family

Susie’s courage

Courage. I’ve been thinking about this word, this concept, this idea, all weekend. Trying to figure out what to share for this inaugural Five for Ten post. Certainly I don’t feel I have much, so that was easy to dismiss. I kept coming back, over and over again, to Susie. Susie was like a mother to me, and I mean that literally. My sister and I grew up in the loose net of extended family known as the “Four Families,” something that to this day I am immensely grateful for. Susie was an integral part of this community, one of the four mothers who formed the corners of the tent under which we all sheltered.

Susie died at 49 of pancreatic cancer, and the way she faced her death is the most human and intimate experience of courage I’ve ever seen. I am still unfolding the immense wisdom she passed on to me – and everyone around her – in those last months. As her body withered, her face grew as luminous as it did bony. I see now that her physical body was just reflecting her passage towards the spiritual world.

I will never forget the months leading up to Susie’s death in the fall of 1997. For one thing, my grandmother died of the same kind of cancer in June. Pancreatic cancer suffused those months. My mother, even more surrounded by illness and death than I was, was intimately involved in Susie’s caretaking. There were a group of women who circled around her, supporting both her and her sons, in a way that I think of often now.

“Women do not leave situations like this; we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.” – Elizabeth Berg

This quotation, which I invoked recently to friends involved in similar caretaking, really captures what those months were like. I was nowhere near as intensely involved as my mother was, but I was still a part of the experience. Ethan, Susie, Mum and I had countless dinners on Susie’s sun porch. We sewed square for quilts. We attended caretakers meetings.

Experiencing Susie’s death was an exquisite, once-in a lifetime privilege. I learned more about death and, perhaps paradoxically (but maybe not), about life from her in those months than I can express. Susie faced death with extraordinary grace. Somehow she was able to say to those of us near to her: Yes, I am dying. But see, I am not afraid. And so we were not afraid. And though the crushing sadness remained, without fear, it was more manageable.

Susie was able to rise above her own emotions to provide solace and strength to those around her. She spoke honestly about her fears, her experience, her pain. But she also honored the great good fortune of her life and was able, somehow, to put her own need away so that she could reassure those close to her, take care of her boys, until the end. I can neither imagine nor fathom the strength it took for her to do that, to put her own need for reassurance behind her desire to comfort those around her. We were supposed to be taking care of her, but in fact it was the other way around. Hers was an amazing act of generosity; to this day I am humbled when I remember it.

Hilary shared with me a prayer that was said at one caretaker meeting that I did not attend. The closing line was: I believe all of our paths are perfect. I think of this often. If a woman who died before 50, leaving two young sons with everything in front of them, can find a way to feel at peace with that, I owe it to her memory to recognize the perfection – or at least the beauty in the imperfection – of my own path. To look at our lives, baldly and without pretense, to see the beauty even in the barrenness: this is courage.

Motherhood is both enormous and tiny

Despite my general disinterest in mother’s day, even my dug-in heels are slipping against the tide of forwarded emails, blog posts, and essays I’m reading this weekend. Let me be clear: I have no problem with beautiful, heartfelt words about motherhood – in fact I adore them. I just find the packing of them into a single weekend a little weird. I think we ought to celebrate this every day, and in my view random celebrations mean more (big, huge massive exception: my birthday). I also share all of Anne Lamott’s aversions to Mother’s Day, so lucidly and wisely expressed in her essay here. I have always disliked this day but it wasn’t until I read her words that I really understood why.

Still, as Anne says, being a mother is among the richest experiences of my life, and I’m thinking about it this morning. Motherhood is is both enormous and tiny. It is made up of emotions so unwieldy that I can’t put them into words, and of moments so small I would miss them if I blinked (and I’ve surely missed millions). Sometimes the feelings are so giant I feel swollen with them, taut, tight, very much like I was in the last trimester of pregnancy. Sometimes the minutiae is so small that it seems impossible to hang any meaning onto it, and every time I am surprised when somehow, the hook actually holds. I’m not sure whether it is one facet of the human experience or a prism through which that experience may be seen.

In my struggle to experience the moments of emotion so overwhelming I feel as though I’m jumping off a tall pier into the ocean, or ducking through the heavy downpour of a waterfall, I turn to the words of others. It is in Anna Quindlen’s essays, Kelly Corrigan’s videos, and a million quotations that I have pulled out of books that I find myself nearest to understanding. I reach, grasping, for the ways that those far more eloquent than I have described and captured this experience.

For the tiny, the minute, I don’t have to look any further than right here. The moments flutter like magnolia petals around my feet, stunning, short-lived, and quickly turning to brown mush. When I write about them I’m trying to memorialize them in their pink beauty, their spring perfume wafting off of them in waves. In this way, motherhood is running upstairs to change my shirt before a meeting because Whit pressed his peanut-buttery face against my belly when he hugged me goodbye. It is instinctively holding out my hand to receive a chewed-up maraschino cherry as soon as I see Grace grimacing with not liking the taste of it. It is cooking the same zucchini chocolate chip muffins every single week because it’s the only vegetable Whit will eat, ever. It is driving around to four stores at rush hour because Grace was sad one day in preschool that everyone else had cartons of milk in their lunch and she did not (not easy to find small cartons of soy milk for my dairy-allergic daughter).

Big and small. Tiny and huge. Overwhelming and underwhelming. Tears and laughter. All of these tensions, some of them cliches, exist in every single day for me. Happy mother’s day to you all, regardless of who or how you mother. It is universal, this feeling, and spans far beyond the most traditional definitions of “motherhood.” Of that I am certain.

