Matters of the Heart

 

April 9, 2012

Good morning.  It is Monday.  The sun is just beginning to shine.  I should be at the hospital, with my dad, but I am here, at home, writing this letter to you. 

Sadie is on the living room rug chewing a buffalo tendon.  She chomps and rips. 

Stella sits on the dining room table.  Watching the garden for signs of movement. 

This morning I heard birds chirping. 

For the past seven days your grandpa has been in the hospital.  His heart has gotten the best of him.  It has threatened to betray him. 

It is 9:56 a.m.  He will be in surgery for 4-6 hours as the surgeons move and graft veins from one part of his body to another.  Open heart surgery. 

In that moment, when the surgeons stopped his heart to do their work, did you greet him, along with other souls he has known, waiting to decide whether to allow him to come with you, or to shepard him back to here and now and 1 or 2:00 when the surgery should be over.

I fully feel the weight of this.

The wait of this.

In the days preceding, my father told me stories.  Sitting on the hard plastic chair this week, I have listened.  I have heard him.

Stories, my dad cast as the main character, involving my mother, my grandmothers, great aunts, uncles.  Ancestors from Spain, Portugal, Hawaii, Ireland, Illinois. 

I look for places where our stories intersect.  Where I come on the scene. 

Parenthood was not a choice for him or my mother.

It was not planned.

It happened.

I was conceived in the back seat of a green 1949 Ford convertible.  My dad was nineteen, my mother, fifteen. Accompanying Dad to a Seahawks game one Sunday afternoon, my father proudly pointed out the parking lot, between a run down gas station and a warehouse in Seattle, where he and my mother “made out” and made me.

It was 1954, before the “Pill” and legalized abortion.  In the 1950’s a woman’s place was in the home.  The marriage rate in the United States was at an all time high.  Getting married right out of high school was considered the norm.  Being single and pregnant was socially unacceptable.

            With my cells dividing--forming arms, legs, lungs, heart, forming inside her womb--my mother had two choices. She could go to a home for ”wayward girls”, have me and put me up for adoption. Or she could marry my father.  Influenced by my stern German Catholic Grandma Fran on my mother’s side, and my three hundred pound Portuguese Catholic Grandma Thelma on my father’s side, my father did the honorable thing.  He married my mother.

            While other girls my mom’s age, went to sock hops, proms, and eventually graduated from high school, my mother had me, my sisters and my brother. She spent her days changing diapers and warming bottles for babies that came every year. By the time she was 21, there were five of us. Another one was on the way.

            My birth certificate says I was born at 12:49 a.m. on Wednesday, May 25, 1955 at Swedish Hospital in Seattle Washington. Sometime between my birth and second birthday my dad enlisted in the Army.  My second birthday was celebrated in Oakland, California. By then I had one baby sister and another on the way.

            I celebrated my third and fourth birthdays at Fort Lewis, where my dad was stationed at the time. A month before my fourth birthday I got my third sibling, a brother. On my fifth birthday we were living in Hawaii. I had a party in Wahiawa at the Nani Wai apartment hotel. I got a Viewmaster, pedal pushers, shorts, a bathing suit, blouses, and a yellow dress. One month after I blew out the candles on my cake, I got baby sister number four. That year, September 9, 1960, I went to my first day of kindergarten at Waianae Elementary.

            I know all of this because I have my baby book. It is a maize satin covered written history of my early years.  It stops with my first day of school. I have taken this book out often and fondled the wax envelope with the dark curled clipping of a lock of my hair from my first haircut. I have traced the lines of my newborn footprints and compared my thumbprints to my mother's. The Story of Our Baby is full of information-- when I got my first tooth, smiled my first smile, walked my first steps. There are little mother's notes like "Sherry is now at five months and is starting to grab things and play with them. She is getting cuter all the time."

As a mother, I know recording all of this took time. This book, and a handful of black and white photos that show a chubby, smiling, little, curly dark-haired girl, are all I have to prove that my parents must have cared for me when I was little. My own memories do not allow me that.

