I've been thinking about her a lot recently -- Mary of the wild hair and sometimes surprisingly wicked humor -- as I went through the process of applying for, being secretly sure I would get, and then not getting a library job I thought should be mine. I've found myself wanting to take my humiliation to her, to drop my hurt and disappointment at her feet and demand of her, "What the hell happened?"
For years Mary wanted me to do more with my life, to pursue a higher level of librarianship, to live up to a potential she saw in me that, for whatever reasons, I didn't want to fill. Last fall, after her death, a colleague referred to me as her "work daughter," and though I scoffed at this at the time (as though I had some claim on her!), I wonder if in some ways I didn't turn her into a work mother.
I started working for Mary when I was twenty-three years old, grew into true adulthood on her quiet but observant watch, went through heartbreaks and joys in the world she so carefully kept an eye over. I think she would have been proud of me for leaving, in the end; for following my heart even if it was a misguided heart, for trying to decide what was true. Mary was a woman of formidable practicality, after all, and the idea of wallowing in stagnant unhappiness would not have appealed to her.
Is it ever too late to eulogize a person? Months after leaving her world, months after her leaving ours, she's been so close to the surface again lately, demanding the good solid cry I couldn't give her back in the autumn time.
We worked together for fifteen years, watched each other with reserved affection through illness and loss, through depressions and accomplishments and the giggling fits of just life. I spent her last days at the library shredding documents for her and wanting to say, "You are dying." Wanting to say, "Mary. No one cares, no one will ever care, about documentation for your travel expenses from 1995." Wanting to say, "Please stop. Stop shredding, stop hiding, stop protecting us, stop building your walls of privacy. You are dying. Be here with us now."
But I kept shredding decades old papers as she gagged and drooled, her weakened fingers puzzling at handfuls of handkerchief. We loved each other, she and I, but we were not a demonstrative pair, and I had made a promise to her weeks before not to make her cry. It just made her already difficult breathing more so, and I didn't want to be a part of that.
At the end of her last day I helped her put on her jacket and gathered up her bags and walked with her through her library for the last time. I looked on as she smiled graciously at everyone we passed -- our staff of so many years, professors whom she'd known forever, students who didn't realize she wasn't coming back. We walked across Amsterdam Avenue, across campus, across Broadway in the October dusk and finally into her apartment, me carrying her bags and not really knowing what to do with myself during those moments when she had to pause to rest, to catch her breath.
I wish that I'd understood then that she was down to weeks. If I'd known (I
tell myself now), I would have forced myself awkwardly through our
reticences.
Later, after finding out that she had died -- at home in her beloved Columbia apartment, surrounded by her siblings -- I would obsess over never having gotten a job recommendation from her. When I finally realized last summer that I would be leaving New York I went to Mary's office and told her of my unplanned plans for heading west. She asked then if she should start working on a letter for me and I said no, not yet, I'm not quite there yet. She just got weaker after that, needing more and more days off, causing ever increasing busyness on the days she came to work, and I never brought it up again. Later, I felt like The Outsiders' Two-Bit obsessing over losing his favorite comb in the rumble that led to his best friend's death. It felt easier, of course, to obsess over the lack of recommendation than to obsess over the lack of Mary.
Now, as I am dealing with the fall out from failing to get this library job I'd been banking on more than I'd quite realized, I am missing her good sense, her support, her forthright trust in my abilities and my judgment.
I'm trying to believe (to steal a phrase from a feel-good view of the world I've never quite bought into) that the library thing is 'just not meant to be.' The library thing is old school, my old life, and maybe not what I'm supposed to be doing out here on the western rim, in my new life, in this new world. Maybe it's time to let that go, to dive perhaps into writing, to get more serious about my fiber work, to throw something creative and achingly beautiful out into the world.
I'm not entirely sure that Mary, in all her good sense and solid practicalities, would approve of this, and I am missing what surely would have been a righteous indignation on her part when she heard about this job fiasco. But I know she would have appreciated whatever beauty I come up with, and would have loved watching her work daughter finally spreading some wings and daring something new.
Showing posts with label friends and family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends and family. Show all posts
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
outside
The stupid thing about dying is that we all go through it but we so rarely seem to understand it, and I am finding that my cavalier attitude towards it is wearing a bit thin these days.
I've wrapped this cavalier-ness around me -- and at times an accompanying near disdain for grief -- since I was sixteen years old. Once you've watched your father writhing on the lobby floor at the local Boys & Girls Club, and then watched his eyes glaze over as he's shoved into the back of an ambulance, there's maybe not much room left for empathy.
I don't know that I've ever really gotten over it, though I've learned to fake it better over the years. I've learned to sound knowledgeable about death: about the witnessing of it and the mourning of it, about the cocooning inward that happens sometimes after it.
They say, about childbirth, that your body forgets the pain, the agony, of it all. I wouldn't know about that, but I wonder if the same isn't true of deep, deep grief. How else to survive the mind-numbing brutality of it, after all, than to forget?
But I've forgotten the actual feelings of loss behind the facts of my father's death. The closest I can come now is to the grief I felt when a boyfriend up and left in abrupt and spectacular fashion after five years of living together. For weeks I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, felt the world closing in around me, kept looking for the next thing that would make me feel better only to discover that the next thing never helped.
It's a silly comparison, I know, but it's the place I can look to for understanding. Adult grief is so much different, I think, than adolescent grief.
The year or so after Dad died, I found myself not cocooning in, but rather bursting out through the seams, craving attention and worry and concern, staying out late, sometimes staying out all night, or for days on end at friends' houses. I dyed my hair black and stomped around in black witchy boots and took up smoking Marlboro reds. I curled up and cried at parties, fell asleep at the movies, cut way too many classes, scratched at fragile skin with needles and pins. Some of my friends took to making sure I had someone to hang out with on certain nights. Some of them called this Emma-sitting, as in, "Who's got Emma tonight?" I like to think they didn't mind this task so much, but of course they did. We were seventeen years old.
Now I am watching this person I love going through the loss of his father. We're supposed to be grown up now, and there will be no rending of garments, no slashing and burning the world around us to the ground.
I am selfishly trying to remember that being on the outside of this is the right place for me to be: to be the person needed in the moments needed, to show up uninvited without feeling unwanted, to sit quietly over cups of tea, to not be the one needing to be held. I am trying to remember how to reach deep into a darkness I don't quite understand for an empathy that seems like it should be easy.
I've wrapped this cavalier-ness around me -- and at times an accompanying near disdain for grief -- since I was sixteen years old. Once you've watched your father writhing on the lobby floor at the local Boys & Girls Club, and then watched his eyes glaze over as he's shoved into the back of an ambulance, there's maybe not much room left for empathy.
I don't know that I've ever really gotten over it, though I've learned to fake it better over the years. I've learned to sound knowledgeable about death: about the witnessing of it and the mourning of it, about the cocooning inward that happens sometimes after it.
They say, about childbirth, that your body forgets the pain, the agony, of it all. I wouldn't know about that, but I wonder if the same isn't true of deep, deep grief. How else to survive the mind-numbing brutality of it, after all, than to forget?
But I've forgotten the actual feelings of loss behind the facts of my father's death. The closest I can come now is to the grief I felt when a boyfriend up and left in abrupt and spectacular fashion after five years of living together. For weeks I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, felt the world closing in around me, kept looking for the next thing that would make me feel better only to discover that the next thing never helped.
It's a silly comparison, I know, but it's the place I can look to for understanding. Adult grief is so much different, I think, than adolescent grief.
The year or so after Dad died, I found myself not cocooning in, but rather bursting out through the seams, craving attention and worry and concern, staying out late, sometimes staying out all night, or for days on end at friends' houses. I dyed my hair black and stomped around in black witchy boots and took up smoking Marlboro reds. I curled up and cried at parties, fell asleep at the movies, cut way too many classes, scratched at fragile skin with needles and pins. Some of my friends took to making sure I had someone to hang out with on certain nights. Some of them called this Emma-sitting, as in, "Who's got Emma tonight?" I like to think they didn't mind this task so much, but of course they did. We were seventeen years old.
Now I am watching this person I love going through the loss of his father. We're supposed to be grown up now, and there will be no rending of garments, no slashing and burning the world around us to the ground.
I am selfishly trying to remember that being on the outside of this is the right place for me to be: to be the person needed in the moments needed, to show up uninvited without feeling unwanted, to sit quietly over cups of tea, to not be the one needing to be held. I am trying to remember how to reach deep into a darkness I don't quite understand for an empathy that seems like it should be easy.
Friday, March 06, 2015
in memoriam: a good man
All you had to do was walk into his presence, smile and say "Hi, Harold," and his face would just light up. It was, as they say, a sight to see.
He wasn't always that happy man, and struggled for years with depression and alcohol, sons he rarely saw and women he'd left behind. I didn't know him back then, of course, but rather met him years after he had managed to settle into a life that he loved -- with his wife Andrea, whom he married back in '76, and his son Evan, my sweet man, born three years later.
To me, honestly, he seemed like a giant teddy bear -- a quiet, gentle, bearded man with the strength of an ox and the steadfastness of an oak. It's hard to imagine those earlier years of discontent, of wandering the world, of serving in the Merchant Marines, getting shot at while running ammunition up the Saigon River, leaving broken hearts in his wake. It's hard to imagine but it also explained the hints of sadness, of longing, that seemed to linger sometimes in the creases at the corners of his eyes. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, with him, between laugh lines and loss.
One of my favorite memories of Harold, Christmas of 2001. Nathan and I flew in to SeaTac from New York and Evan came to pick us up. His car broke down before we even got north of Seattle, but we managed to get to a friend's apartment. It was late, closing in on midnight by then, and Evan called his mom to let her know we wouldn't be able to make it home that night. Moments later Andrea called us back to tell us Harold was out the door, car keys in hand -- there was no way in hell he was leaving his kid with a broke-down car in the middle of the night, hours away from home.
