musings

Dancing with the Limp

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

I was thinking about these Anne Lamott lines, which I love and think of often, the other day in yoga.  I separated my left shoulder years ago, which healed up with lots of physical therapy, and in the last few months my right shoulder has been hurting.  I went to see the orthopedic surgeon, who took x-rays and told me it looks like I have some early arthritis in the shoulder.  Wow.  That will make you feel old in a hurry.

But that morning in yoga, I moved cautiously, nervous about pain.  It was my first time on the mat since my shoulder started hurting. I was slow, and deliberate, but I was there.  And I thought about learning to dance with the limp.  And then, of course, my brain hopscotched to all the other ways we’re learning to dance with the limp these days.  I’m growing accustomed to the surge of sorrow that accompanies Dad’s voice in my head, or thoughts of him, which come at random, often, and sometimes with blinding pain.

There are so many limps I’m learning to dance with at once right now.  Most of all, learning to live without Dad, and without John, both of whom were daily parts of my life (and the lives of my children and husband).  Those are big accommodations to make, and I’ll never stop missing them, but I am learning to move forward.  Slow going, one step forward, and one step back, but just like the way I adjust upward dog to not tweak my shoulder too much, I am learning.

What I love about Lamott’s quote is her assertion that we never seal our hearts back up.  I never will, and I think that’s okay.  It’s been 3 months to the day (yesterday) since my father died and I am grateful that I still hear his voice in my head.  I hope I always do.

I have written about our scars before, and about how we all have them.  We are all dancing with a variety of kinds of limps, there’s no question about that. What also seems unquestionable is that as we grow up we accumulate scars and limps, things are dancing with, darknesses of the spirit, hurts, wounds, losses.

And yet we dance on.

Unrecognizable

I was thinking recently of the ways that my life – our lives – look different than they did a year ago.  When I look at this list, the fact that I feel vaguely dizzy makes more sense to me.

Last year, two children played hockey and I was at the rink in Cambridge approximately eight hours a week.
This year, both children play squash.

Last year, two children lived at home.
This year, one child goes to boarding school.

Last year, we had four parents between us and our children had four grandparents.
This year, we have each lost our fathers, and our children have two grandmothers.

Last year, the children were at the same school they’d been at since they were both 4 years old.
This year, they’re both at new schools (see above for Grace boarding)

Last year, Matt and I were both in jobs we’d been in for a while.
This year, we are both in new jobs, his since January 2017 and mine at a company I helped found in April 2017.

Last year, and every year before that, time flew by.
This year, everything is moving at a glacial pace (and yet feels like a blur at the same time).

I’ve written before about the James Taylor line about change: “Once again a time of change … oh the change makes music.”  Last spring, I couldn’t stop hearing those words, and the change I focused on was Grace’s imminent departure for school.  That was a big transition at the time, though of course I was unaware of the enormous earthquakes that lay ahead.  On Thanksgiving I posted a photo and talked about how much was different, without knowing how much more different life would get only three days later. And then my father died, and we careened into the holidays.  Life went dark and blurry, Mum got her hip replaced, it was Christmas, and then New Year’s, and now we are into February.

It is clear that last fall represented an enormous, irrevocable rupture in the fabric of our lives.  We will never recover from the losses of our fathers, and the fact that they happened so closely together still feels surreal.  But it’s also interesting for me to remember that even before September it had already been a year of huge transition.

Being gentle with myself is not a strength, but when I list these changes I am reminded that I have to learn how to do that.  This is a moment of massive upheaval, and while many of the changes that have happened are good, they can be difficult nonetheless.

So, here I am, still trying to hear the music that the change makes.

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.

Word of the year 2018

Well, my word came to me.  After last week’s convoluted and unstructured thoughts on a new year, and a freezing cold week with lots of snow, I know what my word is.

Simple.

I thought it might be peace, calm, or grace, but the word I keep coming back to is simple.

This word featured in this year’s first weekly quote here, which no doubt helped frame it as a word for me.  “I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” Laura Ingalls Wilder said this and oh, yes, it’s true.

I know what matters to me – that’s only become more clear in the last, dark months. I referred to radical perspective on Instagram, and I want to keep hold of that even as life returns to a more normal cadence (although, truthfully, one thing I’ve realized in the last several months that there is no such thing as “normal”).

