family

Angels

I’ve written about how my father was both a physicist and a poet.  I’ve written about the tremendous richness involved in growing up in the space between his two worlds, between the logical and rational and the inexpressible and infinite. He was a man with a PhD in Engineering who read (and annotated, in fountain pen) the Bible and the collected works of John Milton. This duality was expressed in many ways.  My sister Hilary, in her remarks at Dad’s memorial service, spoke about his bookshelves in Cambridge, which housed (and still do) books about World War II, America’s Cup boats, and dense historical tomes in German as well as a collection of gilded angels. That paradox, which defined my father, is the space between, and it’s where Dad lived.

Dad loved angels.  I don’t know that he fully believed they were real, in the sense that there were babies floating in the ether, but he loved them with an affection that I have to think correlates with some kind of trusting.  I guess it’s no surprise then, that I feel his presence in the strangest moments now that he’s gone.

A few weeks ago, on a Saturday afternoon, Mum asked me if Matt and I could change some lightbulbs in her house.  Of course, I said, just tell me where.  The light in Dad’s office and the light in the front hall both needed new bulbs.  I made a mental note. The next day, I picked her up early to go to the airport.  As we drove to Logan, she turned to me, “Oh, I forgot – did you change the light in Dad’s office yesterday?”

“No,” I said.  “We were going to do that sometime soon.”

“Well, it’s working now.”  She shook her head and looked out the front of the car.

Strange.

Then, that same week, I noticed one of Dad’s business cards in the passenger door well of one of our cars.  The business card was worn, like it had traveled in a wallet for a long time.  I am frequently a passenger in that car and I’ve never noticed the card there before that day. Dad had literally never been in that car.

Strange.

It’s not that different than the way Matt keeps hearing What a Wonderful World (his father’s favorite song, and played at the funeral) everywhere he goes. I choose to let these small coincidences (I’m a logical thinker on some level, too, and I recognize that these are likely random occurrences) reassure me, to see meaning in them, to feel my dad near.  I guess part of me has inherited my dad’s love of, and belief in, angels.

 

Time

I have bemoaned time’s swift passage my whole life.  I’m a broken record, actually: I write, I talk, and I think endlessly about this.  Tempus fugit was almost the name of this blog.

And, suddenly, in the last couple of months, that has changed radically.  Now time’s crawling.  It’s been two months since my father died, but it feels like two years.  Thanksgiving, when he stood at the head of one of two tables and carved one of two turkeys, feels like even more years ago.

It’s a strange, contradictory thing: the actual days, as they pass, aren’t really any slower.  Nor are they jammed full of anything special.  Oh, yes, that first week after Dad died is a total blur, and I’m simultaneously aware that it was one of the most sacred and also the most strange weeks of my life.  And a lot has happened, since last fall – Grace went away to boarding school, my father-in-law died, my father died, my mother had her hip replaced, other dear friends and family members died.  We had special visits with our cousins on both sides, experiences inflected with both sorrow and celebration.

But everything feels so slow right now.  Full and blurry at the same time.  I’m sure this is a manifestation of grief (along with my irritability I hope).  But it’s remarkably different from how I normally experience life, which is both vivid and at high speed.

Sometimes, though, time slips in a dramatic, disorienting way.  On Saturday, Mum and I went to a family funeral (her beloved cousin, who was really her father’s younger first cousin, and to whom she’s always been closer than that familial tie would suggest; he also spent a lot of time in Marion, so was a part of my parents’ and our lives).  She stood up and read Crossing the Bar, the Tennyson poem that was read at my father’s funeral.  In that moment, as I watched her read, I felt dizzy, overcome with memory.  I felt like I was back in the church where we celebrated my father’s life, and, maybe even more, I was on the back porch with him as he quoted the poem from memory in post-dinner candlelight. In that moment, as I watched Mum read (beautifully, though I could tell she was emotional) time flew again, ad I thought of this post, and wondered if it was true.

It is, though.  Mostly, everything feels like it is moving incredibly slowly.  I’m struck by how far away life last fall feels.  I suppose it’s that, more than slowness, actually, that I’m keenly aware of.  And maybe that makes sense; the dual deaths of Matt’s father and my father cleaved our lives into a before and after.

The only way I know forward is to do just that: to move forward.  To let myself marvel at the tricks time plays on me, at how long ago it feels that Dad was here while he simultaneously sometimes feels so vividly present.  I think, several times a day, of the email my father sent to Grace after her other grandfather died, in which he asserted that “the only thing to do is to face forward and grab the future with both hands, even if it hurts.”  Indeed. I’m trying.

I do have moments of noticing – often captured these days on Instagram. Life is no less beautiful; what’s different is the lens through which the world.  I trust that things will return to normal, but I also know it will take a while.  Until then, I’m going to let myself move ploddingly through my days, observe what startling joys I can see (alongside the numerous, and inevitable, moments of stunning sorrow). Dad believed in the value of new experiences, of that I’m certain.  I don’t know that he’d thought through this last, and most definitive new experience he would offer me, a literal change in how I move through the world. But it’s undeniable, this impact, and I’m trying to get used to it.