Another favorite memory, July of 2009, at the barbecue Mom and Paul hosted here in Anacortes for all the west coast folks who wouldn't be able to attend Nathan's wedding in Philadelphia that September. Paul spent the afternoon working his oyster-grilling magic and Harold spent the afternoon holding trays of oysters, wandering the barbecue, quietly offering them to the other guests. There was something so sweet, such a desire to be present and helpful despite a quietness that maybe sometimes made conversing difficult for him, that I found myself wanting to just give him a big huge hug. That was a few months before Evan and I got together, but I knew by then that his was a family I wanted to get to know better.
Evan moved to New York not long after that, and for the next few years it broke my heart when it came time to say goodbye to Harold at the end of our Anacortes visits. He always looked so sad to see us go, to see this beloved son of his leaving for the far side of the country. I can only imagine his joy when Evan decided to move home again almost two years ago, and then I didn't have to imagine it when I finally moved to Anacortes a few months ago. He wore it all over his face.
The last few months were hard for Harold after spending a lifetime building houses, sailing the seas first in the Merchant Marines and then as an engineer for the Washington State Ferries, road-tripping with friends and family, learning the banjo and the dobro and falling into the wonderfully close-knit and familial world of the northwest bluegrass scene. The last few months saw his world shrink down to a recliner chair in the guest room, the trip from there to the kitchen, to the bedroom or bathroom and back again. As his liver disease progressed his eyesight grew worse and he began struggling to follow a conversation, to differentiate at times between waking and sleep, to eat, finally to breathe.
Yet through these months of enduring this slow decline and ever-shrinking world, Harold continued to live with an almost shocking grace. We would sit quietly together for a little while most days, he in his recliner chair and me pulled up close with my knitting in my lap. The television would be playing -- old westerns or Pandora bluegrass or country music stations -- and we'd talk about random things, as thoughts rose up through the increasing muddled-ness of his mind. The merits of the Beatles verses the Stones. The surprise of watching old tv shoes (Sanford & Son, specifically) and hearing words that are no longer okay to say. Whether or not I'd like some weed with the celery and peanut butter we were munching on (I didn't). Whether or not he wanted to continue taking anti-depressants. The frustration of causing stress and work for his loved ones.
Once, when I was sitting with him so Andrea could go out for a hair cut, he asked me a couple times when she'd be back. Eventually I noticed him looking off into the distance, a sad and affectionate smile on his face. When I asked him if I could get him anything, he sort of shook himself aware and said, "I sure miss that woman when she's not here...."
Another time, I arrived at the front door to find a semi-frazzled Evan trying to clean Harold up after his breakfast hadn't settled well and he'd vomited all over himself, his chair, the floor. I ended up sitting with Harold in the bedroom while Evan finished cleaning up the mess in the other room. Harold asked where Evan was, what he was doing, kept saying what a good boy Evan is, and eventually this: "I'm so glad he's my son. Otherwise I might not have been lucky enough to know him."
Home hospice care began this past Sunday, the hospital bed arrived Monday afternoon, and though of course we all knew what that meant, I think we were expecting weeks, months, to be able to sit with Harold, to smile at him and bask in his gentleness. Not days, certainly not hours.
It was a good dying, in the end. Early Tuesday morning he took his last breaths in his bedroom, in this gorgeous house that he built, his wife and son at his side. But despite that it is still a shock, as death always seems to be, and the void in the shape of this dear man will linger for a long time, as it should.
He wasn't always that happy man, and struggled for years with depression and alcohol, sons he rarely saw and women he'd left behind. I didn't know him back then, of course, but rather met him years after he had managed to settle into a life that he loved -- with his wife Andrea, whom he married back in '76, and his son Evan, my sweet man, born three years later.
To me, honestly, he seemed like a giant teddy bear -- a quiet, gentle, bearded man with the strength of an ox and the steadfastness of an oak. It's hard to imagine those earlier years of discontent, of wandering the world, of serving in the Merchant Marines, getting shot at while running ammunition up the Saigon River, leaving broken hearts in his wake. It's hard to imagine but it also explained the hints of sadness, of longing, that seemed to linger sometimes in the creases at the corners of his eyes. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, with him, between laugh lines and loss.
One of my favorite memories of Harold, Christmas of 2001. Nathan and I flew in to SeaTac from New York and Evan came to pick us up. His car broke down before we even got north of Seattle, but we managed to get to a friend's apartment. It was late, closing in on midnight by then, and Evan called his mom to let her know we wouldn't be able to make it home that night. Moments later Andrea called us back to tell us Harold was out the door, car keys in hand -- there was no way in hell he was leaving his kid with a broke-down car in the middle of the night, hours away from home.
Another favorite memory, July of 2009, at the barbecue Mom and Paul hosted here in Anacortes for all the west coast folks who wouldn't be able to attend Nathan's wedding in Philadelphia that September. Paul spent the afternoon working his oyster-grilling magic and Harold spent the afternoon holding trays of oysters, wandering the barbecue, quietly offering them to the other guests. There was something so sweet, such a desire to be present and helpful despite a quietness that maybe sometimes made conversing difficult for him, that I found myself wanting to just give him a big huge hug. That was a few months before Evan and I got together, but I knew by then that his was a family I wanted to get to know better.
Evan moved to New York not long after that, and for the next few years it broke my heart when it came time to say goodbye to Harold at the end of our Anacortes visits. He always looked so sad to see us go, to see this beloved son of his leaving for the far side of the country. I can only imagine his joy when Evan decided to move home again almost two years ago, and then I didn't have to imagine it when I finally moved to Anacortes a few months ago. He wore it all over his face.
The last few months were hard for Harold after spending a lifetime building houses, sailing the seas first in the Merchant Marines and then as an engineer for the Washington State Ferries, road-tripping with friends and family, learning the banjo and the dobro and falling into the wonderfully close-knit and familial world of the northwest bluegrass scene. The last few months saw his world shrink down to a recliner chair in the guest room, the trip from there to the kitchen, to the bedroom or bathroom and back again. As his liver disease progressed his eyesight grew worse and he began struggling to follow a conversation, to differentiate at times between waking and sleep, to eat, finally to breathe.
Yet through these months of enduring this slow decline and ever-shrinking world, Harold continued to live with an almost shocking grace. We would sit quietly together for a little while most days, he in his recliner chair and me pulled up close with my knitting in my lap. The television would be playing -- old westerns or Pandora bluegrass or country music stations -- and we'd talk about random things, as thoughts rose up through the increasing muddled-ness of his mind. The merits of the Beatles verses the Stones. The surprise of watching old tv shoes (Sanford & Son, specifically) and hearing words that are no longer okay to say. Whether or not I'd like some weed with the celery and peanut butter we were munching on (I didn't). Whether or not he wanted to continue taking anti-depressants. The frustration of causing stress and work for his loved ones.
Once, when I was sitting with him so Andrea could go out for a hair cut, he asked me a couple times when she'd be back. Eventually I noticed him looking off into the distance, a sad and affectionate smile on his face. When I asked him if I could get him anything, he sort of shook himself aware and said, "I sure miss that woman when she's not here...."
Another time, I arrived at the front door to find a semi-frazzled Evan trying to clean Harold up after his breakfast hadn't settled well and he'd vomited all over himself, his chair, the floor. I ended up sitting with Harold in the bedroom while Evan finished cleaning up the mess in the other room. Harold asked where Evan was, what he was doing, kept saying what a good boy Evan is, and eventually this: "I'm so glad he's my son. Otherwise I might not have been lucky enough to know him."
Home hospice care began this past Sunday, the hospital bed arrived Monday afternoon, and though of course we all knew what that meant, I think we were expecting weeks, months, to be able to sit with Harold, to smile at him and bask in his gentleness. Not days, certainly not hours.
It was a good dying, in the end. Early Tuesday morning he took his last breaths in his bedroom, in this gorgeous house that he built, his wife and son at his side. But despite that it is still a shock, as death always seems to be, and the void in the shape of this dear man will linger for a long time, as it should.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
eulogy (in which i come clean)
Kristen Purcell Fundraiser
The first concrete memory I have of her involved a sand castle and an elvish battle and her, looking quizzically at me from behind that lanky reddish-brown hair that often fell in wisps in front of her eyes. She had let me draw her into one of my many make-believe worlds probably involving pitched warfare and dramatic chases and all kinds of magical goings-on.
But what I remember best is her 9-year-old face crinkling up into a skeptical-beyond-her-years look and saying something along the lines of, "Okay, but WHY would Roquat the Red be trapped in his tunnels if he and the fairy queen have a secret alliance?"
She was always looking for an explanation, that girl.
I was talking recently with my Ari-love about our memories of Kristen and she said that she'd always felt like there was a question mark hovering over their friendship, going back to our high school years. I said from what I remembered of her, that I imagined she wasn't alone in feeling that way. We agreed, though, that she had what seemed like an unusually developed sense of both fairness and acceptance for someone so young, at least for other people -- I imagine she was harder on her self.
The last concrete memory I have of her involved a missed train, a frantic 19-year-old me trying to get back to the city, and her, unquestioningly willing to pick me up in Shrub Oak and drive me to the Croton Harmon station at what was probably an ungodly hour of the morning.
That would have been 1995, at the waning of the year and mere weeks before I ended up dropping out of Barnard, much to the confusion and dismay of friends and relatives alike.
She lived another nine and a half years and I have no idea what she fell into, other than brief snippets of information from mutual friends. She was having fun and being smart with her drug use. She had a job as an au paire. She was doing great. She had OD'd. She was fine. And eventually, one warm summer afternoon in 2005, a sobbing, near-hysterical phone call with the news: Kristen was dead, found in her apartment by a friend who had started worrying.
