by Anne Lamott
Sam also doodled throughout the evening. The rest of us talked, overate, cleaned up messes as we went, held our tongues, ignored the inevitable family tension. The oil of manners made it possible. When you’re kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back—the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy’s Law.
And all the while, Sam drew his little guys, from time to time asserting his adolescent grump. I felt anxious much of time, but what else is new? Something larger than we were, larger than our anxieties and ferocious need to control, got us through, connected us, even if the connection was precarious at first. What shone through was the odd responsibility we took for one another, the kindness, marbled through the past, the bad and silent patches of our shared histories, our character defects, hidden and on the surface, and the glitches. Things got broken—they always do—and children always yap and stamp and cry and demand your attention. It’s called real life, and it’s cracked and fragile, but the glue for me is the beating of my heart, love, and whatever attention I can pay to what matters most to me—making a good life for Sam.
“Hey, Sam,” I said, as I hugged everyone good-bye before leaving the hotel. “Doodle on.”
The next morning, I lay in bed giving thanks for having come from where we were before Sam knew his dad to where we were now. I ordered room service, and then made the mistake of turning on the TV. What if there really was no hope this time? What if the insanity had grown more intense than wisdom? Outside my window, the nearest trees looked sick and in trouble. Their leaves had all fallen, and they looked dead. I could only lean on my shaky Advent faith that things would be okay, more or less, that we are connected, and that everyone—everyone—eventually falls into the hands of God. I pray, and try to be kind, and go to church, and Sam doodles.
But these are the things that Jesus did, too. In John 8, when the woman is about to be stoned by the Pharisees for adultery, we see Jesus doodling in the sand. The Pharisees, the officially good people, are acting well within the law when they condemn the woman to death. A huge crowd of people willing to kill her joins them. The Greatest Hits moment here comes when Jesus challenges the crowd: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” But the more interesting stuff happens before, when he leaves the gathering storm, goes off by himself, and starts doodling.
Jesus refuses to interact with the people on their level of hatred and madness. He draws in the sand for a time. Maybe he’s drawing his little guys—the Gospel doesn’t say. But when he finally faces the mob and responds, all the people who were going to kill the woman have disappeared.
You have to wonder: Where was the man with whom she committed adultery? Some people suggest he is in the crowd, waiting to join in with the others and kill her. We don’t know. But I can guess how the condemned woman must have felt—surprised. She was supposed to die, and her life was spared. Hope always catches us by surprise.
It poured all morning. Even in the gloom and desperation, I played over the scenes from the night before, in all their magic and klutziness and ordinariness: Sam and his brother getting to know each other; the baby in a state of busy wonder. I have to say, I continue to be deeply surprised by life.
I had invited everyone over to my hotel for room service lunch and a movie. I was anxious while I waited. The rain came down, dark and loud. I couldn’t wait to get back to my own home: this was the perfect time to plant bulbs and scatter seeds, in the hope that some would grow. But meanwhile, in Advent, we show up when we are needed; we try to help, we prepare for an end to the despair. And we do this together.
twenty-one
falling better
Last year I was invited to Park City, Utah, to give some lectures just after Easter, and I scammed a free ski week out of the deal. Sam invited his friend Tony, and I invited my friend Sue Schuler. She was a great companion, younger than I but already wise; cheeky, gentle, blonde, full of life—and jaundiced, emaciated, dying of cancer.
She said yes. She had always loved to ski, and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I started skiing only six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering problems. I fall fairly often, and flounder getting up, but I enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations, and abject despair—sort of like real life.
No one in Sue’s family, including Sue herself, was sure whether she’d be able to ski, or whether she would make the trip at all. But I was. No one could have known that she would die only one month after my invitation. I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she’d at least want to try. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again—she had cancer of the everything by then—and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. That would make up for a lot. Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a few hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: “Spring is Christ,” Rumi said, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death; bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger than airport security lines.
Sue said yes, she’d meet me in Park City.
I’d met her about a year before, over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a sort of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. Call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. But I felt God’s hand in this, or at any rate, God’s fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch, funny, left-wing Christian friend for Sue.
It was March 2001. The wildflowers weren’t in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn’t opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy—she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.
Some of her evangelical friends had insisted sorrowfully that her nieces wouldn’t get into heaven, since they were Jews, as was one of her sisters. I told her what I believe to be true—that there was not one chance in a million that the nieces wouldn’t go to heaven, and if I was wrong, who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, she and I would refuse to go. We’d organize.
“What kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?” she asked.
