by Thomas Lynch
Corpses do not fret their coffin boards,
nor bodies wound in love their narrow beds:
size matters less to lovers and the dead
than to the lonely and the self-absorbed
for whom each passing moment is a chore
and space but vacancy: unholy dread
of what might happen or not happen next;
this dull predicament of less or more’s
a never balanced book, whereas for me,
the worth of words is something I can count
out easily, on fingertips—the sounds
they make, the sense, their coins and currencies—
these denouements doled out in tens, fourteens:
last reckonings tapped out on all accounts.
Fresh from its typing, this is the page I posted to the fridge with a kitchen magnet back in the day before stainless-steel appliances made magnets redundant, the better for my missus to see it in her own good time and possibly ink some edits in as marginalia. I loved it when she read my poems and commented for better or worse because it sang to me a song of hope beyond the everyday desolation of long consortium, often marked by romantic indifference and connubial blahs in the stead of bliss.
But days after I’d posted the draft, alas, no corrections or comments had appeared. No cross-outs or smiley faces, no affirmations scribbled in passing, no nothing.
It was another Sunday afternoon when, being as I am a man of habits, I said into the general silence of the day that was in it, “What would you think about my getting a dog?” To which she replied without enthusiasm, “Maybe you could name it Wordsworth.”
My heart leaped inside my bosom. I couldn’t believe my ears. What meaning ought I to take from this expletive-free and contingent utterance? Surely, it seemed, she had read my poem, or at least the title and citation line. Was this some signal of approval, some sign that my efforts had not been for naught? At the very least it was not disapproval, no rhetorical about the state of my (formerly expletive-ridden) mind. No, this was, if not full-throated approval, a willingness to consider the prospect, a nod toward tolerance if not the full embrace of the notion. I moved immediately into my office, where my computer, ever at the ready, soon had me Googling for “Bernese Mountain Dogs, Michigan.” Two days later I was driving up the highway with my middle son to mid-Michigan where a man claimed to be weaning a recent litter.
“What about ‘No!’ didn’t you understand?” she said, when I brought the puppy in the door. “But honey,” I coaxed her, “we can call him Wordsworth! Just like you said. William Wordsworth.”
“Let’s just make it ‘Bill W.,’ ” she said, insinuating the name of the founder of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fellowship to which we both belonged. Was she insinuating that the puppy might shake the serenity that our long sobriety had produced?
It is hard to know, but “Bill” it has been ever since—from the eleven-pound puppy he was that Ash Wednesday of 2006, that first of March I brought him through the door on the day of my only daughter’s birthday, to the hundred-and-ten-pound giant of kindliness he in time became, to the withering, arthritic, ninety-some-pound geriatric pooch snoring on the floor next to my shoes as I type these truths into the computer.
In the twelve years since, so much has happened. If I take stock, it is an inventory of losses. My daughter, now in her middle years, has disconnected from her family. She is estranged from her mother, my first wife, and from me, her stepmother, her brothers and her brothers’ families, her aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone from her family of origin. In the email asking us to keep our distance and not to initiate any contact with her, she said she was going out west for therapy to treat what she called her codependence. She said that she felt that she never got enough time as a child, that she had to grow up too soon, what with the divorce between her mother and me when she was nine and ten years old. I wrote back saying that such insights were hard got and that I supported her eagerness to get right with herself and would follow her directives and stood ready to assist in any way I might do her some good in her efforts. Except for the occasional text message to wish happy birthdays or best for holidays, we’ve had no substantial communication since. Her family of choice, near as I can figure, includes her husband, her horse, her dog, some friends? Before this happened, I spent two years in weekly therapy with her in an effort to discern what might be done to let this cup pass. The shrink thought we’d arrived at a plan for what to do to keep us in each other’s futures. But soon after that, my daughter wrote to say her well-being required that she keep her distance from us all. I said I wanted her to be well. It feels like a death without any of the comforting, buffering infrastructure of mortality—a known cause and certification, a ceremony, a grave, a place I can go and weep. There’s none of that. Her absence, her choice of absence, her riddance of us all is everywhere. On holidays and birthdays there’s a text that comes more or less as a proof of life. For years it seemed I was left with a choice between assigning this sadness to evil or mental illness. I chose the latter. There is no succor in it.
