Cobbled together moment by moment
It’s a melancholy, lonely feeling. I’ve waited to start writing until the boy and his father were out of the house, on their way to a swimming lesson, and I find that everything feels contingent, time-bound, stuck and ever-changing all at once, and I hope this feeling isn’t some sort of premonition, some kind of weird knowledge of the end because the end is near. Like my mind is controlling it and I’ll lose everything, every little bit of it, because I am not good enough, or I am too dark inside. It must be taken away. Or I must be taken away.
The image I have is of a wrinkled, spotted hand reaching out of the mist to pull me into some other world or to pull what would be left of me, the spark, the bit of light. It isn’t frightening and it isn’t soothing and so much of it is obscured, just the hand, the reach, and then I’m gone.
Maybe this train of thought has come about because of my recent discussions with my mother about Christianity and the survival of our individuality after death, something she doesn't entirely buy (I'm still on the fence). Why are we so attached to the personal, the us of us, surviving our bodily death? What do we become? What is death like? Or will we ever know?
Maybe it has to do with the book I picked up last night, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed , three long stories dealing with women “all past their first youth” (is there such a thing as a second youth?) and their struggles with aging and wayward children and spouses. I first read this book in my early twenties when aging was a myth, a theory that I never thought I would test. I am happy to be absorbed in fiction, something outside of hard reality, and terrified by what it may inform me about the future (I have always gotten too much of my information on how to live and what to expect in life from fiction; perhaps I should pick some more uplifting authors).
Maybe it has to do with where my head has been lately – it’s guilt, plain and simple, deep and wide, dark and bottomless. It’s the needs of the body versus the needs of the mind and the soul and it’s bargains with myself about what I can handle and who I am. It’s the tangle of contradictions and prickly intimacies all jumbled up in my heart, wrapping around my mind. It’s murk and mist and mud.
I want to revel in the ambiguity of existence, the way we slam into ourselves in the middle of the night, the little inconsistencies. I want to be human, to forgive myself, to let my mistakes be. I want to be reckless and free, unafraid, standing outside looking at the stars, being in the moment, being there, instead of stuck inside my head thinking about the unknowable and ruminating on the inevitable, thinking that my inherent badness will cause my death or the destruction of those glints of joy that sometimes appear in my life, little shining moments of luck and beauty.
That’s why I was pulling weeds out front earlier today, enjoying being active and in the sun, totally absorbed in a mindless task. It's why I sat with the boy on the couch two hours ago, enjoying his closeness, the fleeting moments of his cuddly six-year-oldness. It will all change, it is changing now, and I want to be here for it all as long as I am here, me, with all my contradictions and flaws, putting the inevitable out of my mind.
Getting it onto the page -- onto the screen -- always clears my head. So now, back to life, cobbled together moment by moment, living as if it will never end.
Image of me holding death in my hands. Or making a sugar skull for Day of the Dead. Pick whichever interpretation you prefer.
Unfiltered
In the middle of the night, while everyone sleeps, I open my eyes, let his name roll off my tongue. I say it as the only witness, the one who was there and remembers, and in the night it is almost as if he exists, whole, alive, solid as anything and just as beautiful as life itself, as the pumping of one’s heart, the slow rise of breath, the way the blood flows from here to there, feeding us, keeping us going, warming our fingertips.
The name is smooth, small, round, cool. It is heavy and old. It is an afterthought, the only thing left, a placeholder, an artifact from another era.
When I opened the box, I took out the name, I polished it up, I held it close to my heart and warmed it against my skin, and I said: you are mine, nobody else’s and I am sorry for what I couldn’t do, for who I was, for my horrible timing. I am sorry that I was me and not someone else stronger, more loved and supported. It was our bad luck, your bad luck. Fate made it this way. I can't think of it any other way because I can't change it now, the build-up to the creation and destruction of life.
Last week, we got to the heart of it. Can you kill something with hate? Murder off a part of yourself, a part of someone else, with the intensity of negative emotion? Is it possible to be responsible for someone’s death through your hatred of them? The hatred of the innocent is a sad and evil thing. I was weak. I am so, so sorry. I think this is very important, the therapist said, this feeling that I killed with hate and the fact that I am having a very hard time forgiving myself for it and for what happened to me afterward, for my lonely struggles. She was right. The guilt permeates everything, leaves my closest relationships tinged with grey, fogged over, aching and heavy with my weakness.
I am sorry. I wish I hadn’t been left to carry the burden of what happened alone. I am not the only guilty party, but I was the one left holding the bag, and here I am, struggling to carry it, to lighten it with words and action and an attempt to keep my battered blackened heart open to love.
I hold him here and there, he is always with me in his cozy box, warm and close. After the house fills and then empties of family, I will open it again, give him the attention he needs and deserves.
I will not forget.
A dense little post, but necessary.
The full poem I mentioned in the post Collecting the shards:
Aubade
Take a streetcar to the water’s edge.
You’ll find an empty bench.
Go and sit on it.
Look out across the bay
water shimmering.
I do believe there is
there is an emptiness.
One can attain to it. -- Kevin Sheehan
... which I can now tie to a quote from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which we just read to the boy. This is from the point in the book shortly after Aslan is murdered: If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you -- you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness.
It's grief. It's appropriate. But I have to return it to the box for a little while, keeping the box close to me, close to me and safe.
Image by Rust Morris.
Mea culpa, mea culpa
I like to pretend that there are no mistakes, big or otherwise, not because I believe we build our own faults out of the rotten parts of ourselves, or that we somehow court danger, flirt with falling, but because nothing is as simple as just doing something wrong. There are always steps, prior decisions, circumstances.
The circumstances that led me -- no, us, though the boy, who is now a middle-aged man, remains clueless – to my mistake were old and complicated. Maybe it started in a darkened room when I was younger and even more helpless and that defining moment was covered over by confirming experience, the hints at my worthlessness, the attention people paid to appearance versus inner reality, the atmosphere of parental distraction that led to the scene on the bed. From the outside, statistically even, my behavior leading up to this moment and what happened after it were extremely predictable. Can we really call it a big mistake?
Of course, despite my philosophical weaseling out of responsibility (so says the large part of me that wants to pin it on me, for the comfort of control, of being the center), I constantly make mistakes, choose the wrong path, decide to hide when I need to stand up and shout. I see my flaws and how they lead to perdition. If I let myself go down this brittle path of self-hatred, of acknowledgement of fault without forgiveness, without looking at the circumstances and how I got there, I will break into a thousand pieces.
Still. I am sorry to all I have wronged. I am sorry for not being good enough, talkative enough, agile enough, calm enough, kind enough, self-confident enough. I apologize for not getting the cat off the chair more quickly before you collapsed. I apologize for that time when I was twelve and I did something strange to the washer. I apologize for being too quiet at the dinner table, or too full of teenage smolder, or too full of myself. Maybe if I had been better, different, you wouldn’t have died or wanted me out or abandoned me. I am sorry for killing you with anger and selfishness and neglect. I apologize for not talking before things fell apart and for directing the anger of a lifetime at you who were most important to me and to practical strangers, too, the ones who unknowingly probed where it hurt the most.
