Month: December 2012

2012: April

I had a wonderful dinner with an old friend from business school in New York one night.

I mourned the passing of Adrienne Rich.

The world burst into bloom, and we admired it on notice things walks, bike rides, and a trip to our favorite place, Mount Auburn Cemetery.

My favorite blog post this month: Perfect

I read Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston, Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh, Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott, Quiet by Susan Cain.

We went to a beach an hour north of Boston that is rapidly becoming a sacred place for our family.  On a cold, clear late-April day we wandered on the low tide sand.  It was magic.

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

2012: March

We had a wonderful week visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Florida.

I read Faith by Jennifer Haigh, Double Time by Jane Roper, Bread of Angels by Stephanie Saldana, and I re-read several of Laurie Colwin’s books including Family Happiness and A Big Storm Knocked It Over.

My favorite blog post this month: Trust, faith, belief, and religion.

Grace performed in the third grade skits.

We saw a cardinal in our backyard for the first time.

When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to be fully present, only recognizing the quality of particular moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that’s the one thing that being “grown up” is: to realize in the present the magnitude or grace of what we’re being offered. – Mark Doty, “Heaven’s Coast”

I hope so too

It’s been an odd couple of days.  I am still floating on that disorienting current of grief and gratitude and guilt that I mentioned yesterday.  I’m experiencing Grace and Whit in high definition, and my awareness of their every detail of is at an all-time high; I’m dazzled, and overcome, by the physicality of their bodies, their presence in a room, their noise, their sheer being-ness.  I look at them and think, again, they are tenaciously sturdy and incomprehensibly fragile at the same time.

Since our conversation on Sunday about what happened, there have been very few references to it in our house.  Grace asked me at bedtime yesterday if the sick and angry man was really dead, and I said yes.  She asked me how many children had died and I told her.  She asked me how old they were and I told her.  She was quiet then, for a long minute, and then opened her book, curled closer to me on the couch so that she was flush against my side, and started reading.

Tonight, as I tucked her in, she said her usual prayers (“thank you for this amazing world” being the line that always slays me).  I kissed her on the forehead and began to stand up.  “Wait,” she whispered.  “I want to say another prayer for those kids.”  I sat back down on the edge of her bed and nodded in the nightlight-lit dimness of her room.

“I hope those kids know they are loved, and know how much their families miss them,” she looked at me, her mahogany eyes huge, shining.  “I hope they are settling into their new lives in heaven.  I really hope they are with Pops and Helen.  Maybe they are going swimming with Helen and talking about airplanes with Pops.”  I swallowed hard, struck by her conflation of her late-summer loss with the deaths of these children.  The deaths are of course as different as you can imagine, but I think that conceptually, they each feel both near and far to Grace.  Her great-grandfather, beloved, but old, in a stage of life so foreign as to be a different country.  These children, strangers, but her close contemporaries, the girls and boys she sits next to at assemblies and walks by in halls.   I love that she imagines them drawing comfort from each other.

I leaned down to kiss her again, and felt her arms clasp my neck and pull me tight.  “I hope so too, Grace.” I whispered against her ear, feeling my tears trickle into her hair.  I hope so too.

2012: February

It seemed like everywhere I turned, I kept seeing the moon rising in the late-afternoon sky.

With my cousin Allison, we drove to CT for a now-ritual visit with Pops and Helen (above).  We had no way of knowing that by October they would both be gone.

My favorite blog post this month: Lonely.

I was proud to see one of my essays, My Subject Chose Me, published on Literary Mama.

Grace and her best friend had a small Valentine’s Day party at our house.  Sugar and pink ruled.

Whit performed in the annual 1st grade “music and dance” assembly, and the air was so suffused with loss and wonder I could barely breathe.

Twice we went to the new playground by the river, both times early on Sunday mornings.

“Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.” – Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

So much here I do not understand

I don’t have any words to convey how I feel about the tragedy in Newtown.  I have only these three personal stories to share, and for some reason I feel compelled to do so.

Yesterday, after a beautiful, candlelight- and allelulia-filled Lessons & Carols service at our church, we came home in the spitting rain for a late dinner.  It had been a day jammed with errands and details, with the minutiae that compose our lives: haircuts, buying skates, frosting gingerbread cookies, shopping online for a last-minute presence for a best friend, an early hockey game. At each step I felt heavy with awareness of what a privilege every single one of those small things was.  Whit was difficult at dinner, picky about his food, and I just blew up.  I lost it.  Matt encouraged me to go upstairs, and after stomping out to make a point (that point being I am such a martyr) by taking the trash out in the driving rain, I did that.  I closed my bedroom door and folded laundry, and as I smoothed a pair of Whit’s long johns I sat down on the bed, overcome with sobs.  I was flooded with powerful guilt: how can I possibly be so ungrateful, when there are families out there tonight who would give anything for the privilege of a bickering child at the dinner table?  How?

This morning, I walked both Grace and Whit to the gate of school as I always do.  I had to go home before the 4th grade’s morning assembly, so I kissed them goodbye and jogged back to the car.  Once I’d crossed the street I turned and watched their backpacks and hooded heads (again, raining) walk away from me.  I was swamped with feelings: sorrow, fear, guilt, grief, gratitude.  I sat in the car and let them wash over me and then, tears still falling, I drove home.

Half an hour later I sat in one of the assembly rooms at school as Grace’s 4th grade class filed in.  The parents sat in a row against the back wall of the room, and the floor in between was filled with the younger grades all sitting criss-cross applesauce.  This was a previously-scheduled “environment assembly,” and the theme was taking care of our earth.  I’m willing to bet I wasn’t the only parent who was thinking of other things, however, as our children stood and sang in their clear, true voices, about how is “time to turn the tide.”  Tears swam in my eyes.  I looked around the room at the teachers who have cared for and shepherded my children over the years with a new and passionate admiration.  A few minutes later the 4th grade sang Big Yellow Taxi, and the words I know by heart rang out, filled with an unexpected, chilling resonance: Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

So much is gone.  Of course, of course, a million, unquantifiable times more for the families that lost loved ones in Newtown.  But for all of us, too.  In my opinion, his incursion on one of the world’s truly sacred spaces – an elementary school – has altered the world we live in forever.

This is the darkest week of the darkest season.  Friday is the darkest day of the year.  And yet how much more pressing this new darkness feels, this darkness wrought of an incomprehensible act, this darkness from the heart of someone who was a fellow human being.  We are moving towards the solstice, and there is still so much here I do not understand.