This is what I like to do when I’m stressed.  Take a big heaping tablespoon of peanut butter and pour melted Hershey’s chocolate all over it.  And that’s so good, you can do it again, and again, until perhaps that’s all you’ve eaten for dinner and half the peanut butter jar is gone.  Or another one of my favorites is to bake a big batch of maccaronni and cheese with all the fat and butter and pull out a serving as big as a football.  Yeah, that’s a good one.  Or how about it this, eat not one, not two, but twelve oreo cookies, at the potluck gathering you’re having for friends and family -- because the oreos are  so small, your body won’t notice the calories, then walk by the brownies and eat one of those too, then notice that someone brought ice cream and while you’re at it you might as well serve up some of the cherry pie. Or how about this one, open a bottle of wine to have one glass, but then have two, and then go ahead and finish it off because no one likes leftover wine and why not, it’s almost gone.  That’s one of my favorites.  So is developing a general attitude of “I don’t give a flying flit,” that’s always healthy and helpful and great for building relationships as well as getting things done.  But probably not as much as much as giving in to a general feeling of ennui, depression, an overwhelming feeling of “eh...whatever.”  That’s good too.

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We’ve received so many nice condolence cards made out to our church, sharing our grief over George Shangrow’s untimely death.  Joan Dennehy at Findlay Street Christian Church, wrote “may you be lifted up as on Eagle’s wings.”  That was nice.  A nice word from Isaiah, she quoted.  Peter Ilgenfritz and Catherine Foote from University Congregational church, wrote us a card, and quoted John 11:25, “I am the resurrection and the life,” they reminded.  “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.”  I liked that.  Manny, the new pastor of University Baptist stopped me in the hall and said he was praying for us, that we would find peace, and hoped that we would, as a church community, “remember the words of Jesus -- ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  Let our hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”  That was good.

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Hospice of Oklahoma County wrote a letter to my family that we received three days before her memorial service last Saturday.  Standard. Form-letter.  We’re sorry for your loss. We were glad we could give your loved one care.  It was nice.  Stapled to the letter, affixed securely so as to not be lost, folded in with their condolences to us, was a list.  The list, you could tell, by its effort, was not to get mixed in the shuffle of cards, death certificates, insurance forms and other now processed plants that had given their life to proclaim my mother’s death -- the litter of paper now scattered across our dining room table.  The list, hospice wanted us to know, was simply titled “Normal Responses to Grief and Loss.”  Crying, it said, was normal after a loved one died.  So was a feeling of emptiness in the stomach and feeling restless, uneasy, difficulty concentrating.  Feeling as though this isn’t real, it’s a bad dream, and it

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