Easter ~ John 3:16

i have been through an Easter without Dragon; i just do not remember it. my memory has always been creepy. i remember everything. everything. i remember being 3 years old and pissing my father off by crying. he wanted me to grow up. i remember what i was wearing. i remember the sun on my legs and arms. i remember his angry face. he did not want to deal with a crying child, and a little girl? he had wanted a son.

i remember everything. all through my years.

but i do not have much of a memory of day-to-day life from my Dragon's funeral on until about Thanksgiving. i don't even remember being at my daughter's wedding. i know i worked my tushy off. i know i made everything. i remember snatches of being with her and selecting fabrics and colors of embroidery floss. but they are more dreamlike memories. nothing clear or lasting.

i know last Easter my son got to come up for the short weekend. i don't remember what i cooked. my daughter tells me i had a dazed or distant look in my eyes for months. they worried about me. but i do remember Thanksgiving. i remember everything up through Christmas, and on until now. i guess my mind was protecting me as best as it could.

and now it's another Easter. without my Dragon. another.
old photos. you've seen them. they are generic for so many emotions. the one above is what i wish i were doing right now. the one below is my reality.
but it is Easter and i had gone to be early. i had finished Suddenwidow's quilt sort of early but i was very tired. i went to bed to read and try to sleep. {if you're reading, i'll email you the tracking number tomorrow night. so Dan, Tuesday the Michael quilt will be in full swing, my focus totally on it. and Supa, i have my sketches set for your daughter's jeans. i am going out tomorrow with my daughter for some floss i'll need. sparkly floss. i think she's going to like them. =0) }

since i went to bed earlier than i usually do, my dogs wanted to go out fairly early this morning. dawn was still a suggestion. birds were still silent. i looked up and saw the waning moon to the west and one single star. Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, "o, swear not by the moon, by the inconstant moon....." he was pointing out the moon's constantly changing appearance and path across the sky were an unreliable vision to swear by. but it is not the moon that changes, it is the sun and the earth that make the moon seem inconstant. it is there, waiting, patient. like i must believe my Dragon is, or i will hit the ground, hit the wall, and never recover.

it is Easter and being outside so early, seeing the constant vigil the moon keeps over us, over me, and seeing that one single shining star brought this to my mind. shame. shame to have my fears. shame to doubt. shame at myself when others have such assurances.

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

it is Easter morning, Dragon, my love. and you are constantly in my thoughts. as constant as the moon.

impasse with God

Warning: This post contains thoughts of religion and the afterlife. Herein are my beliefs and worries, thoughts and hopes. They are based on my chose faith, Catholicism. I have already been punished by the family of my childhood for my conversion. There is no need for anyone to force himself or herself to read and then condemn me as well. Their job was thorough. Well-thought and well-meant comments are welcome. Spiteful and cruel arrogance will be deleted. I do not need anymore of it in my life than I already had, and have.

what happens at the moment of death? where did my Dragon go? this has been crushing me since that moment when i knew, before the paramedics came through the door, i knew he was leaving me. no one can look like that, no one can struggle so to breathe and be saved. was he gone during those moments when he became red in the face? was he gone when they sent me from the room? did he leave his body at the hospital? before he got there? where is he?

did he fly past the moon that night? fanciful i know but there is a poet in me that wants to write about it that way. did someone he trust and love come to get him? his mother? i have to know and yet, it isn’t for me to know, is it? or we’d all know. it would be taught to us as children. Jesus would have clarified.

as a child i believed in Heaven. i accepted it as quickly as i did everything my mother told me. there was Heaven. there was Hell. Hell was spoken of more to me as a child in reference to the punishment waiting for me should i not go to sleep, or if i couldn’t, what would happen if i woke my mother up. “There is a trapdoor under your bed that leads straight to Hell. If you are loud, or wake me up, demons will open the door and reach up with their long arms and grabbed your hands and drag you straight to Hell.”

to this day, at the age of 52, i clasp my hands when i attempt sleep so that they are occupied and the demons cannot grab them. that they can grab my arms or legs or neck is something i cannot do anything about. but my mother only ever mentioned my hands and it’s my hands i keep filled. i used to hold my Dragon. he understood and quietly wept for the child i never got to be. now i am back to holding my own hands.

and i am weary of this particular worry.

when i lost my son 27 ½ years ago, i knew he went to Heaven. he is innocent. he is my little baby, my sweet, Sweet Little Star. each of my children has a nickname that i gave them when the doctors first let me hold them. they were born and swaddled and given to me to hold for a moment before being taken for their Apgar scoring. i whispered each their name against their soft cheeks, letting my lips brush their skin for the first time. my Sweet Little Star. my BabyLove. my Little Boy Blue. i was determined to never be the mother my mother was. i gave them all so much of myself. my Sweet Little Star is in Heaven. i am sure. and i will see him if i am allowed to go. but will i get to go?

