In Freeville, you can set something by the side of the road in the morning, and it will be gone by the afternoon. I had furnished much of my Main Street house with (almost) perfectly good used furniture I’d found roadside. I liked the idea that my things were landing in others’ homes. But there was one category of my and my mother’s possessions that stumped me: spindly chairs that were broken and couldn’t be repaired and other pieces of furniture that I simply didn’t like but couldn’t seem to part with. This included a small pine chest with a broken bottom drawer that my former husband and I bought at an antique store in 1985. I had taken this pine chest from house to house as I had moved to London and back, and then around the country with my many moves. The chest had started to develop a burdensome emotional stink. I felt it was too old and fine to give away, leave by the side of the road, or take to the dump. Emily wasn’t interested in having it. I didn’t want to spend money repairing it, and I didn’t want to see it anymore. I wanted to lose it, along with all of my painful associations of early married life with my ex-husband, which the chest seemed to unleash. It most definitely did not spark joy.
My confusion over what to do with the pine chest led to a decision that some people might find distasteful but that worked for me. This is how I dealt with the never-ending suck of continuously rearranging the broken deck chairs on my emotional Titanic:
I decided to burn some shit in the yard.
I live in a place where many people heat their homes with wood, so outdoor burning is an acceptable practice. I looked up the local statute and learned that in Freeville, burning is permitted but must be confined to a fire pit. Coincidentally, our daughter Clare had given me a small portable metal fire pit for Christmas. I decided that I would start the New Year with a personal burn.
New Year’s Day was cold and snowy. Perfect. I wanted my burn to be at a time when my neighbors’ windows would be closed so the smoke didn’t bother anyone. I started the fire with a tiny bit of newspaper (featuring my advice column—I liked that symbolism) and a twig-style plant stand that had started life as a tripod but was now a bipod.
I watched the plant stand go up in smoke until it was no more. Knowing that it wouldn’t languish in the dump or outside a hoarder’s trailer made me feel good. I moved on to my mother’s collection of broken chairs. One by one, I fed them into the flames and stood in the snow, enjoying both the heat from the flame and the feeling of lightness that accompanied it. Soon enough I started to feel a Marie Kondo–like need to rid myself of other things.
Throughout the winter, I conducted burns—of broken bookshelves and two-legged stools, sprung baskets, the stripped frames of once-wicker tables, and a heavy twig-style porch chair that I had given to my mother but was so uncomfortable to sit on it actually inspired contempt. Yes—I burned the small pine chest. I burned extra copies of the programs from my mother’s funeral, along with the cardboard box they came in. I burned duplicate photographs of arty still lifes that I had taken in college and copies of Farm Life magazine from the 1950s.
When I was done, I spread the ashes on the winter-dormant bed of my mother’s back garden. I was free. I was tempted to also burn Marie Kondo’s book, but even I cannot burn a book. Instead, I donated it to the library’s book sale. I imagine the book changing hands and continuing to inspire or disgust people until it, too, lands in a garbage bag and is finally discarded forever by someone for whom it does not spark joy.
Inspired now by my ability to sort, toss, and burn, I started emptying my house on Main Street, readying it to turn over to my cousins Jan and Roger. Roger’s cancer had forced his retirement from the ministry at his large church near Rochester. Moving to Freeville, with Jan living next door to her mother, Millie, would enable the family to pull close.
Leaving the sweet house where Emily and I had lived and renting it to another family member let me detach from it with more joy than sadness. If you are someone, like me, who gets deeply attached to people and to things, letting go is a heartrending process. I remembered my ex-husband, Andy, who left me so suddenly, telling me that it was best to rip off the bandage quickly. This was best for him, no doubt, but for me, detaching is a serious and sad business. I don’t know if I’ll ever master it.
Bruno took almost a year to renovate my mother’s house on Mill Street. The job progressed in fits and starts as he pulled workers off of the project to work on other (higher profit margin) jobs. The delays gave me time to adjust to the house’s transformation. I had managed to completely empty the bottom floor of the house, but now the two small bedrooms on the second floor were crowded with bins, boxes, and hundreds of books stacked in teetering towers.
Bruno redesigned the small kitchen in back of the house and installed a window over the sink, which faced the barn and the old outhouse. He raised the very low ceiling in one room, exposing the original rough beams. He insulated the plank house and installed new wiring and a new furnace, as well as new windows in half of the house (I decided to keep the old windows, wavy and painted shut, along the front). He put in a new tub and sink and installed a window in the once-dark bathroom. In the evenings, after work was done, I walked to the house from my place on Main Street, and Bruno and I met to go over his progress. The floors—ancient chestnut in one room, wide-planked pine in all the others—gleamed with polish. The windows were newly trimmed in a stately style. Bruno had described the house as a gem, and when he was finished, it did look gemlike, unique and lovely.
