Tag Archives: cancer sucks

This Too Was A Gift

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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

The Uses of Sorrow – Mary Oliver

Years ago, I was younger and didn’t understand myself, or the bumpy ride of Life I was embarking upon. There was a time when I thought all fathers screamed and made their mothers cry, made their daughters scream back, lost all of their families’ money (repeatedly), and didn’t remember friends’ names. At this same time, I knew the core understanding was that no one was to know what happened in our house. It was like the sitting room in every one of my parents’ houses with its Ethan Allen sofas upholstered in blue, the mahogany coffee table, and the china cabinet, in which no one ever sat. The only time I remember sitting in that room was the day that my mother and my boyfriend Chris’ parents and I and Chris discussed how I had to get an abortion and that was our only option. (It was the best thing, don’t get me wrong, but the approach could have used some work. But then again, what the hell are you going to do when your 15-year-olds end up pregnant? Probably make a lot of mistakes and say the wrong thing.) There was a china set in my parents’ house that was purple with gold metallic rims and I always loved the dishes because purple is my favorite color, but we could never use them because they were so “expensive” then one Christmas in my 20s they were “worth more than you” and then there was a threat to break all of them (from 20 something me) and then one Christmas they were used for a guest who I informed should feel very valuable, and now, after death, are used all the time.

I used to think that all the things that happened in my parents’ house were normal until I became an adult and began to see how other peoples’ families worked. For some reason, as a child, I didn’t or couldn’t see it as clearly as I could as an adult.

My dad died in November of 2021 after a very short burst of a battle with lung cancer. As he died, my mom became extremely angry at him, at everything probably, and lashed out a lot. He died very quickly, 9 days after he was admitted to the hospital which was just a few days after being diagnosed. I had forgiven him before he died, partially as a by-product of COVID (we couldn’t see each other for almost two years) and partially as an effect of years of therapy including CBT and EMDR.

Beth died in November of 2022, the same week as my dad a year before. I can hear her laughing at me right now and rolling her eyes at me as I type about how great she was and how painful it was to lose her. Lately, I have been hearing her laughing and it’s like this twinkle in my heart-mind as if tiny gold bells are jingling together and I can see her laughing at the same time. She would not want me to be sad. It was out of my sadness at losing her that I began to find my way to understanding myself; no doubt this process has actually been cooking on the back burner for years, but the reality is that the grief I have felt and still feel for Beth has been one of my greatest gifts and one that she uniquely could give to me.

I mentioned above that I have been in therapy for years. I have had several therapists but two really are the most significant: my therapist in Ellsworth, Maine, and my therapist here in Austin, Texas. My Maine therapist was my kind of therapist: practical, insightful, focused, and pro-active. She told me when I decided to move back to Texas, to seek out a provider to do CBT next. And so, trusting her, I did. I began to work with my therapist in Austin and we first worked using CBT and then combined it with EMDR and, slowly, ideas began percolating in my heart-mind, and here we are.

This year has been incredibly stressful for me. I am a new assistant principal at a high-needs campus in a small, rural district that doesn’t seem to understand how to find adequate resources to help with serious needs in reading, teacher training, and changing student behavior. They are big fans of Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking”, or so it would seem: they appear to believe that if they just wait it out long enough, solutions will appear and they themselves don’t need to seek out experts or helpers or research or……anything. I have noticed this year, in moments of desperation, that my mind follows the path built for it during my CBT, and if I close my eyes for a few seconds, I go to the forest up the hill from Duck Brook, the location I chose years ago in a therapy session which, even to me, was fairly random because I haven’t even spent that much time there throughout my life, but apparently my heart-mind thinks it is the calmest place I have ever been. Visualizing Duck Brook makes the seething, buzzing stress disappear, calm down, and become manageable.

The other day I was in the bathroom washing my hands and thinking about a friend’s house who I was going to go to on Friday. I was nervous as right now I feel so stressed out that I feel a bit insane, despite knowing this is very temporary, and I wonder if it shows on my face or in my words, or will make people not want to talk to me. A voice in my head said to me, “you don’t have to be perfect all the time”. Wow! Really? And I said, wow! Really? It’s working! My messages to myself, in my heart-mind, are changing.

