Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Rachelle Gardner at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Soul Train
- Live Out Your Dream And Discard The Box
- Tears In A Bottle
- From The Young Mom I Once Was, To You
- I Can’t Help Falling
- What A Difference Ten Years Makes
- The Next Best Thing To Robert Redford
- The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
- Where Have All The Years Gone
- Fun With Kiki Cullen
- Stuck On Mom
- Ten Years Later, Our Girls From Northern Ireland Remembered
- The Thrift of Grief
- Job Security
- The Party’s Over
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Eight Cousins
Remember that book by Louisa May Alcott? I read it immediately upon having just devoured Little Women, back when I was twelve. Wow! It’s been a cool forty years—time for a second read, don’t you think?
Anyway, Doug and I leave one week from today for our time in Ireland and Scotland. Have I mentioned I have seven girl cousins in Scotland? So if you throw me into the mix, we make our own grand version of Eight Cousins!
Then of course, we need to factor in their husbands, children, and grandchildren. I’m thinking the crowd approaches fifty, all told. They call their American-born cousins “the Yanks,” which always cracks me up.
I wish I could tell you right this minute what’s been going on with my genealogical research. I have quite randomly begun comparing notes with a McKenna I found on the Very Extremely World Wide Web, and—wonder of wonders—we may be related. And if we are, well…you may have to wait till the book comes out!
This McKenna is going to show us some of the family sites in County Monaghan, Ireland, and I’m going to share with him what I’ve already uncovered about the family tree. He and I are both excited to see how this unfolds going forward.
Now, I’m going to go put together seven photo albums of our last trip for my peeps, just because I can.
I CAN’T WAIT!!!!!
Where?
“Where have you laid Him?”
Imagine poor Mary Magdalene, exhausted with grief over losing Jesus, arriving Sunday morning before dawn at the tomb where Jesus had been placed on Friday evening, and finding it empty. She trips through the burial grounds until she practically collides with a Man who, through her tears, looks like the gardener.
“Where have you laid Him?”
She believes, of course, that He is, without a doubt, dead. She witnessed the brutality with which He was crucified, the finality of the spear stabbing Him in the side. She felt the final anguish of the last of His blood spilling out of the open wound, drops of it falling like tears on her feet.
Who knows if while He was yet with them, she had already come to believe in the resurrection of the dead?
Jesus faces her in the garden and when He says a single word—“Mary!”—she realizes her mistake. He is not dead, but living! And not only living, she realizes with the joy that comes from being purchased back from death herself, but alive forevermore.
“Where have you laid Him?”
The words came to me out of no where in the middle of the night, a question that pierced neither my hands nor my feet, but my heart.
Because if I’ve laid Him anywhere—in the empty back pew at my once-on-Sunday church or inside the crisp pages of a Book I seldom read—it means that I’ve left Him for dead.
I don’t really believe He’s dead anymore—do I?
Where have I laid Him?
They Got Some Crazy Little Scriptures There, And I’m Gonna Get Me One!
I’m awash in paper, people.
It hasn’t been too long ago that I took on solving the Medicare Part D puzzle on behalf of my mother. If you can believe it, her former out-of-pocket cost for her prescription medications was $1500 per month—more than her total income. Now, thanks to moi, she’s only forking over $300. Of course, the taxpayers—and believe me, I am personally and painfully aware of this—are shelling out the other $1200 for her, and about that I have VERY mixed feelings.
But taxes are a subject for another day, namely, next Monday. Today’s topic is the never ending plethora of college brochures and application forms which has become such a long-term part of my existence that I truly don’t remember what I ever did before.
Look, folks, I’ve got so few college credits under my own one-size-too-big belt that it’s still debatable whether or not I’ll ever actually be a sophomore. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know my way around the essay portion and can’t take my turn on the FAFSA dancefloor with the best of you!
Kev’s getting his associate’s degree in a few weeks, and then onward and upward for him. He’s applying to maybe eight different schools and I guess you could say I’ve volunteered to be “involved.” He’s my baby, you understand, and how would I feel if I looked back on this last paper-intensive foray into his educational future and realized I didn’t help at all?
I’d feel just FINE, thank you. But I’ve still volunteered to pitch in, at least with copious amounts of what we shall euphemistically call “encouragement.”
“Kev, you’ve really got to get on this, you know…”
“I am, Mom.”
