What Comes Through The Door
by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Editor’s Note:  Cawthorne Crafton, is an Episcopal priest, spiritual director and author of many books, including Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet as well as the celebrated Almost Daily eMo. She was rector of St. Clement's Church in Manhattan's Theatre district. She was also a chaplain on the waterfront of New York, and served both historic Trinity Church, Wall Street and St. John's Church in Greenwich Village. She was a chaplain at Ground Zero during the recovery effort after the WTC bombing.

An actress, director and producer, she has worked for many years in combining the lively arts and the life of faith. Her books, articles, and radio scripts have won many awards, including numerous Polly Bond Awards from Episcopal Communicators and the coveted Gabriel Award for religious broadcasting. She is seen frequently on television both as a preacher and as a commentator on Hallmark's "New Morning" and "America at Worship," and has been profiled extensively in electronic and print media throughout the world.

Barbara Crafton is married to Richard Quaintance, sometimes better known simply as "Q", a professor of English literature. She has two children and two grandchildren.

Sometimes work is the only thing I can do, and I can’t seem to stop doing it. There’s something hamsterlike about me at those times: working, working, working but, at the same time, seeming not to accomplish much of anything. But not today; I seem to have used up all my consciousness, along with all the tissue in the house. I can't seem to lift even one thought. Frustrating—I mean, it would be frustrating, but frustration takes energy, and I can't seem to sustain a head of it for very long. I used to imagine that the cognitive part of my brain stood alone—what difference should my threadbare feelings make in how I think? But no again. A sad-to-indifferent brain can’t think right. Mine is either too fast or too slow. I must be missing a gear.

But I can play computer solitaire. It's a great way to avoid writing and a lot of other stuff, too. I have heard that some businesses block the games function on their company computers. Hah! Anybody with a smart phone can find his way around that. I lie on the bed with my eyes half shut, hearing the satisfying ding when I land something up on top with the aces, the efficient shuffle when a new hand is dealt, savoring the thrill—electric each time—when I win and all the cards come cascading down in a congratulatory leap over the net to shake my hand. Sweet. So I do it again and again and again. Something hamster-like in that too, come to think of it. Maybe depression makes you change species. Maybe all the hamsters in the world used to be people who didn’t take their meds.

Look at this, I said to my husband as he came back to bed after getting up in the night. The two sleeping cats were entwined around each other, a dark heap of fur against the white sheets. As always, they had arranged themselves carefully perpendicular to us, so that they took up half the king-sized bed. The part remaining to Q and me gives each of us about as much mattress width as we enjoyed in our cribs as babies.

Q gave the pile of cats a shove away from the middle of the bed. One of them croaked a quiet reproach and went back to sleep. You could use that extra pillow as a barrier, Q told me, climbing back under the covers. Set it on your left side. Block them.

Yeah, I said. But it was too late. I was awake, and thoughts of things left undone had begun to stir. I would get up and do something about some of them.

This is so familiar: big ideas, great ideas. I am so good at ideas. Amazing possibilities appear in my mind full-blown: I see them completely, just as they will be when they are finished. They are irresistable. I am putty in their hands. It has always been this way.

But ideas don't appear full-blown in the real world. In the real world, ideas require execution. I experience this as a personal affront. I want the world to be like a printer, only three-dimensional: I send it the idea and it emerges in flesh, just as I imagined it. Never again would a great idea be hostage to my ennui: I would think things into being. Why not? You can do it with an image on a piece of paper—why not with a batch of seven hundred cookies? I'll bet they're working on it right now. I can't wait. Let there be light, God said, and there it was. And the six days unfolded: water and land, the sun and the moon, plants and animals. People. Out of God's imagination things came to be. However long a "day" really was, and however it happened, there it all was.

But no, yet again. You can’t pull real work out of a magical 3-D printer. You have to do it. I begin to slog through the execution part of my wonderful idea. Immediately it ebbs away, receding from me like the tide. It wasn’t a brilliant idea after all. Or maybe it was one, and I was just unable to hold onto it. Typical, a cruel voice within me sneers. And now I am awake, not rested enough to do the day ahead, too awake to go back to sleep. A familiar dread of the coming day fills me: I need to be awake and alert. I am with people at important times. People need me to be strong, a person of faith when they don’t have any faith, a person whose faith they can borrow when they run out. People think I am strong—guess they don’t know me very well.

I have not been in the office five minutes before the first one calls. For the first few words of her greeting, the woman's voice is calm and businesslike until she gets to the reason for her call. Then her voice breaks. The first few times you must use the word "died" to talk about your own mother are usually that way. It's hard to get the words out. Hard to speak the new reality out loud.

This is true even if you've not lived at home for years and years. Even if it has been decades since you needed your mother for any concrete help. Even if, as was the case for my caller, it is your mother who has been the one in need of help for some time now. Even if, as was the case for my caller, your mother has long since ceased to be the woman who raised you, long ago lost her mooring in time and place.

"The unthinkable," is how a friend described his mother’s impending death. I could hear the unthinkable in my caller's voice, too, and I remember it well. How can my mother be dead? How can that word have anything to do with her? I remember feeling as if the world could not go on if she were not in it.

It does, of course. Sooner or later, the world goes on without all of us. It even becomes beloved again, beloved and loving—although we find ourselves charged with a more central role in making it so. When our mothers die, we must mother ourselves.

When our parents die, we sweep together all of our history, look carefully all around to make sure not a scrap of it is lost. People become interested in genealogy, often, at this moment in their lives, casting back into the memory of the wider world to find the succession of birth, love and loss that brought them to the place where they are now privileged to sojourn. It has not seemed particularly important before. But then, life seemed longer before. Now, the living link to the past is gone.

Ah, me. How many times has this utterly normal sorrow has come through my door, after all these years—utterly normal, but so unexpectedly cataclysmic? How many families? How many mothers and how many grown children, stunned and orphaned, surprised at how orphaned they feel? And over this confusing landscape of sudden loneliness, the priest presides, summoning one more teaspoon of steady presence to offer. Like the lawyer, sort of: steady, methodical, knowing what to do when the ones who come don’t know what to do. Your training kicks in: again and again, you are able to do for others what you cannot do for yourself.

Ah, me.