With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love

My mom would be chuckling right now, as I write yet another post on death and funerals and loss. When her own mother died, it was weeks and weeks of morose and moribund sermons from the pulpit that nearly drove her as crazy as the Oklahoma winds. But here we are go again. I am not sure what in the hell is going on in the universe, but it's been a shitty week for too many friends.

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For my dear L.T. Love you.

 

I have an image of my mother and her sister outside of the church in Beloit, Kansas, wrapped against the cold wind in fur coats, clutching each other as they followed their mother's casket down the path and into the hearse. They were both sobbing, their handsome, strong beauty crumpled from weeks of grief and pushing against the inevitable that a late-stage lung cancer diagnosis for a vibrant and remarkable woman brings. I don't remember much but that intimate moment, my grandmother's legacy stitched up in the space held by that embrace.

I can imagine that my mom felt the same push and pull that I did in those final days of my mother's own life, the real-time grief nearly impossible to process, the guilt-ridden wishing that this part would be over so that she would be free and so that we could move on to mourning her given that she already was a shadow of herself. The hardest thing to process was that she was never going to go back to the way she was, that it was reality, that it was over. And that's what we all mourned in real time, that space of anger and sad, that glimmer of her old self in between the days of losing her moment upon moment. The winding down was hard,  unfamiliar, not sudden like it had been with nearly every one before. And the winding down was slow and then fast and then too slow in its fastness, which doesn't likely make sense unless you've lived through that interminable time of ending.

There are a million things I want to tell my friend tonight, my girl L.T. who texted me in the wee NYC hours to tell me that she had just today lost her mother, an extraordinary woman with fire and depth and sparking adventure and deep love and good strength, so much good strength, for her family. 

I want to tell her of the things that I learned from Marie Howe about the spaces that are made by loss in which I learned about myself, so many years after she had gone: 

     I had no idea that the gate I would step through

     to finally enter this world

     would be the space my [mother's] body made.

And how I wish now that I had written a jar full of memories to keep for myself, a scrap for each, that I could pluck out and savor, some fit for my kids, many only fit for the curious adults within belly-laughing distance. And that I wish I had recorded those stories told in the numb days after when we all walked around with dead eyes, tracing the thin, worn path we had too many times before, knowing that it would be five days before the smoke cleared and we could begin to see what damage had been done.

And that in the blackened landscape, shoots peek through and life comes back to itself.

And that letting those shoots grow is important. Really important. Live.

And that good music helps. Often on repeat.

And saving that thing that smells like her in the back of the closet. That's the best. Do it.

And how five years, five years after she left, I can still be knocked nearly breathless by a poem from May Sarton that comes across my desktop without warning, kismet in far too many ways:

An Observation

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

So, sweet friend, so many things and nothing all at once. I wish there was more space to tell you right now, right in this time where everything and nothing is there. It's too much, all of it, and there is so much more to write.

Love you, L.T. 

Gravity pulls us back

My mother and I had a sticky relationship. Two people could not have been more different in many ways, our political beliefs unbending, our ways of arguing about things loud and confrontational. This was years in the making, journeying through high school and college and beyond up until the weeks preceding her death when the soft reality of a short time gave us the space to not so much talk things through, but just to be attentive to the love that we had for each other, the love that underwrote all these things.

People that know about my hard relationship with my mom always wonder, sometimes aloud, sometimes with their eyes, about how we wrapped things up. I shuffle my feet a bit, uncomfortable with the question that implies what it does, that we wasted many years in disharmony only to be robbed of a future together.

But in these past few years that my mother has been gone, I have realized that our relationship was what it was and would have continued to be so until something catastrophic happened that would have changed everything. And then likely changed nothing.

Because behavior in relationships is incredibly difficult to change. The gravity of the well-worn path pulls us back to what we know and are accustomed to, even if it's not what we want in our heart of hearts. That pattern may be the inability to admit that we are wrong or the hurt at another freezing us out. It may be the lack of courage to have hard conversations, to say that we are sorry, operate on a different level and in a different behavior pattern than we had before. But it's just really hard. And it may not mean that we don't love the other person, it may mean that we just don't have the capacity to make that change. Changing behavior in relationships takes time and near constant attention. It takes intention and tending. False starts and failures chip away at the surface. Sometimes it feels safer not to even start. Sometimes the disappointment feels like more than we can bear.

