Grace (Eventually)

by Anne Lamott

  So how can I be represented by a snapshot, or any one specific aging age? Isn’t the truth that this me is subsumed into all the me’s I already have been, and will be?

  Anything that helps diminish self-consciousness is a blessing: self-consciousness looks like the other furrows and shadows on our faces, the smudges under our eyes.

  The most utterly unself-conscious woman I know is a nun named Gervais. She runs a Catholic school for girls down the road from me. She’s close to seventy, but she has the innocence of a girl. If you consider her features, she has a pleasant face. Her hair is short and graying, and she stands tall, in a way that is willowy and flexible, an economy of self-containment and abundance at once, like bamboo. She is plugged into her school and is a do-gooder in the greater community, in touch with everything around her, but she doesn’t need anything from it: the plainness and holiness of the world seem enough for her, and this knowledge makes her beautiful.

  She has the beauty of modesty, which is a virtue the world doesn’t have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.

  When Jesus was asked about beauty, he pointed to nature, to the lilies of the field. Behold them, he said, and behold is a special word: it means to look upon something amazing or unexpected. Behold! It is an exhortation, not a whiny demand, like when you’re talking to your child—“Behold me when I’m talking to you, sinner!” Jesus is saying that every moment you are freely given the opportunity to see through a different pair of glasses. “Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” But that’s only the minor chord. The major one follows, in his anti-anxiety discourse—which is the soul of this passage—that all striving after greater beauty and importance, and greater greatness, is foolishness. It is ultimately like trying to catch the wind. Lilies do not need to do anything to make themselves more glorious or cherished. Jesus is saying that we have much to learn from them about giving up striving. He’s not saying that in a “Get over it” way, as your mother or your last, horrible husband did. Instead he’s heartbroken, as when you know an anorexic girl who’s starving to death, as if in some kind of demonic possession. He’s saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.

  I saw a woman on the beach in Hawaii three years after my son told me that he loved my little face. I was forty-three, and in the early stages of seeing that I had, in fact, become a woman of beauty: I hadn’t fully grown into this yet—I hadn’t even met my friend who wears the fleece vests, or the Catholic nun with the Zen beauty—but the truth, which bats last, was pressing through more and more of the confusion and judgment that had blinded me most of my life. The woman on the beach, who was about my age, was playing in the surf with her young child. She was near the shore, in water that barely reached her knees, so I could see her clearly. There was nothing physically dramatic about her. Nearby in the water or tanning themselves on beach towels were younger women and teenagers in bikinis, who were brown, lithe, smooth, and perfect, who made you want to kill yourself. But this woman looked, well, like us, like me and my friends. She was of average height, with long, dark hair, a bit heavy, with the thigh challenge and a poochy stomach. And she was wearing a bikini, like all the younger women, whereas I, like the other women over thirty, was wearing a one-piece spandex suit, designed for maximum suckage and disguise. But here she was, splashing around in a black string bikini, with an extraordinary lack of self-consciousness and a glistening confidence. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. She commanded the beach. Everyone got it—well, except for a few men.

  We sneaked looks at her, as if she were a movie star. She was the Greek goddess of surf. We beheld her. I thought, “That could be me someday. I could wear a bikini too, theoretically.”

  Perhaps I wasn’t going to buy a bikini anytime soon. But I wondered whether I could splash about like her, with abandon, my head thrown back and my arms held out to the sun. And later that day, I did. Okay: I was wearing mascara, and the same old jaws-of-death swimsuit I’d been wearing that morning. And when I dropped my towel in the sand, I felt shy and stricken and jiggly. After a minute I straightened my shoulders, reached for my son’s hand, and ran with him into the ocean, and I splashed and sploshed and ducked under the waves, and then leapt back up to the air, like Our Lady of the Tides, for all the world to see.

  In Circulation

  Your absence has gone through me

  Like thread through a needle.

  Everything I do is stitched with its color.

  —W. S. MERWIN,

  “Separation”

  Cheese Love

  After two recent nights in a row of insomnia, I finally got to sleep last Sunday at a reasonable hour, only to be shaken awake at midnight by my son. My first thought was that we had an intruder, and I reached for the tennis racket I keep by my bed in case I need to kill someone. “No, no, Mom, I just can’t sleep,” Sam cried out plaintively.

  “That’s terrible to wake me, because you can’t sleep.”

  “You’re my mom,” he said. “I’m supposed to come to you with my problems.”

  The first year after my mother’s death, I felt a lot of sadness that I had never had a mother to whom I could take my problems. She was my problem, or at any rate, this is what I had always thought, and continued to think for a long time. Mothers were supposed to listen and afterward, to respond with wisdom or perspective. But perhaps my mother didn’t read her owner’s manual.

