The faces of the choirboys from Saint Christopher’s were so open and elegant, their features smooth and firmly carved. Looking at them fed my heart. All around me were Richmond’s most fortunate, and I cannot say I felt distinct or different. A lifetime of privilege, driving down streets tastefully strung with Christmas lights, instead of streets that are shabby and run-down, protects me from a great deal.
It is not yet a month since Mom has gone. I continue to be carried by a peace that Dorothy Jones aptly said she “didn’t hardly think could be had in this world.” It is a peace that those who were closest to her share.
DECEMBER 21, 2002
Winter solstice, a day Mom loved. The light is never farther from the Earth, and every day henceforth it will come closer. My house is ready for Christmas, the mantel and windowsills decorated with fir branches, lights and candles, a wreath on every door and window, the fireplace set with wood.
Whenever I think of Mom, I can’t help feeling somewhat inferior to her. By temperament and spiritual habits, she was more refined than I am. It would not make her happy for me to be thinking this way, and I am, in fact, grateful that she left behind such an astonishing life to emulate and love. But it is daunting to feel that so large a mountain remains for me to climb. By slipping over the top, she compels me to follow.
Last night I had a date with a man who left me bored. I do not realize how much I live in a world of ideas and literature until I spend time with someone who doesn’t. And it didn’t help that after a while he began to look like Vice President Cheney. I am lamentably, immovably, at the center of my own life, and it would take a great love to alter my position. Yet I wish one would present itself. My heart has a capacity for love that is not being used.
* * *
The notion of not wanting to be in charge of my life interests me now that I feel I am. For so many years, more than half my life, I struggled with the emotional belief that if I could rest secure in the love of a partner I would blossom, like a flower well and truly planted. The idea that I had soil enough of my own took a long time to mature.
* * *
2003
IN CARMEL, CALIFORNIA
A winter walk on the beach this morning with my old college friend Judy McDonald. We talked about her poetry, our families, and the ways in which we grow. Stewart’s Beach was awash in morning light, the gulls lifting like a net of wings, when the ocean waves purled toward them, wheeling by the hundreds above my head without ever colliding. What pilot could navigate so well? I collected twisted pieces of driftwood (future drawer handles) and pitched bread pellets at the terns, remembering how I used to take Christian here before he could walk. He would crawl across the sand toward the gulls and gurgle with delight when they flew up in a sudden rush over his head when he got too close to them. It was his first experience of his own power, and it delighted him.
Today, lunch with Francesca’s friend Annabelle Lund, who is always doing the unheard-of thing. Recently, she returned from Bosnia, where she had commandeered an ambulance and made dozens of trips out of the war zone, ferrying children to safety. She didn’t speak Serb or Croatian, she just faked her way through all the checkpoints. I asked her what early influences made her the person she is today.
“My parents,” she replied. “They taught me that if you have an eye for other people’s suffering, you have an obligation to do something about it that other people who don’t see it don’t have.”
“You can lose the ability,” I said.
She nodded. “It can atrophy.”
Home again: The weekend was a lonely one. Mom was insulation. Always she was in another room, within earshot, available to hear my last thought. Without her, it would be particularly good to hear from my children, yet they are silent and I am pushed back upon myself and the knowledge that one’s happiness and worth must come from within.
Children are markers of our mortality, reminding us of how far along the road we are. But they are on very different parts of it. While I sit alone before the fire wishing the phone would ring, they are having supper with a lover, deciding whether to be married, feeling the urgency of getting on with it so they can have their own children. To be asked to give mothering to a mother is difficult for them to imagine, much less do, until they are older, closer to the age I am now.
Snow again! The power company won’t come today. My little unheated cottage continues to wait for light, heat, and life. How impatient I am to see it done. All the kitchen drawers are full of pots, dishes, dishcloths, and silverware. But nothing more can be done, including laying down the final floor covering, until the Almighty Power Company comes to town.
I am writing an essay for a magazine. The words don’t shine but they are what come to the surface—small fish while the large ones move silently in the depths, waiting.
A note about friendship—one Ashland friend in particular. Over the years, Ellen Papoulakos has expanded in my mind like a painting that I had only seen the corner of, and the closer I looked the more was revealed. Yesterday, spending an hour with her when my electricity was off, was a joy. She is smart and honest and deep-feeling, with such a wonderfully incisive humor. She hurts terribly when her girls give her grief. But even in the telling of a harrowing teen tale, she makes me laugh. The hour we spent together stayed with me all day. She really feels like a friend one can grow with. Like her house, her spirit is large, solid, and full of light.
I am reading a book about Buddha. He was called the Awakened One. I think that I am still largely dreaming, but the images in my dreams are becoming sharper. Perhaps this is a step.
Yesterday I returned the cards I had bought at the local stationery store to acknowledge all the condolence notes I received after Mom’s death—to exchange for others I liked more. “You know how up in the air one gets with a death,” I told the young store owner. She nodded sympathetically. Then, when she added up the total of the new cards, she said it came to a little more but never mind. “How much?” I asked. “Thirteen fifty” she said. “That’s not a little more!” I exclaimed. “You’ll be going out of business if you act this way.” “But I am,” she said, and then she told me that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.