“Because time’s a wastin’...”
“I know, Mom.”
“We’re leaving in just two weeks for the old country, and I want all the applications to be in the mail by then.”
“Yeah, OK…”
“And don’t just apply to those fancy Swiss schools, Kevin.”
“I’m not—”
“Because maybe you should go to a school here and do a semester in Europe instead…”
“Right.”
“So make sure you ask all the schools upfront for their semester abroad info—”
“I am.”
“Cause you know what the Bible says, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Cast your bread upon the waters, and…”
“And what?”
“And, umm…I think…something like…”
“What are you trying to say, Mom?”
“Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will…”
“Mom?”
“It will come back to you. Yeah…that’s it.”
“But, Mom, won’t the bread be—?”
“Yes, IT WILL BE SOGGY! When your bread returns to you after many days, it will be SOGGY! So what’s your point, Kevin?”
“Mom, are you OK?”
These are the times that try Moms’ souls.
Upon The River’s Shore
In February of 1926, my Grandpa Bernard booked a passage in steerage aboard a cattle boat called the Magpie.
My father, age four at the time, always said that his da had left Grandma and the children behind in Scotland to go visit his parents back in Ireland. He was only to be gone a week, Dad said, but then he ended up being gone, well…forever.
Today, I looked a bit too closely, perhaps, at my grandparents’ marriage certificate. I’m trying to make a timeline of family members, places, times, and events, trying to superimpose it upon the events of a troubled and troubling bout of Irish history, trying to find some answers that make more sense than the ones I’ve been given.
I looked too closely and noticed for the first time that my grandfather’s parents were both dead by the time he and Grandma got married. He couldn’t have been going home to Ireland to see his parents, and he himself hadn’t lived there for more than twenty years by the time he decided to take the journey back.
There’s a mystery here somewhere, that much I know. My father always told us that his da, who drowned after falling from the boat in the River Clyde, was never found. Until four years ago, when a Scottish cousin I met online provided articles from the Glasgow Herald to prove otherwise, I accepted Dad’s story.
But my grandfather’s body did eventually wash up on the shore, several months after he went missing, and several miles closer to home along the river bank than he’d been the dark morning he died.
I couldn’t help thinking about these things as I shuffled through birth and death and marriage certificates today. I couldn’t help wondering at the mysteries we the living must unravel during our short stay upon this earth.
I put pen to paper then, to jot down the information from my Grandpa’s death certificate on my sketchy timeline. I automatically wrote the year 2006, instead of 1926, and laughed at my silly mistake. Until I looked more closely and realized I’d written today’s month and day, too: April 11.
But he died in February, I said to myself. Why did I write today’s date instead?
I looked at the death certificate once more and saw two dates: the morning of his disappearance into the water and the day the River Clyde finally gave him up—April 11, 1926.
On this very day, eighty years ago, Grandma Mary, surrounded by fatherless children, opened her door and someone—who, I wonder? someone she knew and loved, I hope—told her the end of the story of his life.
Tonight, I’m thinking of her, and of my father—gone himself these twenty-two years—and my aunts and uncles, all dead now, too. As much as I wish I could, I can’t write them a better ending, but I’m starting to believe there’s a middle to this story that’s never been told.
And I believe I’m the one to tell it.
Narrowing The Field?
Doug and I are in deep discussions with our youngest child, Kevin, about the course his studies should take after he completes his Associates degree in May.
He’s enrolled in a hospitality management program, and is considering a number of schools at which he could finish his Bachelors, including a couple in Switzerland. It’s a lot to think about, pray about, and decide.
Last night, I emailed him some links I thought might help him, for schools that hadn’t made it onto our radar screen until yesterday. Time is of the essence, of course, as it always is, so I urged him to take swift action in making application to the schools he’s interested in. I awakened at 5:45 this morning for no good reason and checked my email.
Here’s the message that awaited me from Kevin:
“thanks for all the good info. yes i am emailing you at 3:23 in the AM but as you know life is crazy here at the bachelor pad. i will look into all this info more tommorrow and then go to my advisor’s office on either monday or tuesday. probably tuesday because i have a three hour break on tuesdays in which i usually have lunch with colleen krista irene and evelyn but i can skip that just this once.
love you much”
Here’s my question: If you were him, would you really want to leave town?