I cannot find the place where my own memories actually began.  It is a

blur.  Watching the curl of remembered feelings, hearing them shake the rattles in their tail should be warning enough.  Once the snake bites, the poison spreads. 

It will be awhile before I can recover from the fear of going home.

The sweaty palms I tried to dry on the skirt of my dress.  Sweat beads forming into rivulets, dripping onto everything around me.  Leaving little puddles on the black mat of the bus floor, riding home from kindergarten, first grade.

Red ants biting at my five year old flesh as they crawled across my toes, across my feet, up my shins, my torso, my neck until a neighbor found me.

Ketchup and mayonnaise on Wonder Bread.

Imaginary friends.

A field trip to a fire station.

Three Little Pigs puppets I made on popsicle sticks.

“I’m a little teapot, short and stout.”

My father telling my mother, “Calm down.  Lower your voice.  The kids are in the other room.”

………………………………………..

“I don’t want to say nothing bad about your mother,” my dad starts out.  But he is his own hero in this story.  I use what he tells me to recreate my history. 

My sister Kathy is tracing our ancestors.  She has found quite a few.  Is drawing out the family tree.

I need to study the leaves.

…………………………….

            My mother abused prescription drugs.  She did not get them legally.  She washed them down with alcohol.  Spending time in bars, she sought the company of men other than my father.  In her land of oblivion and sex, there was no room for five small children.  Things came to a head when the military police found my mother drunk and high with a sergeant having sex on the bar in the Non Commissioned Officer’s Club at 3 a.m.  The two of them had broken in after hours.  The MPs were going to arrest her. Not wanting to cause problems with my dad’s military career, they called him to come and get her.  She was pregnant with her sixth child.  It was not my dad’s.

            I was in the first grade when we left Hawaii. In the middle of the night mom, with no warning, no explanation, pulled us five children out of our beds where we were soundly sleeping. She hurried us off to Honolulu airport.   We had tickets to Seattle she told us.

            When we got to SeaTac airport we walked out of the plane and into the cold wearing flip-flops, sleeveless shirts, and shorts.  It was November in Washington, which meant cold and rain in Seattle. 

As the spring of 1962 began to flaunt cherry blossoms, daffodils and rhododendrons, we moved out of her mother’s house.  Mom found housing at High Point, a housing project in West Seattle.

            A young boy, just a few years older than me, who let me ride his bicycle, and who lived across the street from us, was found hanging from the clothesline pole one morning.  I overheard the grownups around me as they whispered back and forth about his death. Some said he saw his death as the only escape from that place.  Others whispered somebody killed him. I could not understand any of it.  I only knew a boy I had played with was dead

Welfare mother

cries her eyes out

in the projects

neighbors say

at least that's

one less mouth to feed

My mother was like a ghost in my life.  There were occasional sightings.

            I was hungry all the time.  There was never food in our cupboards or our refrigerator.  We had no dining room table to sit and eat breakfast, lunch or dinner.  So, I spent time at neighbors’ houses, where they had bologna sandwiches and cookies and milk in the refrigerator.

            There was the old couple who had no children of their own.  She made me eggs and bacon in the morning with buttered toast and jam, meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans, meals that made my mouth water.  She died and the man was too sad to feed himself. 

            The girl on the next block who was my age, and an only child--I spent a lot of time with her.  She brought out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips and strawberry Kool-Aid.  We ate and drank on her patio, jelly sticking to the sides of our mouth, cherry Kool-Aid giving us red moustaches.  But then her mom said she could not play with me anymore because my mother had too many strange men over at our house.  I could not understand why I was no longer welcome at her house for something my mother was doing.

            And there was the big black woman with skin the color of milk chocolate. She had more kids than I could count.  One she carried on her hip, another wrapped himself around her leg.  The rest just followed her everywhere.  I began to follow too, hoping I would blend.  She took me with them to pick colanders full of blackberries that she turned into jam and pies.  There were big pots of food-- thick with chunks of ham or chicken or beef, green stuff, beans--on her stove, that smelled like heaven and made my mouth water.  She always made a place for me at the table.