Whether this grief is coincident with, correlated to, or the cause of our lackluster marriage—the second one, or maybe the first—I do not know. But what I do know is we’ve lost our way. We live, for the most part, separate lives and have slowly ceased to share our lives, our dreams, our meals, our bed, our whereabouts, our hopes and fears, our plans for the future. The desolation is as palpable as our bliss once seemed. All of this after many years of joyous intimacy, shared purpose, real partnership makes it more the pity that we both live now like widowed people, bereft of a spouse that, though still alive, is gone from us in measurable ways. We share bank accounts and an estate plan and rise to the occasion for holidays, but otherwise are in every meaningful way alone, and what has grown between us is what Heaney called a “silence beyond silence listened for.” It seems I’ve ended up like Lennie Briscoe—a two-time loser at marriage, estranged from a daughter who chooses to remain out of contact with or from her family of origin. We text our affections or proclaim them to anyone within earshot, but it makes no difference. When I compare my lot to men I’ve buried, whose flaws and imperfections seemed amplified compared to mine, and yet whose wives still went along for the ride, whose daughters doted on them till the end, like a hurt dog howling at the emptiness, I shake a fist in the face of the God I don’t quite believe in anymore.
The poor-me and why-me lamentations, variations on the Book of Job, leave me with a choice between hurt and anger. I tend toward the latter and fear the worst. I keep working the program, the fellowship and twelve steps of AA, because it keeps me from adding a class-A depressant to the gathering sadness, the tears of things. I do not want to live in fear.
MY PAL GEORGE is what we call a “sponsor”—someone in the fellowship to reach out to when the ways of things threaten to overwhelm. He’s been sober longer than anyone I know. And he’s bookish and very well educated: he’s a JD and a CPA, and for a good few of my books, he was the proofreader I sent the roughest of drafts to. He’d fix the spelling and punctuation and errors of thought and construction. We’ve been friends and neighbors for decades now. For years he’s been losing his short-term memory. The arc of his infirmity has been slow but steady. Dithering gave way to a sort of discombobulation, which in time gave way to chronic disorientation, which became what seems now a cruel advancing dementia. Beyond the indignities of age, his condition rightly frightened his family. They got him into assisted living. Attendant nurses see to his meds and meals. There are bingo nights and socials. I call and visit when I can. I live upstate now three weeks out of four, at a lake house with Bill for whom the remove and the quiet are like balms. He doesn’t have young suburbanites to bark at out the windows as they stroll by with their toddlers, infants and designer dogs. Downstate, my wife occupies the house next to the funeral home where I lived for forty- five years and into which she moved, when my sons and daughters were school children or teen
agers and I was the family court’s designee as the “more fit” custodial parent—all of us hobbled some by the end of the marriage that brought them into being.
I CALL GEORGE a couple times a week to see how he’s doing. When I asked him how he was adjusting to living there, he told me what I guess I needed to hear.
“I’m doing fine,” he said. “You can’t be angry all the time.” It makes me believe in a loving God when deep in my resentments about living alone, I hear my sponsor, though addled and beset, bewildered really and yet making perfect sense to me. Good to have just such a sponsor. You can tell him anything and he’ll likely forget. Sometimes I think it might be a gift except when I see the thousand-yard stare he sometimes gets, like combat soldiers who have seen too much, or keep getting a glimpse of what they can’t remember anymore. I took him to the movies a couple months ago. We saw Dunkirk, ate popcorn and Milk Duds. It was fun. On the way out of the theater he quoted some lines from Churchill’s speech to Parliament regarding Dunkirk: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”—something he’d remembered from his lifelong studies and erudition. By the time I dropped him back at his quarters in the care facility, he could not remember what movie we’d seen.
