Confusing Times September 7, 2017

“By yielding, we may obtain victory.” –Ovid

Do you know the term “at sixes and sevens?” That sort of off-center feeling of not quite knowing what to do next, a subtle disorientation? That is how I’ve been feeling lately. My mother is experiencing memory loss, and has been for some time. This was brought home to me in a dramatic way recently, when I saw how confused she was in a large store. I realized that we had turned a corner–we are in deeper waters than I had let myself realize. Things are changing quickly. My role is changing, and this woman who has always been so fiercely independent, is suddenly reliant on me in a way I never expected. It is bittersweet—sweet because she now allows me a kind of intimacy we’ve not had before, and bitter because I don’t want to lose her. As a friend of mine says, “life is a series of not-totally unexpected blows.”  Nothing about this is unexpected, but facing into the lived reality feels vertiginous.

Not long after our trip, I went to Earth Fare. I did a few errands and sat down to gather myself together and write a to-do list. It was pleasant to be in the neighborhood store, and I felt less alone with my own thoughts. I realized that I was holding my breath. So I tried to just breathe. There was nothing I could do about my sense of confusion, so I tried to relax into it. (The operative word here is tried.)

 As I flipped through my tiny note book, I came across this line in a poem by Pamela Wilson: “Not knowing, even confusion, when met, reveals itself as wisdom in its potentiality, pure intelligence.” The poem was from a workshop by Johanna Royo on Heart-Centered Living during a one-day conference, Healing the World through Art, at the Georgia Museum of Art. Johanna described an experience of deep depression and loneliness in her life which led her to her practice of Heart-Centered Living. She said that at the very worst moment, she sat on the floor of her kitchen and it seemed that a huge black hole opened up. And then, instead of resisting it, she fell into it. And came out laughing. She realized that was the resistance and fear that were keeping her stuck.

Sitting there in Earth Fare, I saw an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while.  We chatted, talking about family, when she asked about my mother. She had known and loved my parents for a long time. Not only that, her husband had dementia for twenty years, a fact I had forgotten.  As I described my grief and fears, she nodded with understanding. It was a relief to talk about it with someone who didn’t shy away from the reality I was facing. She gave me good practical advice, and she also described the unexpected gifts that came from his illness. She said that over the course of his illness, he became much more affectionate. They shared an intimacy that in some ways was because of the illness. She described their last anniversary, which was celebrated in the hospital. Because the illness had made him blind, she had to describe the pureed food she was feeding him. They laughed about how when they married they never could have imagined celebrating their anniversary in such a way. She also described how, at the very end, when they thought nothing could reach him, a nurse singing a German folk song caused him to “wake up” and sing along with her in German. It was an unexpected gift of having him back, however briefly.

In a way I could never have orchestrated, I talked with the very person I needed to talk with that day. I left the store feeling lighter, clearer, and less afraid.

Note to readers: I have not posted since January. It was in January that my life felt upended—we had just inaugurated a man I feel is unfit to be president, my mother’s memory issues intensified, and I was under tremendous pressure to sell my book—which meant acquiring a whole new set of skills. My body protested. I am feeling on a more even keel now, and plan to post more frequently.

 

Facing It November 5, 2015

It is dark November–gray, wet, the yellow and red leaves slowly drifting to the ground. I have always liked the melancholy of fall, its rich colors and long nights, but this year the season is not just a metaphor, but also a lived experience. I am in the fall of my life, and what I seem to be shedding  are my illusions—that death is not real, that summer lasts forever. Friends are dying, and children have grown and left. Many of my friends have been thrown up on the rocks of middle-age unexpectedly single, or having been laid off of jobs they thought secure, or, like me, are dealing with chronic illness. There is a general zeitgeist of shock. How did this happen? How did it happen to me?

Life has not turned out as expected.

Why are we surprised? We’d heard rumors, but chose to disbelieve them, children of a golden age that we were. But now, our feints and slights of hand no longer work.

it comes home, the flea-ridden bitch of desolation,

a thin dog with its ribs exposed like a lesson

in mathematics, in subtraction; it comes home, to find its bowl

empty—then the numberless

things for which to be grateful dissolve

like the steam from a fire just doused with water

on a day of overcast grays, lined

by a cold slanting rain—

(from “Facing It,” by Eleanor Wilner)

 

Yet, being alive, we still want to live—although how to live is the question. Jason Shinder in his poem, “Middle Age,” addresses the dilemma:

 

Many of my friends are alone

and know too much to be happy

though they still want to dive

to the bottom of the green ocean

and bring back a gold coin

in their hand. A woman I know wakes

in the late evening and talks

to her late husband,

the windows blank photographs….

