musings

The heartbreak that hovers

For so many years I tried to outrun my sadness and my sensitivity, but no matter how fast I went it trailed behind me, stuttering on the pavement like the cans tied behind a bride and groom’s getaway car.  No matter how fast I ran I could not evade it, this lingering sadness, this strange but overwhelming sense of loss that infused even the most ordinary moments, this heartbreak that hovered around the edges of my life.

In the last few years that heartbreak has caught up to me.  My deepest wound finally opened wide enough that I could no longer ignore it.  I’ve been slowly circling the black hole at the center of my life, drawn inexorably towards it even as I fear the heartbreak that lives there.  That black hole is the brutal truth that it all passes, that every single moment is gone even as I live it, that no matter how hard I try, how fiercely, white-knuckled, I cling, I cannot hold onto my life.

I’m certain it was my children who forced me to turn and to stare into the sun of my life’s blinding, but evanescent right now.  To fall into the place where the heart of my life beats.  Paradoxically, they demonstrated both the unavoidable drumbeat march of time and the critical importance of being still in each individual moment.  They inhabited the now with an impossible-to-ignore stubbornness, yet they also marked time’s passage in a visceral way.  Unaware of this contradiction, they tugged me to the place I’d always shied away from.  They taught me that being present is both the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done and the only way to truly live my life.

In the strange, out-of-regular-life lacuna that the last week has been, I spent some time thinking about how the way that I interact with the world has fundamentally changed.  It’s no insight to observe that a marked rupture from status quo can jolt us into reflection and a new perspective on that normalcy.  I realize, not for the first time, but again, that I’ve stopped – for the most part – those hiding-from-my-life behaviors.  Instead, I now live in a permanent state of broken-heartedness.  The savage and beautiful reality of life’s impermanence colors every moment of my life.

Sometimes I am jealous of those who are less porous, who can walk through life without being so frequently brought to their knees by the pain and brilliance of it.  My every conscious moment is filtered through this prism of my piercing awareness of how fleeting it is.  In the last few years I’ve become almost painfully aware of every detail around me.  The sight of a half moon, one edge ragged, foggy, in the morning sky makes my breath catch, a cascade of emotions tinkling inside me like windchimes: the physical beauty of this planet, the sky’s being near and yet far, the concrete evidence of time’s passage in imperfect not-wholeness of the moon.  I suspect this, the way I am so attuned to the most mundane of details, is either an attempt to fully inhabit each moment or an effort to freeze it, like an insect in amber, but I don’t know which.

And what I realize, again, fiercely, is that this is how I want to live:  in the right now of my life with a broken heart.  I want this, in full knowledge of the pain it carries, far more than I want to keep hiding from my life.  This is a decision I make not in one grandiose declaration, but every single day, every single minute.  It’s not even, really, a decision so much as following my intuition about the way I want to inhabit the world, and it lives in where I choose to place my attention.

Lightning in a jar

My children are 8 and 6.  It is life’s biggest cliche and most painful truism that just yesterday they were babies.  This week my friend Kris pointed me to Julie’s post about watching her children play in the ocean and I gasped, remembering watching my own children in the Massachusetts coast waves this past summer.  They were 5 and 7, she towered over him, he was just learning to swim.

Admittedly, I am tired, having been away from home and not sleeping very much.  I’m even more porous than usual.  But I sat at someone else’s desk in my firm’s New York office with tears rolling down my face as I read Julie’s gorgeous words.  “… I’ve caught lightning here, in these slender vessels …” Julie writes, and my heart tightens with identification.  It’s all so astonishing, so baffling and overwhelming at the same time, and I feel awash, often, in the swarming wonder that is parenting.  My own children, growing tall and lanky in front of my eyes, their childhood passing in one swift swirl of color, the brilliance of their being here flashing intermittently like a firefly in the dark.

Julie’s photographs remind me of ones I took last summer and posted here.  There is something both profoundly moving and absolutely apt about children – the definition of liminal beings – playing along the border where earth becomes water.  Threshold-dwellers dancing at an essential threshold.

I suppose I’m just extra-aware right now, after long days away, of the piercingly poignant reality of Grace and Whit’s lives.  I feel abundantly grateful for their health and in frank awe of the basic fact of them.  It’s all such a gift, this opportunity to be in the presence of nascent human beings, to witness them step through these never-to-be-revisited halls of childhood, to watch their minds and personalities form.  They are as sturdy as they are evanescent, corporeally present even as they seem to waft by me, evading capture.

Memory’s bright freight

I was reading a newly-discovered blog yesterday called Catching Days.  Cynthia Newberry Martin was writing about Devotion, a book I also adored.  She cites specifically Dani Shapiro’s passage on memory, which was one of my favorites as well.  I was grateful for this prompt to return to the elegant pages of the memoir, and I thought about memory all day.

