Lay Me Down

Last Friday evening, I went to a potluck dinner at Asher's new school, bearing foil tins of bean burritos and brownies, cupcakes with thick white frosting and golden sprinkles.  The school sits in an office park in Winchester and the playground is a makeshift, gorgeous set of structures and wild tire swings and rocky hiding places built in the trees at the edge of the parking lot.  There were clotheslines and miniature laundry clips you could hang homemade art from--with the markers on the wooden table, I drew a photo of a sparkling eye.  To be loved is to be seen, I wrote, because I was watching Asher run happily through the trees, now at the basketball court, greeting the school director with what looked like real pleasure, the night darkening as musicians played saxophone and the most diverse and cerebral group of people circulated with plates of pizza and Korean barbecue.  Even after just a month or so, Asher is himself at school, and he is at home at school.  The relief washed over me as I watched my son at ease, drifting in and out of sight.

I was in pain that night--a kind of persistent pain that radiates from my sacrum to my hip and down my left leg, a pain that is pushing me into a kind of fatigue fugue state. I hardly spoke to anyone, and I was at peace with the solitude. I moved from wooden chair to bench to rock, trying to find comfort and failing. I watched the young parents, animated and vibrant, chatting and herding toddlers, drinking sparkling cider and artisan sodas.  I watched the older girls, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, stalking the playground, tall and lanky, speaking in code and asides. One girl wore a velvet blue cloak with a dragon unfurling on its wings. 

When my older kids were younger, I would have run that potluck dinner, stressing about tables and lighting, flitting from family to family, staying late to clean up the detritus.  I ran Earth Day celebrations, I supervised the spaghetti supper, I had a hand in the fund-raising, I knew the other parents.  But I'm older now, and in pain, and I have cancer, and I felt quiet and lonely and in love with my son, under the stars.  The children stole the battery operated tea lights from the tables and climbed the trees, the lights twinkling.  Parents used the flashlights on their phones to choose their desserts from the overladen table.  At dusk, a flock of birds flew low over our heads.  Bigger than sparrows, smaller than Canadian geese--they were dark against the twilight, migrating at night or flocking to roost.  I didn't know. 

My dear friend Karen died this fall, what feels like yesterday but may already be a week, or ten days gone. Not yet a fortnight. She knew she was going to die--she chose hospice instead of a last-ditch, painful run at a difficult chemotherapy with dim prospects.  In the two or so years I knew Karen she was always, always in nature, in the world.  She was camping at the ocean, she was swimming in a cold stream in Vermont, she was hiking the dunes, she was building a fire at night.  I called her one day shortly before she died and she greeted me with a raucous "Hey Gurrllllll! What's up?" I burst into laughter and tears. Her wife held a beautiful ceremony in their wild garden, filled with wildflowers and paths, candles and statues and near their little wooden house, its walls covered in photos of Karen as a child, Karen as a young woman, Karen with the wool cap she was wearing when I visited her at home shortly before she died, when she joked kindly with the aide giving her a sponge bath, luxuriating in the warm cloth against her skin.  At one moment, when the singing ended, the wind rushed in, filling up the trees and sky with sound loud enough to hush the humans gathered in the field.  It felt like Karen; it felt like Mother Earth.  I can't imagine what the difference is between them anymore.

My oldest son was married in India today. He and his wife, Kanika, sent me so many photos from the week running up to the wedding--the beautiful henna on their arms, the flower arrangements of pink and yellow in Dr. Seussian shapes, my daughter and his friends from high school dancing in traditional clothing, her family holding my son like he is theirs.  I'm so happy for them--what a life this is, what a life it is to find yourself riding a horse into a wedding in another country as my son did this morning.  What a life this is, to receive these snapshots over What'sApp as the wedding unfolded.  I spent much of the day in bed today--resting my aching legs and restless with grief and longing for my beautiful first child, saying his vows so far away from me.  Yes, this is the son who also was married last winter in my backyard, the one for whom we made the elaborate frosted three-layer cake.  Yes, those two had their first wedding here, walking through the snow to the archway we put in the labyrinth, because they suspected a trip to India would be too much for me.  They were right. But I greedily want it all.  I want to be at every wedding.  I want to be at every birth.  I want to quietly sit at the edge of every potluck, band concert, graduation from nursing school, Halloween, birthday that is to come.  And to have my children wind their way over to kiss me as they run off to play with their friends, get married, make their own people.  I know it's not like that.  But I'm not ready to let go without tears.

Karen was.  She took her two or so years since diagnosis and threw herself not only into the waves, but into the existential work she needed to do in order to walk out of this world with more grace and acceptance than I could have imagined.  She had must have had moments of terror and doubt and fear, but, that wasn't second nature to her: it seemed to never be enough to tip her in the slightest towards outward expressions of dread.  "What's up, gurrlll?" What's up indeed, Karen? I honor the work she did to come to the peace we all witnessed at the end.  I hope and I pray to Creator, as Karen would say, that we all come to death in such a way: clearheaded, grateful, with the power to move the wind in the trees and silence the grievous hum of the living.

Autumn seemed to descend this year like a heavy rock thrown into the pond--quick, deep, dark. Summer seems like a minute ago.  Karen seems like a minute ago.  And now the flashes of red and orange in the trees and the cold air on my face when I walk the dog at night seem to signal winter is coming, and soon.  I think this autumn and this winter which already lines my heart with foreboding, I will watch the stars instead of fearing death.  I will watch the winter birds on the wire. I will take off my shoes and feel the snow under my swollen toes for as long as I can stand it.  I will take my cues from the animals that hibernate, and allow my pain to be held in warm blankets, on the couch near my children and dog. I will choose wintering over as an antidote to fear.  I will walk across the empty corn fields across from my house, drinking in starlight and letting the dog ramble, catching, out of the corner of my eye, the ghosts of my dear ones in and amongst the branches of the trees.  As long as I can, until the ice makes it unsafe, I will wander the bog, using words to build a process of grief that sustains me, and allows me to carry the ones I loved and the ones I love, which are, after all, one and the same, in my heart, like a heavy stone warmed in the fire, wrapped in flannel, tucked in at the foot of my bed, like I am a girl on the prairie. 

The video at the top is obviously Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson.  Loretta Lynn died this week.  If ever there was a person who showed us the love and the broken heart, the possibility of loving the loneliness that beset me at the night picnic last week, where I glowed with both pain and adoration of my son, finding his way in the trees with his hands cupped around the candle, it was Loretta Lynn. I played the song "Coal Miner's Daughter" for the boys ("We were poor, but we had love/ That's the one thing that daddy made sure of"), who had never heard of her, and one of them asked me how old she was when she died.  "Ninety," I said.  "Oh," they agreed, relieved, "that's a good life."  They know, those boys, what a gift it would be to live that long.  We all know, these days, what a gift.