just to let it go

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
- Dorianne Laux “Antilamentation,”


The dusty boxes are still sitting in the bottom of my closet back home in Oklahoma, my meager pilfering through them surfacing so many emotions that I felt like I needed to stop, to breathe, to reframe my thinking before I carried on.

A text sent to my friend said it all:
"Sorting through all of my childhood to pre-Portland life. Kind of intense to realize what a depressed and fcked up young adult I was, even if people didn't see it on the outside. Crazy."

and

"It's really weird to struggle with the idea that there was a lot of lost time in my life. Time I will never get back and time I may not have in the future."

So today when the poem above from Dorianne Laux came through my feed, something hardened from long ago became soft inside of me.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation.





Every year I spend the days before Yom Kippur reflecting on the past year (no, I'm not Jewish but I borrow this tradition). Thinking through the things that made me happy, thinking through the things I regretted or that made me sad or wistful, thinking of things I want to do in the next year, who I love, who I want to spend time with, how I want to challenge my mind and life to do good things. It's a important time to write things down, to take stock, to see where I am going.

Sitting with these feelings this in-and-post cancer year has brought in the added layer of "time". Time I have wasted, things I have done, situations I have been in during my life that were neither healthy nor happy. And the great sadness of looking forward and thinking about time and not having it and how horrible that would be.

{And then reading that Susan Sontag was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in 1975 and lived until 2004. So go figure.}

What softened inside of me was the realization that life is too short to dwell in what happened in the past, to rehash the things you wished had happened in relationships, to question decisions that led to different paths than the future I had seen for myself. Even for a person like me who has struggled with the depressive tendency toward rumination over such things [the twisting of invisible hands and the sighing of invisible sighs that leaves you sitting in a rut you can barely peer out of], there is the possibility to not revisit this, not to drag it with me, just to let it go.

Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. 

Amen.

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.

*********************
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.

Set Me Free

Lisa's iPhone was on shuffle as we started the road trip back home, first Emmylou's voice ringing out sorrowful and true, then Jim Croce, then Tracy Chapman. Each song a well-worn groove in both of our minds, tracing back to Mom, to Dad, to Hunter, to Grandma, opening a space to reconnect to our stories, to process our losses, to make sense of the lives we have been given and to look forward to the futures we are writing individually and collectively. We had been together for a week of family camp where she wrangled her two small people through activities, the dining hall and the sandy walk from the cabin to everywhere. She was, in her usual way, calm, composed, organized and stellar.

When I think of spending time with my sister, an image pops to my mind of her swimming towards me, pushing a small blue raft while I tread in an ocean of water. She's talking to me as she approaches, acknowledging how tired I am but encouraging me to hold on, to keep my head up, to alternate using my legs then my arms so that I have strength to last longer. We lean our shoulders and arms onto the raft that she's brought, letting our bodies float and release in the shared time...stable, cool, relaxed. And then it's time for her to go again, and as she swims away the raft becomes smaller, but big enough so that I can tread, then lean back and float, tread, then lean back and float, tread, then lean back and float on my own with what she has given me.

This is the essence of my sister: pushing the raft out, tired herself but speaking words of encouragement, a song in her heart for the journey back, swimming, swimming, varying her strong strokes to make progress against the sometimes tremendous waves. Watching her move makes me want to be a better swimmer, to take pleasure in the cool water even though its rough. To meet the challenge but not be consumed by it. To have grace moving through the water.

I love you, Lou.

Blue Ocean

Anne and I pass the pad of paper back and forth, pausing between our writing to sometimes collect our thoughts, sometimes take a breather, sometimes forget to respond until there is a spark that sends us scribbling and sending it the other way. The pad of paper floats over the ocean between us, through wires and time zones and need, a raft for one of us to sit upon while the other kicks the water to propel us forward. The raft is well-balanced, the sun not too hot and a long-ago friendship alights again within this new, unfamiliar space.

We keep each other afloat in these uncharted waters of post-cancer living, this space without a map where both of us churn in our different buckets trying to get out of our heads and grapple with our lives. Our needs are different and our fears are different but the touchstones are similar: How do we live our best lives or, how to get back to living having lived through this time? Being smart, sensible, educated women doesn't make the emotions or the fear of a twinge in the kidney any easier. And so we stretch our legs long in the cool, sometimes rocky water of our exploration, sending the paper raft back and forth ferrying empathy, love and comfort.

Twelve months from diagnosis, six months after treatment, five years from now to being clear. Kick, kick, kick.

Love you, Anne.

Janus, forward and back

Arm looped through mine, small head resting on my shoulder, David and I sat together in the van as it threaded our way back through fields, past round bales of hay and into the evening sun. We had spent the day exploring Nick's grandfather's home village, Ogliastro Cliente, perched on the side of a valley with olive, orange and fig trees that ran like a river to the sea. David had chosen to study Grandpa Tony for his "migration" project at school, winding through Grandpa's journey to the US, his loss of family and a home he loved for the promise of a new life. And now we were part of that repatriation, the need that Americans sometimes have to understand themselves in the context of their ancestry, their history, their DNA.

Through a series of strange and synergistic events that can only be described as "Italian" and typical Giardino luck, we found Grandpa's boyhood home, left to waste away in what only can be described as ruins. It was all there: the chapel, the courtyard, the fig trees out back that skinny Antonio Giardino used to shimmy up for the delicious fruit. Broken down, paint peeling off the walls, birds aloft in the open spaces where Grandpa's family once lived, we were simultaneously enlivened and saddened by what we had discovered.

Something in me wanted to touch the walls, to absorb something inherent that lived there so long ago. Although I loved Grandpa like my own grandfather, these were not my people nor was this my place, but the urge to connect, to let that history leech into my own palms felt very real.