  Mothers were supposed to raise their children in such a way that the children grew up to be responsible, able to participate in life, able to thrive, more or less, both alone and in community. You taught a child to play, for instance, so she could stay healthy and have fun. But my mother so pressured me to be a tennis champion that I had migraines until I quit playing tournaments; she was so competitive that it was ten years before I could even watch Wimbledon with her on TV. And mothers were supposed to teach their kids not to be slobs, and to make their beds in the mornings. A child would thus learn that she was part of an organism, a household where she respected the other inmates enough to pick up after herself, to smooth the bedcovers, removing any socks or books or toys that might leave a discernible bump. But—and I mean this nicely—my mother was a slob, and we were all slobs, until we got sober. My mother’s bed always looked like Krakatoa, unless I made it, because she didn’t have a clue that you could take care of the inside of things, like friends or your own heart, by tending to surfaces: putting on a little moisturizer, say, or making the bed. Surfaces were strictly for tricking nonfamily into thinking you and your family were enviable, more functional than you were.

  The first year after my mother’s death, I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off me, and ten months later, lighter by twelve trillion pounds or so, I met and fell in love with a cool, decent man. His mother had also died that year, had also been a queenly Englishwoman; had also originally been named Dorothy. His mother went by “Dot”; mine called herself Nikki. I could do a dead-eye impersonation of both of them at once: their imperial madness, their royal kindness, their poise marbled into all that arrogant English self-loathing: the nostrils, the skittish, demanding ways.

  During the second year after my mother died, my child became a teenager. I discovered that even reasonably well-adjusted adolescents are often trying to shred your respect, because they are trying to individuate, which is easier when your mother is a total embarrassment, a moron, or both. It seemed natural when I was doing it with my mother, but I tell you, it is wrenching to see it now. I started to understand the existential hollowness she had felt before she had children, the depths of her sorrow when we separated out from her, and how the hollowness threatened to consume her again.

  We responded in different ways: She began to work full-time to put herself through law school, then graduated when I was eighteen. I began t
o put myself down for naps every afternoon. I had an easier time of it than she’d had—although she slept better. I was broke only until my kid was four. She was broke forever.

  I was able to scatter her ashes early in the third year after her death. I was able to ache for her, for all that had been so impossible for her to bear, for the bad cards she had been dealt. Yet I could forgive her only about half the time. I was struggling to learn the little things she forgot to teach me—that I was beautiful, and of value, regardless of how well or poorly I was doing in the world—and was mad that she had given me such a lousy owner’s manual. I saw her as the foil, and believed that I had grown to be the woman I was simply because of how hard I had to work to defend myself against turning out like her.

  When people reminisced about her, I would put my hand to my brow and shake my head slowly. “Ay-yi-yi,” I always said, and everyone understood why. They could see why I might have had such a hard time with her, and what a good daughter I had been to take such great care of her anyway.

  But now, a few years after her death, I can see in my son’s eyes so many points I’d missed about her. Her eyes were large and brown, like Sam’s, but always frantic, like a hummingbird that can’t quite find the flower and keeps jabbing around: she must have been starving to death a lot of the time. I can see in Sam’s eyes that he sometimes finds me controlling and annoying—none of the other kids have to make their beds—and I realize what superhuman patience it took for my mother to live with kids. I see Sam and me get mad at each other, over and over, but then we apologize, become friends again; I see how each time this is redemption. How amazing it is to share that.

  When we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be. We also can’t understand when we’re pregnant, or when our relatives are expecting, how profound and dicey it is to have a shared history with a child, shared blood, shared genes, even humor. It means we were actually here, on earth, for a time, like the Egyptians with their pyramids, but with kids, it’s an experiment: you wait and see what will come of it, and with people, that almost always means a mess.

  And that is what my mother has given me in the fourth year after her death. I can see now that out of that mess came a bunch of gifts—her generosity in the midst of being broke, even when that meant charging things; and the gift of having a gift for friendships; and the gift of survival, life-forcing her way over the jagged rocks of failure. So many women of her generation were wiped out by the whacking down that life gave them, but my mother mostly stayed one step ahead, until finally, the plaque of Alzheimer’s filled her brain. Then, she had children, whom she must have raised right, because we entered into that and cared for her.

  The other day I found some notes I’d written the summer before she died, when she started calling to tell me she was renting us a great box, with cheese! It was going to be so wonderful. “What box, Mom?” I kept asking, and she’d get furious with herself, and with me. Then she’d call the next day to say she had gotten us the box. With the cheese.

  “It’s not a box containing cheese?” I asked, thinking Hickory Farms.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she snapped, and hung up.

  When I went to her apartment to investigate, she opened the door and said, “The man brought the box today!”

  I stepped inside to see, and there on her television set was a cable box that she’d rented, so she and I could watch Wimbledon together on pay-per-view. Then she flung open the refrigerator door, to show me all the cheese.

  At Death’s Window

  The man I killed did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice. He had gone from being tall and strapping, full of appetites and a brilliant manner of speech, to a skeleton, weak and full of messy needs.

