Loss and Gain

The Reverend John Claypool, late priest of the Episcopal Church and earlier in his life a Southern Baptist pastor, taught, among many other helpful and positive things, that "for every loss there is a gain". It was not Father John's idea, but was gifted to him by a clergy friend, a rabbi as I recall, after the loss of John's young daughter. At first, Fr John was deeply offended and resisted the suggestion; but needing something other than self-destruction to see himself through after such an unbearable loss, Fr John took it aboard, began taking notice of himself and his life, and found that it was true; and, beyond true for him, life saving. For every Loss, there is a Gain.

That is not to say that the Gain will fill the void, or erase the grief, or in any way compensate for the Loss - - a notion that only the most pious naive would get, for example, out of the Job drama, which concludes rather simplistically with God giving Job better and more handsome sons and more beautiful daughters, than the daughters and sons that Job lost, intentionally killed by violent weather conspired by God and Satan, that an insurance company today might call, more literally than we like to admit, Acts of God. 

I'm trying to relate my own current Loss to the Job story because the Bible is meant to be of use to us in life, and we have been reading selections from Job as our Old Testament lesson in church these current Sundays. So, for every Loss there's a Gain, where the Gain does not compensate for the Loss, again, is not expected to compensate, that's not the idea - - but the challenge of finding the Gain offers one who wants to give life a chance and move on to live with the loss, the challenge of thinking, observing, and searching, keeping mind and eye out for the Gain. Which may be trivial or may be significant, but nevertheless a Gain.

Here I am then. I'm not trained, educated, or skilled at writing, could not make a living writing, but I write for myself, trivially, an almost daily blog, +Time, that I often deprecate as My Nonsense. Last week my sister had a horrific vehicle crash that caused injuries resulting in her death. A grievous Loss. It was a surprise, a horrendous shock that one makes it through because of its numbing effect on one's senses. Like being in a daze, inexplicably able to joke and laugh in the moment and in its aftereffect, mind and body looking after self and sanity.

One does not realize that one's judgment has taken flight and one is temporarily a stupid damn fool. I've been there in this, and the insidious thing is one's inability to realize it.

So, what's the Gain, where's the Gain in this Loss? I can't answer for anyone else in the family, especially those who may be hurting more. But for me, one Gain has been in my ability to continue writing this almost daily blogpost, as an intellectual exercise in escape. Not that the blogs are intellectual, God knows and I know, but the exercise of writing them has been therapeutic to divert the brain. Finding out that sitting down to write every morning, or even several times in a day, whether posted or not, can be therapeutic for me. Like the common advice to write a letter pouring out your heart, soul, and anger, but don't send it, in fact, burn it. BTDT this week.

So, I've been writing this nonsense for eleven years now, how is this a Gain after the Loss of my sister? Well, there's that NT Greek word that I keep bringing out of Mark 9:1. Mark's word is ἴδωσιν, "they see". It has been a treasure, over the years, helpful to me so many times in so many ways. "They see". Not to be impressive, because honestly I don't "do" NT Greek, I just know enough to know where to look up things. This verb is aorist (here a sort of incomplete future past tense that we don't quite have in English) subjunctive active, third person plural of its root word ὁράω. It means I see, I perceive, spiritually or intellectually and not necessarily visually but with the mind's eye, I discern, I perceive, I realize, I understand. And ἴδωσιν means, maybe sort of, "they finally will have 'got it'". Just so, in this experience of grief in my Loss of my sister, I discover and realize that if I am hurting, it positively helps my state of mind to sit down and start writing, even if it's just free the fingers to start dancing the tippy-type.

Still, that I can distract myself - - as Job, say, was distracted from the terrible itching of his puss-filled bursting boils by conversing with foolish friends - - even though distraction may be something, is not Gain in the material sense Fr John Claypool offers us. So I'm still waiting and watching for that Gain.

My sister grew up in our family as "the One", unique, the middle child between her two brothers Walt and me, as the sassy and defiant one, don't push her, not at all the submissive one, in an argument or other situation, including hearing a parent's order, command, "mama said", don't expect Gina to give up, don't expect her to knuckle under, don't expect her to stop defying; and if she's compelled, don't expect that to be the end of it. And don't expect her to stop seething, because if she's in tears, they are not tears of defeat, they are tears of raging defiance. 