Kirtland Chase Mead

June 9, 1943 – November 26, 2017

Remembrance from my father’s memorial service, December 3, 2017

I am Lindsey, Kirt and Susan’s older daughter. Thank you for being here today to celebrate my father’s life. There is a line in Steinbeck’s East of Eden in which the characters lament the coming death of their beloved father. How could they think of anything without knowing what he thought about it? This is exactly how I felt about my father my entire life. All that mattered was what he thought. Dad’s has always been the voice I hear in my head, and I suspect – and hope – that never changes.

Dad was, as we said in the obituary, a Renaissance man. He was a man of towering intellect, occasional gruffness, and, perhaps, less well-known but equally importantly, hilariously apt one-liners. Two that come to mind for me often are his assertion that “there are two words that separate us from the animals: may and well.” I have taken that particular adage to heart and think of it every time my children respond to “how are you?” with “I’m well.”

Another thing Dad said often that’s come to mean a lot was his repeated comment to his daughters: “I’m sorry, you must be mistaking this for a democracy.” As a child, of course, that sentence drove me nuts. As a parent, I think he was onto something.

Dad had unapologetically high standards. When I graduated from Princeton magna cum laude, his first words to me were “what happened to summa?” Sometimes his demand and expectation of excellence felt onerous, but most of the time it inspired me. He was invariably curious about my life – asking each and every time I saw him about Grace, Whit, and Matt, the new company I founded this year with wonderful partners, and my writing, usually in that order. He told me often, and recently, how proud he was of Grace and Whit (the expression he used, just last week, was “is there anything they can’t do?”). It’s a gift to be so certain of his love and esteem, and I know it.

My father was an engineer. He had 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 had a deep fascination with European history and culture, often manifested in a love of the continent’s cathedrals. His unshakeable faith in the life of the rational mind was 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 less 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 had a three-ring binder full of mathematical derivations he had done for fun (in fountain pen), also stood next to me in cathedrals in Italy, looking up at stained glass windows with frank reverence on his face. For all of his stubborn rationality and fierce belief that everything can be explained, he also always suspected, I think, that some things could not. In fact I think for my father, despite how trained and steeped he was in the language of equations, proofs and derivations, the parts of the human experience that cannot be captured by the empirical were the most meaningful.

This contradiction existed in how he thought about sailing, too, the other primary through-line of his life. Sailing was about careful navigation, measurement, and the angles between water, sail, and wind. And yet at the same time sailing was for Dad about something far less tangible, a fleeting and effervescent way of being in the world, an ability to sense and feel the boat and to make infinitessimal adjustments that made the boat move more smoothly and faster. I often told Dad that he was the person with whom I felt safest on the water, and this is true despite some very bumpy sails. His favorite point of sail was to windward. There was both precision and something far greater guiding my Dad’s hand on the tiller.

There are so many things Dad taught me that I can’t possibly list them, but this was his greatest gift: 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.

Dad often quoted Peter Pan, and his cry “Second star to the right, and straight on ‘til morning!” Dad’s with the stars now, and I’ll remember that every time I look up at the night sky that he so recently explored with us. I think of Grace, Whit, and Dad standing in the street in Marion viewing Venus when it was visible two summers ago. One of my dear friends from college emailed me after Dad died about how he was “part of the firmament,” as a way of conveying her shock at his loss. I loved that image, and one morning this week driving to the bus I asked Whit to look up the formal definition of firmament. It is “the heavens or the sky.” So I think he’s still – maybe even more – a part of the firmament now.

I wish you fair winds and following seas, Dad. And I thank you.

***

Two photos of my children and my father that I love

Thanksgiving and the fullness of life

This is always a poignant time of year, and this year it feels more so than usual.  I wrote last year about Thanksgiving 2002, when Matt’s father had his heart transplant, when the course of our family’s life bent permanently.  Last year Matt’s whole family gathered to celebrate his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, which was also the 14th anniversary of his transplant.  It was a gathering none of us will ever forget.

Of course things are very different this year.  Matt’s father is gone, and his sudden departure has punched a big hole in all of our lives.  On Wednesday we’ll gather with his family, and on Thursday with mine. I can’t stop thinking of that morning in 2002, with our colicky newborn in the back of the car and my father-in-law still in a coma at Mass General.  I can’t stop thinking of Thanksgivings in Vermont, before that, when Matt woke up before dawn to go hunting with his father and brothers.  I can’t stop thinking of last year, and the spectacular Florida sunrises, and the heartfelt toasts to mark 50 years.  The memories feel thick and close this week, sharp, vivid.  The people who are gone feel near, and I wonder, as I often do, where they are.  There’s so much I wonder about death, so many questions I have, both metaphorical and literal.

