I watched the little boy and his family during mass this evening. I know his mother. The boy is her third child, the first and only boy, probably a boy longed for by the father who held him during the entire service, who kissed the boy's soft cheeks with aching tenderness.
The child has Down Syndrome. The kisses were saying: I love you. I love you in spite of, because of, no matter what. I love you for the world to see. They were the perfect kisses, whole, real, infinite.
He walks on his toes. He can't sit still. His almond shaped eyes are light blue, hair surfer blond. He is maybe four years old, possibly five. His tennis shoes were decorated with Spider Man.
I compared him to my own son, now seven. My son is handsome, dark hair and Hershey's Kiss eyes. He is funny, affectionate, adorable.
And he is autistic.
He has trouble sitting still, staying on task, understanding language. He has the social skills of a three year old, gets stuck on ideas and movie scripts. He may never live independently, have a job, drive a car, marry or vote.
I kiss him a lot, an inordinate number of times each day. I kiss him in an almost desperate way, breathing in his cookie smell, the sweet of his doughy cheeks. I kiss him to disappear from my world, to enter his. I kiss him to seal the moment, a perfect eternity.
The other mother and I were disappointed when we learned that our sons weren't the sons we'd hoped for, expected. Was it wrong to expect a healthy child? Her third, my fourth. We'd only known success, healthy, the usual. We took these things for granted, believed that nature only screws up other people's kids, not ours. We were special, different, protected. Our lives were lucky, cocooned.
Not so.
Tonight, with my eyes half focusing on the alter and two priests, one with a cane, I saw a glimpse of my future. My son was in his early twenties, strong, maybe a little too strong. I was Medicare age, not so strong, still caring for the son who wasn't the son I'd hoped for, expected.
Some days, this image doesn't scare me. I love him. We'll be okay.
Other times, the image is too terrifying, like tonight. I didn't want to look at it, so I refocused my eyes, stared at the slain Jesus, the priest barely able to walk, his blood red vestment and stole, the white alter approached with reverence where the ordained solemnly bow and kiss the clean white linens.
They have a ritual. I have a ritual. We have days, which begin and end about the same. We wake up, every day, and live. I feed my son, literally and figuratively, walk beside him in a world made for others, not the disabled. He is different. I've heard all the sugary words, the platitudes meant to comfort. Platitudes don't work, except when they're true, on good days, when I believe that his differences make him special, special in a good way, not the ways the world laughs at, points and stares at, and I struggle to stay here, where the good things are true, on the bright side.
I'm a better person, mother, human, because of him. I've made more friends, real friends, living in Autism World. I can write from the bottom of despair, parental despair, write my way from bottom to top. I can make another mother of a disabled child smile, because it's not over, even if it's not the adventure she'd hoped for, expected. I'm right there beside her, and we'll find ways to laugh at the absurd, to squeeze our strange outlier lives into a new Spanks-like normal. We can have normal, just different.
But still, I sometimes feel disappointed when I remember what might have been, when I forget how much I love him, when I compare; when I focus on the cane and not the human, on the white and not the alter, on the cross and not the kiss.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Breakfast With Beast, Washing Feet, & Liquid Zoloft
My former father-in-law, an eighty-four year old I often refer to as "Beast" in my journals, came to visit last weekend to attend my eight year old's first communion.
We've gotten along better over the years, but sometimes he still tests me, like he did at breakfast the day I took him to the airport to fly home. He asked me to pray over our pancakes at IHOP. I reached across the Formica table for his hands as I mentally reached for the right words to decline his request.
"I want to hear you," he said, as if this were a job interview, a test of my worthiness, my holiness.
"I don't feel comfortable," I answered. I never have felt comfortable praying aloud. I struggle enough praying on my own these past few years, uncertain where to direct my prayers, worried it's all just a silly waste of time. Besides, I don't like the sound of my voice. The distraction makes it impossible to hear myself think.
So Beast began to pray out loud, something simple, good enough. I could have offered something similar, but it still would have made me uncomfortable. After the "Amen" he said, "I don't have to think about what I'm going to say. It just comes out."
Bravo. Must be an annointing or something. I'm out of the loop, I guess.
The same weekend Beast came to visit, my husband bought me a CD lecture series, an RCIA course titled, "Welcome Home". It's narrated by Father John Riccardo, a charismatic man, well spoken, intelligent. You might even say he's cool. He's handsome and young for a priest, maybe in his mid-forties. He often does speaking engagements, recruiting new Catholics and urging those who are lapsed to come back "home."
The CD series is long. Seventeen CDs. I'm on #4. I listen as I drive the kids to school every morning, and I catalog the information, wait for satisfying answers, convincing arguments. I'm not buying any of it yet. And this is unfortunate. My life would be so much easier, if only....
But why is it necessary to teach the parts of a faith, step by step, rule by rule, symbol by symbol. Why doesn't it happen naturally? Why so much convincing? Apologetics? Seventeen CDs?
Do we need seventeen CDs to attract us to Love? Do we need props, prayers and formulae? No. We don't.
It all seems very contrived to me. If it requires this much explanation, so many apologetics, there's something inherently wrong. This is way too many steps to God. Too many predetermined steps toward an ultimate and equally impossible goal: divinity. If there's a heaven, we might achieve perfection there, whatever perfection is. I'd have to lose my mind, my self, my power of thought to reach a state of absolute purity. Rendered neutral. Neutered. Hollow. Whatever Adam and Eve were before they ate that damn apple.
When we're hungry, we eat. When we're thirsty, we drink. When we're lonely, we reach. When we're scared, we turn to a complex intellectualized fantasy called religion, a distraction of symbols and "holy" scripture, stories and promises, guides, gates, and a goal of eternity. It's all suspended from a massive scaffolding, a dream we build out of a desperation to live forever, all glued together by some vapor called faith.
Albert Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Seventeen CDs sounds like what Shakespeare was trying to convey in Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." In his day, "protest" meant an attempt to convince.
Add to Beast's prayer test and the long lecture series, a foot washing invitation last week from a church lady. Yes, a foot washing.
Maureen is more of an acquaintance than a friend, someone I've volunteered with at our Catholic church. We're both involved in the social concerns program and have lost a parent to suicide, but the comparison ends there. If she knew me better, she would never have invited me to a "foot washing."
"We will get the experience of both washing each other's feet and getting our feet washed. Come at 8:30 am for coffee and light breakfast, then from 9:00 to 10:00 we'll have the foot washing," she'd written in her invitation email.
Of course, this is supposed to be an exercise in humility and devotion, patterned after Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus with her hair. I get that. But wouldn't it be more pragmatic to deliver blankets and food to the homeless? Or offer babysitting to the exhausted parents of an autistic child? Sitting around having coffee and washing each others' feet sounds self-indulgent, narcissistic. I couldn't even bring myself to respond to the email.
I thought of Maureen though, during my daughter's first communion, when the priest said, "You can tell when someone is filled with the Holy Spirit. They're filled with joy. Their faces light up." Really? Maureen takes about three different types of antidepressants. Without them, her face definitely doesn't light up. Is this her fault? Of course not. Do we blame a lack of the Holy Spirit, or worse, Satan? Do we blame Satan when a baby is born with two heads, when innocent children are casualties of war or die from an atrocious birth defect?
