Weekend greetings with Allison Miley, forever-friend familiar to longtime readers.
This first Charlotte-condo sleepover visit was the anticipated newsy update, happy chat, fun dinner out with our local, third forever-friend Laurie Hedrick.
It was all of those things.
And not anticipated, something more, deeper and sweet.
For a bit of back-story: The 3 of us have had an unusually enduring 30-+ year relationship that began as intense work team through the fast-growth decade-+ of mega-bank corporate communications (First Union/Wachovia/now Wells Fargo).
I’m a bit older than Allison and Laurie (mentor-level, not mom-level older. Unless, perhaps, I had been a far more developed, unsupervised teen than I was!)
Remarkably, our bond has spanned the nearly 25 years since: Evolving very different careers, growing or changing families, geographic moves — and some milestones, celebratory, challenging… and tragic.
On this reconnect-night, after meet and quick condo tour we are happily into booth, appetizers and breathless chat at favorite nearby Elizabeth bistro. With some updates from each, natural focus is on the lots of news from Allison. She and spouse Rob made a big hometown-move to Chapel Hill a couple of years back, and there’s lots of recent progress and celebration at their long-time home-away-from-home community, Bald Head Island.
The Mileys have funded, actively participate in and support the endangered Sea Turtle Rescue program, and particularly the college-student and recent-graduate marine life internship program at the Bald Head Island Conservancy. (More on their news below.)
As always, throughout these conversations is the Mileys’ late, beloved daughter Claire. Her 21st birthday was July 2nd, the date of her 2019 accidental death in a freak jet-ski accident July 21st. She’s been mentioned in dozens of contexts by all of us since we got together. (As she is in most all regular texts and virtual chat.)
It is only at this moment over dinner together, that the 3 of us consciously make note and mention of what in previous years would be a rather stand-alone thing. This weekend —which we have for weeks been planning on the calendar, details around things to do around the Mileys’ trip to town for the Neil Young concert etc. — is a daunting anniversary. Indeed, this Sunday August 10th— today — in 2019 was the enormous, wrenching, beautiful, unbearably necessary memorial service to honor Claire. It was the culmination of a three-week effort to engage, attend-to, give expression-time and opportunity to a three-county community’s hundreds of high-schoolers, their families and friends devastated by the loss.
Three weeks earlier, the ER phone calls of early trauma-accident-aftermath had fused Laurie, Allison and me together in a new and terrible, permanent way. Our work together on the service, and with the teens, further solidified that.
For those unfamiliar, factual information and the obituary are in the Coda below, after the closing of today’s post.
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Important and immutable as honoring that, always, is, today’s focus is on the palpable shift that has happened. Without some agenda or conscious plan, other than the Mileys’ bravery and heart in making and keeping it so, Claire is simply here, woven, “integrated” in and around everything going on, talked about. That’s a combination of the happy, silly, devastatingly sad, inspiring.
It has created, and allows, this shift to become a comprehensive kind of joy that includes it all. That is beyond newsy, even the happiest of “happy life,” or fun.
That is what was unanticipated.
#1 . Title themes: “Surprised by Joy”
The phrase kept coming to mind, I had thought pretty obviously in connection with the title of the acclaimed and widely familiar autobiographical work on faith by Christian theologian C. S. Lewis. However, a little research turned up another surprise: Lewis borrowed the phrase from the earlier original poem by William Wordsworth. (Link in Coda below.)
The poem is not specifically or literally about faith; Wordsworth wrote it amid profound grief — at the death of his beloved daughter, Catherine. (Whew, more appropriate than realized. )
Allison has mentioned several times this weekend — and it’s something I think, and often write about from psychological perspective: Our culture, and even the wisest, in some ways most psychologically educated and savvy adults among us, simply do not do, or much acknowledge, grief, death, suffering, well.
Nor do we mostly even attend to the basic reality that there is an emotional/felt-experience level to every moment, situation, relationship, transaction, experience of our lives. Yet even rudimentary, “how does that feel for you?/here is how that felt and then this too, which conflicts” just isn’t part of routine discourse! (Brene Brown has some brilliant things to say about this. For a future post, perhaps.)