“Honey girl,” she would say to me, “you better run along home and tell your momma where you is so she ain’t worried bout you.”

            I snuck out of the house by climbing out a bedroom window. I shimmied down to the garbage can I had put under it until the tips of my toes were on the lid.  Balanced there, I let my heels down while hanging onto the window ledge.  Letting go of the window ledge I’d crouch down until I was sitting, and then I’d slide the rest of the way to the ground. 

My mother did not worry about me.  She did not know I was gone.  She  was like a ghost in my life.  Occasional sightings.

When I wore out my welcome with everyone, I’d sneak into their unlocked houses and drink their milk, make myself a lunchmeat sandwich with Miracle Whip or mayonnaise, find a bag of cookies or some chips and find someplace in the woods nearby to enjoy my feast.

            Survival lessons.

………………………………………..

          Andrea, those memories, painful as they are, were nothing compared to what was to come.  The years of my Dad and stepmother.

          My stepmother’s names for me. 

          Fat Ass.  Trouble Maker.  Titless Wonder.  Liar.  Whore like your mother.

          I forgot my own name.  Forgot who I was.

          How did my father not hear this?

          I am frozen here at the computer.  A blank page to tell you what happened.  Hate happened.  My stepmother hated me, despised me, needed to take me down a notch or two.

          Me.  Who will not be destroyed.

          In his own way, my father has acknowledged what happened.

          But he cannot admit his part in it.

          I think of other things.

I found this picture of my dad, my mom and me. 

Memories of my dad.

It is 10:45.  Monday morning.  April 9, 2010.  Fresh from the shower, I brush my teeth.  My sister Linda has texted me, “Dad should be out of surgery around 12:30.”

All week long, sitting in that plastic chair next to his bed, listening to his doctors of the heart, I have had a feeling this could go either way.  If my dad were by himself, he would take off the hospital gown, climb on his Harley, and say “To hell with this.  I‘ve lived this long.  I’ll take my chances.”

He has Mari now. 

And he cannot leave her.

So he will let the surgeons cut his ribs apart, expose his heart, repair what they can, close him up.   He will bear the risk and pain of this for her.

10:45 you are a whispered thought.  “Your dad will be ok.”

It is like a blessing.

A rush of memory.

My dad.

Hush puppies dropped into the deep fat fryer.  Translucent bits of onion shimmering with melted fat as I cut into the crisp outer shell, fill the middle with butter.

The quarter appearing, disappearing from the palm of his hand when he closed his fist, opened it.

B9

I25

N31

G60

O75

BINGO

I want the Hershey Bar prize.

Spit shined black boots.

Green fatigues, starched stiff.

My first communion at Holy Cross, eating a donut afterwards at Winchells, just me and dad, me in my white communion dress and veil. 

The sound of his belt as it sliced through the air, met my flesh.  The sting, then ache of ruptured veins, the multicolored bruises on my skin I tried to hide. 

The underlying beat that carries through this song of my life.

This song I tried to forget, but write now for you.

Another day begins. 

My dad will be ok.

My thoughts are with you.

                        Love you sweetie-Mom.

Easter 2012

April 7, 2012

Good Morning my Dear Sweet Girl—

Easter tomorrow.

1983.  I close my eyes and see you, your sister Erin, standing at the small round dining table I found at a garage sale. 

Both of you buzzing, anticipating multicolored jelly beans and a basket full of green fake cellophane grass with bits of chocolate nested in the sleek shimmery shreds .

A Betty Crocker white cake baking in the oven in two round 8 inch pans fills the house with vanilla and sugar scent.  Later we will make the bunny cake.  Now, we  dye the dozen white hardboiled eggs that sit in the middle of the table surrounded by mismatched cups, some with cracks, filled with translucent red, orange, blue, green dye. 

My thoughts are all over the place.

I cannot sit still.

I am afraid to just be with myself right now.

But that is where I need to be.

Quiet.  Taking in the whisper of air as it moves into my nostrils, I fill my chest with it, inflate.

