November, 2013: How Deep Is the Ocean

I leaned over and brushed a single tear from my father's lapel:  fifty years, one infinite ocean, balanced on my fingertip.

November, 2013: It's My Party (and I'll Cry If I Want To)

My mother had nothing to wear.  It was her last social engagement, and she was the guest of honor.

In the years that she was ill, she stopped paying attention to things like her wardrobe.  She did little socializing during those years, and comfort had become her most important factor in selecting clothes.  She had become progressively smaller, and even though her closets were overburdened with clothes, she truly had nothing to wear.  There would be no "trying on everything in the closet."  We did begin there, even though it felt intrusive to be standing in her cold, abandoned closet fidgeting the hangers back and forth over the rod.  We would need to buy her a new outfit for her funeral.

While my father went out to buy a new suit, my sister and I set out for the mall, armed with his debit card.  Realistically, we needed to buy everything my mother would wear that day.  It occurred to us on the way there, that we had no idea what size to look for.  There is no handbook on how to dress your mother for her funeral.  We did the only thing we could think of; we stopped at the funeral home and asked.  We explained, probably unnecessarily, that our mother had wasted away, and we had no idea what size she wore.  The very understanding undertaker said "I'll go check for you," as if this were a question she was asked every day, and surely this is part of the training in undergraduate funereal management programs.  "Size 14," she told us upon her return.  We were astounded; how was it possible that our tiny mother needed a size 14 dress?  Back in the car, the logic of it occurred to us, individually, and we acknowledged that this was not a situation in which "too big" would be a hindrance.

There were so many issues to consider.  Pants?  Dress?  Skirt?  What would she have chosen for herself?  Colors?  What would she have liked?  Black was out of the question, but it couldn't be a festive color.  Money was no object, but realistically, it was.  We wanted to respect the gravity of our mission, but this outfit, much like the wedding dress she had worn 50 years earlier, would not be worn again.  She had to look nice, but she couldn't be overdressed or underdressed.  The myriad considerations were overwhelming.  We decided on a pantsuit.  It was purple, just the right shade of purple to be serious and age-appropriate, to be respectful.  It was the sort of thing you might want to wear to your interview for the afterlife.  We found a patterned blouse that was neither floral nor jaunty; neither trendy nor old-fashioned.  We were stupid-giddy-broken-heartedly exhausted as we entered the lingerie department to finish the final items on our list, and God help the poor young woman who inquired innocently "Can I help you?"  A moment of silence passed, and we erupted into perfectly inappropriate guffaws of laughter.  The number of ways in which the salesclerk could not help us was unfathomable.  We each thought of explaining our mission but decided against it; politely, we declined her help, periodically giggling as we finished our shopping spree, weeping over what we had lost and laughing at the absurdity of what we were selecting.  As the saying goes, I guess you had to be there.
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Afterward, my friend Laurie and my mentor Diana told me my mother had been beautiful.  It seemed strange to me at the time.  They didn't know her, and as I had watched her fade away for two years, beauty had been the last thing on my mind.  But our brains don't actually see color; instead, they see the reflections of the light waves that are not absorbed by the objects in our gaze.  I believe on that day, as I looked at my mother for the last time, what I saw was the reflection of my own heartache.  It was empty.  Exhausted.  Broken.

As the last 4 years have passed, time and struggle have brushed against the rough edges of my experience, smoothing them out and buffing the colors into soft and cloudy memories.

When I call up my mother's image now, what I remember is not fear, loss, or heartache.  What I see reflected now is love.

Beautiful.

November, 2013: Not With a Bang but a Whimper

"Honey, Mom's gone."

Later, my sister and I would confess that our first thought when the nurse had woken us up from our unexpectedly deep sleep in the TV lounge in the hospice ward was "Where the hell could she go?"  My mother had been a stubborn woman, which we would all agree is an understatement, but she had been unresponsive since we agreed that a morphine drip would be the best way to keep her comfortable.  Still, it would not have surprised us if she had stood up and walked away.  She had, that summer, gotten into the driver's seat of my parents' car because she wanted to go home --even though her license had expired, and she hadn't driven in almost two years.  My second thought was actually that they had physically lost my mother in the hospital.  But no; the nurse had walked by the room and peeked in on her, and she had simply stopped breathing.  She quietly slipped away.

The moment I had been the most afraid of was the split second that she passed from Before into After, and we had all slept through it.  We had been reassured by many lovely, well meaning people in the hospice ward, that many people choose to let go that way, to wait until no one was watching to make the giant leap.  11/11/13.  1:11 a.m.  Maybe it was 1:10 or 1:20, and my brain craftily turned it into 1:11.  Poetic license.  We noted that it was Veterans' Day, and we would never forget.