So much of what I’ve noticed, experienced and sat with this weekend reminds me of my take on the grief and healing depicted in the film in the recent Father’s Day newShrink, “My Penguin Friend,” in Pentecostal Penguins? . Claire and the Mileys even have the deep attachments to ocean, sea and saltwater elements here:
.. [H]ealing for memory and grief that are complex, deeply buried and unexpressed — thus traumatic — must come first through the body, not words, and usually noisy and messy and salty and wet.
It also must come via repetition-reenactment, until the unbearably painful content is part of a broader, different narrative, alongside more “ordinary” contexts and perspective. This is like having to re-break a long, unset broken bone of the psyche, enabling it to heal in the right direction to function as part of the rest of the Self.
Along with their families, on their journey Allison and Rob have had blessed, deeply loving and connected community friendships nurtured over years and decades at their and Claire’s close-knit Bald Head Island and their different hometowns.
They’ve wisely tapped available resources from grief-, spiritual/faith- and other counseling of varying value… read, listened, traveled, watched and streamed voraciously… made lasting connections with other parents who have endured similar tragedies… and by very candid admission, made repeated trips to and through the worst kinds of hell with, and sometimes at, one another…
…resurfacing again to daylight.
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When we found ourselves surprised, and a bit awed, together without having planned it for this commemorative anniversary, Allison emphasized something she really wants made clear:
What today’s reflection is not about, is some hero’s journey victory-lap to be met with cheers at some imagined goalpost or finish-line. Ultimately there has been no script, strategic plan with tactical checklist. No goalposts, and certainly no line to cross — or finish.
#2. “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path…”
— Joseph Campbell, Mythologist, author and educator
At left and right above, are two memes her mom has kept, that she found then-15-year-old Claire had saved onto her phone just days before the fatal jet-ski accident. (Yes, at 15 she was effectively channeling a more succinct and effective Joseph Campbell!)
At center is a hand-painted expression of a similar view, given to me nearly a decade ago by wise, beautiful healer-teacher-yogi friend Kelley Gardner.
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Claire spent much of her childhood active and passionately engaged with marine life, especially rescue efforts for endangered sea turtles and programs for all ages at the Bald Head Island Conservancy. She also spent her birthday in 2017 expanding her sea-life focus with dolphins in Florida. (Photo below at bottom right.)
#3. Running toward
Support for the BHIC programs and participants has been a key ongoing designated memorial to Claire. Along with adoption of a Claire Miley designated turtle among those returning to to lay their eggs, their support focus has been funding and creation of a special intern room for use by the 18 or so annual residential college student or recent graduate interns.
In photos at center and bottom left below, the Mileys and close friends Emily and Shaun Fowler celebrated Claire’s birthday this year with cake and fun with the current interns. (There are 18, several of them guys — who all seem to be out working during the photo shoot below.)
Of the interns each year, Allison says:
“They work around the clock! Patrol the beach all night for nesting turtle moms —the moon pulls them in back to where THEY were born! — and clean out/do science stats and data on hatched nests all day.
It’s not sexy.
They are cool kids we need so many more of in the world.”
For a real burst of hope for our collective future, not to mention that of our planet and its creatures, this link is a brief and uplifting read. Most all of them are already graduates of very competitive programs from a wide range of states and schools.
Meet Our Summer 2025 Interns! - (Bald Head Island Conservancy website)
Also on the main site are many well-documented and real-time updating measurements and data foundational to their programs.
Sea Turtle Protection Program - (BHIC website)
And this from the site, about that bronze Claire turtle in the photos:
Legacy Sea Turtle Claire
A significant component of our Conservancy program involves research across multiple platforms, including tracking every turtle who nests on the island each summer, the number of nests she lays and the success of the nest from our database of turtles who consistently return to the Island.
The Mileys chose a Legacy Mom to be named in honor of Claire. Over the last seven years she has nested on Bald Head 10 times and laid three nests this summer: the last of which produced 121 hatchlings. A very successtul nest! We look forward to seeing Legacy Claire nest on the Island in the coming years. Above right is a photo of a hand-sculpted bronze turtle, by a Wilmington artist, that hangs on the conservancy wall in honor of Legacy Sea Turtle Claire Miley. (The insert provides perspective with all of the other designated-named turtles.)
