While some fire remains

I was in a strange bed last night in a house of unfamiliar sounds, rain pounding intermittently against the century-old façade. My 3:00 am wakeup was spent preoccupied with the thin threads of life, the contingencies of existence, the way we can cling to something that adds up as it slips away.

I once lived passionately, with drama, tears, and tender, aching pain. While there is something compelling about such intensity, it cannot be sustained. The dependency of infancy, the skill acquisition of childhood, and the tinder of adolescence feed adulthood’s warm flame. And here I am. The fire still burns. The light and heat are companionable. But flame eventually turns to ember, the wood to charcoal and ash.

The people who moved this cottage here almost 90 years ago are long dead. The mid-century day trippers who smoked on its porch live on in memory. The local gamblers of the polyester 70s, disco-slim with a wide roiling of bellbottoms, have slowed down for the final curves. My hair is turning grey; my grip relaxing. And the boy grows into himself while we watch, supportive, present, observing with wonder how a healthy plant grows towards the light.

What will he remember of us, of this time? Thirteen for me was tension and silence. It was never doing anything right. It was that feeling of sap rising, of enormous widening possibility. Thirteen smelled of nervous sweat and White Linen. It was crushes and code names, Ralph Lauren and Esprit, the go-go, name brand 80s, over and done with. The story repeats and yet is never the same way twice.

I’m still figuring out how to handle the narrowing of possibility, how much to feed the flames. I am philosophical about it, prepare myself in advance for the slowing. I wonder what will open up for the boy, am excited to see him unfold as I relax into what life will become.

Ant by ant

There are ants swarming the dry cat food. Periodically they breach the moats we’ve created to protect the bowls, a collective culture victorious over human ingenuity and ant bait. We have moats. We have traps. We have orange-scented, not so toxic ant spray. We have paper towels and cleaning solution to mop up the bodies. Nevertheless, the ants persist, slowed but not disheartened by our killing campaign.

 It is January and the ants come in. It is January and Facebook reminds me on an almost daily basis of early 2017, a time filled with illness and death. First it was Nora-dog, followed by my father, followed by my father-in-law. The memories pop up intermixed with sweeter memories from prior years (the boy fitting his impossibly small frame into a circle cut out in a wall at a local playground; the story about Nora’s fear of beeping appliances; the visit my father and stepmother made to see us when the boy was in fourth grade).

It is January and it is cold in a Northern Californian way here in Berkeley, not freezing, but with a chill that gets into your fingers and eats at your toes. The ants come in. Facebook reminds me of life on the precipice of death. My body, anticipating fifty, reminds me that I am getting older. I develop chilblains. I lose my patience easily. I wake to a bolt of anxiety at 3:00 a.m and stretch out my battered feet, one haggard digit at a time.

January. I am alive and surrounded by life, by dogs, cats, and those perpetually optimistic ants. My human family, a tight group, is here, augmented by the boy’s friends and their dads playing playing out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I don’t dwell in the past. I grieve the conversations I will never have. I wonder what lies ahead, but will take this moment in the sun, peaceful and warm, a dog curled at my side, a group at my table.

Resolution

I woke up from a too-rare nap on Sunday afternoon with a strong sense of my own mortality, that existential ache that sometimes comes from a nap in the late afternoon in fall or winter. Sleep has been elusive over the past month or so. My awakenings, at 1:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3:00 a.m., have generally been fraught. Anxious. During the day my heart beats out gratitude for my amazing good fortune to be doing what I love while supported by a stable family, comfortable financially, with a child who is doing well. At night I ride a river of anxiety.

Granted, there’s a lot going on. I’ll be moving to a new office at the end of this month, one that I am furnishing, and adding another day to my practice. I’m also picking up an (extremely) part-time job with my agency and have been doing a small proofreading and editing freelance job for them as well. I’m kinda-sorta running my own business and am also finally able to see that I should be a fully licensed therapist by my 50th birthday, which is ten short months away.