Feebaghbane
You read that right: Feebaghbane. A tiny cross in the road, near the miniature village of Scotstown, in the section of the county called Tydavnet, in County Monaghan, Ireland.
Poor, little Feebaghbane. From everything I can gather so far, my great-grandfather Bernard McKenna was born there in 1847, smack dab in the middle of the famine years. Why his parents stayed, I have no idea. A significant number of McKennas from Tydnavet took a boat, under the direction of a kindly Catholic priest, and ended up on Prince Edward Island, where they’ve eaten well ever since.
Perhaps my people feared the ocean more than the plague. Who can say? All I know is that they did not emigrate, they stuck out the famine years and beyond. My Grandpa Bernard was also born in Feebaghbane, presumably in somewhat less hungry times, in 1884.
He moved to Scotland as a young man, and only returned once to Feebaghbane, as far as anyone knows. By that time, he was forty years old, married, and the father of five children, with a sixth on the way.
He made an overnight trip there on a boat called The Magpie, which carried cattle mostly, and a few poor humans. He went to see his mother, perhaps, if she was still alive. His old man McKenna, who’d been the famine baby, died in 1905, and by the time Grandpa Bernard made his journey home, it was 1925.
Who can say exactly what was in his mind? No one spoke of what happened after the body was found, once it washed up on the shores of the river Clyde near Glasgow. Or if they did, it was only in whispers.
Grandpa Bernard very nearly made it back to his wife and children, one of whom was my father—only four years old at the time. He was seen falling from the cattle boat early that dark morning, only a few miles from home. The boat was stopped and the waters searched, but no sign of him surfaced until three months later, after Grandma had given birth again and after most, if not all, hope for his life had been lost.
If you google Feebaghbane, you won’t come up with much, I’m afraid. There’s a florist who might deliver to an address there if pressed. There’s an outfit called simplyweddings.com that appears in several of the few results, but I don’t imagine they get much business in the Feebaghbane area.
I’m going to visit there in a couple of weeks, regardless. Because whether on the map or not, Feebaghbane has risen to the top of my personal search engine.
Besides, there’s a little spot named “Eternal Beauty & Tanning Centre” which proves once and for all that the Irish still believe in miracles.
Our Beautiful Daughter, Carrie
I can’t resisting posting the body of the email we received from our daughter Carrie last night. She’s in Jamaica, volunteering at an orphanage outside of Kingston. She’s into week two of a five week stay. Read her story, and let me know if you can figure out the parts that make me nervous. (Hint: All the rest of the parts make me nothing but proud!) And if you don’t mind, I’d sure appreciate prayers for my little girl.
Hey, everybody! Greetings from 4,000 ft. up in the Jamaica mountains!
What an amazing week I have had! I’ve done everything from build a cement staircase down a steep mountain slope, to door-to-door ministry in Trenchtown (highest murder rate in the world!), to trying to get the attention of 49 attention-starved children at the same time.
The team from Mizzou that I was with left this morning, with the exception of one girl. At first it was quiet and lonely. I honestly didn’t know if I could last 4 weeks on my own. But I quickly got over it when I saw the kids’ faces again this morning.
They are so beautiful! Most of them are here because they were abandoned and abused. Some of them have been here since they were babies, or small children. There are 3 “houses”. The blue house is the older girls’ home. There are 9 girls that live there and I think the oldest is 13 or 14. I now live in the upstairs part of that house. The yellow house is the boys’ home at the bottom of the property. I haven’t been in it yet.
The green house is the toddler house. I’m not sure how many toddlers live there, but it feels like a trillion at times. I am actually lying in bed at the green house right now. I am a House Mother tonight for five sisters in one of the rooms here. Even though they are not all toddlers (range from 13-newborn), they all stay together in one room. I kind of like being the house mother! Except that their nightlight is massive, so I’ll have to sleep with a blanket over my head.
When I came in, I looked around the room as they were sleeping and I thought to myself, “I’m the nice Miss Hannigan (from the movie, Annie)! My dreams have come true!” This room is connected to another room where one little boy sleeps. His name is Joshua.
Let me tell you about Joshua. He is an emergency case who just got here a couple of weeks ago. His arm is in a huge cast up to his armpit because his father broke it. Joshua is by far one of the most angry and hostile children I have ever known. He lashes out at everything. Somebody looks at him crosseyed and he starts punching them (with his cast, of course).
