Transitions

There have been so many transitions in my life in the past ten years, they have come so fast and furious that it has been impossible to process all of it.  The twin towers of the World Trade Center came down, and I was working as a Pastoral Associate for two different churches with a very good priest, who trusted me to write liturgy and prayers.  Trusted my instincts about the Holy.  I was restless....I was praying for change in my life.  


As I think about it now it seems incredulous that I was not happy, not content there.  I had moved into a house of my dreams, big, stone, turn of the century home on a lovely street....somehow it wasn't enough.  


My prayers were answered in about a year, Steve lost his job, we had an agonizing year of him trying to find a new job, then just in the nick of time we sold our beautiful house and moved to Arkansas.  I lost my job, my friends, my vocation, and most of my daughters since Kristen stayed in New York and Gusta went to school in Ohio.


The air even smelled different in Arkansas, gone was the smell of sweet grass and fescue.  


I could sense that there were good things that could come out of this total upheaval from the start, but only if I could grieve and let go of what I had lost.  It is now 2012, and I am still letting go...still grieving.  Only now do I sense that there is something other than being a Pastoral Associate for me.  For years I have lamented the fact that there is no such occupation in the places that I have lived.  Then late last year, I realized that I don't want to do that anymore.  I cannot do it and be authentic, be true to who I am.  This is something I have known for ten years and one of the reasons I prayed for change.  


In Arkansas, I immediately understood that my new "work" was to begin to do some of the inner work that I hadn't wanted to do and felt like I didn't have time for.  It became very clear to me that making a ton of new friends was not on the list. That would only get in the way of the enormous task of getting on the road to authenticity.  


I had no idea how big the task was when I started.  Probably better I didn't know and just took one step at a time.  I started practicing Centering Prayer and Yoga, I read every book that came to me about mid life transition.  I was lonely, very lonely and I missed all of my wonderful friends in NY.  But I also knew on some level that this very excruciating work and loss was giving me an opportunity to mend some of the brokenness of my childhood and the way I related to people.


While I was in Arkansas, 2005 perhaps, my very closest sister was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.  That is a whole other entry in this blog, but I stood by praying and watching helplessly as she struggled to come to terms with some of the things in her life that caused the cancer, never really able to master any of it.  Seeing clearly for a moment or two some of the dysfunction, then covering it over again and things would go on as before.  She struggled and fought valiantly, but in the end, the pain was so terrible, the cancer so bad that I remember kneeling on the floor of my living room and begging God to not let her be in pain anymore.  And it drug on still, longer until in the early summer of 2009, she finally gave up the fight and passed in her sleep on June 28.  


I wanted to grieve her, but I am a person of compartmentalization.  It is the way I learned to survive as a child and it served me well then, however, now it became faulty.... about a year after her death I started having panic attacks related directly to losing her.  I hadn't come to terms with her death or the way I felt God had let me down.  I was afraid of dying like her, afraid of being in denial in some part of my life so that I sealed my own fate and would die an early death.  


I don't know where I am going with this blog, but for now I am ending this post.  There is so much more to write.  Let's call this Chapter 1 of midlife transition.