.
And equally, retrospective observance that some things were handled quite properly.
My mother passed away the weekend after Thanksgiving of that year, November 26, 2001. I do remember the week of September 11th a visit to her at the Delaware State Hospital and trying to explain to her what had happened to our nation. She was not able to process what I was telling her.
Her decline was rapid between July of 2001, her death and the sale of her home under realtor contract November 30th.
Just 2 years later I made a difficult decision spiritually and otherwise to separate from my first husband. Ironically it occurred around July of that year but by November we had decided to continue working on things and made steps in that direction.
Yet, after another string of various things in the summer of 2005, I (we together) made a very difficult decision on many levels, to divorce. The divorce was basically mutual and desired by both of us. We used a mediator with little cost and two sessions to work out details between us.
But one of us had to elect to be the legally initiating party.
I willingly and for various reasons we seemed to agree upon at the time took on the responsibility of initiating in the divorce.
One thing I recall at that time was a draw inwardly to think about my father. He was a World War II vet and is the reason primarily that I survived the childhood battles I was caught up in.
I wondered to myself not only what does God want me to do or not do but what would my father have done?
My father was buried the day before I was 16 years old and I was then 42. His death had left a huge grounding absence every young woman needs especially in the years where young women mature and begin desiring romantic relationships and marriage and children.
At that time in 2005, I remembered how much my father, who was an ambulance driver, had at times expressed his experiences in World War II and taken me aside and gone through boxes of memorabilia.
So in 2005 I did what I sometimes do, I turned to art, film or other narratives to hopefully get some metaphoric sense of what to do. I remember watching again Saving Private Ryan and the opening scene on Omaha Beach.
The Captain, who we later learn is a high school English teacher, has been drafted into this horrific War and has young men barely older than his stateside students looking to him undoubtedly not only as military Captain but as father figure.
There was a scene in particular where he is dazed and disoriented and has made it safely behind a hedgehog and is watching and assessing and taking it all in, ground level in real time, the entirety of the situation he and the others had found themselves in, and how they all might best survive.
He is watching (the film goes into a nauseating slow motion) a soldier whose arm is blown off and the same soldier turns around walks back five or six feet, picks up his own severed arm and attempts to carry it off with him.
He is then snapped harshly back to the reality of the situation by one of his men shouting in his face “what do we do next, SIR?”
I still find it somewhat unusual that as a mother, during that time of caring for two sons, that this was the scene I identified with the most and gave me internal guidance in some sense.
I thought to myself, “there are two young men depending on me to provide and give them safety and personal health in a variety of ways – nurture, guidance, material provision – spiritual guidance, stability of environment and much, much more.
So I made the judgment call in that time and those moments that the move toward divorce would ultimately be the healthiest move for everyone involved including their father.
I knew then, since I understood War history, having then become more engaged as a homeschool mother teaching developing minds and following various school assignments at times, that I would not know with any certainty possibly for many years down the road if in fact I (we) made the right call.
I believe that many marriages are somewhat like the patient who has flatlined on the operating emergency table and the doctors just keep going and going before someone is willing to call “time of death.”
Overall, I have no regrets in my action. However, I also acknowledge what a dear friend said to me many many years ago prior to this divorce and during difficult times in my marriage. They told me that divorce solves nothing. It only trades one kind of problem for another.
This is absolutely true and of course there have been many times where I’ve questioned the trade-offs. Unfortunately we do not have the luxury to know other trajectories and divorce is the choosing of the most manageable set of issues, typically.
I will say that the decision I made to remarry and relocate to Alabama in 2012, in retrospect, is so extremely and deeply problematic now that there is really no way for me to hopefully wrap my head around the seemingly endless indirect trajectories that occurred from my bad decision-making and eight-year marriage. Like most second or subsequent marriages, it exists in a different realm from my twenty year marriage to the father of my sons.
It is something that I must simply acknowledge trust in the Father’s overall love, goodness and interactive plan that He has with not only me but with my sons and all of his creation, and to try to live faithfully which can be an increasingly exhausting challenge.
Honestly, it is very hard to see the light at the end of this dark dark tunnel. But on this day, today, I acknowledge a scripture at the end of this piece.
Yesterday morning I was prompted to find the recording I have from Jonathan’s baby dedication at Newark Christian Fellowship on April 10th 1994 and listen again.
When I heard my own voice praying, moments of weeping overtook me.
Yesterday, I spent a good amount of time searching for the baptism certificates from Glorious Presence Church when both of my sons were baptized one Sunday, I believe in was somewhere around 2001 or so, actually. Those wishing to be baptized into Christ Jesus by immersion were prepared during prior weeks with the Pastor, and we went to another church that had a baptismal and both Jonathan and Zach made an understood and intentional commitment into the death and resurrection of Jesus.
While I did not find these certificates but know that they exist somewhere here in my home, and know that the faith and profession is indelibly recorded in God’s mind, heart and memory as well of that day as well as my own prayers of dedicating my sons to Jesus uttered in April 1994, I did go through seemingly 10,000 Boxes of Sorrow and Ghosts yesterday – images not making themselves into photo albums and stored in all manners and stages of organized sorting.