I once described for Bruno Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which so perfectly describes the artist’s need for independence, space, and privacy. It also expresses my desire to have a place that is all my own and that others need to knock upon the door to enter. My husband grew up in the most crowded household imaginable; he is happiest when all of our daughters and granddaughters are with us and we have to put an extra leaf into our oak dining table. Given his need to be surrounded by people, it was an act of extreme generosity to make a house for me that is so inviting, and very much my own. As I set up my office and placed my mother’s old wicker chair in its rightful spot in the kitchen, I assured Bruno that I loved the home he and I shared—and now if I ever went missing, he would know the first place to look.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Imperfect Pitch
In the eight years since moving back home to Freeville, Bruno and I have grieved the deaths of eight close family members. Some of these losses have been long and lingering, some heartbreakingly sudden and tragic. We have experienced four of these deaths in February, which, although the shortest month, seems to be the longest and heaviest for us.
The state of grieving implies loss—the loss of any future with a loved one, but also a myriad of other losses. Grieving unmoored me and made me lose my place in the world. If I was no longer Jane’s daughter, Lena and Harvey’s niece, Roger’s cousin, or Auntie Amy to my niece and nephew who had also passed away, I wasn’t sure who I was. I missed my mother dreadfully. She was the person who might have made these other losses easier to bear.
I have read about how grief is different for everyone, and I’ve reminded readers of this when fielding questions about grief and loss for my advice column. I have advised readers to give themselves time, and, echoing my husband’s advice to me, I have urged grieving readers to be gentle toward themselves and to others. But while dispensing my own compassionate advice to readers, I have often at the same time felt quite hollow and disconnected. I have been surprised at how long it has taken me to recover. My therapist’s counsel was to simply allow myself to feel, instead of trying to power through and somehow force my sadness to go away. This simple advice and permission was profound for someone like me. My normal practice was to qualify every tough moment by being ashamed for my self-absorption, while reflexively reminding myself of how lucky I am. I am free. I’m not a refugee fleeing from war or hunger. I’m healthy. I have a loving family and good friends. But these qualifications seemed like hollow platitudes, so I gave up trying t
o pretend to be perfectly well adjusted or to convince myself that I was lucky. And what I realized, very gradually, was that even when I tried to force sadness away, it still perched on my shoulder. When I tried too hard to move on, I became paralyzed. Every time I denied myself the gentleness or compassion I needed, I turned in anger toward someone else. And so I let the gray veil drop, hoping that a breeze would come and catch it, lift it, make it billow and fly away. I waited.
For me, time has helped to close the wounds opened by loss. The turning of the seasons in our harsh and beautiful countryside reminds me of the temporal nature of life and of how the natural world dies and renews and eventually replaces itself. Some mornings, I take my coffee to Willow Glen Cemetery. While there, I do not talk to my lost loved ones; there is no cinematic outpouring or lamentation over the graves of my dearly departed. I just sit there sipping my coffee, staring out at the view, and imagining them in the ground. I think of these lines from the Book of Ruth: “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you, for where you go, I must go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.”
My mother told me that she wanted these words on her tombstone: Life is a memory. But there was no room for this inscription on the grave marker I chose to sit atop her grave. When I met with Brad, the undertaker, to choose her marker, he suggested a flat stone matching those for her parents, grandparents, and other ancestors laid to rest around our family’s large memorial stone. All of these bear only a first name, carved in simple block letters. I agreed with his choice but had my mother’s stone chiseled, not in block letters, but in a Courier typeface. This was a nod to her years when she had supported her family as a typist and an inside reference to the font on the daisy wheel of her treasured blue IBM Selectric.
Several months later, when the stone marker was placed on her grave, the cemetery workers put it facing in the wrong direction. Where all of the other family markers were facing in toward the memorial, Jane’s was facing outward. It was distinctly and most definitely upside down, and when I first saw it, I laughed. My mother always went her own way.
The strangest and most unexpected ancillary loss I experienced in grief was the turning away from music. Immediately after Jane’s funeral, I found myself unable to listen to or make music. Muzak playing on a sound system at a store was tolerable. I could also listen impassively to the radio, if somebody else had turned it on (I never did). What I couldn’t seem to tolerate was live music. When that occurred, I simply had to leave.
It wasn’t until I felt its absence so keenly that I realized that music—both listening to it and experiencing the pleasure of making it—had been an emotional gyroscope throughout my entire life. Those times when I was most lonely and searching, such as after my father’s departure and during my most homesick days in adulthood, I compensated by singing my way through it. At Georgetown, I sang with three choirs simultaneously. After college, I worked as a lounge singer in a small, run-down hotel bar on M Street, singing Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart standards for $50 a night. The pianist and I split the modest tips left in the brandy snifter on the piano. I remember standing at a pay phone on the street and calling my mother after one gig. I thanked her for stacking the playlist of my childhood sound track with show tunes and standards, because now I was making a living from them.
To be bereft is to experience a lack, an absence and a mournful emptiness. I assume that my strong association with my mother’s love of music tipped some unknown internal organ stop to “mute” once she was gone. I couldn’t attend a concert or go to church, and if I had to attend one of our unfortunately regular funeral services, I sat quietly and simply let the tears stream down my face.