That was the beginning of our friendship, which unfolded over a year and some change, a rich condensed broth of affection and loyalty, because there was no time to lose. I couldn’t believe how beautiful Sue was when we met face to face: I hadn’t expected that earthy, dark irreverence to belong to such a beauty. She started coming to my church soon after, and we talked on the phone regularly. I had one thing to offer, which is that I would just listen. I did not try to convince her that she could mount one more offensive against the metastases. I could hear her, hear the fear, and her spirit. Sue had called on New Year’s Day 2002 in tears, to say she knew she was dying.
I listened for a long time; she went from crushed to defiant. “I have what everyone wants,” she said. “But no one would be willing to pay.”
“What do you have?”
“The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I’m not afraid of dying anymore.”
She got sicker and sicker. It was unfair—I wanted to file a report with the Commission on Fairness; and I still want to ask God about this when we meet. That someone so lovely and smart and fabulous was going to die, and that horrible people, whom I will not name, would live forever—it broke your heart. At the same time, she had so much joy. She loved her family, her friends, and eating. She ate
like a horse. I have never known a woman who could put it away like Sue. Her body was stick-thin, and on top of that, the skin on one leg was reptilian, with twenty-two skin grafts from her knees up past her hips, which she’d needed upon contracting a flesh-eating disease at a hospital after one of her countless cancer surgeries.
I ask you.
This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing—it’s another thing I’d like to bring up with God. Bodies are so messy, and disappointing. Every time I see the bumper sticker that says, “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits, having human experiences,” (a) I think it’s true, and (b) I want to ram the car.
Sue and I met one last time on the Thursday after Easter 2002 in Park City, to celebrate the holiday privately, a week late. We shared a king-size bed in the condominium. Sam and his friend Tony took the other bedroom, reducing it to Pompeii within an hour. Then, their work completed, they shook us down for sushi money and headed out for the wild street life of Park City.
The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the human death. He came back with a body—not like Casper or Topper; he didn’t come back as the vague idea of a spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, he had died; and then you could touch him, and he could eat; and these four things are as bodily as life gets.
The first thing Sue and I did was to locate an Easter Week service online, and we followed it to the book. Well, sort of, in the reform sense of “followed” and “book.” That night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, when Jesus had Passover with his disciples before his arrest and gave them all communion. We used Coca-Cola for wine, and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for the bread, broken in remembrance of him.
Then we washed each other’s feet. Jesus had washed his disciples’ feet, to show that peace was not about power; it was about love and gentleness, and being of service. Washing Sue’s feet was scary. I did not feel like Jesus. I felt very nervous. I don’t even like to wash my own feet. We put some soap in a Tupperware tub, and she sat on the couch, and I lifted her feet into the warm water and washed them gently with a soapy washcloth. And then she washed mine.
I watched Sue sleep beside me in bed off and on all night. Sometimes she was so still that I was sure she was dead. She looked like a beautiful corpse, slightly yellow, slightly smelly, ethereal. She’d snore softly, or open her eyes and look at me. “Hi, Annie,” she’d say in a small voice.
In the morning after breakfast, Sue, Sam, Tony, and I took the ski lift to the summit. The boys disappeared. Sue, wearing a lavender ski jacket, had 110 pounds on her five-foot-nine frame, and she was wobbly and trembling. People turned to stare at her, because she was yellow and emaciated. She smiled; people smiled back. She had great teeth. “Oh yeah, and I used to be built,” she said, as we got our bearings in the snow. “I used to have a rack on me.” We stood together at the summit, looking at the mountains and an endless blue sky, and suddenly I fell over. She helped me up, and we laughed and headed down the mountain.
She hadn’t been on the slopes for years, and she moved gingerly; the air was thin and she had cancer in her lungs. Then she pushed hard on her poles and took off farther down the mountain. At some point she turned around and waited for me, and as soon as I saw her, I stopped, and fell over again. There I was, sprawled in the snow, with my skis at an angle over my head, looking like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. She waited for me to get up and ski to where she stood, and then she taught me one of the most important things I have ever learned—how to fall better. She pointed out that when I fell, I usually didn’t fall that hard. “You’re so afraid of falling that it’s keeping you from skiing as well as you could. It’s keeping you from having fun.” So each time I fell, I lay there a moment, convinced that I had broken my hip, that it was all hopeless, and she would show me how to get back up. Each time, I’d dust the snow off my butt, look over at her, and head back down the mountain. After she saw that I could fall safely, she tore off down the slope.