My sister-in-law and her husband were also present at my daughter's first communion. We don't see them often since they live three hours away. To prepare for their visit, I had to find a picture frame for an image of their deceased infant. He was diagnosed with anencephaly during her eighteenth week of pregnancy. Being Catholic, Syliva couldn't opt for abortion, even though the infant would not live beyond a few minutes or hours after birth. The pregnancy was difficult on her already fragile mental state since she already suffered from depression, had had at least one nervous breakdown prior.
When the baby was born, his heart was beating, but he never took a breath. He lived three minutes. She and her husband took pictures. She gave everyone in the family an 8x10 of the lifeless child, airbrushed, his blue eyes glassy and fixed. I couldn't offend her by not displaying the photograph, which I'd put in a closet until I figured out what to do with it. I dug around for a suitable frame, then placed the picture among others of family members, in a prominent place on the fireplace mantel.
Who do we blame for these things? Sister Angelica touched on this during a program on EWTN yesterday (my husband watches frequently). She didn't offer any satisfying answers. People are desperate to know why they suffer so much. God watches. Satan trips us. Bad crap happens. Jesus hasn't returned, two thousand years later, but devout Christians still wait.
Why do they wait? Without the promise of everlasting life, would they still wait? Do they really love God, or are they desperate not to die? Not to be some touched up photo on somebody's mantel?
There are five pill bottles on my kitchen counter. Three are for the dog. He came from a puppy mill. He has allergies, anxiety, and is still recovering from sego palm seed ingestion. So he takes two pills a day, one on an empty stomach in the morning, one with a meal at night, and he gets antibiotic eye drops twice a day.
The other two bottles are for my seven year old son. One is liquid Zoloft. We started him on the antidepressant a week ago Tuesday, to combat the OCD, tics and anxiety that come with his autism. The liquid Zoloft didn't work out. He could taste it in the yogurt, his juice, applesauce. We switched to pills and he took them like a champ. We'll know by Tuesday if it's working, the psychiatrist said. We hope to see that he's no longer repeating lines from Dr. Seuss's Cat In The Hat or Green Eggs & Ham. We hope he's no longer afraid of growing up, that he no longer cries at the prospect of having to drive a car one day, move away from home. The idea of adulthood terrifies him. I can understand that. Adulthood terrifies me sometimes.
Autism drugs, a picture of anencephaly, the price of anxiety, seventeen CDs of apologetics, a morning of washing feet and being asked to pray over pancakes -- this has been my life lately.
My children are watching the movie Frozen as I type. During the movie, the trolls sing a song about being a fixer-upper, and a lyric about making bad choices when we're mad, scared or stressed caught my ear. They were referring to Anna agreeing to marry Hans immediately after they meet. She was desperate. She'd been lonely. No one else was asking. Is this how we choose our religions? Do we simply reach for the one next door? The first one that asks that we seek salvation, divinity? Don't we all want to be saved, in one form or another?
The only time I don't think about these things is when I listen to music from a time when I wasn't worried about anything. When I hear old Earth, Wind & Fire, or America, I feel firmly grounded. Revisiting the past makes us feel better. We know it. We lived it, survived it.
There's no such feeling when we imagine tomorrow. Even with religion, there are no guarantees. Even if you're in the best possible position to enter Heaven, you're still gonna have to die to get there. And there are no postcards from your deceased loved ones. No brochures on heaven. No infomercials. Just faith. And a few rules, like not fornicating, masturbating or using birth control. No supporting gay marriage or abortion. No living together out of wedlock. Stuff like that. And you have to memorize a few dozen prayers, receive a few sacraments (after receiving months of classroom instruction). You have to go to confession regularly. And pray. Out loud.
I've been imagining Beast on his deathbed lately, not out of contempt. I can just see our saying goodbye. We've actually learned to get along over the years, have come to some understanding. He's actually expressed to me some of his own doubts about Catholicism and what we can expect after death. I can imagine our final conversation, low whispers as I sit on the edge of his hospital bed, the air around us thick with the smell of plastic and bleach. I would tell him not to be afraid, that he won't be alone, that we'll meet him wherever he's going.
People have been dying for as long as they've existed. We've "survived" death in a sense, have gotten pretty good at it. What's to fear? Aside from the pain that sometimes comes with it, or the idea of no longer being? The thing is, I can't promise Beast or anyone that there's a heaven waiting for them, or that they're loved by God and heaven's angels. I can't understand such a hands off love.
I can only express my own love, hold someone's hand. And if on his deathbed Beast asks me to wash his feet, I will.
We've gotten along better over the years, but sometimes he still tests me, like he did at breakfast the day I took him to the airport to fly home. He asked me to pray over our pancakes at IHOP. I reached across the Formica table for his hands as I mentally reached for the right words to decline his request.
"I want to hear you," he said, as if this were a job interview, a test of my worthiness, my holiness.
"I don't feel comfortable," I answered. I never have felt comfortable praying aloud. I struggle enough praying on my own these past few years, uncertain where to direct my prayers, worried it's all just a silly waste of time. Besides, I don't like the sound of my voice. The distraction makes it impossible to hear myself think.
So Beast began to pray out loud, something simple, good enough. I could have offered something similar, but it still would have made me uncomfortable. After the "Amen" he said, "I don't have to think about what I'm going to say. It just comes out."
Bravo. Must be an annointing or something. I'm out of the loop, I guess.
The same weekend Beast came to visit, my husband bought me a CD lecture series, an RCIA course titled, "Welcome Home". It's narrated by Father John Riccardo, a charismatic man, well spoken, intelligent. You might even say he's cool. He's handsome and young for a priest, maybe in his mid-forties. He often does speaking engagements, recruiting new Catholics and urging those who are lapsed to come back "home."
The CD series is long. Seventeen CDs. I'm on #4. I listen as I drive the kids to school every morning, and I catalog the information, wait for satisfying answers, convincing arguments. I'm not buying any of it yet. And this is unfortunate. My life would be so much easier, if only....
But why is it necessary to teach the parts of a faith, step by step, rule by rule, symbol by symbol. Why doesn't it happen naturally? Why so much convincing? Apologetics? Seventeen CDs?
Do we need seventeen CDs to attract us to Love? Do we need props, prayers and formulae? No. We don't.
It all seems very contrived to me. If it requires this much explanation, so many apologetics, there's something inherently wrong. This is way too many steps to God. Too many predetermined steps toward an ultimate and equally impossible goal: divinity. If there's a heaven, we might achieve perfection there, whatever perfection is. I'd have to lose my mind, my self, my power of thought to reach a state of absolute purity. Rendered neutral. Neutered. Hollow. Whatever Adam and Eve were before they ate that damn apple.
When we're hungry, we eat. When we're thirsty, we drink. When we're lonely, we reach. When we're scared, we turn to a complex intellectualized fantasy called religion, a distraction of symbols and "holy" scripture, stories and promises, guides, gates, and a goal of eternity. It's all suspended from a massive scaffolding, a dream we build out of a desperation to live forever, all glued together by some vapor called faith.
Albert Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Seventeen CDs sounds like what Shakespeare was trying to convey in Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." In his day, "protest" meant an attempt to convince.
Add to Beast's prayer test and the long lecture series, a foot washing invitation last week from a church lady. Yes, a foot washing.
Maureen is more of an acquaintance than a friend, someone I've volunteered with at our Catholic church. We're both involved in the social concerns program and have lost a parent to suicide, but the comparison ends there. If she knew me better, she would never have invited me to a "foot washing."
"We will get the experience of both washing each other's feet and getting our feet washed. Come at 8:30 am for coffee and light breakfast, then from 9:00 to 10:00 we'll have the foot washing," she'd written in her invitation email.
