Notes From A Broken Heart

Unbidden, almost three decades past the morning his mother and aunt could not awaken him, Philip Anthony Clark lying still in his child-size coffin appeared unbidden in my memory's lens.  I paused in the contrived busyness of most of my days, tried to shake the memory, but couldn't.  Usually at these rare times when thoughts of Philip won't exit my mind, I've learned the art of distraction.  After all, I'm creative and inventive, or at least that's what I've trained myself to believe.   When Philip died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS, American culture paid little, or scant, attention to the matter of dying, death, or its aftermath. America's response to death typically manifested as a mishmash of religious and secular practices.  Whether or not family and close relatives qualified for "paid-time leave," determined the degree that death had entered corporate boardrooms. Not only was I unprepared for Philp's death; no one close to us

 ( Because I  didn't know surrender could or would come as easily or smoothly) , I failed to recognize the unintended (and certainly unplanned) spiritual miracle that had manifested. Granted, I'd finally surrendered to creating an orderly storage space that might deplete the reservoir of energy I'd squandered over procrastinated years.  Had I forgotten that change begins first in the spirit (or unseen) , not in the natural (or seen) ? Had I ever really thought about it? Had it ever been more than an ambitious home project?   "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord.  "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are my ways higher than your ways.  And My thoughts than your thoughts," Isaiah 55:8-9.  My unlikely surrender marked the first of God's intentional miracles! Initially, I didn't receive the spirit of  discernment (because I didn't  recognize it).  Yet,  a  Know-ing-ness quietly descended o

Unpacking a generation of stored stuff started innocently enough.  I approached the twentieth year of living in a three-bedroom, two-bath, up-and-down, filled with clutter, memorabilia, and a quaint kind of classiness that probably only I appreciated.  This home represented the third of three, the last two I'd purchased as a single mom.  Pride of ownership had been hammered into my six siblings and me by parents who'd survived The Great Depression.  Cloaked in solemnity, Daddy's proud, precious, and pure voice spoke volumes. Taylors were survivors! And homeowners!  Perhaps that's why my parents, bloodied but unbowed, gathered up their Mississippi Delta brood and relocated to Chicago at the tail end of The Great Migration.  They sought "something better." Instead, asphalt sidewalks, crowded with three-story buildings, cramped two apartments on each floor, greeted them.  Concrete. Sidewalks.  Until he died, Daddy blamed Chicago's streets for his calloused, b