More snow! I am beginning to feel like a character in Giovanni’s Light. It is dark and frozen and, save for the light from the woodstove, cheerless. I am feeling adrift without Mom here.
The weekend in Washington was a respite from the loneliness I can feel in Ashland. Seeing my old friend Huston delighted me. He has a slight stoop, almost undetectable, when he walks. His hair is now gray and a bit thinner, but the same vitality is there, the same humor and quickness. He worries about getting old. Now is the time to do what he has put off. Huston’s politics are conservative and top down, rather like that of a dog trainer who knows that firmness is always the answer. He supports Bush and thinks our mistake was not getting rid of Saddam in the Gulf War. We agreed to disagree. On a deeper level it is easy for us to converse.
What is troubling me now is the external lack of connections in Ashland. All the life that poured through the front door when Mother was here seems to have almost completely stopped. It wasn’t a lot—the little honking sounds as Esther and Dorothy pulled up to take Mom to the cemetery; her friends, like Pat and Reber, stopping by—but now it has stopped. I am the mistress of a quiet, orderly universe with nothing except myself to remind me that I am here.
I wonder if the death of those we love prepares us for our own. The pull of those who have gone before us gives us reasons to welcome the end of our life as the prelude to a reunion.
Yesterday I read a sentence in a story by Isak Dine-sen: “He was, he thought, the loneliest being in the world.” It consoled me, as if knowing of another who felt the same way diminished the feeling in myself. Then, while alphabetizing the books in the writer’s cottage, the feeling of wanting to be alone set in. So there is a place, deeper than loneliness or being with others, that is neither one nor the other—and as I sorted boo
ks I glimpsed it. Solitude.
Last night, after rehearsing for the Ashland Variety Show, I walked back to the car thinking how the fact that I am loved is not in doubt. But it is the proximity of that love that comforts us. After a while it is of no use to count up all our family and friends in far-off places. The need to love and be loved close up is still there.
Later, after midnight, I heard a knock on the front door. It was the man who had just cut my grass that afternoon. He was reeking of alcohol and said he needed gas money so he could “pick up a loan of $2,500.” I told him to come back tomorrow and we would talk about it. He knew I wasn’t buying his story and he backed off into the night. Thinking of this small well-made man, who had worked with such vigor on my yard all afternoon, drifting through the dark streets, breaking his mother’s heart, is like a sad song no one hears. Before I went to bed, I bolted the doors and set chairs against them, even though I knew he was harmless.
Now it is morning, which restores my heart. I feel quietly full of possibility.
My last visit with Larry Blanchard, eighty-three, who is near death. He lay small and collapsed on his big hospital bed, his cold hand holding hard to my warm one. His wife, Frances, is a formal woman, but she kissed me good-bye when I left and said, “I love you.” It is amazing how real love can melt reserve.
An innocent question from someone at the gym—“Still writing?”—caused me to strike out. “Why do people ask that?” I shot back. “I’m a writer. That’s what I do.” She was embarrassed and taken aback and I regretted my words instantly. But they were out, like a snake that has struck a victim, before I could control myself. Then my own embarrassment, or shame, set in.
I have been continuing to study the writing of Jacques Lusseyran. His capacity to see, although he was blind, depended on his ability to pay attention—neither going forward too much nor wanting anything from the object of his attention, so that the thing could impress itself upon him.
Recently I discovered an unidentified mass at the base of my neck on the left side. I went in for an X-ray and then waited for the results from my doctor. Every time the phone rang or I saw the red light flashing saying a message was waiting, I said to myself, “The truth is my friend.” This helped a lot. Then the verdict: I have a goiter and the doctor wants me to start on thyroid supplements.
Prior to hearing the news, I was clearing a huge stash of books out of a wooden chest, and when the chest was empty I saw something gray at the bottom. Reaching down to pick it up, my hand felt fur and I gave a small shriek. It was a mouse, years old. I thought, The truth is my friend. So it’s a dead animal. The world is full of them. There is nothing repulsive about that. It’s all conditioning. This was how I talked to myself as I went into the kitchen to get a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves. Walking back into the living room, I reached down into the box, closed my hand around the furry object, and brought it into the light. It was a mouse toy! The truth really is my friend.
A long heartfelt conversation with Eliza. At one point we were both in tears. She had wanted so much to be close to me when she was growing up, yet I was not strong enough to pierce the firewall she erected between us when she was a teenager. We talked about forgiveness. “It means giving up on trying to change the past,” she said. And then she spoke of losing her biological mother. Yet in losing her, she said, she found me. This is when she began to cry, as did I. If I had to choose I would have our story begin sadly and end happily, but how deeply I mourn for the little girl who needed so much more than I knew how to give.
Yesterday was the first warm day of spring. I feel as if I am in a new skin, that every frozen thing has been unlocked and made over. In front of me on the coffee table is a bunch of daffodils. I can hardly take my eyes off them. Each crisp yellow head bursts out from the stalk, clean, clear, and fragrant.