I am sorry, I am sorry all of you. But there are no mistakes, everything has a context. I promise to let go of my burdens before I burden all of you again, before I cover myself over in never-ending regret.
And now for something completely different, two great things that acknowledge the blog that I have not mentioned, caught up as I am in the Round Robin.
Dieter Moitzi, writer and creative force behind the fine blog confessions of a wannabe writer passed on the Liebster Blog award to writing to survive and a few other blogs he admires. Please check out his blog for the prose and poetry or, even better, take a look at his ebooks. Thank you, Dieter!
writing to survive was listed as number three in a list of the top fifty personal memoir blogs by adulteducationcourse.org. I'm in good company, with fellow blogging friends La Belette Rouge, Elisabeth from Sixth in Line, earth to holly, and Storied Mind. The post highlighted by reviewer Tracy Myers (a name I've gleaned from other awardees) was In My Defense. Thank you very much, Tracy!
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From the prompt "A big mistake." My reaction to it was surprisingly dark -- these thoughts are what I have been fighting against daily for months now, trying not to indulge, trying to change the way I react, even when I am not aware of the mechanism or reaction.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited a bit.
Image by Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com).
Adulterated joy
Except for me, it’s all at the surface, I have a direct line to my emotions, to what is going on, though I don’t always know the source. I knew that the very idea of family was threatening, the translation of woman/man/kid into me against them, but it had never occurred to me why. Years of threes, me on the outs, the sacrifice, the undesirable, the way I had to build a framework to protect myself, the avoidance even now, now at 41 -- it pulls me back to the days of John the Murderer or Jim the Silent or Kevin the Troubled Genius. That's the background, anyway, for my internal tightening, my bracing against rejection. I am not thinking of these people when I am locked away inside my own head.
I walk past whitewashed bungalows in our neighborhood, grandparent houses with stiff drapes browned by years of cigarette smoke and television rays. Inside the furniture is dark and it smells like sauerkraut and over-boiled hot dogs, like coffee and fake cream, like sewing machine oil and old man sweat. I ache for my grandmother, for the simplicity of two, of being enveloped by love. The year I lived with her and my grandfather is summed up by memories of breakfast on a tray in the kitchen, toaster waffles with margarine and syrup, sausages, and a jelly jar of orange juice. The filtered light of a winter Eastern Shore dawn comes through the casement windows. The kitchen is warm. I am safe. It mixes in with the memory of getting into her bed on snowy weekday mornings, cuddling up close and listening to the radio for school closings. There were quite a few in the winter of 1977-78.
If you ignore mourning, if you try to pretend that loss is all about self-development and looking on the bright side, or if you’re a kid and don’t know how to deal with it, it pops up at the oddest times and years later. The bungalows tell me of other peoples' grandparents, of love going stale in empty houses, and the television is on constantly and the threat of loss hangs everywhere.
My mother and were sometimes two and then a man came along and we were three and I was on the outs, the three-year old standing every night at a dinner table set for two, the melodramatic seven-year old shunned, the preteen who was excluded from dinner conversation the teenager eating alone and living on her own in the year-round coolness of a summer bungalow.
My grandmother and I were always two. She shared her Coke on ice with me, let me lie next to her in her bed. She taught me about double-lined two-way streets and the rules of swimming after eating. She was there on weekends and school holidays. And then she died in front of me and I could do nothing about it, watched helplessly as she slumped on the chair. Nine years old without an advocate.
Maybe this is the tension I’ve been carrying all week, since that session of threes. Connection means loss and relying means loss, too, and so I see the lines of it all, I see it, but you still can’t remove the truth from the matter. There is no pure joy, no happiness without pain, no life without death. Someday I’ll be the one going out, or the one left alone, and my heart tells me “don’t’ get used to it. They all leave and no one will care about you when they are gone.”
From the prompt "Pure joy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one was lightly edited. Yes, I skipped yesterday. It was taking too much time, had too much to develop. Maybe I'll post it someday.
Image: Me at around three years old, my grandmother's cigarette smoldering in her hand. I've posted this picture before. Unfortunately, I don't have any other pictures of my grandmother and me.
Beyond the flip side
Some may be lucky (or un-) enough to die quickly (the major coronary, the proverbial bus or truck, the burst aorta), but for most of us, death is slow and sneaky. There are warning signs, there is the long waiting, the room full of loved ones and stale, sickened breath or empty except for the one on his way out. (Don’t feel sad for the person dying alone. That is how it works for everyone, even those in a roomful of love. Support is good, but at the very end, the gathering is more for those left behind, staving off loneliness. Or so I tell myself when I imagine my own death, my letting go in a sparsely furnished room.)
And what about life? My son has finally showed an interest in learning where he came from, the result of some questions about the difference between male and female bodies, and of our reading of the book It’s So Amazing. His birthday is coming up and last night he asked me "How did I start?" We talked about sex (glossed over for the most part, though he knows the mechanics), the meeting of sperm and egg, the cell division, the way he grew inside me and how we anticipated his arrival. It is so amazing. And a long process. That bundle of cells, the zygote future boy that we didn’t even know existed, is life of a sort, but not quite.
When does death become death and life bloom into its full being? I’ve been at one deathbed knowingly and at a deathchair in ignorance. I’ve watched someone’s body wind down until the final moment, but before then, before the fundamental change, the person in front of us, the himness of him, was already gone. His body was stuck in the waiting room of death for a long sad day and then it was over, yes, the switch was flipped, but the process had been going on for days, months.
Death and life overlap, what was supposed to be the beginning can be the end (the miscarriage, the stillbirth, the end of quickening and the heavy knowledge that you contain death).
And what about the death of love, the way something within us goes flat, but not all at once? It happens after years of holding the love underwater, of neglecting it while it plays in traffic. If you get to it early enough, you might be able to resuscitate it. Its death is a process, like all the rest, like the falling, the immersing, the way two people briefly become one.
From the prompt "In the space of one minute ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I could delve much deeper into this one if I wanted to.
Image by redwood 1.
The dazzling core
After it is all over and the body rots or is burned away or pumped full of chemicals and covered in makeup as a way to convince those who are left that the loved one still exists, light remains. The flash at death, the speed up to space, the dissipation of the distilled self: once freed, light moves at its own dazzling pace.
This is life, the essence, the sparkle, the dance. Contained in a body for ten years or 41 or 87, confined by contingent flesh, pulled along through various circumstances (happy childhoods, punch-drunk marriages, depressions of the emotional or monetary types), the light whips out of the withered husk, the self it used to be, at first opportunity.
