Dylan Stafford

Green Sky, Blue Grass: #1

We all get numbers in life.

My numbers were always one and three. I got one when I arrived as the first-born child of Ginny and Jack Stafford. Mom and Dad had two more children and I got my other number, three, as in oldest of three.

And those were always my numbers, one and three. Dylan, Lisa and Jon were the three kids of Ginny and Jack.

And now my sister Lisa has passed away, unexpectedly, too young and too soon.

My brother and I are two now.

With Lisa, we have always been three.

Two? Two is not right. Two not the way life was supposed to go.

Green Sky.

Blue Grass.

It’s not supposed to be this way.

* * * * *

 

If I just be patient, she’ll figure it out.

That was what I told myself the last few years. If I could learn to accept and to be patient and to trust the universe, then sooner or later, my sister Lisa was going to find a way to live that worked for her. That is what I said to myself.

But that is not how it went.

On May 19, 2016, my sister Lisa passed away. She was only 44 years old.

Did she die too soon? Or was it a miracle she lived as long as she did?

Yes.

Yes to both.

BODY

For a decade, my sister wrestled with health challenges, with long-term chronic pain.

What was it like for her, to have her body cease to support her?

Lisa was incredibly resourceful, a natural researcher with access to the Internet and a librarian’s curiosity, she could always find out things through dogged persistence. She would figure it out, I always thought. She would hang in there and somehow she’d put together a life that worked for her body.

MIND

For longer, for maybe her whole life, Lisa also wrestled with her thoughts. Growing up, I thought she was moody, that her highs and lows could be a tad higher and a tad lower.

Did she have a diagnosis? Was she “something?” Did she have a doctor-prescribed label? I don’t actually know.

She was smart, my sister Lisa. She may have had an actual mental something, but I never heard it officially, only tangentially.

Her mind was not her trusted friend. Whatever diagnosis she did or didn’t have, there was an element of her mind that wasn’t her friend.

After losing her, I look and I think that her body failed her and that her mind was treacherous for her at times. And then I wonder, What about her spirit?

SPIRIT

Her spirit: What about that?

Her spirit was constant. That deep core of her was constant. That deep center that I knew from our shared childhood and teen-age years, through twenties and thirties, and for four of her forties, that spiritual core was steady as she goes.

Lisa loved family, music and animals.

Lisa loved laughing, driving and talking.

Lisa loved color, clothing and creativity.

Those things that Lisa loved were an expression of her deep inside–made manifest on the outside–of her spirit. To me it was like Lisa had deeper roots, that she pulled nutrients out of the soil that I couldn’t reach.

Lisa had an antenna for life that picked up channels most people didn’t receive. She was perceptive. She noticed nuances. Where I might possibly hear the trumpet, she was listening to the entire orchestra.

Lisa was an English major in college. She loved language. She loved interpretation and subtlety. She loved to refer to her OED, her Oxford English Dictionary, as if it were a friend she could talk to, as in, “I’ll just go ask my OED.”

Lisa loved that both of her grandmothers appreciated poetry. Her love of music grasped the poetry of the lyrics. She collected gigabytes of classic rock and studied the rhymes and reasons of the songwriters.

Lisa’s intelligence and her words and her language meant she was difficult to debate. She’d stake a position and build a case and good luck getting her to move. It took me a long time to realize that everything she stated wasn’t automatically “the way it was” because she was so convincing.

GIFT

So I have memories of Lisa now, of her body and her mind and her spirit.

Thank God for memories.

But Lisa did something else that is much more than a memory. Lisa gave me a gift that gives me strength to live and laugh and smile and love, every single day. Lisa gave me the greatest gift of my life, and it was her spirit that opened the door.

SPIRIT TWO

Over several months, from the end of 2000 and into 2001, Lisa took me to “open” twelve-step meetings in Ft. Worth, Texas. She was in a chapter where she was creating her life free of “chemicals that affect you from the neck up.” She invited me to go to these 12-step meetings with her. And I went, to support her.

I had some time on my hands.

