Next year in Jerusalem
Julie Yip-Williams died last week. When I heard the news, I had a panic attack at the elementary school. I was outside the gymnasium where the twins were taking their first kids' dance class, and I could peek in through square glass pane in the heavy, gray school door and see them spinning wildly to the music. The class has children from ages 5 through 11 and the twins were crazy dancers, in love with each other, each brother holding the hand of the other, laughing and twirling. They were hardly paying attention to the young teenager who was attempting to teach her unruly bunch the steps to the latest dance songs. When they came out to the water fountain for a drink, they were flushed and enthralled with themselves. They didn't know I was already there--I came early, unsure they would make it through dance class because Asher had announced he was definitely opposed that morning as he got on the bus, and I feared he would be out in the hallway, weeping and wondering where his mother was. Instead, their mother was out in the hallway, weeping, and wondering where their mother would be soon.
Asher caught a glimpse of me as he ran for the water fountain. I wish you could have heard what it sounded like to me when he said "Mom!?" His voice was filled with joy and he ran right over to me and threw himself into my arms. It's just a matter of time before the twins become too self-conscious for this kind of public love of mothers, this kind of wild, uninhibited dancing, the wearing of all feelings on all sleeves.
It almost broke me right there. I was standing there, my heart racing and tears streaming down my face, anguished because I had just mindlessly flipped open my Facebook app and scrolled down and there it was, Julie Yip-Williams, 42, mother of two, lawyer, stage four colon cancer, beautiful blogger of her astonishing life which took her from being born blind in Vietnam, onto a fishing boat to Hong Kong, to a childhood in San Francisco where she had eye surgery, to Harvard Law School, to a career at Cleary Gottlieb, to death, a death she anticipated and agonized over, publicly, in her own blog.
Oh and Julie put me to shame--she left instructions on how to pay the bills, charged specific people with the caretaking of specific aspects of her children's lives, even spent time worrying over the inevitable next chapter in her beloved husband's life (a woman she addresses with some aggression as the "Second, Slutty Wife"). She died with a book contract in hand for her blog, turning her diagnosis into gold for her children. My friends keep telling me I'm doing such a heroic job, living with cancer, looking mortality in the eye and raising her one more poem, one more protein infused smoothie, one more ohm and ah. But you haven't seen dying until you've witnessed Julie Yip-Williams.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heat heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I stood alone in the hall, my heart racing. The cancer is in me. I can drink turmeric-laced coconut milk, I can take yoga classes, I can take the small white pill every evening, an hour after eating, two hours before eating another morsel, religiously, I can meditate. I can love like my life depended on it, falling in love over and over again with each one of my beautiful, extraordinary children, with my beloved Kyle, with my dear, quieted friends, but my life doesn't depend on it, after all.
I've become a terrible person as the winter light wanes. I am darkly jealous of my healthy friends, who have disappeared into their own lives as the winter picked up speed. I don't blame them--I just want to go with them, back into a world without scans and statistics like only 5% of people with stage four lung cancer are alive five years out from diagnosis. I was a chaperone on a field trip the other day. We already knew I'm an old mom comparatively speaking. If you live in the Concord-Carlisle area, you know to expect good grooming and expensive boots, too. So there I was on a bus surrounded by kindergartners and the other three moms who chaperoned that day. They were, to a T, thin and sleek, with tall leather boots, and carefully applied make-up and beautiful long blown-out locks. The sarcastic me thought sentences like: who the hell are you dressed up for? But honestly, I understood their cautious greetings to me, the imperceptible recoil when they took in my shorn head, my skin covered in chemo rash, my exhausted face, and my feet in their resplendent flat clogs, because my toes are a wreck from the medicine and I can hardly get them into shoes these days. They wanted no part of whatever it is I'm drinking and I sure as hell can't blame them.
I had coffee the other morning with a friend from work--and that doesn't do the experience any justice. First of all, the friend was a dear, dear friend who I happened to meet at work but whose friendship just transcends. Second of all, I had tea. Flowering tea--have you had it? It's lovely--the flowers are bound up in a dark bundle and it's served in steaming hot water in a glass cup. As the heat releases the knot of flowers, the tea steeps and the flower unfurls. And it was wonderful to leave my house, a house I love which sometimes has taken on the aspect of a prison this long winter, and to go out in the world and talk about work deadlines and the death of her mother and her child poised at the edge of adolescence. I forgot, for a moment, that I had cancer. Okay, that's a lie. I stopped the navel-gazing that comes so easily these days, and I listened and spoke of her life, not just mine. It was sweet relief.