Of course, this is supposed to be an exercise in humility and devotion, patterned after Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus with her hair. I get that. But wouldn't it be more pragmatic to deliver blankets and food to the homeless? Or offer babysitting to the exhausted parents of an autistic child? Sitting around having coffee and washing each others' feet sounds self-indulgent, narcissistic. I couldn't even bring myself to respond to the email.
I thought of Maureen though, during my daughter's first communion, when the priest said, "You can tell when someone is filled with the Holy Spirit. They're filled with joy. Their faces light up." Really? Maureen takes about three different types of antidepressants. Without them, her face definitely doesn't light up. Is this her fault? Of course not. Do we blame a lack of the Holy Spirit, or worse, Satan? Do we blame Satan when a baby is born with two heads, when innocent children are casualties of war or die from an atrocious birth defect?
My sister-in-law and her husband were also present at my daughter's first communion. We don't see them often since they live three hours away. To prepare for their visit, I had to find a picture frame for an image of their deceased infant. He was diagnosed with anencephaly during her eighteenth week of pregnancy. Being Catholic, Syliva couldn't opt for abortion, even though the infant would not live beyond a few minutes or hours after birth. The pregnancy was difficult on her already fragile mental state since she already suffered from depression, had had at least one nervous breakdown prior.
When the baby was born, his heart was beating, but he never took a breath. He lived three minutes. She and her husband took pictures. She gave everyone in the family an 8x10 of the lifeless child, airbrushed, his blue eyes glassy and fixed. I couldn't offend her by not displaying the photograph, which I'd put in a closet until I figured out what to do with it. I dug around for a suitable frame, then placed the picture among others of family members, in a prominent place on the fireplace mantel.
Who do we blame for these things? Sister Angelica touched on this during a program on EWTN yesterday (my husband watches frequently). She didn't offer any satisfying answers. People are desperate to know why they suffer so much. God watches. Satan trips us. Bad crap happens. Jesus hasn't returned, two thousand years later, but devout Christians still wait.
Why do they wait? Without the promise of everlasting life, would they still wait? Do they really love God, or are they desperate not to die? Not to be some touched up photo on somebody's mantel?
There are five pill bottles on my kitchen counter. Three are for the dog. He came from a puppy mill. He has allergies, anxiety, and is still recovering from sego palm seed ingestion. So he takes two pills a day, one on an empty stomach in the morning, one with a meal at night, and he gets antibiotic eye drops twice a day.
The other two bottles are for my seven year old son. One is liquid Zoloft. We started him on the antidepressant a week ago Tuesday, to combat the OCD, tics and anxiety that come with his autism. The liquid Zoloft didn't work out. He could taste it in the yogurt, his juice, applesauce. We switched to pills and he took them like a champ. We'll know by Tuesday if it's working, the psychiatrist said. We hope to see that he's no longer repeating lines from Dr. Seuss's Cat In The Hat or Green Eggs & Ham. We hope he's no longer afraid of growing up, that he no longer cries at the prospect of having to drive a car one day, move away from home. The idea of adulthood terrifies him. I can understand that. Adulthood terrifies me sometimes.
Autism drugs, a picture of anencephaly, the price of anxiety, seventeen CDs of apologetics, a morning of washing feet and being asked to pray over pancakes -- this has been my life lately.
My children are watching the movie Frozen as I type. During the movie, the trolls sing a song about being a fixer-upper, and a lyric about making bad choices when we're mad, scared or stressed caught my ear. They were referring to Anna agreeing to marry Hans immediately after they meet. She was desperate. She'd been lonely. No one else was asking. Is this how we choose our religions? Do we simply reach for the one next door? The first one that asks that we seek salvation, divinity? Don't we all want to be saved, in one form or another?
The only time I don't think about these things is when I listen to music from a time when I wasn't worried about anything. When I hear old Earth, Wind & Fire, or America, I feel firmly grounded. Revisiting the past makes us feel better. We know it. We lived it, survived it.
There's no such feeling when we imagine tomorrow. Even with religion, there are no guarantees. Even if you're in the best possible position to enter Heaven, you're still gonna have to die to get there. And there are no postcards from your deceased loved ones. No brochures on heaven. No infomercials. Just faith. And a few rules, like not fornicating, masturbating or using birth control. No supporting gay marriage or abortion. No living together out of wedlock. Stuff like that. And you have to memorize a few dozen prayers, receive a few sacraments (after receiving months of classroom instruction). You have to go to confession regularly. And pray. Out loud.
I've been imagining Beast on his deathbed lately, not out of contempt. I can just see our saying goodbye. We've actually learned to get along over the years, have come to some understanding. He's actually expressed to me some of his own doubts about Catholicism and what we can expect after death. I can imagine our final conversation, low whispers as I sit on the edge of his hospital bed, the air around us thick with the smell of plastic and bleach. I would tell him not to be afraid, that he won't be alone, that we'll meet him wherever he's going.
People have been dying for as long as they've existed. We've "survived" death in a sense, have gotten pretty good at it. What's to fear? Aside from the pain that sometimes comes with it, or the idea of no longer being? The thing is, I can't promise Beast or anyone that there's a heaven waiting for them, or that they're loved by God and heaven's angels. I can't understand such a hands off love.
I can only express my own love, hold someone's hand. And if on his deathbed Beast asks me to wash his feet, I will.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Paper Thin
My seventy-four year old dad called last week, just as I arrived at Texas Children's Hospital. He called not because he'd learned that my sixteen month old granddaughter had had a seizure, a child he's never met. He called because I hadn't written him in a while.
I haven't seen him either, not since 1998.
I still owe him that letter, which I'll get to after this writing exercise. There's not a whole lot to say to him, except that my granddaughter is okay, that her name is London, that her seizure was febrile. When I told him what happened to her over the phone last week he seemed disinterested, as thought he was watching the clock. I mentioned that I planned to visit this summer with my younger children, to spend a week so I could see everyone, including him. I heard the faintest disbelieving grunt on the line. I've said this before.
I might tell him in my letter that my husband and I will break ground soon for our house, that we've finally selected the exterior color: HGTV's White Duck. Or that my son will be leaving his school for autistic children and mainstreaming in a Catholic school. Or that my skin biopsy came back benign. But I don't think these things would really interest him.
I recently typed up all the letters my family has ever written to me, to archive them. I needed to preserve the span of over forty years, remember who we were then, what life looked like when Nixon was president, when the Beatles were traipsing through Strawberry Fields, when Remco was a household name. We're not the same people now. It's not the same world. Some of us died long ago.
I feel closer to my father when I read through his letters. All the pieces make more of a whole, or at least a bottom and couple of sides. But I still don't want to see him, despite that at some point I may succumb to an overwhelming sense of guilt. He might be on his death bed, or worse, in a coffin.
Now I want to stop typing. It's a depth I don't want to dredge up. Better stay close to the surface, like waving to a neighbor you've never really met. And that's terrible on so many levels.
I have reached out to my father before, reminded him of good times, assured him that just because Mom died doesn't mean it had been the wrong decision to divorce her ten years earlier. She and her addictions would have brought him down with her.
I've asked him hard questions about our family, for details I was too young to remember. But I've never asked him the other, equally important questions, like why he ultimately gave me to his sister to raise, or what happened the night he came home at 3 am with stitches in his forehead. I've never asked about the unfamiliar corner house where he once parked his car all night, the house my mother and I watched until I finally fell asleep in her lap. I never knew for certain what she suspected. I'm still afraid to ask my father anything hard about our personal history, to shatter the delicate glass slipper, wave through the shimmering ruse, destroy the possibility of magically becoming what a father and daughter should be. Real.