I sometimes wish we'd intersected during those intervening years, as we each played with and struggled over our particular demons. We both skipped along from one drug of choice to the next but I, at least, eventually skipped along to less scary playgrounds with less dire consequences. (Even then, though, it's hard to stop, and easy to explain away one's drugs when partaking mostly with friends who love you, who are dabblers, who are respectable and smart and don't quite see your desperation, the extra pills you secretly take, the light-headedness and nausea you feel afterwards sometimes for days, the miserable crashing cross-country plane trips during which you kind of almost wish you were already dead. It's also hard to stop when the most magical thing in the world is wandering through Times Square alone at 3am, fairyfied by the wonder that is ecstasy and a summer rain, feeling such deep connection to the sparkly shining air and the laughing giddy people around you that you have to stop moving just to breathe, and so you find a quiet dark stoop somewhere to write out all of this passion you are feeling, only the next day you discover that your treatise on the beauty of life is completely and utterly illegible. Not unintelligible, mind you, but actually illegible. You, with the once-pretty cursive meticulously cultivated ever since grade school, find pages and pages of toddler-scrawl and not much memory of getting home.)
The main difference between us, of course, was that I got out alive and she didn't. I was very lucky in those years after college.
I had a steady, stable, embracing job that provided a reliable paycheck and a place for me to have to go to every day -- a place I actually wanted to go to every day. I'm pretty sure my colleagues didn't know the extent of my after-hours doings, but their warmth in the face of my headaches, my sometimes glassy-eyed stare and exhaustion, was at times more than I could bare. (I imagine they knew a little, perhaps, in the face of (for example) me trying not to stare too intently at my beloved boss as she explained our next project, unaware that her hair, wonderfully curly on a good day, was spiraling and writhing around her head Medusa-like, at least to me, at least after a particularly beautiful but ill-planned night of ecstasy and acid at the same time. Because why not, if you have it.)
I also had friends who, despite enjoying the odd evening of substance-induced debauchery with me, were ultimately supportive and respectful when I finally came to the realization that even these fun drugs -- you know the kinds I mean: the pleasingly multicolored tabs of acid, the ecstasy pills with their fanciful little stamps, the dried 'shrooms that taste like old flesh in the back of your throat -- were too much for me.
I do not know the specifics of Kristen's story, and part of me is glad not to. But I wish, in moments, that we had been more aware of each other during those years; that we could have shared our stories, perhaps shared our burdens, a little bit.
She died alone in the summer of 2005, two years after I finally decided to give it all up, when we were 29 years old. Later this month a few of us are congregating not far from our old stomping grounds to celebrate our 20th high school reunion. It's hard to fathom not her absence at this reunion, as I can't quite imagine she'd have been into such silliness anyway, but her absence in the world -- this girl we knew, for me practically the girl next door.
We're raising some money in memory of her own personal demons but also in honor of her intellect and inquisitiveness and desire to have everybody get a fair shot -- even Roquat the Red in his underground tunnels, even each of us in our failings, in our disappointments.
We're raising money in particular for a non-profit organization dedicated to helping those struggling with drug issues in legal and medical and practical ways.
Please take a look at the link at the top of this ramble, please consider donating. I think Kristen would appreciate that this money may not only help people get the treatment they need, but may help people get the meal they need, the shower they need, the needle they need.
The first concrete memory I have of her involved a sand castle and an elvish battle and her, looking quizzically at me from behind that lanky reddish-brown hair that often fell in wisps in front of her eyes. She had let me draw her into one of my many make-believe worlds probably involving pitched warfare and dramatic chases and all kinds of magical goings-on.
But what I remember best is her 9-year-old face crinkling up into a skeptical-beyond-her-years look and saying something along the lines of, "Okay, but WHY would Roquat the Red be trapped in his tunnels if he and the fairy queen have a secret alliance?"
She was always looking for an explanation, that girl.
I was talking recently with my Ari-love about our memories of Kristen and she said that she'd always felt like there was a question mark hovering over their friendship, going back to our high school years. I said from what I remembered of her, that I imagined she wasn't alone in feeling that way. We agreed, though, that she had what seemed like an unusually developed sense of both fairness and acceptance for someone so young, at least for other people -- I imagine she was harder on her self.
The last concrete memory I have of her involved a missed train, a frantic 19-year-old me trying to get back to the city, and her, unquestioningly willing to pick me up in Shrub Oak and drive me to the Croton Harmon station at what was probably an ungodly hour of the morning.
That would have been 1995, at the waning of the year and mere weeks before I ended up dropping out of Barnard, much to the confusion and dismay of friends and relatives alike.
She lived another nine and a half years and I have no idea what she fell into, other than brief snippets of information from mutual friends. She was having fun and being smart with her drug use. She had a job as an au paire. She was doing great. She had OD'd. She was fine. And eventually, one warm summer afternoon in 2005, a sobbing, near-hysterical phone call with the news: Kristen was dead, found in her apartment by a friend who had started worrying.
I sometimes wish we'd intersected during those intervening years, as we each played with and struggled over our particular demons. We both skipped along from one drug of choice to the next but I, at least, eventually skipped along to less scary playgrounds with less dire consequences. (Even then, though, it's hard to stop, and easy to explain away one's drugs when partaking mostly with friends who love you, who are dabblers, who are respectable and smart and don't quite see your desperation, the extra pills you secretly take, the light-headedness and nausea you feel afterwards sometimes for days, the miserable crashing cross-country plane trips during which you kind of almost wish you were already dead. It's also hard to stop when the most magical thing in the world is wandering through Times Square alone at 3am, fairyfied by the wonder that is ecstasy and a summer rain, feeling such deep connection to the sparkly shining air and the laughing giddy people around you that you have to stop moving just to breathe, and so you find a quiet dark stoop somewhere to write out all of this passion you are feeling, only the next day you discover that your treatise on the beauty of life is completely and utterly illegible. Not unintelligible, mind you, but actually illegible. You, with the once-pretty cursive meticulously cultivated ever since grade school, find pages and pages of toddler-scrawl and not much memory of getting home.)
The main difference between us, of course, was that I got out alive and she didn't. I was very lucky in those years after college.
I had a steady, stable, embracing job that provided a reliable paycheck and a place for me to have to go to every day -- a place I actually wanted to go to every day. I'm pretty sure my colleagues didn't know the extent of my after-hours doings, but their warmth in the face of my headaches, my sometimes glassy-eyed stare and exhaustion, was at times more than I could bare. (I imagine they knew a little, perhaps, in the face of (for example) me trying not to stare too intently at my beloved boss as she explained our next project, unaware that her hair, wonderfully curly on a good day, was spiraling and writhing around her head Medusa-like, at least to me, at least after a particularly beautiful but ill-planned night of ecstasy and acid at the same time. Because why not, if you have it.)
I also had friends who, despite enjoying the odd evening of substance-induced debauchery with me, were ultimately supportive and respectful when I finally came to the realization that even these fun drugs -- you know the kinds I mean: the pleasingly multicolored tabs of acid, the ecstasy pills with their fanciful little stamps, the dried 'shrooms that taste like old flesh in the back of your throat -- were too much for me.
I do not know the specifics of Kristen's story, and part of me is glad not to. But I wish, in moments, that we had been more aware of each other during those years; that we could have shared our stories, perhaps shared our burdens, a little bit.
She died alone in the summer of 2005, two years after I finally decided to give it all up, when we were 29 years old. Later this month a few of us are congregating not far from our old stomping grounds to celebrate our 20th high school reunion. It's hard to fathom not her absence at this reunion, as I can't quite imagine she'd have been into such silliness anyway, but her absence in the world -- this girl we knew, for me practically the girl next door.
We're raising some money in memory of her own personal demons but also in honor of her intellect and inquisitiveness and desire to have everybody get a fair shot -- even Roquat the Red in his underground tunnels, even each of us in our failings, in our disappointments.
We're raising money in particular for a non-profit organization dedicated to helping those struggling with drug issues in legal and medical and practical ways.
Please take a look at the link at the top of this ramble, please consider donating. I think Kristen would appreciate that this money may not only help people get the treatment they need, but may help people get the meal they need, the shower they need, the needle they need.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
ghosts & glorious golden beets
I was going to get some, and then decided not to, but then Lauren decided to get some, and then we wandered on through the market and came across some more, so then I just had to get some too.
Golden beets. They draw me in every time, even when I don't particularly want beets. They're. Just. So. Goddamned. Beautiful.
We met at Union Square, took the L out to Bedford Avenue (oh lord how I detest Bedford Avenue), and walked west towards the East River and all the deliciousness awaiting us at Smorgasburg. We indulged in Dough doughnuts and shared a bowl of Noodle Lane noodles and split the best fish sandwich and finished it all off with cups of strong-enough-to-make-your-toes-curl cold-brewed iced coffee. We sat in the sun and traded stories, she resplendently pregnant and happy, me feeling grateful for the lunch, for her, for this magnificent day.
We took the L back into Manhattan and decided to wander the Union Square farmers market where we bought golden beets and where I bought local linden honey for me and wine for a friend's apartment-warming party.
I swiped her back into the train station, took myself back up to street level, and headed west to catch the A-train home, anxious to have a couple hours before heading back out to the aforementioned party.
As happens because it's so beautiful, I found myself walking along 16th Street and, as also happens (and yet somehow always manages to take me by surprise), I found myself passing Xavier High School.
One of my brother's dearest friends, and something akin to another little brother to me, killed himself during his senior year of high school. Xavier was the last place either of us saw him, on a gray and cold December afternoon when my brother was visiting me at Barnard and I took him downtown to watch this friend compete in a debate tournament.
And even now, almost twenty years later, Xavier jolts me into a moment of grief every time, a moment of having the air punched out of my chest. But yesterday as I was walking, for that moment, for that block, I felt as if some of my ghosts were walking next to me, and it felt warm and golden and good.
