by Anne Lamott
There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn’t: it’s simply the nature of human life.
Kelly had other good friends, too, but they didn’t translate for her into a path of living, the belief that there was a force she could turn to. Friends are friends. So she would turn to me when she got stuck or too sad, and I would give her the same advice God always gives me if I think to ask: Go do some anonymous things for lonely people, give a few bucks to every poor person you see, return phone calls. Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.
Then Kelly’s dog died. Her world came crashing down. She dropped out of life.
She had nowhere to go, so she stayed inside. I could never figure out why, if she had had such a great initial ten years in AA, she stopped going, but faith-wise and in fact life-wise, “Figure it out” is not a good slogan. To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. If I could say one thing to our little Tea Party friends, it would be this: Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is ninety percent of the reason the world is so terrifying. (For the record, three percent is the existence of snakes. Seven percent is general miscellany.) The love of our dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come to knowing the direct love of God on this side of eternity.
Kelly did not have to have a clue about what a higher power was, but she refused to doubt her atheism. She was a fundamentalist. Her great hope was that she could lose weight.
Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love. There is the wonder of the ethereal, the quantum and at the same time the umbilical. Don’t call it God if that lessens it for you. Call it Ed. Call it Shalom. The Quakers, who are not as awful as most other Christians, call it the light.
Kelly and I spoke routinely during each new season of Survivor, but we stopped getting together much. I would call sometimes and ask her to lunch, but she wanted to catch up only by phone; she had gained back sixty-five pounds and was renting a room in Oakland from a quiet family. Otherwise, she insisted, she was doing fine.
I think you know where this is headed.
Fifteen years after we both got sober in 1986, she drank again. It started out well enough. As she described it to me from a bed at one of Oakland’s public hospitals, she had had two glasses of gin on Tuesday, a pint by Thursday, a fifth on Friday, and then had fallen and split her head open. The mom in the quiet family called 911.
“So much for my best thinking, right?”
I said, “Ay yi yi,” finally almost willing to release her to her own destiny, whatever that was. Yet I prayed for her to stay alive until she got the miracle.
This is not where the story ends, but it is what it took her to get back to her meetings, which she attended faithfully for three months. She moved into a studio apartment with a garden. Then the God stuff got to her again, and she stopped going to AA meetings but stayed sober.
“I think there are meetings for atheists,” I mentioned again, with, coincidentally, a printed schedule in my back pocket. Again, she held up her hand in the traffic cop position.
We went back to our Survivor postmortems. I decided to respect her free will and not foist my remedial God curriculum on her, my way of helping people who have asked how to begin experiencing God, asked being the operative word here. I begin by encouraging people to play, and share, and enjoy. I encourage them to pay attention to their experiences with nature and their connections with others, to anything that gives them direction, a second wind, a bit more energy, a connection. Do I think Kelly having so many years of Survivor and me was God in this world? I do. I actually do.
I would never, ever pound any particular text. The Dalai Lama said that “religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.” Various Scriptures are the stories of people trying to understand life, its beauty and its impossible hardship, so they tell stories. The overarching story is how we go from tribal gods to the Beloved, the growth and evolution from animal sacrifice to the United Nations. It is the story of noticing power when we pay attention to the sun, or the wind, or the mountain. There’s power here that is not a vague and abstract thing. There’s power in oil, in water, in silence, and in bread. There is great power in music, which brings us energy and connects us with our own beating hearts, and to others, and reveals the sublime—in the crashing of waves, in drumming, and in the silence between notes. Artists say, “Let me draw something that might help our understanding, help us change or wake up, be inspired to awe or kindness.”
I encourage seekers to practice trust. Maybe your family was not as well adjusted as you hoped, and trust does not come easily to you. Is there something I can trust and belong to, or is it just me and my AK-47?
Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives delight and focus, like an abacus did when we were young. Smartphone calculators? Not so much.
Kelly said to me once: “Play is play. Play doesn’t have to be or lead to anything else but fun.”
But what about the bigger things it can give you—the open heart, the happy exhaustion, the present moment, something beyond you, which is people to play with? It’s the peace of concentration, it’s a welcome—“I’m so glad you’re here!” Play is learning how to wait, how to applaud someone else’s success, how to let others go first. It’s reciprocity and laughter. It’s very simple and it brings us deeply into the Now, and just for a while, maybe for the rest of the day, you don’t have to judge yourself or kill anyone.
I began to be afraid that Kelly would kill herself. I don’t have a moral position against suicide. A number of family friends were not able to make it here and they got out. Their life was misery and was getting worse, and they could not help destroying other people’s lives. Why stick it out? I believe God is close by however you cross over. But meetings and sobriety had given Kelly a new life once, and maybe they would again.
