by Susan Moon
Near the end of his life, my father reconnected with people from his childhood and youth. I think it must have been after his sister died. He had always distanced himself from his privileged background and from the conservative values of the family he grew up in, so I was surprised when, as an old man, blind and sick with cancer, he took a bus to visit a cousin in Maine whom he hadn’t seen for forty years, and he flew to California to see a long-lost friend from boarding school. It was a lot of trouble. He wept, telling me how much it meant to him to reconnect with them. He said they were the only people left who had known him as a child.
Here’s what I mean when I say old friends stick by each other through thick and thin. One time, I hired a professional organizer to help me sort the papers in my study, a task that always makes me tremble. We went through old files together and filled many grocery bags and cardboard cartons with paper to be recycled. She showed me a whole new system for dealing with my incoming mail—“Verticalize! Verticalize!” was her refrain—and she gave me a list of office supplies to put the system into place. I walked her out the front door and said good-bye.
On my way back into the house, I picked up a big pile of mail from my mailbox and carried it into the study. I didn’t know where to put it—my system was in transition. And suddenly, I totally lost it. I had what I think was the only temper tantrum I’ve ever had. Screaming “I hate this!” at the top of my lungs, I kicked violently at each bag and box of papers, upending them. I hurled armfuls of papers into the air, making a blizzard, until the floor of my study was covered in drifts of paper, and then, exhausted, I sat down in the middle and cried. How would I ever get out of this?
Then a ray of light came into my mind. It was the thought of a friend, a friend who lives nearby and works at home, a friend I’d known long enough that I was pretty sure he’d still love me even after he found out what I’d done. I called him up and said I needed him. Luckily, he had an hour before his next piano student was to arrive, and he came right over. He was impressed by the chaos but not afraid of it—they weren’t his papers. He appreciated my vigor, and he pointed out that my tantrum was well-planned, since all of the paper was on the way out anyway. I’d had all the fun of making a mess without doing any damage. He got me laughing, and together we put the paper back in the paper bags, and together we put it out to be recycled.
Friends see each other through changes. For years I’ve been taking a walk with a friend every Thursday morning. When we were young single mothers, we used to take our children skiing together. We also hiked together. Later, on our weekly walks, we took a trail in the hills behind Berkeley. The walks became shorter when we stopped doing the very steep part at the top because of my knees. The next change was to a gentler but still sloping walk in a pretty park near her office—well, actually it’s a cemetery, but we don’t lie down in it. Lately my friend has been having trouble with her hip, and so we have further adjusted our walk, staying on level ground, in the early morning streets of our neighborhood. On our last walking date, she arrived at the appointed time to pick me up, but she had just done something to her back while getting into the car, and so for our walk time she lay on her back on my living room floor and I brought her a cold pack from the fridge. I sat in the rocking chair beside her, and we talked until she had to drive to work.
I’m noticing that when someone you love needs help, it feels good to give it. In order to be “a refuge for myself and others,” as Shantideva says, I try to “make the interchange of ‘I’ and ‘other,’” to remember that helping a friend is not so different from receiving help from a friend, and this gives me confidence that my friends are glad to help me when I need them. There are plenty of opportunities going both directions.
The older you get, the more your friends have health problems. A close friend was seriously ill a couple of years ago with a rare form of viral pneumonia. Many years before, soon after I moved to California, she had been the one to introduce me to the high country of Yosemite. When I got short of breath hiking up the trail behind her, in air thinner than I’d ever breathed before, she encouraged me: slow and steady wins the race, she said. She told me to breathe from deep in my belly, with my diaphragm.
When she got sick, I sat with her often during her prolonged hospital stay. These hours had not been planned for in my busy schedule, and yet there was time to be with her. It was not a problem. Wholeheartedness led the way, and it felt good not to question, not to hedge, not to hold back. It was my turn to encourage her to breathe.
I know a woman in her seventies who has formed what she calls a “pod” with a few old and trusted friends. They have made a pact to go to each other when the need arises, to “be there for each other.” She says this might mean sitting by a bedside, advocating in the hospital, or holding hands when something terrible happens. It might even mean helping each other die. It might mean saying, “The state in which I see you now is what you always told me you didn’t want.”
I’ve been thinking about it. You could make such an agreement explicit, like a wedding vow. If you need me, I will do everything in my power to come to you. If I need you, I will expect the same of you. You could say it out loud, or you could even write up a document.
And even without saying anything, I’m in a sort of pod with my friends.
Old friendships are a benefit of getting old, but old friends also die. It’s lonely when you’re very old and your close friends are gone. This was impressed upon me when I visited my grandmother’s beloved lifetime friend, “Aunt Dorothy,” several years after my grandmother’s death. She was about ninety, and tiny, sitting up in her bed at home, like a little hill in the bedclothes, a small bump of life sticking up above the plain, all her friends gone. She told me she missed my grandmother every single day of her life. She said she didn’t want to be alive any more now that there was no one left in her generation. I guess the silver lining of having your friends all die before you is that it helps you feel more ready to die. I’m thinking of the old spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”: “If you get there before I do, tell all my friends I’m coming, too.”
