i wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
that line of poetry has been flickering in my mind of late, like fireflies in the gloam of an Ohio evening, or the dark embers of a finished fire, pushed to the side with the fireplace brush and ah! those embers are still burning, those orange bits of fire that will likely die out of their own accord, but worried mothers can take those tiny bits of fire and make of them conflagrations of entire households after we all go to bed.
The line of poetry is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I first read in college, when poetry meant everything, when I thought language would save me. So bear with me, lovers of the declarative sentence.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
Some of you know that my afternoon naps, which I need, I need that stolen sleep in order to be awake and present with the boys when they come home from school, falling over themselves to tell me their days, to squabble about toothpaste and pajamas, to tuck into my body to hear Captain Underpants, an unfortunate favorite story which forces me at times to have to say things like Professor Pippy P. Poopypants. I need that stolen sleep to stay up with Kyle and hear her talk of opposing counsel, and the potential of a complicated door locking system Amazon makes which will allow us to give codes to the various people who enter our lives on a weekly basis--the fairly lovable clutch of people who work for Instacart who bring me groceries, the motley crew of handymen who beat a steady path to our door as we start to finally begin to remodel the kitchen from the great mold adventure of last summer--and I need that stolen sleep to stay up and watch television, which has the power to pull me back from the abyss sometimes, thank you Rachel Maddow, and SNL, and The Crown and anything with Frances McDormand in it. I need the stolen sleep to help me stumble to the crate of the new puppy--we got a new puppy, guys, and he's a delicious goldendoodle because Asher is allergic to dog fur, and he's smart and magical and his bladder will not carry him through the night anymore than my cancer enriched anxiety will carry me, so we're a great late night pair like that. Where was I?
Yes, I need that sleep but so often, and especially with those afternoon naps, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
My sleep is deep and heavy and I dream awful dreams--dreams that are about cancer and telling people I have cancer and watching their faces blinker shut a bit to step away from their own fears of death, and dreams where I can never make the phone work, or the car work, and I cannot get to where I need to be to pick up my children, or save my children, because I am in the wrong place, and the place is cancer. I have come to approach these afternoon naps with trepidation because I fear those terrible afternoon naps that force me back to the surface shivering with cold, and overwhelmed with sadness.
My beloved therapist thinks there may be some sort of pharmacological solution for the nightmares, and I am sure that is right.
There's another part of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Let me give you the whole section so you are reading along with me:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you
went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and it almost breaks me to think of his lamentations to God, a God who is not answering him, his words dead letters sent to dearest him who, alas, is away--and I literally picture a thin white envelope carried up on a wind, away, into the dark night sky, and far down below, our bereft Jesuit priest, filled with solitude and despair. This sonnet is one of the so-called Terrible Sonnets Hopkins wrote in Ireland, about four years before his death at the age of 45. The poem was published some thirty years after his death.
Which of course makes me think of unpublished Emily Dickinson. Because I could not stop for Death--He kindly stopped for me--The Carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality.
And just now, truly readers, no lie,just as I was writing this, Avery sent me a poem via text message (which does give you hope, doesn't it?). And the poem she sent is by dear Mary Oliver, and she just sets me back on my heels. I worried a lot, she writes...was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven? and Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, and her laundry list of questions of the most prosaic sort, all grounded in nature goes on until she smoothly ends:
Finally I saw that worrying had come
to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
And Hopkins, for all of his lost soul and early death, is said to have said on his death bed: I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.
I have struggled to keep my footing this winter and I would like to invite you all in as I find my way back to Mary Oliver's sure footing. I have shut myself off too much from this world, and held my thoughts so precious and close, and I have to forgive myself for the journey. It's not easy to live in this odd space between death and life, with the scans and the methadone and the cold, shaved head, and the support group I joined for others whose cancer has metastasized which means the group ebbs and flows even in the first few meetings I have attended as we lose people who can no longer drive to the beautiful room where we meet perhaps because they can no longer find the strength and perhaps because they are no longer with us at all, but Emily Dickinson was so right to write that "Hope" is the thing with feathers--That perches in the soul. She heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea, Yet--never--in Extremity, It asked a crumb--of me. Even in my darkest Hopkins nights, Hope flutters, that feathered bird, in my heart and calls me back from the edge.
I would like, as I was saying, to invite you in as I try to find my footing in the second half of this New England winter, and please don't be strangers. I love your words and photos and cakes and casseroles and I'm going to try to get more rest, and I'm going to try to get more peaceful rest, but I would also love to see you more. I have this one great and extraordinary life, and I don't know that I will ever have the time I desperately want to be here with my people in my old age (because wouldn't I be a great old lady, the kind of old lady who still rocks the baby and makes the ginger snaps and remembers the line of poetry, and would rarely be shocked by what? what could shock me now?), but I'll be damned if I lose sight of the time I do have now, worrying about the time I might not have later. That's my rabbit hole right now, for certain.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
That's Lewis Carroll, and I think I would rather pause here, on the straight away of the rabbit hole, and rather than find myself falling down a very deep well, instead brush myself off now, and try, try to take my old body out into the morning to sing.
