True peace comes with the discovery that we can respect the seasons of life with a spacious and undefended heart. In it we learn to trust, to rest in the truth of the way things are, to willingly accept the measure of joy and sorrow we are given.
– Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace
my birthday, my blog’s birthday: the same, yet different!
Today is my five year anniversary in this space. Five years! My first post, in September 2006, mentioned two friends who have continued to be hugely important fixtures in both my life and on my blog. Last year I marked my blog anniversary by asking for questions from you – I said I’d respond to anything you want to know. It was, I confess, a way to combat my own lack of inspiration, but in the end I found the exercise fascinating.
So, I am asking again: to celebrate five years of writing here, please ask any question you want, or let me know something you’d like to know more about. Thank you, thank you, for this and for the myriad, meaningful, and completely unforseen ways your reading my words has enriched my life. I cannot explain how much I’ve been surprised and moved by what this place, and the rest of the blogosphere, has come to mean to me.
On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure. We drove about an hour north to the beach. The day was magical. It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds. I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light. The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds. You just have to look.
We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted. Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so. We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides. We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean. Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again. He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.
Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded. They jumped in the waves, holding hands. I watched, fighting tears.
Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide. Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it. They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand. No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end. But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next. May we trust the tides.
We got home from Legoland at 11 at night, so the kids’ clocks were all screwy. I woke Whit up the next day at 10am, and he’d fallen asleep in the car that afternoon, something he hasn’t done in years. I put him to bed early, a little surprised but very glad when he curled up with his new animals from Legoland without complaint.
A few minutes later I heard him crying. His sobs escalated and finally he burst through his door, face crumpled, streaked with tears. I was sitting at my desk, right near his room, and he flew down the hall into my arms.
“I don’t want to leave!” his face was wet against my shoulder.
Me neither. I nodded in silence.
“No, Mummy, I really don’t.” I pulled him up onto my lap, where he fits only awkwardly these days, feet dangling down and knocking against my shins.
“I know, Whit. It’s hard to come home from something like Legoland. It’s hard when something we have looked forward to for so long is over.”
He snuffled against my shoulder and then leaned back, looking me right in the eye. “No, Mummy,” his voice was clear. “I wish we hadn’t gone because then I wouldn’t miss it.” My heart stopped. Oh, how I know that feeling. Much like my conviction that we have to accept the risk of everyday life and still, admire the blue sky, I know this to be true: you can’t skip experiences you know you’ll miss in fear of that missing. No, no, no.
“Oh, Whit, no. Don’t say that! You can’t live like that.” He frowned at me. “I promise you we will go back,” I said, my voice fervent.
He bounced off my lap, suddenly, wiped his face and said, “Will we take direct flights?”
What? I was confused. We connected in Dallas last year and this year flew on Jet Blue, with no stops, and he loved the TVs and was riveted the whole way in both directions. I shook my head, laughing inside at the random skipping of his mind. What a fascinating terrain the inside of his head must be. I thought of one of his stock answers when I react to his random, funny interjections: I ask “Whit, where are you from?” exasperated and laughing at the same time. He always answers, deadpan, “Texas.” He is so funny, that guy.
Whit’s flare of humor quickly subsided, though, and he started crying again. I picked him up and carried him to his bed where we sat for a long while, his tears slowly easing as I rubbed his back and kept whispering promises that we would go back. Finally he went to sleep, his arm thrown over the green bear, Lego, that he won last year.
I can’t stop thinking about his words, though. I am as certain as I am of almost anything that we can’t avoid doing things we love just to assure that we don’t have the heartbreak of missing them after the fact. Right? I do, however, know the seduction of this notion, and am intimately familiar with the moments when the intensity of the missing is so strong it feels unbearable. Pam Houston’s gorgeous words rise in my mind, shimmering with their truth. Whit reminds me that this is a lesson I am learning over and over and over again; somehow I never seem to fully learn it. It never stops hurting, either, that missing. But that’s okay. That is living fully. I longer aspire to not miss things. Instead, I hope to accept the missing as the other side of joy, the loss as an integral part of life.
I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.
-Pam Houston
Grace watched some cartoons yesterday morning while I unpacked groceries in the kitchen. She must have seen something on TV about the 10 year anniversary because came bouncing downstairs and asked, casually, “Mummy, what’s 9/11?” I stopped in my tracks and looked out the window at the gorgeous, unbelievably saturated blue of a sky that was exactly like that day 10 years ago. My mind wheeled. We had recently talked about the 9/11 attacks and about Osama bin Laden, and I grasped for what specifically I had said.
I turned to look at her. “Remember, Grace, when we talked about the day the planes flew into the buildings?” She nodded. “Well, that happened on September 11th. 9/11. 10 years ago today.” She looked at me, somber, thinking.
“Why, Mummy?”
“Well, Grace, the people who did it really hated America and they wanted to hurt and to scare us.”
“Why do people hate America?”
I struggled with this answer more than any other. I told her about how we had freedoms in this country – about what we say, what religion we practice, who we love – that other countries don’t necessarily share or agree with. I don’t know how fully she grasped this, but she tried. The conversation veered to the specifics of the day. She wanted to know how the pilots were overpowered and what the people on the plane did, and then what it felt like to be in the buildings. “Did they know they were going to die?” she asked me, and my eyes filled with tears. I have no idea. I can’t answer that, I told her honestly.
Later in the day Grace had more questions. She wanted me to assure her that she would always be safe on an airplane. I said I couldn’t do that, but that the odds of a problem were incredibly low, lower than those of a car crash. Then she wanted me to promise that I would always keep her safe in the car. I said I swore I would always try, but that those are promises that I can’t make. She looked at me, her desperate wish that I could promise I’d always keep her safe vivid, unmistakable in her eyes, and impossible.
I hugged her and told her, whispering into her hair, that the world was full of risk, but that we still had to walk out every day and see all the grandeur that was there, too. We stood on the front porch and I pointed to the outrageous blue of the sky. “See, Grace? Like that. There is so much beauty in this world. I promise.” I wondered if I’d said too much, though I will never forget a lesson my father taught me about risk being an inherent part of life when I was just a bit older than she is.
All day long I felt sad and melancholy, remembering 10 years ago. I remembered on my morning run that day thinking of how I had to call Hadley and John to wish them happy first anniversary. I did call, but to say something else, and I never got through, because circuits to New York were impossible. I remembered standing in a conference room on the 31st floor, watching the words “Boston high rises being evacuated” scroll across the bottom of a screen. I remembered the friend from work, Beth, with whom I spent most of the day (including a long way home from Boston because we were afraid of getting on the T). I remembered the night before and eating dinner on our porch with Quincy, eating the just-unfrozen top of our wedding cake (which we’d had the night before for our first anniversary) for dessert.
Most of all I remembered that Matt had been undecided whether he was going to fly out to LA the night before or that very morning on flight 11. I remembered the voicemail I saved for years, where he said “Hey, my meeting got out early, so I’m going to run to Logan to try to get out tonight.” That bleak ghost had brushed against me and I felt its chill in my spirit. I also felt, then and again, yesterday, the deep knowledge, guilt and gratitude mixed together, that there are others on whom that fog had descended permanently.
The veil between the mundane and mysterious details of our life and the horror we can’t even bear to imagine is as thin and delicate as a cobweb. The risk is unavoidable. And the sky is so, so blue.