Exhale.

Deflate.

Wait.

Come back to now.

This moment, when the only sounds are the whir of the computer processor, the steady hum of the refrigerator, the clock ticking—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

The house creaks, groans. 

I sigh.

My dad is in the hospital.  A heart attack.  He waits for a transfer to another hospital, for the Plavix to leave his system so his platelets stick together again, the assignment of an operating room. 

Sisters, brothers, stories.  My family history is real.  It remembers me .  It gathers around my dad.

Dear Sherry,

On April 2, 2012 you notified us of your potential need to take family/medical leave due to care for a parent with a serious health condition.

This to inform you meet the eligibility requirements for taking FMLA and you have FMLA leave available.

Since last Sunday, I have been at one of three places, at home, at work, at the hospital.

I have long forgiven my father for my childhood, or lack of one.  Neither of us wants to confront it, discuss it in any great detail.  Any more than a paragraph here and there. 

I ask questions.  He fills in gaps. 

The stories I never told you.  If I did not speak of them, they would not be real.  The stories would not repeat themselves.

Over and over.

My stepmother made Cinderella’s look like Donna Reed.  My dad will not admit he knew. 

As I helped you and Erin each cradle a hard boiled egg on a teaspoon, slowly lower it in the colored liquid, wait for figments of color to imbue the hard white shell, the stories of my Easters past fluttered their pages inside me. 

With a clear wax crayon, my stepmother made me write Fat Ass, Trouble Maker, to identify which colored eggs were mine.  My sisters had their own identifiers.  Lazy, Stupid, Ugly. 

Deep breaths as you and Erin and I turn the eggs in their green, red, yellow, orange, blue, pink dye.  Wait for the perfect hue.  Lift the egg, hold it against the side of the cup as we tip the spoon, spilling color back into the cup.  The egg is placed to dry. 

There is nothing written on your eggs.

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. 

1961.  Easter.  I was 6, almost 7.  My sister Kathy would have been 5, Karen 4, Dale 3, Linda almost two.  My mother, 23 years old, was pregnant with baby number 6—who was not my dad’s.  She’d left him and we were living in High Point, a housing project in Seattle.  She—a single mom not ready for, not wanting motherhood. 

My father’s words—“The end always justifies the means.”

No.  It does not.

But I do not argue.

1961.  I woke early Easter Sunday.  I was old enough (a) to know it was Easter, and (b) to expect the Easter Bunny to have left 5 wicker baskets full of sugar treats, 5 chocolate bunnies.  I felt the brittle chocolate breaking as I brought my teeth down on its ears, tasted the cocoa—butter—sugar melt on my tongue, stick to the roof of my mouth.

I opened the bedroom door, walked down the hall toward the living room, it was barely light. 

There was nothing.  No Easter baskets.  No chocolate bunnies.

Surely there must be a mistake. 

I went in the kitchen. 

Nothing.

Maybe the Easter bunny was running late.  It was still early. 

If I went back to bed and was really quiet, there was still a chance he would come.

I laid in the bed I shared with Kathy.  Listened for my sisters and brother to wake up.  Everything had to be quiet.  Or the Easter Bunny would not come.

He had not made it to our house yet.

The house creaked. 

I was bathed in a sea of relief.  It was the Easter bunny.

Quietly, I made my way down the hall again.  Peeked around the corner.

Nothing.

Checked the kitchen.

Nothing.

I went back to my bed.  Grew anxious. 

How was I going to tell Kathy, Karen, Dale, Linda the Easter Bunny had not come yet? 

How was I going to keep them quiet until he made it to our house?

I piled our blankets in the bottom of the closet on top of the collection of dirty clothes mixed with clean.  Explained the situation.  Enforced silence, stillness.  Linda was the hardest to keep quiet.  She was wet and hungry.  I could not change her diaper.  I did not know what to feed her.

Shhhhhhh

If we are not quiet there will be no jelly beans, I call dibs on the black ones.  There will be no chocolate bunnies.

Where was my mom?

