Spiritual Strength

We had been away from church for a month. We are Saturday evening mass goers, but there have been a variety of things happening on Saturdays between soccer and Chelle Summer. The hard part about being away from attending mass is that it’s so easy to get out of the routine that it then makes it hard to get back into it.

On Saturday afternoon, I wanted to keep working on the projects I was engaged in, but I knew we needed to go and it didn’t take me long to realize we were where were needed to be.

It wasn’t just about being the physical building– although as soon as I sat down in the pew I felt a sigh inside myself as in, “Thank goodness. I can rest.”

The usher quickly found us and asked us to bring up the gifts, something we regularly do, and I feel like is an extra blessing at mass. And then we received greetings from others.

However, there also has been some pain our church community over the past week or so- the unexpected death of a 31-year-old adult child and the death of an elderly father for another. Being there allowed us to express our condolences, let them know we are praying for them, and also to say an extra prayer for peace and love on the grief journey.

Yes, we were where we needed to be.

When church was closed for so long during the pandemic and then masks kept us from each other, it made it easier to stay separated, to send messages. But that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. We are meant to be there for each other. In person.

And I’m glad we were.

Peace in the Present

It’s so easy to get caught looking backward or forward, or a combination of both. Then when we wonder why we’re feeling bad– because we’re nostalgic for the past or wishing we were in the future where maybe things will be different. We don’t realize that our pain often comes from not rooting ourselves in the present.

I realize there are many people who believe the present is where their pain resides, however, we also have to remember that looking back we see things differently than they probably were and if we look forward, we’re looking toward things that haven’t happened yet and that can either be painful (our fear) or exhilarating (our hope for a better future). And so the vicious cycle begins– we look back, we look forward, and yet we don’t look around right where we’re at.

When I find myself anxious, maybe the worry that I missed a boat somewhere or the hope that I so badly want certain things to happen, I remind myself to stop and look around, to see where I’m at in that particular moment. That’s when I find a wave of peace and the anxiety retreats like an ocean wave.

It’s easy to look past what’s right there, the beauty of our surroundings or the people we’re with. Nothing is ever perfect, but we should always grasp the present moment. After all, soon it will be in the past, too.

The Choice to Move Forward

While there are a great many lessons that came from the suicide of my younger sister Denise, probably the most profound one was that I couldn’t stop living my life because she had died.

I was twenty-one when she died and when I would speak, I always said that before her death the world was my oyster. I knew I was bound for greater things than even I could see in front of me. But after she ended her life, I felt like the oyster shell had slammed shut on me. The key was I had to figure out how to push it back open, to see the open road and everything beyond that hill in front of me again.

In meeting people in the thirty years since Denise died, I have encountered countless people who have chosen not to move forward. These are people stuck in their grief, stuck in the pain, and many times refusing to budge from where they are. I wasn’t going to be one of them.

I have always known that I can’t change the past which means I also can’t bring my sister back. And when she died, I was twenty-one, I had a long life ahead of me. I wasn’t going to be destroyed by the loss. Life is short (Where have these thirty years gone? Heck, where has October gone?).

That’s not to say it was easy as it wasn’t and some days it still isn’t. As our world continues to evolve, and not necessarily in good ways it seems lately, I have to really reach inside myself and remember that I pried that oyster shell open once and I can do it again. Yet I also don’t want to have do to it again so instead I look up and ahead of me. I look at the view. I see the hope. I see the vista that stretches for miles.

And I remember that’s why I continue to forge forward.

Greeting the Day

It’s Monday morning as I write this and I can’t think of anything better than starting a new week with a sunrise like this one. I freely admit that I don’t jump out of bed in the morning, yet there is something about starting a new day before the sun comes up that makes it worth it to get up early.

Once I was doing a workshop outside Phoenix with a group of Navajos. It was a two-day workshop and on the second morning when I went for a run, I encountered one of the attendees on his way back (I was on my way out). He told me later that they have been taught to greet the day with their steps.

