{"id":194,"date":"2010-04-19T21:14:58","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T21:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/2010\/04\/19\/being-there\/"},"modified":"2010-04-19T21:14:58","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T21:14:58","slug":"being-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/being-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Being there"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span>I had coffee with an old friend on Saturday, a friend I thought had vanished from my life for good. Nine years ago, Lisa\u2019s son Morgan was murdered while trying to stop a fight near his college campus.\u00a0 He was twenty-one years old, three months shy of graduating with honors, engaged to be married to the girl of his dreams.<\/p>\n

I first met Lisa when we brought our son Henry to her kindergarten classroom and tentatively showed her a thick file of test results confirming physical and cognitive delays that the doctors said could keep him from succeeding in a \u201cnormal\u201d class. It was she who, upon meeting Henry, set the file aside, looked into the soul of our sweet, painfully shy, small-for-his-age five-year-old, and saw what was already perfect.\u00a0 Instead of comparing him to his more rugged peers, she met him exactly where he was. \u201cI think he will be fine,\u201d she said to us, and then she began to help us see all the ways that he truly was.\u00a0 When Jack came along, too rambunctious to sit quietly in circle time, she moved her class outdoors, and began to re-envision kindergarten mornings as adventures for the body and the heart, as well as an education for the mind.<\/p>\n

By then, she and I were already soul mates.\u00a0 No, it was more than that; we were friends the way two little kids are friends, always eagerly planning and looking forward to our next play date, be it a long run on the bike path after school or skinny-dipping on an overnight canoe trip to a deserted island.\u00a0 The friendship expanded early on to include my husband Steve and her longtime fianc\u00e9 Kerby; there were couples weekends away on the coast of Maine, birthday dinners and New Years Eve celebrations, movies and readings and camp-outs at the lake with our boys. A long, slow accumulation of good times and cherished memories and late-night fireside stories.\u00a0 Ours was a conversation that, once started, felt as if it would go on forever.\u00a0 There was so much to talk about — love, children, marriage, Mary Oliver\u2019s poetry, reincarnation, the meaning of life. . .<\/p>\n

The death of a child is also the death of a small civilization;\u00a0 the intact family shatters, its old form vanished forever.\u00a0 Lives are broken open by loss, hearts transformed by despair.\u00a0 Friends and loved ones may gather round, willing to share the journey or to bear part of the load.\u00a0 But grief etches its own road map.\u00a0 And sometimes the path leads away from love and connection into uncharted territory.<\/p>\n

Lisa and I have lived in the same town for a few years now.\u00a0 Every once in a while, we run into each other at the gym.\u00a0 Occasionally, Steve and I have dinner with her and her husband.\u00a0 And yet, the bond of our old friendship, once so strong, has been thinned and stretched over time by sadness and busyness. I have mourned the loss of Lisa\u2019s son, and also the loss of my own beloved friend, as she turned away and disappeared from my life almost completely over these last difficult years. I\u2019ve felt the helplessness of knowing that nothing I could do or say would change things, or make them better.<\/p>\n

And somewhere along the way, as my attempts to get together failed, and as the phone calls got fewer and farther between and then dried up altogether, I started to realize that sometimes even our well-intentioned attempts at comfort don’t bring much comfort at all, because there is just no way to bridge the gap between two realities, between someone who has suffered great loss and someone who has not. \u00a0Hard as that was to accept (and hurt as my own feelings have been at times), I kept trying to remind myself :\u00a0 I cannot know what it feels like to be her.\u00a0 I have not lost a child, not had to bear that pain and then learn how to keep on living.\u00a0 My hope for myself was that I could somehow figure out how to be a true friend to Lisa anyway, even from a distance.\u00a0 That I could somehow continue to be present for her — if not face-to-face, than at least in spirit.<\/p>\n

Lisa told me that there came a day last summer when she finally just stopped in her tracks and asked God where he was.\u00a0 The answer was not too long in coming, a new spiritual path literally opening at her feet.\u00a0 Eight months later, she is still on it, doing the hard work of prayer and practice and rebuilding life from the ground floor up.\u00a0 And so it was that we two met at last, and began the joyful, tearful task of reunion.\u00a0 We ordered lattes, and then there was so much to say all at once that we forgot to drink them.\u00a0 Once we both got started crying, we couldn\u2019t stop — till we started laughing at ourselves. \u00a0 And in that moment it hit me hard — how much I\u2019ve missed her, and how deeply, profoundly grateful I am to have her back.<\/p>\n

It felt amazing, after all this time, to finally get to say everything that we each had been waiting for such a long time to say.\u00a0 She wanted to apologize. I wanted her to know that she didn’t need to. For the truth is, my friend has taught me how to hold a place for someone in my heart, even when that person\u2019s own heart is otherwise engaged.\u00a0 So often this is our real challenge: to grow in compassion, to keep on loving, to somehow be there for another, even from a distance, a distance that may feel at times like a very long arm\u2019s length indeed.<\/p>\n

The next day, Lisa was going to attend Morgan\u2019s fiancee’s baby shower.\u00a0 Susie got married last summer; she is expecting a boy.\u00a0 And so, just like old times, the two of us finished our cold coffee and went shopping.\u00a0 Together, we picked out a music box for the unborn child who will not be Lisa\u2019s grandson, but who will arrive with her blessing and be the recipient of all the love she has to offer him. \u00a0She knows, for sure, that’s what Morgan would have wanted.<\/p>\n

As we stood there at the counter, watching the store owner wrap this special gift for a very special baby, we could only marvel at life, all these unexpected twists and turns.\u00a0 The inevitability of both death and birth, and the profound lessons to be learned from a loved one\u2019s suffering. No doubt I will need to be reminded again and again, but today I can say this with conviction: Being present to pain and sadness, in whatever way we can, teaches us the true meaning of patience, compassion, and faith.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had coffee with an old friend on Saturday, a friend I thought had vanished from my life for good. Nine years ago, Lisa\u2019s son Morgan was murdered while trying to stop a fight near his college campus.\u00a0 He was twenty-one years old, three months shy of graduating with honors, engaged to be married to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,23,24,25,29,31,32,14],"tags":[115,182,201,209],"class_list":{"0":"post-194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-compassion","9":"category-connection","10":"category-courage","11":"category-friendship","12":"category-grief","13":"category-healing","14":"category-soul-work","15":"tag-change-2","16":"tag-friendship-2","17":"tag-grief-2","18":"tag-healing-2","19":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}