Two Years Out – © Jim Verschueren 11.25.2007

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me (Gladys Knight) – Whole song – 3 min.

This sermon is about thankfulness...about lessons learned in hard times, and about regrets along the way. But primarily, this is a post-Thanksgiving sermon with a continuing Thanksgiving message.

Thankfulness even in the face of great loss.

I begin with what I am still most thankful for in all my 60 years. That 32 of those years were shared in love with a soul mate. For those 32+ years, she was the best thing that ever happened to me. She made everything else possible. I am thankful for Donna.

I will be playing pieces of songs throughout this sermon. They have been my touchstones, one of the ways that I have endured grief and loss.

Alexandra Leaving (Leonard Cohen) – clip - 45 seconds

It is sometimes surprising what we become thankful for.

In May of 2005 my wife, Donna, took ill over a weekend. By June we had a definitive diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. At the end of June the attempt to remove the tumor by surgery was quickly aborted when the surgeon found at the first stage that the cancer had spread to the liver. Whether the chemo Donna endured that summer prolonged her life or not, I will never know. She died on October 18, five days after our 32nd wedding anniversary.

I had time to say good-bye to Donna as she was leaving. I am grateful for that beyond my ability to express that gratitude in words.

I have had a much harder time saying good-bye to Donna lost.  I still do, and I expect – and anticipate, gratefully – that I always will.

I am thankful for the pastoral care of interim minister John Burciaga. John came to the hospital the night Donna died, though it was early in his time here and he had met us only once. He took me to breakfast and gave me sage advice – particularly his suggestion that I set aside a time to grieve each day, intentionally. I ended up doing this by burning a CD of 21 songs that made me cry. I listened to that CD over and over again for months, adding songs as my journey progressed. I knew that stages were changing as new songs grabbed my heart. I knew that a milestone had been reached when I could listen to that CD and smile with the memories rather than sob.

An important lesson from John for all of life: Show up.
It’s a lesson I practice now, to be present when someone is at a sad time, even if I have nothing other than my thoughts and care to offer.

The Lucky One (Allison Krauss) – clip 1 minute
This was my song for the longest time. One of the many that tapped the well of grief, brought floods of tears and emotional release. I was grieving but I was alive and life was bringing the joys we had anticipated together:

Guilt is a stage of grief, mixed inextricably with gratitude and joy and sorrow and regrets. The lucky one, but not without a cost.

What I didn’t – and haven’t – read about is the second year.
How would things feel on the second wedding anniversary, the second birthday, the second time the date of the failed surgery rolled around, the second month of May, the second month of June, the second Christmas, the second Thanksgiving?

 

Now the second year has passed. I’m Two Years Out. We have just celebrated the third Thanksgiving. About six months ago I wrote a dear friend about the lessons I felt I had learned – and the regrets I had - through it all. I am sure I am not alone with lessons and regrets, so I offer you mine.

Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley) – clip 30 sec

Another song that touches me always. Love can bring – maybe always does – great hurt. Not a victory march.

One Lesson: Tears come often. And that’s OK. Really, more than OK.

For the love and joy of my family and for the deep hurt that Donna is not here to share/enjoy/enrich it all. A broken hallelujah, but a hallelujah nonetheless.

Another Lesson:    Even with all the good that has come and the happiness found, exactly as Thornton Wilder says, what was so central before is not lost or diminished. I think of Donna every day. I remember the feelings and the commitment. Nothing that has happened since, nothing that will happen, will change that.  A broken hallelujah, but a hallelujah nonetheless.

Another lesson is about guilt.

I understand why I feel guilt. I am so blessed with so much that she should be here to enjoy as well, and together. But rather than dwell on feelings of guilt, perhaps the most important lesson, for me, is to live with the pain of the loss and rejoice in feeling it.

I read just one book about grief after Donna died – Ashley Prend’s Transcending Grief & Loss.
All during that first year I experienced what I learned there – that the loss is never over, that grieving can take you back to square one without notice. I learned to let the waves of sadness, guilt, despair, loneliness and inconsolable grief wash over and through and around me. I learned that they would recede, that the tears and the experience of heart-wrenching pain were cathartic.

I learned to be thankful for the pain.

We are alive and engaged in life when we allow ourselves to experience our pain much as we welcome the experience of our joy.

Then there are the regrets:

Regrets – so trite to say, but mostly about things not done.
I wish I’d held her more those last few months. Throughout those last months, I think I only really broke down once and let her see me totally distraught – in Ogunquit the last time we went for an overnight. I like to think it let her know how much her leaving was hurting me.