How does this connect to losing Beth and having my heart squished, smashed, twisted, and transformed with grief? Last weekend two friends and I talked about how we could hear her laughing all day. It was magical and funny. Lucy and I talked about how we felt that she was becoming a part of us like her spirit is living inside our body and that’s how we can hear her and feel her all over the place. I told her that last Saturday I kept thinking I would turn around and she would be sitting next to me. I love this idea of processing loss as a process of transforming with the person, and I love the words shared with me by my coworker Mr. Moore who assured me those we love don’t want us to be sad.

I remember one trip to the coast we were in Port Lavaca, walking along its dirty in-town beaches looking for a roseate spoonbill skull or a pelican skull or both (skulls were the main focus of those trips) and we found this tiny vegetarian or vegan restaurant on one of the shore roads. It was in an old Victorian house and had a traveler-esque caravan in the front yard. We sat on a couch in front of the bay window that looked out to the ocean and found a copy of “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay in the stacks of reading material. We were waiting for our fancy teas (or smoothies? I can’t remember) to be ready and she told me the story of Louise Hay and her belief that past traumas can “live” in the body and make you sick and how she believed you could heal yourself, and how she loved her because of what she did for gay men in the 1980s who were dying of AIDS and made them feel better and that it wasn’t their fault what had happened. I knew then that Louise Hay’s ideas had made a huge impression on Beth and that they had informed a lot of what she thought in terms of keeping her cancer at bay, which she was able to do for almost 15 years.

Beth was blessed because she was a blessing and was loved by many people. Some of them helped her change her life away from how she had grown up in Oklahoma (something about her early life she fundamentally decided she had to change), brought her to Texas, and helped her feel a sense of functional, supportive family, something she had never had. She began to learn about possibility and began to repeat the teachings shared with her by that family’s father figure, Mr. Rusque.

Throughout our friendship, Beth taught me a lot about living, not be afraid of dying, and being honest and present with oneself and with others; to not judge but also not judge oneself too harshly. These lessons sank in, slowly, despite my stubbornness and fear (the fear probably will linger forever, it is in there deep), and I think she was speaking to me last weekend when I heard that message about not having to be perfect. When she was alive, I heard her say the things she said, I heard her reflect on her life and her death, I listened to her reflect on people and laugh at things that had happened and never try to force anything to happen one way or another, but just to be delightful and loving and funny and extremely beautifully dressed.

In death, in transforming my heart, in creating a space within it in which she will always live, I can hear her words, clear as tinkling golden bells, and I can begin to take them to heart. It is an amazing feeling to feel someone so deeply, to miss them so much, to have them so close. It is the best way I can honor her, to hear her speaking, to hear myself speaking, to practice what I have learned in therapy and in life, and to move forward. She liked to say during the last few months about how she was getting out before it all fell apart. Little did she know she wasn’t leaving, not really. She was giving herself to us.

Love Rising From the Mists

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When I tell you this story, there are some of you who will hear, some will listen, and some will know.

I feel that I am at the beginning of grieving the loss of my friend Beth. When I think of her lately, I can feel her hair in my hands; at the end of her life, her hair grew back as she wasn’t on chemo anymore. Her hair was brown and short and stuck up and out in places, but she still looked so cool with her yellow beanie. When she died, we realized that one of the colors was always yellow.

When we went to the doctor on October 4, her longtime doctor and trusted caretaker told her that she had lived well with cancer for a long time and that now she would not live well with cancer anymore. Her liver was failing; destroyed by chemo, it had changed from the soft sponge of bodily fluid filtration to a hard rock that didn’t let much in or out. Her tummy filled up with liquid and she felt ugly. She wasn’t, of course.

During that doctor’s visit, every experience that we had had together flashed before my mind. I thought of Port O’Connor, and Angela, apartments in Dallas, plastic jewelry, my first marriage, Cecile’s old apartment, and when she decided to marry “a rich guy”. I thought of searching for dead things and going out to Sunday Beach with Angela’s high school crush (or perhaps she was his?) and his two children. His son looked like a Troll doll and we loved him. He covered us with mud. We escaped without sunburns. I thought of walking through the Albert Memorial near Buckingham Palace, and traipsing past Embassies and through the city at night. I remembered getting dizzy in the jewelry room at the V&A and eating sandwiches on the lawn, watching naked British children bathe in the pool.