What am I going to do? There's nothing to do but get up each day and have at it. I've read all the books on dying of cancer now--When Breath Becomes Air, The Bright Hour, Memoirs of a Debulked Woman, and so on and so forth--and I know the tropes: the fall from grace of the diagnosis, the bargaining and the clinical trial, the way that life goes on even though one has cancer (the dying parent, the troubled adolescent, the bills, the dog, the dishes), the book contract, and then death or miraculous extension of life (see clinical trial).
I am really mad that Julie Yip-Williams, who I don't know and I'm not sure I would have loved in real life (she isn't sarcastic, for one, even when she conjures up the Slutty Second Wife), died, really mad. I'm furious. And yes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, I am grieving myself and the inevitable passage into death that has been accelerated for me by cancer, unless, ah!the fates, I die in some as yet unknown freak accident. Perhaps a falling tree limb will dash me to the ground--that seems quite possible these days.
It's Passover this week, my favorite holiday. My large, extended family will descend upon Concord-Carlisle over the next week, and none of the women from my family will have long, shiny hair which has been professionally blown out, and none of them will be wearing designer boots or expensive lipsticks. If they recoil a bit when they see my tired, ravaged face, it will be because in their mind's eye they can still remember the healthy Tracy, with her thick brown hair and large laugh and steady production of children and baked bread, and the chasm between what was and what is will alarm them a bit, as they haven't been around for the blow-by-blow. And believe me, I know I'm not even halfway there on the path Julie has so kindly forged ahead for me. I have yet to receive the news at my scan that the cancer has mutated. I have yet to experience the organ failure that patiently waits for me at the end of my life.
I need to stop thinking this way, don't you think? I'm confessing here that I'm finding it hard. I know the right way of thinking is to celebrate that I am still here. It's spring and I will awaken, barring tree limbs, each morning this March and April week, as we head towards Passover and the flowers awakening under this snow and the matzo ball soup, the afikomen tucked into a thick white napkin and hidden away, almost certainly in the bookshelves, the voice of my mother intoning the Passover service, the twins old enough this year to read the four questions themselves, the four glasses of wine, (not to worry, I promise to stick to the grape juice which pairs so much nicer with methadone), the bittersweet promise of next year, in Jerusalem.
I'm tired of being sick and tired. Something about Julie's obituary snapped something in me and I panicked there in the hallway, with the sound of Justin Timberlake curling underneath the doorway. I want to stay, I thought, and here's what I know about Julie. No matter the carefully constructed lists and notes and videos, no matter how well-prepared she was about her own death, she wanted to stay, too. The recoil of those young mothers is nothing more than the recoil at the unexpectedness of finding death chaperoning the field trip. Believe you me, I don't like it either.
But the boys loved having me, and I loved sitting on the bus with them. We went to a play in Worcester, but no matter, I could not convince them we were not in Boston. It was a big, exciting city to them, and they went to bed that night thinking they were right that the theater on that big street, filled with people and busses and noise, was in exciting Boston. The world didn't let them down that day--it was even better than advertised. I thought the play was terrible--poorly written, the plot lost to the costumes, but the kindergartners applauded wildly. I've got to damp down the sarcastic, cynical voice in me for my own good, I think, and spend some time looking at life the way Asher and Elijah do. Dancing like no one is judging me, going in for the wild hug in the hallway, being thrilled to unexpectedly discover mom is in the hall, peering in on you with love and adoration.
Next year in Jerusalem. What does it mean to utter those words? Is Jerusalem a once and future city, where the Temple is rebuilt and the Messiah comes? Is Jerusalem a place we want to be, this year, or next? If Jerusalem is a place with a sense of the divine, the miraculous, a place where human meets the divine, what to do with the real Jerusalem, the sorrow we feel at the bloodshed and hatred? Asher and Elijah will remember the field trip when they went to Boston and saw a wondrous play, with their beautiful mother at their side. If their mother was in reality, ailing, with wrecked skin and shorn hair, if the city street was a impoverished street in Worcester, where the theater was sandwiched in between a check cashing business and an empty storefront, so be it. From the earthly Jerusalem, let us yearn for the heavenly one.
"For instruction shall come forth from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem," the Torah says. And then: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: Nations shall not take up sword against nation: they shall never again know war."