And you can live the rest of your life sick to your stomach that this never happened, riddled with guilt that you squandered your time with something so precious as your mother's time in your life. You can let that eat away at you, blame yourself, wonder what you could have done. Or you can realize, as so many relationships in life, that it was what it was, mine the time that you had for the good, push past the regrets and move forward. You can take this realization into your relationships that are alive today, have expectations for people and for yourself, live according to what you need and how you need to be loved and to recognize your own role in how that all works out. Because that is what she would have wanted, honestly. I think she'd appreciate that most.

Grief is a Sneaky Thief

Sluggish from the cold and cranky from not eating, I bolstered myself for the inevitable acres of ugly shoes I would find on the other side of the department store door. I was looking for shoes for a trip the next day, my least favorite past time when "shoes" meant boring, flat, uneven-pavement-appropriate foot coverings that also had to work with suits. Bah.

The ugliness of the shoes did not disappoint. Laps and laps around tables of tricked out clogs and pilgrim-buckle flats was proving to be fruitless and frustrating until I heard the sound of laughter coming from a section of chairs. I looked over to see a grey-haired woman in her mid-60s walking away in a pair of shoes, her daughter near me with a half-laughing, half-exasperated look on her face.

"She can be so difficult with these things," the daughter smiled. I looked up again to see this woman, so like my mom with her jeans, her silver-top short hair, her sweater and vest, sparking eyes and great smile taking another lap to test out her selection. My breath caught and a lump swelled in my throat. "Your mom reminds me of my mom, actually," I said. "My mom's been gone for two years. She was a handful too." It was all I could do not to add "Treasure these moments because you never know what is going to happen next."


The jealousy I felt for that daughter in that moment was completely overwhelming. I walked away, trying to fight back the tears and compose myself, all of the angry thoughts about my mom dying too early rushing into my mind and heart. I wanted to run out the door, leave so I could get rid of the visual as quickly as possible. Instead I circled back around and struck up a conversation.


True to my initial perception, this woman was every bit as spunky and fun as my own mom. We complained about the ugly shoes, talked about how people don't dress for work any more, giggled about how shoe shopping in such conditions nearly drove one to drink and agreed that a drink this early in the day would surely be fodder for the gossipy nature of our smallish town. And then, they picked up and walked out with gracious goodbyes, a twosome together on to their next stop.

It was, for a moment, a strange sort of contact high. In a parallel space, my brain kept saying "It's like I can be with my mom, but not really. This is like being with my mom just for a minute. Is this good, or is this bad?", both taking me out of the moment and drawing me deeper into it. I bought my ugly shoes and stumbled back out into the rain, a bit fogged as to what had just happened.

I sat with these mixed emotions all night, trying to talk myself through the roller coaster of feelings I was having. It was an unusual night, my family away and friends that I usually turn to not available. For the first time in a long time, I had to sit with it on my own and deal, just deal, with my feelings and sadness. I just had to be with it.

Grief is a tricky thing. Sometimes it's a rubber ball let off in a room, zinging and flying all around without any sense of continuum or trajectory. Sometimes it's a sneaky thief that catches you unawares and tries to take something from you. Most times, you have to fight the urge to run away from it, instead standing with pain borne of loss, but borne of good memories and deep longing. Standing with grief, leveling with it, exposing yourself to it is the journey of anyone who has suffered loss. It's the path to recovering from that suffering. It's the way to begin to heal and move forward. It's a bitch of a job.

I like to imagine that at some point in a department store in Oklahoma City many years ago, someone else had the experience I did yesterday with a woman and her three daughters and the laughter and love that showed through. I like to imagine that the woman and her daughter I met yesterday somehow knew that they made a difference in my afternoon. I like to imagine that we provide spaces for each other in this reconnecting to things we have lost along the way. I like to imagine my mom would have found a certain beauty in this story.

What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye

Today I smell like dirt and sweaty-ness and deliberation. My feet hurt from standing too long looking at shades of my childhood spread out on tables in my aunt's new home while my lungs cough up dust from brown-filmed boxes kept in basements too long.

