Today, August 16, 2014, marks the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of a woman I never met, my mother-in-law, Nina Barkus. That event, combined with the death of my father almost one year earlier, sparked the meeting, the love affair, and subsequent twenty-six years of marriage (so far) between my wife and I.

This is for her and her mother (mam), Nina Barkus.

Grief changes a person. Grief, along with it’s drinking buddies: pain, shame, anger, betrayal – they have a way of reducing a person to his most elemental place, her lowest common denominator. A human being stripped to that bare minimum of barely surviving/survivable raw material. It can push us to become someone we don’t even recognize.

Like a persistent toothache on steroids comes grief; some unimaginable carnivore of light, a predator of hope. It is no respecter of persons. It makes its entrance like a bull in a china shop, impolitely and destructively unexpected. All one can do is stand by, hide somewhere they think to be safe from the onslaught, and observe the damage unfolding before them.

Grief is shameless. It cares not how it comes, undressed and brazenly free of restraint. Like being forced to watch one’s own daughter perform a pole dance, grief strips itself and its participants to places well beyond their own humanity, well below self-defined limits of propriety. It can haunt our conscience as much as our consciousness.

Grief is the chameleon of human experience. It lays in the center of our lives, taking the shape of its container, the color of its environment, so that it becomes maddeningly insouciant, invisible to either scrutiny or even identification. Once identified it shape-shifts again, leaving us now both to grieve and shrink from the exhausting process it is in the first place. It is the never-ending injury to its own insult.

Unlike hope, which, like water, undergirds our elusive oil refusing to mix with the more delicate undergrowth, grief kneads itself into the dough of our lives, leaving us to bloat and swell but with no vision of what might arise in its place. It is a ruthless bully, intent on bruising the softest places where lasting scars are most likely.

Grief most often accompanies a death: of a loved one, a lover, friendships, self-confidence – the list is long. It offers little other than the ominous sense that someone is watching from the shadows, leaving us unnerved as we fumble for the car keys. Just when it seems we’re safely inside, a hand grabs us from behind, refusing us the safety of ‘elsewhere.’ We do not run from it. It runs to us. We do not hide from grief because we end up hiding right behind it. Grief hears our labored breathing every time and quickly finds us out.

Grief is the Goliath of our inner experience. It stands, boasting and blethering on impudently as we soil ourselves before its not inconsiderable size and bully demeanor. “It has killed others greater than I”, we say, as we look way up to find the faceless monster bearing down in full strength upon our pitiable frame.

One could speak as well of the pitiful awakening to one’s own flawed behaviors; ways of seeing things that hurt others and oneself. Poured on top of this kind of grief is the scalding gravy of shame. It is perhaps the worst grief of all since it is often accompanied by a raking internal self-awareness of the negative kind that is seldom polite and never constructive. In fact, it generally becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nothing shapes our grief quite like the knowledge that we may have been the cause of it in another. It has a baldness about it, a merciless fait accompli that, if not well discerned and graciously attended to, becomes our very demise. It flattens the soul, kicking the air out of our spiritual gut in ways we never thought possible.

Having lost my father and both in-laws to cancer (among any number of friends and colleagues) I can confidently attest to the groaning maw of emptiness that accompanies such an ignominious demise. ‘Tis true faith indeed to smile into the great oblivion, unfairly bestowed, and sing.

Well, that was dark, one might fairly say. And they’d be correct. Is there any corrective?

Indeed there is. Having one’s heaviest grief tossed into the lap of another, whose measure of personal pain could never be fully known, but whose faith, unflinching; whose love, unwavering, produces the only known antidote: hope. Grief, be gone, for (s)he who has hope, has everything.

And that hope has a name…

May 14. Our Anniversary. This time last year I posted the most popular piece this blog has ever seen. Thank you. This year, it’s my wife’s turn. After all, she’s more the real deal than I’ll ever be, as writer…and human. To wit…

Our epic romantic comedy begins in a High School English Class in 1982, when I (possibly the inspiration for Bridget Jones but with more klutz and better hair) switch high schools in my last semester. The English teacher reads a poem by one of her past students. The best she’s ever had. (A rumour persists that the student and the teacher did indeed ‘have’ each other, but it was unfounded). This former student’s sister sits in front of me in the class. She winces at the mention of her brother for she had endured comparisons throughout her public school career.

The quality of writing in this geo-political poem, something about beavers and eagles, leaves me completely gobsmacked. My 17 year old self thought I had some writing talent, not stellar, but better than average. How could someone my age possess such staggering talent? I dip my toes in the Sea of Self Defeat, a place I would later wade and nearly drown. How many days or weeks it was between the time I hear that poem and then sit with my parents on the sofa, just before graduating from high school, to be informed of my mother’s colon cancer, I can’t recall with accuracy.