Like my mother I'm ridiculously addicted, to hope.
A psychiatrist once told me, regarding my father, that sometimes we have to let go of people, even when they're family. I'm still trying to decide whether that's what I want, but first I have to decide why I'm afraid to face him. I thought I knew last year when I abandoned an attempt to visit him. I got as close as Fort Worth, Texas, to the tiny house in Polytechnic Heights where I grew up. But I couldn't move beyond it, to my father's house in Burleson where he lives alone after three failed marriages. I then decided it was his long ago cruelty to my siblings and mother that justified my discomfort. Why should I honor this man, our tenuous relationship, when he deeply hurt the people I love, no apologies? But now I'm not so sure.
Opinions differ, my sister saying one thing, my father another. I'm stuck in the middle; the two don't speak anymore. But I'm haunted by what I do know, the night I saw him beat my sister, the afternoon he struck my thirteen year old brother in the face with a white-knuckled fist. I remember the day not long after when he lunged at my brother, chased him out of the house for saying he wanted to move out and live with our mother. My brother lived in the streets for the next nineteen years, and died there.
My mother and brother can't corroborate any story. I'm left with only pieces.
So I go with my gut, remain on my side of the ruse, continue writing to my father about the present, but never about us. I don't want to face him, in words or physicality. I don't want to risk finding out that confronting my fears might result in nothing but an awkward moment, empty talk, hollow sounds masking raw wounds. He would disappoint me. I can't accept his destroying the fantasy we've built out of thin pieces of ourselves, out of paper and minutiae. I can only live with disappointing myself, with facing him too late.
The letters are insulation, and a substitute for the father/daughter relationship that is most likely impossible. I just need to know that this is enough, for both of us.
In the past I invited him to see me several times, but his excuse was always that he didn't "travel much." I remember these words when I go through his letters, the post cards from the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. He couldn't travel 257 miles, 3 hours and 53 minutes to walk me down the aisle in 2003. He declined when I invited him to see my last two children when they were born. He just couldn't.
And now, neither can I.
I haven't seen him either, not since 1998.
I still owe him that letter, which I'll get to after this writing exercise. There's not a whole lot to say to him, except that my granddaughter is okay, that her name is London, that her seizure was febrile. When I told him what happened to her over the phone last week he seemed disinterested, as thought he was watching the clock. I mentioned that I planned to visit this summer with my younger children, to spend a week so I could see everyone, including him. I heard the faintest disbelieving grunt on the line. I've said this before.
I might tell him in my letter that my husband and I will break ground soon for our house, that we've finally selected the exterior color: HGTV's White Duck. Or that my son will be leaving his school for autistic children and mainstreaming in a Catholic school. Or that my skin biopsy came back benign. But I don't think these things would really interest him.
I recently typed up all the letters my family has ever written to me, to archive them. I needed to preserve the span of over forty years, remember who we were then, what life looked like when Nixon was president, when the Beatles were traipsing through Strawberry Fields, when Remco was a household name. We're not the same people now. It's not the same world. Some of us died long ago.
I feel closer to my father when I read through his letters. All the pieces make more of a whole, or at least a bottom and couple of sides. But I still don't want to see him, despite that at some point I may succumb to an overwhelming sense of guilt. He might be on his death bed, or worse, in a coffin.
Now I want to stop typing. It's a depth I don't want to dredge up. Better stay close to the surface, like waving to a neighbor you've never really met. And that's terrible on so many levels.
I have reached out to my father before, reminded him of good times, assured him that just because Mom died doesn't mean it had been the wrong decision to divorce her ten years earlier. She and her addictions would have brought him down with her.
I've asked him hard questions about our family, for details I was too young to remember. But I've never asked him the other, equally important questions, like why he ultimately gave me to his sister to raise, or what happened the night he came home at 3 am with stitches in his forehead. I've never asked about the unfamiliar corner house where he once parked his car all night, the house my mother and I watched until I finally fell asleep in her lap. I never knew for certain what she suspected. I'm still afraid to ask my father anything hard about our personal history, to shatter the delicate glass slipper, wave through the shimmering ruse, destroy the possibility of magically becoming what a father and daughter should be. Real.
Like my mother I'm ridiculously addicted, to hope.
A psychiatrist once told me, regarding my father, that sometimes we have to let go of people, even when they're family. I'm still trying to decide whether that's what I want, but first I have to decide why I'm afraid to face him. I thought I knew last year when I abandoned an attempt to visit him. I got as close as Fort Worth, Texas, to the tiny house in Polytechnic Heights where I grew up. But I couldn't move beyond it, to my father's house in Burleson where he lives alone after three failed marriages. I then decided it was his long ago cruelty to my siblings and mother that justified my discomfort. Why should I honor this man, our tenuous relationship, when he deeply hurt the people I love, no apologies? But now I'm not so sure.
Opinions differ, my sister saying one thing, my father another. I'm stuck in the middle; the two don't speak anymore. But I'm haunted by what I do know, the night I saw him beat my sister, the afternoon he struck my thirteen year old brother in the face with a white-knuckled fist. I remember the day not long after when he lunged at my brother, chased him out of the house for saying he wanted to move out and live with our mother. My brother lived in the streets for the next nineteen years, and died there.
My mother and brother can't corroborate any story. I'm left with only pieces.
So I go with my gut, remain on my side of the ruse, continue writing to my father about the present, but never about us. I don't want to face him, in words or physicality. I don't want to risk finding out that confronting my fears might result in nothing but an awkward moment, empty talk, hollow sounds masking raw wounds. He would disappoint me. I can't accept his destroying the fantasy we've built out of thin pieces of ourselves, out of paper and minutiae. I can only live with disappointing myself, with facing him too late.
The letters are insulation, and a substitute for the father/daughter relationship that is most likely impossible. I just need to know that this is enough, for both of us.
In the past I invited him to see me several times, but his excuse was always that he didn't "travel much." I remember these words when I go through his letters, the post cards from the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. He couldn't travel 257 miles, 3 hours and 53 minutes to walk me down the aisle in 2003. He declined when I invited him to see my last two children when they were born. He just couldn't.
And now, neither can I.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Faith Deep
A Vietnamese woman once placed her small warm hand on my then pregnant belly and said, "You have girl." I believed her, because she was so different from me, at a time when I didn't want to be me. I believed her because we were standing in her element, fresh figs in a bamboo bowl, unsweetened green tea in a cup, other Vietnamese women softly clucking in what was for this Texas girl, a foreign tongue. I believed because she believed.
A doctor who had a reputation for incompetence once stopped me at work to say that my neck must be hurting because of the fixed tilt of my head. He was right, and the pain was intense. He took the time to walk me upstairs to his office, help me onto an examination table, and spend a half hour trying different neck collars to find the perfect fit. His attention was thoughtful, slow and methodical, sweetly paternal. He seemed to care about me in that moment despite all the other things he could have been doing, should have been doing, and this made me trust him, maybe even believe in him.
Two women visited me in the hospital while I labored with my fourth child, two complete strangers. They came to pray for me. I'll never know if it was their practice to visit all maternity patients, or only those who, for whatever reason, were laboring alone (my husband could not be with me at the time because we had no one to watch our two year old). As I sat in an uncomfortable birthing chair the women prayed the Lord's Prayer, each holding one of my hands. I felt embarrassed for crying, but the tears were unstoppable. These women had been unexpected, their maternal kindness filling my deepest need which was, simply, to know that I wasn't alone.