When we were told that it was the end, I remembered all the lived experiences; so much life! That is of course what I learned the most from Beth. I learned about LIFE. We once found a beautiful coffee shop with a caravan in the front garden in Port Lavaca; it was an old Victorian house and we never found it again, but that one time we found “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay and she told me about how and why Louise Hay wrote the book. On one of her last days, she said to me, “I wish my body could heal itself!”

During that last month, I spent most of my time with her massaging her and talking with her. She was in so much pain, although I suspect she didn’t admit the true force of the pain because she didn’t want to be woozy with Dilaudid. I massaged her because I wanted to keep her energy moving; keep her chi zipping around her body and soul. I spent a lot of time rubbing her perfect feet and legs and the middle of her back; this is where most of the pain was. I would also rub her face and her head and her shoulders. I would try to move the energy around, hoping it would keep her with us for longer.

One night I was staying with her and I looked at her in the half-light of the lamps. She was so tired but kept saying thank you, kept saying thank you and I love you. I went outside and called our friend Vivien. I said, “Vivien, I am worried. Her eyes look funny.” It was as if they couldn’t focus properly, or wandered when they shouldn’t. I remembered Maw Maw and how fast she slipped from us once she started. I will never forget her sleeping in that big bed with its white sheets and its golden light, falling asleep at about 7pm after I cooked us a dinner of lamb chops.

I have heard a theory of grief that I like and can attach to; the pain we feel is an alternative experience to the love we feel for the person. When my dad died last year, I felt like I was falling off a cliff into some bottomless space; there was no anchor. Slowly though, I found my footing again and realized that I must make my own anchor and remember all the tools he gave me, despite our many fraught years. This is different.

As I said above, when I think about Beth, really think about her (because I avoid it in my conscious mind sometimes), I can feel her hair in my hands, I can feel her hands, her shoulders, her tiny arms, her beautiful legs, and perfect feet. I can hear the sound of her moving in her hospital bed. I can see her eyes clouded with ammonia toxicity. I can see her moving around and saying thank you to me. I can hear her talking about cheese and visiting Italy. It is like she is becoming a part of me, of my body, as I feel all the parts of her. It is like she is right here, an ethereal version of a very real person. I think that this means that I truly love her, and she loves me, and this feeling, this painful transformation, is the process of grieving her loss. From now on, there is the Patience that lived when Beth was alive, there is the Patience during this grieving process, and there will be the Patience after.

Due to her immense grace, humor, love, and understanding, I suspect the Patience after will be a better person who is more in touch with faults and feelings, and with the preciousness of the moments.

When we went to the doctor on October 4, how would we have known she would die less than one month later, on November 2? She had lived so well, for so long. I wish I could hug her. But I can, because when I think of hugging her, I can feel her hugging me; I can feel her tiny body that cancer just ate up. I can see the light in her windows and the green of her houseplants. I can think of how great a hostess she was, and how she loved drinking dandelion tea those last few weeks to help her liver.

Beth, I miss you so much. I know you are here, in your own way. As Lilian said the other day, it’s like you are everywhere!

A Letter Written the Day After Your Funeral

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She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine –

Witch-Wife by Edna St. Vincent Millay

You once told me, when I described the trouble I was having staying asleep, that I should get up in the wee hours and write my memoirs. After all, that was what Patti Smith had done! I listened.

Yesterday we held the art show for you: the one you talked about every day until the day you left us. The art show had your shadowboxes and your bones and dead things, your bed, your cushions, some clothes, and most of the jewelry. None of your paintings made the cut; I am looking at one right now. I love the Fossil Hunters. I was interviewed by the videographer whilst wearing no lipstick, my Patagucci jacket, and frazzled hair. He said what I said was “great”.

Later in the day, I had had too much wine and was admiring Gary and Mary’s advanced 14-month-old baby ruling the roost like she was at least two, and we talked about past relationships and past lives and that time he saved all of us when we moved you out of the big house on the hill. Last week I learned about how the people you lived with really didn’t want you to move out; both parties the same, but different. Two locations, a similar feel. I will write my treatise on devil’s bargains later. Today is just a letter to you.

