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Good Night Moon, Spanish moss frost, and heart break

Last night Whit picked a book for me to read to him before bed, as he does every night.  Uncharacteristically, he brought me Goodnight Moon.  “A good night book,” he said, plopping into my lap.  He is tall and angular now, in a way that only Gracie used to be.  He curled up against me and I read Goodnight Moon to him, saying the words by heart.  He was quiet, unusually still, and when I was finished he whispered to me, “Can you read it again?”

Of course I did.  Rocking in the yellow chair that held me as I nursed two babies.  In the nursery that held Grace, exactly eight years ago.  The nights are long, as they were then, the the light feels limited, though full of feeling, emotion and elegy, when it is here.  I read Goodnight Moon again, voice cracking at parts, and I could tell Whit was exhausted because he lay limply against my chest, not looking up to wonder at my tearful voice.

I wondered if this was the last time I’d rock a child reading Goodnight Moon. I thought about how often we do something for the last time without knowing it; the importance of a moment, its heavy significance, is so often clear only in retrospect. I wonder if part of this is self-protection: if I knew every time something was a last, I don’t think I could bear it.  As it is, the possibility of that, the unavoidable truth of loss, hangs around every moment of my life, Spanish moss twining around the branches of my consciousness, falling in elegant loops that sometimes occlude the sun.  That is hard enough.

This morning the fields were covered in silver frost (the color of Spanish moss, in fact, which is what made me think of it).  It was really quite spectacular, and take-your-breath-away cold too.  Grace and Whit wanted to run across the field at school (see photo), marveling at their own footprints in the rime.  Leaving their marks.  I stood and watched them, wistful.  As we do every morning, Whit and I walked Grace to the 2nd grade playground.  We say goodbye to her always at the same point, at a remove far enough from her friends that Grace feels comfortable throwing herself into a real hug in my arms.

After watching her run towards her friends, her brand-new birthday backpack bright on her parka-ed back, Whit and I turned to walk back to his building.  He reached up and held my hand, his nubby woolen mitten curling around my fingers.

“Whit?” I said to him, leaning down.

“What?”

“I like that you still like to hold my hand.”

“I like it too,” he said, squeezing my hand.  “It makes me feel like my heart will never break.”

Oh, my sweet boy.  If only.

Navigating by the stars

“Besides realizing that two glasses of wine can make you drunk, I have had this revelation: that you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.”

– Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

Sometimes when I look at the night sky I find myself breathless, and dazzled, and then, quickly, dizzy. I look around, trying to focus on the stars, but the sky gets blurry and I feel disoriented. This is what Ann Beattie’s words always makes me think of, and it’s how I feel right now.

The days fold into each other, collapsing into a series of moments both transcendent and mundane. Each evening I have a bittersweet taste on my tongue and a vague sense of deja vu – this again? These same demons, these same questions, these same stars blinking in the black sky, inspiring and elusive at the same time?

I consider myself deeply fortunate to have bumped into Bruce from the Privilege of Parenting out in these wild cosmos. His steady, thoughtful support and insightful comments and emails are nothing short of sustaining.

Today he emailed me with some thoughts, the last of which was this:

You are making your soul. It takes a long time and it’s damn hard work, so hang in there.

I love this image. I haven’t thought about the struggle and the joy that I write about so often this way before. Frankly, I’d always assumed the soul is something we’re born with. Maybe, actually, our soul is something we construct. This makes such sense to me, suddenly. My thirties so far have been a journey of letting go of the assumptions – about right and wrong, desire and duty, direction and velocity – that so strictly guided my first thirty years. The single biggest thing I’ve let go of is my belief in the critical importance of movement, the primacy of having a destination.

The map by which I so surely navigated for thirty years somehow broke as I made my way into the summer of adulthood. This was terrifying. Unmoored and lost at sea, I spent several years in the fog. And, if I’m honest, I am still there. I think, ultimately, that being lost is the fundamental state of life, and that my work is learning to be comfortable with that. What I know now is that the landmarks and lighthouses that marked my way were all evanescent anyway.

Maybe, returning to Ann Beattie’s quote, I’m navigating by the stars now. I’m in the territory of the soul, and it often feels perilous and lonely. It’s slow work, soul-making. I think of something I wrote in January, about the ways that life is both linear and cyclical; it strikes me that the making of a soul is a fundamentally non-linear enterprise. For me, who for so long was such a strictly linear person, this is deeply uncomfortable. In the discomfort lies the way forward, of that I’m sure. So on I go, circling and circling, staring at the stars, blinking, trying not to panic at how dark it is and how unsure I am about where I am.

How sheer the veil is between this life and another

Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new.

M died last night. She was 39 and left two children in their early teens. It was entirely unexpected.

I feel sad today, for her, for her family, for the abrupt loss of someone who had so much ahead of her. I feel as though something chilly has brushed past me in the dark, something I can’t see but something I can feel. Yesterday, I spoke to her. Today, she is gone. Where? My mind still struggles with this truth, which is maddeningly abstract and painfully concrete at the same time.

I also feel keenly, shiveringly aware of how close we all tread to the line of our worst nightmares every single day. The yawning terror of what might be, of that we most dread, exists just off to the side of our lives, and though we skirt it and forget it it still threatens. We live on the precipice, walk on a tightrope, exist in a world where the boundary between normal and tragedy is far more gossamer and fragile than we ever let ourselves imagine.