Joshua is so handsome. When he does smile (too rarely), it lights up the room. I think he’s about 4 years old. I really love him and am trying to express that love however I can. If I see him about to get angry, I run up to him, pick him up, give him a big hug and tell him I love him. I really feel like he’s been denied true love for so long that he doesn’t even know how to respond to it. He just kind of has this look on his face like, “you do??” I really hope to see a big change in Joshua over the next month.
______________
What a morning! Five of us girls went to help out with the toddlers. Man oh man they’re a handful! Seriously, it almost drove us to insanity. Hitting, biting, screaming, kicking, punching, crying, hitting, crying, biting, hitting, hitting, hitting, screaming. It’s interesting because I know that when they realize I am here for longer than a week, they’ll start respecting me.
I’ve been told they’re like this with all of the short-timers. They test test test. And it takes longer than a week for them to start looking at new people as a disciplinarian. It’s so hard because you’ll see one kid hit another, so you go over to stop the fight and to take the “bad” kid away for a talk. The “bad” kid turns limp (the ol’ “I suddenly forgot how to walk” trick)...so it turns into a “Stond oop. Stond oop! STOND OOP NAWO!” (stand up. stand up! STAND UP NOW!) war.
By this time you see another kid across the room spitting in the baby’s eye while beating the sick kid with a wooden stick. So, you have to leave the limp kid to go make sure the baby and the sick kid are ok, and then try to remember to go discipline the culprit…well, the two culprits, if you count the first. All of the offenses start piling up and pretty soon you can’t remember who did what to who. It’s insane!
My schedule during the week will go something like this:
6AM wake up
7AM breakfast in toddler house
8:30AM staff devotions
9-11AM teaching school
11-12 toddler playtime
12PM lunch
1-2PM free time!
2-5PM tutor big kids and playtime with everybody
5 PM dinner
6 PM baths, getting everybody into PJ’s
7 PM toddler and big girl devotions
7:30 PM, bed for the kiddos, and me if I want to. :)
I will be free on some weeknights and every other weekend. I really don’t know what I’ll do when I’m off. Sleep and journal and make phone calls, I guess. I won’t go down into the murder and weed capital of the world unless there is a group going down.
Here is a nice little comparison I made on my first night here:
United States: Some roads are hard to deal with. We complain when I-70 is under construction (again) and traffic during rush hour can definitely be a mess.
Haiti: Four main “highways” that look more like mud pits than anything else. But not too curvy or up and down…just some slip-sliding around and a trillion pot holes to dodge.
Jamaica: The actual roads aren’t too bad at all. It’s the drive up the one lane road that goes up the mountain. Yes, one lane. I look to my right, I see rock. I look to my left, and can’t even see the bottom of the valley. Oh, and did I mention that the tires of the van are RIGHT on the edge and there’s no guardrail for a lot of it. Oh, and did I also mention that the driver isn’t necessarily going slow and takes curves like there couldn’t possibly be cars coming from the other way. Oh, and yes, there are always cars coming from the other way. Wild stuff…but what an adventure!
_______________
OK, I wrote that first part a couple of days ago, and just haven’t had a chance to be on email since then. The past couple of days have been good. I started teaching the preschoolers today. I decided to keep a theme for the week, weather (guess I was thinking of Marc). So, I incorporated shapes into a weather picture that I made for them to color. Then we had a memory verse and Bible story about when Jesus calmed storms.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about hurricanes and tornadoes and tie that into learning our numbers. Wednesday will be colors, etc. It’s been a lot of fun! We had to weed out the kids who were disrupting class, which took a good while. But once they were gone, we got a lot accomplished. Joshua (the little boy I spoke about earlier) was the best student, believe it or not! He listened, memorized the verse quickly and sat quietly. He’s very smart and creative.
One thing that I get so frustrated with: The kids try to steal food from the small toddlers and babies—after they’ve already eaten themselves! It’s hard b/c obviously they’re still hungry, but it’s also not right to steal. So, here I am trying to pry 20 little hands off of the highchairs. After about 15 minutes, I think I’ve got in under control. Then I notice they start coming in the kitchen on their hands and knees, picking up crumbs off of the floor. Once again, sad but wrong.
Anyway, it’s still pretty hard to get their attention, being the new girl who (according to the teens) looks like a teenager. But I’ve been told that by the end of this week they will start to recognize my voice and my firm tone and will start listening and obeying better. Lord, I pray this is true. It’s extremely challenging, but amazing at the same time. I look around the room sometimes when I’m frustrated and I think “They are all so beautiful…who would want to abandon these children?”