My very clear sense of what I prize most has been a beacon in the last few months, and I want to honor that this year.  I want to keep that simplicity of focus and that determination to pare away what doesn’t matter.  I want to focus on those I love most and, after that, on my work and my writing.

I want to keep it simple.  There’s no use in anything else, I think I already knew that, but the last months of pain and sorrow have certainly brought it home.  So in 2018 I will be focusing on the simple things.  They’re what matters, as Laura Ingalls Wilder says and as I already knew.

What’s your word for 2018?

A New Year

The top of this year’s Christmas tree, with our angel.  That this tree came within an inch of our ceiling, by dumb luck, is one of the small joys I mention here, whose shimmer I’m newly aware of, and whose presence is a balm.

It’s no secret that 2017 was very, very difficult year for me.  The weeks between November 26 and the end of the year were without question the darkest of my life, in what was already its hardest season. My word for 2017 was deliberate, and for the first nine months of the year, it felt about right.  I dedicated yoga practice to the word deliberate, when I (occasionally) meditated, I allowed that word to guide me and to surface.  I thought about how I could be careful with my time, my choices, my attention, my life.

And then we lost Matt’s father and my father in two months, and our lives veered off the rails.  Deliberate became, frankly, irrelevant.  I can honestly say that since late September the notion of making careful choices hasn’t crossed my mind. I’ve been writing obituaries and eulogies and thank you notes, crying unexpectedly and often, comforting children who are both scared and sad, talking to a spouse who is facing eerily similar circumstances.  We both miss our own dads most of all, of course, but we enjoyed close relationships with each other’s fathers, too, and so Matt and I are both mourning two important men simultaneously.

The day after Christmas, I described this holiday season on Facebook as “shot through with light and suffused with both love and loss, but mostly, honestly, bewildering.” On Christmas Eve, in the church service we always go to, I was in tears several times.  During the prayers of the people when the minister asked the congregation to speak the names silently or aloud of those who have died in the last year, Matt said “Kirtland Mead” and I said “John Russell.”  There is so much about right now that feels surreal.

But even the midst of these dark, confusing days, I am aware of a deep thrum of gratitude.  I wrote about it the morning after my father died, and right after John died I spoke about it unceasingly to Matt.  Both men had full, rich lives, and left tremendous legacies and long shadows.  We are immensely fortunate to have known, loved, and been loved by them.  There is no tragedy here, at least in my view.  There is a lot of sorrow, and a fair degree of shock, but also an enduring feeling that life is good.

Anyway.  There was also much that was good in 2017, though those developments have been thoroughly occluded by the sorrowful events of the year’s end.  Both Grace and Whit started at new schools that they love.  Both Matt and I are in new professional roles, mine in a company I co-founded. One thing that gives me comfort is knowing that both my father and my father-in-law knew of all these developments before they died, and they knew everyone was doing well.  I’m glad for that.

Despite this sturdy sense of gratitude, it was still a holiday season marked predominantly by sorrow. In the midst of all the darkness, though, I’ve been able to see beauty.  I’m still unpacking all the gifts that the box of darkness that the autumn of 2017 handed me, but one of them is surely awareness of small joys.  I wrote on Instagram that this fall had given us radical perspective, and I think that’s connected.  A lot, and I mean a lot, of things cease to matter, when a few things matter so much. It sounds paradoxical when I write it, but somehow realizing how few of the things that cause me and those around me angst and frustration really matter opens the door to awareness of the beauty in many commensurately small things.  Does that make sense?  I’m not sure.  In the wake of devastation, when there is such an overwhelming focus on one (or two) heartbreaking events, a deep well of thankfulness for small comforts has sprung up.  For those of you who have helped provide those: it is appreciated. We have been borne up and carried by the love of friends and family in these last weeks: there’s no way for me to thoroughly express my thanks for that.

I don’t yet have a word for this new year.  I’m mulling some over – peace, calm, grace have all come to mind.  What I want most fervently is a less eventful year.  I want for my family – the family I came from and the family I built and live with – to have some months ahead of quiet joy, of small pleasures and creeping peace.  I want my mother and my mother-in-law to laugh again, and I know they will.

In past years my New Year’s posts have been about lessons learned the year before, about things I want to carry into the new year, about words that guide me.  This is less structured than that, I realize, but perhaps that’s apt: life is a mish-mash of feelings right now, mostly dark with some shimmers of light.  I do have trust that we’ll make it through, all of us.  And I hope you do too.

Happy 2018.