Does light remember? Are we contained in hundreds of points of light in the night sky, stardust? Starlight? I’m still trying out this theory on myself, this idea that maybe there is an underlying spiritual layer, matterless, pure light, the mystery of life underneath the machines that are our bodies.
Light does not remember. Light exists, mysterious, animating, strong, the substrate, the core, but once it leaves a body, it breaks into a million different pieces. Or waves. Who we are scatters across the universe, to be gathered in a different configuration and shot into a body again. Maybe.
But it doesn’t end, light. It hurtles, it makes us who we are, it is the purest thing about us. Don’t cover the light. Try your best to see it, to acknowledge it through the worst of circumstances. Let it simultaneously ground you and lift you. And don’t get too attached. Light resists containment. It is not individual. We exist in a community of waves, of commonalities, sparks underneath the surface.
From a prompt: It never ends. I went with something positive and never-ending. A change of pace. Lightly edited from yesterday morning's original.
Image: Me, the mirror and the flash.
Reconciliation
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
Kevin’s last day started with a predawn pantomime, a fluttering and flapping of his thin-boned arms, his blue eyes serious as he gestured to his throat and chest: I can’t breathe.
My boyfriend Stephen and I were keeping vigil in his hospice room, taking over that night for my mother and Kevin’s 24-year-old son Ian. The cots were rigid, thin, like subpar stretchers but low to the floor. We would periodically awaken to the creak of the door as the night nurse checked on Kevin, the widening wedge of light from the hallway prying our eyes open.
Hospitals and hospices are yellow-tinged at night, their lights low, the rectangles of frosted glass over the bed or ceiling fluorescents dimmed just enough to give the nurses light to pierce a vein. The effect is barroom dingy and sordid, the supine patients the barflies, the nurses cocktail waitresses plying pharmaceuticals and sympathy. Still, in the dim glow of the light over the bed Kevin looked at least a decade younger than his 55 years. His skin retained its tanned, smooth quality and his hair was still chestnut brown without a trace of grey. It was his weight that gave him away, that and the tubes, the hissing oxygen tank. After nine years with the terminal bone marrow disease myelofibrosis, after almost seven months in and out of the critical care unit at Georgetown University Hospital, Kevin’s five foot ten frame had melted down to 86 pounds.
With his tracheostomy speaking valve removed, Kevin could not talk, but his distress was clear. I groggily rushed to get help. Kevin again fluttered his arms, too earthbound to be wings, too light to be useful, at the nurse. Thinking a change of position would take the pressure off his fluid-filled lungs, she and I turned him on his side. She administered a bolus of morphine through his IV.
Kevin’s body slumped. His eyes closed and his breathing took on an autonomic quality. It was as though she had flipped a switch. Kevin’s panicked pantomime was his last conscious act.
“You’d better call your mother,” the nurse told me. “There’s been a change.” It was 4:15 a.m., March 24, 2002. Kevin was dying of untreated pneumonia.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1984
Kevin Sheehan, poet, philosopher, carpenter, moved down the street from my mother and me in late March. Pale pink cherry blossoms feathered the tree out front. April’s candy-colored tulips foretold of May’s riotous azaleas. My mother invited our attractive new neighbor over for dinner, plied him with Szechuan chicken, coarse red wine, and talk of the Romantic poets. I was fourteen, a high school freshman, a volleyball cheerleader and devotee of German class, obsessed with the pop groups Duran Duran, Wham!, and Haircut 100.
He entered our lives like an explosion, tossed our world this way and that. That first dinner led to more. Kevin objected to my teen angst, my silence at the table, so my mother started cooking meals in our kitchen to bring to his house every night, always leaving me a plate. Most weekends I abandoned Wilmington to go to my grandfather’s place in Maryland, where I stayed in the Little House, an adjacent summer cottage that had no heat, plumbing, or phone line. My grandfather removed his prosthetic foot and hearing aids at night, leaving me completely unsupervised. I embraced the blurrying effects of alcohol, raided my grandfather’s liquor cabinet (the Johnny Walker Red, the sour Paul Masson wine) or siphoned my mother’s gin into a jar to bring with me.
That summer I met a 20-year-old college student who liked to visit after midnight. I learned to anticipate his knocks on the door as I watched Kung Fu reruns in the dark and yearned for his kisses with their heady taste of Budweiser and pot.
By September, my wardrobe darkened to black with fluorescent accents, safety pins dangling from my ears, I had discovered the saving power of punk music. At Kevin’s house he and my mother ate by candlelight, drank bottles of Sangre de Toro or gin and tonics, light on the ice. They talked Keats or Nietzsche over homemade French fries and garlicky chicken. At home I poured slugs of amaretto, made bitter screwdrivers, the orange juice bleached pale by vodka. I walked the streets in the dark, smoking clove cigarettes, my Walkman blasting the Dead Kennedys.
Washington, DC, March 21, 2002
“But I’m only 55 years old,” he cried out. “I’m not ready to die!”
Kevin spoke from his bed in the critical care unit, a thin thing, all stretched skin and solid bone, solid from the myelofibrosis.
With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow fills in with scar tissue, becoming fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in the body’s last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. The blood these organs make is inefficient, practically useless, the cells misshapen and immature. Already overloaded with the task of filtering out the extra white blood cells the body produces as part of the disease, gorged with their own blood-making, the liver and spleen swell dramatically.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage the disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant, which are both dicey bets. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work.
Myelofibrosis was killing Kevin in its indirect way. It dodged the blame, pointed its finger at the hospital, the pneumonia, the fact that Kevin’s body had stopped digesting the food that was coming to his stomach via a surgically-installed tube.
Delaware and Maryland, 1984-2002
This is what happened during my mother and Kevin’s 18-year relationship: Thirteen moves, three mortgages, one bankruptcy and foreclosure. Scores of fights. My move to the Little House at fifteen when my mother bought a one-bedroom house down the street. My labor in the Little House at sixteen which resulted in one stillborn child. My return to the Little House a week after the stillbirth. Four lousy cars. One new car totaled. One new car driven into the ground. Four dogs come and gone. A summer of no communication between me and them. One (empty) refusal to attend my first wedding. One spleen out. At least three breakups. One Ph.D. completed by Kevin at the midpoint of his illness. Dozens of philosophical conversations between the three of us over red wine, candlelit, intense, perfect. Laughter – at Kevin’s jokes or our shared ones -- the biting wit, the piercing eye. Seven hospitalizations.
Maryland and Delaware, 1992
The biggest fight I remember took place right before I left the East Coast for graduate school in Illinois, only months before Kevin was diagnosed. It was a fight that stretched out over a day, with deceptive lulls, lacunae of calm. There was a truck ride along a ribbon of asphalt, the tall green corn of an Eastern Shore August tunneling us in, and the yelling, about what I no longer remember. “Get out!” Kevin screamed at my mother as he pulled off the road. She slipped out the door, squawking all the while. As I slipped along after her, Kevin said, “You don’t have to go, Jen.”
