Losing the words ... one of these days

By JoAnne Young

I’m just going to level with you all. It’s been a week.

 

You know those weeks, when you feel a little drained of words because you’ve used your quota. The language segments of your brain just want to flat line for a couple of days and let the parts that think in pictures report for duty. 

 

Alas, not an option today. So I will find a few and write them here.

 

On Saturday, a family, a police department and a community buried a good man, one they will wish for a long time could be above ground and walking among us. Mario Herrera’s death was senseless, and the violence that surrounded it has damaged a long list of lives. 

 

A lot of profound words were said this week about this man, his life and this event. The ones that stand out for me were those of Lincoln Police Chief Jeff Bliemeister. 

 

“It is my hope that all of us lower our emotional guard, even if only for a short time, in order to truly feel and process the grief, confusion, anger, sorrow that are spinning inside each of us.”

 

Acknowledging these feelings is necessary, like acknowledging all the other feelings that have come, one on top of another this year. The losses we have felt are not only of people and of health, but of a lot of those things we loved to do and people we loved to see in our day-to-day moving about. 

 

With the close of this week, I want to return to some of the simpler truths. 

 

When my parents died a number of years ago in Texas, only a month apart, I couldn’t absorb it all at once. It took a number of trips to their house and sorting through their belongings and doing those necessary chores of closing their lives. But during those months, I learned to see beyond the harder lessons to the sweet messages and helpful words they left. 

 

Some were hidden in places that could be found only with careful attention; others placed in opportune spaces or moments as we went about grieving and remembering. 

 

My mother was a saver, and as I sorted through what she had left behind, I came across a column she saved that encouraged celebrating the first camellia blossom with your good china, and losing the words, “one of these days …” 

 

Mario Herrera’s brother Pancho said similar words at Saturday’s funeral. 

 

On the Tuesday before Mario was shot, Pancho said, he had swung by his house in Lincoln to visit. And as he left, these brothers who did everything together as kids said they needed to get together more often. It was something they always seemed to say. 

 

As Pancho drove back to Omaha, he had this thought for the first time: Their kids were older and they no longer had the anxieties of practices and lunches and school and homework anymore, and they could start to spend more time together, share a drink on the porch and be old together. 

 

They had turned a page. He didn’t know it was the last page. 

 

We’ve all done a lot of thinking and saying “one of these days …” in the hardness of 2020. One of these days when we can travel again to visit our families, when we can while away an hour at a favorite restaurant. When things return to something we can recognize. 

 

But maybe we can learn and we can find something to celebrate now, even if it’s in a different way … like dinner on the deck with the china my mother saved, shut away in the cabinet for that once-in-a- great-while special occasion. 

 

Or that drink on the porch and being old together, with a toast to Mario and Pancho, and to now.