My dad was an ocean away, stationed in Hawaii.  Making another family.  Until my mother disappeared and the Red Cross brought him back to Washington to claim us—five of us.

“Your stepmother and I got together to do a job.  We each had children to raise.”

“You all turned out all right.”

“Dad, maybe.  But we are all fucked up in out own ways.”  I tell him. 

Linda is with me.  She shakes her head yes.

He measures his success by what we have accomplished.  Does he realize how much there was to overcome?

I know my story.  I come here to the hospital so he can tell me his.

I listen him.  Record him.  Take down notes.  Ask questions

He is my father.

I am his daughter.

I have forgiven him for all he thought he knew about parenting, for all the things he did not.

I wonder.

Without these stories, my father’s, my mother’s, and now mine, without understanding I, too, was a child, became a young woman, and then your mother—without knowing this history, will you forgive me for all I thought I knew about parenting, for all the things I did not.

Mostly, I thought love would be enough.

I thought I could make up for my childhood by giving you yours. 

Without a frame of reference, without me telling you about how I grew up, how could you know?

I am my father’s daughter. 

I start again from there. 

Happy Easter. 

Eat the ears first.

Love—Mom.

Moving

March 23, 2012.

Dear Andrea,

I am moving. 

It is hard to be still.

My house is mine again.  The  smell of muddy man boots, Carhart jeans, jackets are gone. The wet wood, the damaged molded parts have all been ripped out, thrown out, dried out, disinfected.  Wood has been replaced by slate.  Slate from India.  Tumbled slate, mosaic slate, slate pavers.  My bare feet caress the cool roughness of stone.

Dressed in an abeurgine colored silk negligee and matching robe, both trimmed in black lace I dance to the regular beat of Baba Mall as I unpack boxes, take my time.  Contemplate  substance, texture of everything collected.  Only I understand the full meaning of these items.  Someday, someone will inherit all of this.  Should I leave notes for them?  “I bought this collection of fabric dolls from a little shop in Tallin..”

You would know that. 

I take the mundane and turn it into something exquisite.  This experience of moving. 

Of music that touches me, rocks me elementally.

I bend to pick something up from the floor.  My necklace, 18k gold, your name in Arabic, thin as a sheet of paper, falls in my mouth.  I bite it gently.  I remember when you bought this.  Its history.

Yesterday I saw a ghost of you in WalMart. 

From the back, the way the girl stood at the counter, the way her pants were just a little too tight, her fleshy sides spilling out over the waistband, the color of her hair, the wave in it she tried to tame, the casually tense way she held herself.  I walked past her, holding my breath, listening for your voice.

I wanted her to be you.  I wanted to go up to her, wrap my arms around, bury my nose in her neck, whisper, “I love you”, kiss her cheek.

I was in the laundry soap aisle before I could breathe again.  But I did not cry.  I don’t count tearing up as crying anymore.

Rehanging pictures of you as a baby, resetting your baby shoes on their shelf, I feel the pull of your mouth, the movement of your tongue against my nipple hungry for nourishment.  Our eyes meet.  You smile. Milk pours out the side of your mouth. 

Your sister texted me today.  She is moving.  She has a box of used sharps that were yours.  Do I want them?

Not really. 

I tell her she can dispose of them.  Good luck on her move.

No reply.

Moving in.  Moving out.

Moving in again I keep only the important stuff. 

I arrange and rearrange. 

Nothing ever goes back the same way it was.  

I re create my space.  My self.     

Moving out.  Moving in.

I disinfect, polish to perfect shine, leave no smears.

Before I can move away, dust collects again, begins to settle. 

You are dust now.  Ashes. 

Alone beneath the blanket I tucked around you at night, the Easter Bunny I gave you when you were two, the five and dime tiara.

In my closet.  Hidden behind my suits and jackets.

I was a mother.

I am a mother.

Still.

This I cannot move in or out of.

I love you—Mom

Full Moon Rising

March 10, 2012

Friday night, as Steve and I left my house, making a right turn on

Linwood street

I gasped.  In front of us was a full moon climbing hills of sherbert clouds. 