That’s what keeps me going….knowing how starved they are for attention and for love.
That is all for now—we’ll see how many of you actually got to the end of this. :)
Thanks for all of your support and prayers and please continue to pray for this home and these children.
Love you all!!
Carrie
Thanks To My Scottish Father
This morning, I did something so very extremely fun that it deserves its own blog entry.
I put into the post a manila envelope stuffed to the gills with all the documentation necessary to prove my British citizenship and sent it to the Bristish Embassy in Washington, DC.
Unless I’ve taken a misstep along the way (which would be easy to do considering the convolutedness of the instructions), I should receive back a British passport in the not distant future—perhaps in time to carry it with me to the Old Country.
“But what will this get you?” my sister Liz asked. She’s trying to decide if she wants to piggyback her way to a passport by virtue of my efforts. (I hope she and all my siblings do!)
“Becoming a British citizen makes it so you can live and work anywhere in the European Union without visas or work permits.”
“Can you get their free health care if you live there?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said, “and I know I can vote in their elections, too.”
“Would you really do that?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m kind of afraid I’d get called up for jury duty.”
So far, that’s the only downside to multi-citizenship I can see. And today, even British jury duty sounds like a thrill.
Yeah. I’m kind of excited!
Tacky Home Repairs 101
Some of you may be relatively new to home ownership. You may have heard that keeping up with all the maintenance will end up costing you everything you’ve got, that it will eat up the home equity you want to be building to the point that you might as well rent and save yourselves the heartache.
But there are others like me out there, I’m guessing. Older, more experienced, worldly-wise home owners. Those who’ve come to realize that you can live your whole lives in a house and manage to never figure out how to do even the simplest tasks.
Doug and I are having company for dinner tonight, and I’m afraid I’m digging too deeply today. Do you know what I’m talking about? I should be doing a once-over, and instead I’m pulling out all the stops—actually removing items from shelves instead of dusting around them, vacuuming the upholstery, and paying more attention to grout than a woman my age should have to.
I needed an Ibuprofen and Starbucks break, and Doug was more than happy to join me for a ride down the road. As we left the house, I noticed the bottom piece of a downspout had become detached during last night’s storm. It lay there on the walk, and out of its middle poured what looked like the remains of a bird’s nest.
“You haven’t cleaned the gutters for years,” I said, matter-of-factly.
“I have, too,” he answered.
“Doug, look.” I pointed to the twig and straw clog. “That’s why the water pours in front of the door when it shouldn’t, and off the corners of the roof instead of through the gutters. You need to clean the gutters…”
“I clean the gutters almost every year,” he said. “Well, maybe not last year. But the gutters are not the problem.”
I have to admit I get a little thrill when he uses his authoritative voice.
“So what’s the problem?”
“The downspouts. I don’t get to them quite as often.”
Right.
On the way to retrieve our drinks, I mentioned for the umpteenth time in a very non-nagging kind of way that both sinks in our master bathroom are completely clogged, to the point that it’s becoming challenging to run water for even an abbreviated tooth-brushing.
“But you can’t take them apart today,” I said, “because I’ve already cleaned in there, and I don’t want it messed up again.”
“I understand,” he said, and really that’s the thing I love best about him, you know? He’s so wonderfully understanding. “Try to remember to remind me sometime when the sinks are already filthy, OK?”
Isn’t he the best?
We got home with our iced Americanos just now. Iced because I’m working up a serious sweat and while it’s more than pleasant outside, it’s stuffy as all get-out in here. Why? Because the shutter door of our attic fan will not stay open, so the fan is doing us no good whatsoever.
I heard a home-repair-talk-show guy addressing this very problem a few weeks ago. He said it’s because the vents on top of the roof are clogged up. Why am I not surprised? Apparently, Clogs Backwards R Us.
Doug has already tried sticking the long tube from the inside of a roll of wrapping paper into the shutter, forcing it open. Last week, when he used this method, I actually caught a brief breeze. Turns out it wasn’t because of Doug’s handiwork, though. Just a passing tornado.
I decided to forget the gutters (I mean downspouts, of course…) and sinks and concentrate my limited powers of pursuasion on trying to catch a cool breath.