Why I have changed I don’t know, but order is a new, seemingly easy habit for me these days. When Mother died, she left her meticulousness behind. Every other day a new bag of things for Goodwill is loaded into my car.
“I miss your mother!” exclaim many of her Ashland friends when I run into them. It is a natural remark, but it is the comparison that hurts, knowing that I am not my mother and that her friends are thinking this, too, comparing me to her and wishing I could be exchanged for her. This is a terrible self-pitying hole to fall into and I am not sure how to get out.
Then Pat called and I tried to describe my state of mind. She understood and commiserated. A few minutes later, Katie telephoned, wanting to have lunch. She had her own troubles, so the two of us sat in my kitchen and shared our lives with each other and were lighter because of it. Later, I kept my appointment with Peggy, and she ran energy into me as I mostly slept. But she was very confirming and urged me to focus upon receiving so that my capacity to give would remain in balance. “Try to be aware of your mother’s presence,” she said. “It’s subtle, but you can sense it if you are open to it.” Even the mention of Mother filled my eyes with tears. And finally at the end of the day, Carolyn Hemphill sat by the fire and kept me company. When I look back at this one day there was a lot to receive.
One of the day’s highlights was a long satisfying conversation with my friend Kerin. She told me a story about her husband, Patrick. They have three very challenging children as well as a difficult dog. One day Kerin said to Patrick that the dog was too much to handle on top of everything else that was going on and that he had to go. But Patrick said he didn’t think that was a good message to send to the children, given the fact that they were adopted—that when a dog is difficult it is given away. “We’ll just say that it’s a member of the family and we’ll deal with it.”
She read me a letter she received from the writer Carol Bly on the subject of dealing with the vicissitudes of life:
For your own sake I feel pleased you are shedding, one by one or perhaps for all I know ten thousand by ten thousand, those feelings of being entitled not to suffer this thing or that in life—such as mental illness in one’s immediate family. It is such a good thing for a writer to lose all feelings of having any rights to a decent life. Here is why: If one has no rights or expectations with regard to a decent life, no immunities, one’s heart overflows with gratitude. That gratitude is a handy place from which to write.
A new calm is upon me. I am fed by the companionable quiet of the early morning. Work, it says. Draw closer. The way is prepared for you.
I find my reaction to other people’s troubles and joys instructive. My sister’s new lover has made her calm and solicitous of me, and I don’t like it. The role I was in the habit of playing—of the wiser, more sophisticated older sibling—has been taken from me by my younger sister, and it doesn’t suit me at all to be robbed of my “power.” When we become attached to a role for our identity, it is very hard to give it up. But if the play is to keep going, we can’t get too attached to our parts, as they keep changing.
Larry Blanchard’s funeral in the First Presbyterian Church in Richmond was brilliant. His son Buck’s tribute was just like Larry—authoritative, funny, and wistful. The sanctuary was packed. I found myself weeping with the singing but truly joyful that Larry was finished with his work. And then my tears were for the deep sadness in life. I wept for my children who were hurt by all my broken promises to them. I wept for other children weeping because their parents had let them down.
The amount of time and effort I put into getting dressed for his funeral seems like a superficial reaction to such a deep event. Applying cosmetics to heighten the color of my face and cheeks made me feel as if I were a corpse myself. Women applying makeup are like morticians fixing up the dead.
An item in Newsweek about the phenomenon of aging and how a certain chemical, GABA, keeps us sharp. As we age the brain does not produce as much and our capacity to filter out distractions and noise decreases, making it more difficult to learn. What the article doesn’t discuss is why the brain does this. Is there some benefit to the decrease?
The As
hland writing seminar begins tonight. The house is in readiness—washed floors, cleaned rugs, polished furniture, jugs of white peonies on every table, at every window. The last hours before my students’ arrival will be spent working over the exercises, putting their folders in order.
The blessings in my life increase: the steady love of friends, the material support of income, good health, interesting work, and the amazing rewards of family. Eliza is coming for ten days, which seems miraculous. And I am also aware of a new kind of undeserved ease in my life, with tasks being accomplished and goals reached with so little strain that I practically float from one to the other. This morning, as I often do, I looked at the book of my mother’s writings that I put together for her funeral. “Innocence is the capacity to be found” she copied on one page. That was certainly her.
When I feel empty and dissatisfied, with more time than ways to use it, my first impulse is to fill my life with other people. But this is precisely when I should not do this. Equal relates to equal, and my imbalance would throw the other person into a state of imbalance, too
Happiness consists of such small things: a glance in the mirror that makes one feel attractive, a clean shirt, the prospect of a friend for lunch. When I came into the dining room I saw the phone flashing with a message. It turned out to be my granddaughter, Rhys, pouring her four-year-old heart out into my answering machine. I could only understand a third of it, but it was so sweet to hear.
When all is said and done, everything we’re given or learn or possess in any real sense—the ability to play Beethoven sonatas, write books, understand the principles of physics—is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves. When I think of how the vast stores of knowledge a human brain contains are destroyed at death—all of I. F. Stone’s Greek, his love of dancing with his wife, Esther—then I have to conclude that he was given these things, like walking sticks, to support him on his pilgrimage.
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