“Why would she want to stay here? You’re not her father!” my mother screamed, a moment that clicked a switch inside of me: like I needed a father? Had she been looking for one?
I followed my loyalty out of the truck.
That night, back in Wilmington, my mother and I ordered a black olive pizza. Kevin, who was not planning on eating pizza, walked into the kitchen as we were opening the box. He hated black olives. Our choice was a choice against him (you were either for or against Kevin: there were no other interpretations). Spit flew. He flung a plain yogurt container across the kitchen where it exploded, heavy and white, against the oak cabinets. More screaming, my mother’s hysterical rush into the night, the dog chasing after her.
Kevin looked at me icily over the banister as he walked upstairs, his belly swollen, his spleen secretly filtering out excess white blood cells, heavy with blood-making.
“This only happens when you’re here. You cause these things.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
I was defiant. I knew he spoke lies. But a lifetime of blame comes home to roost at some point.
Washington, DC 2001 - 2002
In early September 2001, almost nine years after his diagnosis, Kevin checked into Georgetown University Hospital for shortness of breath. His pleural cavity, the space that houses the lungs, was filling with fluid.
I imagined the sharp straw they used to drain the fluid out, thin, metallic, pointed like a quill at one end, the flow of a liquid as viscous as a milkshake, as red as blood. One of the effects of end-stage myelofibrosis is a low platelet count, which can cause difficulty clotting. The internal puncture wound from the drain kept bleeding. Blood drizzled and oozed. It pooled in his pleural cavity before finally solidifying into a gelatinous mass. The mass interfered with his ability to breathe. It had to come out.
September that year was all clear blue skies and fluffy clouds, superior, deceptive mornings of pure sunshine. On September 11th, after being belatedly evacuated from the U.S. Senate office building where I worked as a librarian (the march home with other federal and nonprofit workers, the quiet skies and scary rumors, the unreality of it all), I took my unexpected afternoon off to visit Kevin in his hospital room. Stephen and I walked from our Adams Morgan apartment to Georgetown, a walk I would repeat countless times over the next several months. It was a liminal moment, the time of change. It was one of Kevin’s last afternoons of relative normalcy.
This is what happened to Kevin in seven months of hospitalization: Three thoracic surgeries to remove blood clots. One unnecessary hernia operation that landed him on a ventilator (aka respirator) for the first time. Several emergency intubations, a procedure that takes place when one’s oxygen levels fall precipitously and medical personnel force a breathing tube hooked to a ventilator into one’s lungs. One intubation-scarred epiglottis that let food and liquid enter his compromised lungs, making them more prone to infection. Two failed swallowing tests. Installation of a tube that went directly from his stomach through his abdomen to a drip bag of nutrient-rich sludge, Kevin’s “food.” Ten days of almost-fatal bleeding. Two expensive doses of blood Factor VII to stop the bleeding. Three tracheostomies. Numerous bouts of pneumonia. One nasty bedsore that went down to his tailbone. Endless bags of fentanyl, of hardcore antibiotics, of morphine. Several triumphant February walks around the critical care unit, Kevin gripping a walker, all 86 pounds of him getting along on pure will.
We watched over him, my mother and me, were at the hospital together almost every day for six and a half months. When she got the flu, when she moved from her apartment to a condominium, when she had to complete something on deadline, I took on her role at the sickbed. After Kevin emerged from a drug-induced coma, when the bleeding had stopped, he talked of angels and devils, the murk of being subdued by drugs, by the ventilator, how my mother and I appeared as saviors in the darkness.
He apologized.
I continued to keep watch. I listened. Sometimes I read to him. One afternoon a favorite nurse talked about an unnamed patient who didn’t get visitors: “That’s what happens when you’re not nice to people in your life.” If you only knew, I thought.
I was there because I cared. I was there because I wanted to help. But I was also there to redeem myself, to erase my own sins, for being the kind of person parents abandon and people are cruel to, for not being able to love the baby I gave birth to when I was sixteen.
Here, with Kevin trapped in the hospital, I could show my goodness. I could show him his goodness, that even those who do bad things deserve to be treated as human beings. It was absolution for both of us, hope in life, in the power of human beings to forgive and be made new.
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
My mother woke quickly to my call, roused Ian with a shoulder tap. They rushed without panic in the manner of people used to medical emergencies, pulled on yesterday’s clothes in the dark and splashed cold water on their faces. Casey House Hospice was in Rockville, Maryland, about 15 miles away from my mother’s Takoma Park condominium, a journey from one set of desperate concrete strip malls to another, up Georgia Avenue past the bodegas and Chinese grocers to the rolling greenery of the distant Washington, DC suburbs. In good traffic the trip took about 40 minutes, a buffer zone between my mother’s life and what remained of Kevin’s.
The morning was cool. Optimistic. Spring coaxed green out of brown earth and black branches. Forsythia bushes flamed across the landscape and daffodils sprung from dampened ground. A few hours after my mother and Ian arrived, Joe, Kevin’s closest brother, drove in from his hotel. We began our death watch.
The day before, the hospice minister, an Episcopalian, had visited Kevin. Stephen, Ian and I were there, sitting in the dusty afternoon, quiet under the oxygen hiss. Kevin had something to confess and he wanted us to witness it. He told of something bad he had done, bad enough to send him to hell. The minister was sympathetic and kind, told Kevin that he was not damned.
“Does that sound ok, guys?” Kevin turned his head to face us, without irony, sincere. We reassured him.
Each of us dies an individual. Some people go on the off flutter of the heart, the sudden starburst in the brain. Others may slip into a coma and then just stop breathing. Kevin went out slowly. Six of us – me, my mother, Stephen, Ian, and Joe, sat in the room. Woody, Kevin’s golden retriever, panted on the slick floor. We watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall, rhythmic, machine-like. His jaw was slack, the mossy tombstones of his teeth showing just under the lips, and with each intake of breath his mouth opened, only to drop again on the exhale.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The hiss of the oxygen tank. Sickness has a smell, a kind of fecundity, the triumph of bacteria, rich and thick. The room smelled of mucus and rubbing alcohol, of pneumonia and plastic. We sat and watched Kevin breathe. We wondered how long dying could take. We looked out the window at the incongruous spring-in-the-country scene. We excused ourselves to escape into life, to go for a walk, to read a magazine in the mauve and grey common room.
