Sally Quinn, reporter for the Washington Post, said during a speech that Josh heard something along the lines of this:

As women, we have learned that we can have it all, we just can’t do it all.

Your reaction? Discuss.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Today we held what Mr. Badger calls “the annual 5 Jews and a Catholic” tree trimming. This year, they were smarter and put up the lights BEFORE we arrived so they didn’t have two preschoolers screaming, “faster, Mr. Badger, faaaaaaaaaaaaster!” Apparently, screaming at someone while they are untangling yards and yards of lights is frazzling.

Possibly the best ornament is the one the ChickieNob made. It was rather phallic. Unfortunately, what you can’t see from this photo is that the tree branch is poking out of the paper directly above two circles and a bunch of squiggles that strongly resemble a scrotal sac.

The joy of Christmas–two Jews and a tree

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

Good activity
Read through a year of your posts
And choose the best one

—Melissa

I was trying to come up with a good poetic form for this reminder for the Creme de la Creme list. I considered the sestina, but it was probably too long for what I needed to say. I started a villanelle but had a lot of trouble fitting the word “nineteeth” in iambic pentameter. Not to mention that few words even create an off-rhyme with the number.

This is the final weekend before the list deadline. The list deadline is a strange thing. All it means is that I promise to have you up on the list on January 1st if you submit prior to midnight on December 19th (next Friday). I’ll still add people after that point and you may even be on the list on January 1st if you submit on the 20th. But more likely, you’ll go up on the list after January 1st. Which simply means that you miss out on a few readers who burn through the list on New Years Day.

Directions for submitting are on the post–I would love it if we had everyone from the blogroll represented on the list. I’ve already started to read through and write blurbs and for the third year running, the list is incredible. I think the most amazing part is the diversity of topic on the list considering all are coming from inside the same community. I promise you, when you see the list on New Years Day, you will want to be on it.

Mrs. Spock’s comment triggered a thought. I often will leave myself notes in my datebook after a loss to remind myself to check in on the person months down the road. This may take all of the passion out of the act to have it essentially scheduled, but I know without that reminder, I’ll forget. I’ll move on because it won’t be in the forefront of my thoughts, even though the loss is probably still in the forefront of the mind of the primary mourner.

I realized when Mrs. Spock wrote: “I feel a responsibility as a tertiary mourner to comment on a blog, and then continue to do so long afterwards. It seems that there is usually a huge influx of support after a terrible event, and then it dwindles down as weeks and even months pass. I think of widows who want their loss to be remembered 6 months after the loss, but everyone else has moved on. I try to fulfill that wish by hanging in there and continuing to comment later” that there is something simple we can do.

We can schedule a reminder to reach out months later on LFCA. In other words, each day, I can click back three or four months and pick out people who needed support then and remind people that they may still need support now. I can begin doing this on Monday with no trouble. It is simply cutting-and-pasting. I can also add a category to the form called The Way Back Machine where people can leave news that happened months ago in which they still would like support. For instance, a death in the family.

My questions are these: (1) would it be helpful? If you have gone through a mourning process on your blog, did you find comments and support dropped off long before you had your needs fulfilled? Or is getting that support months down the road not necessary? (2) could it be potentially upsetting to find yourself in that category and be reminded of an old wound if you weren’t expecting it that day? Or is it silly to think that the wound was ever closed? Would it be more meaningful to receive that support when you least expected it or would it ruin your day?

The problem with the LFCA is that unless a person specifically asks me not to post news (or if it is on a password protected blog), I post things I read and things people mail in through the form. We put it to a vote about a year and a half ago when the LFCA began that I’d just add without checking in with everyone since it was out there anyway. In other words, if everyone could find it on their own, the LFCA was merely pointing people in the right direction to celebrate or support. But I would want to hear if you’ve had a negative experience with the LFCA–if you saw your news posted and wished it hadn’t been. I can always remove news at someone’s request, but, of course, you can’t truly unring the bell.

Your thoughts on this new section?

After I finished reading Elizabeth McCracken’s book, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, I felt very quiet. We had planned on watching either Love Actually or About a Boy after I finished the final few chapters and now suddenly that plan felt very wrong.

The only thing I could relate this stillness to were two deaths that occurred in our community.

The first was the death of Zoe, Allison’s daughter. She had already lost Lennox. I remember reading the news and then going down into the basement where Josh was watching a movie or sports. I stood there for a moment and just stared at him and then I said, “Zoe died. Allison lost Zoe.” And we both just stared at each other and then I started crying.

The second was the death of Devin, Natalie’s son. I can still remember all the small steps that brought her to that night. First she was on the blogroll under “in the beginning.” And then she was doing IUIs. And then it was IVF. And finally, the night I learned about Devin death, it was raining very hard. We had been to a craft store to buy stickers and we came home completely drenched. We had walked through puddles and we were all shivering. I had plans to write the Roundup after the twins went to bed and instead, I wrote the news that I had just read. I sat in the living room, crying while looking at this shaded window. It just seemed unreal.

And this is the deeper point; the mourning for a child you not only don’t know but a mother far removed. Yes, I know Allison and Natalie in the sense that we chat via email and I read their blogs and I would feel comfortable allowing either to stay at my place without worrying that they were really axe-murders. I know these strange intimate details from reading their blogs and yet, we all collectively admit, we don’t really know each other with the exception of those who climb through the computer screen into our real lives–such as the TOOTPU women for me.

There are the primary mourners–the parents–and there are the secondary mourners–their friends and family. And then there are the rest of us–the tertiary mourners who simply don’t know what to do with these huge emotions we feel at hearing such terrible news except to write it out in a blog post, place a candle on the sidebar, send a letter through the mail, make a donation in someone’s name.

How can we not cry or feel quiet in the face of such tremendous grief? I think it not only comes from transporting ourselves to that terrible space; testing out the grief on our own life, feeling for a moment how it would feel to be the carrier of such horrific events (because we do that instinctively–it is why we stare at car accidents, I think we’re trying to take in the details so we can paint an accurate mental image of our own personalized imaginary car accidents) but also truly a collective heart. When you care enough to take the time to read the story, to commit yourself to reading post after post (or, in the case of McCracken’s book, page after page), you come to a place of true affection. And it breaks my heart to think that someone I wished well did not receive my cosmic request.

What can I say about McCracken’s book except to say that it was gorgeous. It literally ached. It was beautiful. It hit its mark perfectly–to show a happy life where someone is also missing. And it made me feel incredibly quiet for her.

It is the next selection for the Barren Bitches Book Club. The sign-up post is below this one, so please scroll down if you wish to join along. Safety in numbers and this is definitely a book that benefits from reading it together rather than alone.

What are your thoughts on tertiary mourning? What is the place of the tertiary mourner? As someone grieving, how do you view the tertiary mourners?