oh this is hard

the hard roads are the ones worth choosing

I love David Brooks’ columns for the New York Times.  He reminds me of my father, almost always.  And never more than in his most recent piece, The Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible.

Dad and I discussed many things, ad nauseum, throughout his life.  Our last conversation, on Thanksgiving 2017, was about books.  Mostly I listened to him – there was an awful lot to learn from my father, who remains the most intelligent and interesting person I’ve ever met.  The central point of conflict, if we had one, was Dad’s repeated exhortation that I find my passion.  I simply didn’t have a central animating passion in my life, and this flummoxed him.

Dad, who had a master’s on Physics, a PhD in engineering, and made his profession in consulting, had a clear passion.  It was Europe: its history, its culture, its religion, its art.  One of the most powerful experiences of my life was in Europe with Dad, when we descended to the bottom level of Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and I found myself moved by something powerful, inchoate, inexpressible.  I stood in the basement of the Basilica, crying, unable to say what had grabbed me.  I’ve never forgotten that moment, but still, I was unable to translate that feeling into a response to the question of “what’s your passion” that Dad was forever asking me.

Brooks discusses the development of a passion, the kind of fervent love of something beyond ourselves that drives a life. He unpacks something I have personally struggled with: so much discussion of the “big” topics (in this case, passion, and in mine, memory, time, maturation, parenting) feels general and in that, generic.  Brooks is interested in the specifics, as am I.  He writes compellingly about how “…the process starts in mystery. Like falling in love, these ignition moments happen at the deepest layer of our unconsciousness,” and then discusses how the calling or vocation grows through curiosity and exposure.  I thought of Dad going to Germany on a Fulbright and then seeking out experiences in Europe (of which I was the happy beneficiary).

Eventually the craftsman loves the process, not just the product.  I think often of the Chris Stapleton line that always, viscerally, reminds me of dad: “the hard roads are the ones worth choosing.”  Dad believed in his marrow in the value of hard work and challenge, and I’ve internalized that entirely.  Carol Dweck’s assertion reminds me of Dad: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

Oh, Dad.  Thank you for showing me by example what it is to love something outside of yourself, even if it’s not what you do to make your living.  Thank you for demonstrating the value of a rich and manifold life.  I’m still working on expressing what my passion is, but I think it’s something to do with words and expression of the universal.

You were my first and most influential teacher, on all fronts, and I think of you every hour of every day.  I’m not sure my “passion” will ever be as succinctly described as yours, but I am profoundly grateful for your example and guidance.

Seven years

Kirtland Chase Mead

6/9/34-11/26/24

Seven years without you, Dad. I’ve missed you every one of those days, but mostly what I feel now is what I felt literally the day you died: deep gratitude that you were my father. I remember being stunned by how immediately and viscerally I felt that. I’ll never be able to fully express all the things you taught me, as my first and most important teacher. You showed me the world. You taught me not to be afraid of adventure. You demonstrated the importance of hard work. You showed me the transformational power of art – music, painting, architecture, poetry. You preferred to be alone, with a book, above most things and I definitely inherited that. You were a true believer in meritocracy and listened carefully to most speakers. You loved working with others in a professional context – the number of people who spoke of you as a mentor and a teacher after your death was astonishing. You believed in the value of taking the hard road (that Chris Stapleton line will make me think of you every single time I hear it). You will forever be the smartest person I’ve ever known, with the widest range (PhD in engineering from MIT and published poet just scratches the surface) You had an extremely finely honed bullshit detector. You were the king of the one liner (“I’m sorry, you must be mistaking this for a democracy” and “two words separate us from the animals, and those words are may and well.”) you did not suffer fools but once someone impressed you, oh were you loyal. You believed I could do and be anything and I still feel your faith in me and I still am not sure you were right. Being Kirt Mead’s daughter is one of the identities I cherish the most fiercely (I can name the others I equally esteem: Matt’s wife, Grace and Whit’s mother, and co-founder of the firm where I work and that I adore). You’ve crossed the bar, Dad, and as you always wanted we read that Tennyson poem at your funeral (and then Whit surprised me by memorizing it for a poetry contest at school). I’ll never stop trying to make you proud. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you.

My father’s eulogy is here.

the Sunday of summer

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

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

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.

***