That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Hope and fear are two sides of one coin--this Buddhist observation is repeated by Sharon Salzberg, who tells us "we move from hope to fear to hope to fear to hope to fear in an endless loop."
Yesterday G. from my metastatic support group died. She had been in hospice care less than a handful of days.
G. scared the hell out of me the first time I went to group. She was angry and caustic, I thought; she spoke of chemo as the poison "they" pump into our bodies that was going to kill all of us. I don't know what I expected people would talk about in a support group for people with stage four cancer. I was still in shock from my own diagnosis, I can see that now, and G.'s straight talk and unwillingness to engage with any of the pink ribbon, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, everything happens for a reason bullshit was jarring to me. I looked at the group leader. I thought she might smooth out some of G.'s edges for the rest of us. But everyone knew G. there but me. It was who she was and, like the others, in time, I grew to adore her.
G. picked me out from the group early on and made me feel special. Maybe that's how we all felt. She called me "honey," and it felt like a balm especially because she never said a thing she didn't mean. She was done playing every single last game. We could all take a page from G.'s book. It's not actually about stopping to smell the roses. It's about recognizing the existential disaster of fragility it is to live on this planet and despite that, to choose to love. It doesn't get more vulnerable than that, and there is nothing like belonging to a group of people like this support group to come into deep awareness of that fragility.
My world has narrowed and in some ways for the better. I can't say I don't waste time--there are moments everyday where something distracts me--still--an article about Trump, a poorly written book, the minutes when I drift off in exhaustion and forget to attend to every minute I've been given with my family. But I am one flip of the coin, at every turn, from fear. And fear wakes you up.
I mourn G. I already miss her voice that once scared me.
The morning after Mary Oliver died, I was up early to walk the dog because I had to go into MGH early for scans. I thought to myself: I wonder how many people--for whom Mary Oliver's deceivingly simple verse about finding self and soul and purpose in the natural world, in the smallest whorl in the curve of a shell, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, who instructed us:"If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles"--how many people were asking her for a sign. Where are you now Mary Oliver? Tell me you are safe; show me there is more to this world than the surface of things, than the beating heart? I decided to throw my voice into the chorus and asked for a sign.
And just like that, just like Mary Oliver's poetry, an owl began to hoot from across the field. The hooting was persistent, plaintive. Some would say that owl always hoots at 5:30 in the morning, and I miss it when I walk the dog an hour later. But I took it into my heart where the sound has comforted me, even as I think of G, who I knew for a short time, and of Mary Oliver, who I knew not at all.
I'm feeling calmer, better these days. I am sure some of it is the anti-depressant the psychiatrist who works with my oncologist prescribed to me, although I'm not even sure I'm on an effective dosage yet. I know some of it is yoga--I often find that I stop thinking about cancer when I am in a good yoga class. Some of it has been my mantra to keep moving: bundle up and get out there in the cold with the dog. I was at the bog earlier this week. The paths are navigable, barely--there are pitches of dark ice on the trails that remain in shadow even when the winter sun is out. The ice on the pond was booming in a low voice when we were there, and the noise spooked the dog. He likes to see the source of noises. I cleave to the mystery of unexplained noises, or, as with the owl, the choice of resting with the simplest of explanations, or allowing myself to hope, for a moment, for more.
Asher asked me last night, as I tucked him in, what a period is. As it turned out, his class was working on Mr., Mrs., & Ms. and Asher kept saying the word period and a little girl told him it wasn't nice to say that, that it was something that happens to girls' bodies. You know me, if a child of mine asks me a question, I answer them, in as fulsome a way as I think they can manage. So our talk turned to babies. Asher said he hopes he has 100 children. I smiled at him. That's a lot, I said. And 62 dogs. All of that would certainly teach him what it means to make a living.
There isn't much space for me, now, between the meaning of my life and my family. Hardly a shadow.
In the common law, the rule against perpetuities prevents people from using legal instruments, like a will, to exert control over the ownership of property for a time long beyond the lives of people living at the time the will was written.
Isabella Stewart Gardner built Fenway Court, as she liked to call her museum, to resemble a 15th century Venetian palace. She meticulously designed and supervised every architectural detail of the building and personally installed each piece of the art collection, which contains over 2500 paintings (aside from those lost in the infamous theft), sculptures, tapestries, furniture, rare books, and decorative art. She left the museum"for the education and enjoyment of the public forever," tasking Harvard Law professor and founder of the law firm where I worked (and still work, in a part-time and from-home capacity) John Chipman Gray, with working out the legality of her behest, which stipulated that nothing in the gallery ever be moved, changed, added to, or altered in any way. The irony here is that Chipman Gray was the author of The Rule Against Perpetuities, a classic explication of the common law. In establishing Gardner's perpetual bequest, one might suggest that Chipman Gray was subverting the very rule he had taken such great pains to explain and establish.
