Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

Petrovsky lacuna (mathematics): a region where the fundamental solution of a differential equation vanishes

  51.

  Some of my best conversations with Jacob take place in the car. When the radio is off, the DVD screen tucked away, in the silence the car transforms from a suburban vehicle into a sanctuary. The other day, we were driving home from school, and all of a sudden, Jacob piped up from the back seat: “How do we know we’re not dreaming right now?” The idea that we might be dreaming frightened him. He wanted to know what was real. I know he feels great comfort in anything quantifiable: maps, lists, facts, figures. He also thinks a lot about death. Maybe when we die it feels like dreaming. Despite evidence to the contrary, he thinks that only very old people die. That life has an expiration date, like his squeezable yogurts. Eighty, he thinks. Or better yet, ninety or one hundred. Comfortably far off for everyone he knows and loves.

  Jacob has been coming up with more of these questions lately—perhaps because he has some awareness that I’ve been thinking about them too. What he doesn’t know is that he’s the beating heart of my journey. That, had he not been born, I might never have felt this need to explore my intermittent feelings of emptiness and loss. There was always some sort of shiny distraction. Always a way of quieting the voice that exhorted me to think harder, delve deeper. And besides, things were pretty good, particularly when I considered where I had come from; as the poet Jane Kenyon once wrote, “It might have been otherwise.”

  I had lived most of my adult life thinking that way: I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise. But becoming a mother made me greedy. I wanted more than the awareness of my own good fortune—the day, each breath, the quiet, the health of my loved ones, my own two strong legs. I was looking beyond the horizon of my own gratitude—and make no mistake about it, I was grateful. But I knew that past that horizon was a drop, a free fall. There was much that I didn’t remember. So much that I had left behind. I couldn’t teach my son to be unafraid of his lacunae if I wasn’t willing to sit in the deepest hollows of my own.

  52.

  Is it ever right to give up on a person? To decide—if indeed, it amounts to a decision—that a relationship is beyond hope? What would it take, to arrive at such a place? And, having arrived at such a place, what then? In the Yom Kippur service during the Ashamnu, the ritual recitation of communal sins, among the sins of committing slander, adultery, covetousness, there is this: for the sin of succumbing to dismay.

  To succumb to dismay. It had never seemed like much of a sin, but it did seem that there might be a high price for succumbing. Shortly after Michael and I decided to move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, he turned to me one afternoon and asked what I was going to do about my mother. It had been a year since I’d seen her. I had stopped speaking to her during Jacob’s illness. It was a horrible choice, but not a difficult one: my mother or my child.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that it had come to this. I had spent years—my whole life, really—trying to make peace with my mother. She was at war with the world, but with no one so much as me. My very existence seemed an affront and disappointment to her. Even as a child, I felt myself shrink in her presence, trying to make myself invisible so that her rage might pass over me. As I grew up, I developed the protective mechanism of forgetting. I forgot the pain she caused me until I felt it again—and again.

  When Jacob had become ill, my mother dismissed his illness too. She thought I was exaggerating—that it was no big deal. She screamed that I wasn’t paying attention to her. She told me I’d better watch out or my marriage would fall apart, because Michael and I seemed depressed. Finally I walked away. I couldn’t be Jacob’s mother and her daughter at the same time. I had written my mother a note when Jacob seemed to be recovering, and had called her on the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center. But that had been the extent of our contact. She had called, faxed, e-mailed, FedExed, and otherwise tried to get hold of me. But Jacob’s illness had taken me apart and put me back together. My heart had grown tougher, more resilient. Life was too short, I told myself. But I hadn’t succumbed—not totally. I still had a glimmer of hope. Maybe things could be different. Maybe later.

  But now, later was upon us. We were moving to the country. If I didn’t reach out to my mother, it might never happen. She wouldn’t know how to find me. She could die without anyone knowing it. She had very few friends—she had alienated most of them. Michael knew that for my own future peace of mind, I needed to be able to tell myself that I had done everything I could. Absolutely everything. So what are you going to do about your mother?

  The psychiatrist’s office was on the ground floor of an apartment building on lower Park Avenue. Like many such offices, it announced itself discreetly, with a small bronze plaque. I had arrived early. I walked east, to Lexington Avenue, in search of a Starbucks—but coffee was the last thing I needed. I was already hopped up. My heart was racing; my fingers tingled. It was a bitter cold day, and the street felt like a wind tunnel. I should have been home in Brooklyn, packing up our brownstone. We were moving in less than a month.

  I rounded the corner back to the doctor’s office, then checked my watch. It was three o’clock—the appointed time. Just as I was about to buzz the doctor’s intercom, a taxi pulled up in front of the building. She emerged slowly, swinging one leg, then the other, to the curb. The full-length fur coat, the freshly highlighted hair, the big, dark sunglasses: she didn’t look like a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had once been shattered by a near-fatal car accident. She was regal and beautiful as she greeted me, her cheekbone sharp and cool against my own.

  “Hello, my dear daughter,” she said.