I learned so much from the truly young people this week--the young people in the streets of Washington with their poised anguish, my kindergartners, my young adults who each, in their own way, found a way to reach out to me this week and make me feel known and understood, which is, for me, divine. I am furious at the passing of Julie Yip-Williams, and yes, I see that I am grieving for myself. God grant me the ability to see beyond myself to place myself in a larger context, to grieve, appropriately for the multitudes who drown in loss and sorrow--whether they have lost a loved one to cancer or to gun violence. God grant me the grace to see what is right in front of me--my dancing children, my parents, my beloved, my adult children moving forward with their own lives and loves. Next year in Jerusalem, this year in Jerusalem.
Asher caught a glimpse of me as he ran for the water fountain. I wish you could have heard what it sounded like to me when he said "Mom!?" His voice was filled with joy and he ran right over to me and threw himself into my arms. It's just a matter of time before the twins become too self-conscious for this kind of public love of mothers, this kind of wild, uninhibited dancing, the wearing of all feelings on all sleeves.
It almost broke me right there. I was standing there, my heart racing and tears streaming down my face, anguished because I had just mindlessly flipped open my Facebook app and scrolled down and there it was, Julie Yip-Williams, 42, mother of two, lawyer, stage four colon cancer, beautiful blogger of her astonishing life which took her from being born blind in Vietnam, onto a fishing boat to Hong Kong, to a childhood in San Francisco where she had eye surgery, to Harvard Law School, to a career at Cleary Gottlieb, to death, a death she anticipated and agonized over, publicly, in her own blog.
Oh and Julie put me to shame--she left instructions on how to pay the bills, charged specific people with the caretaking of specific aspects of her children's lives, even spent time worrying over the inevitable next chapter in her beloved husband's life (a woman she addresses with some aggression as the "Second, Slutty Wife"). She died with a book contract in hand for her blog, turning her diagnosis into gold for her children. My friends keep telling me I'm doing such a heroic job, living with cancer, looking mortality in the eye and raising her one more poem, one more protein infused smoothie, one more ohm and ah. But you haven't seen dying until you've witnessed Julie Yip-Williams.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heat heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I stood alone in the hall, my heart racing. The cancer is in me. I can drink turmeric-laced coconut milk, I can take yoga classes, I can take the small white pill every evening, an hour after eating, two hours before eating another morsel, religiously, I can meditate. I can love like my life depended on it, falling in love over and over again with each one of my beautiful, extraordinary children, with my beloved Kyle, with my dear, quieted friends, but my life doesn't depend on it, after all.
I've become a terrible person as the winter light wanes. I am darkly jealous of my healthy friends, who have disappeared into their own lives as the winter picked up speed. I don't blame them--I just want to go with them, back into a world without scans and statistics like only 5% of people with stage four lung cancer are alive five years out from diagnosis. I was a chaperone on a field trip the other day. We already knew I'm an old mom comparatively speaking. If you live in the Concord-Carlisle area, you know to expect good grooming and expensive boots, too. So there I was on a bus surrounded by kindergartners and the other three moms who chaperoned that day. They were, to a T, thin and sleek, with tall leather boots, and carefully applied make-up and beautiful long blown-out locks. The sarcastic me thought sentences like: who the hell are you dressed up for? But honestly, I understood their cautious greetings to me, the imperceptible recoil when they took in my shorn head, my skin covered in chemo rash, my exhausted face, and my feet in their resplendent flat clogs, because my toes are a wreck from the medicine and I can hardly get them into shoes these days. They wanted no part of whatever it is I'm drinking and I sure as hell can't blame them.
I had coffee the other morning with a friend from work--and that doesn't do the experience any justice. First of all, the friend was a dear, dear friend who I happened to meet at work but whose friendship just transcends. Second of all, I had tea. Flowering tea--have you had it? It's lovely--the flowers are bound up in a dark bundle and it's served in steaming hot water in a glass cup. As the heat releases the knot of flowers, the tea steeps and the flower unfurls. And it was wonderful to leave my house, a house I love which sometimes has taken on the aspect of a prison this long winter, and to go out in the world and talk about work deadlines and the death of her mother and her child poised at the edge of adolescence. I forgot, for a moment, that I had cancer. Okay, that's a lie. I stopped the navel-gazing that comes so easily these days, and I listened and spoke of her life, not just mine. It was sweet relief.
What am I going to do? There's nothing to do but get up each day and have at it. I've read all the books on dying of cancer now--When Breath Becomes Air, The Bright Hour, Memoirs of a Debulked Woman, and so on and so forth--and I know the tropes: the fall from grace of the diagnosis, the bargaining and the clinical trial, the way that life goes on even though one has cancer (the dying parent, the troubled adolescent, the bills, the dog, the dishes), the book contract, and then death or miraculous extension of life (see clinical trial).