Thank you

I’m not a big celebrator of Mother’s Day; like most other holidays (with the notable exceptions of Christmas and my birthday) I tend to be relatively disinterested and even skeptical.

That said, I love this video that Kelly sent. Love it. I think it applies every day, not just this Sunday.

Thank you … for wanting me so much….
Thank you for letting me sink all the way into you….
I’m glad you made me bus my dishes, write thank you notes, and call my grandparents…
Thank you for changing as I changed, for letting me win sometimes, for letting me go…
Thank you for carrying me. Up hills, over puddles, across ice, first in your arms, then on your hip…
then in your wallet and back of your mind all of these years.
And for considering yourself so wildly blessed to be my mother.

My father is a physicist

My father is a physicist. He has a master’s degree in Physics, a PhD in Engineering, and an abiding trust in the ability of science, logic, and measurement to explain the world. At the same time, he has a deep fascination with European history and culture, often manifested in a love of the continent’s cathedrals, those embodiments of religious fervor, of all that is not scientific, logical, or measurable. His unshakeable faith in the life of the rational mind is matched by his profound wonder at the power of the ineffable, the territory of religious belief and cultural experience, that which is beyond the intellect.

I grew up in the space between these worlds. This gave me an instinctive understanding that two things that appear paradoxical, like these beliefs, can be both totally opposed and utterly intertwined. From my father I learned that at the outmost limits of science, where the world and its phenomena can be understood and categorized with equations and with right and wrong answers, there flits the existence of something more intangible, less distinct, discernible. The finite and the infinite are not as distinct as we might think, and the way they bleed together enriches them both.

My Dad, who has a three-ring binder full of mathematical derivations he has done for fun (in fountain pen), has also stood next to me in cathedrals in Italy, looking up at stained glass rose windows with frank reverence on his face. For all of his stubborn rationality and fierce belief that everything can be explained, he has also always suspected, I think, that some things could not. In fact I think for my father, despite how trained and steeped he is in the language of equations, proofs and derivations, the parts of the human experience – often expressed and experienced (for him) through great cultural gestures – that cannot be captured in by the empirical are the most meaningful.

He introduced me – never explicitly, but through the example of his passions – to the fact that something can be true and its opposite can also be true. Dad was the one who taught me about life’s ability to hold two poles in one hand; in fact, he taught me about the way life insisted on that. His deep but deeply buried spirituality underlies all of his adamant belief in the concrete and scientific, and from him I learned that these two ways of being in the world could – even, should – coexist. This is what I was expressing when I called him an engineer with the heart of a poet.

This contradiction exists in how he thinks about sailing, too, I think. He adores sailing, and always has. For him it is in many ways an exercise of careful navigation, of measurement, of the angles between the water, the sail, the wind. There is so much about sailing that is precise and careful. And yet at the same time it is about something far less tangible, a fleeting and effervescent way of being in nature, an ability to sense and feel the boat and to make infinitessimal adjustments that make everything smoother and faster. There is precision, and physics, and then there is something greater, finer, deeper guiding my Dad’s hand on the tiller.

I am still sifting through the ways that this lesson has informed my choices and echoed through me. I sense that it has contributed enormously to the contours of my life, and believe that this is my father’s greatest gift to me: the belief that there is meaning beyond that which we can prove, and that a life of celebrating that can be a rich one indeed. Thank you, Dad. I love you.

Storm-tossed and run aground

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” (Louisa May Alcott)

This quote, long known to me, has been in my mind lately. It occurred to me yesterday that overall, though, I feel a strange combination of storm-tossed and run aground. Both whipped around in a frenzy of wind and water, but also stuck, unable to move. This contradiction underlies a tension, I think, that I’ve written about before: the feeling of holding opposite poles in my hands simultaneously. The middle place, I guess. Stuck and lost. At the same time or alternating with an awkward rhythm.

Neither of these feelings is comfortable, and they both entail my Greatest Fear: being out of control. In the storm, I often feel unsafe, buffeted on all sides by influences whose intentions I am not sure of, by events and powers that I do not understand. But when run aground, I feel stuck, trapped, unable to move towards that life I am increasingly sure I want.

“A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.” (unknown)

All of the fear around being lost in the storm or stuck on the shoals could easily drive me to seek refuge in a safe, protected place. And oh how I know the feeling of wanting someone to keep the world at bay for me. But then I remind myself: this is not where life is lived. It is the moments when I’ve let go, gone on the (metaphorical) roller coaster, opened my heart up to the inevitable bruising … this is where I have felt most alive. And in truth? Most of the harbors I have known have become their own traps after a while.

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” (John Masefield)

Hiding, retreating: this is not the solution. The sea – the storm, the wind, the rain, the water, sharp shells in the shallows that can cut you – this is where life is. In the mess, the unpredictable patterns, the haunting call of seagulls and the rhythmic snapping of halyards against masts. In the squeals of children splashing at the water’s edge, in Grace’s incandescent grin when she swam to the distant raft by herself, in the flash of white sails in the sunlight as they pass by.

These thoughts of the sea remind me of my parents, always, powerfully. I close with one of my Dad’s favorite poems, which I also deeply love. It reminds me of what I have always known: that the sea, as disorderly and uncontrollable as it is, is also home. We cannot control the tempestuous ocean of this life. Better to cast out to sea.

Crossing the Bar (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.