Images I had forgotten long ago and never thought I might see again including one very precious photo of my father.
I flipped through album after album of homeschool portfolios looking for where I may have tucked those baptism certificates and seeing that I had put many original photo images into those rather than family photo albums.
I have seemingly now created myself more layers of physical mess and potential consuming endeavors in the future that will call to me for my attention here and there…
But it is worth it. Preserving our memories and our life stories and that of our children is always worth not only the effort, but the pain, in some cases. I think of friends who have lost young or grown children to a number of premature tragedies and how hard that must be in some other plain of existential pain.
I was able through some photos to look right into the deep beautiful brown eyes of my young baby boy and toddler and developing son and emotionally bypass the fruit of darkly-prompted (I believe snares of other influences have taken my son captive in a long period of time in various ways) efforts to disconnect and estrange.
I believe that relationship estrangement of all sorts – whether between individuals, families or nations – is not an expression of health but a manifestation of the spiritual brokenness of this world and that exists in each of us with God and others.
In my mind, the only true healing must be found with the starting point of opening ourselves to the one, true God and closing ourselves off to various forms of spiritual evil.
I experience in a more sustained way yesterday, a spiritual and emotional breakthrough of connection with my grown, estranged child.
A mother will never ever forget the child they carried in their body, nursed at their breasts and nurtured and cared for.
With that, I transcribed my words spoken that day of Baby Dedication at church in 1994, and provide the audio.
“Lord, I thank You for Jonathan and Zachary, and,
I just pray that You would protect them, and,
bring them into Your kingdom, and,
help me to be the mother that they need me to be.
In Jesus’ Name.”
~ April 10, 1994
I respectfully say to whomever might find there way to reading this, for whatever reason and with whatever opinion/understanding, that I will continue to navigate this spiritual battle as a mom, and not a generic mom but as being the mother of the sons God gave to me, not to any other.
My personal understandings and beliefs about the role of a parent, I stand in, and I am not alone. Even the pastor at the church during this time spoke at the beginning of the lifelong commitment and calling to be a parent to our children. While this of course takes various forms, that does not negate our spiritual responsibilities to our grown children.
Truly, if we parents thought we should have been given some instructional manual for each unique child, this feeling into their adulthood and beyond continues to reveal our need for God in all of these sacred matters.
Simply put, I will never forget Jonathan or acquiesce my hopes, dreams and much more that he experience the fullness of life, love and all manner of good things that are found in Jesus and that one day, God will answer the prayers of my heart concerning my relationship with him.
For all I know, I may not live to see this day, it may take many years for Jesus to do His work.
For those of us who watch from afar as others go through their sufferings, and sometimes filter in a well-meaning desire for our sufferings to simply end, that we let go of something, I would ask if I were to do this in the way that some people might envision I should, and the trajectory of that said advice precludes any chance or hope that I will ever see my son again or be in good relationship with him, where will these people and voices be when I might despair in moments at holidays? Or, when I grow old mourning for my losses?
Where will these people and voices be when my son’s birthday comes and I send a text “Happy Birthday, I love you,” and I am “ghosted?” without any response?
Where will these people and voices be when I open some drawer and am thrust immediately into some re-opening of deep pain and loss?
Where will these people and voices be when I open my Facebook and take in the beautiful images and celebrations of other people I have known most of my adult life? And please do not misunderstand I have no bitterness toward the goodness others experience but it does not negate my pain from afar.
I am no different from any other human in all of this.
I raise these points not simply because of my own story or situation, but this applies to all of us.
Obviously we know the idea not to make assumptions or other things when we have not walked in someone else’s shoes. Likewise, in the abundance of counselors there truly is safety/victory, I believe, and we must do the hard work of processing the variety of feedback and voices that come into all of our lives concerning our predicaments and sufferings.
Many years ago a wise friend said be careful of those who give advice and are unwilling to walk with the consequences of their advice to its full end…
While I don’t think that should preclude people speaking to one another in caring and wise and helpful ways, I do think it is a call to navigate with a bit of pause and empathy and care, with recognition that there are times when our words may inadvertently undermine someone’s last remaining hopes.
Unless we can guarantee that our advice will produce positive outcome, we need exercise care.
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(Parts From Isaiah 49, CEV)
“This is what the Lord says: I will answer your prayers because I have set a time when I will help by coming to save you. I have chosen you to take my promise of hope…you will rebuild…from its ruins…you will set prisoners free from dark dungeons to see the light of day…on their way home, they will find plenty to eat, even on barren hills. They won’t go hungry or get thirsty; they won’t be bothered by the scorching sun or hot desert winds. I will be merciful while leading them along to streams of water. I will level the mountains and make roads…my people will return from distant lands…Tell the heavens and the earth to celebrate and sing; command every mountain to join in the song. The Lord’s people have suffered, but he has shown mercy and given them comfort. The people of Zion said, “The Lord has turned away and forgotten us.”
The Lord answered…
“Could a mother forget a child
who nurses at her breast?
Could she fail to love an infant
who came from her own body?
Even if a mother could forget,
I will never forget you.
A picture of your city
is drawn on my hand.
You are always in my thoughts!”
Thank You For Reading
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