There are two passages that strike me from Devotion‘s section 54.  The first, Cynthia also quotes:

Why do we remember the particular things we do?  Great pain certainly carves its own neurological paths.  But why random, ordinary moments?

I have written before about how some of the memories I recall most vividly are of “random, ordinary” moments, whose eventual power I would never have known as I was living them.  I am fascinated by this particular alchemy: why is it that we recall what we do?  Certainly my mind has power to shape our memory in ways beyond my conscious awareness: this is at work, I think, in the way my brain seems to airbrush over certain incredibly difficult times, smoothing the specific contours of grief and pain into a uniform, though unmistakably sad memory.  The years at Exeter, for example, are for me a blur of snow, cold, running, and my tiny dorm room.  Very few specific memories endure.  The same is true of the months after Grace’s birth, as I grappled with my post-partum depression.

This makes me think of the oft-quoted line from Ann Beattie’s gorgeous short story, Snow: “people forget years and remember moments.”  As curious to me as why certain moments become eternal, sturdy parts of our memory is how rarely we can know as we live our lives which specific experiences will be elevated to this pantheon.  Which moments endure?  Why?  What message is our spirit sending to us in the patchwork of our lives that it preserves with glowing, brilliant detail?

I randomly remembered an essay I’d written during freshman year on To The Lighthouse (why this memory?  why today?) which addressed something similar.  I opened it up tonight and, amidst an odd encounter with my 18 year old self, found this line:

“Mrs. Ramsay illustrates what most human lives are like – a long thread of day-to-day banality and an occasional, vivid gemstone of insight or memory.  It is these memories, these moments, that make life interesting and valid; we live from one of these special times and experiences to another; while the stuff of life may be the mundane, it is the rare moments for which we truly live.”

How is it that we can’t recognize the gemstones as we live them?  Certainly there are hours, days, months of our lives that feel more alive than others.  Some periods of my life feel like going hand over hand through a swarm of gray days, clinging to the few moments of emotion or meaning that rise through the fog.  Other periods are like standing under a waterfall of feeling, unable to take it all in, pounded with emotion and sentiment, so awake and receptive I feel either pain or a gradual, defensive numbness.  Still, we can’t know which will be the memories that really endure, that lodge in our minds and stay with us for the duration.

The second passage about memory from Devotion comes at the end of section 54:

I had experienced my own memory as a living thing, a palpable presence in my body.  I had felt my past unfurl inside me as if it had a mind of its own.

I was actually thinking about something like this before I reread the section and found these lines; again, Dani puts into exquisite words the bumbling and humble thoughts of my heart.  I was thinking about some of the most cherished memories, the ones whose remembered details stud them like the jewels that cover a Faberge egg, who glitter most brightly in my mind.  Some of these take on an odd power, functioning almost like a lens through which I see my life.  Retrospectively, yes: the memory of that time in my life is refracted through that specific, salient moment.

But also, perhaps more oddly, this works prospectively.  There are certain moments who seem to have, in retrospect, informed the shape of the rest of my life.  I can’t know if this happened in real time or in retrospect.  I remember sitting at the foot of my bed, holding 5-day-old Grace, dripping tears onto her newborn head and answering earnestly the question of “what are you looking forward to?” with “when she goes to college.”   This has taken on such power as a defining moment of that time in my life, and of my motherhood in general.  But did that happen then, or only as I remember it and the (admittedly blurry) months around it?  I don’t know.  I have the phrase “freight of memory” in my mind, but in truth this is more like memory pushing something formative in front of it, rather than pulling it behind it.

In this way our past unfurls inside of us, cohabiting our present.  The past and the present echo inside of us, both creating the music of now and anticipating that of tomorrow.  We cannot understand the mystery of memory; my goal is merely to accept the messages it offers.  To honor the things my soul seems to hold dear, as represented by which memories bob up out of the morass to be the ones I recall with blinding brightness.  To remain open to the ordinary moments, as I can never know which will become those to which I return again and again, rubbing them like a touchstone in my pocket.  It strikes me that this trick of our mind is, perhaps, just another way of acknowledging the grandeur and beauty of the most mundane moments in our lives.

(originally written in March 2010)

Give yourselves to what you cannot hold

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

-Ranier Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1,4

More beautiful and thought-provoking words from the lovely blog, A Year with Rilke.  Isn’t Rilke, in his characteristically simple but powerful imagery, talking about growing up, letting go, trusting – all of my favorite themes?  Isn’t this, in essence, what I was looking for when I jumped off a high platform into thin air?

I love Rilke’s assertion that the “trees” from childhood, those epitomes of rooted, solid stability, are too heavy to carry into adulthood.  In midlife I have begun to realize that the tools I used to understand and navigate my earlier life simply did not work anymore.  Furthermore, I’ve started to understand that the resolute permanence on which my worldview was built is evanescent anyway.  The trees are too heavy now.  Maybe they were never real, though that I don’t dwell there.  That they are not now is what matters.