“Try to get the fan going for me, will you?” I asked.
The next thing I knew he appeared before the open window in our bedroom, where I was huffing and puffing my way through a dusting regimen. He held his hand in front of the window to brag.
“Hey, babe,” he said, “the attic fan is pulling air really well now.”
“You fixed it that fast?” I said. “Wow! I’m really impressed.” I believe in giving praise where praise is due, after all.
“Yeah, I doubled up on the tubes and that did the trick.”
It figures.
Reverting To The Mean?
I sprang Mom from the nursing home day before yesterday. She’s back in her assisted-living apartment.
I’m feeling a little ticked-off right now, so I thought I would share. I’m hoping that any of you who have spouses, children, parents, friends, or pets will understand.
For a month in the nursing home, Mom was on her best behavior. The PT had her walking in the halls up to what must have been several blocks at a time, and she cheerfully cooperated with every task a health care worker assigned to her. She complied with using her walker at all times, washing her hands after using the bathroom, and even agreed to remaining dressed when all of us and even God knows she prefers stark nakedness.
I’ve been laboring under the misconception that Alzheimer’s or some other form of serious dementia had kicked in with a vengeance, and of course, I’m not going to get after someone who doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to remember something like panties, but guess what?
A revelation has dawned: my mother is not demented! Once they made some seriously overdue and desperately needed adjustments to her medications, she’s as clearheaded as we are! (Maybe I’m assuming something about you, I don’t know…)
Anyway, I got her home on Tuesday, and the VERY first thing she wanted to do was climb into bed. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, since I know that these moving days are quite stressful and exhausting. I even helped her get all tucked in before I left, but it all felt so darned familiar. Surely this wasn’t the beginning of her former bad habits, was it?
Yesterday I didn’t see her, but my sister Liz did. She emailed to say she’d gotten there at 4:30 in the afternoon and Mom was sound asleep. Of course, it was nearly time for dinner, and Mama don’t miss no meals, so her nap was about to end by the time Liz arrived. Still, I didn’t like the feeling I was getting.
This morning, I showed up unannounced at 10:30. I opened the door to her apartment and could see her naked legs sprawled out in her bed one room over. I walked into the bedroom, past the blaring TV which had been left on in the living room.
“Hello,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Just listening to Judge Joe.”
I stepped back into the living room and flipped off the judge. Judge Katy was about to take the bench.
“Are you sick, Mom?” If my mother is ill, I will do everything in my power to excuse all kinds of behaviors and assist her in every way I can.
“No,” she said. “Although I did have one terrible episode of diarrhea at 4 am.”
“That was then,” I said. “And this is now. Your panties are in such a bundle it looks like you’re wearing a thong. You’re not wearing a thong, are you? And your blouse is mostly unbuttoned and exposing your entire stomach. Not only that, but there are three days worth of dirty clothes in a pile on the floor.” I started gathering up the laundry. “Mom, you need to get out of the bed and get dressed.”
“No, just sit down over there on the chair and talk to me.”
See, folks, this is where it gets dicey. I’ve spent years of my life sitting down on the chair over there and ignoring the squalor of the dirty Kleenexes and the plates of half-eaten food shoved under the bed and the smell of…you don’t want to know.
“No, Mom, you’re not sick. So I’m not going to sit down in here and talk to you and pretend like you’re not naked. Sorry. If you want to visit with me, you will need to get out of bed, get dressed, and come into the living room.”
And that’s exactly what she did.
The jig is up, folks. I’m going to hang tough with my new policy. Now that I know what she’s capable of, I refuse to be disrespected by (my sister Mary loved my word choice here) her bizarrely nasty behaviors.
I don’t know if that’s mean of me, or not. It’s just the way it’s going to be.
Why
“I don’t know why I was born.”
Frightening words to hear come out of anyone’s mouth, I think. Maybe especially when they are the opening words to a conversation, before even the small-talk niceties of “Hi, how are you?” and “Just fine. How about you?” have been exchanged.
Instead of sweet-talking lies, only the visual of walking into her apartment and seeing her sitting on the couch with her head buried in her hands, and then those stark, mono-syllabic words, each one standing on its own jagged edge, like brittle bones without marrow.
I don’t know why I was born.
Doug and I looked at each other and knew this was an answered prayer. All we’d asked for, really, was a simple opportunity—a chance to speak to Mom about the way of things between her and Jesus. A chance to point her toward the One for whom we were each made.