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As for keeping Claire, both sadly and happily, matter-of-factly here… In routine descriptions of their close friend-group communities, in both Bald Head Island and Chapel Hill, in Allison’s stories there are kids, grandkids, students of all ages. Some knew Claire in person, many more for whom she is real inspiration, presence, point of shared connection, love — and powerful lessons in compassion and empathy.
(Here are a couple of previous years’ editions that provide some of the sequence of the Mileys’ path.)
“In the Service of Healing,” in Spitting in the Wind Part 2, July 3, 2022.
“Going to Carolina” in Dearest Friend newShrink July 4, 2023
#. 4 Writing home(s)
Interesting, to me touching — and clearly not by conscious plan or design — Allison and Rob chose to move their primary (what had been Claire’s school-year) home away from Davidson. This distanced them from such intense past-pull of all of her former schoolmates, volleyball teammates and competitors, former dance-community peers. This changed their “center of gravity” to their long, deep ties in their former college and first-jobs hometown of Chapel Hill.
Their home, close in to campus, athletic facilities and longtime faculty, was already a gathering spot of generations of their alum-friends and their families. They were a destination by the time so very many of Claire’s classmates from multiple schools, then younger friends in classes behind hers, began attending UNC-Chapel Hill.
The week that so many of Claire’s own class of ‘23 arrived as UNC freshman, the August 28 fatal shooting and a mass campus lockdown brought panic to already nervous arriving freshmen and their parents. One of Claire’s lifelong friends, son of the Mileys’ close friends, was standing in a line frighteningly close to the shooting.
That time, and hanging out in some refuge those early weeks, with welcoming/supportive (and fun!) Allison and Rob clearly set the tone for college years to come. Here are a couple of her posts, from late 2023, and this past April. There are many other ballgames, service projects, and fun stuff together in between.
It’s as though they, and their Claire, are growing forward — not locked away in a forever-15 box.
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#5. … “bidden or unbidden”
The “bidden or unbidden” of the subtitle is a loose paraphrase of Jung’s description of how the unconscious/soul/psyche, its archetypal images, symbols and experiences, autonomously flows and appears in conscious glimpses of its own accord. This is whether or not we pay conscious attention, invite, or try to stifle or ignore it.
I use the phrases here as a needed reminder that encounters with unconscious stuff — universal though they are, and no matter how much and deeply one has studied and tracked the phenomenon and the content — are jolting/surprising when we experience them!
So it is with this weekend and our “well here we 3 are, managed unconsciously to come together with Claire this weekend — the first time we’ve seen each other in person in years!”
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As a closing note today, will emphasize the ways that joy — beyond, and in my experience different from, happy moments, pleasure and fun — is not in spite of the sad, even tragic, irretrievable things which are inevitable in every life and relationship. For me those elements are part of joy, maybe even defining ones. As though it (and we) would not be whole, in deepest joy, without them.
I think again, here, of my former Pacifica professor Dr. Robert Romanyshyn, whose book The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation is a memoir of his journey through the 1994 very sudden death of his loved first wife, in front of him, at age 46 — and his since finding deep love again. He says:
“It is true that we grieve because we have dared to love. But it is also true that we love because we have learned how to grieve. The love that springs anew from grief is more free of fear than love that has not yet been tempered by loss.
In its embrace we recover our citizenship in the cosmos…”
… and joy comes in.
Sturgeon Moon 2025: What makes August's full moon a special 2-night affair (from Live Science)
In a rare skywatching treat, [and depending on local cloud-cover] you can see August's full Sturgeon Moon rise soon after sunset on both Saturday, Aug. 9 and Sunday, Aug. 10.
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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Coda: Saturday, August 10, 2019, Davidson, NC
The Lilly Family Gallery of Chambers Building at Davidson College
Claire Elise Miley July 2, 2004-July 21, 2019 - (Obituary & Service Information, Cavin-Cook Funeral Home & Crematory)
Surprised by Joy, poem by William Wordsworth (The Poetry Foundation)
Beautifully done post, Tish. Thank you for sharing insight into the tangle of loss, grief and joy.