“Annie, I have got three houses on the market. I need to get back on my feet. God and meetings are not going to do it.”
I once saw a boys’ soccer game on YouTube where a Japanese team trounced a team of little American boys. Many of the American boys started to cry. The Japanese team came over and instead of gloating or doing the postgame high-five lineup, they hugged the American boys, exhorting them: “You were so good to play against. Wow! Next year I bet you’re going to win.”
I just hoped Kelly’s friends and I could help keep her alive and sober until something quirky caught her by surprise. But she chose to stay alone. God is often in solitude and quiet, through the still, small voice—in the breeze, not the thunder. But isolation is different from solitude, and Kelly started drinking again.
I hoped her life would turn topsy-turvy enough to get her attention. Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.
We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure. These days are among the hardest we will ever live through. The wind is blowing, but because we are together in this, we have hope. Most days. Maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, my friends and I are aware of our brokenness and the deep crazy, the desperation for light, hope, food, and medicine for the poor. What helps is that we are not all crazy
and hopeless on the same day. One of us remembers and reminds the rest of us that when it is really dark you can see the stars. We believe grace is stronger than evil and sin. We believe love is stronger than hate, that the divine is bigger than all huge egos simmered together in a bloviation stew, and this makes us laugh. And laughter is hope. We believe and hope that we will get through these terrifying times.
Jesus says we need to approach God and life like children, not like bossy white alcoholic women with agendas, good ideas, and meeting schedules in their back pockets, so I gave Kelly space. I mailed her Roz Chast cartoons, but it was too painful to see her when she’d been drinking, and our visits dropped off further. We still spoke in the mornings, especially during a Survivor season. I simply tried to extend my love and welcome to her without any hope of rescuing her, which is hard for me to grasp with my flinty little Protestant brain.
I called her to the bitter end, dreading it some days. Like the rest of us, I am a mixed grill of beauty and self-centeredness, pettiness and magnanimity, judgment and humility. On a bad day, I’m pushing old ladies on the Titanic out of the way to get to the lifeboats. (They’re old, they’re going to die.) When I pray, I have more good days. I tend to do more service to the poor and lonely, where joy resides. So I’d call her, and listen and love her.
Survivor was the collagen that, no matter how drunk she was getting, held us together. It was the green shoot through which our love flowed. The divine is so eccentric. It is usually regarded as powerful but other times as weak (the baby, the crucifixion), and sometimes it appears absent altogether. Sometimes when I can’t see God, I try not to see the divine as more-powerful-than, but just think that it outlasts, like in Survivor: loving community will outlast our present darkness and cruelty. Mr. Einstein said that the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones. My belief is that even then there will be mercy, goodness, and loving-kindness.
Sometimes I believe that we are here in the world and that God lives upstairs, but other times that we exist on a horizontal axis, running from past to present to future, tracing with a lot more faith than we can usually muster the divine plan of loving community as it unfolds, and (faith tells me) prevails.
When my son first got sober, he had no truck with God except that he was still alive and getting well because of a Group of Drunks. Then he discovered the National Lampoon satiric poem “Deteriorata,” in which God may be seen as a hairy thunderer, or a cosmic muffin. For years my son called his higher power The Muffin, as in “The Muffin is showing off today.” On messy days, both of us still beseech The Muffin for a hand, a break, a few crumbs of love.
The human condition is both the mess and the tenderness. I don’t think love is sovereign in our world in the sense that it can be summoned on cue as if by magic and that once summoned it lingers forever. It’s more that if we are lucky, we experience moments of love as a gift between people, and between people and the divine. A whiff may have to be enough sometimes. The universe seems to know we are always alone; we get pushed out at birth, into the cold and the too loud and the too bright, and this provides us with the incentive and the chance to discover connection, warmth, solace—ourselves, in other words.
I tried to stay with Kelly as her pain and craziness increased, but she couldn’t bear this. She preferred to be barricaded in the shame and malfunction and booze. I understood that. I asked her to the movies. I asked if I could come over with barbecue. But she could not stand for me to see her at her highest weight in twenty years.
One day she shared good news. “I have a close friend,” she assured me, “the older lady upstairs. She’s great, brilliant, she’s one of us. We eat together most nights, at her place. You’d love her.”
“Can I come meet her?”
“One of these days. She’s huge, too. She has cancer but she’s in remission. I try to help take care of her, and that makes me happy. I visit every day. We absolutely accept each other. We have cocktails, and watch TV, and laugh like crazy.”
She told me funny and affectionate stories about the large brilliant woman upstairs the last time we talked. Then she stopped calling me back. She preferred life in the tunnel of her own making, which of course most of us do. You can’t force people to be willing to face their pain and anger, to own the ugliness that is in all of us. You can’t. I’ve tried so hard.
