A year without my dad.

Last Feb. 25 was a Saturday. Jenna and I were getting ready to go spend the morning with my dad while my mom ran some errands. But one phone call changed that, and everything else. Within 15 minutes, I was kneeling beside my dad’s body—neither of us breathing.

If you’ve asked me how I’ve been doing this past year, I probably said, “OK,” or “Much better,” or something like that. But the truth is that I’m still in shock. I would think that if you were attacked by someone with a machete and he sliced your right arm off, you would stand there frozen for a while as you tried to comprehend what had happened to you. I’m still doing that. I take care of my family and go to work and go to school and sing in the car with the radio and play Clue with my daughters and all of that, but the truth is that I cannot believe my dad is gone. I’m still frozen, staring at blood pouring out of the open wound, wondering if what happened is even real.

We adults who lose parents are in something of a no-man’s-land of grief. We have not lost someone who wasn’t supposed to have been lost. We have suffered a loss that follows the natural progression of things. We are supposed to bury our parents. We don’t say, “He had his whole life ahead of him.” It’s not the numb shock that gives way to the indescribable heartbreak we knew in 1992 when my teenaged sister-in-law died in a car accident.

When we lose a parent, people come to the funeral and send cards and bring food, but things get back to normal pretty quickly. We haven’t been through what people would call a “tragedy.” Instead, we who have buried our parents at the “natural” stage walk around in a silent devastation. We can keep living our lives the way we did before, for the most part. But a heartsick child wails away deep inside of us. A child who reels from the separation from this lifelong presence. A child that we keep safely tucked away while we go about our daily business. A child whose cries we muffle when someone asks us how we’re doing.

I don’t know what the older men I see in public think when they notice I’m staring at them. Maybe they are flattered. Maybe they are creeped out. All I’m doing is trying to picture my dad’s head on their bodies so it could almost be like seeing him again. I find myself wanting so badly to tell him something that I almost say it aloud to no one so I can pretend he’s listening. I’m momentarily confused when Jenna says she wants to go to the cemetery, and then I remember, “Oh, yes. My dad is dead and he’s buried there.”

These are the weird moments in which I have found myself during the past year.

When people ask how I’m doing, I’ll keep saying “OK,” or “Fine.” But what I’m really doing is waiting for the shock to pass so I can finally breathe again.

You Should Hear Gayla Pray

Today I'm blogging over at Growing Up Church of Christ, which is Mike Allen's blog. Check it out, and have a happy Thanksgiving!

The Other Side of Funny

My dad, who died this past February, was a funny guy. The funniest person I knew, actually. I don’t remember the first time someone told me, “Your dad is so funny!” And people still tell me how funny he was. I never laughed harder at anyone than I did at my dad, and I always knew I would laugh at his funeral. Which I did. He valued humor and learned how to use it to his advantage. When he was young, it helped him make friends. As a teen, it helped him get girls. In the Army, it kept him from getting beaten up. When he was a youth minister, humor helped him cross that vast expanse between adult and teen so he could connect with young people. In tense elders’ meetings, he could crack a joke and lighten up the atmosphere (sometimes this worked; sometimes it didn’t).

In his last days, when a degenerative lung disease had robbed him of his breath and health, a particularly brutal form of dementia was creeping across his brain. He wasn’t the same person. We would try to joke with him, but most of the time, he just became more irate. A couple of weeks before his death, I was visiting him in the hospital—as I did just about every day. The dementia was raging that day. He was mad at having to be in the hospital. When I asked how the food was, or how the nurses were, or what he had been doing, he cut me off with an uncharacteristically angry “I don’t want to talk about what’s going on in this place!”

With his humor gone, I hardly knew how to talk to him. I tried again, carefully avoiding any topics having to do with the hospital.

“Well, it looks like the Republicans might have to choose between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. This could get interesting,” I ventured.

Still not cracking a smile, he said, “I’d rather talk about what’s going on in this place than that!”

And there he was again, my same old dad, still being funny.

My dad passed his funny on to me. But it took some refining. In junior high, when I repeated the political jokes I had heard on David Letterman to my friends, they turned and ran and avoided me the rest of the day. But eventually, I figured out what kind of humor to use with which people in which situations. I still struggle with what is appropriate, though. I’m reminded of this when someone responds to me with, “I’ve never heard a minister’s wife say that before!” Oops.