I always think of this- whether I’m out running in the early morning hours of the day or swimming as the sun is coming up. There is something to be said for starting a new day with steps or a swim, some kind of movement.

I was thinking this morning how easy it would have been to sleep in and miss this beautiful show by Mother Nature. It’s worth the effort to drag myself out of bed and into my running shoes. It’s the best way to greet a new day, to see hope in the possibilities ahead, no matter what happened the day before.

Time vs. Process

We’ve all heard it– time heals all wounds.

If only it were true.

In all years my speaking with people after loss, particularly suicide loss, there have been those who had lost a loved one long before I had and their pain was much greater than mine. If it were true that time heals all wounds, they would have been leaps and bounds ahead of me. Instead, often they had been told to stuff their grief (mostly because it was suicide) into the back of the cabinet and move on.

Watching that pain was an integral reason why I worked so hard to process the loss of my sister, my parents, of my divorce, and the countless other losses that have happened in my life. When people ask how I was able to meet Greg and marry him and have such a good marriage, I tell them it’s because I did the work.

I trudged through the incoming surf and darkness like in the photo of the temple in Bali above. It wasn't pleasant ever and I hated every stupid minute of it, but I knew that if I wanted to go forward, it was what I had to do.

The processing road is rocky, but if you choose to stand still and simply look at it, things might get better for a time, but they’ll come back and eat away at you in a bigger, more painful way. It’s better to push yourself forward. You’ll find that sunshine, you’ll find the rainbow.

You’ll find the happiness. I know because I was there and I found it myself.

The Story Changes

I spoke at the high school where Greg teaches at two health classes a week ago. It had been some years since I’d spoken at a high school and I worried about how to tell the story of Denise's suicide, now thirty years in my rearview, to students who are fourteen/fifteen, two lifetimes for them removed from it happening.

But as I began to speak and weave parts of her story leading up to her death as well as the immediate aftermath for us, something struck me– how much the story has changed in those thirty years.

I first spoke at schools about three years after she had died, maybe less than that. Comparing it to having thirty years of happenings to share, I wondered how I filled the time previously. But I spoke in more detail about the events leading up to her death and the immediate aftermath. Those are the very things that I now weave into the story, more sidebars to other parts of what I share.

When I was living back in Naperville after my divorce and not long before I moved back to Albuquerque, my high school health teacher, Mazz, asked me to speak at his advanced health classes (there were two). Even then (now more than ten years ago), I worried what I could say that might inspire them.

After I finished speaking, a girl came up to me and told me how much she appreciated my story because they were all seniors getting ready to graduate and hearing all that I had been through made them see, “That no matter what we go through, we’ll be okay.”

I had been so focused on working through my challenges that I didn’t see how they could help others. Now it’s time to share how I made it happen.

The Depths of Grief

This is what grief looked like when Denise died by suicide in 1993. This photo was taken by Pamela Joye on the University of New Mexico campus some years ago for me and when I recently saw it, I realized how much it personifies my grief experience. The path is there, yet I couldn’t see it.

There were no thoughts of telling Denise’s story in that time– I’ll explain how that came about in the weeks ahead– it was all about finding a way forward. And that’s what any grief journey should be, about delving into our pain because that’s how we do find our way out of it, our way forward, our way back to finding meaning and everything else that makes life worth living. It’s also how we find love again.

When Denise died in 1993, there was no Google to search for information on what the suicide bereavement journey would look like. The books available were very limited. And there weren’t a whole lot of support groups either. It was much more difficult to connect with people who had similar experiences; we had to rely on each other in our families where each of us told a different story because we had a different relationship with our loved ones who died. And friends who wanted to help us but didn’t know how.

I heard Garth Brooks on the radio not long ago, when I was driving home from my morning swim at the gym pool. It had been a long time since I’d listened to his music and I thought I’d tune up some on a run. For the first time in a long time, I felt myself take a trip back in time to my own initial grief journey after Denise died.

