One of the many recipes that my Mom saved in her cookbook cupboard

Today, I am angry.

I am angry but I feel like I shouldn’t say that. It would be easier, more comfortable, to say that I’m sad. That’s true, too, and everyone understands sad, especially if you have recently lost a loved one. Anger, though, is ugly. There’s so much strife in the world already. Why would I want to bring out more?

Maybe it’d be better to talk about the things I’m grateful for. There is so much! I am grateful for the birds at the feeder outside. The fire blazing in the fireplace. My cozy home. This cup of hot tea. An encouraging text from one of my best friends.

Yes, so many beautiful, good things.

Except.

Grateful as I am, I can’t escape the fact that I am mad. Though it makes no sense, I am angry that my Mom had to die. I am also furious that my sister and I have to figure out what to do with all she left behind.

I want my Mom back. I want to walk through her kitchen door and have her sitting at the table, reading the paper and having coffee. I want to talk about the news with her, and have her tell me that avocados are on sale this week. I don’t want to look through all the drawers. I don’t want to have to touch every item in her five bedroom home to make sure we don’t miss something important. I don’t want to find the get well cards that my classmates sent me when I rode my bike down the hill and got a concussion in second grade. Or every single report card I ever had. Or the box of teeth and hair that was tucked away in a drawer. Whose teeth? Whose hair? No one knows.

I don’t want to figure out what to do with the walls of family portraits, my grandparents and their parents, looking young and happy. They are all dead and my Dad is dead and my Mama is dead and I live in a 900 square foot house that is already full. Of course, I know we can scan these beautiful photos. And we are lucky to have such lovely shots of those who went before. But there are so many of them, mostly professionally framed. I hate to dismantle them, but who has the wall space for these? And the terrible truth?  Even if I did have the wall space, I’m not sure I’d want to fill it with these portraits. They are important to me, but I don’t know if I want to see them everyday. Is that ungrateful of me?  Does that show a lack of respect for my ancestors?

Another small example of the sorting we have had to do: my Mom’s cookbook cupboard. She had dozens of cookbooks, some dating back to the 1950s. Also, there was a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings, probably nine inches high, all recipes that she had spent years collecting. Pumpkin bars and chili cheese casseroles and spicy Mexican nuts and apple crisp.   She hated throwing away her magazines without going through them first. I don’t know if she ever cooked any of these.

The dedication page from one of my Mom’s older cookbooks. The times have certainly changed!

We threw these in the trash.

I didn’t want to do this. But recipes aren’t what they used to be. Not with the internet, where you can Google anything and have 15 versions of it with reviews at your fingertips a moment later.  It was just another death, another good-bye, another small loss in a long parade of death and good-byes that won’t be ending anytime soon.

I hate this.

I am angry that my sweet Mama did not realize how emotionally devastating it would be for my sister and me to do this.  I remember her joking with us about it. Not recently. Not after she was sick. But years ago, when she was healthy. “I am leaving all of this for you!” she laughed.  I laughed too. I laughed because she was my Mom, and it was her house, and she loved her things and couldn’t throw anything away, and I loved her, and that day was far away. So far away that I stupidly didn’t think that it would ever arrive.

Except it did.

I know my Mom loved us and wouldn’t want us to feel this extra sadness on top of the sadness we already feel at her death.  But I do feel it; I do. Every time I say no to keeping something that she saved and loved, it feels like I am betraying her. That when we get rid of her things we are getting rid of her. Moving past her. Leaving her behind.

I don’t want to leave her behind.

I know this isn’t true. But this is one of the hardest things I have ever done. And there is still so much left to do.

Last night, I was snoozing on the couch, happily dozing through our latest episode of “The Good Place” on Hulu, when my husband said, “Oh no.”

This is never a good thing.

Those words, at night, after he had barely let the dog out for his nightly pit stop?  It usually means just one thing: skunk.

Actually, he didn’t need to say anything. The smell spoke for itself. Well, the smell and the dog flying through the door, jumping onto the footstool, and rolling around in a frantic attempt to de-skunk himself.