I find myself studying humor as though it were a complex science. I’m fascinated by Steve Martin’s theory of what comedy is (quite simply, a distortion of reality). I admire the hilarious honesty of Tina Fey, the absurdity of Monty Python, the homespun wit of Garrison Keillor, the surprisingly sophisticated humor of Phineas & Ferb, the self-deprecation of Ree Drummond (AKA the Pioneer Woman), the wackiness of Dave Barry, the mundane of Jerry Seinfeld and the deadpan of Steven Wright. A heroine of mine is Erma Bombeck, who, while cracking up the entire nation for 35 years, was probably the first public figure to let women know they did not have to be perfect homemakers. And then there’s Frank McCourt, who, while not known as a humorist, had the ability to find humor in the most horrific of circumstances. Just recently, I’ve become enthralled with video bloggers and the way they’ve given humor a whole new medium. I love discovering humor in new places. This world needs more of it. Keep it coming.

I grew up with humor, and cherish its value, and I hope to be able to cling to it in my final days—just like my dad did.

Having said all that, humor has a dark side.

It’s true. Many funny people struggle with depression and loneliness. Funny people also run the risk of never being taken seriously. Here’s a story of something that happened to my dad, and I still get mad when I think about it. When he was in his 30s, he had to have some benign growths surgically removed from his vocal chords. The procedure ended up affecting his voice permanently. Not his speaking voice, but when he tried to speak loudly or shout, his voice would break up. One night, my dad (during his youth ministry years) had taken the youth group to an area-wide event. As the event was winding down, members of the youth group had scattered across the fellowship hall to socialize. When it was time to go, my dad attempted to call across the room to gather everyone up. His voice broke up, as usual. Another youth minister standing close to my dad doubled over in laughter.

Clueless guy: What is wrong with your voice, Winston?

My dad: Oh, I had some growths cut off of my vocal chords years ago, and it still affects my voice.

Clueless guy (laughing uncontrollably): Oh, Winston, you are a RIOT!

My dad: No, really. I did.

Clueless guy (guffawing and slapping my dad on the back): Growths cut off of your vocal chords. You crack me UP!

My dad: I’m being serious.

Clueless guy (still guffawing and making a general donkey of himself): Sure you are! You kill me, Winston. You are SO FUNNY! (walks away cackling)

To funny people, this kind of thing can get quite annoying. Which brings me to a few things people need to know about the funny people in their lives:

1) We’re not always funny. This is why, when you come up to us and say, “Say something funny!”, you might get a blank stare. Truthfully, when someone does this to me, the thing that invariably pops into my head is the dirtiest joke I ever heard. I might unleash it on the next person who does this to me. Really. I might.

2) Funny isn’t all we are. People don’t always make an attempt to get to know us beyond the funny. This is one reason funny people struggle with loneliness and depression. When you tell funny people “You are so funny!” and “You always make me laugh!”, it does make us feel good. We like being able to do that for people, to put a smile on their faces—help them have a better day than they may have been having before. But when those are the only things you say to funny people, we know you don’t know us very well.

3) For some funny people, their ability to be funny has developed in spite of—or because of—a place of profound pain and struggle. Gilda Radner battled eating disorders from her childhood on. Steve Martin fought debilitating depression. Tina Fey was attacked by a stranger with a razor blade when she was in kindergarten, and she carries the resulting facial scar to this day. John Belushi and Chris Farley used humor to cover the demons that would eventually kill them. If you know someone who is funny, who always has a word or comment that makes everyone laugh, who seems to be the most easygoing person in the world—the truth is that they probably carry some inescapable darkness on some level. Because everyone does.

4) Funny people take being funny very seriously. When I was writing my humor column for the Baytown Sun from 2002-2006, I was aware—sometimes painfully--of the fact that our country had gone to war and that the news on the flip side of the page my little black-and-white photo was on (my column was usually printed just inside the front page) was never very good. Trying to make people laugh during a difficult time is nervy and it sometimes felt flat-out wrong. But it can also be viewed as a ministry, and that’s the attitude I adopted over time. If Will Rogers could make people laugh during the Depression, I could make people laugh during the uncertain years following the Sept. 11 attacks. It was a self-imposed responsibility that meant a lot to me. I used to tell people that my column-writing gig, although it paid next-to-nothing compared to what I’m paid now, was the most rewarding writing work I would probably ever do. I still believe that is true. I miss it a lot, and if I ever have the chance to land a gig like that again, I would pounce on it.

To quote my dad, I'm being serious.

ACU Leadership Camps

This week I'll be blogging over at the ACU Today blog about my family's long-time involvement with ACU Leadership Camps. Look for a new post every day from Sunday through Friday!

My Writing Life

It’s difficult to say exactly when I started writing on a freelance basis. Early on, it sort of just happened, and then I began pursuing it, which made it happen even more. I guess I’ll just tell you my story instead of trying to explain it.