All day I thought I would come around a corner and see you laughing. It was unbelievably cold yesterday; fog descended upon the city and everything was cast in white-grey. The light was lovely. Vivian and I dressed the mannequin in a wonderful yellow-and-orange outfit; two kimonos and a yellow shirt dress and a necklace made of hundreds of charms. Behind the mannequin, in the window, hung jewels and pearls and chains, as well as the chandeliers. We made the room look like you had just left it after getting ready to go to a party.

I knew you, we knew each other, through so many different lives. Vivian knew you through more; she and I bonded during Covid over our shared moment in life. We bonded again during your death as we aimed to protect you ever still from people who sought to own parts of you, thinking your things would help fill the void. You, wiser than they, knew better.

I got to know your sister and her children over the last few weeks. She and I cried together and I became buddies with Aabah especially, laughed with Saabira, and stared into Faatina’s eyes, tearing up when I realized she will never know you because she is too little. Yesterday, I carried Aabah into the dressing room and said, “do you see Beth’s clothes?”. She nodded and said, “sometimes Mama gets very sad when she thinks about Beth”. I said, “we all do because we can’t talk to her anymore. But one day, you will wear this jewelry and that is how we will remember her”. She nodded.

Downstairs, just before we sang “So Long, Marianne”, Noah and I met and talked and he shared with me that he thought, he suspected, that you never wanted people to see the art while you were alive. We remarked on how mysterious you were in moments, how contrary. He said that he thought if you had had the show while you were still alive, you wouldn’t have come. I suspect he knows a thing or two (please see me winking to you here).

Yesterday I woke up and could barely get out of bed. It felt like the morning, at 4am on November 10th of last year, when I was woken by my mother to go to the hospital. I sat on the couch in the living room that morning and said to myself, “ok. You have to drive your mother to the hospital where her husband has just died”. I said to myself, “you can do this”. I said to myself yesterday, “you can do this”. I drank coffee and red wine and forgot to eat, but I did it. I went to sleep at 830 and woke up twelve hours later.

I said that yesterday it felt like I would walk around a corner and see you. Today it felt like I didn’t believe you are gone. I don’t believe it. You will come back, won’t you? I can talk to you again, can’t I? I know the true answers. I must remember you in my heart and mind.

Remembering you telling me you were having a heart attack (it was steroids) and speeding through tiny coastal towns until we reached a hospital, running inside, and announcing, “someone has to help me, my friend has cancer!”. The doctor was a jerk and we stole all sorts of things from the ER room, remember? Or when we walked through London trying to find strange buildings, and ate ramen and saw the city at night, and had cappuccinos under the Albert Memorial, and saw the jewelry at the V&A. Or when we went to Mexico and took mushrooms at Mimi’s mom’s ranch, drank too much cheap wine in Amanda’s trailer in Port O’Connor, cooked spaghetti and told our life stories in the dark, got stuck in sand bars, found skulls and skeletons, shopped at thrift shops, drank frozen rose on the one day you were angry at having cancer. So many more memories; the day we learned that you would die from your doctor, except we didn’t know you would die less than 4 weeks later.

I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. We had so much more to do. I will take you with me, see and feel you everywhere. The other day the sunset blew up the sky in orange and blue and I said, “Hi Beth”. I wonder if you are sitting on the couch behind me whilst I type, just out of reach; as I turn to check, will you slip away?

THE TIME you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

To An Athlete Dying Young by A.E. Housman

Dark Apartments, Stingrays & Terrible Shoes

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There were noises the other night: creaks and movements in the dark. These were noises that I hadn’t heard for three years since I had last taken care of a loved one in the night. They were the sounds of someone moving around who recently had a normal bed that makes no creaks and the strange plastic sounds of an airbed with a human being moving upon it.

I met her in a dark apartment in Dallas, a hundred years and 7 lifetimes ago. By that I mean 21 years, when we were 21 and 22 years old. She made plastic jewelry in her oven in her own dark apartment, but it was in the dark apartment of our friend Ashley that we met. Ashley knew about makeup and exfoliation and hung giant pieces of fabric from her ceiling. Her boyfriend who would become her first husband barely spoke to me and never spoke to Beth. She talked about the smell of the plastic jewelry as it baked in the oven and how it was probably toxic. Toxic, but geometric; it was clear in spots and opaque in others. Squares danced upon rectangles intermingled with other shapes, too.

