Using Stories in the Grieving Process

We took in a stray cat several months ago and named her Juliet.  Actually, it turned out we took in three cats, because she was already expecting.  My granddaughter, seven year old Kayleigh, immediately claimed her as her own.  She took her to bed at night, fed  her, played with her and loved her.  She even cleaned out the kitty litter.  When the mama cat was ready to deliver the babies, she delivered the first one in Kayleigh’s hair in the middle of the night.  Now, that’s a bonding experience.

We usually kept Juliet in the house, but one night she ran out the front door.  If you’ve ever owned a cat, you know you don’t coax a cat home if she’s not willing.  We kept opening the door and calling to her, but finally had to go to bed, hoping she’d come back when she was ready.

The next morning my husband left early before the sun came up, and there was our little Juliet, laying by the side of the road.  He said it was apparent she hadn’t suffered.  But our hearts hurt at the thought of having to tell Kayleigh.

Soon, I could hear Kayleigh’s footsteps upstairs as she anxiously ran around looking for Juliet, calling her name.  She came running into the kitchen: “Where’s Juliet?”  My daughter put her arms around her, and with lots of tears, told her what had happened.    

Kayleigh didn’t say anything, but ran into her bedroom where she drew a picture of Juliet lying on the foot of her bed, nursing her two little babies.  She glued it to a simple paper picture frame and hung it next to her bed.  There were tears on the picture.  Later in the day she created a little book by stapling some papers together.  The first picture was Juliet on the back patio when she found her. There was a drawing of the night the kitten was born in her hair.  And then came the hardest drawing of all–drawing a car with headlights and Juliet running towards it.  The final picture was out under the trees with the leaves falling all around where Juliet was buried.

Within a few days, Kayleigh’s dad came home from a deployment and the family moved back on the army base.  Dad said, “No more cats.”  He’s not heartless.  Just practical.  And Kayleigh became quiet and withdrawn. She continued to draw cats- hundreds and millions and billions of cats. But in the busy-ness of life and moving, the stories had stopped.   One day I suggested to her dad that he take time to ask Kayleigh to share the stories about Juliet and they started flooding out of her heart. She told him about the time Juliet left a ‘gift’ of a dead mouse on the basement floor.  And how, one time,  Juliet carried one of her baby kittens upside down-- by her bottom. She always told that story with a giggle.  And, of course, how the baby came to be born in her hair in the middle of the night.  And in so doing, once again moved along the process of healing a broken heart.

Kayleigh started smiling and laughing again.

Without the stories, raw emotions can be unbearable.  Stories help us sort through feelings and provide a means of releasing them.

Stories are a powerful heart-healer.

Thanksgiving and the Face of Evil

When we went to bed last night, my husband suggested we use one of our prayers to just thank God for our many blessings without asking for a single thing.

So I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for, and mingled up there at the top of my list which includes family, faith and health is my freedom. Which leads my thoughts to something I’ve been mulling over in my mind the last while.

We just finished another election and both sides are hurling accusations that the other side is ‘evil’.  Now, when I look at the word ‘evil’, I notice it is ‘live’ spelled backwards which pretty much sums up the problem with evil.  Evil is the opposite of live.   Instead of ‘living’, evil is about ‘dying’–dying hope, dying happiness, dying dreams.   Evil is a destructive force, not a creative force; it crushes spirits and suppresses energy.  But the question of the hour is, “What does the face of evil look like?”  Will I recognize it when I see it?

 For example, my daughter visited China awhile back and went to the tomb of Chairman Mao where she joined thousands of Chinese as they reverently filed past his remains.  She learned sometimes a hundred thousand people pass by in a single day.  How could this be?  Wasn’t the man ‘evil’?  Didn’t tens of millions of Chinese die under his brutal hand?  She carefully posed the question to a man next to her, who replied that, yes, many had died.  Mao had flaws.  But what he intended to do was good.  And for that the Chinese honored him.  I had previously read Mao’s own words.  He told the youth that as much as they thought their own fathers loved them, Mao loved them more.

I thought of other brutal dictators of the last century.  Hitler’s aim was for the ‘perfect society’.  He loved beautiful art, beautiful music, beautiful literature.  He was a gifted artist himself.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose, saw Lenin up close and personal.  She said he was a “sincere and extremely able man” who dedicated his life to the passionate belief that he could create a society where “insecurity, poverty, and economic inequality shall be impossible.”

How can that be ‘evil’?

I’ve read the writings of Karl Marx.  He had seen firsthand the brutal heartache of poverty.  What if a society could be created so there were no poor among us?  Specifically, what if a mother, now stooped over trying to scrape together a few crusts of bread to feed her starving children could turn her energies to pursuing art and literature?  Is that such an ‘evil’ desire?

And yet, in their passion to do ‘good’, they did the work of pure evil where hopes and dreams were crushed and millions of lives perished in the wake.

So it brings me back to the original question:  What is the line that separates the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’?  What does evil look like? We have many do-gooders among us, all vitally interested in our ‘best good’.  How do we sift the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’ before the damage is done and we experience the fallout of their good intentions?

And this is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m still applying the idea to  a variety of situations to see if the model works, and I ask you for your help in the experiment.  But so far I haven’t found an exception.   I believe the line separating good from evil comes down to the element of coercion or ‘force’.  You can have the most wonderful intentions in the world, but once you introduce the factor of force to the equation, you have turned those good intentions into evil.

Mao forced his ‘good’ ideas onto the Chinese people.  He destroyed their connections to the ideas of the past by destroying their antiquities and their books–he even had their grass and trees and flowers torn up and destroyed. He needed them to think like him.  He replaced what he destroyed with a little red book everyone was required to carry on their persons at all times and to study diligently.  How many of these ideas found in his little red book do you have a problem with?

“It is important for a country to retain modesty, and shun arrogance.”

“It is the duty of the Party to serve the people.  Without the people’s interests constantly at heart, their work is useless.”

“China’s road to modernization will be built on the principles of diligence and frugality.”

“A communist must be selfless.”

“The multiple burdens which women shoulder are to be eased.”

“In order to get rid of blindness . . . we must . . . learn the method of analysis .”

Hitler promoted motherhood and family. What can be ‘gooder’ than that?  He once said, ‘I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

And in the name of ‘goodness’, these men worked pure evil.

As Rose Wilder Lane summed it up: “The Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.”

Christianity is a tremendous power for good until it is ‘forced’ upon people.  The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Once Spain purged the country of all their perceived ‘evil’, the country died.

 Who would take issue with any of the five pillars of Islam?  They believe in worshiping one God and of praying to him daily; of taking care of the poor; of looking on all people as equal in the eyes of God; of self-restraint.  Yet, once those ideas are ‘forced’ upon people, as some radical  Muslims have taken upon themselves, does it not turn the good into evil?

So if force becomes the line where good crosses into evil, it makes me question the wisdom of things like  compulsory education where learning is forced, for example.   And it certainly makes me examine many of the ideas being put out there by government officials, federal and local, under a new lens.

Obviously the idea needs to be explored a lot more than this and I’ve gone on far too long for a beautiful Thanksgiving morning like today.  But I’ll continue mulling because I pray that next year and the year following and the year after that will still find me writing about my gratitude for being free.

I have a feeling the realization of that prayer may be tied into how many people recognize the face of ‘evil’ for what it truly is before our freedom is lost.