What do these instances have in common? Is it vulnerability, pain, fear and uncertainty? Is it gentle touch, intimate attention, that others had intuited a need or question that I hadn't articulated? These were people I didn't know well, might never see again, adding a rare ephemeral quality which focused the moment.
In all three instances and many others like them, I trusted someone, at least for a moment. But I wasn't required to invest long term trust. These were very low risk exchanges. I would lose nothing for trusting these people. A gender guess, a non-invasive medical prop and sincere prayer weren't going to kill or bankrupt anybody.
But what about riskier types of trust? How do we discern the trustworthy from the predators, the otherworldly wise from the out-of-this-world crazy? In many cases, we don't have to. When a psychic tells us we'll travel the world and meet Prince Charming in the next six months, it's no big deal. But what about when large sums of money are involved, or our basic human rights, or even the long term future of our souls?
While we're busy worrying about GMOs, irregular moles and holes in the ozone layer, we're told this life is nothing compared to eternity. We keep on paying on our mortgages, sending our kids to college, flossing and planning for retirement, despite this life being just a Pinto compared to the Cadillac that follows -- if we're good, a relative term.
But I trip over this part about the after life, especially after working in the medical field for so long. Death is real, life is real, and both can get ugly. And I've never heard from those who landed in any hereafter.
I admit that I'm an SNSB, a Special Needs Spiritual Being. I'm a mess when it comes to religion and faith. Call it my "cross to bear". I've had holy water poured on me by well-meaning Christians. Some wearing giant diamond Jesus pins have prayed over me outside busy shopping strips, prayed that my former husband, a cheating, gambling, drug-addicted abuser would return to me because "marriage is a sacrament, and what God has joined together..."
So many have worried over the fate of my soul, all because I struggle with reconciling the reality of the every day with resurrections and virgin births. There seems to be such a chasm between the Catholic church and what looks like the real world to me. Is real so wrong? Is God so picky about where and with whom He works? The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a THICK book. Add the THICK Bible to that. I get lost in all those words, in what reads like both a taunting riddle and a legal summons.
I need simple. I need Bible Braille and a seeing-eye dog for the many busy contradictory intersections. I need extra time on tests, miracles, signs, SIGNS, SIGNS!!! Something like a bubbling brook that gurgles, The confusion is theirs. The barriers and strictures are man made. Relax. I'm everywhere...------>And would God actually speak this, our human language? Or would it more likely be Math? Or visual images? Or the patterns in music? Why would God limit communication to only words, or rely solely on them to reach each one of us? Some can't read. Some aren't allowed to go to school to learn. Some will never see a Bible nor have the freedom to choose a religion.
And another thing, Why is God a He? The apologists say that women can not be priests because Jesus, the first priest, was a man. In other words, because Jesus had a penis.
My minds gets stuck in loops when I try to make sense of everything. It goes something like this:
The Catholic church states that abortion is wrong because of the sanctity of life, but says that capital punishment is right because the guilty must be punished, the worst guilt punishable by death, guilt decided by a jury of fallible humans. The church says that killing the guilty is sanctioned by God (in the Old Testament at least), because it's written in the Bible by men who heard God's voice or had visions, and those visions or auditory hallucinations were different then than they are now, um, because those people weren't crazy like we'd assume in modern times. Anyway, the whole point of religion is giving our lives over to God, to Christ, who died for our sins, though we're still sinners, but he died to save us, to save us from death, though we die anyway, so rather we're saved from eternal damnation in Hell, Hell being either a hot fire or merely a separation from God, at least more of a separation that we already experience when worshiping a silent invisible being. So Heaven is our goal, which is either gold and pearls or a mental state of union with God, sort of like we have now on a good day. And Heaven exists because the Bible says it does, a book written by men only, the same men who thought the earth was the flat center of the universe.
Pope Francis gives me hope. I've considered writing him a letter, but the last time I wrote to a Pope (Benedict), he quit.
In our everyday lives we are advised to check the accuracy of our purchase receipts, to read the fine print of contracts and other complex legal documents, to ask questions, dig deeper, follow our instincts. But religion says the opposite, that no matter what, we are to fall into faith, forget logic, forget ourselves and all that is "secular". We're told to simply trust the mystery.
But there's a big difference between a mystery and a puzzle. A puzzle has pieces. We can find the pieces, solve the puzzle. A mystery is elusive, baffling, confusing. And I know one thing for sure, especially since the Affordable Healthcare Act became a reality: There's money in confusion.
My brain can not reconcile these things. And my common sense will not let me make that leap of faith. As a child it was easy to believe, just as believing in Santa was easy. But I'm no longer a child.
I'll let a soft-spoken woman predict the sex of my unborn child in broken English. I can temporarily have faith in a doctor I wouldn't let operate on my dog while he makes a benign attempt to soothe a pain in my neck. I can sit with those who wish to pray over me when I am afraid and lonely, even though prayer is an odd practice if God's will, which is always aligned with our best interests, can not be altered.
But I can't take the biggest leap of all, that giant ten meter dive, complete with divine rotations and impossible flips without making even the tiniest splash. I can't because I don't know what I'm diving for, believing the impossible for, suspending disbelief for, and I simply can't comprehend ambiguous unproven consequences or trust that there's even water in the pool.
You're diving for eternal salvation... Salvation from what? From the wages of sin... Which are? Death... We still die. Your body dies... Exactly. But your soul goes on to be with the Lord... What's a soul? Your spirit... Which goes where? To Heaven... Which is where? Where God is... Which is where? In too beautiful a place for our feeble minds to comprehend...just trust that God is with you, that you are not alone. Have faith.
For now I have no choice but to be still, at least until the water rises up to meet me.
A doctor who had a reputation for incompetence once stopped me at work to say that my neck must be hurting because of the fixed tilt of my head. He was right, and the pain was intense. He took the time to walk me upstairs to his office, help me onto an examination table, and spend a half hour trying different neck collars to find the perfect fit. His attention was thoughtful, slow and methodical, sweetly paternal. He seemed to care about me in that moment despite all the other things he could have been doing, should have been doing, and this made me trust him, maybe even believe in him.
Two women visited me in the hospital while I labored with my fourth child, two complete strangers. They came to pray for me. I'll never know if it was their practice to visit all maternity patients, or only those who, for whatever reason, were laboring alone (my husband could not be with me at the time because we had no one to watch our two year old). As I sat in an uncomfortable birthing chair the women prayed the Lord's Prayer, each holding one of my hands. I felt embarrassed for crying, but the tears were unstoppable. These women had been unexpected, their maternal kindness filling my deepest need which was, simply, to know that I wasn't alone.
What do these instances have in common? Is it vulnerability, pain, fear and uncertainty? Is it gentle touch, intimate attention, that others had intuited a need or question that I hadn't articulated? These were people I didn't know well, might never see again, adding a rare ephemeral quality which focused the moment.
In all three instances and many others like them, I trusted someone, at least for a moment. But I wasn't required to invest long term trust. These were very low risk exchanges. I would lose nothing for trusting these people. A gender guess, a non-invasive medical prop and sincere prayer weren't going to kill or bankrupt anybody.
