oh this is hard – A Design So Vast

the Sunday of summer

August 5, 2022August 5, 2022

I’ve written before about the word “liminal” and about how it speaks to me. Now we enter the most liminal of times, at least as far as I’m concerned: August. We turn towards the fall, towards new school years and new beginnings, time marks another year past. I have often thought it is not an accident that I’m born during this time, which I often experience with tears in my eyes, a faint sense of dread in my heart, and time’s drumbeat in my ears.

That’s truer than ever this year. For some reason, summer’s impending close is hitting me harder than usual this year. I think that’s probably because this is likely the last summer both kids will live with us, and we’ll luxuriate in slow mornings and dinners on the porch. These days are painfully numbered. I have been writing about – obsessing about, let’s be honest – time’s irrevocable forward march since Grace and Whit were small. But this obsession has roared back into my mind in the last few days and weeks.

All of this is at it should be. I love my young adult children. I honestly adore them more with every passing year, and thus far there hasn’t been a year of parenthood that hasn’t been better than the last. That said, it’s undeniable that something is ending, that the period of family life where we’re all together draws to a close.

My previous post was called “the ache and the beauty,” and if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that those two things are inextricable from each other. But all the knowing in the world doesn’t insulate me from the pain of that ache, from the echoing sorrow it brings. Ahhhh … I know. I’m so upbeat, on this summer August morning when it’s hot as hell on the Massachusetts coast, where I got Dunkin Donuts with Grace and can hear Whit’s alarm going off down the hall.

Be here now.

I got temporary tattoos that say that, and I look at those words on my wrist now, daily. I’ve always said that if I get a real tattoo, ever, it will be those three words on the inside of my wrist.

Onward. As the days grow shorter – I can definitely sense a different texture in the light, a sense of something gathering to its end – and the approach of Real Life grows more clamoring. I don’t know how to handle the sadness that these developments bring, but I’m old enough now that I recognize its coming. I try every year not to let my preemptive sadness about what’s ending occlude my last days inside its joy. I will try, again, anew.

Captive on a carousel of time

May 26, 2022May 26, 2022

Celebrated my 26th (belated 25th) reunion from college last weekend. How is that possible? We just graduated. Above is my favorite photo of hundreds from the weekend. Arms around each other. Walking away. The woman on my left is my roommate and was one of our bridesmaids. The woman on my right is Whit’s godmother. How lucky I am to still count as dear the women I met in the fall of 1992.

Saw a Harvard grad walking by our house this morning in cap and gown, on her way to commencement.

It reminded me of all the years I wrote about commencement, about this bittersweet season of endings and beginnings. I wrote this in 2017, when both children graduated from the school they’d been at since pre-K. They both left that year. I remember sitting with all four grandparents in two different gyms for both kids on the same day. Four months later both of our dad would be gone. The breathtaking impact of the fall of 2017 is still sinking in.

But today I’m thinking of endings and beginnings, of how we say goodbye to years as the world bursts into bloom, of how my soul still functions on the school year calendar. Grace is home from college, Whit has one more week, and then it’s summer. Time is flying faster and faster, which is both the world’s tritest cliche and its deepest truth.

*** also, I am aware of what a huge privilege it is to write these words and to mourn time’s passage with my healthy, living children.***

Words from 2017 and 2013, still true now:

Tomorrow, both children graduate – Whit from sixth grade and Grace from eighth. At the school they’ve both been at since they were four, sixth grade and eighth grade are inflection points (the other is twelfth grade), so they each have graduation ceremonies. As you can probably imagine, I’m perpetually in tears these days and expecting an emotional day tomorrow. I did my last pickup at the gym. I packed the last lunch of my career as a mother. Etc. Etc. Etc. The lasts are coming thick and fast right now, and I’ll be honest, I’m trying to catch my breath and keep my balance.

This time of year always feels this way to me, limned with endings and loss despite its perch at the moment that my favorite season, summer, bursts into reality. I have written a lot about how this season of ends and beginnings feels for me. This year the complicated emotions are stronger than ever, with both children moving on (and in particular with Grace leaving for boarding school).

There’s something about the word, commencement, that captures all the conflicting emotions that are bound up in this moment. This moment every year, but perhaps, most of all, this moment in my life right now. Grace and Whit are, as I’ve written before, taking flight. I’m so proud I ache, but I’m also keenly aware of something big coming to an end.

So much radiance. So much sorrow. Inextricably wound together, twisted through every hour. Tomorrow, we commence. Onto the next thing, into the onrush of time, keenly aware of all that’s glorious and all that’s lost, always, at the same time.