We held my father's hand and watched while the nurse listened for as long as she needed to for my mother's absent heartbeat.  The nurse told us to stay as long as we wanted to.  We stayed as long as my mother would have wanted us to, which was long enough to say goodbye and respect the moment but no longer.

It was strange to pack up our various bags of things:  our knitting; the bag of socks my father had brought with us; the rest of the Halloween candy; my mother's clothes; my father's comforts from home; tea bags; laptops; e-readers.  We walked off the ward.  I thought fleetingly of all the things that happen in the dark of night in the hospital, in the hospice ward, so that families like ours could leave in dignity and peace.

Someone drove my father home.  I vaguely remember driving his car at some point.  Jamie went home to be with our son the next morning because his parents, who had been babysitting all week, had to get back.  I slept for a very long time in my hotel room until my sister called, and I was reminded of all that we had ahead of us.

A lot of work goes into letting go.

November, 2013: Angels Among Us

I have seen them everywhere.  Shuffling in the parking lot at Trader Joe's; taking slow, careful steps in the library; sitting in the audience at the elementary school chorus concert.  They're mostly women although that may be coincidence.  They are ghosts of themselves, with their thinning hair and translucent skin, barely hanging on to their husbands/children/sisters.  Their effort to remain in the world is almost too much to bear.  I can't make myself look at them because they envelop so much loss.

We began losing my mother much more quickly than I expected but exactly as I feared.  She spent 7 long weeks undergoing intensive chemotherapy in 2011.  We celebrated her birthday the first weekend she was admitted.  Celebrated is not the right word - although we tried.  When I left her, I hugged her harder that I was ever able to hug her again.  I was afraid of the word chemotherapy; afraid of what it would do to her.  I was afraid I would never see her again.  She hugged me back and told me it would be okay.  She was never the same.

Because I lived two hours away, I spoke to her a lot on the phone during those weeks in the hospital.  She remembered a lot; she always knew who I was and asked about Duncan and Jamie.  She also talked about the who were keeping her imprisoned in that place and how poorly they treated her.  I couldn't tell if she really believed she was being held hostage or if she was using a metaphor.  She talked about the clouds in the corner of the room and sometimes about the angels.  The same mother who raised me to be a card-carrying, devout agnostic...We began to develop our sense of dark humor as we knowingly spoke of "chemo brain."  Sometimes, it gets better after the treatments end, and sometimes it does not.  I imagined a complete recovery followed by five years of remission and counted to five obsessively, wondering where we would all be in five years.  I really believed we would have five more years with her, and even though five years is really no time at all, it can be a very long time if you spend it well.  It would not, in the end be five, but you see how those fives add up, optimistically, when you count them over and over by five.

Almost two years to the day later, I held her cool, fragile hand, kissed her forehead, and smoothed back her beautifully white, baby fine, angel hair.  My father and sister were so much better at managing the entire hospital experience than I was.  I was so afraid, already drowning in the weight of loss.  I was still learning to just be there together in the moment.

I met my friend Laurie shortly before she lost her own father and before my mother was diagnosed with leukemia.  In his final days, her father had taken to carrying these silver angels in
his pockets.  He gave them away to everyone he met.  After he was gone, she continued to find them everywhere.  Stacked in her son's room, on the windowsill, under the bed, next to the socks...she gave me one of his angels, and I have carried it in my wallet since.  I pull it out from time to time and stroke it softly, adding three, subtracting two, subtracting 2011 from 2016, smoothing away the years before and the years after.  Always, we end up here, today, where literally everything is different, and we are learning to rebuild life in the shadow of loss.

I see them everywhere.  Shuffling in the parking lot at Trader Joe's; taking slow, careful steps in the library; sitting in the audience at the elementary school chorus concert.  They're mostly women although that may be coincidence.  They are ghosts of themselves, with their thinning hair and translucent skin, barely hanging on to their husbands/children/sisters.  Their effort to remain in the world is almost too much to bear.  I want to hold their cool, fragile hands, kiss their foreheads, and smooth back their beautifully white, baby fine, hair.  They are angels among us.