“What She Doing Now” came on and I remembered running through the snow in Muncie, Indiana, where I was a college student at Ball State University when Denise died. It was the next winter, my senior year, and I had to stop. The pain was so great, I just couldn’t move forward anymore in that moment. I don’t know how long I stayed there; somehow I found it inside me to keep going and return home, but that moment sticks out to me of what grief was like. You go forward, the world turns, daybreak comes, sunset comes, it starts all over again. Somehow you keep putting one foot in front of the other.

You don’t stop missing your loved one. You feel guilty laughing for the first time, for experiencing things without them (although you know it makes no sense because they aren’t alive now). Somehow, somewhere, I found that strength. Then sometimes I had to rest, but with rest comes strength again. And with strength comes movement forward, getting stronger each time.

"Route 66 Dreams" Inspiration

Choosing What to Share

I spent a good part of yesterday working on two paintings (when I wasn't folding laundry and that I did because Greg was gratefully painting the trim on the outside of the house so I didn't think it was fair that he did that and fold the laundry). At some point I took a break from painting and I picked up my phone to check social media. But before I hit the button to take it out of sleep mode, I looked at the phone, wondered if I really needed to look at anything, and ended up putting it back on the counter where I had left it previously. Then I returned to my painting.

I am the first to admit that social media has played a huge part of taking my messages forward, particularly in my days working to help the suicide bereaved. I realize that if you lost someone to suicide today, you will have a drastically different experience than me because you can easily connect to people via the internet whereas it took me years to find other bereaved siblings. And now my messages have changed to sharing how I've moved forward through my losses by using my creativity, at least the visually creative aspects of my life (sewing, painting, cooking, etc).

However, I also know there is a line for me of what I choose to share, when I choose to share it, and how much time I spend looking at it.

While it might seem that what I create visually is how I spend the bulk of my time, the reality is that my writing is still what's most important to me. It obviously takes longer for me to share that so in the meantime (as I wrote about balancing goals last week), I share the visually creative items. I also found out in my early Facebook years that if I shared what I was writing, I never finished it.

I stopped talking about my writing because I realized it was something I have to keep to myself until it's completed. Most people in my daily circle of life don't know what I'm working on for the same reason. And yet there are many times I so badly want to share things but I know the time isn't right so I let it go (and probably post a photo of Lilly instead!).

When I went for my last spiritual direction visit with Fr. Gene, at the Norbertine Abbey here, one of things I told him was how I find that I'm not supposed to always share the journey that I'm on, that instead I'm supposed to wait until it's over when I can look back at the road and reflect more on it. It's only then that I can see what it is about my journey that would be most meaningful for others to read about.

And in that same vein, the Wall Street Journal recently published an article about letter writing. One line stood out for me where the woman said that even though we seemingly share more of our lives by constantly posting on social media, we aren't really sharing of ourselves like we did writing letters.

Writing letters was one way that I honed my writing skills early and now I'm finding that as I've pulled back in sharing some aspects of my journey, they are instead finding places in my manuscripts. Once again, it's about balance and deciding what I should share now and what I should save for later, to be shared in another way as part of a bigger project.

Welcome to Chelle Summer!

After years of of a variety of web sites, we have merged all my work into one place. 

Chelle Summer.

Here you'll find links to my books (and there are more of those to come!), the inspiring blogs I'm known for, recipes from Chef Chelle, and– soon– a store for the Chelle Summer bucket bags and tote bags.

The focus of Chelle Summer is also the idea of bringing together what inspires me and sharing that with you and the world. After spending many years helping people through grief and loss, my concentration has turned to living the creative and inspiring life I have dreamed of. And by living it, I'm showing that despite whatever happens to you, you can go forward and have a great life.

You'll find links to social media where I often share the items that inspire me or what I create. And of course the awesome photography of Pamela Joye (who also built this site). 

Take a look around. Pull up a chair and stay awhile. Connect with us on social media.

And get ready for what's next. First up? The Chelle Summer store, of course.