But that nap. It came after a family visit that was too much. I was too much—too cranky, too overloaded. I was keenly aware that this Christmas tradition of ours was contingent on all its players being present and that none of us will be here forever. Though it’s the second Christmas since my father died—and it’s been a long time since I saw him in person on the holiday—I felt the permanence of his absence so concretely. My father-in-law’s absence was palpable as well. This small family will morph. Its members will drop off, one by one. I wished a large second family for the boy when he grows up. I wished him a partner that could bring him acceptance, connection, and other people. I worried that we were not enough and that he, too, would too soon have to get used to the contingencies of life, the fact that traditions do not protect you from the necessary shifts, and that sometimes those shifts are the result of earthquakes.

I understand change. Nothing stays the same. I wouldn’t want it to. But I am scared that all of this will shift before I have a chance to see how it plays out. I have no choice but to hold this feeling loosely, to move forward anyway.

The word for 2019 is courage—the courage to live as if it couldn’t all fall away while remembering that it can all fall away; the courage to be present with anxiety while continuing to be grateful; the courage to connect when connection feels scary. I wish courage for me this year, and for you, no matter the way the earth may crackle under our feet. The earth will do what it does. May we be brave, with the presence of mind to choose how we respond.

Burn before reading

We walk around in masks, our mouths obscured, the cityscape soft and confused by smoke. Entire conversations happen without seeing a lip move. This is nothing, really, but the environmental aftershock of tragedy up north. We breathe in the remains, take death into our lungs. Trees, people, animals, houses, reduced to this clinging haze.

My brain ping-pongs between faded associations. Fire=my grandfather. November=loss. Anyone between the ages of 7 and 33 could be a child of mine and yet still parts of me lay unclaimed in childhood. I sacrifice myself to the smaller cause (a seeded pomegranate; in a moment, dinner— both interrupting the flow, just when the flow started; other times it’s laundry or an idle comment that requires my attention. Who, dear Reader, is paying attention to my needs? It has to be me, which is not in my nature.).

Do you require a narrative? Do I owe you that? I do not have it in me. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Even green wood can burn. Metal pools and hardens, bone becomes ash, if the fire is hot enough. But there is nothing to see here but a mask that catches my words before they reach the open air.

Minding the gap

Periodically, without warning or apparent provocation, the tune creeps into my head. All alone at the end of an evening and the bright lights have faded to blue. . . My conscious associations with the Eagles song “Take It To The Limit” are few and the lyrics hold little direct meaning. Still, when the song begins its slow sly creep into my consciousness, I am six years old and my father is singing in the car. He periodically glances over at me, earnestly performing for us both. This isn’t memory. This is time travel, a nostalgic, almost comforting mirage dating back to the gap.

The gap spans the five years between when I was two and seven years old, bookended one one side by my mother’s recollections of a crumbling relationship and on the other by my stepmother’s emergence, when contact with my father became more regular. Mom left college to go to work after I was born, while Dad remained an undergraduate, albeit a depressed one who struggled to keep things together at home. The one animus-free image my mother recently shared of those early days is that of my clean-cut 19-year-old father holding me at my grandparents’ kitchen table. He gazes into my eyes. I gaze back. The image is profound, simple, and concrete. When I think about it, it is almost as if I was there.

My mother did not mention this moment until after my father’s death. Had she told me earlier, I could not have truly taken it in. Finding the good, locating the connection, between my father and me so early in my life was too painful. Unable to do its sweetness justice, I would have gotten angry at the thought, the nerve, of those gazes, the cheap looks of someone who could not follow through on his good intentions.

I am almost fifty years old and yet I still sift through my childhood looking for clues. For example, this gap I’ve been contemplating lately, the years that I can no longer ask my father about — why am I thinking about that time with this fresh curiosity? His absence make it possible to consider it without the familiar anger. It also makes the exercise strangely futile. Whatever story I tell myself is as close to the truth as I will get.

There are spotty memories, disconnected from any timeline, a random scattering of dots on a blank page. Being awakened in the middle of the night to take my asthma medication. A scary story in a dark car. A golf course apartment and my fear of a stray ball to a window or the head. Maybe this Eagles song singalong. The details feel like they matter. There just aren’t enough of them. Maybe what really matters is that this newfound curiosity will never be satisfied. The truth isn’t a series of facts, I assuage myself. It’s in the stories we tell. But this story has multiple narrators. And one of them won’t be talking. 

(To hear the live version of the song, try this link.)