Showing posts with label stories for my kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories for my kids. Show all posts

Monday, August 17, 2015

Where it sits


My bit of my mother's remains are nestled between a thick stone slab and the outer box of my brother's coffin, slipped there in a smooth wooden box by a persistent funeral director and a kind person at the Archdiocese who knew that spot, one spot down, was meant for her and not her 15 year old son whose life ended too early. Mom had always joked that she wanted to be with Dad and Hunter in the end. "Just sprinkle me around the edges," she said. "Nobody will ever know."

But she's there with a banded plaque that spans the marble, a three-person plot made out of the two. She thought about the options before she died, knowing she would be cremated, noting that our family plot was still an option in her small hometown in Kansas, talking about Africa and the ranch and of Dad and Hunter. So we divided her ashes, each taking a small part of her great legacy, to trail her earthly being back to the places she loved.

It's a curious thing to think about where your physical being will be after you die. Our people have always been buried with family, generations of people in the same acreage in small towns on the plains, still married through early deaths and lost children and all manner of combinations of life that came next. You were with your people, that man you married or the parents you lived with or the generations of people who stayed within the same range of life that makes a family a community. You can trace that lineage through the fading marble, lives made visible and marked and remembered.

I've never given much thought to where I want my remains to be after I've gone, never had that discussion with anyone outside of my then-husband. In those days of early marriage, I'd always assumed that we'd be together somewhere, ashes mixed, such a romantic notion. Cremation offers you that, a pause button, a hilarious pause button in some ways, allowing you to believe that if you are the one and only, there is life ever after together somewhere.

But life circumstances change, and change radically, and a new life requires you to consider these things anew. And the question of permanence keeps coming to me, of marking space and time, of having a sacred spot for your children to visit if they need to. A place they never go but can if they want to. And this notion of dividing suddenly feels weird, like the human form is elastic, stretched to the corners of the earth.

Even as I write this, my body craves the weight of place, one place, consolidated in its being. Permanence. The intimacy of ritual. The process of saying goodbye. The feeling of knowing where someone is. Not having a plan makes me feel unmoored and anxious.

Where will I go? What is special to me? What will be most important to my kids, most of all? Where is my soul most in touch with this earth? When I think about that one question, a few images appear: The sunrise over the fields at headquarters in Oklahoma, the evening sky in Santa Fe, driving into downtown Seattle on a sunny day, the tiles of the Rome train station, the south China sea at sunrise from the deck of a ship...it suddenly feels as easy for my kids to travel to these places and snap pictures as to fling the grainy remains of this body into any space. I'm adding this to the list of things to leave behind, the ideas and thoughts and what it would mean to remain upon this earth long after I'm gone.

1,640 miles away, I can imagine sitting in the cool marble room tracing the name of my sweet brother who came into this life 40 years ago today. That's where this sits.







Thursday, April 9, 2015

Raising successful children

There is an inordinate amount of time spent at indoor soccer. Inordinate meaning days every week for watching practice or scrimmage-like games, days where you see the same kids playing pretty consistently. My kids enjoy soccer, but they are not the kind of players that are hungry for the ball, first across the line, driven by some inner force that zips them up the field. Nor am I the kind of parent that coaches (at least not all of the time) from the sideline, calling to their kid when they are standing at midfield to give them pointers or tell them how to run plays. Those are the achievement-oriented parents who are gunners themselves and have gunner kids...or don't. I've always wondered that. What's it like to be a non-gunner kid of a gunner parent?

And there is also a little something in me that wonders if the decision we made not to be pressure-focused and achievement-forward parents has meant that my kids step back a little too much, are less driven than they probably could/should be, less likely to get into the college of their dreams, less likely to be superstars who have climbed mountains and made a perfect grade on their SAT and started their own magazine by the time they are 12. It's also a privileged position that my kids don't have to think about these things the way other children do. I think about this a lot and I wonder, as most parents do, if we are doing the right thing not manning up our boy or perfecting our girl, if the lack of nightly math homework will really screw them in the end.

And then I have a day like the other day where I am driving down the road with my precious cargo when the topic of change comes up: big changes, small changes, god knows we've had our fill. D says "Well, this year I have been through A LOT of change." I smile, thinking "no doubt, dude", but I ask him what he means and the conversation goes something like this:

D:  Well, this year I have been through A LOT of change, Mom.
M:  Like what, bro? What kind of change are you thinking about?
D:  Um, Mom? BRACES?
M: Braces?
D: Yeah mom, BRACES. It's like the biggest thing that's ever happened to me. It's huge!
M: Well, it is, D. Your parents also got divorced and don't live together anymore and we are all moving to Rhode Island in a few months, but I hear you on the braces.
D: Well, the divorce was ok, though. I mean, I know it's hard for a lot of kids, but it has not been a big deal because you and Dad did such a good job with it. I meant to say that to you the other day. I just don't know what the big deal is about divorce.
M: (totally misty). Well, it is a big deal to a lot of kids, D, I'm glad you recognize that. And I'm glad you feel confident about how your dad and I have worked things out. I love you, Buddy. You're the best.
D: Thanks, Mom. (big smile, squeeze on shoulder)

It's those moments where I think that it's all going to be ok, that we are raising some emotionally kick ass kids who think a lot about things, whose strengths lie mostly in the way they relate to others, whose lives are held tight by people that love them, many of whom do not live under the same roof.