Death has actually been on my mind since my Aunt E’s funeral, actually, and since a dear friend lost his mother unexpectedly in July. As I sat in the pew at my aunt’s memorial service, I thought about how there are many more funerals ahead of me than behind me. And when my friend’s mother died I had an eerie sense of what is to come as the generations fold and my peers and I take our place at the head of the line. Both of these thoughts give me goosebumps, and not in a good way.

I’m sorry for this not-at-all-upbeat post. It seems incongruous, as I sit here on vacation, waiting to pick my boisterous, tired, and sunburned children up from the bus that bears them back from summer camp. But that is the point, I guess: to remember, always, how sheer the veil is between this life and another, between good news and terrible, between just another regular day and the day it all grinds to a halt.

There’s only one way to honor those who have stepped through this veil, one way to turn this tragic reality that flickers at the edges of our experience: to use the awareness of what might be, and of the proximity of the chasm, to heighten our awareness and celebration of the days that we remain safe. To remember, always, those trite sayings that are also so achingly true: today is all we have. Seize it. Take nothing for granted.

I’ll be hugging these two extra hard when they get off the bus today.

Towards the radiance

This has been a marvelous summer in many ways. I’ve really let myself sink into life at home with Grace and Whit, and I’ve been fortunate to do some special things with them that I hope they will always remember. They have each commented to me that they like having me around more, a comment which delights and saddens me at the same time (I am going back to work in a few weeks). The kids seem taller by the day, both are tanned, relaxed, and happy, and their relationship is developing into a true friendship (though of course the non-stop fighting has not changed).

It’s also been a strange and somewhat sad summer, an interval of time suspended between two realities, between the known and the unknown. Newness and change hover on the horizon, and as we move towards the end of August the shadows they throw grow ever longer. The summer always feels a bit apart from regular life, and that has been even more true than usual this year. There’s something safe about that knowledge, but also something sorrowful. This special time draws to an end and I feel its closing in my bones, like the sudden chill in the evenings and the infinitessimally different angle of the sun.

We still have three weeks left, but a part of me is already lunging towards the fall, wishing the changes would just come already rather than continue to lurk around the corners of my days. I’ve begun to feel that preemptive anxiety that always robs me of the riches of today. I wish I could push the insistent awareness of what is coming out of my field of vision, so that I could purely inhabit the days that still lie between me and that future. I’ve never been good at that, though.

Today is my birthday, signaling the clanging shut of another year, and the promise of another (oh the blessing it is that this is so – I know it, I do). Mid August seems to be when peoples’ attentions shifts towards fall, despite the fact that we are still deep in long hot summer days. A perfect analogy for me, I think, and the way I exist both here, now, but also in the future (and the past) in a way that sometimes occludes the radiance of my ordinary life.

“What will be will be well, for what is is well.” (Walt Whitman, thank you to Glenda Burgess for the reference).

Onward. Into the unknown – and the unknowable. Towards the radiance.

The definition of terms

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. – Socrates

We were visiting friends at the beach this past week, and at one point I was with Grace in the ocean. Despite the heat of the day, the water was cold, and we were standing right at the edge of the waves’ breaking, tip-toeing in slowly. Suddenly a really big wave came and Grace was standing in just the wrong place. She was tumbled over and thrashed around in the whitewater. When she came up, spluttering, her hair and her bathing suit were both full of small rocks. She was breathless, surprised, somewhere between gigglingly startled and authentically afraid.

This was just one more time when the ocean provided me with a metaphor. I know I’m neither alone nor original in finding meaning in the waves, the water, the tide, the undertow. But it is to these images and sounds, to the salty bite of the ocean air, the snapping of halyards against masts, the caw-caw-cawing of seagulls soaring above that my mind most often returns. I am the child of sailors, who grew up mostly on the coast, and this runs through my veins as surely as does my affection for scientific inquiry and my East Greenwich Eldredge blood, so perhaps this instinct is innate.

For some reason I feel a connection between the image of my daughter, tossed in a wave breaking on shore, and that quote by Socrates. I’ve been in my own version of whitewater lately: feeling confused, a bit lost, unsteady. And I wonder if part of that is because I haven’t even begun to define my terms, the terms by which I want to live my life, by which I want to exist in the world. I am fairly sure that awareness of such a need is progress for me. I suspect that for years I just assumed some general universal terms applied to me. Terms that were, importantly, set by someone else.

No more

I’m going to set my own terms now.

I am not sure how, or when, because right now I’m still a bit upside down in the whitewater, unable to see for sea spray in my eyes, and waiting for the water to drain out of my ears so that I can hear clearly. But at least I know I need to. I know the terms I want to live my life by start with compassion and empathy and kindness, and that they include a deep need to honor the reality, savage and beautiful as it is, of my life.

Maybe that’s what writing is for me. Just as my lifetime love of cornflower blue was, all along, guiding me to my son’s eyes, maybe my words, in the convoluted, slow-to-be-revealed wisdom that I must trust is there somewhere, are taking me to the place where I will know how it is I want to engage with the world. How is it I want to live my life.