  He and his wife still loved each other very much, but he’d lost the ability to do the things he had most loved to share during their thirty years together: to cook and overeat, to hike and travel. He had always been passionately literary, but he was losing the ability to read and write, which had defined his life. Both elegant and down-to-earth, with lifelong depression and a rich, crabby sense of humor, he was sixty when he was diagnosed with cancer.

  One day he’d been like the rest of us, comically forgetful, trying to live as fully as he could while trying to slow down, and attempting to get through it all without too much difficulty. Then stomach pain, headaches, and like sudden bad weather on vacation, only months to live.

  Everyone recommended that he contact a hospice provider to help with pain management, but this was not his way. He said that if it was just his body deserting him, maybe. But his mind? His ideas? His self?

  Mel and Joanne (that’s what I’m going to call them) told me about it one night over dinner. Their grown kids wanted Mel to do chemo; aggressive treatment might buy him six months, or maybe not, and he had decided against it. He wanted to feel as well as he could for as long as he could, savor his family and friends and the beauty of life, on his own terms, in the strange basket of sickness. And if the fear and suffering got too great? Well, they’d deal with that then.

  That night was the closest I came to drinking in all the years I’d been sober, but somehow I didn’t drink. I believed that God would be close to us all, no matter how things bounced, even though Mel was not a believer. And the following months were a mosaic of beauty, love, and his body breaking down. He could no longer hike, and he wasn’t ever hungry. He was by turns depressed, fascinated, scared, fine, exhausted, sad, accepting, enraged, grateful, and amazed at the love and support that surrounded him. If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

  At first, opiates diminished the pain without muddying his mind, which was as finely tuned as a melancholy thoroughbred’s. But then he began to space out a little more often, and he became terrified by the prospects. One day over lunch, I told him that if he ever experienced too much pain or diminishment, I would try to help him die on his own terms, if he wanted.

  He was surprised, and so was I. I hadn’t particularly planned on offering this. I told him about the evening many years earlier when my brothers and I promised my father we would help him die if his brain cancer took him to a place that he could no longer endure. My father was relieved to the point of tears, but looking over the top of his Benjamin Franklins, he pointed at us sternly and quoted Duke Ellington’s great line “Do nothing till you hear from me.”

  We promised, but when he got to the point where we knew he would not want to be in that shape, he was no longer capable of making difficult decisions. Two months before he died, as he lay in a hospital bed in our one-room cabin, in what amounted to a coma, my younger brother and I crushed up some barbiturates that his doctor had given him to help him sleep. But we couldn’t do it. We were too young.

  All of his old friends who were part of his final months said sternly that we must not play God, that nature must be allowed to take its course—and they were all atheists. So we did the best we could, and it sucked, and it was beautiful. But the whole time I knew he had not wanted to end up in the shape he did.

  I know if the tables had been turned, he would have helped me out.

  So I offered to help Mel if he ever needed me. We talked about it briefly. What did I think death was like, he asked. I didn’t have a clue, but I’d heard an Eastern mystic say that it was like slipping out of a pair of shoes that had never fit very well. We moved on to what we were reading, and how our kids were. I knew for a fact that Mel believed in assisted suicide. We had discussed a story about it in the paper once: A local man gave his wife an overdose, then sealed her upper body in a plastic trash bag with duct tape. He gave himself an overdose of pills, and they died holding hands. What love!

  Mel was somewhat surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide: I believe that life is a kind of Earth School, so even though assisted suicide means you’re getting out early, before
the term ends, you’re going to be leaving anyway, so who says it isn’t okay to take an incomplete in the course?

  Nothing more was said until some time later, when Mel, Joanne, and I were at dinner. “Annie,” Joanne said, “we want to talk about your offer.” Oh my God, I thought—I had just been being nice. I couldn’t take someone’s life. I’m not at all that sort of girl. I’m usually more like a flight attendant—bringing people cool drinks, blotting spills.

  “I won’t be me for much longer,” Mel said. I don’t remember what else was said. I asked whether his doctor would prescribe barbiturates—when my father was dying, we had communicated with the Hemlock Society, and I knew exactly how many Seconal pills it took to kill a big person, how to crush them up and add them to applesauce, and how to feed the sick person toast and tea so that he wouldn’t throw up the pills.

  They shook their heads. They hadn’t known their doctor long and felt too shy about asking. Shy!

  I didn’t know where to start. Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while—now you just nose around on the Internet, but this was more than a decade ago. You couldn’t go around asking any old doctor for a bottle of sleeping pills or painkillers; it just wasn’t done. So I did what you had to do in the old days, before computers: I talked to a number of trusted friends.

  Through wily, underground ways, I came up with a prescription that would cover enough pills for a lethal dose. One night Mel and I had a cryptic phone conversation. “I got it,” I told him, like a spy or a drug dealer.