You might imagine that hospices are full of ancient people, wrinkled sickly husks, people who have had opportunities to live full and hopefully happy lives. The only other patient I remember was a woman who couldn’t have been past her thirties. She sat in her room with the door open, watching television in her hospital gown, the remote in her pale hand. A layer of fuzz covered her scalp, the aftereffects, I assumed, of a failed chemotherapy regime. Most people went to Casey House Hospice because they required serious medical attention to be comfortable: pumped-in oxygen, help in being turned, an IV, a catheter. Kevin, who could barely move and was dependent on oxygen and constant pain relief, fit into this category. This woman must have as well. But she looked so young, so alive and alone, free of tubes, with the enviable ability to move on her own power.
Back in the room. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The slack jaw, the shock of brown hair, the fluttering of Kevin’s heart underneath his solid thin bones. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Outside, robins tore into earthworms, tulips inched towards the sun. A spring breeze, hopeful, but with a touch of winter, pulled through the soft green new leaves. We didn’t speak. We watched. We wondered how long it would take. He took another gulp of air, his chest swelling, before he discarded it again.
Midday, Stephen and I escaped to get lunch for the family. We left the hot heavy air of the hospice and leapt into the car. The outskirts of Montgomery County were unfamiliar, the high and wide malls with their box stores, the restaurants with heavy meat and fried food. We drove somewhat randomly, would stop and look at menus and report back, finally bringing back bags laden with fat-crisp food, comforting and rich.
The room hissed. Kevin breathed low and wet through the pneumonia. Each member of the family took a break to eat in the common room, nibbled at the French fries or the fried chicken or the veggie burgers with cheese. We ate without tasting, ate because we had to, because that’s what the living do. Back in the room, the rhythm slowed, but the pattern remained the same.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The fluttering was fainter, Kevin’s heart still hard at work, the lungs doing their duty, slower now. Slower.
At 3:00 p.m., I went outside to call Martha, an old college friend, someone who knew the stories about Kevin, knew his effect on my life. The expansiveness of Kevin’s last hospitalization was almost impossible to convey. How could I explain the deathbed, his relentless heart and lungs? Typically, Martha kept on talking and talking. I could have left the phone on the path and gone back in, I could have just hung up or claimed a low battery. Instead, I paced. I listened to the swish of car tires on the interstate. I looked back at the window. I stepped on the cracks and watched a line of ants invade the grass. Finally, I cut her off mid-sentence. “I really have to get back to the room.”
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
We were tired with Kevin’s effort, with the winding down, almost bored with it. His body clung to life. The pneumonia had taken over his lungs, it was slowing down his heart, the two organs were working together as always, going out as a pair. The hiss of the oxygen. The rise and fall of his chest. The crazy tappings of his heart. Outside, the sunlight thinned and the bushes shivered with afternoon’s end.
Kevin took a deep breath. His heart gave a feeble beat. He exhaled. My mother gestured to his chest, Woody barked, and we clung to each other, my mother, Ian, Stephen and me, while Joe looked on.
Kevin went out in a flash of light, my mother told us. After the flash, she had a vision of him walking along a riverbank, his old collie Augie by his side.
That night I thought back to the afternoon that I had massaged Kevin’s scalp. His skin was thin as vellum, his hair hadn’t been washed in weeks. Kevin closed his eyes contentedly, like a cat in the sun, as I worked my fingers through his unkempt hair and palpitated his forehead. Why couldn’t I have done more of that? More handholding, more touch? Hospitals are impersonal anonymous places. Most of the touch he received was the medical kind, invasive, bloody, painful. I wished I had massaged him more, had held his hand more. It was all too late now. His body was heading for ashes.
I woke at 2 a.m. to the feeling of Kevin’s hand upon mine, his presence in the room. “You were there for me, and that was enough,” he told me. “Thank you.”
I went back to sleep.
A version of the personal essay I wrote for my creative nonfiction class (edited version added Sunday afternoon). If you got through all 3300 words of it, I thank you.
Riffs on a theme
laundry
thinking about last night's writers' group meeting
cleaning
dishwasher emptying
pondering 80s band names
exercising
music
daydreaming
talking on the phone (a long overdue and good, if a bit unsettling, conversation)
I need to complete my assignment for my creative nonfiction class. I need to take the story of Kevin's death -- the long day, the endless winding down, the surreal quality of it all -- and find a different way in. I've written about 3000 words, most of them the wrong ones. I need to do it, but keep on avoiding the task.
In this week's "lecture," our teacher was talking about finding the theme, the underlying topic that holds a piece of writing together, something that takes it out of a story of a series of events into something larger than itself. This is what is missing from my current draft. It's missing from some of my other work as well. People die. They rush into it, they take their time about it, they go out in an explosion of gunpowder or in the slow drip of blood and breath. This is not a theme, this is a fact, and it's not enough to make Kevin's last day compelling story material.
So what is the theme? Has it revealed itself yet? It finally hit me: forgiveness.
My forgiveness of Kevin through his long slow horrible hospitalization. My self-absolution through being there every day, through every up and down, by being kind to someone who was unable to treat me with kindness. His apology. His forgiveness of himself (the day before he died, three of us in the room during his confession to the hospice minister, the story I already knew but that Kevin's son was hearing for the first time, our role as witnesses, to the story, to Kevin's pre-Vatican II Catholic abused child fear of being bad and going to hell). Fear of what would happen to him after death kept Kevin going for a long time. He confessed and was absolved. And then his body slowly let go, loosened its grip on life.
OK. I have a theme. It's the same theme that runs through almost everything I write. Now I have to figure out how to approach it, in my voice, without going overboard. That last day where we weaved in between his hospice room, where death was taking its time, and the outside world, where spring was everywhere, where we had to eat, where people rushed and lived and acted as if they were immortal? I have to make it real and rich and, ultimately, about something else.
Fingers crossed that I can pull it off by Sunday night.
The thin line
Starr, a runaway, showed up in May 1972. Her body was awkward, all straight lines and angles, with the prominent exception of her belly, round and hard as horse flesh. The women took her in, fed her lentils and brown rice and shimmering river trout. When her time came, they swept a plastic child’s pool free of cobwebs and pulled it under the tulip tree. They ferried pots of stove-heated water from the house to the pool until the water spilled over the lip and soaked into the dust.
“Your son,” one of them said as she held him up in the moonlight.
The women covered Starr’s trembling shoulders with towels stiff from the clothesline, held the umbilical cord tight for the knife. Calloused hands massaged her belly. A soft voice whispered in her ear as she pushed out the placenta. They cleaned and swaddled the baby and lay him next to Starr as she slept on a pile of blankets on the sleeping porch upstairs.
The next morning, in the shade of the tulip, the women cut through roots and dug deep into the clay. They found a box. They fed Starr oatmeal with wild blueberries, supported her as she stood at the grave. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt, and stared, stoic, as the others finished the job.
Starr disappeared a week later. She tumbled over to the next town or hitchhiked back home, no one was sure. The commune, disquieted, slowly emptied. The men got jobs, found other women. One by one, the women left, too. They styled their hair. They tossed away their jeans and tie-dyed tunics and replaced them with floppy business suits and silky disco dresses. The tulip tree grew strong and thick, its blossoms heavy, fragrant with the renewal of life. A new family moved in, three kids and a dog, a tire swing suspended over the child's unmarked grave.
