I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder
A mantra 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.
there is still so much here I do not understand
Toward the Solstice, 1977
The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to address
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhood,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.
(Adrienne Rich)
Earthquake
sunset over the reception after my father’s funeral, 12/3/17, photo by Grace
How shall the heart be reconciled/ to its feast of losses?
I’ve written about these lines, from Stanley Kunitz’s beautiful poem The Layers, many times. That fact makes me shake my head now … I never knew what loss meant, until these weeks, so it feels naive that I was writing about it at all. Maybe I was getting ready, in some strange way. I do think all our experiences add up to where we are, and in retrospect things make sense, so perhaps the circling around impermanence, and loss, that I’ve been doing here and in other writing, has been some kind of preparation or prescience.
In October, I shared a photograph on Instagram with a caption about how September had felt like an earthquake for our family. I almost worry about sharing this piece today, for fears of what tremors lie ahead. Am I jinxing us? Every time I think the earth has stopped shaking, there’s another rupture ahead. This one, my father’s death last month, is for sure the largest for me. By a mile.
Dad was the center of my world, his is the voice I hear in my head, he was my first and most essential advisor, counselor, and sometime critic. My mother, who I’ve described as “like the sun, surrounded by orbiting planets,” is an integral part of my daily life, much more than Dad ever was. But his influence in some ways loomed even larger, and until the day I die it will be his approval and opinion I seek above all others. His loss is immense, and to come on the heels of of my father-in-law’s death feels almost inconceivable.
I designed our holiday cards before Matt’s dad died. They feature a photo that’s not great of us four, notable because we are in motion. The whole card was about things being blurry due to change: 2 new jobs, 2 new schools, half of our nest now empty. At Labor Day, this had already been a huge year of transition and change. And then came September and November, and back to back deaths, and suddenly we are deep in grief on top of breathless from all that’s new. It occurred to me only as I wrote this post that it’s these two men’s names that I have, one my middle, maiden, and professional, and one my married and legal. I’m proud to have both of their names, and grateful for the enormous ways that both shaped me.
I’m struggling to catch my breath and to find my footing. I keep thinking of Kunitz’s lines, and about how this autumn has truly been a feast of losses. There are two other lines of writing I’m thinking of a lot these days. One is Mary Oliver: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” Dad gave me a box of darkness, in his death, yes, but also, I’m beginning to understand, in his life. The seam of sorrow that ran through his heart I recognize in myself. He and I talked about light and darkness often, but it’s one conversation I remember particularly vividly. He quoted a passage from Paradise Lost from memory. He was comfortable with life’s poles, and knew the way that one enriched the other. I have written about this a lot, and I suspect it’s his single most enduring gift to me.
The other passage I keep hearing in my head is Khalil Gibran: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being,the more joy you can contain.” I have long believed this to be true, and I already knew I was capable of deep sorrow and deep joy both. These last few months, however, have shown me new depths of loss and sadness, and I suspect it will take a while for me to experience the commensurate joy.
I really do feel like I’m standing in the rubble of an earthquake, and what’s new since the last time I mentioned an earthquake in October is my fear there are more startling, unanticipated shocks coming. Maybe there are. I can’t focus on that now. What I do know is that I’m changed forever after this fall, and I’ll never stop missing my father-in-law or my father. I am still deep in mourning, but even from this dark, dark place I feel undeniable gratitude that both of them were in my life. “Though much is taken, much abides.” Indeed.
to notice each thing
We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach
but we notice each other’s beautiful face
and complex nature
so that creation need not play to an empty house.
~ Annie Dillard
Thank you, First Sip, for reminding me of passages I love that I needed to read right at that moment.