everyday life

Unrecognizable

I was thinking recently of the ways that my life – our lives – look different than they did a year ago.  When I look at this list, the fact that I feel vaguely dizzy makes more sense to me.

Last year, two children played hockey and I was at the rink in Cambridge approximately eight hours a week.
This year, both children play squash.

Last year, two children lived at home.
This year, one child goes to boarding school.

Last year, we had four parents between us and our children had four grandparents.
This year, we have each lost our fathers, and our children have two grandmothers.

Last year, the children were at the same school they’d been at since they were both 4 years old.
This year, they’re both at new schools (see above for Grace boarding)

Last year, Matt and I were both in jobs we’d been in for a while.
This year, we are both in new jobs, his since January 2017 and mine at a company I helped found in April 2017.

Last year, and every year before that, time flew by.
This year, everything is moving at a glacial pace (and yet feels like a blur at the same time).

I’ve written before about the James Taylor line about change: “Once again a time of change … oh the change makes music.”  Last spring, I couldn’t stop hearing those words, and the change I focused on was Grace’s imminent departure for school.  That was a big transition at the time, though of course I was unaware of the enormous earthquakes that lay ahead.  On Thanksgiving I posted a photo and talked about how much was different, without knowing how much more different life would get only three days later. And then my father died, and we careened into the holidays.  Life went dark and blurry, Mum got her hip replaced, it was Christmas, and then New Year’s, and now we are into February.

It is clear that last fall represented an enormous, irrevocable rupture in the fabric of our lives.  We will never recover from the losses of our fathers, and the fact that they happened so closely together still feels surreal.  But it’s also interesting for me to remember that even before September it had already been a year of huge transition.

Being gentle with myself is not a strength, but when I list these changes I am reminded that I have to learn how to do that.  This is a moment of massive upheaval, and while many of the changes that have happened are good, they can be difficult nonetheless.

So, here I am, still trying to hear the music that the change makes.

Earthquake

sunset over the reception after my father’s funeral, 12/3/17, photo by Grace

How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?

I’ve written about these lines, from Stanley Kunitz’s beautiful poem The Layers, many times.  That fact makes me shake my head now … I never knew what loss meant, until these weeks, so it feels naive that I was writing about it at all.  Maybe I was getting ready, in some strange way. I do think all our experiences add up to where we are, and in retrospect things make sense, so perhaps the circling around impermanence, and loss, that I’ve been doing here and in other writing, has been some kind of preparation or prescience.

In October, I shared a photograph on Instagram with a caption about how September had felt like an earthquake for our family.  I almost worry about sharing this piece today, for fears of what tremors lie ahead. Am I jinxing us? Every time I think the earth has stopped shaking, there’s another rupture ahead.  This one, my father’s death last month, is for sure the largest for me.  By a mile.

Dad was the center of my world, his is the voice I hear in my head, he was my first and most essential advisor, counselor, and sometime critic.  My mother, who I’ve described as “like the sun, surrounded by orbiting planets,” is an integral part of my daily life, much more than Dad ever was.  But his influence in some ways loomed even larger, and until the day I die it will be his approval and opinion I seek above all others.  His loss is immense, and to come on the heels of of my father-in-law’s death feels almost inconceivable.

I designed our holiday cards before Matt’s dad died.  They feature a photo that’s not great of us four, notable because we are in motion.  The whole card was about things being blurry due to change: 2 new jobs, 2 new schools, half of our nest now empty.  At Labor Day, this had already been a huge year of transition and change.  And then came September and November, and back to back deaths, and suddenly we are deep in grief on top of breathless from all that’s new. It occurred to me only as I wrote this post that it’s these two men’s names that I have, one my middle, maiden, and professional, and one my married and legal.  I’m proud to have both of their names, and grateful for the enormous ways that both shaped me.

I’m struggling to catch my breath and to find my footing.  I keep thinking of Kunitz’s lines, and about how this autumn has truly been a feast of losses. There are two other lines of writing I’m thinking of a lot these days.  One is Mary Oliver: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”  Dad gave me a box of darkness, in his death, yes, but also, I’m beginning to understand, in his life.  The seam of sorrow that ran through his heart I recognize in myself.  He and I talked about light and darkness often, but it’s one conversation I remember particularly vividly.  He quoted a passage from Paradise Lost from memory.  He was comfortable with life’s poles, and knew the way that one enriched the other.  I have written about this a lot, and I suspect it’s his single most enduring gift to me.

The other passage I keep hearing in my head is Khalil Gibran: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,the more joy you can contain.”  I have long believed this to be true, and I already knew I was capable of deep sorrow and deep joy both.  These last few months, however, have shown me new depths of loss and sadness, and I suspect it will take a while for me to experience the commensurate joy.

I really do feel like I’m standing in the rubble of an earthquake, and what’s new since the last time I mentioned an earthquake in October is my fear there are more startling, unanticipated shocks coming. Maybe there are.  I can’t focus on that now. What I do know is that I’m changed forever after this fall, and I’ll never stop missing my father-in-law or my father.  I am still deep in mourning, but even from this dark, dark place I feel undeniable gratitude that both of them were in my life.  “Though much is taken, much abides.”  Indeed.

Summer 2017

One of our last family tennis matches, late August, 2017.  I promise Whit was also having fun.

This summer was jammed to bursting with beauty.  Possibly it shone particularly because we knew a big departure and ending threatened at summer’s end (Grace’s departure to boarding school), or maybe it just was golden, but for whatever reason there was a particular patina to these three months.  A few highlights:

We kicked off summer with a trip to New Hampshire where we went ziplining.  As is often the case, I felt flattened by the metaphors presented by ordinary life. The kids were brave (and so was I) and we were together.  It was breathtakingly beautiful, flying above the trees.