  We walked together into the psychiatrist’s office that cold winter day. It was the first of what turned out to be six sessions we attended. We took our seats—she erect in the center of a sofa, me slumped into the farthermost chair. What did I hope for? I know this much: I hoped. Fervently, deeply, powerfully, I hoped that in the presence of a neutral stranger with an advanced degree, my mother and I could connect.

  Six sessions—six hours—and there are huge gaps in my memory, lacunae. I do remember the tone of her raised voice. The usual phrases—How dare you? I was a wonderful mother! You seem to feel the need to turn me into a monster—and the way they lost their power in the presence of a third party. It wasn’t long before he took my side. I hadn’t anticipated this. I know they’re not supposed to take sides, but he did. Irene, you’re not listening to Dani. Excuse me. Excuse me, Irene. Irene! You’re not with us here. You’re not understanding anything that’s going on. Irene! Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. Surely I was poisoning the psychiatrist. Poison was a word my mother liked to use a lot.

  At what turned out to be our final session, my mother came in carrying an oversize manila envelope. I didn’t think much of it at the time, or the way she rested it next to her on the sofa, or the way her gaze occasionally shifted to it. The psychiatrist was being particularly hard on her that day. I understand why Dani feels like you don’t hear her, Irene. She isn’t real to you. You’re just talking at her. Halfway through that last session, my mother jumped to her feet faster than I would have thought possible, and the envelope clattered to the floor. Her face was white with rage as she bent down, gathered it up, and stormed out of the office.

  What followed—the next two events—have become forever linked in my mind. My mother called that night with the news that the manila envelope contained the results of a brain scan that showed her to have metastasized cancer. Didn’t you wonder what was in the envelope? Didn’t you even care? When I got off the phone, shaken, I called the psychiatrist. Had he known? Had she told him? There was a long silence, during which I realized that he wasn’t at liberty to say. But he did offer me this, his parting words: In thirty years of practice, I have ne
ver said this to a patient, but there is no hope for you and your mother. None at all.

  53.

  A small group of people gathers together at my friend Abby’s Manhattan apartment once a month to study Torah with Burt Visotzky, a respected and gifted rabbi. When she first invited me to join the group, I felt conflicted. I had spent my childhood confused by Torah—learning by rote, understanding nothing. But I went anyway, and now I look forward to these Tuesday evenings—in part because of the feeling that each person in that room is engaged in a personal struggle with faith. Before we begin discussing the Torah portion, we go around in a circle and everyone says a few words about how they’re doing. This never fails to make me a little nervous. It reminds me of AA, except that most of us are drinking wine.

  Last week, I was fresh from my second visit to Kripalu—another yoga and meditation retreat—when I went to Torah study. When it came my turn to speak, I was raw, vulnerable. I had just spent several days with a heightened awareness of what was going on in my mind, and it wasn’t pretty. I talked about how hard I was finding it to meditate. In almost every meditation instruction, the phrase begin again emerges as a theme. Your mind is wandering? Begin again. Clouded over with thoughts? Begin again. A twinge in your knee? Don’t judge it, or beat yourself up about it. Let it go. Return to the breath. Begin again.

  Well, I was having a hard time beginning again, and I was judging myself for it. Instead of gently, with compassion, returning to the breath, I was caught in a cycle of self-recrimination. What was going on inside my head was so stupid! So shallow and ridiculous! My mind was consumed either with the past or the future. I became lost in conversations that hadn’t happened and probably never would. I had been practicing yoga for many years, had developed this meditation practice, had begun to explore my Jewish roots with a semi-open mind—but still, there was all this internal chatter. I couldn’t seem to quiet it. Why couldn’t I remain in the present for longer than, oh, say, three seconds? I had a new understanding of the word scatterbrained.

  The people in the group were nodding and looked sympathetic, but when I finished speaking I felt even worse. Why had I even talked about my struggles with meditation in this Torah study group? One thing had nothing to do with the other. As we turned to the text, I felt exposed by the hours and hours of looking inward. What was the point of any of this? How did it all connect—if it connected at all? The yoga, meditation, reading, Torah study—it felt futile. The words swam together. I sank into my chair and tried to disappear.

  I wasn’t the only frustrated person in the room that night. Burt read aloud from Genesis 30, in which two sisters, Rachel and Leah, use surrogate handmaidens to compete for the status of having produced the most children for Jacob. This prompted one woman in the group to ask why we read these stories. What are we supposed to get out of them? I had often wondered the same thing. “I mean,” she said, “these people do terrible things to each other.” Burt smiled in agreement. It was true—there was no question, really—that these biblical characters were not exactly exemplars of ethical behavior. But there was something more. I had become friends with Burt over these many months, and could feel the intensity of what he was about to say before he even said it. “Because they’re ours to grapple with. Their human frailties allow us to see our own. We doubt and question them, generation after generation. It’s our text.”

  On the long ride back to Connecticut, Michael driving, I kept thinking about the whole idea of human frailty, and how—paradoxically—the recognition of frailty contained within it a kind of strength. What Burt had said had struck a nerve: the questioning was the true work of engagement. To question, to doubt, to rail against, even to reject—these were our prerogative. As a child, I had been taught not to question. But as Paul Tillich once wrote, doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it’s an element of faith. If only I could hold close to that idea. If only I could gently, simply—like a child learning to walk—begin again, and again, and again, whether returning to the Torah, to the meditation cushion, or simply to myself.

