Hawaii

We went to Hawaii over Kauai for spring break.  For obvious reasons, we did not plan our trip during the fall as we usually do.  For other obvious reasons, I did not have the usual lots of planning/air BNB/adventure in me.  I am sure we will go back to Europe, but for now the whole continent reminds me of my father in a way I can’t sign up for.  So we went to Hawaii.  None of the four of us has ever been, and truthfully, I’ve always wanted to go.  We chose Kauai because we’d heard it was the quietest, most rural island, and that sounded about right.  The trip there was long (booking six weeks before travel, on miles, means you don’t get the most direct or convenient flights).

We arrived in Kauai on Tuesday afternoon.  It was gray and spitting rain, but we were thrilled to be there and the children ran right to the ocean.  On Wednesday morning we woke up to torrential rain.  Our phones vibrated with flash flood alerts.  The concierge at the hotel said they hadn’t had rain like this in years.  The forecast was for three days of torrential rain and maybe a peek of clearing on Saturday (we were leaving Kauai on Sunday morning). I had a moment of: can’t we get a break?  we just wanted something to be smooth and relaxing.  But I tried to shake off my grumpiness, and we headed to where we always go when we don’t quite know what to do: the bookstore.

The western-most bookstore in the United States, to boot!  Talk Story sells both new and used books, and the smell when we walked in reminded so much of my father I was almost brought to my knees.  Everybody bought a book, and we found a cute place for coffee and acai bowls, and I was glad we brought raincoats.  I woke up the next morning and lay in bed, listening to a constant whirring sound.  “Is that more rain?” I asked Matt, distressed but resigned.

“No, Linds, it’s the air conditioner.”  He replied.  I jumped up and pulled the curtains, and saw that it was gray but not actively raining.  Delightful.  We spent most of the day at the ocean, and the kids took a surfing lesson. The sun actually came out.

My favorite experience of our Hawaii trip was the three afternoons we spent floating in the water together.  The waves were big and rough, and we let them toss us around.  Grace, Whit and I had a long conversation about how when the waves get really big the best bet is to drive through them. The only way out is through.  True in life, too.  I told both children about how when I was in labor with them, I envisioned waves, and I thought about this particular adage: through.  Through to the other side.  Lean into the wave.  It strikes me that while my childbirths were long ago now, that advice is still good today.

Another day, we went zip-lining.  The landscape was spectacular, and all four of us tried it in the “flying” position as well.  Grace and Whit were the most fearless and also ziplined upside down. The scariest part of any zipline, we all agreed, was the leaning into thin air from the platform.  It’s the jumping off.  This is true, also, of life itself.

We also went for a beautiful hike along a ridge by the ocean.  We could see humpback whales leaping and spouting in the ocean.  The landscape was rocky and foreign and gorgeous.

We saw sunsets (below) and sunrises (below that).  By “we” I mean Matt and me, as Grace and Whit slept long and hard.  Kauai was as magical as we had been told.  The island felt relaxed and joyful, and strange coincidences made us both feel our fathers near.  A song that reminds Matt of his father was playing seemingly everywhere we went.  And we saw dozen of KCM (my father’s initials) license plates in Kauai.  Yes, all the plates there start with K.  But still.  Everywhere I turned I kept seeing KCM.

The first couple of days were rocky, and we had some family arguments I’m not proud of.  But once we found our groove, it was lovely: we ate well and slept well and rested well and felt the sun on our faces.  The difficult first days reminded me that all four of us have, individually and collectively, been through a lot these last several months. We are still limping. The losses, and their aftermaths, are still fresh. I think forgiveness and patience is called for.

Forgiveness.  Patience.  Two things I’m not good at, giving or receiving.  But the waves are big, and the only way through is to lean into them, with forgiveness and patience.  And some deep breaths.

unexpected wonders

Unexpected wonders happen,
not on schedule,
or when you expect or
want them to happen,
but if you keep hanging around,
they do happen.

~ Wendell Berry

Another beauty from First Sip.

I’m going to be off for the next two weeks for spring break with Matt, Grace, and Whit.  Back soon!

Angels

I’ve written about how my father was both a physicist and a poet.  I’ve written about the tremendous richness involved in growing up in the space between his two worlds, between the logical and rational and the inexpressible and infinite. He was a man with a PhD in Engineering who read (and annotated, in fountain pen) the Bible and the collected works of John Milton. This duality was expressed in many ways.  My sister Hilary, in her remarks at Dad’s memorial service, spoke about his bookshelves in Cambridge, which housed (and still do) books about World War II, America’s Cup boats, and dense historical tomes in German as well as a collection of gilded angels. That paradox, which defined my father, is the space between, and it’s where Dad lived.

Dad loved angels.  I don’t know that he fully believed they were real, in the sense that there were babies floating in the ether, but he loved them with an affection that I have to think correlates with some kind of trusting.  I guess it’s no surprise then, that I feel his presence in the strangest moments now that he’s gone.

A few weeks ago, on a Saturday afternoon, Mum asked me if Matt and I could change some lightbulbs in her house.  Of course, I said, just tell me where.  The light in Dad’s office and the light in the front hall both needed new bulbs.  I made a mental note. The next day, I picked her up early to go to the airport.  As we drove to Logan, she turned to me, “Oh, I forgot – did you change the light in Dad’s office yesterday?”

“No,” I said.  “We were going to do that sometime soon.”

“Well, it’s working now.”  She shook her head and looked out the front of the car.

Strange.

Then, that same week, I noticed one of Dad’s business cards in the passenger door well of one of our cars.  The business card was worn, like it had traveled in a wallet for a long time.  I am frequently a passenger in that car and I’ve never noticed the card there before that day. Dad had literally never been in that car.

Strange.

It’s not that different than the way Matt keeps hearing What a Wonderful World (his father’s favorite song, and played at the funeral) everywhere he goes. I choose to let these small coincidences (I’m a logical thinker on some level, too, and I recognize that these are likely random occurrences) reassure me, to see meaning in them, to feel my dad near.  I guess part of me has inherited my dad’s love of, and belief in, angels.

 

Memory pulls us forward

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory–there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.”

–Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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.