I graduated from Abilene Christian University (Abilene, TX) with a journalism degree in 1994. As a student, I had established myself as a pretty solid writer through my work on the campus newspaper and yearbook. The people in the campus media relations office noticed and began asking me to write for the alumni magazine, ACU Today. My first article for them was in 1994, and I’m still writing for them. I have a major feature in the issue that’s about to come out.

ACU Today is a slick mag that wins tons of awards, and I’m proud to be a part of it. The problem is that it only publishes quarterly, so if I relied on it as my only income, I would have starved to death between issues long ago. So I was working other jobs during the mid-to-late ’90s (church secretary, university events coordinator, etc.).

In 2000, my husband graduated from seminary and we moved to the Houston area for his first ministry job. I was so happy that I was finally going to be able to stay home with Julia, our exceptionally adorable toddler. Turns out staying home was…OK. I really wanted to be home with Julia, but I wanted to keep writing, too. It’s a very strange thing to be college-educated and have opinions on all kinds of issues, but the most intellectually-stimulating thing you do all day is dig Froot Loops out of the couch cushions. I had a story idea for the local newspaper (The Baytown Sun, Baytown, TX) and spent DAYS mustering the courage to call and pitch it to them. I finally did, and they let me write it. They liked it, and I ended up writing features for them for about five years. After I had been doing that for a couple of years, I wrote a column for the paper about visiting the local mosque and interviewing the leaders there for the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. This led to me writing a weekly column for the next 3.5 years. I tried to keep it funny by writing about the craziness of everyday life and, because they are easy targets, I took occasional shots at Rick Perry and the tobacco industry. I also made fun of Jerry Falwell once, which earned me my first piece of hate mail. Except for the person who wrote that, everyone seemed to like my column and I became known as “the Erma Bombeck of Baytown.” If you go to my blog (deanaland.blogspot.com), you can read some of those columns. They are posted mostly on Wednesdays between Nov. 2004 and Aug. 2006.

Let me say something about my stint as a weekly newspaper columnist. Baytown is a blue-collar, refinery town full of the most genuine, hard-working people I have ever met. Being able to connect with that community through my column was the most satisfying writing I have ever done. It paid next to nothing, but I doubt I will ever again have a writing gig that rewarding. If you’re only writing for the monetary benefits, you will miss out on a lot. Besides, if you go into writing for the money, you’re not smart. You’re just not.

Then in 2005, I got a call from an old friend that I had not seen in years. During the years we had been out of touch, she had gone to college, earned a journalism degree and landed an editing job with VideoPlus in Dallas. VideoPlus publishes magazines (and other resources) that support the direct-selling industry. My friend asked me to start writing for their pubs, so I’ve been doing that since 2005. A couple of years ago, VideoPlus bought SUCCESS magazine, so now I write book reviews (and I’ve done a few features) for that magazine. All of the mags VideoPlus publishes are distributed nationwide at major booksellers. Does it ever get old to walk into Barnes & Noble, pull a magazine off the shelf, and find my byline in it? Nope.

I had to let the newspaper gig go when we moved to Arkansas in 2006, but since I had also been writing for magazines and saw how much more they pay than newspapers, I was OK with that. (But so, so sad to let my column go.)

Today, I’m still writing for ACU Today, VideoPlus, and I just picked up At Home in Arkansas, a statewide home and garden design pub, this past year. That was another stroke of luck. A friend of ours at church is a dentist who is a major advertiser with them. The editor mentioned to him one day that she needed writers, and my friend told her about me. I came home to an email from the editor, asking when I could start. I’ve been writing for AHIA for almost a year now. Some people call those lucky connections “networking.” I call it “suh-WEET.” I also just landed a grant-writing internship for this summer, which I will do from home. Grant writing may not seem that thrilling, but for writers who really want their words to make a difference, there is probably no more direct way to do that than writing grant proposals. There can be good money in it, too, so it’s worth checking out.

I’ve done some editing, too, but mostly as favors to friends and family. My dad was also a newspaper columnist for several years, and I edited his stuff for free. I only do so much for free, though. A friend of mine wrote an e-book and sent it to me to proofread before she self-published it. I gave her a little feedback, but I told her to pay someone (me or someone else) for a full editing job because that book needed a lot of work. She ignored me and published it anyway. It is nothing short of hideous, bless her heart.

Here are the reasons why freelancing has been great for me:

1) During the ten years I had preschool-aged children at home, it allowed me to keep working and keep my skills up while still focusing on my kids. They went to mothers’ day out twice a week, so I scheduled my work for those days. They didn’t even know I worked until they were older. To me, you can’t put a price on something like that.