The heartbreak of finding something so broken, so ruined mirrors my own ruminations about time and place, what stays, what you leave behind. In a few days I return home to Oklahoma to help clean out my childhood home and prepare it for sale. My feelings of dread about this are indescribable, not only for the deep feeling that it gives me of being unmoored, parentless and ungrounded, but also for the worry of being weighed down and encumbered with an emotional and physical heft that I resist leaving behind, but am at my core yearning to cast off. Being parentless means having no home to return to, it means making your own way in whatever way your life brings you. It means preparing yourself to be outward bound, stocked and ready for the journey and for whatever lies ahead, on your own without the safety net of a parent to pick you up and dust you off. But it also brings you the sweetness of being captain of your own ship, unconstrained by familial expectation and guilt. Defining who you are in this space is a tricky process, one that for the most part you must walk alone until you know who you are, what you take with you, what you leave and what life you make for yourself.

I'm reminded of reading Thomas Wolfe so many years ago, before I was old enough to parse what Wolfe was trying to say:

“The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, "Well, where do I go from here?”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Beginnings, endings, looking back and forward like Janus standing in the middle ground.

When the stars fall from the sky

Miles and miles sped beneath the wheels of the Intourist bus that endlessly ferried us through cities, countryside and towns of the Soviet Union's former republics. U2's The Joshua Tree was on repeat on my Discman, me being all of 16 years old and out of the country for the first time in my life. Cities and towns, cities and towns, aging mosques, strident Soviet monuments, Stalin's grave, Lenin's tomb...they all clicked like snapshots as the miles mounted. In one country, so many faces, diverse and unique and representing the beautiful ethnic communities that co-existed, barely, in this complex space. People were eager to speak with us, to learn about our country, to know what life was like outside of what they knew. I remember the students from Moscow University that accompanied us for part of the trip and a boy named Denis that my friend Annie drew out in the most amazing way, in the shortest period of time.

This was the trip where I understood my smallness in the bigness of the world. Looking out of the bus window into cities crowded with people, I was overwhelmed by the idea that behind each set of eyes sat a story, a history, family, loves, desires and dreams. That within each person lay a map of experiences and feelings to be plumbed, explored and investigated. These moments gave me a tightness in my chest that I to this day cannot explain, that somewhere in the smooth flow of the music running through my body I felt alive and connected to the multitudes of people carrying on their own individual lives in that moment.

This feeling has stayed with me for as many years, the feeling of being small in a big world, the feeling of being connected to people through the recognition of their own uniqueness. I think the tightness in my chest was as much about knowing the vastness of the world as the opportunity to connect with people on so many levels, all the while knowing you'll never connect with all the people your being desires to meet.

I sat in a bar with a friend of a friend last night, immediately taken with her bright eyes and engaging personality. Earlier this week I had lunch with a (soon-to-be former) co-worker/friend who I've known just a year but feel incredibly connected to. I've been drawn in by people I work with, people I live with, people I don't know and will never see again just talking between tables at a coffee shop or sitting on a plane. I've had my life change course in moments in bars in Guatemala and mountain tops in Colorado and leadership training weekends in Australia. There are things that pass between people when the heart space is open, beautiful and intense things that may last but for moment but stay in your memory for years the vibe is so present. It's the openness to this experience that brings beauty to this world, even if it is sharing something as simple a smile through the window of a bus passing through Red Square.

Emergence

Photo credit: picture of The Rooster by my girl Jess of Oh, The Joys

In my mind, there is a thin grey hand-drawn line, bumped with squiggled dots for milestones that represent my life. There's being on the all-boys baseball team, there's summertime with Grandma and Aunt Pat driving through New Mexico, there are wide swaths of sadness and loneliness, there's Hockaday and all of the myriad of things that lie below the line that tell the story of how that time went. There's Dad, there's Hunter and then there is where my current life begins to take shape. So much, it feels, in so few years. So many years to mark, graph, picture, describe, giggle at, crow about, mourn, ponder.

I'm at a complicated time in my life, post-cancer and pretty much at midlife. I feel as though I am emerging again, a mermaid being borne of the sand to move into the cool fresh of the sea, another chance to swim quickly through life with the energy and vitality of a woman half my age. Oh, to be half my age but know what I have learned so far, propelled forward by the strength of my own body, will and mind. I can feel it there, that strength of my body and urge to swim, just below the surface after a year of being trapped in the sand, weighed down, finally twisting free.

And in this emergence, I'm thinking about time a little bit again. Having it, not having it....what that means and where I put it. David and I have been reading Books VI and VII of Harry Potter and this idea of Horcruxes has caught my eye, not for the soul-ripping aspects of evil, but more for the concept of keeping parts of your soul in entrusted places so that, no matter what, you live on.

I've been thinking about the containers that house this white magic of my own: Ava and David who came from my own body and who are the best things I have given to this world; my deep friendships with a handful of people who see what is written on my heart more clearly than I ever could; this blog where I have poured out more information that any sane person would; the kids' school, which has been my passion for four years.

And if I think of things that fill up those parts of my soul that I have dispersed, the film reel flickering behind my eyes shows a dazzling blue sky over Puget Sound, the breathtaking beauty of a New Mexico sunset, a deep conversation with a close friend, a walk with my mom, and an afternoon speeding down a hot Texas highway in a gold Cadillac convertible.

There is a method to this madness. The more I push my soul out into these entrusted spaces, the more I am filled with what I have known, what I am knowing now, what I will learn. I have space to reflect. I have space to welcome love and friendship without fear. I feel myself breaking away and rising to the best self I have been in years. To some degree this being buried in the sand has healed me, to some degree it has given me time to think, to some degree it has made me love the bracing cold water and strong current that I must fight even more.

In these bodies we will live
In these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, 
you invest your life.  -Mumford & Sons