The line of poetry is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I first read in college, when poetry meant everything, when I thought language would save me. So bear with me, lovers of the declarative sentence.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
Some of you know that my afternoon naps, which I need, I need that stolen sleep in order to be awake and present with the boys when they come home from school, falling over themselves to tell me their days, to squabble about toothpaste and pajamas, to tuck into my body to hear Captain Underpants, an unfortunate favorite story which forces me at times to have to say things like Professor Pippy P. Poopypants. I need that stolen sleep to stay up with Kyle and hear her talk of opposing counsel, and the potential of a complicated door locking system Amazon makes which will allow us to give codes to the various people who enter our lives on a weekly basis--the fairly lovable clutch of people who work for Instacart who bring me groceries, the motley crew of handymen who beat a steady path to our door as we start to finally begin to remodel the kitchen from the great mold adventure of last summer--and I need that stolen sleep to stay up and watch television, which has the power to pull me back from the abyss sometimes, thank you Rachel Maddow, and SNL, and The Crown and anything with Frances McDormand in it. I need the stolen sleep to help me stumble to the crate of the new puppy--we got a new puppy, guys, and he's a delicious goldendoodle because Asher is allergic to dog fur, and he's smart and magical and his bladder will not carry him through the night anymore than my cancer enriched anxiety will carry me, so we're a great late night pair like that. Where was I?
Yes, I need that sleep but so often, and especially with those afternoon naps, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
My sleep is deep and heavy and I dream awful dreams--dreams that are about cancer and telling people I have cancer and watching their faces blinker shut a bit to step away from their own fears of death, and dreams where I can never make the phone work, or the car work, and I cannot get to where I need to be to pick up my children, or save my children, because I am in the wrong place, and the place is cancer. I have come to approach these afternoon naps with trepidation because I fear those terrible afternoon naps that force me back to the surface shivering with cold, and overwhelmed with sadness.
My beloved therapist thinks there may be some sort of pharmacological solution for the nightmares, and I am sure that is right.
There's another part of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Let me give you the whole section so you are reading along with me:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you
went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and it almost breaks me to think of his lamentations to God, a God who is not answering him, his words dead letters sent to dearest him who, alas, is away--and I literally picture a thin white envelope carried up on a wind, away, into the dark night sky, and far down below, our bereft Jesuit priest, filled with solitude and despair. This sonnet is one of the so-called Terrible Sonnets Hopkins wrote in Ireland, about four years before his death at the age of 45. The poem was published some thirty years after his death.
Which of course makes me think of unpublished Emily Dickinson. Because I could not stop for Death--He kindly stopped for me--The Carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality.
And just now, truly readers, no lie,just as I was writing this, Avery sent me a poem via text message (which does give you hope, doesn't it?). And the poem she sent is by dear Mary Oliver, and she just sets me back on my heels. I worried a lot, she writes...was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven? and Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, and her laundry list of questions of the most prosaic sort, all grounded in nature goes on until she smoothly ends:
Finally I saw that worrying had come
to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
And Hopkins, for all of his lost soul and early death, is said to have said on his death bed: I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.
I have struggled to keep my footing this winter and I would like to invite you all in as I find my way back to Mary Oliver's sure footing. I have shut myself off too much from this world, and held my thoughts so precious and close, and I have to forgive myself for the journey. It's not easy to live in this odd space between death and life, with the scans and the methadone and the cold, shaved head, and the support group I joined for others whose cancer has metastasized which means the group ebbs and flows even in the first few meetings I have attended as we lose people who can no longer drive to the beautiful room where we meet perhaps because they can no longer find the strength and perhaps because they are no longer with us at all, but Emily Dickinson was so right to write that "Hope" is the thing with feathers--That perches in the soul. She heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea, Yet--never--in Extremity, It asked a crumb--of me. Even in my darkest Hopkins nights, Hope flutters, that feathered bird, in my heart and calls me back from the edge.
I would like, as I was saying, to invite you in as I try to find my footing in the second half of this New England winter, and please don't be strangers. I love your words and photos and cakes and casseroles and I'm going to try to get more rest, and I'm going to try to get more peaceful rest, but I would also love to see you more. I have this one great and extraordinary life, and I don't know that I will ever have the time I desperately want to be here with my people in my old age (because wouldn't I be a great old lady, the kind of old lady who still rocks the baby and makes the ginger snaps and remembers the line of poetry, and would rarely be shocked by what? what could shock me now?), but I'll be damned if I lose sight of the time I do have now, worrying about the time I might not have later. That's my rabbit hole right now, for certain.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
That's Lewis Carroll, and I think I would rather pause here, on the straight away of the rabbit hole, and rather than find myself falling down a very deep well, instead brush myself off now, and try, try to take my old body out into the morning to sing.
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