Later, it was raining in July at the Tarpon Motel in Port O’Connor, Texas. I was in this crazy moment of rejecting a corporate career; upon reflection, I just realized that was the last time I hated my job. But I digress. It was raining. Raining, raining. Beth sat on the second queen bed in the room. She was wearing a very fashionable hat and was very quiet. She was very quiet a lot then. We went, during a break in the rain, to drink cheap beer on the dock of the marina next door with Billy’s mom, Lynn. Lynn was great; she was a strong woman and was so loving to her kids. She was great until she wasn’t; like all of us.

During that trip, we were assured that Ashley’s brother knew how to navigate the shallow waters of the gulf and could take us to Matagorda Island to a friend’s cabin. Adam ran aground within minutes and we were stuck trying to get an outboard out of the mud, all the while conscious of possible stingrays beneath our feet. When we made it to the island, it was unbelievably hot and the cabin just had screens over the windows. The screens had holes in them, or the door did, or something, because the heat and the mosquitoes were unbearable and we abandoned ship quite soon to shimmy back in the water and the mud to the mainland.

Then there was the time we went searching for a building like the Pompidou Centre in London. I was wearing terrible shoes; a trait that Beth constantly chides me for. Terrible shoes! They were beautiful vintage men’s loafers that were the complete opposite of what one should wear while walking through London. We had lunch at the Barbican and found the building, and my damn feet hurt, and we ate vegan ice cream in a strange downtown coffee shop in the finance district and took the Tube during rush hour. She was sick, even then, and even during those days was having reactions to chemo that made her unable to do much because she was so itchy and having a hard time sleeping. We did, however, walk around London at night and eat ramen in Mayfair and Indian food near Buckingham Palace and have cappuccinos (I think) at the Albert Memorial after seeing a show at the Serpentine with Alberto and Reuben.

I just spent the evening in my workshop, applying gold leaf to a lantern I have been working on for a friend for years. We played on the wood it is made out of when it was a tree. For years, we have played on this tree. I took Matthew’s graduation photos on it. About ten years ago, it finally died after one last winter storm. I culled its bark and have hauled it around with me since. I sat tonight, applying gold leaf and thinking about how much life changes, and how losing people is so difficult. Losing people is hard for me because I can’t talk with them anymore, I can’t hear their voices anymore, and I worry about losing my memories of them. I think: do I want to be in a world without them? The answer is of course, yes, but it is a sharper world; the visions are more dear, colorful, passionate, and valuable. The big things are bigger and the little things fade into complete unimportance.

So it goes.

I will miss you.

Rainy Monday

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Today the students worked on puzzle cubes and, mysteriously, more capybaras appeared on the drawing wall. Students right now are really into capybaras.

My friend who is in the hospital is doing all right and finally getting some dots connected in terms of care. It seems to me that if you were to have to navigate the US health system on your own, you would just tear your hair out.

I was thinking about one of my favorite times with my friend, when she and our another old friend stayed at an aunt’s house in Port O Connor. The house was just beautiful; up on stilts, you were at eye level with palm trees. The wind whipped perfectly, and one night we made dinner in the kitchen, mushrooms with pasta I think, and we told stories and we heard my friend’s whole story for the first time. It is not my story to tell without permission, but it involves all kinds of things that should be written in a book.

That night we had a fire in the fireplace, and if I remember rightly, it was cold in POC, which sometimes it was. I miss going down there although the last time I was there was only last summer. We should have stayed longer, me and my two friends and the dog.

This morning just as I was waking up, I had a dream. I was outside on a lawn somewhere in England, and my cousins were all around on the grass. I was sitting and they were standing but I was child high and all their kids were moving around. I realized it was at a pub so I went inside and my Dad, young with dark hair, was sitting at a small table and he smiled at me. He asked me if I was all right, if everything was all right. I couldn’t talk to him: the words wouldn’t come out and were completely hushed as if their air had been compressed right out of them. He smiled and then he was outside the window with a rolling suitcase. He waved at me and walked out of the windowframe.