***

Years ago I described the fleeting nature of time as the black hole around which my whole life circles, the wound that is at the center of all my writing, all my feeling, all my living. Certainly that seems to be borne out by what it is I write, over and over again. At the very midpoint of the year, the sunniest, longest days, I find myself battling an encroaching sorrow, an irrefutable sense of farewell. The proof is in my archives.

The world bursts into riotous bloom, almost as though it is showing off its fecundity. The days are swollen and beautiful, the air soft, the flowering trees spectacular. The children gleefully wear shorts to school, the sidewalks are dusted with pollen and petals, and we round the curve of another year. We start counting down school days, we say goodbye to beloved babysitters who are graduating from college, and I find myself blinking back tears.

Every year, I’m pulled into the whitewater between beginnings and endings that defines this season. I can barely breathe.

It’s all captured in the event that so many of us attend, year after year, at this time: commencement. It was my own commencements that marked this season, for years: from grade school, high school, college, graduate school. And then there was a time when, though I wasn’t personally attending commencements, I felt their presence, sensed the ebb and flow of the school year. It seems that my spirit and the very blood in my veins will always throb to the cadence of the school year. And now it is my children who commence, who close a year and begin another, wearing too-long hair and legs, vaguely tentative smiles, and white.

Commencement. Isn’t this word simply a more elegant way of describing what might be the central preoccupation of my life? You end and you begin, on the very same day. You let go of something and while that I-am-falling feeling never goes away, you trust that you’ll land. And you do, on the doorstep of another beginning, a new phase, the next thing.

No matter how many times I’m caught from the freefall of farewell by a new beginning, though, I still feel the loss. As much as my head understands that endings are required for them to be beginnings, my heart mourns what is ending. That a seam of sorrow runs through my every experience is undeniable; it may sound depressing, but I genuinely don’t experience it that way. It is just part of how I’m wired, and it’s never closer to the surface than right now, as this school year winds down, as we celebrate the beginning that’s wrapped in the end, as we commence.

Much is Taken, Much Abides

September 30, 2019

I wrote a piece a while ago that I shared on Medium last week. It’s probably pretty redundant for anyone who has been reading here – about Dad, poetry, Tennyson, Whit, loss, memory. One of the reasons I go back and forth on continuing to write here is this sense that I’ve become a totally boring, repetitive writer. Still, it’s a piece that means a huge amount to me, so I’m proud to see it up. You can read the piece here, and the first part of it is below. To add color to the particularly complicated and rigorous last year, Liz, who read at Dad’s funeral (one of two non-family members to do so) recently died herself. I will attend her funeral next weekend. Losses everywhere. Much is taken. Much abides.

***

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Dad closed the heavy Norton anthology and slid it onto the table in front of him, before picking up his wine glass and leaning back against the house and looking at me in the candlelight. It drove Mum crazy when he leaned back on the chair’s rear legs like that. She was always afraid he’d either fall or break the chair, maybe both.

I could hear the late-summer crickets chirping in the deep darkness and thought once again of how early sunset came these days, as the world rushed towards Labor Day and the fall. Dad and I were on the back porch in Marion, candles burning down, the napkins of the rest of the family crumpled on the table. Mum and Hilary had gone inside a while ago, and Dad had pulled the old Norton out of the front room bookshelf to read. He loved Tennyson and so do I. I was going back to my senior year in college next week, and I had almost chosen to write my thesis this upcoming year on Tennyson. Ultimately I’d chosen to write about motherhood and poetry in the lives and work of three twentieth-century poets, but Dad and I had talked a lot about Tennyson as I made that decision. He’d read me Crossing the Bar (the poem he’d always told us he wanted read at his funeral and which his own father had also adored) and Ulysses more times than I can count, and others, too: he loved High Flight and had recently re-read the Inferno for fun and wanted to talk constantly about the incredible imagery of light and dark in Paradise Lost. “Read” is not really accurate, actually, since he recited long parts of these poems by heart.

As I grew up and got married and had children of my own, Dad and I kept talking, about life and the world and poetry, too. I didn’t really understand the meaning of those Tennyson poems, or, perhaps, of those candlelit evenings where we sat in the dusk with poetry and late summer rising around us, until the fall of 2017. My husband Matt’s father died in late September of that year and two months and three days later my father died, too. Matt’s dad’s death was quick but expected; he’d been battling a variety of health issues stemming from a successful heart transplant in 2002 for years. Dad’s death was sudden and shocking; he died of a presumed heart attack three days after hosting Thanksgiving for 30, after a run and before he was coming over to our house for dinner.

Dad’s December funeral was surreal until I heard the familiar words read by one of my family’s oldest friends,, Liz. She stood on the podium and began to read.