Chipman Gray and Henry James both were recipients of letters from Mary Temple, James' young cousin, who died in 1870 at the early age of twenty-four. Minny was a real-life heroine for James in his youth. He saw her as a free spirit,"a plant of pure American growth," amongst the refined ladies of their time. James said the very air of Newport was "vocal with her accents, alive with her movements. " She too had a second life, lived on, for those following the thread, in perpetuity as the basis of the character Milly Theale in The Wings of a Dove. An easily forgotten life becomes embodied, as it were, in "the beauty and dignity of art" as James describes it.
I've been thinking of the rule against perpetuities, and whether one should aspire to subvert it, as I lean into the fact that there is so much life I not only won't witness, but can't control. This is, of course, true for all of us. In the cancer world, people sometimes advise you to make videos to give to your young children to be viewed at birthdays or graduations. The theory, I suppose, is that my voice could be heard beyond my death, my influence in some way continued. But I am almost struck dumb at the thought of what I might say. I have no advice that is not already known. All I have is love and a small human wish to be remembered, in the hearts and minds of the people I love. The people who will be alive when I die, that is to say. Shall I make a short video that says simply "I knew you, really knew you, and I loved you?"
I've located Mary Oliver here with so many men: Walt Whitman, John Chipman Gray, Henry James. The poet Susan Howe said "If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself." Howe was interested in Gardner for her work of curation, a woman whose wealth enabled her to obtain a kind of "perpetuity"available to most.
What is it to live on in perpetuity? Or, to be clearer about my wishes, on in the generation of people you abandon when you die? Will my wife and my sister and my dear children, let me name them, Cameron, Zachary, Avery, Zoe, Asher and Elijah, my mother and my father, my dearest friends look for me in the frozen language of these musings? Will they listen for the haunting hoot of the owl across the winter fields? Will I be allowed to come to them in their dreams, unbidden? Will I be the howling bitter wind that is outside the house, where the people live and shiver by the fireplace? Will I be available in the gaps and silences of the lives of the living?
In the meantime, there is life to be lived. Today I have Hebrew school conferences, where I will go and listen to stories of Asher's perpetual restlessness in class, and Elijah's deep desire to please, to get it right. I will do laundry--folding the towels neatly and stacking them in the overflowing linen closet. I will text with Avery and Zoe, both needing to connect today for different reasons. I will take my flashlight with me when I take the dog for his last walk, because the road in front of my house is black at night, with no streetlights and no sidewalks, and I fear a single car coming down the road will take the curve too tightly and hit me (even though it seems preposterous to me that I could have such bad luck, I am unconvinced by the news headlines that luck or symmetry have much to do with the human condition and outcomes).
I pray I hear the owl on that last, nighttime walk tonight. I hope.
Yesterday G. from my metastatic support group died. She had been in hospice care less than a handful of days.
G. scared the hell out of me the first time I went to group. She was angry and caustic, I thought; she spoke of chemo as the poison "they" pump into our bodies that was going to kill all of us. I don't know what I expected people would talk about in a support group for people with stage four cancer. I was still in shock from my own diagnosis, I can see that now, and G.'s straight talk and unwillingness to engage with any of the pink ribbon, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, everything happens for a reason bullshit was jarring to me. I looked at the group leader. I thought she might smooth out some of G.'s edges for the rest of us. But everyone knew G. there but me. It was who she was and, like the others, in time, I grew to adore her.
G. picked me out from the group early on and made me feel special. Maybe that's how we all felt. She called me "honey," and it felt like a balm especially because she never said a thing she didn't mean. She was done playing every single last game. We could all take a page from G.'s book. It's not actually about stopping to smell the roses. It's about recognizing the existential disaster of fragility it is to live on this planet and despite that, to choose to love. It doesn't get more vulnerable than that, and there is nothing like belonging to a group of people like this support group to come into deep awareness of that fragility.
My world has narrowed and in some ways for the better. I can't say I don't waste time--there are moments everyday where something distracts me--still--an article about Trump, a poorly written book, the minutes when I drift off in exhaustion and forget to attend to every minute I've been given with my family. But I am one flip of the coin, at every turn, from fear. And fear wakes you up.
I mourn G. I already miss her voice that once scared me.
The morning after Mary Oliver died, I was up early to walk the dog because I had to go into MGH early for scans. I thought to myself: I wonder how many people--for whom Mary Oliver's deceivingly simple verse about finding self and soul and purpose in the natural world, in the smallest whorl in the curve of a shell, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, who instructed us:"If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles"--how many people were asking her for a sign. Where are you now Mary Oliver? Tell me you are safe; show me there is more to this world than the surface of things, than the beating heart? I decided to throw my voice into the chorus and asked for a sign.
And just like that, just like Mary Oliver's poetry, an owl began to hoot from across the field. The hooting was persistent, plaintive. Some would say that owl always hoots at 5:30 in the morning, and I miss it when I walk the dog an hour later. But I took it into my heart where the sound has comforted me, even as I think of G, who I knew for a short time, and of Mary Oliver, who I knew not at all.