what will happen? what has already happened to my Dragon? he felt he would go to Hell for all that he did in service to his country. i told him he killed for his country but he was not a murderer anymore than a policeman who saves people from the bad guys are murderers. i told him that what he did, he did for God and country and that his honor and integrity, his worries for his soul would grant him his place in Heaven. he fought for his country. he fought for an idea and an ideal that was, at the heart of it, good and decent.

he would smile at me but i hope, i think i saw, relief in his eyes. he felt i knew what i was talking about. he called himself a heathen. i called him my lovely Dragon who saved my children and me.

but a year has passed and i am so alone and so tired. while worrying about money and health care, i still wonder and worry about Heaven and he is really there, and if i would be allowed to be with him. was what i always told him correct? nothing can shake faith like the loss of someone so important. after everyone goes back to their lives, and the alone time comes, the exploration of the dogma and the examination of faith starts. how to you keep to your faith when it is tested to this magnitude? my Dragon is somewhere i cannot go yet. i am not even allowed to know. when it is my time to go, will I be reunited with him?

to comfort myself, i try to create the image of my sailing out to find him. since i am so tired of life, i am too tired to believe i could fly. but he is my Dragon and he will come out of a beautiful sky to find me. he will take me up with him on his great back and we will go off to Heaven where i can rest for a moment.

however my inner child, the one that was religiously threatened with a trapdoor of demons under my bed begs God to let me be with my Dragon with promises that i will work so very hard in Heaven. please, oh, please just let me be with him. i won’t touch him if i’m not supposed to. i will just look at him while i work for You, listen to his deep voice, wait for his smiles. but, please, let me just be near him.

{it is a pathetic little prayer, isn't it? "When Rabbit Howls." a book i studied my first semester in abnorm. psych. i thought it then. i think it now. sometimes things can happen to a child that changes them forever. they become something different than what they were meant to be.}

so many theologians and philosophers have written their interpretations of Heaven, when it starts, who goes, and is there marriage and love there. some believe we are reunited but only insofar as we know each other but never look at the other because we are looking at God. some wrote of marriage being an earthly institution that cannot continue in Heaven because all things of this earth die. Catholic bishop Wilhelm Schneider predicted that God would bless the holy sacrament of marriage and that couples would reunite in Heaven, meeting joyfully, and that their unions blessed on earth through the priest, would now be blessed by God. he went on to touch on physical love saying that in Heaven, “we are freed from inordinate passion,” but that our reunions with our spouses would be “a spiritual union and will continue in the purest and most delightful interchange.” i've known priests who had a hard time discussing physical love. i've known others that were salt of the earth men who knew there was such a thing as sex and their counsel was wise indeed.

i cannot imagine my Dragon restraining himself, even in Heaven, especially in Heaven, where all good things come to those who have waited. he was a man of great passion. Heaven would have to make allowances for him.

i like what the chaplain to the queen of England, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) wrote of his marriage to his beloved wife, Fanny. “All I can say is, if I do not love my wife, body and soul as well there as I do here, then there is neither resurrection of my body or of my soul, but of some other, and I shall not be I.”

there is a poem called “The Blessed Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. in it he tells of the reunion of lovers in Heaven. in Heaven couples have similar clothes, hair, and faces. they hug, kiss, and gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. when Damozel arrives in Heaven, she cries because she cannot feel whole, such is her love for her husband. God makes her complete, but it is through her husband that she will feel all of Heaven. the poem creates a kind of quad-eternity rather than the Holy Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and the Divine Couple that were joined on earth through their pure and eternal love. they are God’s children and Damozel needs to know that they will be reunited when her husband dies and comes to Heaven.

the last verses have the appearance of the figure of Mary. here She is not merely the mother of Christ, but a sacred person who understands women and the role their mates and children play in their lives. She is the Blessed Mother of all. Damozel proclaims that it will be Mary who will bring her and her love to a sympathetic and loving Christ and it is Damozel who speaks last.

There will I ask of Christ the Lord

Thus much for him and me: -

Only to live as once on earth

With Love, - only to be,

As then awhile, forever now

Together, I and he.

it is my belief that God created an enchanting world filled with what i see as miraculous, awe-inspiring beauty.