November, 2013: Prayer Shawls

While I sat in the hospital in November, 2011, watching plasma and
saline and toxic chemicals drip into my mother, I needed something to keep my fingers busy.  I needed the quiet rhythm of wooden needles marking time against each other while I learned to sit quietly, in the moment, with my family.  I wanted to make her something comforting; although hats were an obvious choice, I was cold in the hospital, and I thought about how it would feel in a hospital gown, in a cold, sterile bed that overlooked the construction of the new hospital wing.  I picked the softest yarn I could find in my stash and held it up to my cheek; I imagined it wrapped around her shoulders.  I picked a pattern that would require little thought and cast on a simple shawl.  It began with just three stitches and grew reassuringly by two stitches at the beginning and end of each row so that it didn't only grow longer but also wider as I worried it, stitch by stitch, into being.  Afterward, I found it in a box of things that had come home with her from the hospital that December.  I don't think she ever wore it, but I wear it now, and it brings me great comfort.  

Two years later, the air was cold and dry as I curled in the chair in the hallway, wrapped in my father's worn sweatshirt.  However I tried, I could not warm myself.  My knitting needles clicked as I knit row after row of soft blue alpaca, stopping periodically to hold it against my cheek and test how well it would comfort me afterward.  Weeks before I had chosen the blues and grays because they resembled the ocean, where she had wanted to go for her birthday in November, 2011, the birthday she spent in the cold hospital room.  When I packed hastily for my trip to the hospital, I needed something to knit, but I couldn't take any of the projects I had already cast on.  They were to be Christmas gifts, and I couldn't knit all that sadness into gifts for other people.  Instead, hour after hour I knit my mother's comfort into a shawl I could wrap around myself in the months to come when the cold and the loss and emptiness would be impenetrable.  Although it makes my heart clench when I hold it against my cheek, that basic shawl, slightly too large because I was reluctant to let it end, helps me to remember that my mother would want me to live my life.  She would want me to start my life over if I wanted to, to go to the beach, to take a nap, or read a good book.  And so I have done these things; I take more risks, I step out of my comfort zone, I tell my son how much I love him.  I wrap that shawl around me and revel in its comfort; I know she is with me.

Prayer shawls have long been part of many religious affiliations.  The Tallit in Judaism, the Mantilla in the Roman Catholic tradition, and Pentecostal prayer cloths are just a few examples of special clothing people have worn during prayer.  Among fiber artists, the prayer shawl embodies the creator's thoughts and prayers for the receiver.  Prayer ministries have formed for the sole purpose of knitting and crocheting prayers into comforting shawls for those in need physical or spiritual comfort. Shawls are begun, crafted, and given in prayer.  In prayer ministries, the shawl may be passed around a prayer circle so that each person can add their own prayers, or stitches, to each shawl.  


Although I didn't realize it at the time, and it certainly wouldn't be traditional to knit one's own, I see now that these shawls, knit at the beginning and end of my mother's illness, were prayer shawls.  With each stitch, I connected with my family, shared thoughts of my mother, imagined how we would rearrange the stitches of our life without her  I wear them now for comfort; always cold, I have been even colder as I have reknit the void left behind by her passing.  I receive a lot of compliments on these simple shawls; for now, I tell the sad story of how they came to be, but I hope that in the near future I will share stories about how my mother taught me to knit, about her aunt Rose who always made the most beautiful baby clothes, about the times that my mother and I shopped for yarn, or about her faith in my ability to knit socks.  I think of my son, teaching himself to knit by watching YouTube, trying out double pointed needles, and becoming entranced by weaving.  We are tied together, stitch by stitch, row by row, threads spun and plied from the past to the present, our future an infinity of combinations of colors and textures made from two simple stitches.  Knit. Purl.  

November, 2013: Into the Light

I've come to believe that in the same way that I have "work friends" and "knitting friends" and "college friends" I also have "loss friends."  They aren't necessarily people I hang out and drink coffee with, but we have connected at some core level through our experiences with loss.  Most of us could use the hashtag #cancersucks to describe moments in our lives.  My sister has a friend (a real friend) who I count among my "loss friends;" after losing one of her sons tragically to cancer (#cancersucks), she has dedicated her life to helping families who are undergoing traumatic experiences with childhood cancers.  Because her son's favorite color was orange, Laurel believes that Myles speaks to her through beautiful orange sunsets.

It's probably a coincidence, but from the time my mother was hospitalized in November, 2011 for intensive chemotherapy, I have been witness to spectacular sunsets.  Many nights while I was making the drive from Albany Medical Center to Amenia, New York, I had to pull over and watch because I was spellbound by the exquisite beauty in the skies.  During that week in November, 2013, the sunrises and sunsets were breathtaking.  From the wide expanse of windows in the hospice ward, each day greeted us with a glorious watercolor of crimsons, fuschias, salmons, corals, burgundies, vermilions, magentas, garnets, apricots, tangerines, peaches, cadmiums, amethysts, pomegranates, periwinkles, lilacs, lavenders, orchids, plums, and violets...as if it were necessary for us to drink up every color in the universe in that one moment.  Nights drifted in reluctantly as the colors blazed and slowly muted into darkness; temporarily sated, we reluctantly let go of the day.  Like Scheherazade, they forced us to stop and just BE in the moment while they danced around us with their stories and promise of just one more day.