 

Do we know too much to be happy?

Perhaps not happy in the way of our protracted youth.  We can’t unknow what we know, what we’ve experienced. There are losses and they are real. I think we are supposed to feel them, not minimize them. They are a part of our story, but not our whole story.

A friend thrown over by her husband ten years for a girl his daughter’s age has found a new, surprising love.

A friend laid off in the recession has been rehired and is now a senior and respected teacher.

Children have children; our street is full of the next generation.

Fall is a season, but not the only season.

 

 

 

 

 

Boon August 22, 2014

My daughter called last week, weeping into the phone about Robin Williams death.  “It is as if a part of my childhood is gone,” she sniffled, “he was so great.  I just loved him.”

 I was happy that my daughter at 28 could feel things so deeply.  On hearing the news, I was shocked and saddened, but it didn’t come at me with the force it did her.  We become drier, I suppose, with the shocks of living, if we survive to middle age.  When I heard that Mr. Williams had Parkinson’s as well as the black dog depression,  I shook my head ruefully.  It just keeps coming, it never ends—“it” being life, La Vida, as my housekeeper says.  Life is full of troubles, if you haven’t heard. 

 A friend of mine says, “Until three years ago, I didn’t know what people were talking about when they said life is hard.  Life isn’t hard, I’d thought, it’s a blast.  Now I know what they are talking about. Boy, do I.”  My friend is fifty; three years ago her husband left her for another woman.  Another friend’s dying mother has come to live with her.  My friend is up at 2, 4 and 6 am, taking care of her mother, lifting her heavy, numb legs off the bed, supporting her the few steps to the potty.  Her sleep is fragmented. She feels trapped, stressed, alone.

My childhood friend’s mother went through a protracted and painful death this spring.  The day she died, my friend wasn’t with her, because she was seeing a surgeon about her recently discovered colon cancer.  The memorial service had to be put off because my friend had to recover from her own surgery. She hasn’t had a chance to mourn her mother, or herself because her father has Alzheimer’s and she is busy making arrangements for him while getting her parents’ home of forty years ready to sell.

 We have gone through our own harrowing.  One of our beloved children has fallen down the rabbit hole of drugs and alcohol.  It feels as if we’ve been in an earthquake: the ground is Jell-O, and none of the walls seem solid.  How is this our life?  My husband and I are stunned, numbed, shaken.  Everything has shifted, become unrecognizable. 

 And yet. And yet, even acknowledging La Vida as I do, even acknowledging my age, illness and limitations, I still dream of dancing on tabletops, of drinking wine on the coast of Croatia as the sun sets on the Adriatic.  As Jason Shinder writes in his poem, “Middle Age”:

 Many of my friends are alone

and know too much to be happy

though they still want to dive

to the bottom of the green ocean

and bring back a gold coin

in their hand ….

Foolish, maybe.  But how do we survive La Vida without the consolation, the idea of the gold coin?  Without the belief there is a boon to be had, do we just put our heads down and plod through? 

 Robert Pinsky suggests, in his poem, “Samurai Song,”  a boon, but one of subtraction, not addition. 

When I had no roof I made

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

 

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited….

 

When I have no means fortune

Is my means. When I have

Nothing, death will be my fortune.

 

Need is my tactic, detachment

Is my strategy. When I had

No lover I courted my sleep.

I find this poem strangely affirming, especially the line “When I had no thought I waited”.  The speaker is confident, centered, and in command of himself.  He is not thrown by external circumstances.  He does not define himself by his poverty, but by his abundance.  He is able to do this because “detachment is my strategy.”  He, it seems to me, has won this poise not through a life of ease, but a life of adversity.  No one and nothing can take this boon of “self” from him. We may know too much to be happy, but we still can be joyful.

I still want to drink wine in Croatia, to dance the tango in Argentina.  But in the meantime, I am looking for the gold coin right here, right now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything Changes, Nothing is Lost June 20, 2012

Julian Barnes wrote a wonderful, subtle novel about a middle-aged man who slowly discovers that the narrative he’s constructed about his life is based on misapprehension of his most important relationships.  The Sense of an Ending is the title of the novel, and that phrase has been coming back to me a lot lately.