I'm feeling calmer, better these days. I am sure some of it is the anti-depressant the psychiatrist who works with my oncologist prescribed to me, although I'm not even sure I'm on an effective dosage yet. I know some of it is yoga--I often find that I stop thinking about cancer when I am in a good yoga class. Some of it has been my mantra to keep moving: bundle up and get out there in the cold with the dog. I was at the bog earlier this week. The paths are navigable, barely--there are pitches of dark ice on the trails that remain in shadow even when the winter sun is out. The ice on the pond was booming in a low voice when we were there, and the noise spooked the dog. He likes to see the source of noises. I cleave to the mystery of unexplained noises, or, as with the owl, the choice of resting with the simplest of explanations, or allowing myself to hope, for a moment, for more.
Asher asked me last night, as I tucked him in, what a period is. As it turned out, his class was working on Mr., Mrs., & Ms. and Asher kept saying the word period and a little girl told him it wasn't nice to say that, that it was something that happens to girls' bodies. You know me, if a child of mine asks me a question, I answer them, in as fulsome a way as I think they can manage. So our talk turned to babies. Asher said he hopes he has 100 children. I smiled at him. That's a lot, I said. And 62 dogs. All of that would certainly teach him what it means to make a living.
There isn't much space for me, now, between the meaning of my life and my family. Hardly a shadow.
In the common law, the rule against perpetuities prevents people from using legal instruments, like a will, to exert control over the ownership of property for a time long beyond the lives of people living at the time the will was written.
Isabella Stewart Gardner built Fenway Court, as she liked to call her museum, to resemble a 15th century Venetian palace. She meticulously designed and supervised every architectural detail of the building and personally installed each piece of the art collection, which contains over 2500 paintings (aside from those lost in the infamous theft), sculptures, tapestries, furniture, rare books, and decorative art. She left the museum"for the education and enjoyment of the public forever," tasking Harvard Law professor and founder of the law firm where I worked (and still work, in a part-time and from-home capacity) John Chipman Gray, with working out the legality of her behest, which stipulated that nothing in the gallery ever be moved, changed, added to, or altered in any way. The irony here is that Chipman Gray was the author of The Rule Against Perpetuities, a classic explication of the common law. In establishing Gardner's perpetual bequest, one might suggest that Chipman Gray was subverting the very rule he had taken such great pains to explain and establish.
Chipman Gray and Henry James both were recipients of letters from Mary Temple, James' young cousin, who died in 1870 at the early age of twenty-four. Minny was a real-life heroine for James in his youth. He saw her as a free spirit,"a plant of pure American growth," amongst the refined ladies of their time. James said the very air of Newport was "vocal with her accents, alive with her movements. " She too had a second life, lived on, for those following the thread, in perpetuity as the basis of the character Milly Theale in The Wings of a Dove. An easily forgotten life becomes embodied, as it were, in "the beauty and dignity of art" as James describes it.
I've been thinking of the rule against perpetuities, and whether one should aspire to subvert it, as I lean into the fact that there is so much life I not only won't witness, but can't control. This is, of course, true for all of us. In the cancer world, people sometimes advise you to make videos to give to your young children to be viewed at birthdays or graduations. The theory, I suppose, is that my voice could be heard beyond my death, my influence in some way continued. But I am almost struck dumb at the thought of what I might say. I have no advice that is not already known. All I have is love and a small human wish to be remembered, in the hearts and minds of the people I love. The people who will be alive when I die, that is to say. Shall I make a short video that says simply "I knew you, really knew you, and I loved you?"
I've located Mary Oliver here with so many men: Walt Whitman, John Chipman Gray, Henry James. The poet Susan Howe said "If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself." Howe was interested in Gardner for her work of curation, a woman whose wealth enabled her to obtain a kind of "perpetuity"available to most.
What is it to live on in perpetuity? Or, to be clearer about my wishes, on in the generation of people you abandon when you die? Will my wife and my sister and my dear children, let me name them, Cameron, Zachary, Avery, Zoe, Asher and Elijah, my mother and my father, my dearest friends look for me in the frozen language of these musings? Will they listen for the haunting hoot of the owl across the winter fields? Will I be allowed to come to them in their dreams, unbidden? Will I be the howling bitter wind that is outside the house, where the people live and shiver by the fireplace? Will I be available in the gaps and silences of the lives of the living?
In the meantime, there is life to be lived. Today I have Hebrew school conferences, where I will go and listen to stories of Asher's perpetual restlessness in class, and Elijah's deep desire to please, to get it right. I will do laundry--folding the towels neatly and stacking them in the overflowing linen closet. I will text with Avery and Zoe, both needing to connect today for different reasons. I will take my flashlight with me when I take the dog for his last walk, because the road in front of my house is black at night, with no streetlights and no sidewalks, and I fear a single car coming down the road will take the curve too tightly and hit me (even though it seems preposterous to me that I could have such bad luck, I am unconvinced by the news headlines that luck or symmetry have much to do with the human condition and outcomes).
I pray I hear the owl on that last, nighttime walk tonight. I hope.
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