Now, over forty years after we first met, Susie and I have come to this bait shack at the edge of the harbor, to take pictures and write. We are practicing the exchange of self and other. Susie comes from California and lives in Massachusetts, and I come from Massachusetts and live in California. She, the photographer, has lately become a writer, and I am learning to take pictures. Perhaps our next collaborative project will be a book with text by her and photos by me.
This week I read a piece of the young adult novel she’s working on and gave her feedback, and yesterday she taught me how to get greater depth of field, so that both the green seaweed floating on the surface and the barnacled rocks under the water were in focus. I love that phrase, depth of field. It describes our friendship.
Out the window the low sun paints the rocks with yellow light and moving shadows, so that figure and ground keep changing, and the rocks flow into each other, soft as water. Now Susie stands with one foot on either side of a crevice, in her familiar bow-legged stance. She points the camera down, adjusts the focus, pauses, completely still. She’s waiting for something, maybe a wave to lap up. I hope she gets just the shot she wants. I feel indescribably fond of her, in her black wool cap.
We have the same name. In college we were both called Susie. Once, she woke me up in our dorm room, calling, “Susie!”
“Yes?” I said.
“Oh my god!” she said. “That was so weird! When I called you Susie just then I meant me.”
House of Commons
OVER TIME, without my planning it, my house has become part of the commons.
I’ve lived in the same house for close to forty years, almost unheard of in this age of family uprootings. I’ve always shared the house with other people, and I still do.
The first epoch in the house was the time of my children’s growing up. In 1972, I was a newly divorced mother of two small children
, and I bought the house in Berkeley, California, with the help of my parents. I was afraid I’d feel isolated if I lived alone with the kids, especially since their father moved away soon after we parted. I thought it would be good for them, too, to have other caring adults in the household. I chose a homey, shingled house, whose four-plus bedrooms made it plenty big enough to share with others. Two venerable walnut trees arched over the house in the back yard.
Friends moved in with me—and we four adults and three kids lived together for the first few years. The walnut trees bore many walnuts that we dried in the attic and put into pies. The other mother and I took turns making supper for the kids. A housemate painted a sun on the kitchen ceiling, with wiggly yellow rays reaching out.
We had massage classes on the living room floor in front of the fire, and wild parties with homemade music. I see now that it might not have been the most stable household possible for my children, but in Berkeley in the seventies, it seemed almost normal. We were transcending the claustrophobic limits of the nuclear family.
The time went by, the people came and went. Those who moved in were always friends or friends of friends. An artist slept in the kitchen hallway in order to use her bedroom for a studio. One man spent hours in his room practicing reflexology on his own feet while wearing a turban and pantaloons. As the tides ebbed and flowed, bringing Zen practitioners, boyfriends, exchange students, dogs and cats, the kids and I remained onshore.
People who didn’t live in the house came to know it, too. The massage classes gave way to more sober events, like monthly letter-writing parties for political causes. There were house meetings about the war in El Salvador and fundraising potlucks for the nuclear freeze campaign. The kids and their friends played music in the house on various instruments. For years, three friends and I, with the help of our several children, produced a family humor magazine—Garlic, the Breath of the People—on the dining room table, pasting down the drawings and typewritten columns with wax and getting it ready for the printer. We had three hundred subscribers.
The house grew its own homey culture, like yogurt or sourdough starter. If you spilled something on the comfortable, slightly shabby furniture it didn’t matter much. There was usually something that needed fixing—a leaky faucet, or a broken step on the back porch—but the house had a mood of friendly welcome.
Many housemates sat at the kitchen table with me. They stayed a year, or two, or three, and eventually moved on. When my children, too, flew the coop, the house seemed to lose its purpose. All those years, living with other people, I had been making a home for my children, and so it had been my home, too.
Now it felt big and echoey, not like home. Still, it was home base, if not home, and I stayed on. A college friend from Senegal and his school-age sons lived with me for a year while he taught at the university. A couple, friends of a friend, arrived from Vermont in a gypsy wagon they had built, and stayed for a few years, to be near their Berkeley granddaughter. And my sons came back for visits, sometimes long ones.
I was continually learning the lesson of impermanence. I knew that some of the housemates would be leaving from the moment they arrived, like the friend from Africa who had a yearlong appointment. Occasionally I asked someone to leave. But there were some I wished would stay.
Still, I understood that I was the owner. I couldn’t have my cake and eat it, too; I couldn’t expect people to stay in my house exactly as long as I wanted them to and no longer. So the house was a lopsided community, privately owned. At one point I almost persuaded dear friends to buy half the house, but it turned out there were tax impediments.
