A Design So Vast

Alone

October 15, 2019

“I ain’t lonely, but I spend a lot of time alone.”

Matt told me a while ago that this, the first line of Kenny Chesney’s Better Boat, made him think of me (aside: we are all country music, all the time at our house). I haven’t been able to stop thinking about those words. There’s such truth in them. I don’t think I actually spend a lot of time alone, but it’s definitely true that it is often my preference to be alone. And I am never lonely when I do that. In fact, when I do feel lonely, I have learned that it’s always when I’m surrounded by people with whom I don’t feel a connection. I am literally never lonely when alone.

Sometimes people are surprised that I’m a very strong introvert. There’s never been any ambiguity about my Myers-Briggs type: INFJ. And I’m getting more I, not less, as I get older. Reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking was definitely eye-opening for me. It explained two important things to me: first, how much I’ve been compensating in my professional life, where extroversion is valued, and second, why I never felt fully comfortable at Harvard Business School (not that many I’s there!).

The compensating explains a lot about how much I crave being alone when I’m not working. I truly love the people I work with, and I truly love my work, but it definitely demands interaction, attention, and engagement. I am not surprised, therefore, that when I’m not working what I want is to be alone. I want to read, or I want to drive in silence (this is a particular detail of my life that people find weird), or I want to just be by myself. One of my friends from college recently bemoaned how she was getting plans mixed up because she just wanted to say yes to everything. I quipped that that’s where we were different, because I just wanted to say no to everything. And I do.

Sometimes I worry I’m becoming such a curmudgeon in my old age. But then I remember that for 10+ hours a day I am interacting and somewhat intensely. It makes sense that for me, I need to decompress in the day’s other hours. It’s perhaps unfortunate for the two E’s who live with me (though my 14 year old son is very happy to have me in a room by myself and not talking to him!), but it’s just the way it is. I think they get it. Hopefully they do!

As I get older I am less and less inclined to override my instincts, which tell me to stay quiet, to stay alone, to breathe deeply, to look at the sunset, to build up my strength for the next day. I guess we all just become more ourselves as we age. And for me, that self likes to be alone.

Things I Love Lately

October 8, 2019

Big Little Losses – Rebecca Pacheco’s beautiful piece about dropping her daughter off at preschool for the first time literally rang every bell for me. Those preschool days are long ago, but the feelings I had there are still a part of my daily life. “I see it all before me, and there’s so much I can’t see, and it’s all too much.” Yes. Yes. Daily.

The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – I devoured Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The book is gripping and I couldn’t put it down. Wonderful storytelling and I found it more empowering and hopeful than Handmaid’s, which remains eerie and unnerving in its prescience.

The Beauty of the Ordinary – Pico Iyer’s piece is a beautiful evocation of the ways that fall reminds us that life is beautiful precisely because of how ephemeral it is: “…but as we pass into a deeper season in our lives, we come to see that the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last.”

Unbelievable – I watched this whole series in a weekend and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Powerfully told and alarming at the same time.

What are you reading, thinking about, watching, and loving lately?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly. You can find them all here.

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.

PTSD

September 24, 2019

This year, as August began to pinwheel toward autumn, I was aware of a low throb of dread in my stomach. It was almost subconscious, but it was there. I then entered a stressful sprint at work which is now ebbing, and the dread is back. It’s taken me a while to realize that I have some deep-seated PTSD about the fall, since for three years the autumn months brought loss and fear.

In 2016 Matt sustained a serious injury that necessitated surgery and a difficult recovery. I shared on Instagram an image of three years ago late August when I was thinking about how that day marked the beginning of a difficult season. In 2017, both of our fathers died and Grace left for boarding school. Saturday marks two years since Matt’s dad died. His death, while knew he was sick and ailing, was very quick at the end. Of course only two months later my father redefined what a “quick” death was. In 2018, we faced a significant health scare. It was a scary fall but everything is ok, and I apologize for the vagueness but want to keep it private. Everyone is healthy.

When I write that down, I guess it doesn’t surprise me that I have some powerful anxiety about this time of year, that something deep and inchoate echoes inside of me. Truthfully, it’s as much about loss of control than it is about loss in general. More than anything, these last years have shown me in vivid, visceral terms that I am not in charge of the big picture of life’s unfolding. They’ve also reminded me that all we have is today.

I think all the time of Stanley Kunitz’s question, “How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?” That these words are dear to me is not new since my personal feast of losses in the last years. I wrote about them in 2011. But I think I understand this question in a new way now, and my heart is growing reconciled. Slowly, imperfectly, absolutely. But I do feel that there’s a peace settling into the space between the new holes in my life.

To me, that reconciliation is just about acceptance. And some of this, I’m sure, are standard midlife learnings. Nothing that happened in our family in the last 3 years is extraordinary; it was just a little more than I expected in a short space of time. Everyone grapples with losses and fears. That’s life. I know that now. And even in the darkest seasons, there can be light, love, and laughter. I’ve learned that too.

Onward. There’s nothing I can do but honor the quaking inside, which at least I think I understand now. This morning there was a ladybug on my arm, which I’m taking as a good luck omen (did I make that up?)? Maybe this fall will unfold without any trauma. I can hope.

Things I Love Lately: summer reading edition

September 17, 2019

I read some great books this summer! I’d love to hear what you enjoyed as well.

The Most Fun We Ever Had – Claire Lombardo’s novel was engrossing, entertaining, and un-put-downable. I loved it.

On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard – I’m lucky enough to have met Jen Pastiloff and to already love her work; her memoir was even more moving, wise, funny, and honest than I expected. Gorgeous.

City of Girls – I adored Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and devoured it. I can’t get Vivian’s voice out of my head.

The Expectations – Alexander Tilney’s book is sharply-observed and familiar. Entertaining (though I did catch one reference to a girls’ athletic contest against Belmont Hill School, which is a boys’ school!)

Where the Crawdads Sing – I loved the first half of Delia Owens’s book (it reminded me of two books I adore: Island of the Blue Dolphins by O’Dell and My Absolute Darling by Tallent) and the second half a bit less.

The Guest Book – In an altogether different way, Sarah Blake’s book was about deeply familiar world as well. It touches on complicated themes and explored the ways that choices in our past echo into our present. Really good.

The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides. Page turner.

Normal People – Sally Rooney’s novel came incredibly highly recommended and it lived up to it. Wry, funny, wise.

The Last Romantics – I really enjoyed Tara Conklin’s novel, with its themes of love, poetry, history, the presence of the past.

Rich and Pretty – Rumaan Alam’s novel is an incisive, keenly-observed examination of female friendship.

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi’s book, which is Grace’s All School Read this summer, was my first book of the summer and my favorite.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss – Margaret Renkl’s book was the last book I read this summer. I can’t remember who told me I had to read it, and I wish I could because they were absolutely right. A mix of Annie Dillard ad Mary Oliver. Beautiful.

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