Love Means Never Having to Struggle?

I can't agree with this (and I forget where I got it from - I've had the draft waiting to be written for a while). Here's what I wrote Then: It doesn't allow for the very real presence of difficulty (which is what I read in the word "force") in any passion. Writing is hard. I love it, and I'm good at it, but sometimes it drives me crazy. Does that mean I shouldn't be a writer? Nope. Relationships are hard. I love people and I care about them, but sometimes some of them drive me crazy. Does that mean I shouldn't be loved? NOPE. Let's allow for the very productive role of challenge in life. It's not a bad thing.

Here's what I want to write now: No way, José. Love is beautiful and weird and scary and thrilling and natural and distracting and a work of art and a work of sweat and somehow both unpredictable and predictable at the same time. So go ahead and struggle. Everything of value is worth some struggle. What would life be without it?

Untitled

I have a recurring dream that I have lost my voice. I am sobbing for Mom, and sometimes I am screaming at someone about how unfair it is, and I can’t scream loudly enough. My voice chokes in my throat, and I scream without sound. When I wake, I don’t need much dream theory to suggest that this relates to the depth of my grief, and how it isn’t fully exorcisable, how it will always live in my chest along with my love for my mother. For the rest of my life, I will love and miss her. I will be only so happy. My happiness will always be laced with sadness - and yet I have to try to be twice as happy, for her, and for the happiness she embodied that she can no longer give to others. She gives it in memory, of course, and that is going to have to be enough - except it isn’t enough. It just is.

I hear a car on the avenue outside my window and I think it is my mother’s car pulling into the driveway of my childhood home. I think this for two full seconds, and then I remember. I travel back through grief and memory along the tow rope of the Way My Life is Now, Without Her, and I am back in Brooklyn, back in my pajamas, back writing about a mother who should be still alive but wasn’t given that chance. I should not be writing a eulogy. I should be planning to take her to Hawaii. I should be trying to convince her to visit, to hug her grandcat (a word I didn’t feel comfortable with her using until she got sick), to hug ME. I should be arguing with her over why I should take the couch and she should take my bed, with my discounted high thread count sheets. We should agree that they are not as luxurious as they should be, and we should then discuss that part of the appeal of hotels is the fact that you don’t have to do your own laundry. We should be making fun of my ex boyfriend together, and she should be meeting the dear friends of mine that she never got to meet. We should be visiting my aunt together.

I have done and will do all of these things. I have done some with her in life, and I will do all with her in death - in After Life, I guess I should say. To me, the After of her Life is togetherness with me. She is on my shoulder, in my heart, in my DNA, in my smile, in my eyes, in every breath, in every beat of my heart. I am without her, and she is within me. And it’s not enough. It just is.

Every Day Mothers' Day

This Fathers' Day (and every day), I celebrated my mom. She was a superparent. She raised me with little help, lots of love, and the kind of boundless energy and attention that I aspire to show a child someday. She made me inquisitive, brave, and sensitive. She challenged the boundaries I set for myself. She skipped down the street with me. She gave the best hugs. She listened, always. She worried about me. She reveled in my joys. She fought with steely, warm strength to stay alive, and she told me it was for me - I don't think I will ever receive a greater gift, nor be loved so hard. Her spirit sits on my shoulder, and her voice rings in my ears. I miss her with my whole self, and I am steeped in gratefulness for her love, her example, and the precious time that we had. Every new thing I do and every old thing I cherish is in her name. My Mama Nancy.

I also celebrated my auntie. She is my Mom Person now - more than an aunt. She is a best friend, a confidante, a tv watching buddy, a jokester, a good shoulder for tears, a tower of strength, a model of generosity. She has been dealt some jaggedly painful blows, two in just this year, and she honors the memory of our loved ones with her grace and generosity and bravery. I am so lucky to have her in my corner, and I will always be in hers. With my cousin and his wife, we are a little family that leaves room for the presences of our loved ones. Just try to pull us apart. You aren't strong enough. I love, you, famdamily.

Family: Loss and Love

From where I sit in my aunt's living room, I can almost see the room where my mother died. It's blocked by the bathroom door. One of the surprises of my visit here has been that I am not weirded out by walking through that room. I don't choose to spend time there, or to sit in the places where I often sat when Mom was dying, but I am okay being in the house. I came here because my uncle just died. My aunt lost her baby sister and her husband of forty years within four months of each other. My grief for my mother is deep, and I grieve for my uncle, but I also grieve for my aunt, and the unique and unfair position in which she finds herself.