I wrote on Instagram last week of how this year I’m particularly aware of the losses that 2017 has brought to us.  Of course, there have been many beginnings, too. We began this year with a strong sense of optimism, aware that 2016 had been a difficult year, and the first months were full of good news.  Then, of course, came some bad news and some endings, Matt’s father’s death the most significant by a mile of a longer list.  We come to the end of this year in a more reflective mode than we began it, but perhaps that is a normal rhythm.  It strikes me that it probably is.

As the ghosts and memories swirl around me, what I feel, more than anything, is gratitude. I feel privileged to have lived those moments, even the difficult ones, and to have known and loved (and been loved by) the people who are no longer here.  I feel thankful for the family who remains, who hold some of the same memories I do.  I feel a tangible sense of honor to be on this earth, taking pictures and writing about my experience, looking at the sky, loving my family.

Kunitz’s words, “how shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?” run through my head.  How to honor what is gone while also remembering what has begun?  That is the task of these weeks for me. I feel thankful in a newly deep way, a gratitude shaded by the awareness of life’s losses and heartbreak.  Maybe this is adulthood: an elegy for what is gone and a song of celebration for what is at the same time.

I think what I’m saying is that as I get older, difficulty and glory are more closely intertwined, the light and the dark of life more inextricable.  Every joy is striated with awareness of sorrow, but the reverse is true, also. That’s either the most depressing thing I’ve ever written or the truest, I don’t know which. Maybe it’s both. But this period of my life is marked by a simultaneous embrace of what is – of thanks for what still is, in some cases – and the aching, echoing reminder of what was.

As I write these words it occurs to me that I am talking about nothing less than holding the fullness of life.  The losses and the beginnings, the heartbreak and the beauty, the mundane and the magical. All of it, all the time, simultaneous, bittersweet, dazzling.  Life itself.

 

 

 

John Adams Russell

October 4, 1944 – September 23, 2017

What I wrote about John this weekend on Instagram:

The world lost one of the greats yesterday, John Adams Russell. It was my privilege and honor to be John’s third and final daughter-in-law and to spend 19 years in the light of his love. John was fiercely committed to his family and one of the great joys of my life is knowing how close his relationships were with my children, who he called Whitty and My Amazing Grace. John received a life-saving heart transplant almost 15 years ago and since then (and probably before, but my knowledge isn’t as good) he embodied grace and gratitude. While he faced several health challenges over the last 15 years I never once heard him complain. John loved this wonderful world. He truly appreciated both the big, glittering moments (dinner atop the Eiffel Tower, having his whole family gathered for his and Marti’s 50th anniversary) and the small, quiet ones (a simple dinner with Marti on the back porch in Florida, a FaceTime exchange with a grandchild). He fought hard to stay here a long time and we are all thankful for the memories that allowed us to make. His awareness of his great good fortune and his loyal love of family are examples to me and will be all the days of my life. Rest in peace and godspeed, John. We love you and always will.

***

I have so, so many wonderful photographs of John.  The one above may be my favorite.  Like me, he liked to take photographs, and many of the pictures I prize from family celebrations came from him.  He was also an avid texter – Grace taught him how to use emojis, and we often joked she had created a monster.  I still have several text strings from him on my phone, and I don’t think I’ll ever erase them.  He was present and he was engaged and he was absolutely a vivid, bright, huge part of our lives.  His loss leave a huge hole.  This is the first thing I haven’t been remotely able to protect Grace and Whit from, and they are mourning.  We all are.

All we can do is focus on the immense gratitude we feel for his life, and our keen awareness that he got almost 15 extra years because of a gracious heart donor and his or her family (be an organ donor!!!) and because of his fierce fight.  He stayed here because he was determined to, of that I feel sure.  I’m so thankful he did.  He knew five grandchildren he wouldn’t have otherwise, and experienced more joys than we can count.

One of the primary lessons for me of these sad and difficult days is that we must say what we feel no matter what.  John died suddenly at the end, and did not have the opportunity to say formal goodbyes to a lot of people.  There’s sorrow in that, yes, but what it’s made us consider is that nobody, not a single person to my knowledge, was unsure how John felt about them.  He was an emotive and expressive man who said “I love you” a lot and the fact that my children and husband know without equivocation how he felt about them is a huge gift.  Don’t wait to say how you feel.

I’ve written a lot about John, but the piece that most specifically recounts the aftermath of his heart transplant is here, at Brain, Child. We were just so fortunate.  So lucky.  So blessed.  Yes, we were.  And we knew it.  And so did he.  What an enormous gift.

It is hard to choose favorites of my many photographs, so I wanted to include the pictures I have of the first time John met Grace and Whit. They adored him.

October 26, 2002.  A month before his heart transplant, and he basically broke out of MGH to come see Grace.

Easter 2005.  Whit was 2 months old and as you can see delighted to meet his grandfather.  This may be the only photo I have of Whit with Grandpa where he is not grinning ear to ear.