ROOM FOR THE ROCKS
A Widow Bit – June 21, 2009
By Mary Koch

            A friend who is active in numerous civic organizations, has abruptly resigned some significant posts. Life has a way of telling you, he explained, when it’s time to adjust priorities. That message may come in the form of illness, family disruptions, or in my case, two deaths – a husband and a mother – within 21 months of each other.

            I marveled, as I cared for my mother through her final weeks, at the peace I was experiencing. Of course there were sorrow and tears, the anticipation of loss. At the same time, there’s nothing like imminent death to heighten your appreciation of and appetite for life.  

            Having dinner with a friend one evening, I was silently pondering this unusual ease and calm in my soul.  Why don’t I feel this way when I’m at home, busy with all the things that fill my life, I wondered. As if reading my mind, my dinner mate told a story that I – and probably you – have heard before, about the professor who brings a quart jar full of rocks into his classroom.

            “Is the jar full?” he asks the class, and they agree it is. Then he pours pea gravel into the spaces between the rocks, and repeats the question. Now, the class agrees, the jar is certainly full. Then he pours in sand, which once again settles into unoccupied space. By now the class is suspicious, but they say, yes, the jar appears full. Finally, he fills the jar with water.

            I remembered the story, but I’d reached the wrong conclusion. The moral is not, my friend advised me, that there’s always room for more – that we can always pack more into our lives. The moral is, if we don’t put the rocks in the jar first, there won’t be space for them.

            When you have a seriously disabled husband and then a frail and dying mother, you don’t have to wonder, “What are the rocks in my jar?” Your life is full and meaningful. It’s not an easy life, but there is a peace in making someone you love feel comfortable and safe.

            After John died, fearing the space that had been filled by an enormous rock, I packed my quart jar to overflowing with gravel, sand and water. Perhaps that’s inevitable for some of us as we grieve – to fill that emptiness of  time and space. But water, sand and gravel cannot fill the emptiness of the soul. And so the jar appears full, but the substance – the content of our life – is lacking.

            At the risk of stretching this metaphor into something tiresome, the lesson I learned while caring for my mother is that it’s time for me to tip the jar, empty out at least some of the gravel, sand and water. I don’t know for sure what the new rock or rocks will be, but I do know I won’t have room for them unless there’s space in the jar.

A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN
A Widow Bit – June 7, 2009
By Mary Koch

            After we solemnly watched the earth being shoveled over the urn in its grave, after we sang the hymns Mother had requested, after we listened to scripture she had chosen, after we embraced long-absent friends – wondering if this would be our final visit with some, after the family gathered for food and favorite stories, after all that, it was time to deal with the stuff.

            It’s the stuff of life, the abundance of things we believe we need. My parents never had a lot. Dad was a minister; Mom a writer and teacher. They not only couldn’t afford much, they had to move their household every once in a while.

            Even so, by the time Mother died, she’d crammed 92 years worth of goods and memorabilia into a two-room apartment. We filled my nephew’s pickup, my sister’s capacious car (twice!), and my van. And still, there was enough stuff left for a non-profit group to hold an estate sale

            We’d begun the process by offering family members an opportunity to take whatever they needed or wanted. There were no squabbles – how to divide the so-called “estate” has been a long-running family joke.

            I was moved when my nephew, who earned his master’s degree just before his grandmother’s funeral, accepted the velvet-lined hood that she’d worn for her master’s ceremony at age 60.  I was intrigued when her great-grandson, a rock musician with all the requisite piercings and grim attire, chose a delicate, fluted candy dish which Mother (for reasons known only unto her) had filled with pine cones. And I’ll never forget the look of delight and awe on the face of a great-granddaughter when I pulled a bright red kimono from the wardrobe and handed it to her.

            Her mother, my niece Sandra, agreed to take on the Herculean chore of archiving boxes and boxes of family photos dating back to her great-grandmother’s albums.

            “Be ruthless,” Mother’s best friend Jean advised my sister-in-law Ericka as Ericka puzzled over what clothes to donate for the sale and what to toss.

            Ruthless was precisely how I felt as I sorted through Mother’s papers, discarding certificates and plaques attesting to her many achievements and awards, even a paper she’d saved from her student days, bearing an “A” grade and a handwritten note from the professor: “Rarely do I have an opportunity to read papers of this quality …”

            I kept her journals, boxes of them dating from 1931, which will join boxes of my husband’s journals and my own in my well-filled basement.

            Back home last night, I sat on the patio, sad but not depressed, alone but not lonely. A full moon danced a do-se-do with a line-up of dark clouds. When the clouds were in front, you could see a mysterious light leaking out around their edges – like walking at night past a lighted house with its curtains drawn. You know there are things going on inside.

            That’s all I know for sure about heaven – there’s something going on behind those dark clouds, where the light radiates.