And so into midlife I walk, trying, every single day, to let go of those illusions of certainty.  To release my hold on the tree branches that so effectively sheltered me for many years.  What is left is the open air, something ineffable and beyond logic: the deep trust that something will catch me, keep me from harm.  Trying to have faith in what I cannot hold.  In a contradictory way the more effort I exert here the more this elusive faith evades me.  So, yet another truth of right now: it is in loosening my grip that safety lives.

Once again I will remember that life itself lives in the open air, in the surprising buoyancy of the trapeze, in the untrammelled, unasked-for joy in my children’s smiles, in the startling incadescence of a blaze of light in the cloudy sky.  Life is in the design so vast it cannot be seen up close.  Life is in the space that dwells beyond the power of my rational mind; it cannot be categorized and beaten into submission by the intellect. It is as insubstantial and essential as air.

I will remember that I must give myself over to that which I can neither hold nor understand.

The pain of the world threads itself through me

I read Jo’s gorgeous post, Everything Under the Gaping-Mouth Moon with a wince of recognition.  She writes – beautifully, as ever – about the dissonance she experiences between her own “singalong life” and the horrors that she knows are out there in the world.  “While children starve in North Korea, I barter with mine about dessert,” she writes, and I both smile and grimace, knowing the squeaking, nails-on-chalkboard feeling that putting two realities like that next to each other can generate.

Jo goes on to talk about how gratitude can be an antidote to the world’s suffering, about realizing that embracing joy, even in the full knowledge that out there is an ocean of sorrow, is not a bad thing.  In fact, it could be a good and generative and healing thing.  I love her points and highly recommend her post – Jo’s blog in general, actually.

As her writing often does, Jo’s words made me pensive.  I went off on a slightly different direction, though.  I can’t stop thinking about the ways in which my piercing awareness of the pain in the world – writ large and writ small – threads itself through my everyday life.  I regularly find myself keening – literally, wailing, internally if not externally – over the hurt in the world.  One day, driving through Harvard Square, stopped at a red light, Whit pointed to the man with the tattered cardboard sign begging from the stopped cars and asked, “Where’s his mummy?”  That made me cry so hard I had to pull over.  I can’t quite elucidate yet how devastated I am by homelessness; it’s a combination of guilt at my own comfort and despair about a society that abandons those who need it most.  I don’t read the paper anymore – some of that is from sheer laziness, sure, but it’s also because I simply can’t take the litany of news about deaths, despotic rulers, and economies in free fall.

This functions in a variety of ways.  Because of my porous nature, I’m easily hurt and saddened by what I witness, in my small world and in the larger one.  It also makes me, sometimes, awfully maudlin, even morbid.  This past weekend, sitting at a kitchen table at the Lost Island in New Hampshire with two of my very dearest friends, I descended into conversation about how the axe is hanging over our heads and it’s just a question of when.  Someone is going to get sick.  Someone is going to die.  Who will it be?  I’ve observed before that I have far more funerals ahead of me than behind me.  I’ve also been through enough severe illnesses, of parents and close friends, to know what that does to you.  And I ought to be more grateful, every single day, for the pulse of life that beats through me and my healthy friends and family.

And somehow I can’t.  I seesaw wildly between gratitude so intense it brings me to my knees, eyes full of tears, and crushing guilt at my own nonchalance about my good fortune.  I can’t believe I’m not more thankful, not more aware of the extraordinary good fortune of every single day that I – and, more importantly, so do my best friends and my family – get to be alive and healthy.  My existence is an odd combination of twinned grief and gratitude and overwhelming foreboding of bad things to come.  I know there is bad news on the horizon – there must be.  I also know that I ought to ignore it, and dance in the sunlight while it’s here.  And sometimes, truly, I can.  But not always, and in those moments I’m completely paralyzed by a simultaneous fear of those clouds and horror that I’m not appreciating the now better.

As one of my favorite, truly favorite bloggers, Kate at sweet/salty, put it: “Life is pain punctuated by joy.”  I hate being negative, I fight the creep of cynicism, and daily I wish I had more wonder in my life.  Still, I think she might be right.  There is so much damn rain in this world.  And, as I’ve realized, the more people you love, and the more deeply you feel, the more rain you get.  There’s no question about that equation.  Still, I’d never do it differently.  I wouldn’t trade my life for one with shallower feelings or one protected from the threat that I know clouds every moment.  Like my dear, beloved Jo, I sometimes want to pound my fists on the steering wheel, I squeeze my eyes closed to hold back the torrent of tears, and I rail against my own ingratitude.  Still, I know: this is life.  Radiance and shadow.  Turning, turning.