But what about riskier types of trust? How do we discern the trustworthy from the predators, the otherworldly wise from the out-of-this-world crazy? In many cases, we don't have to. When a psychic tells us we'll travel the world and meet Prince Charming in the next six months, it's no big deal. But what about when large sums of money are involved, or our basic human rights, or even the long term future of our souls?
While we're busy worrying about GMOs, irregular moles and holes in the ozone layer, we're told this life is nothing compared to eternity. We keep on paying on our mortgages, sending our kids to college, flossing and planning for retirement, despite this life being just a Pinto compared to the Cadillac that follows -- if we're good, a relative term.
But I trip over this part about the after life, especially after working in the medical field for so long. Death is real, life is real, and both can get ugly. And I've never heard from those who landed in any hereafter.
I admit that I'm an SNSB, a Special Needs Spiritual Being. I'm a mess when it comes to religion and faith. Call it my "cross to bear". I've had holy water poured on me by well-meaning Christians. Some wearing giant diamond Jesus pins have prayed over me outside busy shopping strips, prayed that my former husband, a cheating, gambling, drug-addicted abuser would return to me because "marriage is a sacrament, and what God has joined together..."
So many have worried over the fate of my soul, all because I struggle with reconciling the reality of the every day with resurrections and virgin births. There seems to be such a chasm between the Catholic church and what looks like the real world to me. Is real so wrong? Is God so picky about where and with whom He works? The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a THICK book. Add the THICK Bible to that. I get lost in all those words, in what reads like both a taunting riddle and a legal summons.
I need simple. I need Bible Braille and a seeing-eye dog for the many busy contradictory intersections. I need extra time on tests, miracles, signs, SIGNS, SIGNS!!! Something like a bubbling brook that gurgles, The confusion is theirs. The barriers and strictures are man made. Relax. I'm everywhere...------>And would God actually speak this, our human language? Or would it more likely be Math? Or visual images? Or the patterns in music? Why would God limit communication to only words, or rely solely on them to reach each one of us? Some can't read. Some aren't allowed to go to school to learn. Some will never see a Bible nor have the freedom to choose a religion.
And another thing, Why is God a He? The apologists say that women can not be priests because Jesus, the first priest, was a man. In other words, because Jesus had a penis.
My minds gets stuck in loops when I try to make sense of everything. It goes something like this:
The Catholic church states that abortion is wrong because of the sanctity of life, but says that capital punishment is right because the guilty must be punished, the worst guilt punishable by death, guilt decided by a jury of fallible humans. The church says that killing the guilty is sanctioned by God (in the Old Testament at least), because it's written in the Bible by men who heard God's voice or had visions, and those visions or auditory hallucinations were different then than they are now, um, because those people weren't crazy like we'd assume in modern times. Anyway, the whole point of religion is giving our lives over to God, to Christ, who died for our sins, though we're still sinners, but he died to save us, to save us from death, though we die anyway, so rather we're saved from eternal damnation in Hell, Hell being either a hot fire or merely a separation from God, at least more of a separation that we already experience when worshiping a silent invisible being. So Heaven is our goal, which is either gold and pearls or a mental state of union with God, sort of like we have now on a good day. And Heaven exists because the Bible says it does, a book written by men only, the same men who thought the earth was the flat center of the universe.
Pope Francis gives me hope. I've considered writing him a letter, but the last time I wrote to a Pope (Benedict), he quit.
In our everyday lives we are advised to check the accuracy of our purchase receipts, to read the fine print of contracts and other complex legal documents, to ask questions, dig deeper, follow our instincts. But religion says the opposite, that no matter what, we are to fall into faith, forget logic, forget ourselves and all that is "secular". We're told to simply trust the mystery.
But there's a big difference between a mystery and a puzzle. A puzzle has pieces. We can find the pieces, solve the puzzle. A mystery is elusive, baffling, confusing. And I know one thing for sure, especially since the Affordable Healthcare Act became a reality: There's money in confusion.
My brain can not reconcile these things. And my common sense will not let me make that leap of faith. As a child it was easy to believe, just as believing in Santa was easy. But I'm no longer a child.
I'll let a soft-spoken woman predict the sex of my unborn child in broken English. I can temporarily have faith in a doctor I wouldn't let operate on my dog while he makes a benign attempt to soothe a pain in my neck. I can sit with those who wish to pray over me when I am afraid and lonely, even though prayer is an odd practice if God's will, which is always aligned with our best interests, can not be altered.
But I can't take the biggest leap of all, that giant ten meter dive, complete with divine rotations and impossible flips without making even the tiniest splash. I can't because I don't know what I'm diving for, believing the impossible for, suspending disbelief for, and I simply can't comprehend ambiguous unproven consequences or trust that there's even water in the pool.
You're diving for eternal salvation... Salvation from what? From the wages of sin... Which are? Death... We still die. Your body dies... Exactly. But your soul goes on to be with the Lord... What's a soul? Your spirit... Which goes where? To Heaven... Which is where? Where God is... Which is where? In too beautiful a place for our feeble minds to comprehend...just trust that God is with you, that you are not alone. Have faith.
For now I have no choice but to be still, at least until the water rises up to meet me.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Flying Cats & Lost Shoes
Bette Midler and my mother, Beverly, share a December 1st birthday. That says a lot, or not. It depends on whether you believe in astrology, that Sagittarians are a little wild, will punch you in the eye then take you to the doctor. I like to compare average folk to celebrities, romanticizing both.
Mom saved alcoholics. Bette saves trees. Mom was an alcoholic. Bette played one in The Rose.
The comparison ends there, except Beverly's fate was similar to that of Bette's fictional character.
Today is weird. I've been on Twitter way too much, which means I now know of every disaster and crime around the world, and every flu death so far this season. Maybe it's not a good idea to be so randomly connected after all, especially when you're deep in the doldrums.
The flu is going around, and my thirty-nine year old niece is in ICU on a ventilator. She has pneumonia in both lungs, a complication of the flu. She hadn't been feeling well for a week or two, went to the doctor and was immediately transported by ambulance to Baylor All Saints Medical Center in Fort Worth.
I have a babysitter on standby in case I have to fly there on a moment's notice. I hope I don't have to make that call.
This cusp of tragedy coincides perfectly with my sudden preoccupation with mortality. Too many friends have cancer or recently died. Death seems to be knock-knock-knock'n on everybody's door.
I thought this wasn't supposed to happen until I was old, maybe 82.
The obituaries in the New York Times are usually a short list -- three names to save space -- of famous or semi-famous people. I always focus on the age. It's comforting to see that death usually occurs in the eighth decade of life. This matters because I have much to do before I join the daisy pushers. I have small kids to raise for starters.
But this isn't the problem I have with death, that it could happen too soon, will happen to me one day. I have a problem with death happening at all, to anyone. Which is unfortunate because it does happen, to everyone.
Deepak Chopra, who annoyed me until I watched an interesting interview this morning, talked about finding a mental state that enables us to peacefully accept mortality. I haven't found that mental state yet. But I need it, because the small loose ends are getting to me. For instance, the gray fluffy cat on Highway 6 last week. Her body was stretched as if flying, midair in a Superman pose, when she was hit by a car. It was a completely insignificant event on the whole. It certainly won't make the Twitter feed. But I noticed it.
Then there was the lone shoe at the base of the curb farther down, a shoe without its foot or person attached, which metaphorically screams: RANDOM. Just as random was a leaf, bright red and brittle, floating peacefully from its tree limb to the street below before it was blown asunder by my rushing SUV. Every few miles there was something else, a plastic shopping bag blown across the highway, the pulpy remains of squirrels, stray animals wandering near stray people.