Needless to say, I woke up pretty quickly.

I grabbed Biscuit, held him at arm’s length, stumbled into the kitchen, threw the dirty dishes out of the sink with my free arm, turned on the water, and put him in, all while barking orders to the rest of my family: Google the de-skunking recipe! Gather the ingredients! Quick!

This was not Biscuit’s first evening encounter with a skunk. They are plentiful here where we live. I always try to have the magic de-skunking materials on hand: hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, dish soap. They are powerful together.  But this time, Biscuit had not just taken a glancing blow. He had gotten a full dose of skunk oil in his face. The yellow residue was around his mouth, nose, and eyes, making him foam at the mouth.  By the time we were done with bathing him, I felt like I’d had a skunk encounter, too.

The smell lingered. The smell permeated.  We wandered around the house, our noses pressed into random surfaces.  The couch cover? The throw blankets? The pillow covers? All needed washing. Also, everything I was wearing, and everything my husband was wearing.

I put out bowls of vinegar (a tip on Google for eradicating skunk smell from your home). We sprayed Febreze and air freshener, which mostly just made the house smell like cinnamon skunk. Finally, we went to bed, several hours after the initial attack.

This was not my favorite day.

The next day, we woke up to skunk. In my fantasy life, the overnight hours and the bowls of vinegar scattered around would have made everything better.  If anything, it seemed like the smell was worse.  Somehow, it made its way onto our lunch bags and computer bags. Onto the dirty dishes that I tossed out of the sink. Onto the clean dishes that were in the dish drainer.  Into the cupboard after I made the mistake of putting those dishes away.  Even onto my tea thermos, which had been in the dish drainer.  Out on the road, I took a nice sip of tea and might as well have kissed the skunk myself.  It was my favorite to-go cup– purple, and perfect, and so foul with skunkiness that I had my son throw it away when I dropped him off at school.

Now, as I write this, nearly two weeks have passed. The stink is basically gone, which I am so grateful for. It is funny the things that can make you crazily thankful, things like not smelling a skunk when you walk into your house. This is truly beautiful, but you don’t realize how beautiful until you have a close skunk encounter.

But this newfound gratitude? I don’t know if it was worth it. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it.  What good could possibly come from my dog getting blasted by a skunk right before bed?

Maybe I don’t have to answer that question. Maybe it’s not my job to figure all this out.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and my favorite theologian on the planet, reminds me that our dualistic minds constantly judge and categorize all our experiences,  quickly deciding if they are good or bad.  Rohr teaches that there is good in every seemingly bad experience, and bad in things that we immediately judge as good. My dualistic mind takes issue with this, because, clearly, skunk attacks are bad. Also bad?  My mother’s recent death by brain tumor, rotten meat, dirty diapers, stolen massage tables, a vomiting child in the middle of the night, dog bites that make you bleed when you have finally forced yourself out for a jog.

Also, since I am so skilled at making these judgments (a little sarcastic, I know) here are a few things that are undeniably good:  Olympic medals, winning the lottery, being discovered by Disney and having a hit television show, getting a perfect score on the SAT, winning the election, earning that Division I athletic scholarship, launching a blog that gets thousands of hits, writing a bestselling book.

Except, here is what I’ve learned for sure.

God is in the stink.

Yes, God is in the beautiful moments, too (or those moments that I judge as beautiful). But there’s no doubt that God is in the messes with us. God shows up to help wash the yellow skunk oil off Biscuit’s face at 10 pm when all I want to do is go to bed. God is with me in the dog bite, the death bed, by the graveside. God is in the botched Olympic performances and failed tests. God is in the losses and falls, in the skunk place and those places that I hate.

Blessing upon blessing. Stink upon stink.  Light and dark, dark and light. Sweet roses, cinnamon, vomit, skunk spray.  All are part of this beautiful world. It is my dualistic mind that judges.  If I can drop down deeper, into a non-dual space, then I can almost, almost welcome the skunk spray.  Or at least not judge it so quickly. It’s where God meets me.