He’s there still, a silent presence swaddled in grace, the boy who never was. Visitors to the house feel him as the absence of something, love or sun or words, a puzzle piece gone missing. He comes in their dreams, the stilled body, the bundle on the floor, the baby with closed eyes.
Every mid-June, an unfamiliar car drives past the house. The driver is a middle-aged woman with capable hands, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Her two girls, just as blonde and skinny as she once was, stop arguing as the car slows. The tulip tree shudders, letting loose a flurry of petals that get tossed by the wind. The woman reaches out and catches a fully intact blossom. She will put it with the others.
She remembers the silence, her son's pale form in flat water, the taut section of umbilical cord. He showed her the thin line, the permeable border, how easy it is for birth to equal death.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
Yet another Three-Minute Fiction entry that disappeared into the ether. The challenge this time was to write something under 600 words that started with the line "Some people swore that the house was haunted." and ended with "Nothing was ever the same again after that." The first line felt tacked on (hmm, maybe this is why it wasn't picked as a possible winner), so I've just taken it off as well as done some substantial editing.
Oh, Iowa Writers' Workshop students and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, why do you deny me glory?
Image by Roger B.
Tip of the pen to Holly for alerting me to the contest a few months ago.
Back to the old house
The house meant safety and comfort. It was predictable, constant, the place my mother and I returned to when life was falling apart, where my grandmother would take care of me when my mother was working or needed the time.
Then, when I was nine years old, my grandmother died. She collapsed in a chair in the kitchen while I stood watching. With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather unable to use the phone, it was up to me to call the ambulance. My grandfather and I waited for the Volunteer Fire Department, a long, horrible wait. We watched the men struggle to lift her substantial body onto the stretcher. Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had gotten the cat off the chair sooner, if had understood my grandmother's gasps and flapping arms more quickly?
Sometime between the card games (solitaire, spit, go fish), the many phone calls to friends and relatives, the shopping trip for a burial dress, blue just like she'd wanted, and the wake where an uncle pulled out a cousin's loose tooth, the family decided that my mother and I would move in with my grandfather. In less than a month, we were out of our one-bedroom student housing apartment and back in the house at Hollywood Beach, my unemployed future stepfather along for the ride.
My grandfather’s house was cigarette smoke and chemicals, sugar and coffee, sawdust and mildew. It was porn magazines next to the candy in a cabinet in my grandfather’s room. It was my stepfather’s workout den in the unheated guest cottage we called the Little House. It was séances and Ouija boards, the yearning for a sign that my grandmother was still watching over me. Sometimes it was fights around the dinner table, arguments over food or housecleaning. It was nights in tight spaces, me in the sleeping bag under the bedcovers, in the attic with the pull-down steps, on the inflatable raft under the picnic table. It was sadness and anger and grief, the knowledge that I was on my own.
They sold the Hollywood Beach house in 1990, but I still visit it in my dreams. It stands for itself, it stands for part of me. The dreams used to be yearning, worried, guilty. I forget to take care of my (dead) grandfather. My mother and I bury body parts in the front yard. My uncle and aunt show up and I hide from them. Then the dreams changed, got a little better. My grandfather and I coexist in the house. We have a companionable sit at the dining room table. I leave before my aunt and uncle arrive. Interestingly, the Little House is never featured in these dreams, despite its importance in my own personal history.
Last Thursday night, I had another house dream. It was a beautiful summer day and various neighbors were busy with yard work or socializing. I felt comfortable, a part of things, visible and connected. My mother and I were discussing the renovation and eventual sale of the house, reminiscing about good times. I worried that the foundation would need to be redone, but she thought it was sound. My aunt and uncle arrived and went to work moving furniture from the house out to the lawn. Thinking this was a yard sale, a large crowd gathered in the grass and started dickering over the furniture. I yelled that it wasn't a sale, just the preparation for renovation. Suddenly I was happy about it, the prospect for an improved house, the same house but better, remade. Maybe we didn't have to sell it. Maybe we could add another floor, tear out the mildewey carpet, put up drywall where 70s embossed paneling had been, and come back to this house to live. It could be itself, a summation of memory and experience, and it could be something new at the same time.
What to make of it? The house is me, I am the house. The house is what it was, a place where things happened and people died, a holding place for my memories, a symbol of false security. My childhood was difficult, full of moves, losses, and bad men. Once my grandmother died, I had no adult advocate, and so I constructed a framework for myself, one where I made sure to rely on no one for my emotional needs, where I took care of my physical needs on my own as soon as I was able. I've let go of some of this. I have friends, a husband, good relationships with my parents. But I am still self-sufficient to a fault and quick to mistrust others. The framework gets in the way. It feels as much a part of me as my bone and muscle, organic and necessary to my existence. But perhaps I can work around it, make it into something new. The old house needs renovating. The foundation is sound. I'm ready.
And I'm not nearly as melancholy about it as Morrissey:
Image: The old house, undergoing renovation a year and a half ago. The Little House is to the left, obscured by the digger.
The cold cold ground
When Kevin announced that he wanted to be buried, it seemed bizarre. In the ground? Smothered under dirt and grass and rock? In the end, we did it. Half of Kevin's ashes were buried in an urn in a cemetery in Chestertown, the same cemetery that my friends and I used to cut through freshman year in college to go to 25-cent draft night at Newt’s. My mother spent the first two years after Kevin's death driving every weekend from the Washington, DC suburbs to his grave, bringing Woody the dog along until Woody got lymphoma and died. Gradually she visited less and less until her trips tapered to one or two a year.
The tapering was bound to happen. Time changes grief, makes it less of a physical ache than an emotional one. Talking to the air can be as satisfying as a graveside monologue. Kevin wanted his little plot of land and he got it, with a stone that my mother dragged out of the woods and a beat-up concrete angel propped next to it. When we want to visit, he’s there. Except, of course, he’s not.
My husband dug the hole yesterday morning. He dug it deep, struggled to cut through cloying clay. We looked at Zoe one last time, touched her soft fur, and told her we loved her before rewrapping her body and lowering it into the grave. I tossed in the first shovelful of earth. It's a strange sensation to cover a body with dirt. It feels wrong or maybe stark, a jarring acknowledgement of death. The towel still contained her warmth. She was alive an hour before we buried her. Surely this was a mistake.
Eventually what is left of Zoe return to the earth. She will live on in our memories and in our stories. The cats we have now will grow old with us. Their time will come. I'll be dust myself some day, my ashes tossed to the wind or scattered into the water, or perhaps sitting in an urn on a mantel or a closet shelf, waiting to be forgotten.