When I’d been in the house for twenty-five years, I had a reunion party, of all the people I could find who had lived there with me. The ones who were living in Chicago, Prince Edward Island, Denmark, Germany, France, and Senegal didn’t come, but local people came, and we sat in a big circle in the living room and told stories: about the time my dog ate a housemate’s lump of hashish and collapsed on the front steps with a piece of it still on her tongue that he managed to salvage, about the comparative croissant tasting event, the visiting teenagers from the Soviet Union, and the time one of my kids, at the age of five, cut up a housemate’s diaphragm with scissors. To have all those people sitting together in the living room at the same time, to have twenty-five years of household history crunched together in one moment, was both wonderful and sad. Was it me or the house itself who had gathered us all in? And why, when so many people had passed through, did I alone remain?
I was glad when my sister and her two daughters moved in with me, but when she bought her own house two years later and they moved out, it seemed like the end of an era. I thought it was time for me to go, too.
In 2000, I rented out the house and set off to explore other possibilities. I lived in a wine barrel in a retreat center in the country, but it was too small; I rented a room in someone else’s house, but it didn’t feel like my community; I rented a beautiful flat by the beach, but it was a long haul to get to my job and my friends in Berkeley, and I was lonesome. After a few years, I decided to move back in.
I’m still here, still sharing the house with others.
It’s hard work taking care of an old house, endlessly fixing and painting. It takes time, money, and energy. I’m in my mid-sixties. When I moved in, I was twenty-nine. I’m able to cope with it now, but for how much longer?
I think about my contemporaries, my friends and relatives: almost every one of them lives either alone or with a partner (unless they are temporarily living with me), except for a few who live in residential Zen communities. How odd that I’m the only one still living in shared housing, like a throwback. It’s not a policy decision; I’m certainly not defying the bourgeois lifestyle. Life would be so much simpler if I sold the house and moved into a little apartment or a condo.
But here’s the thing: I don’t want to live alone. I need my own private space, but I like to hear the sounds of people I love knocking around the house. I like to smell their coffee in the morning (I don’t drink coffee anymore), and I like to sit down to a meal together, not every evening, but often, and find out what’s shaking.
What does an older single woman do if she doesn’t want to live alone? I could sell my house and move into a cohousing community with strangers. I could move into a Zen community, if I were willing to get up at 4:30 every morning and dedicate my days to a demanding practice schedule. I could join with friends to plan a community together, but when a group of us tried that years ago, nobody ever stepped forward to do the full-time work of finding the place and setting it up, and the group fell apart. If the community already existed, if my dearest friends lived in a homey, socially relevant, spiritually grounded community in the country close to Berkeley, with a good view of an unpolluted body of water, with shared vegetarian meals twice a week, and room for visiting grandchildren, I’d move right in. But I’m not holding my breath.
There’s “retirement living.” My mother and stepfather lived happily in an apartment building for seniors for the last fifteen years of their lives. But they were older then than I am now, and I’m not ready for that yet.
Community exists through time, not just in space. By now the house itself has become a member of my extended family. When friends or relatives strain their backs, they let themselves into the yard through the gate and get into the hot tub. They celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in the back yard. My grown sons, my daughter-in-law, my granddaughter, my nieces and nephews come visiting. The house is a way station for friends in transition. It’s become part of the commons, and I’m currently its steward. Others, through use, have gained a right of way. I don’t quite feel I have the right to sell it, not yet. I keep it open as a place of possibility. The painted sun is still shining on the kitchen ceiling.
In recent years, like chickens coming home to roost, people who lived in the house before have returned. My sister recently cycled through a second time, and a young woman who lived here as a child tu
rned up briefly. Now a niece lives in the house with me, and I’m waiting to see who else is coming.
I know the time is approaching when I’ll quit being the housemother, and I don’t mean by dying. I’ll get too tired to figure out what to do about the muddy basement, or I’ll get too sad when someone I love moves out. A change is coming. Maybe someone will move in with me and promise never to leave, or someone will invite me to live with them. Maybe I’ll divide the house into two apartments and rent or sell one of them to a friend. Maybe I’ll be ready for a retirement community, or surprise myself by wanting solitude.
It’s not going to be an easy transition. I’ll need courage. But the commons is a living, breathing organism that stretches beyond the walls of my house. I’m part of it, and these days I have faith that the commons will take care of me in ways I can’t foresee.
Getting Good at Staying Still
I WAS HAVING CHEERIOS and milk with my mother at the little table beside the window, in her retirement building in Chicago. Her sixth-floor apartment overlooked Lake Michigan, and it was one of my mother’s greatest pleasures in life to sit in her favorite chair and watch the passing of ore boats and clouds. This was the first morning of my visit, and my mother turned her attention from her lake to her daughter, saying, “Your hair is so wild! Can’t you do something to get it out of your face?”
“Why don’t you ever tell me when you like my hair?” I said.
She tried to redeem herself that evening, lavishing compliments upon me when I put barrettes in my hair before we went downstairs to dinner. But the next morning, again, she looked at me over her bowl of cereal, with her head cocked, and I felt it coming.
“You looked so beautiful last night,” she said, trying to be diplomatic. “I could hardly take my eyes off you.” I knew that was just the prelude. “But this morning . . . can’t you just brush it back?”