family

Lexington Battle Green, 5:15am on Patriot’s Day

I should have expected the slap-down from the universe.  I really should have.

In March 2009 I wrote about fragility.  “At any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger, either through an accident or through development of illness. When thinking about this post last night, I thought initially: I have chosen not to live in fear of these risks.”  As usual, I write my posts a few days in advance.  The day it went live, Whit ended up in the ER with his second allergic reaction to tree nuts.  It was scary.

In May 2012, I wrote about the 10 things I wanted Grace to know when she turned 10.  One of them was “Don’t lose your physical fearlessness.   Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw.”  Days later, she broke her collarbone.

Over the weekend, I wrote about ease, and the ways in which my life right now is the opposite of ease and, perhaps, the embodiment of it.  The post went up on Monday morning.  Monday itself was an exceedingly bumpy day in our family’s life.  I thought almost all day of my friend Launa‘s image of a family of four as a shopping cart.  When one wheel’s wonky, you just can’t drive smoothly or straight.  Monday we had four wheels out of joint.  Which meant, of course, we went nowhere fast and with great aggravation.

It was, on the surface, a great day.  We got up at 4:40 to go to the reenactment of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War in Lexington.  I’ve never seen it before, and it was both fascinating and unexpectedly powerful.  But that early wakeup put everybody on edge for the rest of the day.

We watched the marathon some, I worked a lot of the day, the kids both finished homework they had not gotten to over the weekend.  Nothing specifically went wrong.  But everyone was crabby – myself included, most certainly – and there was a lot of short-tempered snapping.  Dinner was filled with tense silence and crossed arms.

I didn’t feel ease.  I felt frustration and a generalized feeling of anger and exhaustion.  How could one early morning derail us all like this? Why are we all living so close to the edge right now (all the time)?  Why does everything feel so hard?

As it often has, reading saved us.  After some dish-clanging and raised-voice dinner cleanup, we all retired upstairs.  Grace and Whit showered.  I did some email.  Before long, I was in my favorite place, sitting in bed with a child on each side of me.  We were all breathing, we were all reading, we were all together.  The dissent and aggravation and tears of the day dissolved in the face of those irrefutable truths.

This is what I’m learning, finally:

This is what ease is.

This is what grace is.  They’re not the same thing, but they are, at least in my head, related. They are also some of the many, many manifestations of the way life is not necessarily what we expect it to be.

Ease is not never being aggravated.  It’s coming back to center more quickly.  I think of the round-bottomed glasses my parents have on their boat, which wobble but don’t actually tip over.  It’s breathing through the discomfort.  It’s trusting that the light will return, even when it’s dark.  It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would, ease, but it’s still here, in every step, in every breath, in every moment.

Silver bells from our tree lined up after we took them down on 1/3/16.  Time for some silver polish?

On January 3rd, we took down our tree.  I woke up that morning and went for a run during a glorious sunrise, and then came home to a regular morning of coffee, laundry, and, eventually, ornament removal.  And all morning I felt sad.  Really sad.  Like, sitting in the chair by myself with tears rolling down my face sad.

I couldn’t get out of my own way.  Our tree was coming down, and we were wrapping up another Christmas.  Our 14th as a family, our 11th as a family of four.  I’m a nostalgic person, prone to melancholy – we’ve established that – but this sorrow was unusually acute, even for me.  How many more years do we have when the children will relish the quiet, slow week at home with us between Christmas and New Year’s?  How long until they no longer embrace enthusiastically our family traditions, like celebrating New Year’s Eve as a family of four?  I’m not a fool.  I know these days are numbered.

It was my wise friend Julie Daley who gave me words for what I was feeling.  On Instagram she noted that what I was doing was honoring the ending of something, and she said that always carried grief with it.  Her words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer.  Yes.  That’s precisely it.  I’m a porous person, that’s not news to anyone who knows me, but still, sometimes I’m bewildered by how bittersweet this life can be and by how much loss is contained in every single day.

Even as I write this I realize how tiny this goodbye is.  Everyday life is full of farewells, and if we’re fortunate, they’re mostly small.  I thought of my friend Lisa often during this Christmas season, a friend who walked with all of us who knew her right to life’s final farewell.  Her courage in that process astonishes me still.  I suspect it always will.  Bidding goodbye to another holiday is a huge privilege, of course, compared to her experience.  Compared to anything real.  I know that.  Trust me, I do, and still, I’m sad.

But I’ve been musing over this notion now for weeks, the concept of honoring the ends of things.  The idea that the end is as sacred as the beginning, while something that feels deeply true to me, also seems somehow counter-cultural in American life, with our quasi-obsession with newness and the start of things.  I think of a vase of flowers, drooping and faded, or of those who are elderly, or of even the darkest, end days of the year.  All of these things make me feel some vague sense of unease, but as I get older I also recognize their particular beauty.

I think also of Whit’s off-the-cuff comment, one I think of almost daily, that Grace gets the firsts, but he gets the lasts.  How true that is.  And both are vital, essential, powerful. We are marked and shaped as surely by the beginnings of things as we are by their end.  The start of something (birth being the most fundamental example) is holy, no question about it, but so too is the end (death, here, in this analogy).

Despite our societal discomfort with endings – and my own – I think witnessing the individual losses and farewells and losses is crucial to fully living this life.  At least, for me, there’s no other choice.  So thank you, Julie, for helping me understand the grief that is so much a part of my daily experience. It is this: honoring the ends.  I don’t love how this sorrow feels as it courses through my days, but I feel certain that it makes the joy more vivid.

Thank you, Sugar Paper, for your help with our card.  I love it.