  As we sped along the highway, I checked my e-mail. There was a message from Burt: I want to quote you a Mishnah text from tractate Berakhot about prayer: “The early pious ones used to meditate for an hour before praying.” I know it feels to you like you are starting over each time, but really all you are doing is bringing your footsteps back to our well-trod path. That’s not starting over. It’s picking up the thread.

  54.

  Michael and I were out to dinner with another couple—very good friends of ours. The husband was someone I’ve known since seventh grade. With my parents gone and few relatives left, these ties to my past have become increasingly important to me. This guy was at my bat mitzvah! He saw me wearing that dorky peach corduroy suit and my first pair of heels! I knew him when he was a shrimpy, late-blooming adolescent, as opposed to the well-known actor he later became. We were familiar with each other’s high school crushes and embarrassments.

  Dinner was at a Manhattan restaurant, a hushed place with artfully arranged food and flattering lighting. We were grown-ups now—there was no doubt about that. At least we looked like grown-ups, had grown-up lives. Maybe even acted like grown-ups. He had two young children, I had one. We’d both been a bit beaten up by life but were, at the moment, weathering things pretty well. The four of us were talking about our kids when the subject turned to memory. Why do we remember the particular things we do? Great pain certainly carves its own neurological path. But why random, ordinary moments?

  “I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, watching my mother boil me an egg,” my friend said. He looked puzzled, reaching back. “She must have made me eggs hundreds of times. But I remember that one particular time.”

  I knew what all of us were thinking. What would our children remember? The oldest among them—Jacob—was nine. What ordinary moments had imprinted themselves on him at this point? And what painful ones? Michael and I rarely fought, but there had been a fight or two over the years that Jacob had witnessed. Would that be what he took away from our peaceful, happy family life? His parents red-faced and screaming at each other? I hoped not. God, I hoped not. But who knew?

  I tried to create a daily sense of constancy and ritual: family dinners, holiday traditions. On Hanukkah, we lit the menorah each year with Jacob’s best friends. We ordered bagels and lox from Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side for Yom Kippur, and had a crowd to break the fast. On our kitchen table, I kept a book of Buddhist wisdom, open to a different page each day. Most days, we remembered to read the little snippet of wisdom and look at the accompanying photograph. The black-necked cranes of Bhutan. The monk meditating in the hidden valley, his face rapt and peaceful. Had any of it seeped in? Would Jacob be sitting in a restaurant with friends some day when he was old enough to need bifocals to study the wine list, and remember some random thing from his childhood?

  My mother yelled at me because I couldn’t find my socks.

  My dad made me bacon.

  Who the hell knew? It was all in there, conscious or unconscious. What rose to the surface—and why?

  “I feel no connection to the kid I was,” Michael suddenly said. I had never heard him say anything like this before. “I’m a completely different person.”

  “Me too,” said our friend.

  I understood feeling like a completely different person. I had been a late bloomer too, and when I thought back to my teenage self, my twenty-something self, I had a hard time understanding how I had gotten from there to here. But no connection? I looked at my friend across the table. I could still see the seventh grader I had once known, alive inside him. Could he see that in me? Was there—surely there must be—a through line connecting the disparate parts of ourselves? I had very few memories of my childhood, and my adolescence is a blur. My life came into focus for me around the time my father died. But still, I knew that each part of me—the lost adolescent girl, the rebellious, miserable young woman, the confused, grief-stricken daughter
, the grown woman still trying to sort it all out—is linked one to the next, like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

  Nope, no connection. Completely different person. I could see that it would be desirable, maybe even preferable, to disavow pieces of the past—all the uncomfortable, unexplainable, embarrassing bits. But I knew better. I had experienced my own memory as a living thing, a palpable presence in my body. I had felt my past unfurl inside me as if it had a mind of its own. These layers of ourselves are always there, waiting for the right moment to emerge. The cooking of an egg. An overheard argument. A walk in the woods. The black-necked cranes of Bhutan. A jumble, perhaps, but nothing is ever missing. Just hidden from view.

  55.

  I kept coming across the term householder. In Buddhist readings and teachings, it cropped up again and again. Householder. Loosely translated from the Pali, it meant “layperson.” That was me. I was a layperson. I had a home and a family, and was very attached to both. I had no intention of renouncing home life. With any luck, I would never become a wandering ascetic. So what did this mean, to be a householder? Was it possible to do anything more than skim the surface? And if not, was skimming the surface better than nothing at all?

  Householder was defined narrowly as a wealthy and prestigious family patriarch: a guild foreman, banker, or merchant. But Buddha had specific advice for women householders as well:

  Be capable at one’s work.

  Work with diligence and skill.

  Manage domestic help skillfully (if relevant) and treat them fairly.

  Perform household duties efficiently.

  Be hospitable to one’s husband’s parents and friends.