Photo by Mockingbird HIll Cottage

My Odes to Grief

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“I used to be a great and powerful man”, my father said to me the third-to-last time I saw him, in October of 2021. I walked into his room and he looked so old: white as a sheet, with slightly pink skin, hair all akimbo, eyes wet with tears. He spent those last few weeks crying so much of the time.

I said, “you ARE a great and powerful man, and you know as well as I do that strength comes from here” (pointing to his heart) “and here” (pointing to his head). He apologized for crying and I said, “well you know me, I am the most emotional person in the world and I cry all the time“.

He would die about 6 weeks later, about one week after speaking to me oh-so-clearly on the phone from his hospital bed in Bar Harbor, Maine for the last time.

I have had a hard time writing lately. I am not sure if it is the pandemic, the death of Cody’s grandmother who lived with us, teaching during the pandemic, graduate school, the nonstop droning length of COVID19, or my father’s death. But now, I am faced with two immediacies. I am gripped by grief: it is holding on to me something fierce and fast. It will not let go. People keep telling me just to “let it all out” but I am afraid to let it all out lest it consumes me and renders me a puddle of tears on the floor.

Those people who know me or my father, Michael Blythe, know that we had a very difficult relationship. He was a difficult person; he was highly intelligent in all areas except for emotions and communication. He was afraid of emotions and so diluted them, and he was afraid of communicating his emotions so he covered them with anger and rage. Ask his friends, the breakfast crew, about how much they loved him while recognizing the fierceness inside.

At the same time that my dad died and I came to understand the grief of a child for her parent, specifically the grief of a daughter for her father, especially a daughter who is so like her father minus the rage and anger, one of my best friends, my sister, really, has taken a turn in her cancer journey and now is in the hospital, breathing with the aid of oxygen, and worrying us all very much.

Death comes a-knocking. We must welcome it as an old friend, as one of the only guarantees of this life, and yet, we don’t talk about it because it is so frightening and so utterly sad.

I was speaking to a friend last night about my feelings of grief. She said, “you aren’t writing”. I said, “I know. I am afraid”. She encouraged me to start again.

I feel I am of two minds. One of them is rational and logical and understands that everyone dies and that it is ok. That brain says: everything in life is fine, and it is just sad that you can’t talk to your father anymore. The other mind is a tiny animal with gnashed teeth and sharp claws whose heart is outside her body. I had an internal analogy at first that I was a reverse pincushion; instead of the pearly ends facing out to protect hands and fingers, my sharp ends were facing out to catch me, gouge me deep, and feel the horrific bottomless pain that is losing your father.

The night that he died I stayed up so late, drinking a whole bottle of wine by myself over the course of a long evening (this was when I thought that alcohol would help: turns out, it makes everything much worse). I spent the evening looking at photos of me and my dad, especially of photos when I was little. I looked at photo after photo and I began to ask myself: what did we even fight about? I could not answer the question; I still do not know. I think it was that I was a headstrong teenager, and he was going through a crisis after losing his job, and those two storms met head-on and became thunderclouds that brewed for twenty years. I am so blessed that we smoothed those clouds out the last three years, he attended my wedding to Cody, and we talked all the time. I am so thankful to Cody for showing me the importance of healing my relationship with my dad, because he had lost his many years before, and was, like me now, always wishing he could call him.

The night he died I cried and cried. I felt like I was drowning under a heavy wave of water that would not let me up. I felt I was on a cliff’s edge about to fall. I felt a huge weight, like a stone, on my heart. It pushed deeper and deeper down and in, like what I imagine a black hole does to matter: I was collapsing. I went to bed at 2:30 and my mom woke me up at 4 to go to the hospital. I went downstairs and sat on her couch and said, “pull yourself together, kid. You have to drive your mother to the hospital where her husband has just died”. I said, “I am driving you to the hospital”. She said no. I said, “yes, I am” and she handed me the keys. We arrived at 4:25 and he had passed just a few minutes earlier at 4:19.

In that room, he was so peaceful, laying slightly to his side. His face was pink, pinker than it had been anytime over the last few months. When he finally was medicated for pain, he received so much medication that the nurses told us he must have been suffering for a long time. This was no surprise: he was always a pain in the ass about admitting anything was wrong. The nurses had cracked the window to let his soul slip out into the air, up to the mountains, out to the sea. He was so peaceful. He never had been so in his life. I sat next to him and smiled. In my mind, I said, “Daddy? Where are you? Are you on a plane? A ship? Traveling somewhere first class on an adventure?” I suspected so, and still do.