The two of them killed themselves together not long after that, upstairs at the older woman’s apartment. They were quite drunk. This broke my heart at first. But later I was glad that Kelly was numb and not alone; that she was with a friend, the loving woman upstairs, which is another good name for God.
I was glad Kelly had a short death. That she was released, that she didn’t die a long wet death in the bottle.
What if she had been willing to give up three percent of the identity she was committed to being, the fundamentalist atheist, and entertain the concept that there was something, anything, greater than herself? Anything! Three percent! Who knows if that might have led to another long patch of sobriety? She stayed loyal to her family’s isolation and beliefs, barricaded from the world. She had created a fort, like my grandson’s fort of sheets and pillows, that is soft and in which you can hide. This is alcoholism. When it tumbles down, some people take your hand. We know what it is like, and we want you to be part of us. You are welcome here. Here, have some of my tea, it’s still hot. That is God.
I was so glad Kelly had a friend she let in, one of us, kind and funny, and that I had Kelly for all those years. She was a lovely person, so full of life. Her essence was absolutely still coming through, undamaged, especially in her affectionate stories about her friend upstairs. Essence can never be hurt. It was right there, in her stories. Is this proof of something, that soul and life force cannot be destroyed? I don’t know what much of anything means, but I do think so.
Kelly’s brothers had a memorial service for her. People cried and roared with laughter, they missed and experienced her in the big funky room where all those sober alcoholics have meetings all day, every day, where she had been welcomed and nursed back to health, given a home. If that isn’t God, what is?
I wish good things lasted forever. That would work best for me. But God is a lot more subtle than I am comfortable with. Saint John wrote that God is Love, that anytime you experience kindness and generosity, hope, patience and caring, you are in the presence of God. Anytime you express these, you are drawing something I would call God into the world. That is how ordinary and accessible God is—meals, TV, visits, laughter, and especially friendship, which made Kelly share with us the things that finally made her feel safe, there in the room upstairs.
ELEVEN
Food
Try to do a little better. Try to be nicer to yourself and to your body. That’s all.
Except do not, under any circumstances, start a new diet on Monday, or January 1, or maybe ever again. Diets make us fatter. Why commit to hunger and crankiness if we are almost certainly going to fail and gain back whatever we lose? Is it the secret exhilaration of early weight loss? The sense of control and moral superiority? The dream that our lives and health will more closely resemble TV commercials, the dream that this time we’ll keep it off?
You may not mind living this way, but what if your kids spend their lives chasing these same dreams, embracing the lies and toxic obsession, the secret disgust at their bodies?
I used to start diets, too. I hated to mention this to my then therapist. She would say cheerfully: “Oh, that’s great, honey. How much weight are you hoping to gain?”
No one talks to me that way.
I got rid of her sorry ass.
Well, okay, maybe not then. It was ten years later, after she had helped lead me back home to myself, to radical self-care, to friendship with my own heart (and thighs), to a glade that had always existed deep inside me, to (mostly) healthy eating that I’d avoided all those years by achieving, dieting, bingeing
, pleasing people, and so on.
She was a tour guide through the battlefield that food had been in childhood. My mom, who was ferociously gifted in the kitchen, was so unhappy in her marriage that she stuffed it all down and became quite heavy. She was short, round, red, and fearless. My father was tall and lean, and in an act of revenge and one-upmanship, he became a great cook, too.
Meals at our house were arctic, served at a beautiful dining table in an igloo.
My mother was always on a diet, except when she was bingeing. When she binged, it was in secret. I learned to diet and to overeat in secret, which is just the best.
Dieting, as with all forms of trying to control our beastly instincts, is about the fear of death. There are people who have overcome this fear, recognizing that making friends with destiny is the way home to freedom, but they are not always the best conversationalists.
It is okay to fear death. Many people who don’t can be a little too pleased with themselves. But for our purposes here, let’s say that most people overuse things like food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, work, and porn to avoid what they don’t want to feel—and mostly what we don’t want to feel is fear. If I were God, overconsumption would work better, without such bad consequences, i.e., waking up the next day with a hangover, or a food baby, or divorce papers. By extension, dieting and deprivation and all the jollier aspects of Calvinism should work. But they don’t.
Secretly overeating serves the same purpose as dieting: to numb bad feelings, although then, of course, it causes shame and regret. But it is a lot more fun than dieting to sit down in front of the TV with half a carrot cake, or onion dip for ten and a bag of Ruffles. It is unabashed rooting around at the breast, or at the earth like truffle pigs. Shoveling food down is theoretically so comforting; it’s a break from the whole world. But because it comes from outside us, it is the same dry fretful breast many of us nursed at. Here, at the mixing bowl of brownie batter or mashed potatoes, is our earth mother in her distressing guise as carbs; as dough.