I am really mad that Julie Yip-Williams, who I don't know and I'm not sure I would have loved in real life (she isn't sarcastic, for one, even when she conjures up the Slutty Second Wife), died, really mad. I'm furious. And yes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, I am grieving myself and the inevitable passage into death that has been accelerated for me by cancer, unless, ah!the fates, I die in some as yet unknown freak accident. Perhaps a falling tree limb will dash me to the ground--that seems quite possible these days.
It's Passover this week, my favorite holiday. My large, extended family will descend upon Concord-Carlisle over the next week, and none of the women from my family will have long, shiny hair which has been professionally blown out, and none of them will be wearing designer boots or expensive lipsticks. If they recoil a bit when they see my tired, ravaged face, it will be because in their mind's eye they can still remember the healthy Tracy, with her thick brown hair and large laugh and steady production of children and baked bread, and the chasm between what was and what is will alarm them a bit, as they haven't been around for the blow-by-blow. And believe me, I know I'm not even halfway there on the path Julie has so kindly forged ahead for me. I have yet to receive the news at my scan that the cancer has mutated. I have yet to experience the organ failure that patiently waits for me at the end of my life.
I need to stop thinking this way, don't you think? I'm confessing here that I'm finding it hard. I know the right way of thinking is to celebrate that I am still here. It's spring and I will awaken, barring tree limbs, each morning this March and April week, as we head towards Passover and the flowers awakening under this snow and the matzo ball soup, the afikomen tucked into a thick white napkin and hidden away, almost certainly in the bookshelves, the voice of my mother intoning the Passover service, the twins old enough this year to read the four questions themselves, the four glasses of wine, (not to worry, I promise to stick to the grape juice which pairs so much nicer with methadone), the bittersweet promise of next year, in Jerusalem.
I'm tired of being sick and tired. Something about Julie's obituary snapped something in me and I panicked there in the hallway, with the sound of Justin Timberlake curling underneath the doorway. I want to stay, I thought, and here's what I know about Julie. No matter the carefully constructed lists and notes and videos, no matter how well-prepared she was about her own death, she wanted to stay, too. The recoil of those young mothers is nothing more than the recoil at the unexpectedness of finding death chaperoning the field trip. Believe you me, I don't like it either.
But the boys loved having me, and I loved sitting on the bus with them. We went to a play in Worcester, but no matter, I could not convince them we were not in Boston. It was a big, exciting city to them, and they went to bed that night thinking they were right that the theater on that big street, filled with people and busses and noise, was in exciting Boston. The world didn't let them down that day--it was even better than advertised. I thought the play was terrible--poorly written, the plot lost to the costumes, but the kindergartners applauded wildly. I've got to damp down the sarcastic, cynical voice in me for my own good, I think, and spend some time looking at life the way Asher and Elijah do. Dancing like no one is judging me, going in for the wild hug in the hallway, being thrilled to unexpectedly discover mom is in the hall, peering in on you with love and adoration.
Next year in Jerusalem. What does it mean to utter those words? Is Jerusalem a once and future city, where the Temple is rebuilt and the Messiah comes? Is Jerusalem a place we want to be, this year, or next? If Jerusalem is a place with a sense of the divine, the miraculous, a place where human meets the divine, what to do with the real Jerusalem, the sorrow we feel at the bloodshed and hatred? Asher and Elijah will remember the field trip when they went to Boston and saw a wondrous play, with their beautiful mother at their side. If their mother was in reality, ailing, with wrecked skin and shorn hair, if the city street was a impoverished street in Worcester, where the theater was sandwiched in between a check cashing business and an empty storefront, so be it. From the earthly Jerusalem, let us yearn for the heavenly one.
"For instruction shall come forth from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem," the Torah says. And then: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: Nations shall not take up sword against nation: they shall never again know war."
I learned so much from the truly young people this week--the young people in the streets of Washington with their poised anguish, my kindergartners, my young adults who each, in their own way, found a way to reach out to me this week and make me feel known and understood, which is, for me, divine. I am furious at the passing of Julie Yip-Williams, and yes, I see that I am grieving for myself. God grant me the ability to see beyond myself to place myself in a larger context, to grieve, appropriately for the multitudes who drown in loss and sorrow--whether they have lost a loved one to cancer or to gun violence. God grant me the grace to see what is right in front of me--my dancing children, my parents, my beloved, my adult children moving forward with their own lives and loves. Next year in Jerusalem, this year in Jerusalem.
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