A tribue to Zoe-cat
My first husband and I were newly married and had just bought a house. The realtor’s partner’s daughter had found this malnourished, Giardia-ridden kitten in a German Village alleyway. Once the kitten was done with her medications, would we like to take her in? We already had a cat, Sidney, and a sheltie dog, Loudon. But our new house was big and Mr. X and I had both grown up with animals and we were reveling in domesticity. So a month after we moved in, Zoe moved in too.
Her first night with us was not auspicious. She hid in the litterbox, growling and crying while Sidney lurked silently outside. Eventually she came out and showed her true assertive nature, but those first days of intimidation marked their relationship. She preferred the laps of humans to feline company.
Zoe has remained kitten-sized. In her early and middle years, she was actually somewhat zaftig. Rubenesque. In the past year and half or so, she has gotten heartbreakingly skinny. Her fur goes unwashed and she spends much of her time asleep. Her kidneys are failing. Her mind wanders. She is not the cat she used to be.
So here’s to Zoe, the cat who used to trill every time she leapt, the kitty who convinced us that she couldn’t jump up to her food bowl but who later scaled our 8-foot fence, not once, but twice, the tiny powerhouse who had to be subdued at the vet’s office for any procedure. Zoe who confidently crawled around the cab of the pick-up truck while Mr. X drove from Ohio to Washington, DC and Sidney mewled in terror from his carrier. Zoe who braved the long flight from DC to San Francisco. Zoe, the cat who used to perch herself up to bat at my dental floss every night.
It is time to let her go.
Tomorrow morning she will join the others, among them cats Regis, Sheba, Frank, Liz, Ming, Nicky and Sidney, and dogs Greta, Buttons, Barney, Samantha, Louise, Augie, Woody, and Loudon. I’ll ask myself again why we do this, why we take in animals who will be with us for such a short time.
It’s about love. Love comes with the threat, the almost-guarantee, of loss and we take it on anyway, hoping that the sadness won't outweigh the joy.
Image: Top, Zoe in her rounder days. Bottom, Zoe in her kitten days.
That yearning
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
godless wonder
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
The bottom of the sea
Tom was pinned to the sea floor, staring into the gloom of pale green water, when his family started drifting past like surreal floats in an underwater parade. The first one to show was Faye, his father’s girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece bathing suit with a plunging neckline. It was the same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and even in the murk he couldn’t stop staring at her cleavage, worried that something would pop out. Faye was bounteous, but untidy. She was a concern. He tried to speak, to get her attention, but his words came out as a giant bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open and unseeing. Tom watched with increasing tension, staring into them, not noticing the pocket of air that contained his voice had winnowed its way to the surface. It was the same with all of them, his sister Veronica, his parents. They floated past one by one without purpose or reason, looking as they did in life. Except for their eyes. Unresponsive, flat and always open, their eyes were sightless. It was as if they were dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their mother insisted on buying, clutched a leash with a stiffened hand. Tilly was on the other end of it, pulling in undeath as in life, stretching the girl’s arm past her head as she floated by on her back. From the look on his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows raised, mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he were in mid-shout – the man was surprised to find himself there with the rest of them. He was dressed for a pickup ball game, with catcher’s mitt and a ratty Phillies baseball jersey over a pair of running shorts and his legs, weighted down by over-technical sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.
It was only once his father floated away, became a speck in the water, that his mother showed up. She was almost within touching distance, if Tom could have moved his arms. Her body slowly began to turn, the white terrycloth robe twisting around her legs and then spinning out again. With each turn the fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion dance. There was a beauty to it. For a second Tom thought he caught her eye, thought he saw a flash of recognition, but then she, too, was gone, carried away by the current.
He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave him tied to the bottom of the sea where there was no air? But he was alive. The air just came. He became aware of the heaviness in his chest, how his lungs, thickened and clogged, would fill like balloons, suddenly buoyant. His chest would start to expand and his body, reborn, light, would pull against its tethers, and then his lungs would empty again. He would wait for the next breath to push into him, to refill his body with lightness.
An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital bed, his body a pale thread under bleached sheets. A cap of greasy blonde hair clings to his forehead and underneath his sallow skin blue veins trace a map of the body. Sleep glues his eyes shut. White Velcro ties bind his wrists to the bed frame and his arms are so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth, rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic port in his hand to an IV stand. A tube snakes from his mouth to a ventilator sitting to the left of the bed. The night nurse re-taped it a few hours ago, inadvertently placed the tube at a rakish (though more comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if he should be holding a candy cigarette between his teeth instead of a ventilator line. For the moment, his lungs are receptacles. They expand and contract at the ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the machine does the work with quiet hums and hisses. His breath is external. Electric.
The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a slate blue reclining chair by the window, mouth slightly open, head slumped against her shoulder. A copy of the New Yorker lies open on her lap. In this light the circles under her eyes look like shadows and her unwashed hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are mossy and her breath sour. When the respiratory therapist, a large square man named Joseph, walks into the room, she doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the strange cadence of hospitals, where day and night are delineated by the migratory patterns of doctors and residents, the dominant physician leading his or her flock with authority during business hours. The way they trample! At night, residents travel alone or in whispering pairs, quiet in soft-soled shoes, not wanting to bring attention to their drawn faces and wrung-dry minds.
Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on Tom’s numbers and clean the vent line. He pulls a pair of gloves from the box by the door, struggling to get them on. Underneath the latex, his pale hands shimmer with a thin layer of sweat. He smells of cooking grease and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed up; he has pneumonia and the thick secretions interfere with his breathing. As the man bends over him and attaches the vacuum line to the vent tube, his body exudes heat. Tom feels the warmth of breath, of Joseph’s proximity, followed by the industrial pull of the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of mucus. Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips the tube into a glass of clean water. The water rushes with the joy of movement, of life.
With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They deflate, go limp, until they spasm in protest. He begins to cough. The coughs are productive and Joseph continues with his careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he leaves the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed mother who has just woken up. Exhausted, scraped clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep while his mother adjusts his blankets and smoothes her hand over his forehead. She is grateful to feel his skin under hers, is even relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom is still here and fighting.
The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the green, a small shape moves toward him. It travels in a nimbus of light made blurry with disturbed silt. The slow movement is hypnotic and Tom is filled with a sense of calm. As the form emerges, he recognizes the fine long hair of his maternal grandmother, white as bone, a flash of brightness in the deep. The mud and sand, the irregularities in the sea floor slow her down. She catches his eye and waves. Tom feels warm, well-fed, almost satiated. Gram will catch up with him. Everything will be ok.
But someone is tugging on his elbow. His mother has returned with purpose and animation. Tom looks into her eyes, her face a series of hollows, furrowed brow over darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around her head in crazy corkscrews. We love you. Stay here with us, she demands. Gram waves again, smiling, encircled by jaunty bubbles. There is no hurry. When it is all over, the end will only matter to the people left behind. He has infinity stretched out before him. His suffering will eventually be a memory and such memories are stored in the body, destined to rot.