My sisters and I are wrapping up the final stages of the Great Dividing of Things, a summer's worth of sorting and selecting from my mother, grandmother and aunt's possessions that will come to reside in our own homes. The Great Dividing has been intense, not because we have fought or wrung our hands over these things. In contrast, we three have managed to be loving and thoughtful of each other in our system, only wincing once or twice at losing a much-loved item to another.

No, the Great Dividing has been intense because we are women who carry so much of who we knew in the things we can touch and feel. Grandma's glassware reminds me of strawberries and cream breakfasts on early morning wakings in her beautiful home. My mother's shotgun, a favorite bronze statue, the bold charcoal strokes of a favorite auntie's talented hand: all comfortable reminders of a home that will no longer be here for us in its present form. Often simple things become exceptionally beautiful for the story behind it...a sweet Victorian biscuit holder becomes even more cool knowing that Dad and Aunt Pat bought it while in Europe together and a salt and pepper shaker set becomes more valuable when it was brought from the Old World by people we never knew but who in some way relate to our present being. It's a struggle not to make everything meaningful, to not drag too much forward for the sake of holding on to people who have left too soon and to places that are no longer your own.

And through this process, I have begun to realize just how important this essential nature of things is for me. A week ago I began to re-read a copy of The Bone People, underlined and dog-eared by my 20-something self that reminded me of the sometimes-lost but fundamentally strong woman I had been then. I wear Mala beads made by my gorgeous friend Molly and am soothed by their smoothness and her power during a stressful meeting. I have my own ritual of rereading a new copy of my favorite book before I give it to a friend just to imprint my own feelings, energy and intention in its pages.  There are things that are in every way precious to me because of the thought or intention with which they were created or loved or given to me. In rough times, these are the glue, the touchstones, the cairns on the journey.

It's the feel, the smell, the thought, the history of person's imprint on an object that makes it special. It's holding something that's been held by the person you love. It's the essence of the person connected to you peering through, the heartstrings that it tugs, the feeling of knowing yourself there that it provides.

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Rifling through my closet, I reached back to find an old sweater of my mother's that I'd brought home after she died. She'd been gone for over a year but her warm, achingly familiar scent still remained mixed in the soft fibers as I buried my nose deep and drew in her memory. "Mijo!" I called to David, "come here". Without a word, I held out the sweater for him to smell. Drawing back, eyes shining and face flooded with memories, he smiled and said "Grandma Suz." Oh, sweet boy, that we can hold on to that, that we can, that we can, that we can.

Reflections on My Mom at 40

She seemed so tall and beautiful, long dark hair and big brown eyes. We were at our home in Tucson, Arizona and my dad was all atwitter, but trying to keep it on the down low...we were having a surprise party for Mom! A party at Casa Molina, my mom's favorite restaurant. She knew something was up when we four got dressed without complaining and waited quietly to go to dinner. I wish I had a copy of the picture of my sisters, brother and I all dressed up. We were so excited, proud of our Mom, ready to eat the delicious cheese crisps that Casa Molina served (hey, we were kids, food mattered).

Casa Molina was packed with so many friends, many of whom who had come from out of town to celebrate with my mom. What a party it was! Drinks flowed (of course). Frank Borelli brought a rubber chicken to remind Mom of a trip they'd taken to the Dominican Republic. I can see cute Peggy Babby smiling. But mostly,  I remember her beaming, my beautiful Mom, so happy to be enveloped in friends and family, dark eyes shining and that wonderful laugh that could light up a room.

Today I am thinking of my Mom at 40, what a youthful and vibrant woman she was, even though she had four small children and a lot going on. My heart hurts a bit thinking of all that lies ahead for her in the near future and how she would suffer loss and sadness with grace and determination.  I am thinking of what an amazing rock she was during incredibly difficult times not only for our family, but also for anyone who had lost a husband or a child, needed advice, wanted to talk. I am thinking of her friends (her sister, her Tucson buddies, her sorority sisters, her neighborhood friends) who became a lifetime source of laughter and strength. But I am mostly thinking of her legacy, what an amazing woman and example she was to my sisters and myself.

Here's to you, Mom. We miss you terribly. Thanks for showing us the way.