“Stop.”  I demanded.

“What?” Steve asked looking in the rearview mirror and all around him for signs of impending collision.

“The moon.”  I told him, pointing straight ahead. 

“I can’t stop in the middle of the road.  Let’s find a better view point.” 

The rising moon played hide and seek with us as we drove down 2^nd Street, turned right on North Street, crossed the overpass leading to the long abandoned Olympia Brewery, turned right on the little side street leading to the entrance to I-5 North. 

We never found a better viewpoint.  We never stopped.

The moon stayed to the east of us, an ice ring rainbow encircling it. 

Since January 25 I have been a nomad.  Traveling from house to house with my toothbrush, a pillow, a change of clothes and Sadie.  The water damage to the house has been a phenomenon.  My stove sits in the middle of the kitchen floor that is waiting to be tiled next week.  My pots and pans, mixing bowls, cooking utensils are all in boxes.  My silverware and dishes are covered in sawdust.  The living room looks like a storage unit.

The only thing that remains intact is my sense of humor.  And even that is lost amidst the chaos sometimes. 

Steve has been studying the Indian tribes of Washington, Idaho and Oregon.  I sat down at a space cleared on my dining room table for the laptop computer and saw the home page for the Coeur d’Alene tribe.  I clicked on the Warrior Society tab and read about tribe members who joined the military services in WWII, tribal members who serve our country now.  I clicked on the tab Culture.

As I watched the moon rising, Steve driving my Subaru towards “our” other home (really his home) in Issaquah, I could not help but think of the tribe of Coeur d’Alene  Indians.  I mentioned this to Steve. 

The Homeland is still home. The place "where the old ones walked" includes almost 5,000,000 acres of what is now north Idaho, eastern Washington and western Montana. The "old ones" were extremely wealthy from an Indian perspective, with everything they needed close at hand. Unlike the tribes of the plains, the Coeur d'Alene's and their neighbors, the Spokane's, the Kootenai, the Kalispel, the bands of the Colville Confederated Tribes and the Kootenai-Salish, or Flatheads, were not nomadic. Coeur d'Alene Indian villages were established along the Coeur d'Alene, St. Joe, Clark Fork and Spokane Rivers. The homeland included numerous and permanent sites on the shores of Lake Coeur d'Alene, Lake Pend Orielle and Hayden Lake.

All ancient tribal trade routes and paths remain today. In fact, those very same routes are still used all across the country. Today, however, we call those tribal routes "Interstate highways."

The reservation now is smaller than it used to be.   Much smaller.  The website does not tell me how many acres, how much the tribe has lost.  Looking at the map, I understand.  There are not always words for loss.  It just is what it is.

“I wonder what the Old Ones thought when they saw a moon like this rising.”  I think out loud to Steve.  Because I am wondering. 

“Thought?” Steve queried.  “I think they watched the phases of the moon, saw it disappear a sliver at a time, waited for it to reappear again.  I think they felt the ebb and flow of forces beyond their control, listened to the movement of those forces, followed the course of rivers as they flowed away from and towards something bigger than themselves.  Turned their faces to a whispering breeze and found shelter from howling winds.”

I am reading Annie Dillard’s book, The Living—a old fashioned novel about the Pacific Northwest frontier.  Chapter One.  The first part of the book is about Ada’s loss of her son, Clare.  Three years old, Clare died after he fell from the wagon he was riding in and was run over by its wheels.

Children die year upon year.  Grief is invisible.

“The moon looks like a dilated pupil.  The pale white over the indigo sky looks like an iris—an iris ringed with dark red orange pigment.”  I tell Steve.

I am an “Old One”, a pioneer woman, a mother now who watches the moon rising on this Friday night—full, bright, ringed with an icy rainbow of color.

I try to pay attention to the ebb and flow of forces beyond my control, the way a river flows.  I turn my face toward a breeze and listen intently trying to discern what it is telling me.  I seek shelter from howling winds. 

I miss you.  There is no shelter from that.