Give the living a little more time.
Image: "Murky Water" by -Ebil-Bils.
A virulent strain of grief
I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was living in the Little House with disastrous results and he and my mother were at the thin edge of eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully, though that of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning: The below goes into detail about an illness and a harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well, it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease, though it was probably pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail, to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy. People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work (because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying to write about that time in a way that makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was admitted and how early on we thought he was going to slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax scares and work closures, of mail that came to the federal library where I worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a journey that required great vigilance on my mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they want to do things, think that action is always the best course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all those details of his hospitalization came out, details I have stored away for years: the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations, emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and that eating in front of him when he was getting his food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound frame and a walker and did halting laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month, disguised under a new premise with a much younger protagonist. After the month was over and the first draft off my head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I know next to nothing about the disease I had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And what do I know, really, about parental grief, which is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing research, reading books and looking at websites. There is one blog out there, very detailed and well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling her little boy's fight against cancer. That little boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing this?).
When you are in the middle of a life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all you can think about. Everything becomes medical and you find out all you can. You learn about the strength of nurses and the support system that crops up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you never thought were possible before. You are steeped in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like it will never end. You don’t want it to end with death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this family and the little boy that will never grow up. I hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to all the people who have experienced such prolonged pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore, April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a way to write something that sings and is true and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings it to life and honors those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top image: Kevin at Georgetown University Hospital, January 2002, about three months before he died.
Away from here
We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands, took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly.
Nobody had told the little one about what had really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell him what was happening, what would happen. He hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't, not until I was old and sinewy, not until Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had seen enough of loss myself by age eight, learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other people. My boy, he could remain untouched.
There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at the spine but swollen around the belly, carried him off into the back yard. I tossed him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish rack. The boy, always his father's shadow, made for the door, but I knelt down and blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little privacy, that's all. It's like at the doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got through two stories when Joe finally came back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid," Joe told him. I sent the two of them out there alone.
Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide in, where all you could see in the thick stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes, maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had professed his love while the cat panted, glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he came back into the house, Joe had shaped him into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb gently against each eye to close it.
He told the boy that it looked like Tristan was taking a little rest now, sleeping off his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good boy.”
That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops, it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't seem to notice, came in dancing and told me Tris was better, was sleeping.
That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog had blotted out the moon and the damp had sunk into my bones, made me drop the flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama raccoon and her kits peered at us out from the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest. Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git! Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They shambled off in the direction of the creek, looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all the fur with none of the grace.
A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of the box. I hadn't looked at him since the collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in the flashlight and take a final look, could stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.
The next morning we told the boy that Tristan must have taken off, shimmied through a hole in the fence, or through some miracle of will had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off for a better place. He put his little hand in mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine, perfect, whole.
Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now, eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw into the cold water as he searches for fish. Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving grass, tail quietly twitching before the final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there, away from here.
This was from a writing prompt last summer: write about something you don't want to write about. I didn't want to write about our cat's death, at least not directly, so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit the theme around here these days. It was originally three paragraphs with very little spelled out, but as I expanded it the details it became more gruesome. Not sure what I think of it, but here it is.
Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down. This one's slower than usual at least!
Image: Strawberry Creek, by Edwin Deakin, from Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.
And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to sleep because of his epileptic fits.
The themes of death and grief and how we cope with them have been on my mind, simmering under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story, the first line written in the Little House when I became responsible for someone else's death, when what was left of my childhood was stomped into flatness.
So when I just started writing without a plot in mind for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming out of my fingertips.
If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in a car accident. She had to go on living, because it was her only real choice.
An excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt
One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.
Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.
I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And five days later cold.
Image from Celestial Dome.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date unknown.
Writing prompt: Give us some trivia
Illustration by Ed Harriss.
I was born with a stork bite on my neck, an egg-shaped mark pink as a salmon fillet. On some children this mark fades, but on me it spread down and around my neck, a two-inch wide necklace of permanent blush. “That’s a natural piece of jewelry,” Mom would say, “Some people pay good money to have that kind of thing tattooed on their skin.” Those people didn’t live in my town. The people in my town thought my neck band was the mark of the Beast. After twenty turtleneck winters and dickey summers, I finally had a plastic surgeon burn that thing off of me. It was worth every cent, every painful minute.
People think that calling them stork bites is cute. Like the stork doesn’t exist and, even if he did (yes, it’s the males that you have to worry about), he wouldn’t nip an innocent baby on the nape of the neck! What do they know about storks? Those birds are aggressive as hell. There’s nothing cute or funny about them or their predilections. That’s the brain stem, you know. One chomp there and you’re paralyzed for life. Dead before you even get a chance to give out a second wail of hello to the world. My parents turned their backs on me for five seconds … five seconds … and that nasty stork took his opportunity.
Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. My father had a younger brother, Cole was his name (they did name him). He was born at home. After the exhaustion of a 33-hour labor, his mother took a nap. The midwife was in the bathroom, and Grandpa — well, Grandpa wasn’t known for hanging out at the scene of a birth or death. By the time the midwife came back into the room, the stork’s work was done. Missy waved that bottle at Cole's face, tried to coax the nipple between bluing lips. When she turned him over, she saw it. This was no salmon mark, but a clear bloodless bite, a chunk of the baby’s neck gone missing.
So. You think the stork brings life, carries babies to their mamas in a soft muslin hammock, all pure and sweet and accommodating? No. Babies are born through blood and sweat and pushing, through exertion, the body like a machine that just keeps going until that thing is out. Then you have to keep watch, for the stork waiting to make his mark, for the death that can creep into the room on innocent-looking sleep, for the deadly cough that you can’t hear from down the hall.
Keep your babies close.
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old black and white composition books, barely held together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin, half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems that he probably wrote in his senior year of high school. They are short and generally angry, each one typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a page.
If I could explain the importance of the notebook, maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working class intellectual. In the midst of fatal illness, he completed his dissertation and received a PhD. He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I still laugh when we remember his stories and jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often – he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability to see the darkness in himself and others never took into account the overwhelming goodness we each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and black math was caused by a childhood of pain and anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering was also a time to make peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every day, there for both him and my mother, keeping company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show that we all have the ability to be good. Even him. Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched and stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A small group of family gathered in his hospice room and listened to him wind down, heard the silent spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to life again as we sat and waited for death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an image of him walking along a river path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those six months of dying were great? What a wonderful opportunity for me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You were there for me. Thank you.
Then he was gone.
Two Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
Writing prompt: Its dark and secret heart
Mom-mom, 1934.
My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.
It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.
I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.
My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.
Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.
Now I know that such hopes are false.