These things really bother me, especially juxtaposed with Jesus Saves and God Listens bumper stickers. Those stickers mean what exactly, when a young beautiful mother of two is fighting for her life in a Fort Worth hospital bed.
People get lost, hurt and die. No one is spared. And that sucks, even on a good day.
I remember my niece, Linda, when she was a toddler. She was born in Hawaii, moved here to Texas when she was very young. The first time I met her was an afternoon at her paternal grandmother's house when Linda emerged from a bedroom, still groggy from a long nap. Her hair was a mad high rise, dark eyes puffy. She was so timid, suspiciously eying those in the room. She certainly didn't know who I was yet, her mother's younger sister. I never heard her speak that day.
Linda grew up watching me. She used to sit on the back of the toilet to watch me apply my makeup. Like most little girls, she was fascinated with growing up, with feminine mysteries, but she would never need makeup. She is exceptionally beautiful -- black hair, brown eyes, a flawless olive complexion and lashes as thick as a grass skirt. She also grew into a courageous outspoken woman, no longer timid. She describes herself on Facebook as "Loud".
There are several others in ICU with Linda, similar symptoms, hooked up to ventilators. This flu season the victims seem to be in their mid-twenties or middle-aged and otherwise healthy. It doesn't make any sense. Nothing does, really, unless I accept random as the norm, which is tricky and disturbing. The other option is to believe in magical nonsense, which I'm too old for now.
I wish I still believed.
Perhaps Deepak can suggest a nice balance between science and spirituality, or put a pleasant spin on random events. I vaguely recall something about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that the act of observing changes what is observed. Kind of like an Escher drawing. Something more easily digestible would be nice, some peace with permanent endings, and reassurance to quell the fear that none of this, none of us, really matter.
This is a dark blip in my usually positive outlook, but while it's here it's real and worse, there are real circumstances feeding it.
No celebrities immediately come to mind when I think of my niece. Except maybe Melody Moezzi, an Iranian American writer, attorney and activist. She is exotically beautiful, smart, and "Loud". She's a fighter who overcame serious health problems.
This comparison is a strange comfort, my own version of nonsense. It's also comforting to read that All Saints is committed to meeting everyone's spiritual needs: "Persons of all faiths and those of none may come with equal confidence." Those of none.
I like the word confidence. Is it a cousin to faith? Deepak described faith this morning as the act of accepting the unknown, releasing the need to make sense of everything. Faith is also defined as belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. The definition that gives me the most trouble is "the theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will." Those words leave me feeling like the empty shopping bag blowing randomly across the universe.
Maybe it was faith that propelled the cat across the busy highway. Maybe faith is the lost shoe owner's trusting acceptance that he would have the strength to move on and buy another pair. Faith might be the courage to gracefully leave the tree, to accept the messy random pulp of life. My mother, who saved others but couldn't save herself, was a frequent visitor at All Saints before alcohol won the war. She always advised that we do what we can then, "Let go and let God." But when she let go, so did God. Poor communication, perhaps.
Mom saved alcoholics. Bette saves trees. Mom was an alcoholic. Bette played one in The Rose.
The comparison ends there, except Beverly's fate was similar to that of Bette's fictional character.
Today is weird. I've been on Twitter way too much, which means I now know of every disaster and crime around the world, and every flu death so far this season. Maybe it's not a good idea to be so randomly connected after all, especially when you're deep in the doldrums.
The flu is going around, and my thirty-nine year old niece is in ICU on a ventilator. She has pneumonia in both lungs, a complication of the flu. She hadn't been feeling well for a week or two, went to the doctor and was immediately transported by ambulance to Baylor All Saints Medical Center in Fort Worth.
I have a babysitter on standby in case I have to fly there on a moment's notice. I hope I don't have to make that call.
This cusp of tragedy coincides perfectly with my sudden preoccupation with mortality. Too many friends have cancer or recently died. Death seems to be knock-knock-knock'n on everybody's door.
I thought this wasn't supposed to happen until I was old, maybe 82.
The obituaries in the New York Times are usually a short list -- three names to save space -- of famous or semi-famous people. I always focus on the age. It's comforting to see that death usually occurs in the eighth decade of life. This matters because I have much to do before I join the daisy pushers. I have small kids to raise for starters.
But this isn't the problem I have with death, that it could happen too soon, will happen to me one day. I have a problem with death happening at all, to anyone. Which is unfortunate because it does happen, to everyone.
Deepak Chopra, who annoyed me until I watched an interesting interview this morning, talked about finding a mental state that enables us to peacefully accept mortality. I haven't found that mental state yet. But I need it, because the small loose ends are getting to me. For instance, the gray fluffy cat on Highway 6 last week. Her body was stretched as if flying, midair in a Superman pose, when she was hit by a car. It was a completely insignificant event on the whole. It certainly won't make the Twitter feed. But I noticed it.
Then there was the lone shoe at the base of the curb farther down, a shoe without its foot or person attached, which metaphorically screams: RANDOM. Just as random was a leaf, bright red and brittle, floating peacefully from its tree limb to the street below before it was blown asunder by my rushing SUV. Every few miles there was something else, a plastic shopping bag blown across the highway, the pulpy remains of squirrels, stray animals wandering near stray people.
These things really bother me, especially juxtaposed with Jesus Saves and God Listens bumper stickers. Those stickers mean what exactly, when a young beautiful mother of two is fighting for her life in a Fort Worth hospital bed.
People get lost, hurt and die. No one is spared. And that sucks, even on a good day.
I remember my niece, Linda, when she was a toddler. She was born in Hawaii, moved here to Texas when she was very young. The first time I met her was an afternoon at her paternal grandmother's house when Linda emerged from a bedroom, still groggy from a long nap. Her hair was a mad high rise, dark eyes puffy. She was so timid, suspiciously eying those in the room. She certainly didn't know who I was yet, her mother's younger sister. I never heard her speak that day.
Linda grew up watching me. She used to sit on the back of the toilet to watch me apply my makeup. Like most little girls, she was fascinated with growing up, with feminine mysteries, but she would never need makeup. She is exceptionally beautiful -- black hair, brown eyes, a flawless olive complexion and lashes as thick as a grass skirt. She also grew into a courageous outspoken woman, no longer timid. She describes herself on Facebook as "Loud".
There are several others in ICU with Linda, similar symptoms, hooked up to ventilators. This flu season the victims seem to be in their mid-twenties or middle-aged and otherwise healthy. It doesn't make any sense. Nothing does, really, unless I accept random as the norm, which is tricky and disturbing. The other option is to believe in magical nonsense, which I'm too old for now.
I wish I still believed.
Perhaps Deepak can suggest a nice balance between science and spirituality, or put a pleasant spin on random events. I vaguely recall something about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that the act of observing changes what is observed. Kind of like an Escher drawing. Something more easily digestible would be nice, some peace with permanent endings, and reassurance to quell the fear that none of this, none of us, really matter.
This is a dark blip in my usually positive outlook, but while it's here it's real and worse, there are real circumstances feeding it.
No celebrities immediately come to mind when I think of my niece. Except maybe Melody Moezzi, an Iranian American writer, attorney and activist. She is exotically beautiful, smart, and "Loud". She's a fighter who overcame serious health problems.
This comparison is a strange comfort, my own version of nonsense. It's also comforting to read that All Saints is committed to meeting everyone's spiritual needs: "Persons of all faiths and those of none may come with equal confidence." Those of none.