For the fall of 2000 I was taking a leave of absence from my company Siemens. I’d been in Munich, Germany, on a fancy international assignment from 1997-2000. I had returned home to the US and asked for some time off to “figure out what I wanted to do next in my career.” It also turned out that my girlfriend and I were breaking up, but I didn’t know that yet.

If you hang around the barbershop long enough, you might get a haircut.

And

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Twelve-step meetings are a world of language unto themselves. The stories, the personalities, the clichés and principles all swirl around in the cracked-vessel, God-given chaos that offers hope and life to people who’ve lost at living life on life’s terms.

Nobody comes into 12-step work riding high, with a brand new car and an awesome career, the spouse and the kids all shiny and perfect.

More often a 12-step meeting is the last house on the block, the last option. To a newcomer it is like finding the only porch with a light on, but it’s a small 30-watt bulb hanging on a bare wire, barely visible from the cold street. But it is something. And it is something spiritual.

At least it was for me.

But remember me, the one who might barely hear a trumpet? How would I ever see that small 30-watt bulb? It was Lisa’s antenna that picked up the signal. Without Lisa, I would have missed the 30-watt light, missed the porch all together.

But this was a unique pause in my life, this fall of 2000.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

The student was me.

The teacher was my kid sister Lisa.

She took my hand, the hand of her proud big brother, and she guided me.

After four months of open 12-step meetings, of free coffee and funny stories of bank robbers and home-wreckers and all the chaos of people learning to live in recovery, my sister Lisa asked me one Sunday night in the car, “Dylan, do you think you might be an alcoholic?”

It was a shock.

There I was, four months in the waiting chair at the barbershop, but when they asked me if I was ready for a haircut it was still a surprise.

And Lisa was the only person on the planet who could have gotten me into that barbershop, and then posed that question.

No one else could have coaxed me to go to 12-step meetings. Without my sister Lisa, I would have gathered my ego, licked my wounds, jumped back into my career and powered ahead, building a life without a foundation. And I’d have built too big, and it would have crumbled. But Lisa bypassed that; Lisa’s gentle hand led me to sobriety at least a decade early; She saved me a decade of self-inflicted pain.

All her love and language and the gentle warrior she could be, I was the beneficiary of that. I was a proud, first-born Texas son with two degrees who spoke three languages. And I distinctly remember thinking, sitting in the car with Lisa, shocked at her question, I remember my brain formulating this thought, “An alcoholic? Me? There’s no space on my resume for that!”

Looks like a duck, probably a duck.

Lisa pricked the balloon of my pride.

On the outside my life still looked like it was working, but on the inside it wasn’t.

I was almost a decade older than my mom and dad had been when they’d married, but I couldn’t make a relationship with a woman work. I was disappointed in myself but I couldn’t see that I was my own problem.

Lisa could see that even though I couldn’t.

Sometimes the person who brings you to sobriety is called “your Eskimo,” as in the person who brought you out of the cold. The person who brings you to sobriety is a big person. That person is a hero. That person has the courage to tell you to your face to look at yourself. And that is no easy conversation.

That person is a spiritual giant.

That is what I honor in my sister Lisa.

Her spirit.

It was her spirit, her center, her deep generous love of family and poetry and life in all its goodness that guided her to guide me.

So here I am now, living life without my kid sister Lisa. With my brother Jon, I’m a two now instead of a three. For the rest of my life I will live without seeing Lisa, without talking to her, without hearing her laugh and seeing her smile. That is what is absent, her body and her presence.

But her spirit is alive and well.

Her spirit is what I get to honor as I keep walking the spiritual path that she gifted to me, a day at a time. Her spirit isn’t only a memory. It is because of Lisa that I have a foundation to be a decent husband, a tender father, to be employable; None of that is a memory; All of that is Lisa’s spirit living still. It’s her gift. Her spirit is alive and well. I see Lisa in clouds, floating and changing and watching over me.

Thank you God, for my sister Lisa. Welcome her into the light of your face. Thank you for the gift of 44 years of being her big brother. Thank you for her generosity of spirit.

Amen.