Another regret – so trite again.
That work came before family so much of our lives. She worked hard to keep me balanced and mostly succeeded. I wish she had not had to make such an effort.

Regrets – something around my dad and his relationship with Donna and my part in the struggle and the hurt that were there. I can’t quite express the regret. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have a picture of what I could have done differently, so regret doesn’t feel quite like the right word.

The regrets are balanced in many ways by what she/we/I did well, and that is a great comfort.

So…bottom line...what would I say about losing Donna Two Years Out? That the intensity of the grief is not all that different from the first year. But that the frequency of that intensity is reduced. And that for me, there is reason to be thankful for both the reduced frequency - and thankful for the continuing intensity.

Perhaps Love (John Denver & Placido Domingo – clip 30 seconds
Some say love is holding on, and some say letting go.

I have learned that it is both, somehow done together. Two Years Out, I hold on to my love for Donna, as the song goes, both like a cloud and strong as steel. But I have also let go – let go of her presence.

As people who know me and my journey will have understood immediately, the title of my sermon, Two Years Out, is a double entendre.

Second Time Around (Frank Sinatra) – 1 minute

Two Years Out ~ Love Comes Again.

Many of you know that I am now in a new, committed relationship. A few months after Donna died I went on my first date with Carlo. I didn’t expect new love to come so soon.

I did know that I would explore the other side of my sexuality after Donna died. She did, too. I have two sons: Ben is 32 and Paul is 28. That summer Donna asked if I would like her to write to our sons. I don’t believe she ever did; I said the boys and I would work it through when the time came.

Again, I am experiencing gratitude, guilt at times, great joy, and regrets. Again, life lessons.

I am very thankful for this church’s role in the nurturing of all of our children, that they may grow up to be loving human beings.

The worth and dignity of every person.

We recite these words Sunday after Sunday. That you and I LIVE these words, I know from my experience, is no small thing.

Both my sons and their spouses have welcomed Carlo into our family. “We just want you to be happy” was Ben’s response when I told him what I was about. Paul wondered why I hadn’t told them earlier.

That such a transition could be made with such loving welcome among friends, colleagues and family, has been astonishing to me.

I am thankful for a world, at least in this corner of it, that affirms and rejoices in our loving relationship. As my church community, you are on the front lines of building that better world which is the core of my faith and my spirituality.

For this I give thanks from the very center of my being.

There is guilt, too, when love returns.

I remember singing a line in a hymn at church last spring about moving on with life even though there is pain. Well, not singing, but choking up. I was sitting in the same pew with Susan Treleaven and we both felt that meaning. It has to be done.

As for regrets attached to this new stage of my life, I have some regret, maybe, that Donna and I did not deal more openly with my sexuality. Not necessarily publicly, but certainly with each other over the years. Perhaps publicly, too. Maybe the stresses and strains we experienced from time to time needn’t have been, or could have been managed differently.

Which leads me to yet more lessons Two Years Out.

One is about the importance of openness in community.

Donna and I shared our journey that summer with everyone who would join us. Many of those folks were members of this church, some of you sitting here today. That openness buoyed us, gave us strength, and most wonderfully, conveyed to Donna what her life had meant in the lives of so many others.

My faith is that community is what gives life meaning. Our community of South Church made our journey that summer, and my journey since, meaningful.

Most recently, I had a conversation with a colleague at work that underscored that lesson of openness. By sharing my story, I learned that her gay, teen-age son has been out since he was 12, and heard some of the trials and tribulations he and the family have gone through. Her reaction to my story was the same as I have heard so often – I’m so glad you are happy. Maybe my head has been buried in the sand, but I am repeatedly amazed by how warm and supportive people can be when you “let them in.” 

“Letting people in” was a huge lesson from Donna’s illness and from that summer – one that I’m relearning… over and over.

And I have learned in these two years that grief and love are inseparable.

When I walk on the beach together with Carlo and old friends, I envision Donna there. I am able to smile both at the memory and at the thought of her place with those friends and, somehow simultaneously, at the joy of Carlo being there now.

It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary can be.

Recently Carlo made apple crisp, one of Donna’s favorites, something she made frequently. He didn’t know that apple crisp was one of Donna’s specialties.

Carlo’s apple crisp was not Donna’s apple crisp.

I am thankful for two kinds of apple crisp, both delicious. Our joys and our sorrows inextricably intertwined.

I am thankful for the mysteries of life and the communal journey we take together.

Bless us all.