Four years later, after a recent break up with one of the many Johns I dated, (the last had a thing for blondes) my Pastor tells me about a student of his in a music class at college, Rob. Not long after, said music student shows up to our church (enter Bridget Jones’ misunderstanding scene): with his fiancée! Who is blonde! Chatting with her, she is pleasant. And, I discover they attend my BFF’s church where BFF’s father is the Vicar.

While away at college, I learn through a letter from BFF that Rob has called off his wedding to blonde fiancée. As BFF and Rob are both much better musicians than me, I ask if she is interested in him. “No,” she says, “He’s a player.” (As it turns out, BFF has confused one girl, different hats). The important point to note is that I hold very firm opinions on country music, camo fabric, animal prints, and players.

One evening, I am out at a mystery supper at BFF’s church. Rob attends. Alone. He, BFF and I carpool between dinner locations. I find him engaging and witty. My mother is weeks away from losing her battle with cancer and I had great need of ‘witty’. I remind myself frequently that he is a player, and his new GF is a student, NON-BLONDE, opera singer. When he learns my mother is dying of cancer, he hands me his phone number with an offer of mutually consoling conversation. “My father recently died of cancer. I understand this. If you ever want to talk….” I am touched, but will never call, because, say it with me, ‘he is a player.’

We discover our cars are parked beside each other and, what started as a quick goodbye, ends as a thirty-minute conversation about the ‘c’ word. And, we share what it is like to be 22 and watch a parent die. Though all of my friends have tried to be compassionate, he is the first person who actually understands what I feel. A bond was forming. The next day I tell my mother how much fun I had the night before and she is pleased. Two weeks later, at my mother’s funeral, BFF tells me, “one day, I know God is going to bless your socks off and good will come from this.”

I adjust, (not well), to attending University in Calgary, and grief. I develop a few crushes to provide minor distractions from my grief. A snowy November evening, several of us decide to go out for cheesecake. We carpool. (Who knew we were so green in 1986)? Suddenly the car door opens and BFF pushes me onto the icy pavement. “Rob needs someone to carpool with him.” Frankly, at this point, my interest in Rob is strictly platonic. I have two other crushes on the burner. We chat non-stop, and I became more fascinated with him as the evening goes on, especially when he tells me how he ended up in jail after a rock concert. A few years previous, that might have been me. I discover once again, that we both possess a saucy, British sense of humour that plays off each other well. Rob, I later learn, kept thinking, ‘damn, she’s funny, I wish demure, Christian, opera singer girlfriend was more like Rae.”

Painful days ensue in my grief process prior to my first Christmas without Mam. December 28, at my little Baptist church, I‘m surprised to see Rob. I’m even more surprised to learn he is going to be doing a choir practicum over the next several months. Things are looking up.

That evening, a large group of friends diminishes to six. Only Rob and I are left and briefly discuss our experiences with grief. Then, to my utter disbelief, he tells the group how he wishes opera singer GF wasn’t so perfect. “Why can’t she trip, spill, fart, or drop something? Maybe speak stupid words at the wrong time?” No man, and I repeat, no man, has EVER stated these as desirable qualities in a woman!

Fast forward several months. Rob has ended relationship with Opera Singer GF, and we have developed a sweet friendship that has slowly blossomed into a romance. The first time I am at his mother’s house, we are standing in the living room and I see a family picture over a piano. “I know that girl,” I say, unsure of where I have seen his sister. He tells me her name.

“YOU, it was YOU, who wrote the geo-political poem about the beaver and the eagle?!” I am, again, gobsmacked. Five years later, I still remember not just the poem, but how impressed I was with the writing. A year later, at our wedding, we pay tribute to the parents we lost to cancer. When I return to my seat, BFF has tears in her eyes, “I told you God was going to bless your socks off!”

2012. Twenty-four swashbuckling, adventurous years of marriage filled with many epic misunderstandings, juicy secrets, a rinse-repeat of colon cancer, this time with my father, and two handsome, talented sons later, I turn my back on the Sea of Self-Defeat. I remember my love for writing, and I begin writing a novel. Frankly, our romance had waned, and writing a handsome hero is like having an affair, without the mess! But as I rediscover my love for writing, I also rediscover my love for Rob. I have always been in awe of his many talents, but perhaps he needed to hear me say it again. He listens patiently as I read chapters aloud. We start acting out characters and scenes (mmmm), one of which lands me in the hospital with a dislocated kneecap after trying to demonstrate spy ‘gravity grips!’

Today is our 26^th Wedding Anniversary. I am still deeply moved by his writing. I am more moved by him. And he is, without doubt, the funniest man I know and the best I’ve ever had. If we’re unavailable, we are probably rehearsing a scene.