Grief is grabbing hold of me and won’t let go, and one of the only ways I have ever found to discover what I really feel and am thinking about is through writing. I also know that writing about death is hard for others to read, but perhaps that can change. Another friend and I were talking today about our friend in the hospital, and she told me that she envisions me as someone who writes and gardens, gardens and writes. In other words, she was the second angel to appear with the same message: write, Patience, write.

As I walk through the stages of grieving my father, experiencing an immense, tangible, and tragic shift in the public schools in which I have worked for 16 years, and support my friend who is also, perhaps, transitioning away from this reality into another one, I will write it all down. I hope you will join me.

Thanks for your patience.

Meredith Drew, 10 Years Later

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My friend Meredith died in 2011. It has been ten years since she graced me with her words, her observations, and her sense of humor. I was cleaning up my inbox today and found this email. I almost wrote her an email back, even though I know that she won’t be able to read it. Or maybe she can? I often think she is around, on the edges of my life, watching, smiling, and occasionally laughing. It is her laugh that I hear on the wind, and in the still darkness of starry nights.

[names have been changed]

My best thoughts are Sunday morning when i first wake
up. Short sentence insights given to me from myself.

This morning:
If it hadn’t been for Patience ….

You were the one who saved him. I brought him to you
and you said, and then, no matter what anyone else
said, I held to what you said.
You were right about the school. When Alan destroyed
that, he showed his willingness to destroy his only
son.
I know you wondered why I stayed. I was waiting. I can
see it now, his pushing me to stand up so that he
could smash me. “Sebastian is not really mine because I
have to share him with you.”
Only one strike then. One chance, and my aim had to be
dead on.
So. Based on what you said, and only on what you said,
I made a move. (literally) Defying the court, the
experts and all of those carefully orchestrated lies.
YOu saved my son that day, you know. You’d meant to
spend the day with your husband and your new house.
I doubt you remember where you stood, where I stood
when I said, “Tell me Patience about Sebastian,” and you
answered. Sam was in the background keeping Sebastian’s
attention on other than us.
It’s like a photograph in my head, all bent up and
worn now from my taking it out and looking at it so
many times, just to check, “No, no. That’s not what
Patience said. Don’t listen to them.”
I was just a mom, and you were just a first year
teacher, emergencied in no less with your funny degree
and a quick summer course. There were no letters after
our names.
Valentina, the Russian seer and healer told me, “You
have great power. It is in your love for your
children. Stay in that place.”
The photograph in my head is of just that. The 4 of us
feeling powerless. Loving powerfully, not knowing the
importance of that moment, what would come of it.
You called yesterday, to check, worried that you are
not doing enough for Sebastian, worried as you are that
you are not doing enough for your own students, I
think.
I have a picture in my head, of your not doing much of
anything, just standing there, saying a few words. It
was all that you could do, of course. To you it must
have seemed like so little, hardly a “kodak moment.”

The picture shows You, however, standing in that place
of love, speaking so powerfully that in that moment
Sebastian’s life was changed.
The power did not come from your doing. It came from
your being.
You said you told your students in the bathroom that
it was because you love them.
Well, yes and no. Yes, because you love them, you have
power beyond human comprehension. No, because that is
not why you were crying. YOu were crying because you’d
momentarily and inadvertently fallen from that place
into fear.
Anyway, I have this crumpled worn picture that I
wanted to show you of you being You in that space of
love and power. Amazing, how the more I look at it,
the more clearly the Grace comes into focus.
Your Grace.
Amazing
Trust that.
Like I said. Do not be afraid. Just believe.
In you.
I have a picture of my doing just that. In the middle
of a breakdown myself, desperate, loading Sebastian and
myself in the car driving to Austin, unable to explain
to myself why it seemed so very important. Amazing,
the Grace of my knowing to turn to you.
Your words and a picture of your saying them burned
into my brain. You were that quietly powerful.

I have been listening to Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations lately. My two recent favorites are: Cicely Tyson and Grace and Gratitude.