“You were born for God, Mary,” Doug said.
I gasped and prepared to be told that she did not want to talk about religion, that she hadn’t meant to imply that a spiritual discussion would be welcome. Instead, she looked at him and waited, as if she’d been waiting to hear those words forever.
Mom asked a lot of questions that day, nearly five weeks ago, before her most recent fall, hospitalization, and nursing home stay. We tried to answer in ways we hoped she could comprehend in her agitated and despondent state.
Mom finally turned to Doug and said, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
And then Doug said something so profoundly true that to think of it even today makes me weep.
“It’s OK, Mary. It all comes down to four words, really. Do you want to know what they are?”
“Yes.”
“God loves Mary McKenna.”
Mom looked stunned to hear the news, the good news of the gospel, the bare-bones truth about the Savior’s intimate affection for her. And for once she didn’t argue with the messenger.
When we were getting ready to leave that day, Doug asked Mom if she would like us to pray with her.
“No,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Doug answered. “Because you know what, Mary? You can talk to God anytime you want, just like we’re talking here.”
A few days later, I told Mom how I was going to have to have an MRI again. She knows I’ve hated going into the tunnels with a passion, so severe is my claustrophobia.
When we were about to hang up the phone, Mom said, “Do you remember my friend Mary Jo, from when you kids were little? And how she used to end every conversation by saying, ‘I’ll pray for you’?”
I giggled, figuring Mom was about to make fun of poor, old Mary Jo. “Sure, I remember.”
“Well, would it help you if I said I would pray for you?”
Yes, Mom. It would help me. More than you could know…
In the space of a few short days, Mom went from “I don’t know why I was born” to “Let me pray for you.”
Sometimes, I have to admit, I’m not quite sure why I was born, either. If we’re honest, I guess we all feel that way from time to time.
But on that beautiful day when my mother gathered the strength of soul to utter those weak-sounding words, I remembered a bit more of the reason.
Miracle
It’s been nearly a month since I posted the entry called “Move Over.”
I was pretty frantic when I had that dream, and even more freaked out the next morning as I made my way to the hospital at day break. But God gave me a peace about my mother’s situation that felt so real, so true, so…unfamiliar.
All I could think was that my mom was dying, and that God decided to have mercy on me in advance of her demise by relieving me of my overactive sense of responsibility for her. It would have been a kind thing of the Lord to do, but evidently that’s not what He had in mind.
Mom’s been three weeks in the nursing home now, after a week in the hospital. These have been the best three weeks Mom’s had in years. One explanation for her huge improvement is that the hospital screwed up in a big way. For the week she was an inpatient, they neglected to give her one of her seizure meds, Neurontin.
No wonder she freaked out in the hospital! Turns out she was going through withdrawal—complete with fever, puking, high anxiety, disorientation, paranoia, and the shakes—and no one knew it.
I mentioned on an earlier post that Doug and I got to pray with Mom several times during her ordeal. My sisters Mary and Bridget prayed with her also—at her insistance.
They tried to go home from the hospital late one night and Mom couldn’t settle down enough for them to leave.
“Katy says you can’t go until you pray with me,” she said, in a spiritual panic the likes of which they’d never witnessed.
Of course, I had said no such thing.
“Um…okay,” one sister said. The three of them held hands and Bridget began.
“Dear Jesus, help the doctors figure out how to help Mom, and help Mom get better.” She looked to Mary for sisterly support.
“And dear Jesus, help Mom to sleep good. Amen,” Mary finished.
The two of them looked up to see a disgusted look on Mom’s face and one of the girls said, “What? Doug’s prayers are better?”
“Yip.”
I love this story not because it makes Doug look good, but because it marks the moment, at least in my mind, when Mom began to get her life back. She made a strong declaration about a personally held opinion, and it wasn’t based on fear or weakness or dwindling acuity.
Mom has been with the program ever since. She’s had three very productive weeks of physical and occupational therapy, during which she’s made astonishing progress. Yesterday, she and the PT walked through the huge complex where Mom’s staying, taking only occasional short rest breaks.
“Do you mean Kathleen pushed you in the wheelchair?” I asked, knowing that Mom hasn’t walked more than 20 feet at a time with her walker since August.
Mom made a dismissive gesture with her good hand and said, “Pfffft…what wheelchair? I don’t need that thing.”