I've been contemplating abandoning New York City, heading west, finding my love and my next move. I am excited about this, even as I move almost imperceptibly, glacier-like, in that direction.
But I will miss these streets, and I worry that I will be abandoning these ghosts. There's been a certain comfort, over two decades of walking this city, in coming knowingly or unknowingly across my particular haunted places.
Every time I walk down 113th Street, I smile at the memory of a Symposium dinner with my father at the end of a childhood going-to-work-with-Dad day.
The rock wall overlooking Riverside Park, especially in the gloaming-time when the sun is just going down across the Hudson and the shadows come swirling in, brings back hours-long conversations with Mick, perched up there on the wall and thinking, I think, about falling.
And then there's Matt, heartbreaking Matt and the reminder, walking down 16th street every once in awhile, that you rarely know that this time -- this moment right now -- may be the last moment you see someone you love.
And I know of course that these places are not my ghosts, but the deep pleasure in still being able to walk fragments of their worlds is real. I wonder, sometimes, if pieces of people can be caught in their multitudes of geography -- in concrete and leaves, in rivers and libraries and ash. I'm hoping, of course, that I will take them with me when I go.
So I walked along 16th Street yesterday, basking in the afterglow of a lovely afternoon with my Lauren, wondering what to do with my beautiful golden beets, and also thinking about my dead. And I felt, in that moment, very, very lucky. Is that really so strange?
Golden beets. They draw me in every time, even when I don't particularly want beets. They're. Just. So. Goddamned. Beautiful.
We met at Union Square, took the L out to Bedford Avenue (oh lord how I detest Bedford Avenue), and walked west towards the East River and all the deliciousness awaiting us at Smorgasburg. We indulged in Dough doughnuts and shared a bowl of Noodle Lane noodles and split the best fish sandwich and finished it all off with cups of strong-enough-to-make-your-toes-curl cold-brewed iced coffee. We sat in the sun and traded stories, she resplendently pregnant and happy, me feeling grateful for the lunch, for her, for this magnificent day.
We took the L back into Manhattan and decided to wander the Union Square farmers market where we bought golden beets and where I bought local linden honey for me and wine for a friend's apartment-warming party.
I swiped her back into the train station, took myself back up to street level, and headed west to catch the A-train home, anxious to have a couple hours before heading back out to the aforementioned party.
As happens because it's so beautiful, I found myself walking along 16th Street and, as also happens (and yet somehow always manages to take me by surprise), I found myself passing Xavier High School.
One of my brother's dearest friends, and something akin to another little brother to me, killed himself during his senior year of high school. Xavier was the last place either of us saw him, on a gray and cold December afternoon when my brother was visiting me at Barnard and I took him downtown to watch this friend compete in a debate tournament.
And even now, almost twenty years later, Xavier jolts me into a moment of grief every time, a moment of having the air punched out of my chest. But yesterday as I was walking, for that moment, for that block, I felt as if some of my ghosts were walking next to me, and it felt warm and golden and good.
I've been contemplating abandoning New York City, heading west, finding my love and my next move. I am excited about this, even as I move almost imperceptibly, glacier-like, in that direction.
But I will miss these streets, and I worry that I will be abandoning these ghosts. There's been a certain comfort, over two decades of walking this city, in coming knowingly or unknowingly across my particular haunted places.
Every time I walk down 113th Street, I smile at the memory of a Symposium dinner with my father at the end of a childhood going-to-work-with-Dad day.
The rock wall overlooking Riverside Park, especially in the gloaming-time when the sun is just going down across the Hudson and the shadows come swirling in, brings back hours-long conversations with Mick, perched up there on the wall and thinking, I think, about falling.
And then there's Matt, heartbreaking Matt and the reminder, walking down 16th street every once in awhile, that you rarely know that this time -- this moment right now -- may be the last moment you see someone you love.
And I know of course that these places are not my ghosts, but the deep pleasure in still being able to walk fragments of their worlds is real. I wonder, sometimes, if pieces of people can be caught in their multitudes of geography -- in concrete and leaves, in rivers and libraries and ash. I'm hoping, of course, that I will take them with me when I go.
So I walked along 16th Street yesterday, basking in the afterglow of a lovely afternoon with my Lauren, wondering what to do with my beautiful golden beets, and also thinking about my dead. And I felt, in that moment, very, very lucky. Is that really so strange?
Saturday, June 07, 2014
ancient beads and old friends
We met by the clock in Grand Central Station yesterday evening, in the midst of the rushing Friday night post-work crowds. She was wearing these beautifully bright and simple beaded necklaces, white and blue and yellow and green and all the colors of the rainbow. I complimented her on them and she just looked at me, surprised, and laughed, and said, "Emma, you made these for me!"
As soon as she said it, of course, it all came rushing back: that year or so in high school of obsessively stringing beads and crocheting skull caps (mostly burgundy and, of course, black). And I couldn't believe that she still had these necklaces, tucked away somewhere safe for over twenty years. She looked beautiful and happy in a flirty summery outfit and those bright and cheerful beads, and it felt indescribably warm -- this realization that she'd saved them all this time.
What's magical and heartbreaking in the world so often revolves around the waxing and waning of relationships. I've written a lot over the years about the waning part of things, have perhaps (some would say definitely) wallowed more than is helpful in the endings of things. But lately, over this past year, these past few months, even just this past week, I've found myself reveling at the pure good fortune of having the people that I have in my life.
Erica and the fact that despite long stretches of little communication, somehow our conversations and letters always feel, to me, deeply connected.
Jill and our sometimes prickly but life-long love for each other.
Nick and his willingness to accompany me to random dinners and random parties and weekly lunches and long walks-and-talks down Broadway or Riverside or Central Park West of a beautiful spring evening.
Lauren and her gorgeous New York brashness and deep understanding of some of my inner most insecurities.
Johanna and our friendship's propensity for being a safe place for endless conversations about grief (though also about silly movies and wonderful books and what's really the best ramen place in this town).
Ari-love and, well, everything.
And Cindy, my friend of the beaded necklaces and flirty sundresses and crazy beautiful curls. Cindy with whom my friendship has been waxing and waning since middle school, but mostly waxing. We two are so awkward, sometimes, in the world and with each other and yet I don't know that it is possible to love a friend more than I love this woman.
So we met up yesterday at Grand Central and headed down to BAM, where we joined her brother and his husband for dinner and wine and the wonderful hilarity that was Ask Me Another. Afterwards we wandered around Brooklyn, ostensibly looking for the C but secretly enjoying the wandering and the beautiful June night. We got home to my place just before midnight and promptly went to bed, both of us early risers and done in after a long day.
This morning was filled with tea and talk and apples with peanut butter, and then it was time to leave for work. She waited with me at the bus stop and then made her way home, and I've been left with this sense of warmth, this sense of being suffused with love and well-being, ever since.
A woman I knew in college once wrote a piece about her father's death and the "boundless luck" that had exemplified an adventurous and fulfilling life. I've always remembered that phrase, and peered at it suspiciously, but perhaps in my old age I am beginning finally to understand it. Perhaps not the adventuring, exactly, but the sense of contentment that she also seemed to imply.
As soon as she said it, of course, it all came rushing back: that year or so in high school of obsessively stringing beads and crocheting skull caps (mostly burgundy and, of course, black). And I couldn't believe that she still had these necklaces, tucked away somewhere safe for over twenty years. She looked beautiful and happy in a flirty summery outfit and those bright and cheerful beads, and it felt indescribably warm -- this realization that she'd saved them all this time.
What's magical and heartbreaking in the world so often revolves around the waxing and waning of relationships. I've written a lot over the years about the waning part of things, have perhaps (some would say definitely) wallowed more than is helpful in the endings of things. But lately, over this past year, these past few months, even just this past week, I've found myself reveling at the pure good fortune of having the people that I have in my life.
Erica and the fact that despite long stretches of little communication, somehow our conversations and letters always feel, to me, deeply connected.
Jill and our sometimes prickly but life-long love for each other.
Nick and his willingness to accompany me to random dinners and random parties and weekly lunches and long walks-and-talks down Broadway or Riverside or Central Park West of a beautiful spring evening.
Lauren and her gorgeous New York brashness and deep understanding of some of my inner most insecurities.
Johanna and our friendship's propensity for being a safe place for endless conversations about grief (though also about silly movies and wonderful books and what's really the best ramen place in this town).
Ari-love and, well, everything.
And Cindy, my friend of the beaded necklaces and flirty sundresses and crazy beautiful curls. Cindy with whom my friendship has been waxing and waning since middle school, but mostly waxing. We two are so awkward, sometimes, in the world and with each other and yet I don't know that it is possible to love a friend more than I love this woman.
So we met up yesterday at Grand Central and headed down to BAM, where we joined her brother and his husband for dinner and wine and the wonderful hilarity that was Ask Me Another. Afterwards we wandered around Brooklyn, ostensibly looking for the C but secretly enjoying the wandering and the beautiful June night. We got home to my place just before midnight and promptly went to bed, both of us early risers and done in after a long day.
This morning was filled with tea and talk and apples with peanut butter, and then it was time to leave for work. She waited with me at the bus stop and then made her way home, and I've been left with this sense of warmth, this sense of being suffused with love and well-being, ever since.
A woman I knew in college once wrote a piece about her father's death and the "boundless luck" that had exemplified an adventurous and fulfilling life. I've always remembered that phrase, and peered at it suspiciously, but perhaps in my old age I am beginning finally to understand it. Perhaps not the adventuring, exactly, but the sense of contentment that she also seemed to imply.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
birthdays
Last week, my mother sent me and my brother a handful of old pictures of Dad in his various incarnations. A few with us kids. A few from his own childhood (he idolized and dressed up as Roy Rogers -- I have the proof!). One or two lovelies of him and Mom back in their California days.