In the days After, I have remained particularly sensitive to the comings and goings of each day's show of colors.  We have moved to a new state, where we live at the top of a hill; during many of my drives to and from work or just watching from the many windows of our house in the country, my breath catches as I reflect upon the swirling pools of watercolors.  I like to think that my mother is there with her own parents and sister, who she lost far too young, and with Myles, reminding us to stop to take notice of the world's magnificence.

sunset in our back yard                                                     sunset at Duncan's school

November, 2013: Interstices

The next day, of so many days that would later blend into one, we were all still there.  The day passed in a state of semi-normalcy as we went about the business of waiting.  We took turns bringing back food, water, coffee, and tea.  We updated friends.  We cancelled work, and conference travel, and checked in with babysitters.  We updated our children's teachers about the first substantial loss they were about to endure.  We assured my father that he could go home to take a shower, and maybe even a nap.  We assured my mother that although we loved her, and we knew she loved us, we would be okay.  She could go, you know...if she was ready.

Our young friends were a little more occupied.  Their people had come...I remember them as arriving like the family in Patricia Rylant's children's book The Relatives Came, although far less festive.  Families would arrive en masse in that place, with picnics and drinks and spiritual advisors; they chatted and caught up and had mini reunions and talked about how they really should get together more often, and not just for these sad occasions.  Then everything would become quiet, as if they realized suddenly that they would not all be going home.

When night fought her way back in again, and we went around the corner for pizza, we bought extra to feed our three young friends, just in case.  That night their grandmother came out and took them out for dinner.  It was difficult loosening the grip on the comforting idea that my life was preordained, but I felt better knowing that they were not alone.  Someone would need that pizza after all.  There are times, when you are waiting, when you can summon up just enough energy to take care of the living, but there are times when you just can't.  There was a great spirit of sharing in the hospice ward, the wing devoted to waiting for After.  My nephew came that night, and although he could not bring himself to see my mother, his good-byes already having been said in his own way, it was calming to be wrapped in the comfort of the everyday that he brought with him...homework, play dates, school projects.  He was a reminder that Out There, life went on.

My mother, in her stubbornness, hung on.  We were all exhausted.  It was the diametric opposite of sleepless nights spent in labor and delivery waiting for new life to enter the world.  There were sleep deprived moments of dark humor.  There was one long, dark act of the play unfolding where we begged her to stay.  "Look," we implored, "We know we told you it was okay to go, but we also JUST told Dad it would be okay for him to go home to take a shower.  PLEASE wait until he gets back.  PLEASE.  He will never forgive himself if you go now, and he isn't here.  Then you can do whatever you want.  Just hang in a little longer."  I thought of the oldest brother of our young friends (or maybe it was even an uncle) who had made it in time and said a little prayer for all of them too.

With that day almost over, and the waiting continuing, the nurses brought us sheets and blankets, warm from the dryer.  We settled onto two adjacent couches in the waiting room and napped under a sign that decreed "No sleeping in the television room."  Clearly, we were not the first people to squat illegally since we had been so well cared for.  Just as I drifted off, my sister poked me and motioned to the couches behind us, where the girl and her two brothers had stolen into our world of darkened waiting, like stray cats, seeking whatever small comfort they could find.  My sister and I nodded silently at each other, acknowledging that sometimes the most you can do for someone is be there with them, in the moment.  Waiting.  Together.

30 Day Writing Challenge: Day Eight

Bookish Tales of Love and Hate

I love books; I love the smooth feel of the paper under my aging fingers, the rough edges of the pages, the excited squee of a brand new book opening for the first time, the creaky but familiar ache of a beloved book being called into action for another round.  They are like family members to me; selecting favorites and estranging the dysfunctional are as painful as gathering them into my lap with wine or tea are comforting.  It is rare for me to discard a book before completing it because I feel they all deserve their chance at a loving family; it is equally rare for me to reread books for a similar reason - the time I spend rereading a book is time I cannot spend getting to know another, whom I might want to welcome into my world.

