everyday life

Around Here Lately: bittersweet and beautiful

We are entering summer’s dog days.  I did a post like this last month and really enjoyed the exercise of recalling the particular moments of my life.  I do share details like this regularly on Instagram, also. 

Matt and I went to a lovely dinner to mark the summer solstice, on June 21st.  It was a glorious, perfect evening and I tried not to let my enjoyment of it be clouded by my awareness that we are now turning back towards the dark.  I succeeded in part.

Whit spent a few hours at his desk in June, though more hours in a rowing shell and on Fortnite.

The weekend of June 23rd was downright cold in Marion.  We had a lovely, quiet weekend the four of us, which included this after-dinner walk to visit Little Brea.

The week of July Fourth found us all with my mother, including my sister and her family.  We celebrated Mum’s birthday, as we always do.  It was intensely bittersweet, sometimes more bitter than sweet, but it was beautiful at the same time.  I’m constantly amazed by how memory works: already the difficulty and heat and irritation are fading in my memory, and the joyful moments are becoming stronger.  I’m grateful that this is how time works.  We went for walks after dinner each night.  This is the four cousins on one such walk.  

We watched fireworks together at dusk on July Fourth.  Buggy.  Bittersweet (remember all the years we did this with Dad). Beautiful (the fireworks were lovely).

There were some glorious skies during our after-dinner walks.  This is on July 6th, as we stood listening to the music played by local volunteers.  When they played What a Wonderful World, there were some glassy eyes, but we were together.

Around Here Lately

The last few weeks have been incredibly sweet.  Bitter, also (specifically Dad’s 75th birthday and our first Father’s Day without our dads), but mostly just very sweet.  Grace and Whit have both been at home and though the early weeks of summer, after school but before camp, are always a particular logistical challenge, they are also surpassingly lovely.  I used to share posts regularly with photographs of small moments, and I want to revisit that habit.  I often share these observations on Instagram these days, and if you’re on there, please come find me!

I do the New York Times crossword on my phone every day (not really Friday or Saturday).  I was happy to see my POD in it recently (this the larger-then-mini Saturday “mini,” which I like best of all).

Grace and I tried aerial yoga one evening.  I think I’m too old to be upside down that much, but it was an adventure!

My sister-in-law invited us over to come pick some of her glorious, blooming peonies as she was about to leave the country for a week.  They are just my favorite.

When Grace snaps things like this, it makes me incredibly happy.  Nothing better.  They were fighting an hour later, but still, I love this, and love that they had dinner in the garden together.

We had family dinner at a fried chicken restaurant that both children wanted to try.  Not sure we loved the restaurant, but I loved the rainbow wall, the buttermilk biscuits, and the laughter.

One night Grace, Whit, and I went for a walk after dinner to the park.  We all like to swing, still.  This sunset greeted us. Another evening we had a picnic dinner in the park. The neighborhood park where both children toddled many years ago, where they played Micro Soccer at three, where so many memories of their childhoods crowd my vision.  I love it there, and love that they still want to go.

Grace and Whit gave me this card with a very thoughtful note (including how much they love having the whale pod under one roof, to which I say, me too) and a wooden spoon with a smiley face in it.  One of the best gifts I’ve received!

Whit and I went for a jaunt to Philadelphia (to see two of my dearest friends from college and their families) and to Baltimore for the bar mitzvah of one of his best friends from camp.  I’m not sure the two of us have been on an airplane alone before.  It was just absolutely great.  He makes me laugh so hard, this kid does.

He also remains sweet.  We had an awkwardly long interval between bar mitzvah and flight, and so we walked around the Baltimore inner harbor for a bit before heading to the airport early.  We had a relaxed dinner in the terminal and then, as we wandered around the airport bookstore, he said, without really realizing it, I think, “Mum, I just really like being with you.”  Oh, me too, Whit.  Me too.  One of my top ten parenting moments.

Father’s Day has always been, much like Mother’s Day, just a regular day in my world.  This year I was really cranky and about halfway through the day I realized it was sadness hiding as irritation.  Of course, that’s not fair since Matt, too, is in the exact same place.  The only downside of doing this together, that.  Still, all four of us went to see my father’s grave and talked to both of our mothers and took this photo and let’s face it, we are supremely fortunate.  We all know it.

Yesterday camps began and the regular rhythm of summer began.  I’m already nostalgic for the first two weeks of June.

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.