This one, in particular, I love so much -- that hat, that hair, that quiet, pensive, far-away look. I wonder what he was thinking about, caught there in that beautiful moment, or if he was thinking about anything at all.
I sent it to family friend Bill, with whom I've been spending quite a bit of time these last few months. He wrote back almost immediately saying, "That was a Bill I didn't know. Goddamn long-haired Berkeley hippie, I suspect!"
This made me laugh, and in a funny way made me feel a little better about the fact that I didn't really know him in those days, either. Today would have been his 68th birthday.
This one, in particular, I love so much -- that hat, that hair, that quiet, pensive, far-away look. I wonder what he was thinking about, caught there in that beautiful moment, or if he was thinking about anything at all.
I sent it to family friend Bill, with whom I've been spending quite a bit of time these last few months. He wrote back almost immediately saying, "That was a Bill I didn't know. Goddamn long-haired Berkeley hippie, I suspect!"
This made me laugh, and in a funny way made me feel a little better about the fact that I didn't really know him in those days, either. Today would have been his 68th birthday.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
another april eighteenth, almost
Last year was a lovely eighteenth of April: a simple, delicious dinner of some of my father's favorite things shared with three of my favorite people. My mother, my Jill, my boy. This year will be a quieter eighteenth of April, more solitary perhaps yet still emotionally rich.
I will get up at quarter to six, throw on my running clothes, do some stretches, and go for my thrice-weekly walk/jog/stumble. I will come back and prepare for the day. I will get my usual seat on the bus and spend a lovely half-hour reading. (I am undeniably a creature of habit, and this is okay.) I will spend the day with colleagues I love, in a place that I have loved since I was a little girl.
I will, perhaps, finally get around to replying to a beautifully intimate and family-history-filled letter I received last week from my uncle. I will be amazed at how despite knowing this uncle for thirty-seven years, there are whole worlds still to learn, entire histories about which I know nothing at all.
I will go home after work and meditate, my closed eyes facing the sunshine that will likely be streaming in through my living room windows. I will breathe, and try to remain calm in the face of the Llama-monster's likely yowling in my face. I will not get the giggles (though it will be alright if I do), and eventually the bell will chime and I will re-enter the waking world and scratch behind the Llama-monster's ears and we will sprawl contentedly on the sun-dappled wood floor of my apartment (though it will be alright if it's instead gray and dreary).
I will cherish my father's memory by learning to cherish even more the lives he helped to shape, and by continuing to tell the story of him as I know it.
"And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
-Tim O'Brien, from The Things They Carried
I will get up at quarter to six, throw on my running clothes, do some stretches, and go for my thrice-weekly walk/jog/stumble. I will come back and prepare for the day. I will get my usual seat on the bus and spend a lovely half-hour reading. (I am undeniably a creature of habit, and this is okay.) I will spend the day with colleagues I love, in a place that I have loved since I was a little girl.
I will, perhaps, finally get around to replying to a beautifully intimate and family-history-filled letter I received last week from my uncle. I will be amazed at how despite knowing this uncle for thirty-seven years, there are whole worlds still to learn, entire histories about which I know nothing at all.
I will go home after work and meditate, my closed eyes facing the sunshine that will likely be streaming in through my living room windows. I will breathe, and try to remain calm in the face of the Llama-monster's likely yowling in my face. I will not get the giggles (though it will be alright if I do), and eventually the bell will chime and I will re-enter the waking world and scratch behind the Llama-monster's ears and we will sprawl contentedly on the sun-dappled wood floor of my apartment (though it will be alright if it's instead gray and dreary).
I will cherish my father's memory by learning to cherish even more the lives he helped to shape, and by continuing to tell the story of him as I know it.
"And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
-Tim O'Brien, from The Things They Carried
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
this strange and lovely thing called family
I can't begin to tell you how much I love
this picture.
It came the other day in a rare and unexpected email from a relative, my father's big brother, my formidable Uncle Earle. I say rare and unexpected because he and I are not often in touch directly, though I hear about his goings-on from my mother and I imagine he hears about mine.
But clearly I don't hear nearly enough about his goings-on because the message* that came with this wonderful picture took me completely by surprise. It also managed to make me feel both very, very happy and indescribably sad, all mixed up and at the same time.
When I was a little girl I always loved visiting my aunt and uncle and their magical house of mysteries. But then adolescence kicked in, and then college, and then jobs and bills and all that fun adult stuff, and somehow years go by now in between visits.
My uncle of the constantly wry expression (due largely but I would guess not entirely to a long-ago medical issue about which I am fuzzy on the specifics), the brilliantly dry wit, and the deep, gruff voice, I confess, intimidated me a little when I was growing up. He seemed not to share my father's innate goofiness and playful laughter, and somehow the fact that he so loved gardening (and the fact that my father so loved him) didn't quite soften the edges I'd built up around him in my head. I began to suspect my childish impressions weren't entirely accurate quite a few years ago, though, and this most recent email is just further proof that clearly I've been missing out on something beautiful.
This picture of Earle -- smiling shyly amidst armfuls of gorgeous daffodils with his beautiful garden spreading out behind him -- momentarily took my breath away. It made me miss my father and his quirky grin with a particular sweet ache I haven't felt in a long time. It made me miss the idea of him growing older, graying, balding, surrounded by daffodils on a first day of spring. It made me crave watching him settle into retirement, into his golden years, with as much gentleness and grace as my perhaps not-so-formidable-after-all Uncle Earle.
I have this fantasy - this idea - of moving west and falling into the warm embrace of these people, this amazing family that sometimes I fear I barely know.
*"Hi M - this is one of my "art" projects. Delivering 550 daffodils around town to businesses and people I care about. Wish i could smile better. Hope all is well with you. Love Uncle Earle"
It came the other day in a rare and unexpected email from a relative, my father's big brother, my formidable Uncle Earle. I say rare and unexpected because he and I are not often in touch directly, though I hear about his goings-on from my mother and I imagine he hears about mine.
But clearly I don't hear nearly enough about his goings-on because the message* that came with this wonderful picture took me completely by surprise. It also managed to make me feel both very, very happy and indescribably sad, all mixed up and at the same time.
When I was a little girl I always loved visiting my aunt and uncle and their magical house of mysteries. But then adolescence kicked in, and then college, and then jobs and bills and all that fun adult stuff, and somehow years go by now in between visits.
My uncle of the constantly wry expression (due largely but I would guess not entirely to a long-ago medical issue about which I am fuzzy on the specifics), the brilliantly dry wit, and the deep, gruff voice, I confess, intimidated me a little when I was growing up. He seemed not to share my father's innate goofiness and playful laughter, and somehow the fact that he so loved gardening (and the fact that my father so loved him) didn't quite soften the edges I'd built up around him in my head. I began to suspect my childish impressions weren't entirely accurate quite a few years ago, though, and this most recent email is just further proof that clearly I've been missing out on something beautiful.
This picture of Earle -- smiling shyly amidst armfuls of gorgeous daffodils with his beautiful garden spreading out behind him -- momentarily took my breath away. It made me miss my father and his quirky grin with a particular sweet ache I haven't felt in a long time. It made me miss the idea of him growing older, graying, balding, surrounded by daffodils on a first day of spring. It made me crave watching him settle into retirement, into his golden years, with as much gentleness and grace as my perhaps not-so-formidable-after-all Uncle Earle.
I have this fantasy - this idea - of moving west and falling into the warm embrace of these people, this amazing family that sometimes I fear I barely know.
*"Hi M - this is one of my "art" projects. Delivering 550 daffodils around town to businesses and people I care about. Wish i could smile better. Hope all is well with you. Love Uncle Earle"
Monday, March 10, 2014
class wars. also family histories.
One of the nice things about spending so much time with family friend Bill these past weeks has been hearing little stories -- beautiful little fragments -- about my father.
As you may have gathered by now, family friend Bill was one of my father's best friends. The two Bills, if you will! (Though thinking about it now, as an adult, I am sort of amazed that they became such close friends. They are very, very different in so many ways -- my father the westerner, rugged, a little ragged, a country mouse in the big city. Bill comparatively sophisticated, in touch with his feelings, urban and urbane, well-versed in cosmopolitan living.)
Somehow last week, during our weekly get-together, we ended up talking about money. Specifically, we were talking about how some people just seem to have too damned much of it.* Suddenly Bill said, "Now, your father, his politics were good of course. But he wasn't by any means a radical when you guys first got to New York."
He went on to tell me how, not too long after we moved here from the west coast, Dad had taken Mom out on the town. Part of their wanderings that day involved a leisurely stroll down 5th Avenue, and this leisurely afternoon stroll led to some surprising results.
"After that walk," Bill said, "he came to the conclusion that it was time for a revolution."
*When there are hotel rooms that go for tens of thousands a night, and hamburgers in the hundreds, well, clearly some people just have too much money! But on a more serious note, this is of course a real and growing problem here in America. Check it out.
As you may have gathered by now, family friend Bill was one of my father's best friends. The two Bills, if you will! (Though thinking about it now, as an adult, I am sort of amazed that they became such close friends. They are very, very different in so many ways -- my father the westerner, rugged, a little ragged, a country mouse in the big city. Bill comparatively sophisticated, in touch with his feelings, urban and urbane, well-versed in cosmopolitan living.)
Somehow last week, during our weekly get-together, we ended up talking about money. Specifically, we were talking about how some people just seem to have too damned much of it.* Suddenly Bill said, "Now, your father, his politics were good of course. But he wasn't by any means a radical when you guys first got to New York."
He went on to tell me how, not too long after we moved here from the west coast, Dad had taken Mom out on the town. Part of their wanderings that day involved a leisurely stroll down 5th Avenue, and this leisurely afternoon stroll led to some surprising results.