Reluctantly, I will admit to a few weaknesses.  If pushed to select a single favorite book, I would choose John Green’s Looking for Alaska.  At the time I picked it up, I had read and enjoyed a lot of young adult fiction.  Nevertheless, Looking for Alaska affected me in ways I never expected from a young adult novel.  John Green’s characterization brought boarding school life and main characters alive with such clarity and force that when the climax occurred, I felt as if I had been struck by a train.  It is well known among Green fans that we don’t discuss plot in public forums in case we risk spoiling books for others so I can’t say too much, but it was nearly impossible to disconnect from the fictional world he had drawn me into and to remember that the characters were not, in fact, part of my real life.  Later, I would discover that every John Green book would have that effect.  His understanding and portrayal of the lives of adolescents is startlingly accurate.

I meant to select a young adult book and an adult book that I loved, but the old favorite who keeps nosing her way into my recollection is Little Women.  It is a book I return to when life is difficult or celebratory. I remember being heartbroken at my grandmother’s death; my mother told me find a book I really liked and read it.  Since then, I have reread Little Women at least a dozen times, variously relating to the strengths and weaknesses, loves and losses, interests and foibles of Amy, Meg, Jo, and Beth.  At least one of their lives always brings me comfort and has a lesson to teach me about what is happening in my own life.  They have traveled far with me in my 50 years, and their pages feel like fine Irish linen.

Among my adult favorites are almost anything ever written by John Irving - until he began to recycle his characters and plots into new forms that are interesting but not anywhere as engaging as their great grandparents.  The Fourth Hand, for example, is the great grandchild whose eyes are the spitting image of great grandpa John.  Even though his writing skills develop as you travel from The World According to Garp to A Prayer for Owen Meany, he becomes a little too comfortable when he reaches a certain age, round about A Widow for One Year.  It doesn’t seem to matter though.  Unconditional love is unconditional, and every single book he writes is welcome at my Thanksgiving table.

Similarly, Wally Lamb won me over with his ability to describe the painful but uplifting challenges of Delores Price, who has no reason to hope and every reason to give up but is bestowed with an unexpected, undeniable, lifesaving, spunkiness.  Every book he writes is that best friend who becomes family, not because you share the same blood, but because you choose each other.  It takes Lamb forever to write a novel so our visits are infrequent, but when you do meet up for coffee, it is as if you never spent time apart.  Every.  Single.  Book.  Genius.

The most memorable book I was forced to let go was American Psycho.  Early on, not as a young adult but as a Young Adult, I enjoyed Bret Easton Ellis’ descriptions of the beginnings of adulthood, of how we make the transition to being semi-responsible people who live without our parents, hold down jobs, take on new roles, and experiment with our places in the world.  But American Psycho?  I just couldn’t.  I have been told that the story is a tongue-in-cheek look at a sociopath rather than gratuitous violence, blood, guts, and gore, but I found American Psycho so disturbing that I had to kick him out of the house.  I didn’t even try to find him a new home.  I threw him away, in the garbage; relegated him to a life of homelessness, later to be glorified in an equally disturbing movie, that I also could not embrace as one of my own.

So, there they are; the four I can’t live without and the one I can’t live with; I remember where and when I was when I encountered each of them; their comings and goings are etched into my memory like my first and last memories of my loved ones; some perfect and some painful, but I would not be who I am today without having spent time with each of them.

30 Day Writing Challenge: Day Seven

The Tattoo That Wasn't

We had talked about tattoos, my husband and I, in that way that people talk about random subjects when they are getting to know each other; the "have you ever's," and "my favorite_________ is," all the way to the serious ones, like "how many children would you want to have?"  We agreed about tattoos that were not against them, but neither of us would ever get one.  We just wouldn't; it wasn't who we "were."

Shortly after my son was born, my husband announced that to honor the nine months I carried our child and the pain I went through in childbirth to bring Duncan into the world, he was going to get a small tattoo of a Keith Haring crawling baby on his ankle.  And I, in that way that people who are women who happen to be ragingly full of hormones and also sleep deprived can do, completely lost my composure.  In fact, I either threatened to leave or may actually have stormed out of the house, keys in hand, and gone for a drive, leaving Jamie with the infant son.  There was screaming; there was yelling; there were floods of tears.  Because...this was not who we "were."  All I could see was that "we" had changed - that Jamie was now a person who got tattoos, and I was not - and that we had no future together.  I was now a dumpy, boring, mother with no edge left to her, and my husband was a biker who was going to seek out the kind of woman who DOES get a tattoo; yes, I went to those extremes.

Afterward, when I had calmed down, I explained all this to him.  I assured him that I would be fine with his Keith Haring crawling baby tattoo, but I still would not get one.  He assured me that he would NOT be tattooing anything if I felt that strongly.  Despite all our affirmations, we remain completely untattooed.  We do, however, remain married, and we are both just edgy enough for each other.