2) I have loved being a “free agent” and writing for whatever publication I want to.

3) I love the flexibility of working from home. Both our girls are in school now, but I can still go on their field trips and take care of them when they’re sick without having to use sick leave or beg for time off. I joke about getting to work in my pajamas, but I usually wear actual clothes. But I could work in my pajamas, if I wanted to.

4) I love seeing my name in print. Again, that never gets old.

Here’s what I say to people who want to be successful freelancers:

1) Be nice to people. Be genuine and honest, and be a good friend. For one thing, that’s what nice people do. And you never know when a relationship that you value personally could become professionally valuable (like with my VideoPlus editor friend). You don’t want to snub someone who later becomes editor of the magazine you’ve always dreamed of writing for. That would really, really suck.

2) Get someone to give you a chance. And when that happens, turn in clean copy and turn it in on time. Editors remember writers who do that, and they will ask you to work for them again.

Thanks for reading all about me, and please check out my professional website (www.deananall.com) and like me on Facebook (Deana Nall’s WordWorks)!

"Housewives"

Update: Mr. Sumrell wrote back in a letter published in today's (5/30) Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His letter follows:

"To all of my critics, so-called professing Christians, feminazis and all-around smart alecks--in general, the blind leading the blind--I stand by what I have written. Women began to get out of their places with the granting of the vote, and like Eve, walked out on their own. They got the vote, took men's jobs, quit being female and they ought to repent and come back to God and follow his word.

The mess this country is in is also man's fault. There are sissifed men preachers who will not preach the old-time gospel--all of the word instead of a weak social gospel. I know their weak church or organization would likely kick them out if they did.

Micah was a man of God who had to stand alone. God showed him the truth. Four hundred false prophets jumped up and down all in one accord against what Micah had said, but they turned out to be wrong. So it is with my critics.

Though I'm hated and ridiculed for my words, I stand by them. We all, men and women, will answer to a holy God someday.

David Sumrell
Springdale"



This letter appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 25, 2012. I wrote the letter below it in response.

In response to David Sumrell’s letter of 4-25, nowhere in the Bible does God ordain women as “housewives.” In fact, Deborah was a high-ranking Israelite leader and judge (Judges 4:4-5). Lydia was an entrepreneur (Acts 16:14). The Proverbs 31 woman, who is regarded by scripture as the ideal wife, was also involved in entrepreneurial endeavors (v. 24), as well as real estate development (v. 16). And in the book of Esther, it was Esther’s voice and political clout that saved the Jewish people. Yes, we women can be homemakers. (Not “housewives.” We are not married to our houses.) We can derive great joy from raising our children and creating healthy homes for them. But we can also earn degrees, build careers, make advancements that contribute to the betterment of society, lobby for peace and protection for our families, and be strong and effective leaders. Why some men find this threatening is beyond me. If Mr. Sumrell has ever stopped being terrified of women long enough to have women in his life, I sincerely hope they have other men in their lives who encourage, support, and honor the gifts they have beyond pushing a mop. They will certainly never get that from him. Deana Nall Bryant

That Sick

I thought long and hard about posting this. It's a story from some of the darkest days of my life. I decided to go ahead and post it because I want to:

1) help raise awareness of hyperemesis gravidarum in light of the First Annual Hyperemesis Gravidarum World Awareness Day coming up on May 15,

2) get as many people as possible to sign the Hyperemesis Gravidarum Education, Research and Awareness Petition. Even if you've never been affected by HG directly, more research could protect your wives, daughters, granddaughters, etc., from this devastating disease. And it could prevent them from having to consider the horrible decision that I had to wrestle with (but thankfully, never had to make).

So I invite you to read my story and sign the petition. But I have to ask two things of you:

1) This is not the place for an abortion debate--especially if you have never been as ill as I was.

2) If you know my daughter who is mentioned in this story, please do not discuss this with her. I don't know why anyone would do that, but you never know!

"That Sick"


Crumpled in a heap on the bathroom floor, I decided to just stay there. Making my way back to bed would require a bigger effort than I was willing to make. I slowly rose up on one elbow and reached an emaciated arm up to the bathroom counter. A streetlight through the window illuminated the brown, yellow and purple bruises along the inside of my elbow. I must look like an anorexic junkie, I thought. I felt around on the counter, located the ponytail holder I was looking for, and tied my hair back before dropping to the floor with a thud. Now I was ready for the next round of vomiting. Until then, I closed my eyes and tried not to pray that prayer again.