Love you Andie—Mom

Obituaries

 

February 12, 2012    

Dear Andrea,

What can you tell me about death?  About dying?

This morning I read The Issaquah Press.  I skimmed through the news on the first page about free health screenings at the Health Fair yesterday, Senatorial support for same-sex marriage bill; looked at the color picture of Julie  Clegg, pet photographer on the first page of Community Section; noted Squak Mountain Nursery was having free seminars on pruning trees, planning roses and starting seedlings.

It wasn’t until I got to page B3 that anything really piqued my interest.  OBITUARIES.  There were three.  Marcella Louise Antonich-Layman known by family and friends as Marcy.  Marcella was your middle name.

She shared the obituary column with Richard Leander Ingertila and Laurel “Lolly” Anne Snedeker .  The story of each life summed up in 6 to 9 small paragraphs. 

I have read the obit Steve wrote for his wife.

I write you letters all day long on my heart.  I try to remember the genes you took from me.  Catalogue them.  Sum them up into neat small paragraphs.  A fitting obituary for you.

I contemplate death.  Everyone around me represents potential loss.  6-9 paragraphs in the obit section.

Steve read me something he saw on his Facebook last night.  It was a letter.  It read Dear Pessimist and Optimist, while you were arguing over whether the glass was half empty or if it was half full, I drank it.  Sincerely, the Opportunist.

Everyone around me represents a connection.  Those I knew before you died.  Those I have met after.

I could not write your obit.  I could not sum you up in 6 to 9 paragraphs.  Dean did that for me.  I have not read what he wrote, studied it like I am studying Marcy’s, Richard’s and Lolly’s.  After I saw your name under the heading, OBITUARIES­ nothing else would register.  The letters did not fit together to form words, sentences, paragraphs, anything I could comprehend.  All I could see were just black marks on a page.

Dean went out and bought a stack of The Olympian’s on the day it ran the picture and paragraphs of you.  He was irate.  The paper misspelled Lyme disease as Lime disease.  I tried to get him to stop his tirade—“fucking morons, imbeciles, what the hell is lime disease, people are going to think Andrea died of too many limes, too many margaritas.” 

I was crying, vibrating with all the pitches of sorrow wanting to escape from me.  “Please.”

“Just forget it.” 

“Leave it.”

“Fucking morons, imbeciles.  How could they get that wrong.  I specifically spelled it out for them.”  He flapped the paper and it made slapping, snapping noises that hurt my ears.  I was in so much pain it hurt to move from one minute to the next.

Jake intervened.  “Hey it could be worse.  I was watching this show and Aunt Mildred died.  They sent her nephew to the paper with her obituary.  On the way he read it.  Aunt Mildred was remembered as a devoted wife, loving mother, sister, grandmother and friend.  ‘Wait,’ the nephew thought, ‘they don’t acknowledge that she was also an aunt.’  When he got to the newspaper, he  put a comma after grandmother, deleted friend, put a comma in after friend and added ‘beloved aunt.’  The next day a family member brought a stack of newspapers over so everyone could read the obit.  They all sat there reading quietly until they got to the friend, and ‘beloved cunt.’

Maybe this morning I am looking for typographical errors. 

Though I did not realize at the time, Jake’s story taught me I could find something hysterically sad and hysterically funny in the same moment.  My first lesson, in death and dying.  A lesson I wake up with every morning, it follows me through my day.

I refrain from counting all my losses.  The ones I could see coming.  The ones I did not.

I am trying hard to focus on what I have.

Marcy will be remembered by all for her love of family, friends.  And laughter. She is survived by her husband, daughter, son, granddaughters.

Richard was a parachute jumper in the United States Navy.  He is survived by his loving wife Marie, son and grandchildren. 

Lolly was a Norwegian beauty.  She will be treasured for her love, kindness, elegance, wisdom, endless patience and strength, and will be dearly missed by all who knew and loved her.

What could anyone tell me about death, about dying? 

I am learning, even as I live.

I love you Andrea.

There are not enough pages, enough words for me to write an obit for you.  Ever.