"After that walk," Bill said, "he came to the conclusion that it was time for a revolution."
*When there are hotel rooms that go for tens of thousands a night, and hamburgers in the hundreds, well, clearly some people just have too much money! But on a more serious note, this is of course a real and growing problem here in America. Check it out.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
'i found myself down by the water...'
My aunt had a heart attack last weekend. She's in the hospital now, with her husband and oldest son hovering close by keeping an eye on things. From what I hear, she seems to be okay and will be going home soon.
Part of me would like to be there myself, but my aunt and uncle emigrated to New Zealand years ago and are (almost) quite literally on the other side of the world.
They were living in New Guinea twenty years ago when my father died of a heart attack, and it took them several days to make it back to New York. This didn't seem strange to me back then, this delay in their arrival. She was my father's baby sister, my wild and wonderful globetrotting Auntie, living on a sailboat and exploring beautiful and exotic places and doing the most gorgeous watercolors of her travels and sending us kids the sweetest handmade cards and fabrics and gifts from all over the world.
Last summer my aunt and uncle decided to cut back on their months of sailing every year and settle more permanently in their house in northern New Zealand. I fell in love with New Zealand during three weeks I spent there back in 2006, but it's a damned long way away and a damned expensive plane ticket to get there and back, and somehow the news of their settling there made me feel very sad.
Yesterday morning when I first read the email letting us know about her heart attack, I didn't feel anything but distance. Later in the evening, when I was talking to my boy on the other side of the country, I mentioned it almost as an after-thought. He looked horrified, of course, because it is never good to hear about one's girlfriend's beloved Auntie being hospitalized, and I think surprised at first that I didn't seem more upset.
And strangely, the more I talked to him about it, the more I felt an almost shocking anger welling up behind my eyes. I found myself crying with rage over the distance between here and there, and over the distance between my father's death and her arrival in our house in Mohegan Lake. The choices she's made over the years -- to be so far away from family so much of the time -- seem alien to me, especially now as she and her husband are growing older and facing the inevitable decline that comes with that.
(Of course here I am in New York City, thousands of miles away from my family, from my boy, and well aware of my own hypocrisy. Yet there are degrees of distance -- at least in my head, at least during last night's bout of anger, which of course was inextricably linked to my fear of losing her, of losing another connection to my father, to my self.)
I've been thinking today about the myriad ways in which grief can surprise us, years or even decades later. Yesterday marked four years since my boyfriend's older brother killed himself -- not very long at all in the grand scheme of things, and certainly close enough to still feel unbearably raw. But instead of being filled with sorrow or rage, my boy somehow managed to find some solace -- walking out in the forest lands, down to his beloved ocean.
He wrote this last night, and I keep coming back to it today as I am trying to be more aware of my own anger, my own fear and seemingly ever-present grief:
"I found myself by the water. It hit me that all of this will forever come in waves. Like when you're sitting on the beach, and sometimes the waves come almost to your feet, but then the next wave is way out there and doesn't come close. Bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker. But always waves. There's nothing you or I can do to stop the waves. The forces behind them are bigger than us. But if we can accept them, and watch them from just far enough away, we can usually hop out of the way before we get our socks wet, or before they swallow us up."
Which, finally, brings me to where I was wanting to go with this all along. I've fallen out of the habit of meditating in the last few months, and in a weird way I can't help but think that last night's anger came, at least in part, out of that lack.
So this morning I sat. Just for ten minutes, but it was okay. Nice, even, and calming. I wrote to a dear friend last weekend, before even hearing about my aunt's heart attack, that I'd fallen off the meditation wagon recently. She wrote back, "Your morning ritual of tea and meditation sounded so lovely! You deserve to start your days so sweetly, my dear."
Perhaps tomorrow I will sit again, or perhaps the day after that. And perhaps if I keep doing that, some of these waves will recede a little bit, or at least stop threatening to swallow me up. And then -- then hopefully I will be able to to think of my aunt only with love, as I want to and as she deserves, and not have that love tinged with hurt.
Part of me would like to be there myself, but my aunt and uncle emigrated to New Zealand years ago and are (almost) quite literally on the other side of the world.
They were living in New Guinea twenty years ago when my father died of a heart attack, and it took them several days to make it back to New York. This didn't seem strange to me back then, this delay in their arrival. She was my father's baby sister, my wild and wonderful globetrotting Auntie, living on a sailboat and exploring beautiful and exotic places and doing the most gorgeous watercolors of her travels and sending us kids the sweetest handmade cards and fabrics and gifts from all over the world.
Last summer my aunt and uncle decided to cut back on their months of sailing every year and settle more permanently in their house in northern New Zealand. I fell in love with New Zealand during three weeks I spent there back in 2006, but it's a damned long way away and a damned expensive plane ticket to get there and back, and somehow the news of their settling there made me feel very sad.
Yesterday morning when I first read the email letting us know about her heart attack, I didn't feel anything but distance. Later in the evening, when I was talking to my boy on the other side of the country, I mentioned it almost as an after-thought. He looked horrified, of course, because it is never good to hear about one's girlfriend's beloved Auntie being hospitalized, and I think surprised at first that I didn't seem more upset.
And strangely, the more I talked to him about it, the more I felt an almost shocking anger welling up behind my eyes. I found myself crying with rage over the distance between here and there, and over the distance between my father's death and her arrival in our house in Mohegan Lake. The choices she's made over the years -- to be so far away from family so much of the time -- seem alien to me, especially now as she and her husband are growing older and facing the inevitable decline that comes with that.
(Of course here I am in New York City, thousands of miles away from my family, from my boy, and well aware of my own hypocrisy. Yet there are degrees of distance -- at least in my head, at least during last night's bout of anger, which of course was inextricably linked to my fear of losing her, of losing another connection to my father, to my self.)
I've been thinking today about the myriad ways in which grief can surprise us, years or even decades later. Yesterday marked four years since my boyfriend's older brother killed himself -- not very long at all in the grand scheme of things, and certainly close enough to still feel unbearably raw. But instead of being filled with sorrow or rage, my boy somehow managed to find some solace -- walking out in the forest lands, down to his beloved ocean.
He wrote this last night, and I keep coming back to it today as I am trying to be more aware of my own anger, my own fear and seemingly ever-present grief:
"I found myself by the water. It hit me that all of this will forever come in waves. Like when you're sitting on the beach, and sometimes the waves come almost to your feet, but then the next wave is way out there and doesn't come close. Bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker. But always waves. There's nothing you or I can do to stop the waves. The forces behind them are bigger than us. But if we can accept them, and watch them from just far enough away, we can usually hop out of the way before we get our socks wet, or before they swallow us up."
Which, finally, brings me to where I was wanting to go with this all along. I've fallen out of the habit of meditating in the last few months, and in a weird way I can't help but think that last night's anger came, at least in part, out of that lack.
So this morning I sat. Just for ten minutes, but it was okay. Nice, even, and calming. I wrote to a dear friend last weekend, before even hearing about my aunt's heart attack, that I'd fallen off the meditation wagon recently. She wrote back, "Your morning ritual of tea and meditation sounded so lovely! You deserve to start your days so sweetly, my dear."
Perhaps tomorrow I will sit again, or perhaps the day after that. And perhaps if I keep doing that, some of these waves will recede a little bit, or at least stop threatening to swallow me up. And then -- then hopefully I will be able to to think of my aunt only with love, as I want to and as she deserves, and not have that love tinged with hurt.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
knowing jill
I've been accumulating pieces of her these last few weeks, fragments like moths startling and taking flight and eventually whispering to ground -- quiet and sure-footed in the dark.
At first she was merely a void, an empty space at the core of someone I hold dear. It's been frightening, at times, to watch the gravitational pull her death has over him. As if now she's gone, he has no other escape.
Then it was pages from her diary paraphrased over glasses of wine, written years before the cancer settled in. I wish I could remember the exact words she wrote in the days after 9/11 -- there was something so obvious there, and yet so unspoken in the public sphere that it took my breath away when Bill read it to me. She apparently didn't think of herself as all that smart, felt that people didn't take her all that seriously, but she saw straight through to the truth of things.
Last week it was one of her favorite books -- Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, if you must know. I'm about half way through it myself now, and I hadn't quite understood before how opera could be so loved, but now maybe I can.
A friend insisted I take the remnants of a pack of cigarettes home with me last week. Neither of us smoke anymore, of course, but after a few beers neither of us could resist. At the end of the evening he had a girlfriend impatient with his odorous relapses to go home to, and I did not.
Camel Lights, of course, because isn't that what pretty much everyone smokes? (Not Mick. Mick always smoked Camel unfiltereds. I never could figure out how to smoke those things, how to be cool enough to smoke them, or maybe how to be quite that self-annihilating.)
This week it was old photographs, again over glasses of wine and before bowls of soup. Pictures of her from decades ago, everywhere, Mexico, Hawaii, Greece, Morocco, young and playful and tough. A small bright painting fell out from between the back pages of the photo album. Practice, he called it, and insisted I take it home with me. The colors -- orange and pink, white and dark charcoal gray -- clash with everything, and with nothing at all.
I'd planned on giving the cigarettes to Lauren this week, my one last regularly smoking friend. They're her brand, after all, and lord knows I owe her a pack, or two, or three, but our schedules never quite meshed up.
Her art of course will outlive her now, caught behind glass, filling up storage units, trapped between the pages of old photo albums.
I've been sneaking cigarettes out the bathroom window as if I were sixteen years old again, only this time feeling very guilty instead of adolescently defiant. Jill, I'm pretty sure, never smoked a cigarette in her life yet it was lung cancer that took her down.
It's enough to make you wonder, isn't it?
So I've been sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom, burning scented candles, watching smoke curl and swirl and drift out into the winter air. I've been watching this smoke while thoughts of smoke-free Jill, of self-annihilating Mick, come swirling and curling in.