I like the word confidence. Is it a cousin to faith? Deepak described faith this morning as the act of accepting the unknown, releasing the need to make sense of everything. Faith is also defined as belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. The definition that gives me the most trouble is "the theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will." Those words leave me feeling like the empty shopping bag blowing randomly across the universe.
Maybe it was faith that propelled the cat across the busy highway. Maybe faith is the lost shoe owner's trusting acceptance that he would have the strength to move on and buy another pair. Faith might be the courage to gracefully leave the tree, to accept the messy random pulp of life. My mother, who saved others but couldn't save herself, was a frequent visitor at All Saints before alcohol won the war. She always advised that we do what we can then, "Let go and let God." But when she let go, so did God. Poor communication, perhaps.
Friday, December 27, 2013
Danny Boy
DeDe and I worked together for one year at a local hospital in the late 90's. We were both mammographers and since our patient load was light, we had a lot of time to talk. She did most of the talking, about her pending divorce, her kids, her weight, her sister with multiple sclerosis.
When my best friend of almost twenty years passed away, DeDe said to me, "I can't imagine how you feel right now, because I can't imagine how I'd go on without Sally."
Sally was her best friend, a woman I met through DeDe. She would one day be my coworker and confidant.
Last week Sally notified those who knew and worked with DeDe that she had passed away. DeDe's friends and family met in an upstairs party room at an Italian restaurant to celebrate her life. We released balloons in her honor, small pieces of paper attached to the ribbon with favorite memories. I hugged Sally as the perfect orange spheres lifted up into a gray sky. For a moment, an old pain returned, that of losing my own Deedee fifteen years ago.
A few years ago I wrote about Deedee here, a piece titled "Immortal Frog" that attempted to describe a twenty year friendship. I wasn't satisfied with the piece, then or now. It's hard to convey perfection or deep loss, to take a reader all the way to heaven or hell. I will never be able to recreate that love in words, to explain it, paint it, make it real for a reader.
I thought of Deedee this afternoon while driving, which is happening a lot now, and I realized that it's because of DeDe's death. Duh. But today was different. Real or imagined, I could feel my friend in the car with me, like a fullness within and without. I could almost smell the Agree shampoo in her thick hair, see her square earthy hands, hear her high-pitched laugh. I felt connected to something rich and old and forever. I'm not superstitious enough to believe it was actually her, but like particular smells, our deepest loves stay with us, in high fidelity.
I thought about the laughter we shared, and not just any laughter, but the sort that becomes gasping, raking animal sounds. On the telephone we would build up a rhythm and humor tension, and before we hung up we were barking and choking. It was a soul orgasm. I used to tell her, "We're adding years to our lives."
We felt immortal back then.
Fifteen years later, I feel deeply mortal. I don't think it's an age thing. I think it's a laughter thing. I just don't do it like I did. No one makes me laugh like Deedee, for whatever reason. With her, I was home. I've tried to find her in others, thought I had a couple of times. But she's not out there. There was only one. Our friendship was perfection, the fit. We built it, admired it openly, talked about how lucky we were.
What I missed most today was picking up the phone. I used to be able to pick it up at any moment and call her. But today, when one of her favorite songs, Danny Boy, came on the car radio, I wanted to share it with her. I considered calling my sister or one of my other friends, started making up excuses, digging up words to say. But no one else could have filled the void.
There was no one to talk to, not the way I wanted to talk. I have friends, and I love them, but they aren't her and today, no one else would do.
As often happens, the thought occurred to me that maybe I might find it again, that perfect friendship fit. Then reality hit, not hard, just a soft nudge. Maybe it was Deedee saying, No, you won't find it again. But that's okay. Once upon a time, it found us.
When my best friend of almost twenty years passed away, DeDe said to me, "I can't imagine how you feel right now, because I can't imagine how I'd go on without Sally."
Sally was her best friend, a woman I met through DeDe. She would one day be my coworker and confidant.
Last week Sally notified those who knew and worked with DeDe that she had passed away. DeDe's friends and family met in an upstairs party room at an Italian restaurant to celebrate her life. We released balloons in her honor, small pieces of paper attached to the ribbon with favorite memories. I hugged Sally as the perfect orange spheres lifted up into a gray sky. For a moment, an old pain returned, that of losing my own Deedee fifteen years ago.
A few years ago I wrote about Deedee here, a piece titled "Immortal Frog" that attempted to describe a twenty year friendship. I wasn't satisfied with the piece, then or now. It's hard to convey perfection or deep loss, to take a reader all the way to heaven or hell. I will never be able to recreate that love in words, to explain it, paint it, make it real for a reader.
I thought of Deedee this afternoon while driving, which is happening a lot now, and I realized that it's because of DeDe's death. Duh. But today was different. Real or imagined, I could feel my friend in the car with me, like a fullness within and without. I could almost smell the Agree shampoo in her thick hair, see her square earthy hands, hear her high-pitched laugh. I felt connected to something rich and old and forever. I'm not superstitious enough to believe it was actually her, but like particular smells, our deepest loves stay with us, in high fidelity.
I thought about the laughter we shared, and not just any laughter, but the sort that becomes gasping, raking animal sounds. On the telephone we would build up a rhythm and humor tension, and before we hung up we were barking and choking. It was a soul orgasm. I used to tell her, "We're adding years to our lives."
We felt immortal back then.
Fifteen years later, I feel deeply mortal. I don't think it's an age thing. I think it's a laughter thing. I just don't do it like I did. No one makes me laugh like Deedee, for whatever reason. With her, I was home. I've tried to find her in others, thought I had a couple of times. But she's not out there. There was only one. Our friendship was perfection, the fit. We built it, admired it openly, talked about how lucky we were.
What I missed most today was picking up the phone. I used to be able to pick it up at any moment and call her. But today, when one of her favorite songs, Danny Boy, came on the car radio, I wanted to share it with her. I considered calling my sister or one of my other friends, started making up excuses, digging up words to say. But no one else could have filled the void.
There was no one to talk to, not the way I wanted to talk. I have friends, and I love them, but they aren't her and today, no one else would do.
As often happens, the thought occurred to me that maybe I might find it again, that perfect friendship fit. Then reality hit, not hard, just a soft nudge. Maybe it was Deedee saying, No, you won't find it again. But that's okay. Once upon a time, it found us.
Still
Did you get
what you asked for
remember now
why you sent your heart
searching
were you asking then
for better or worse
for the up and down of
love
for tiny feet now
cooing, crying
mess, mayhem
were you asking
or remembering
since the heart
sees the future
as a memory
love existing
out of time
as does god
for god is
love
hushing doubt
its longing
only faith could carry
brought us here
to tiny feet
remember now
the vows, the dress
the unrest
the cake, champagne
to overnight
sudden, success
we, us
fade, blur
to family
but look closer, listen
to the question
we are
still
the answer
what you asked for
remember now
why you sent your heart
searching
were you asking then
for better or worse
for the up and down of
love
for tiny feet now
cooing, crying
mess, mayhem
were you asking
or remembering
since the heart
sees the future
as a memory
love existing
out of time
as does god
for god is
love
hushing doubt
its longing
only faith could carry
brought us here
to tiny feet
remember now
the vows, the dress
the unrest
the cake, champagne
to overnight
sudden, success
we, us
fade, blur
to family
but look closer, listen
to the question
we are
still
the answer
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