Surrender’s a big part of staying sober. “Let go,” we alkies often say, “let God.” LG, LG! Or “not our day to watch it,” meaning we are not in charge. It’s why I address my supplications to Whomever’s In Charge Here, because the article of faith I hold to is provisional, to wit, if there’s a God, it isn’t me. The fellowship has ruined my religious certainty—that One True Faith-ism we all are raised with. But the fellowship of wounded, variously damaged goods who’ve shared their experience, strength and hopes with me have illumined for me, however dimly, a life of faith. It’s made me wary of certainty and open to hopes and loves I never before imagined. It’s made me grateful and rheumy eyed so that I find myself weeping at the ways of things. De Rerum Natura, Lucretius called it—the glimpses of godliness we sometimes get in the otherwise quotidian, dull happenstance of life. Lucretius was a disbeliever, whereas I’m a happy ignoramus—in either case, we do not know.
The things George still remembers best are often things that happened years ago, like the woman who told him at his mother’s funeral how his mother “understood life’s higher callings.” He remembers that as the high praise it was of a woman who took to heart the hardships of others and did what she could to make their situations better. I tell him I think he has that too, an understanding of life’s higher callings, how he’s been a source for me of good orderly direction, if not the voice of God, at least a goodness in him that is undeniable. He looks out the window at the birds in the snow—chickadees and nuthatches, titmice and a cardinal—and asks if I believe it means an angel is near, to see a bright red cardinal in the chill of winter. Perhaps, I tell him, it’s his mother, or mine. He looks away; I’m getting rheumy eyed.
I had Bill’s grave dug two years ago, fearful as I was of getting caught by frost deep in the ground, with a dead dog on my hands in Michigan’s winter. And I started collecting the soup bones, littered everywhere over the yard, which he had worked the marrow out of over the years. It got to where I’d have them custom cut at the butchers, a few dozen at a time. I found a couple hundred of them and strung them on a line of rope and wound some solar-powered lights around the rope and hung the whole assemblage from the fulcrum that overhangs the water’s edge and by which the former tenants’ dock was swung out into place each spring. The bone rosary is what I call it, this blinking string of bones and lights that’s meant to mark the spot where Bill will be interred sometime in the coming spring, I reckon, when his age and infirmity come to the certain end all living things come to. I’ve even written a brief lament and asked my son to have it cast in bronze so I can bolt it to a stone over his grave.
LITTLE ELEGY
for a dog who skipped out, and after XJ Kennedy
Here lies loyal, trusted, true
friend for life, Bill W.,
named for Wordsworth and the guy
by whose twelve steps I’ve stayed dry,
sober even, these long years,
like the good dog buried here
who could bark but never bit;
never strayed too far or shit
indoors; never fell from grace.
God, grant him this ground, this grave,
out of harm’s way, ceaseless rest.
Of all good dogs old Bill was best.
They laugh at me, of course, my sons, for all the planning for Bill’s demise—the hole at the corner of the lot, the rosary of bones blinking in the dark over the water’s edge, the stone, the little poem. Preparing for Bill’s death they figure is a way of preparing for my own or diverting my attention from fears about what lies ahead, in the way that Easter has, for true believers, been a blessed assurance of eternal life, a contingent balm, in its alternate narrative, in the gaping maw of mortality.
I’ve a friend who says we’ve lost our “eschatological nerve,” the certainty that heaven awaits the good and perdition the evil doers. With the loss of a sense of eternal reward or damnation producing justice in a world so often unfair, we’ve begun to uphold the so-called prosperity gospel, to wit, success is a sign of God’s favor, as if grace was deserved or earned like the poverty the poor are said to have coming to them. The good news formerly proclaimed by the evangels has been replaced by their enthusiasm for Donald Trump and his zero-sum, winners and losers agenda.