We spent a lot of time as a family of four (and as a whale pod of three, since Dad did a lot of golfing) at my parents’ house on the Massachusetts shore.  We swam and we biked and we played tennis and we watched LOST and we ate caramel M&Ms and we grilled on the back porch. We played cards, did puzzles, and watched the Red Sox under the slow spin of my parents’ ceiling fan. Our days together were largely unstructured and we put being together as a family above all else.

Whit loved sailing, and I hope he’s found a sport that he can enjoy during the school year.  Grace had a very successful tennis season, playing on our tennis club’s team which qualified for Nationals and personally winning the club U14 singles and with her partner the U18 doubles.

We had two wonderful visits with my sister and her family, over the 4th of July (and my mother’s birthday) and later at our cousin Allison’s wedding.  That wedding was a true highlight of the summer, as we watched a family member we dearly love (she’s precisely in between Grace’s and my ages, and we all think she’s the best) wed her long-time boyfriend who we also adore.  Welcome to the family, TDT!

I kept up my streak of reading books best described as Those You Can Buy in an Airport.  I found myself unable to concentrate on anything more challenging, and sought out stories that were plot, plot, and plot.

I turned 43.  I’m in the thick heart of life’s grand pageant now, there’s no question about it.  I continue to be struck by the non-coincidence that both my birthday and our anniversary land during the weeks of the year that I find the most liminal, the most striated with both endings and beginnings.  It is without question a melancholy time for me, and yet it holds some big celebrations.  This seems apt, and it’s also intensely bittersweet.

August was quiet.  Grace was at home, preparing for boarding school, and I worked a lot of days with her puttering near me.  She spent a few days with Matt’s family in Vermont, which was full of joy and waterskiing.  For anyone curious, Matt did not waterski. We passed the one year anniversary of his injury, and then of his surgery.

Grace and I picked Whit up at camp because Matt was in California, and had a happy visit to the place she spent six summers.  We returned to our pre-camp routine of family dinners, card games, and ice cream.  We saw Matt’s parents when they were here.  We watched some more LOST.  We read together in bed.  It was the best kind of ordinary, and I could see the shimmer in that ordinariness.

And then, just like that, summer came to an end.  September arrived with its host of changes, and our family spun off into its next and new season.  We are all still a little stunned and shaky from these changes – well, I can only really speak for myself here – but also deeply grateful for three months together.  I won’t ever forget the swims to the line, the family tennis matches, the candlelit dinners on our back porch, the quiet walks, the loud laughter.

It was a magical summer.  And now, it is in the rear view mirror.  Onward.

August break

As I have for many years, I plan to take August off from blogging.  There’s a lot happening in this final month of summer: campers coming home (Whit), children preparing to leave home (Grace) and for new schools (both).  We have shopping and packing and laundry to do, as well as our final family dinners in this particular season.  It brings tears to my eyes to write that, so you can bet I’ll spend chunks of this next month in tears and morose.  But I’m going to do my damndest to live it well, to let go of my fear about what’s coming, and to pay attention, and I’ll be back in September.

I hope to see you then.

Turning

It may shock some of you to hear this, but I can be heavy lifting.

I know.

Someone as melancholy as me, as attuned to both loss and sorrow?  Hard to believe.  But it’s true.

And it is getting more pronounced.  Well, to be accurate, my sensitivity is getting more pronounced all around, which means I’m more aware of both the dark stuff and the outrageous beauty. I try to focus on the latter.

But there are times when I’m swamped by all that feels difficult.  That’s not true right now: as I wrote just last week, this has been a summer full (so far) of uncommon beauty.  Of course, I also acknowledged that that patina is likely burnished by the endings and departure that lurk under everything right now.  But still, there’s a lot of beauty right now.

In the last week, though, I started noticing that the days were getting shorter again.  The nights are falling a bit earlier, and I am already aware of summer’s end even amidst all the riotous hydrangeas and hot days and beach swims. It’s as though the next season, and its accompanying darkness, is already encroaching in around the edges of the light and beauty of right now.

It’s that old preemptive regret thing, the way I can’t focus on what’s in front of me because I’m too distracted by what I can sense on the horizon. Everything is turning, so fast I can barely catch my breath: summer turning towards fall, Grace turning towards her leaving, Whit turning towards teen-hood and being a young man.  We are all inching forward on the ferris wheel and I am breathless at the view but also at what I know lies ahead.

I’m not the only person in my family who evinces this sensitivity.  On Sunday night, Whit was sad at bedtime.  It took me a while to drag out of him what was wrong (planting the seeds of another post, about the ways in which we should run into the burning building, or about how it is when those we love are at their worst that they need us the most) but he finally admitted, tearfully, what was on his mind.  It was a long list, but one of them was that “the summer’s already halfway gone!  It feels like we just got out of school!”  He was very upset. “I mean, summer is basically almost over.”  He swallowed, wiping tears from his face.

“I know what you mean, Whit.” I told him, rubbing his back.  I had no idea what else to say, since the truth is the awareness of how fast it all flies brings me to my knees on a regular basis.

With effort, I turn my face back to what’s in front of me, and take a deep breath.  My time on earth turns forward no matter what I do.  The bitter aspect of my orientation towards bittersweetness is unavoidable (so, by the way, is the sweet part).  What I can choose is where I place my attention.  So, once again, I try to do that right here.  Right now.