At first she was merely a void, an empty space at the core of someone I hold dear. It's been frightening, at times, to watch the gravitational pull her death has over him. As if now she's gone, he has no other escape.
Then it was pages from her diary paraphrased over glasses of wine, written years before the cancer settled in. I wish I could remember the exact words she wrote in the days after 9/11 -- there was something so obvious there, and yet so unspoken in the public sphere that it took my breath away when Bill read it to me. She apparently didn't think of herself as all that smart, felt that people didn't take her all that seriously, but she saw straight through to the truth of things.
Last week it was one of her favorite books -- Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, if you must know. I'm about half way through it myself now, and I hadn't quite understood before how opera could be so loved, but now maybe I can.
A friend insisted I take the remnants of a pack of cigarettes home with me last week. Neither of us smoke anymore, of course, but after a few beers neither of us could resist. At the end of the evening he had a girlfriend impatient with his odorous relapses to go home to, and I did not.
Camel Lights, of course, because isn't that what pretty much everyone smokes? (Not Mick. Mick always smoked Camel unfiltereds. I never could figure out how to smoke those things, how to be cool enough to smoke them, or maybe how to be quite that self-annihilating.)
This week it was old photographs, again over glasses of wine and before bowls of soup. Pictures of her from decades ago, everywhere, Mexico, Hawaii, Greece, Morocco, young and playful and tough. A small bright painting fell out from between the back pages of the photo album. Practice, he called it, and insisted I take it home with me. The colors -- orange and pink, white and dark charcoal gray -- clash with everything, and with nothing at all.
I'd planned on giving the cigarettes to Lauren this week, my one last regularly smoking friend. They're her brand, after all, and lord knows I owe her a pack, or two, or three, but our schedules never quite meshed up.
Her art of course will outlive her now, caught behind glass, filling up storage units, trapped between the pages of old photo albums.
I've been sneaking cigarettes out the bathroom window as if I were sixteen years old again, only this time feeling very guilty instead of adolescently defiant. Jill, I'm pretty sure, never smoked a cigarette in her life yet it was lung cancer that took her down.
It's enough to make you wonder, isn't it?
So I've been sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom, burning scented candles, watching smoke curl and swirl and drift out into the winter air. I've been watching this smoke while thoughts of smoke-free Jill, of self-annihilating Mick, come swirling and curling in.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
thank you, mister president
My boyfriend finally got around to signing up, via Obamacare and the great state of Washington, for health insurance yesterday afternoon.
He's generally remarkably healthy these days
-- in the four and a half years we've been together, I've seen him get
maybe two or three colds and some nasty springtime allergies and that's about it. But he's also a cancer survivor and lost a brother to suicide, and it's weighed heavy
on me over the years that he hasn't had health insurance.
We joked about getting married for it because my employer-provided insurance is pretty good, as far as these things go, but it seemed a weird reason to do that whole tying the knot thing when neither of us is much interested in marriage.
Last night we were catching up on each others days, me telling him about the inherent sadness of my dinner with a grieving friend, him telling me about how relatively simple the insurance sign-up ended up being. And I can't tell you the relief that just immediately seeped through my body, both my physical and mental being, when I heard this. It felt like a previously unknown weight had been lifted, and that I maybe don't have to worry so much about him -- about whether he can afford to visit a doctor, a specialist, a shrink.
Sunday, February 09, 2014
histories
I walked up to the far northern tip of Manhattan this morning to meet an old and dear friend at the train station. It was cold, which came as no surprise given the winter we've been having this year. I was expecting the cold, but I wasn't expecting quite how warm and fuzzy it felt to walk back home with her in the cold winter light. It'd been a couple months since we saw each other last, and though we've emailed, there's just no replacement for getting caught up in explaining recent woes only to have someone so dear turn to you and say, "I know. I've been wondering about that..."
I forget, sometimes, the beauty in keeping our histories -- and the people who carry them, who have lived them with us -- close to our present selves. I've been reminded of this a lot in the last couple of weeks, and am very grateful for it.
Then she let me dress her up and take these pictures. Over all, it's been a pretty good day.
tussah silk scarf cowl thing
I forget, sometimes, the beauty in keeping our histories -- and the people who carry them, who have lived them with us -- close to our present selves. I've been reminded of this a lot in the last couple of weeks, and am very grateful for it.
Then she let me dress her up and take these pictures. Over all, it's been a pretty good day.
tussah silk scarf cowl thing
Monday, January 27, 2014
crying
I got an email yesterday morning from our Bill letting us know that his Jill had died early Friday morning, finally losing her ongoing battle with cancer.
I spent the morning puttering: knitting, talking with Mom and Nathan, putting together a huge pot of soup to simmer on the stove, getting ready to eventually head down to his apartment and see what, if anything, there was for me to do.
Eventually I called Evan and was surprised to find myself bursting in to tears. I think he knew right away that Jill had died -- we've been expecting it for awhile now and it's been at the forefront of our almost daily conversations this last week. He asked if I was okay, and suddenly I was sobbing into the phone.
I said yes, mostly, and that I hadn't even really been crying much. Just in abrupt moments -- in the shower, chopping onions for the bean soup, right then on the phone. He paused and then said, with a warm smile in the sound of his voice, "So when it's been safe, you mean..."
I spent yesterday evening with Bill, mostly just sitting at opposite ends of his couch but also at the dining table with steaming bowls of home made bean soup (with enough left over for his lunch today), mostly just listening. There weren't any raw onions to cry over then, unfortunately, but he cried enough for the both of us and I was glad to be able to be his person, in those hours, to cry to.
If he'll have me, I am hoping to stop by again this afternoon, make sure he eats the rest of the soup, restock his refrigerator a bit, hear a little more about his Jill and the world he's lost. All the while knowing, thank God, that I have my boy's voice to come home to later tonight, to cry to if that's the way the day goes, and to know it's safe to do that.
I spent the morning puttering: knitting, talking with Mom and Nathan, putting together a huge pot of soup to simmer on the stove, getting ready to eventually head down to his apartment and see what, if anything, there was for me to do.
Eventually I called Evan and was surprised to find myself bursting in to tears. I think he knew right away that Jill had died -- we've been expecting it for awhile now and it's been at the forefront of our almost daily conversations this last week. He asked if I was okay, and suddenly I was sobbing into the phone.
I said yes, mostly, and that I hadn't even really been crying much. Just in abrupt moments -- in the shower, chopping onions for the bean soup, right then on the phone. He paused and then said, with a warm smile in the sound of his voice, "So when it's been safe, you mean..."
I spent yesterday evening with Bill, mostly just sitting at opposite ends of his couch but also at the dining table with steaming bowls of home made bean soup (with enough left over for his lunch today), mostly just listening. There weren't any raw onions to cry over then, unfortunately, but he cried enough for the both of us and I was glad to be able to be his person, in those hours, to cry to.
If he'll have me, I am hoping to stop by again this afternoon, make sure he eats the rest of the soup, restock his refrigerator a bit, hear a little more about his Jill and the world he's lost. All the while knowing, thank God, that I have my boy's voice to come home to later tonight, to cry to if that's the way the day goes, and to know it's safe to do that.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
consumerism
I don't really get Black Friday. I don't get
waiting on line for hours in the cold and dark. I don't get this
national obsession with getting the best deal, the biggest electronics,
the most cheaply-made gifts. My family is trying to keep Christmas
small this year. What I mean is that we're trying to keep it filled
with love instead of filled with things. Oh, there will be presents of
course! There is a baby involved now in our holiday gatherings, so of
course there will be presents! But my gifts this year will be simple
gifts. A handcrafted wood playset. A knitted cowl. A jar of infused
honey. Local handcut, paper-wrapped soaps. Things to please the senses:
the tactile pleasures of wood and warm wools, the rich, satisfying
tastes and scents of honeys and herbs and oils. I won't be specifically
supporting Handmade Monday (11/25) because I try to buy handmade on a
regular basis already anyway. But I encourage YOU to support it because
it's a lovely thing in the face of our overly-consumerist, factory-made,
underpaid gift-giving culture.
There's so much talent out there, so many people making beautiful, durable, practical, fantastical, truly artisan things, and it's so worth being a part of and a supporter of that movement.
There's so much talent out there, so many people making beautiful, durable, practical, fantastical, truly artisan things, and it's so worth being a part of and a supporter of that movement.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
BFFs
So we did the photo shoot yesterday for the bridal shop. At one point Dawn, the lovely photographer, instructed Ari, the lovely model, to look at me as if we were having a conversation. We started chatting about what to buy for our Thanksgiving feast next week. (Tons of garlic, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts, more garlic, some sort of bird. Did we mention garlic?) Dawn sat patiently. Finally she rolled her eyes, amused, and said, "Ladies. When I said have a conversation, I didn't actually mean HAVE A CONVERSATION!" This is what happens when you've been BFFs with your model since the first grade, I guess.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
confessions of a soapaholic
I was writing a silly story in my head the other day about turning my boyfriend into a soap snob. It didn't really go anywhere but it still makes me smile in its small, silly way.
I am a soap snob. I love handmade soaps, and pretty much won't use anything else these days. Every time I find myself in Anacortes I swing by the farmer's market and stock up on these lovelies. I spend way too much time browsing Etsy in pursuit of the next soap. Some have been awesome. Some have been iffy. Some are still on the ever-growing wish list.
And then there was the one that my boy deemed just about the perfect soap. I was not so secretly thrilled to have converted him into a soap connoisseur, and returned to this shop again to stock up on this particular body product perfection but only managed to snag two more (the woman had decided to move on to other endeavors and was selling off the last of her stock): one for our showers those last days before he left for greener, more western pastures; the other to be tucked into his backpack for use on the far side of his travels.