I had gotten pregnant. That’s all I had done. Just a few weeks earlier, I had stumbled out of the bathroom holding a pregnancy test that showed an unexpected extra line. I couldn’t say the word “pregnant;” it was too unreal—too unbelievable. So I stammered to Chad, my husband of five years, “Honey, I think you knocked me up.” I was a healthy 26-year-old with a fun job coordinating alumni events at a university while Chad worked on his ministry degree at seminary. We had meant to wait until he had graduated to start a family. But it was happening now. That was OK. We were elated.

When you are newly pregnant and overjoyed about your condition, the symptoms of pregnancy are greeted with near-giddiness because they serve as confirmation that the pregnancy is truly happening. My period had disappeared, so I gleefully threw boxes of tampons into the back of the bathroom closet. Wouldn’t be needing those for a while! Coffee and toothpaste began to smell funny. Because I was pregnant! I started feeling queasy. Because I was pregnant! When I threw up one Thursday evening, I proudly told my husband, “I just threw up because I’m pregnant! Isn’t that cute?”

Life can have a way of taking our joy and crushing it to dust in the cruelest of ways. When I threw up that Thursday night, something began that neither Chad nor I saw coming. Something that would strip everything away from me and leave me nearly dead before it was over. Something that would impact me so deeply that I would never be the same.

That Friday morning, I woke up and kept vomiting. It never stopped that day, or that night, or the next day. Every half hour or so, I threw up. Even when there was nothing to throw up. I tried to go to work the next week, but there was no restroom on my floor. I would stay only a few hours and come home. My doctor said nausea and vomiting were normal in pregnancy, but he was concerned about how badly I had dehydrated. Even one sip of water would come right back up. He admitted me to the hospital for IV fluids and large doses of Phenergan. They were able to get the vomiting stopped and sent me home. I had been home a few hours when the sickness came back with a vengeance. Then I remembered something. In one of my pregnancy books, I had read a short paragraph about a pregnancy complication called hyperemesis gravidarum. That’s the name they give “morning sickness” when it escalates to life-threatening levels. Other than IV therapy and tranquilizers, not much could be done for this condition. The paragraph ended with the reassurance that this condition is extremely rare.

Surely this was not happening to me. Surely the vomiting would stop at any moment and I could start eating again and going to work and having a healthy, normal pregnancy. But everything kept pointing to hyperemesis. My life had become a miserable succession of vomiting for days, going to the hospital and getting rehydrated, and returning home to start vomiting again. I missed more work—sometimes days at a time. The weeks turned into months and I was a prisoner inside my own body. I was so weak that getting out of bed required monumental effort. And there was no escape from the unrelenting nausea and vomiting. My pregnant friends were wearing cute maternity clothes and picking out colors for their nurseries while I wasted away on the bathroom floor, so sick that I wanted to die. Chad was at a loss. This had blindsided both of us, but he did everything he could to take care of me. I was too weak to stand in the shower, so he would get in with me so I could lean against him. I began praying at night for God to either let me miscarry or let me die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning and face another day of vomiting. My doctor had never seen anyone that sick and did not know what to do with me. My weight dropped. I had started the pregnancy at 133, which was a healthy weight for someone with my height and frame. As my weight plummeted into the 120s and teens, and then below 110, my doctor became exasperated with me. “You really could stop this if you tried,” he said. “I believe at least half of this is in your head.” Why would anyone choose to live this way if they had any control over it at all? I had been healthy and active before this happened. Did he think I enjoyed being this ill? My weight neared 100, and I hadn’t weighed 100 since junior high. “If it gets below 100, we may need to consider terminating this pregnancy,” my doctor said.

One day, I threw up for the last time. That was September 19. The first day I had thrown up was June 4. I had thrown up for 15 weeks, missed two months of work, been hospitalized seven times and lost 35 pounds—more than a quarter of my body weight. I slowly began eating again and eventually gained my weight back, plus some pregnancy weight. On January 19, I gave birth to a baby girl that was and has always been in perfect health. I will never know why she was not harmed by that pregnancy.

When you’re that sick for that long, you change. When you’re that sick for that long, abortion stops being something to vote against and becomes something that could have saved your life. When you’re that sick for that long and your daughter, when she’s five, gives you a flowerpot with her handprint on it for Mothers Day, or when she’s 12 and the two of you are laughing at YouTube videos together, a haunting voice in the back of your mind reminds you that you once considered ending her life to save yours. That’s what hyperemesis does. It steals your joy and tears it to pieces and once you’ve wrestled it back and pieced it back together, it’s never the same. And that’s something a mother can never reconcile.