I'll always be worried about the path, in so many ways different than the one that I was given as a child. I'll always be worried that I haven't done the right thing as a parent, that love is not enough, that my kids will look back and wonder why I didn't push them harder or expect them to achieve more. I suspect they will, in any condition, know that I loved them, more than anything in the world. And their 43 year old selves will continue to feel that, whatever path in life they choose.


Sunday, October 5, 2014

Memory Kit

Gran's mushrooms cooking in butter
Mom's scent
The feel of a cheek on my cheek that lingers after a hug goodbye

My mind has been on this idea that Andy Warhol had about his cabinet of scents. He'd wear a scent for three months, then force himself to stop wearing it and would put it away in a special cabinet so when he smelled it again, he would remember things that happened in that three month period of time.

A little body warm and curled to mine
The view of Seattle coming over I-5 in the breaking light
Hunter waiving goodbye, basketball tucked under his arm

Three months. I can't imagine even being able to pinpoint things in such a short period of time. Another thing I've been pondering is this idea of memory, particularly sensorial memory and how it fades over time and what could be done to keep it. Smells, skinfeels, tastes, visual snapshots. Like the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" but collapsed into a life museum where you could sit and visit. It would be a blessing and a curse, something that would keep you so mired in the past, like an addict almost. This may be why memory fades, because our heart and mind cannot bear the rawness of the feelings that we experience in those moments. Or, perhaps, constant access to those moments would tend to erode the impact of the feeling of these experiences when they come upon us suddenly. On one end, it's a soft blanket. On the other, it's a meth addiction. You could have your own little kit of memories, a set up that would put you under, just for a minute.

The smell of scotch and water
The feel of Ava's warm, newly born body on my chest
Dew-kissed sunrise over rust-colored earth

And then there's the difference between the memory as it was and the memory as you remember it. Which would you want, if there was a difference? Would you include shitty memories like the vomity smell of saline that they used to clear your port or the smell of incense that made you nauseous at your brother's funeral? 

I think you would have to lock these away too, happen upon them from time to time like the disgusting buttered popcorn jelly bellies that sneak into your handful of yumminess. Then the kit becomes real, a record that reminds you that life is not meant to be lived in perfection, that you survive and make it through. Triggers, these are all triggers and for some it would be a nightmare while others it would help them heal and thrive. 

What memories would I put in my kit if I only had 25 spaces to fill? 10? 5? What experiences would I carry with me? What is essential to what has made me? What is worth remembering and what is worth letting go?

Friday, November 2, 2012

Gifts

The heat rolled in liquid waves off of I-35 as we blew down the highway, bandannas on our heads and beers in our hands. Wide as the road, Sharleen's gold '76 Cadillac convertible "Darcy" danced through the shimmer as we took Texas by storm that summer. We were in that middle space between highschool and what comes next in life, driving out the past few months of our lives with deep conversations and hundreds of miles back and forth between Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and beyond.

Sharleen was the sister I never knew I needed. Twins of different mothers, we had the kind of deep and intense relationship that highschool girls have when they are wrestled off to boarding school and left to their own devices. Even at 13, you could tell her soul was a thousand years old. Late nights in our dorm room, we would sit up talking through the stuff that carried heavily with us; sometimes painful and challenging relationships with our mothers, dads who were intense, loving and often difficult men, what it meant to escape to the big city from small towns and all their complexities. Sharleen was, in many ways, my first true love: the person who knew me best in life, the person I bared my heart and soul to, the person that I learned to fight with and work it out all the while knowing that she wouldn't haul ass no matter how bad it got. She was, and is to this day, the person I can trust most with my heart.

Because I write this blog as much to document a bit of my life for my children as I do to hammer stuff out, I am tempted to tell all of the Auntie Sharleen stories here so that they will some day read what this friendship has taught me. Like the time I picked up the mail to find the card I had sent back to her, returned out of anger and hurt over a rift that nearly broke our friendship, written with a note of explanation on the outside that made it impossible to not hear her message. How that act of persistence and love taught me that people who love you will ride through the rough shit and take the lead position, even if it's painful and sad, even if it means they have to be the one willing to prove what you are worth to them. That trust is borne of those acts.

Or the time I turned around in a crowded church at my brother's funeral and saw Sharleen and her entire family there, completely unannounced, having journeyed at great expense from different states just to stand with our family. That being strong for someone is sometimes quiet and deep and subtle. That solidarity means everything.

Or the many times we sat through death together, celebrated life together, flew to each other for advice and a steady hand even though months had passed between communications in our insane lives. That once built, a strong friendship transcends all other things and becomes a fortress, a port, a refuge, an oasis. That people who you have let into your heart can be your best guides, for the fundamentals of who you are as a person, what is best in you, does not change.

I've struggled to write this post for some time, actually. I began it after a trip to see Sharleen earlier this year and have sat at my computer trying to compose it over and over. There is no way I could begin to capture what this woman means to me, no way. I remember sitting in a darkened movie theater in New York City, a plastic cup of surreptitiously procured wine in my hand, watching the movie Beaches with my best friend, this woman that means so much to me, this person with whom I share a connection that will never be broken. I remember tears rolling down my face at the thought of losing her, just as they are now. I remember thinking that I could never thank her enough for what she has given me, what she has taught me, and what I hope to give to her in return.

These blessings are deep. I am so lucky.