Two weeks ago he asked me for the shop link for the perfect soap and for some reason it made me sad to have to tell him there was no more. But I did have a recommendation for him (my new favorite bar, acquired during my summertime travels to his neck o' the woods at the Skagit Valley Food Co-op): Samish Bay's delicious lemongrass & oats soap.
I had forgotten about this exchange until, a week or so later, he told me a story about being out with a friend buying beer and finding himself wandering the soap aisle, having remembered my suggestion. And he found it! And what's been making me smile these last few days is the thought of us thousands of miles apart, hours and hours apart, using the same damned soap.
And the thing is, I've been feeling closer to my boy lately than I have in a long time. Not just because of the soap, obviously, but it's funny how this distance -- all these miles and miles and days and months of ambiguity -- may just prove to be a clarifying experience.
I was talking to a friend about this over Labor Day weekend, well before the soap -- about how I've been missing him more than I'd expected. She just smiled that shy, knowing smile of hers and said, "Well, that's a good thing, isn't it? Now at least you're sure."
I don't pretend to know what the future holds, or where any of us will be a year or two years or ten years from now. But I do know that I've found surprisingly sweet pleasure in having him ask me for soap advice, going to him for yarn advice, sharing our small daily tales of triumph and woe. And maybe, at least for now, that's enough.
I am a soap snob. I love handmade soaps, and pretty much won't use anything else these days. Every time I find myself in Anacortes I swing by the farmer's market and stock up on these lovelies. I spend way too much time browsing Etsy in pursuit of the next soap. Some have been awesome. Some have been iffy. Some are still on the ever-growing wish list.
And then there was the one that my boy deemed just about the perfect soap. I was not so secretly thrilled to have converted him into a soap connoisseur, and returned to this shop again to stock up on this particular body product perfection but only managed to snag two more (the woman had decided to move on to other endeavors and was selling off the last of her stock): one for our showers those last days before he left for greener, more western pastures; the other to be tucked into his backpack for use on the far side of his travels.
Two weeks ago he asked me for the shop link for the perfect soap and for some reason it made me sad to have to tell him there was no more. But I did have a recommendation for him (my new favorite bar, acquired during my summertime travels to his neck o' the woods at the Skagit Valley Food Co-op): Samish Bay's delicious lemongrass & oats soap.
I had forgotten about this exchange until, a week or so later, he told me a story about being out with a friend buying beer and finding himself wandering the soap aisle, having remembered my suggestion. And he found it! And what's been making me smile these last few days is the thought of us thousands of miles apart, hours and hours apart, using the same damned soap.
And the thing is, I've been feeling closer to my boy lately than I have in a long time. Not just because of the soap, obviously, but it's funny how this distance -- all these miles and miles and days and months of ambiguity -- may just prove to be a clarifying experience.
I was talking to a friend about this over Labor Day weekend, well before the soap -- about how I've been missing him more than I'd expected. She just smiled that shy, knowing smile of hers and said, "Well, that's a good thing, isn't it? Now at least you're sure."
I don't pretend to know what the future holds, or where any of us will be a year or two years or ten years from now. But I do know that I've found surprisingly sweet pleasure in having him ask me for soap advice, going to him for yarn advice, sharing our small daily tales of triumph and woe. And maybe, at least for now, that's enough.
Sunday, September 08, 2013
coming clean
I failed to go to a wedding last weekend and have been floundering in a morass of guilt and relief ever since. It was a wedding for a woman I adore, and though we have never been particularly close I am pretty sure, in my less insecure moments, that this adoration is mutual. But I had been dreading the wedding all summer.
My own partner is several thousand miles away finding himself, and while the summer has in some ways been very good to me, it has also been very difficult. And then this late summer wedding weekend began to get complicated, with trains to catch and uncertain places to sleep and rides not as forthcoming as originally hoped.
I had lunch a few days before the wedding with a dear sweet friend about whom I've written before. This time she brought me a little organza bag filled with a couple ginger candies, a worry stone, and two klonopin. And it struck me, in those days leading up to my abrupt failure, that perhaps it wouldn't be so horrible to bail on something that had me so tied up in knots as to be craving a klonopin or two.
And so I didn't go, and instead caught MetroNorth up to Cold Spring and spent a few hours with my Cindy, my grounding, my home away from home.
This morning I finally allowed myself to look at some pictures from the wedding on Facebook, and of course there was the ex-boyfriend and his lovely wife. It's been awhile since I've seen pictures of him, let alone him in the flesh, and I was taken aback at the way my heart clenched up, the way my breath caught in my throat. But of course there it was, the underlying reason behind my last-minute wedding freak-out.
I've been working hard these last eight months to find an inner peace, and I am beginning now, after a winter and a spring and a summer of trials, to feel it within reach. I couldn't let an uninvited run-in with a man I spent five years in a twisting spiral of mutual drama and abuse upend this thing, this feeling, that I so want.
And yet, upon seeing these pictures of him this morning, my heart seized and raced and I felt so unbelievably angry with myself for still reacting this way. And so I decided to sit, to find my breath in the silence of my home, alone, surrounded by some of the many things I love, by some of the beautiful things I have made.
And strangely, magically, in the middle of my fifteen minutes of meditation (specifically focusing, this morning, on the words of forgiveness*), I felt a warmth -- for my partner three thousand miles away, for that former partner in all his beauty and intelligence and rage, for my lost self, the angry hurtful woman I so often was with him -- that I had not expected, and a calmness spreading outward and quieting my racing brain.
Later, in the warmth of this early September afternoon, my mother and I were chatting and I told her about the pictures and my shame at this still physical, visceral response. She, ever the calm and supportive one, just chuckled and said something to the effect that we can't always help what the body does, how the body responds, and she knows and I know better.
And it was nice, so nice, though I won't dwell on it any more than that. It was nice, and I am grateful for it, and though I still feel badly about missing my friend's wedding, I am hoping that she will find it in her heart to forgive me. (I've already got something gorgeous planned for her wedding present. Maybe that will help...)
My own partner is several thousand miles away finding himself, and while the summer has in some ways been very good to me, it has also been very difficult. And then this late summer wedding weekend began to get complicated, with trains to catch and uncertain places to sleep and rides not as forthcoming as originally hoped.
I had lunch a few days before the wedding with a dear sweet friend about whom I've written before. This time she brought me a little organza bag filled with a couple ginger candies, a worry stone, and two klonopin. And it struck me, in those days leading up to my abrupt failure, that perhaps it wouldn't be so horrible to bail on something that had me so tied up in knots as to be craving a klonopin or two.
And so I didn't go, and instead caught MetroNorth up to Cold Spring and spent a few hours with my Cindy, my grounding, my home away from home.
This morning I finally allowed myself to look at some pictures from the wedding on Facebook, and of course there was the ex-boyfriend and his lovely wife. It's been awhile since I've seen pictures of him, let alone him in the flesh, and I was taken aback at the way my heart clenched up, the way my breath caught in my throat. But of course there it was, the underlying reason behind my last-minute wedding freak-out.
I've been working hard these last eight months to find an inner peace, and I am beginning now, after a winter and a spring and a summer of trials, to feel it within reach. I couldn't let an uninvited run-in with a man I spent five years in a twisting spiral of mutual drama and abuse upend this thing, this feeling, that I so want.
And yet, upon seeing these pictures of him this morning, my heart seized and raced and I felt so unbelievably angry with myself for still reacting this way. And so I decided to sit, to find my breath in the silence of my home, alone, surrounded by some of the many things I love, by some of the beautiful things I have made.
And strangely, magically, in the middle of my fifteen minutes of meditation (specifically focusing, this morning, on the words of forgiveness*), I felt a warmth -- for my partner three thousand miles away, for that former partner in all his beauty and intelligence and rage, for my lost self, the angry hurtful woman I so often was with him -- that I had not expected, and a calmness spreading outward and quieting my racing brain.
Later, in the warmth of this early September afternoon, my mother and I were chatting and I told her about the pictures and my shame at this still physical, visceral response. She, ever the calm and supportive one, just chuckled and said something to the effect that we can't always help what the body does, how the body responds, and she knows and I know better.
And it was nice, so nice, though I won't dwell on it any more than that. It was nice, and I am grateful for it, and though I still feel badly about missing my friend's wedding, I am hoping that she will find it in her heart to forgive me. (I've already got something gorgeous planned for her wedding present. Maybe that will help...)
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
sweetness & honey
Had lunch today with, I think, quite possibly one of the sweetest women in the world. We get together once a month or so for lunch or tea or long walks down Central Park West or dinners in the East Village or at our respective apartments with our respective partners. Every time she brings me some little thing so thoughtful, so kind, that it makes me smile for days afterward: a rose quartz stone for slipping beneath my pillow to bring peace; a tin of peanut butter ginger candies; a special boxwood tea light to burn on New Year's Day; a hand made birthday card in my favorite shade of orange and her ever present purple.
The feeling is mutual, though I am not as adept at these small tokens of affection. I have to work a little harder, and yet more than for anyone else, I am often coming across things I would love to give her: a tub of honey-orange scented lotion; a felted purple flower; a sparkly purple mermaid scarf; others I have stumbled across and been excited about and then forgotten.
I love this reciprocity, and look forward to our Christmas exchanges and these offerings of small gifts and delicious treats almost every time we get together. It's a funny thing, and lovely, and cherished.
The feeling is mutual, though I am not as adept at these small tokens of affection. I have to work a little harder, and yet more than for anyone else, I am often coming across things I would love to give her: a tub of honey-orange scented lotion; a felted purple flower; a sparkly purple mermaid scarf; others I have stumbled across and been excited about and then forgotten.
I love this reciprocity, and look forward to our Christmas exchanges and these offerings of small gifts and delicious treats almost every time we get together. It's a funny thing, and lovely, and cherished.
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