Mom

Droid Astronomy

January 29, 2012

Good Sunday Morning Andrea—

A shear veil of rain surrounds Steve’s house.  The lake is full, overflowing, creating a small pond, its surface echoing falling raindrops. 

The trees, stripped of all pretenses, stand bare.  Broken limbs, some big around as my waist, lay everywhere, a testament to forces beyond my control.

Since you died I have been searching for order.  For a way to explain your death in a way that makes sense to me.  For a way to incorporate the incorporatable. 

I am giving up my search for order.

Surrendering it to forces beyond my control.

I do not need to understand, explain, rationalize, apologize .

I can just be.

Except your death surrounds me like the dome of stars I laid under last Sunday at the dark beach at Barking Sands.

Oh my Gosh—you would be so amazed at what you can do with a phone now.  You can take your I Phone, or your Droid—did you die before or after the I Phone or the Droid? I cannot remember. 

Anyway, there are apps for the I Phone, the Droid that you can download.  If you have that app, you point your phone at the light shining in the night sky and it will tell you the name of the planet or the star you are facing.  The map outlines constellations.  Names stars and planets.  I never have to stand on a dark night and wonder, what is that shining in the distance.  Now, I can know.

Knowledge is a choice.

Holding the phone up to the night sky, I am at the center of my universe.

I am one small speck on a slightly tilted turning globe of land and water. 

A satellite can track my existence.  My presence in  physical relation to everything else on this planet.

Every choice, every act, is significant. 

I start each day now, expecting nothing.  The anticipation of surprise propels me forward.  Enough, I am rewarded. 

Days run together, undefined.  I find myself sometimes in unexpected places.  I am changed when I become aware.

Like the pond rippled with raindrops, everything around me changes until it dissipates.

When I surrender, I am strongest.  Only then am I aware of all my weaknesses, those things I must protect.

The memories of you.

It is essential that I cry out. 

I am in the process of delivery.

Delivering myself from the weight of grief so I can cradle it in my arms. 

She who has gone before, my new friend, midwife’s me in my grief. 

We talk about you, her son, knowing everything the heart cannot speak and how delicious it is to wrap your names around our tongues like the first time we named you.  Barry.  Andrea.  We taste the vowels and consonants  sitting on the beach together sifting sand. 

Love, loss, memory. 

Shells, no bigger than a figment of my imagination, collected, will transport me back to this moment from some future point in time.

Last Sunday night Steve and I took our Droid’s, two pillows, beach towels and a blanket.  Barefooted, I followed him out to the shore.  We wanted to lay flat, explore the universe above us, around us as the day and tide retreated. 

On the bed we made on sand and lumps of vegetation, we held our phones above naming stars, constellations, planets.  Jupiter was following Venus who had just passed below the western horizon. 

I laid as perfectly still as I could, held my breath, opened my eyes as wide as I could, focused on nothing.  It was then I could see myself in the middle of a 360 degree circle –a horizon encircling me.  The darkness, punctuated with specks of light varying in intensity.

Each light has a name.  Its name has been spoken back to the first awareness of its meaningful existence.  A place to navigate from, to.  Passed from tongue to tongue in breath, in sound, in song, in kiss.

My birth sign, Gemini, is above us. 

I move my phone.  Find Mars.

Saturn.  Spica, the star.

I do not trust my eyes. 

Me, pressed against the earth by the centrifugal force of movement.  The earth spins on its axis.  The sky appears to be moving.

Directionally confused here, I cannot feel north, south, east, west.  I am at an intersection where earth meets water, meets air.  A cool breeze blows over me.

I count five falling stars.  Five falling stars for this woman born in the 5^th month of 1955. 

Five secret wishes only my heart knows. 

And you, Andrea--Saturn and the Spica.  Two ships, whose helms you stood at out at sea. 

At breakfast my friend Jean, her husband, tell me “Oh that was an ‘oh hi mom’.”

You are so much more than just a memory.

I see ripples of that everywhere.

Sadie says to tell you hi. 

I love you.  

Mom.