Some years ago, Gina was driving the car on a genealogy exploration trip with our aunt. At an intersection without a traffic signal, Gina needed to make a left turn across heavy traffic. I wasn't there, but she waited and waited, finally saw what she considered her chance, a gap that would allow her to speed across between oncoming cars. It turned out to have been a chance, not an opportunity, and she lost. Her car (actually she was driving our aunt's car) was slammed into by an oncoming car. Both of them had severe injuries. In Gina's case, both of her ankles and both of her wrists were crushed. The injuries, corrective surgeries, and rehabilitation left her with permanent change in her physical abilities. I thought she did beautifully, but my brother, who always knew Gina better than I, told me that she found herself crippled, permanently disabled, and with a different outlook on life itself.

Her outlook - - this is sort of where I'm going at the moment as I try to discern Gain in all this - - apparently was that if she had to live life like this, she was damn-well going to live it her way. Not the way of an invalid cooped up at home. She sold her condo and bought an RV, a large motorhome, so she could travel at will, visit whomever she wanted to visit, when she wanted to, spend Time at RV campsites, sometimes for weeks on end, making friends with neighboring campers, who, taking to this traveling old lady, shared life stories, friendship, and fried fish that they'd caught in the creek or river that ran through the campground. For several years, she made herself mobile, a Traveler, traveling far and wide. I eventually gave up thinking to always know where she was, it wasn't my business or place to know anyway. 

Wednesday morning, October 6, driving on SR 20 on her way from, I guess, Lynn Haven, to Pensacola to visit Walt and his son and family before heading north to visit daughters Teresa in South Carolina and Susanna in North Carolina, something happened and she rolled her RV. I was told that it rolled several times, as it rolled, disintegrating, coming to pieces, flying apart. Again, the photograph bears witness: 

I don't know anything about the circumstances or the speed she was driving, but Gina was taken to BayMed with injuries. I got to visit with her in her ER trauma room, where she was conscious and aware and talking, up until they sedated her and prepped her for helicopter flight to Sacred Heart, Pensacola. She wasn't all torn to pieces visibly as one might expect looking at the photograph; but major head and chest, arm and knee injuries, plus the effects on her heart of both the accident and her genes (it runs in the family, from our father's mother's side, our paternal grandmother had it, our father had it, I have it too, and I think Walt has it, if you are related to us from the Weller side, you'd damn well better be aware) and a lifetime of smoking that she apparently only quit after a heart and hospital episode several summers ago. 

So in spite of her strong will (I may come back to that), and the instant and excellent emergency medical care, Gina died. They took her off the ventilator this past Tuesday morning, and Nature mercifully acted very quickly. 

Where am I now, trying to perceive a Gain after this Loss? I'm philosophizing it, because as yet I don't see a measurable Gain in terms of "things of this earth". What I see is that Gina died doing exactly what she wanted to do. In our most recent two decades, unlike Vietnam when we had a military draft, Marines who signed up after high school because they always wanted to be a U S Marine, and went through all that it takes to become a Marine, but then were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, died doing exactly what they chose and wanted to do. An eighty-three year old woman knows damn well she is going to die, sometime - - nevertheless, notwithstanding, and regardless. She might as well live as she chooses, and die doing what she loved most. My brother texted me about Gina doing this, choosing to live as she chose, No Matter What. 

Of course, as well as Job &c, I'm contemplating Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken", where all of life is composed of What If. Gina chose her road and drove it.

At any event, No Matter What caught me by surprise that Wednesday morning, and frankly, when the helicopter team wheeled her out of BayMed, I thought she had a chance, and likely would make it. Well, I'm looking for Gains now, and I'm taking it as a Gain that my sister did not survive to live out her years as some category of "---plegic". That maybe she perceived from her ER bed, and the flight gurney, and the OR table, and her ICU bed, what the alphabet was going on and, exercising her Free Will, decided to cut the crap and Go. It would have been just like her. 

I knew her not better but longer than anyone else in our years of life. Even as an infant she was feisty, and all our growing up years in family. She was at nobody's command but her own. So at this point, my Gain is that Gina did it all exactly as she decided for herself, including the dying.

I'm counting it as a Gain that the twins were not in the RV with Gina. I'm counting it a Gain that no one else was hurt, a Gain that she didn't run into anyone else, a Gain that no strangers' property was damaged, a Gain that no innocent people were hurt or killed. A Gain that she didn't leave her heirs facing a lawsuit to sort out. A Gain that Gina knew life was a risk, and took it and, frankly, won.

For every Loss there's a Gain, and

though I'll continue counting Gains, at least for now, I intend this to be my final blogpost about this, and go on, because for me, for now,

the sun still rises!

Bubba Papa Dad Carroll Tom