“Sunset and evening bell, and one clear call for me,,” I looked up from my front-row seat and felt as though I was floating in the rafters, maybe above the driftwood cross that hung from the ceiling, watching myself.

Then I could hear my father’s voice, which felt as much a part of me as my own heartbeat. “But such a tide as moving seems asleep,” Dad recited Tennyson’s words by heart.

Liz stepped down from the pulpit and returned to her seat. The silence in the church was heavy, punctuated by sniffling and rustling. I heard someone sob quietly in the back of the room. The last time I’d been in this church with Dad was just over 17 years ago, when he walked me down the aisle towards the man who would become my husband a few minutes later.

Annus mirabilis

October 2, 2018

I’ve had the expression “annus mirabilis” running through my head lately and finally I turned to Google to discover its actual full meaning. Many people have called 2017 an “annus horribilis” for our family and in some ways it definitely was. But in fact “annus mirabilis” feels more accurate to me.

An annus mirabilis is “a Latin phrase that means “wonderful year”, “miraculous year” or “amazing year”. This term was originally used to refer to the year 1666, and today is used to refer to several years during which events of major importance are remembered.”

And you know what? 2017 definitely wasn’t wonderful, but it was amazing, in the I-was-amazed meaning of the word. In the meaning that I read in Jeanne McCulloch’s All Happy Families: “Amazed: to fill with wonder. Also: to bewilder.” Our entire lives changed in 2017. The year was full of wonder and bewilderment, in equal measure, I think. The changes can be captured in twos:

Two new schools
Two new jobs
Two fathers (and grandfathers) gone

One of those new schools was a boarding school, so our family life took on a new shape. One of those new jobs was a company that I helped to found, which has been an incredibly marvelous experience (and I’m so grateful that both Dad and John knew of that founding before they died).

Events of major importance? No question. 2018 has been a year of fewer changes but no less emotion, which surprised me, truthfully. But when I step back and think about it, I guess it makes sense that there would be some settling in, some aftershocks, and so I think that’s what has been going on. The degree of both wonder and bewilderment that 2017 held were never going to resolve themselves neatly overnight when we stepped into 2018, a transition I recall as being fraught with emotion, even as it feels like a decade ago.

I am trying to give myself space and gentleness as I acknowledge that our annus mirabilis is taking longer to process than I anticipated. Intellectually that makes sense. Emotionally I want to be “me” again. But even as I write that, I realize the futility of that wish: the me that began 2017 is gone, and I’m forever changed by the events of that year. Wonder and bewilderment. Annus mirabilis. All these words resonate somewhere deep inside me, and I grab onto each. But on some level I still feel lost in an inchoate place.

But I can’t stop thinking of annus mirabilis. Maybe that’s my book. It’s certainly where I am right now, and at least for a while still to come, I imagine.

How We Thought It Would Be

September 25, 2018September 25, 2018

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that much of our suffering in this life is due to our attachment to how we thought it was going to be. Put another way, I believe that one of the tasks of our lives is letting go of how we thought it would be. What did you think, that isn’t so? I’ll go first.

I thought my father would live to be in his nineties

I thought my daughter would go to my alma mater for high school

I thought I’d have published a book or two by now

I could keep going. For a long time. That’s not really news to me. What’s news is that when I think about it, I realize that I don’t dwell on these things. Well, maybe my dad. That one I still rue daily. But maybe I’m growing into maturity, because at this point I can recognize these truths I thought would describe my life without pain. How did that happen? I’m not sure. I wish I could pinpoint when the “what…ifs” stopped, but I can’t. I do know that it’s releasing them that’s allowed a whole-hearted embrace of the reality of my life.

By letting go of our attachment to what might have been, we can embrace what is. I know that is true. There’s no question that there’s a list equally as long as the things I thought would be true, and that’s the list of things that I didn’t expect. Some of those surprises have been pleasant, some dazzling, and some heartbreaking. But they represent the reality of life right now, and there’s room for them because of all the things that aren’t as I hoped, planned, or imagined. So the task, I’m quite sure, is to let go of the latter so that we might let in the former. It feels like this is all going to happen anyway – what isn’t as we thought it would be isn’t, and what is, is – so the only question is how gracefully we can allow these things to be.

Easier said than done, but I seem to be moving in that direction. Maybe the letting go comes with circumstances out of my control showing me how little the fretting and holding on helps me. Maybe it’s just an inevitable development with middle age. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s nothing I’ve done, and no comment on me in particular. But I’m grateful for it.

What did you think would be, that isn’t? And do you have any lessons about letting go of those things?

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