Bruno’s mother died in the summertime, about eighteen months after my own mother’s death. Marnie was ninety-three and, after her own series of injuries and health emergencies, she had spent most of the summer fading away. That last day, Marnie was lying in her bed at Maryhill Farm, with many of her twelve surviving children gathered at her bedside. Bruno wanted me in the room with his mother and brothers and sisters, but I tried to stand near the back, closer to the door. As my mother-in-law’s breathing became more labored, several in the room asked for a song. The only musical members of Bruno’s family seemed to be on the road, as they were making their way to her bedside, and suddenly I felt the group turn expectantly toward me.
My mind… was a blank. I tried to flip through my mental Rolodex of remembered hymns and sacred songs to sing for this very religious and devout person. I had nothing. Nothing at all. Marnie had been important to me, and her children were very important to me. I tried to coax that dormant performance gene into life in order to lead the group. Suddenly, I was relieved to feel a song start to bubble up from within. But the song that surfaced on that strange day was the title song from Oklahoma! I pushed “Oklahoma!” down, but it wouldn’t stay there.
I remained mute and sweating. While someone else started an off-key version of “Amazing Grace” and the group joined in, I slipped out of the room.
It wasn’t until three years after my mother’s death that I was finally able to attend a local concert of live music. The towns around Freeville host summertime community choruses and bands. It’s a no-audition situation right out of The Music Man, where people rifle deep in their coat closets for the clarinet they played in high school, show up for one evening a week of rehearsal, and then squeeze out a few songs in a concert six weeks later. Emily and I had both performed with the community chorus when she was young, when my sister Rachel directed it for a few summers.
Bruno and I sat together in the high school auditorium for that summer’s concert, holding hands while our neighbors sang “Buffalo Gals” and played “The Washington Post March.” I was expecting the now-familiar “flight” sensation, where my heart raced and my breath quickened, and I wanted to jump out of my skin. But this time I didn’t want to flee. I wanted to stay. And I wanted to feel it. I promised myself that I would try harder to bring music back into my life, in order to feel the way I used to feel, back when I felt like myself.
Last summer, I persuaded myself to join the chorus. Rehearsals were held in the heat-conducting linoleum-clad basement of the Methodist church in nearby Dryden. The air was thick with summer heat and the unmistakable scent left by the honey wagons, spreading manure on nearby fields. There were almost eighty of us: farmers and retired people, office workers from Cornell, and schoolteachers. The age range was eight to ninety. I sat next to Mrs. Streeter, who’d taught typing in my high school fifty years ago. “We altos have to stick together, Amy,” she said, patting the seat. Damn straight, Mrs. Streeter.
The chorus was led by Jen, a local middle school music teacher. Jen had chosen a perfect program, with a balance of challenging new music and old-timey crowd-pleasers. She got us warmed up and blasted us through rehearsals quickly and expertly. She taught a little bit of theory and vocal technique. I hadn’t sung a note in three years, but I could feel the old tumblers moving and shifting. Out in the parking lot after rehearsals, standing and talking about the program with my neighbors, I felt the old antic joy rising.
Over the course of the summer, I let myself fall in love with music again, but now I noticed a change. After a lifetime of being entranced by the sound of my own voice, I was now focused on how it felt to blend my voice along with others’. I was no longer the best singer in the choir—not by a long shot. Those slots were taken by younger and more practiced singers. But I no longer needed to be heard. I dropped the snobbish need for excellence I had assumed over the years. What felt good to me was the experience itself: coming together with other people, all of us showing up at a church basement, bravely baring our musical inadequacies and rusty pipes. My happiness was enhanced by standing next to Mrs. Streeter, the robust ninety-year-old alto.
One evening at rehearsal, I asked our director why music makes us feel the way we do, why it seems
to rearrange our cells. She explained the physics of cymatic vibrations. Membranes vibrate and matter assumes new shapes when sound waves hit. I didn’t only feel like my cells were rearranging themselves when I was making or listening to music—it was actually happening. That’s why music was so healing and life-changing, and why its absence was such a genuine loss, compounding all my other losses.
Our concert was held on a stifling August night at the high school auditorium—the same place where forty years before, I had been a lead in Oklahoma! and Bye Bye Birdie. During our program, we sang a challenging new piece, commissioned to celebrate the twentieth year of the chorus. The band played its annual performance of “The Washington Post March,” while the audience clapped along. We also sang “Buffalo Gals” as a crowd-pleasing male-versus-female duel. I didn’t faint, weep, or want to run away.
A month after that summertime concert, I returned to the Freeville United Methodist Church on a Wednesday night for choir practice. I had passed the church several times a day on my trips down Main Street, but I hadn’t entered it since the most recent funeral I had attended there, two years before. There were ten of us at rehearsal. Every other person had been singing with the choir for years, and I knew them all, personally and musically. The church had a brand-new minister and a new choir director, and I liked the symmetry of starting afresh with others.
I hadn’t put on one of the polyester gray robes and sung regularly with the choir for twenty years, but I knew how things would go; we would charge our way through the hymns and that week’s anthem. Some of us would struggle with nerves during our short solos. Some of us would spend the rest of our lives searching for, but never quite finding, the note. We would sing at two services on Christmas and Easter, remember each other’s birthdays, and pass around homemade fudge.
Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things Page 19