All this to say, thank you. I know many of you have actually prayed for my mother, and I think God has answered in a wonderful way.
I talked about it with Mary last night, and she said—in a voice that sounded like a cheesy ad for a goofy TV program about dogs who save their owners from certain death—“It’s a miracle!”
I said, “Well, actually, it kind of is, you know…”
And she said, “I know! That’s why I said it’s a miracle!”
So many miracles happen every day, really, when you stop and add them up. Some people say if they’re common, they’re not miracles, and they’d probably say my mom’s turnaround is just an ordinary occurrance—nothing to write home about.
But you know what? I’ve been there every day for over four years now, in the trenches with a woman on a steady decline, and if this isn’t a miracle, then I’ve never seen one.
And I just had to write home about it—to you.
Identity
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that the mark of a Scot is that “there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.”
I don’t know if that quote gives you shivers, but it does me.
Because, you see, I’ve been to the cemeteries, even the ones in County Monaghan, Ireland, where if the sunshine holds or you’re not afraid of the grey rain falling upon the greyer tombstones, you can date the McKenna clan back eight hundred years.
And if a generation is forty years or so, eight hundred years is twenty generations.
In the year 2000, before I’d begun to make any sense at all of my father’s family history, Doug took pictures of me at the grave sites of every random dead McKenna we could find, and in Monaghan, McKennas are legion.
When we return to the auld sod next month, I’ll be armed with enough pieces of the puzzle to locate the graves of not only my grandparents (buried in Scotland), but my great-grandparents in Ireland, as well.
I left off this project two years ago or more, when my mother’s devolving health situation cried out for all my attention. Now I’ve resumed sending for certified documents so that hopefully, with just a bit more work and the luck of the Irish on my side, I’ll soon have accumulated everything I need to obtain both my British and my Irish citizenships.
I’m smiling through tears as I write this. I can’t tell you why, exactly. I don’t know myself why this is so important to me, but it is.
Maybe it’s because my father’s father drowned in the River Clyde in Scotland when my father was just a wee lad. Maybe all my life I felt like Dad was missing someone, and by virtue of his wistfulness, he imbued me with that same missing-someone feeling.
All I know for sure is this: There burns alive in me a sense of identity with the dead, even to the twentieth generation.
Me, An Irish Princess? Say It Isn’t So!
Earlier today, BJ Hoff commented on my previous post and recommended a book called “Paddy’s Lament,” about Irish immigrants in the 1800s.
I’m a sucker for the word “lament,” probably because I’m SO Irish and well, lamenting is one of the things we do best. And since Doug and I had already decided that our St. Patrick’s Day celebration would consist of making a run to Barnes & Noble to use the 15%-off coupon they sent me in the mail as well as my preferred-customer 10% discount (OK, I’m Scottish, too), and that we would purchase a book about Ireland, BJ provided the perfect segue to our outing.
Man, that was a long sentence. The Irish are like that, you know.
Anyway, Doug dropped me at B&N so that I could preview a few selections while he went to a brief business meeting. When he found me a little while later, I must have been beaming. There I sat, a latte in one hand and one of those Ireland On A Whole Lot Of Bucks A Day books in the other.
Since my latte addiction may present a few pesky problems when we land on the auld sod, I was thrilled with what had just jumped off the page at me.
“Look, Doug, it says ‘coffee shop’!”
I pointed to the page, which had an oddly-placed picture right above the caption of a terribly run-down looking boat.
“Um, Katy,” he answered, “it says ‘coffin ship.’”
I really need to get over myself.
In The Name Of All That Is Holy, Especially St. Patrick…
Please, if you love me, don’t use the ill-begotten term “St. Patty.”
This year is the first year that I’ve noticed this on banners and ads and even, Saints Preserve Us, on greeting cards. There may be a Saint Patricia out there, and if there is and you want to give the old gal a nickname, then St. Patty would work just fine.
But Patrick was a man, and the nickname for Patrick is “Paddy.” In fact, Irishmen of all stripes are prone to being called “Paddy” in the same way my father and all his brothers when they emigrated to this country from Scotland were automatically nicknamed “Scotty.”
Just so we’re clear on this, “St. Pattie” won’t work, either. Unless you want to reduce my favorite saint of all time to ground chuck.
Have Mercy! And Erin Go Bragh!