My cousin and I have always been close, but now we are part of a special club. We have a bond that will never be broken: by losing our parents, we have become even closer. My cousin and my aunt are now my most immediate family. The three of us are a unit - it is now us against the world. We will have new traditions and inside jokes. My aunt will be the grandma to all of our children. Her house will become the family compound for holidays and special occasions. When I lost my mother, I felt the loss of my immediate family, but now I know that that was never true - i just lost the person at the core of it. It's a shattering loss, but not one that leaves me alone.

We have all cried a little on this visit - mostly tearing up. I decided a long time ago that crying is too emotionally and physically taxing to do all the time. My uncle died a week ago yesterday, and my mother died four months ago tomorrow. We have sat in the sun and reminisced. We have looked at family pictures. We have done lots of hugging. We have laughed until we wanted to pee. We have felt my mother and uncle's presences behind our conversations and shared experiences.

Someday I will wrestle small children onto the train along with my bags, and my husband and I will head up north to join the rest of my (now diminished) family here at my aunt's house. My aunt will pick us up at the station, and my cousin and his wife and their children will come out to meet us. We will remember my mom and my uncle, telling as many stories as the children's attention will hold, so that they can feel them as part of our family.

Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still. 

Refractions in the Self: or, the Toad Cave Theory

Part of the experience of grieving, for me, is knowing that there is now more than one person inside of my head. One of these people is my mother, who, to be fair, has always been there. Her voice comes out of my mouth when I talk to babies and animals. I also channel her when I teach, or when I have to be disappointed in someone, or when I am proud of someone, or when I console or congratulate a friend.

I'm also finding that I now have a divided self. There's the Normal Me, who writes every day, exercises like a maniac, laughs a lot, reads a lot, and is rarely home. The state of grief in which I now live overlaps that self with another, less familiar self. I think of this one as Toad Cave Me, because when I am most deeply sad over the loss of my loved ones, I feel like a toad at the bottom of a subterranean space, wedged in the corner of a deep, deep hole. I lie still, I cry a lot, and I sometimes lose momentary sight of the point of the things that Normal Me does. Normal Me moves a lot, and Toad Cave Me is the picture of outward inertia. (The brain can overpower the body, I guess.) Even when Toad Cave is on the move, she's lethargic and scared and often doesn't want to be where she is. You'll see both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me crying in the street, but I bet you could suss out the differences between us by our respective demeanors and the looks in our eyes.

Toad Cave Me has only appeared once or twice since my mother's death, and one of those times was immediately after my friend's death last week. The only other time she's been strongly present was a weekend when my mother was in the emergency room and a sort-of manfriend mostly best friend had just shattered my little heart to pieces. Toad Cave's presence makes sense, people tell me, because I am going through a serious trauma. My only parent is gone. Nobody misses her like I do. It takes more energy than I realize.

In the days after my mother's death, I was so motivated to be the daughter she knew that I wondered if stillness would ever come. It took about a month and a half for Toad Cave to reappear, on hiatus since my breakup and Mom's ER visit.

The ways I'm finding to pull away from Toad Cave's grasp now, or to ameliorate it when the pull is too strong, are varied. One is to imagine motion, and that at least lets me know that I'm valuing it almost as much as I normally do. Another is to stop, take a breath, run off and cry if I need to, and tell myself that feelings shift, and the courage and grit and love that my mother inculcated in me will rise to the surface soon enough, and help me power through. When it's really tough to move, another way is to ride out the stillness, to remind myself that it won't continue forever, that maybe I need the rest, and, above all, that my mother would be the first one to tell me that it's okay to take it easy, even for a mile-a-minute person like me.

Both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me are comforted by the recent words of a friend of mine: "How can you have expectations of yourself right now when you don't even know yet who you are without your mom around? Do the best you can do, for now. That's all you can do, anyway. And besides, it's enough."

Piling up

A dear friend was found dead in her apartment late one night last week. I am bowled over by her sudden, unexpected death - she was a vivacious person in her early thirties who had made lots of strides in creating the life she wanted. We don't yet know why she is no longer with us. I can't stop thinking about the overseas trip I was meant to take to visit her later this year. We were both so excited. Now her family has to bury her.

J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.

Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.

While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.

J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.

Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.