After my daughter’s wedding in May, we took a much-needed vacation to our favorite island on the Georgia Coast.  Unfortunately, Tropical Storm Beryl was also in residence.  We had two good beach days, one day of high wind and surf, and the rest were rainy and windy.  The wind caused the house to shudder, and huge branches came down.  We had brought a friend for my son, a girl who is like a sister to him, and we spent our time playing Apples to Apples, reading  and watching  “Lost.”  Getting cabin fever, I suggested to Maggy that we go look for toe rings.  Years ago, when Hannah was fifteen, we’d bought toe rings in the wonderfully tacky beach stores downtown, and I had lost mine.  So off we went.  I suppose I was trying to recreate the fun I’d with Hannah. Unfortunately, it seems that toe rings are no longer in style–all we could find were ugly, dusty old things.  Dispirited, I went outside while the kids shopped, and pulled out my cellphone to call my daughter.

“Hi Mom, what’s up?”  I told her about the toe rings, hoping it would kindle in her some memories of our beach vacations, that she would be in the mood to reminisce.  “Yeah, yeah, but Mom, Brian and I are shopping for pillows–what kind should we get?”  I could hear people in the background. “Down is the best,” I told her, watching an egret alight on the marsh mud.  “OK, great, let’s talk soon, gotta go,”  Hannah said.  I stood holding the silent phone, knowing then that there was no going back, that this change was real.  She had left my nest and was feathering her own.  Her life is all before her, and the past is prologue.  I felt caught out in my vulnerability, in becoming the kind of woman who clings too tightly to the past.  But there it was.  I stood, stunned, as  the marsh grass rippled in the wind, and the egret raised its magnificent wings and lifted off.

Last week, I visited the home of a childhood friend.  Her parents have been failing–her father, the curmudgeon of my childhood, is bent over and slowly losing his sharp mind.  I brought roses to this former rose gardener, and told him it was like bringing coals to Newcastle.  He couldn’t remember my name, didn’t recognize me, but smiled at the allusion.  “Oh, no, no, no,”  he said, patting my shoulder.  His wife shuffled in on her walker, as tall, straight and self-possessed as ever despite the scars incurred in her second fall in three months.  Ever the southern lady, she directed her daughter to make the tea and set out the cookies, and graciously led me into her sun-room.  The house was almost exactly as I remembered it; it hadn’t changed over the years, only the occupants had.  I met my friend’s eyes as she served the cookies–her eyes were brimming with sadness and love. I had never seen her so patient with her folks, so solicitous.   “My brother says they will have to go into a home; they can’t go on like this,”  she told me privately.  No way around it, it seems, but I wonder who he will be without his garden, who she will be without her kitchen.  “Lida, cut Sara some hydrangeas before she leaves,” her mother commanded, and her father comes out brandishing pruners.  He didn’t know who I was, but he wanted me to have some of his flowers.

Just the other evening, we were staying late at Legion Pool, a wonderful WPA structure that has anchored my summers my whole life.  My earliest memories are of learning to swim there, and we spent every summer of my childhood escaping the Georgia heat there.  It is a large, gracious pool next to a large open field, surrounded by mature trees.  Those trees have been with me as I grew up, married, brought my babies to the pool to nurse, and taught them to swim there. I feel as if I know every branch of every tree, and that as I watch them, they know me too. This place has been a lovely constant in my life, a place of community and continuity which is hard to explain to folks who’ve never experienced it.  It is here that families catch up with the latest happenings, swap recipes, make plans, and share our hopes, dreams and sorrows. It is slated to be torn down to make room for a parking lot next year.  That night, as I watched the blue shadows of children playing in the inky water as the sun set,  I was filled with a sadness that this too would pass.  Was it too much to ask for just one lovely thing to remain the same?

In theory, I’m all for things dying to give birth to new things, for the passing of the old to make way for the new.  But the living of it is another matter.  The wind howling and keening around our vacation house in May echoed my feelings in this season of endings and beginnings.  Like the marsh, I have been filled, and emptied out, and I know I will be filled again.  I read of how storms changed the contours of our island, how rising waters would change it further.  I know I will get used to the new configurations of my family and community life, to the new landscapes of town and island.  But not yet.  Like the storm, like women for millennia, I need to mark the changes, to keen and lament.  And then, maybe, I will walk out again into a calm, sunny day.