This year Easter falls on April Fools’. Some feasts are moveable, some steadfast. It’ll also be, if my friend George remains, as he has since April 1st, 1974, quit of the booze that made him crazy, his forty-fourth AA birthday, proving, as he often says, that any fool can get sober if he or she works the program. Whether March Madness or April Fools’, Easter is for those who believe in second acts and second chances, another go, mulligans and do-overs. Easter is for repentance and forgiveness, amends and abundant life. Easter is when the lost are found and the dead arise, transfigured, glorified by what is possible. The Easter I believed in as a boy was a sort of zombie apocalypse. It never mattered much to me whether Jesus was really raised from the dead. Like Lennie Briscoe I was damaged at the specter of the capital punishment. The broken, bloody body of the Christ that hung center stage in Catholic churches was more a spectacle to me than narrative. Perhaps that’s sacrilege. Perhaps not. Nor have I much interest in whether the Moral Influence or Substitutionary Atonement models of redemption most apply. My faith in a loving God, keeping a count of the hairs on my head, comes and goes with changing realities. It is as if I blame every outrage, every evil not averted, every sadness that might have been undone, on the God I hardly believe in anymore. Some days I see the hand or hear the voice of God implicated in the things that happen; others not so much. Begrudgery and resentment are the crosses I bear, and I find them much heavier than just giving thanks. This Easter I’m not looking for an empty tomb, triumphant savior or life eternal. Rather, some spiritual progress, instead of perfection; a little repair if not redemption, some salvage south of full salvation. “No appointments,” an old-timer used to tell me, “no disappointments.” No expectations, no vexations.
Truth told I see sufficient triumph in the way that Bill still makes the climb upstairs at night, despite his sore hips, cloudy eyes, and the withered muscle mass in his shoulders and hindquarters. It comes with age. Is he driven by loyalty or an old fear of sleeping alone? Is it love or fear of loss? Impossible to know. He carries on but does not speak.
I see an Easter in George’s getting through another day of his assisted but nonetheless bewildered living, in good humor though utterly out of sorts. I sense it in the texts I get from my long-estranged daughter, those proofs of life; the flickering of tenderness I still feel toward my distant wife, our genia
l courtesies.
The meeting I go to on Sunday nights up at the lake is in the basement of Transfiguration Church. And that’s what I’m after this Easter, I think. That’s what I’m after most of the time, the momentary radiance of the divine beaming out of God’s creation. Old dogs can do it, old friends, old wives; old sorrows borne patiently, old grievances forgiven, old connections restored.
New ones too, like the other night at the meeting when Lilah was talking. She’s the youngest pilgrim at the table. She’s paid her dues and is working on sobriety. She’s talking about how she came to know that she was beloved, when her girlfriend, noticing how badly sunburned Lilah got when they were gardening one August afternoon last summer, did not scold. Rather, she carefully peeled the dry shreds of skin off Lilah’s reddened shoulder, bent and tenderly kissed the spot, and held the desiccated remnants of her darling’s flesh in the palm of her hand, like viaticum, a sort of holy grail that she brought to her mouth, ate and swallowed.
Her sharing this intimacy and its intelligence quickened my breath and then caught it up. Gobsmacked is what I was, my mouth agape as if trying to hold my breath and let it go. My eyes were getting red and rheumy yet again, welling with a glimpse of the divine, the beautiful, the redeemed and atoned for, manifestly forgiven beings, all of us assembled around the table, we had shown up broken and bewildered and disconnected and were suddenly beatified, illumined and made new, transfigured in the shimmering moment; my catching breaths were shortening and I was fearless suddenly, cavalier about the scene I was on the brink of making.
It was then I was remembering that Jesus wept.
WHENCE & WHITHER
Some Thoughts on Uteri, on Wombs
The contemplation of the womb, like staring into the starlit heavens, fills me with imaginings of Somethingness or Nothingness. It was ever thus. If space is the final frontier, the womb is the first one—that place where, to borrow Wallace Stevens’s phrase, the idea of the thing becomes the thing itself. It is the tabernacle of our expectations. The seedbed and safe harbor whence we launch, first home and habitat, the garden of delight’s denouement. A place where the temps are set, the rent is easy, the food is good and we aren’t bothered by telephone or tax man. That space we are born out of, into the world, where the soft iambics of our mother’s heart become the first sure verses of our being, the first poetry of our life, Cavafy said. “Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams; sometimes in thought the mind hears them . . . like distant music that dies off in the night.”