We celebrated Good Friday that night, a week late. It’s a sad day, of loss and cruelty, and all you have to go on is faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it. I hate that you can’t prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I’d have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check as you went along, to see if you’re on the right track. But nooooooo. Darkness is our context, and Easter’s context: without it, you couldn’t see the light. Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.
After the Good Friday service, Sue wanted to show me her legs, the effects of all that skin grafting. The skin was shocking, wounded and as alien as snakeskin.
“Wow,” I said. Sue let me study it awhile. “I have trouble with my cellulite,” I said, guiltily.
“Yeah,” she answered, “but this is what me being alive looks like now.”
She had fought militantly for her body over time, but she was tender and maternal with it. She took long, hot baths at night, and then smoothed on lotions.
The next morning we celebrated Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, when Jesus was dead and hidden in the tomb, and nothing made sense, and no one knew that he was going to be alive again. Most of his disciples had left Golgotha on Good Friday even before he died; only a few women remained at the cross. The disciples skulked off like dogs to the Upper Room, to wait, depressed and drunk—or at least this is what I imagine. I certainly would have, and I would have been thinking, “We are so fucked.” Father Tom adds that there was a lot of cigarette smoke that night, and Monday-morning quarterbacking.
One thing Sue wanted to do before she died was to get a massage, to be touched sensuously again, so we arranged for massages on this Saturday.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, as we walked to the salon, “you don’t see a lot of bodies like Sue Schuler’s here in Park City, Utah.”
Sue got a gorgeous masseur from India—he looked like Siddhartha—while I got a tense white German woman. Sue and her masseur walked off together, and she glanced over her shoulder with the pleasure of someone on her way to her bridal suite.
My masseuse looked like she was impatient to start slapping me.
When I saw Sue again, an hour later, she smelled of aromatic lemon oils.
“Did you feel shy at all?” I asked.
“Nah!” she told me. “Not after I gave him a tour of the bod.”
Sue got up early on Sunday, the day we were leaving. The sun was pouring through the windows; there was a bright blue sky. She no longer looked jaundiced. She was light brown, rosy. She made us her special apricot scones, small, light yellow, flecked with orange fruit, for breakfast. I tried to discourage her, because I didn’t want her feelings to be hurt if the boys turned up their noses: “The boys won’t eat apricot scones,” I insisted. “They eat cereal, Pop-Tarts . . . treyf!”
“Oh, they’ll eat my scones,” she said slyly. And they did; we all did. We ate all but four, which she packed up for us to take on the plane. Two survived the drive to the airport in Salt Lake City. They were gone by the time we arrived home.
twenty-two
cruise ship
The aunties have put on weight since our last trip to the tropics, the aunties being the jiggly areas of my legs and butt that show when I put on a swimsuit. I had fallen in love with them five or six years ago, the darling aunties, shyly yet bravely walking exposed along the beaches of Huatulco, Mexico. Used to having them hidden in the dark of long pants and capris and the indoors, I suddenly understood that they had carried me through my days without complaint, strong and able, their only desire to accompany me, on beaches, in shorts, and to swim in tropical water. I vowed to include them from then on, to be as kind and gr
ateful as possible.
But that had been nearly fifteen pounds earlier.
Now they wanted to come with me to the Caribbean.
My friends Buddy and Father Tom had persuaded me to go on a cruise with them in March 2003, shortly before the United States went to war “preemptively” in Iraq. Tom said the trip would be a lot like the cruises I take in the comfort of my own home when the world has gotten me down, left me incredulous and defeated. At those times, I make a nest for my baby self on the couch in the living room. I stretch out with a comforter and pillows, and magazines, the cat, unguents, and my favorite drink, cranberry and soda with a lime twist. These are periods of stress and Twilight Zone isolation, marked by hypochondria, numb terror, despair, and the conviction that I must go on a diet. Even at—especially at—these times, I hate to stop, though I know that to go faster and faster and do more is to move in the direction of death. Continuous movement, I tell myself, argues a wasted life. And so I try to create a cruise ship, to carry me back toward living.
The main difference between my cruise, though, and the one Tom and Buddy wanted me to go on, was that at my house, during school hours, there is no one around to whom I have to be nice, and no one who will see me in a bathing suit. And my cruise takes only two hours, instead of a week. It’s unbelievably healing; it resets me. Yet it takes time, at least two hours. You can’t rush a cruise ship; you can’t hurry doing nothing. After a while, you see the sweetest, most invigorating thing of all: one person tenderly caring for another, even if it’s just me taking care of me on my old couch.