He wants us to be happy here. He gave us the gift of being able to love. He gave us marriage. Jesus loved to go to the celebrations of marriages so why would marriage be taboo in Heaven? and if someone, say someone like me, who had lived their whole life praying and being quiet, and worrying about the trapdoor of demons under the bed, why would they be as instantly relegated to Hell as her mother was so willing to do? i’ve read William March. i was not a "Bad Seed." i was a little girl who thought the world was beautiful and liked to collect rocks and blow the seeds off dandelions. i still do those things. sadly, i also still feel that if there can be demons under a little girl's bed to keep her silent, then God is going to have a hard time deciding on me. if my mother could firmly stamp that into my child's mind, what hope would i have of God's grace?

i am at an impasse, of sorts, with God. i would like to know, very much like to know. i know i will not know until it is my time to know. when i fear too much what will happen to me, i think of what i said to my Dragon. when i worry about my Dragon who is apart from me, maybe not hearing me tell him i love him, not hearing my assurances that he is a good man and worthy of the Heaven he feels he denied himself by being a Marine, i remind myself of two things:

we are all God’s children and Jesus asks the children to come to Him.

i also remind myself that God is above all else, a God of love, and love has many definitions. after all, He gave me the sun and the moon……..

.....and He honored me with my Dragon.

Heaven ~ where and what

see that tree that stands alone in the fog? that's me. i took this photo with my Dragon standing behind me. i thought the tree looked heartbreakingly poetic. my Dragon thought she looked stalwart. little did i know then that that tree would become symbolic of me. my heart is broken. i can sometimes throw a rhyme together. but i am not very stalwart. i am, however, becoming stoic. people never cease to dismay me.

but i am not stoic when i think about Heaven. it was the second thing that hit me when they brought me in to sit with him after he died. first, i thought, "he's so quiet. he's gone. he really left." then i thought about where he was at that moment. was he still lingering? was he seeing me see him? did he know what i did with my wedding ring?

my rings were made by our favorite artist, Jes MaHarry. my wedding ring is hammered copper with a gold heart and silver leaves. it speaks to all the years we were planning together, all the passing seasons, of our hair turning silver with our age, and of eternity. when my Dragon slipped the ring on my finger, the heart was turned outward to him. sitting there holding his hand after he died, i talked to him. just him and me. i took my ring off and turned the heart so that it faced inward, to me. i told him i would always be his wife. my heart is closed off from ever wanting anyone else. no one can walk where the Dragon walked. no one can come close to what he means to me. it wouldn't be fair to anyone to let them try.

i've been told i'm speaking out of turn, that it's too early. i will be 52 years old next month. i've been through all kinds of hell that i would never touch on here. i know my own mind and heart. i will be the Dragon's wife here in this life until i stop breathing.

but i am lost without him here. and where is he? i've always had faith. but then it was easy. "sure there's a Heaven. it's a beautiful place where there's no more pain, or fear, or death. we'll all be together in Heaven."

well, a book i just read said, "there is no marriage is Heaven. you will know your spouse but in the way God intended. but you will not be married to him. you will each have your service to God in Heaven."

i sobbed. not married to my Dragon? what kind of Heaven is that? i have and am combing dogma, scripture, doctrines, everything i can find to get some kind of sane hold on Heaven. but the Bible speaks in symbolism and analogies. it's cryptic. we're not meant to know. and my fear is so tangible. i've tried to be decent all my life. i've prayed. i've sacrificed. i've never sought vengeance. i've ducked my head and turned away from vexing people, from people who would and did hurt me. i pray for forgiveness of my sins, any sins my children may commit, and the sins of my Dragon. i pray for him very often.

i'm alone. always alone. i can do that. the dogs think i'm talking to them.

so why would i be punished? why would i not be allowed to be his wife? why will we be separated? we always worked better as a team.

it is my hope, what i cling to, that God gives us each the Heaven we pray for. i want the sun to clear the fog from around me.

i want it to light the path that i feel most comfortable on and am most familiar with, the driveway to our house by the ocean. this one or something like it:
i hope i get to see a quasi-familiar place that brings such gladness to my soul that i shine brighter than a womanNshadows could ever imagine of shining on earth.
i want to experience all seasons God made. i want to be with my Dragon. maybe God would allow me to paint some sunrises, or sew quilts for the babies that go to Heaven, like my first baby. i wonder if i'll get to ask questions; like ask my mother why she hit me so much, why she made me so afraid of her.

but mostly i just want to be with my Dragon, and to have my first baby back. Quinn. it's been so long since i've told anyone his name. my gift to myself. twenty-six years ago, he was taken from me. i'd like to hold him again. AND i'd like to know that he knows who i am and that he will be allowed to still be my son.

i wish i knew something that someone knows that gives me some kind of faith that families can be families in Heaven. no marriage? no families? how could that book say that? why did i read it?

i should just turn around and go shoot myself in the foot. i really didn't need to read that right now. i was searching for something to hang on to. now i'm struggling to just hang on.
i just have to calm down and think of my island and my Dragon waiting for me. and Quinn. oh, Lord. i have to go lay down now.