Tag Archives: grief

Posted on by
Reply

It was dark. We had cooked lamb chops, “good lamb chops” that she had gotten from somewhere like Central Market. We cooked them on the giant, beautiful, expensive Viking range in Tina’s kitchen. Tina was out of town so she was staying in the big house and I went to stay with her. We cooked the lamb chops, 3 minutes per side and then two to finish them off, and I think we made a salad but I don’t remember. We drank light French red wine out of tiny beautiful glasses and I think it was our last dinner together.

I helped her up the stairs; she was sleeping in Tina’s room on the second floor of the old house. You had to walk up a tight, tourney staircase, so I walked her up and spent time with her in the bathroom as she got ready to go to bed. She washed her face and put lotion on her hands and brushed her teeth. She was so tiny; tinier then than she had ever been before. No hair but still that beautiful, beautiful face, that beautiful beautiful spirit that shone through everyday. I got her into bed; all the sheets were white, the walls were white, everything in that room was very light and I think she really loved sleeping in there.

The day we shaved her head, it was in that room, too; I think she had some sort of connection with that space. With how high it was above the ground, with how open and airy it was. She always loved a light-filled space. I looked in her eyes as I was sitting in bed with her. I could see the light of the lamp reflected in her eyes, and there were tiny white plates suspended in the black centers of her eyes. They almost looked like those glints of light that teenagers put in their sketches of characters when they’re first learning how to draw cartoons: these tiny points of light that are supposed to tell the viewer that their eyes are twinkling. But in this case her eyes weren’t twinkling, those little plates were matte, deep, solid somehow: they collected the light. I hadn’t noticed them before and took a while to stare at them and try to figure out what they might be.

After she went to sleep I went back downstairs and called Vonda and told her that Maryann’s eyes looked strange: that there was something floating in them. At the time I thought maybe it could be something to do with medication or cancer, I just wasn’t sure. All I knew was that there were tiny plates floating in her eyes. Later, I learned that those tiny plates were ammonia crystals floating in her eyes, teaching us that her liver was failing very quickly. She had been on chemo for so long, at that point almost 16 years, that the chemo had changed her liver from the sponge it’s supposed to be to something resembling a rock; nothing passed through, nothing was filtered out, and so the ammonia that builds up in our bodies naturally, everyday over time, had begun to build up in her body and was reflecting through her eyes.

Today I’ve been reflecting on my own current illness which also has some liver markers going on. I’ve been really thinking about Maryann and that time when her liver stopped working. Maryann is in my thoughts all the time right now; I am convinced she is around me a lot and sometimes I feel her here just watching me and taking a gaze and seeing what’s going on. But this time is different. I feel like she’s just out of reach, but she’s trying to tell me something but I don’t know what it is.

As I lay here on my bed having a day that feels like a setback, after watching a rainstorm, I’m just curious about everything. What am I supposed to learn? When I think about my dear friend Maryann, I miss her so much, but she’s right here. It’s so strange and hard to figure out.

If I could ask her and she could answer I would say what are you trying to tell me Maryann? 

Lyme Diaries – The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself

Posted on by
Reply

Kathleen Bowman is a person who lives in our small community up here in Downeast Maine, and a few years ago, she saved my life.

A few weeks ago, she and her husband came into the gallery with some friends who were staying with them. I didn’t say hi at first as I was talking to one of the friends who was gazing out the back of the gallery at the garden; there is a beautiful, luscious garden of hostas and rhododendrons and a small pond out the back of the gallery, and it is mesmerizing. He said, “do you know my friend Kathleen?” I said and smiled, “Kathleen saved my life”. He looked at me, quizzically, and we walked to go and say hi.

Since Wednesday of last week, I have been experiencing crazy edema in my legs and an increasing sense of pain in my back and abdomen, coupled with digestive troubles. It feels as if my whole system has become locked up and like it is stopped. It is a disconcerting and painful feeling. The swelling of my legs is scarier still, and makes walking uncomfortable. It also reminds me of a very scary time in my life when this happened before, when I was 18 years old, during my senior year of high school. At the time, for months, I hid the edema under the baggie pants that were customary in the late 90s. I loosened the shoelaces in my Vans to accommodate swollen feet. In Creative Writing class, I sat on the couch under the classroom’s tiny windows. I loved that class, obviously. One day, my teacher crouched down near me to help me and friends with something, and she noticed my swollen ankles under my pants and she asked me about them and how long they had been like that. I said I didn’t know and she asked a friend to walk me to the nurse. The nurse asked me the same question, and I said a few months. (Why? I was asked a lot during that time. I was afraid I was dying, and I was a sad and lonely child, and thought maybe it was better if I just did that, quietly). My mom came to get me and I went to the doctor and they admitted me to the hospital with a blood count of 1.7 (normal is 7). I spent the next two or three days in the hospital, and it was one of the most lonely times of my whole life.

I know my mom dropped me off at the hospital; she must have. But I was alone at night, and the doctors were assholes because I was (probably) a teenage asshole to them. I watched “Boogie Nights” and didn’t sleep and wondered if I was going to die in there by myself. I was on oxygen, which was great because I could actually breathe for the first time in a while, but thought to myself, over and over, “this isn’t good”. Some friends came, but the best ones didn’t, as it was too scary. It was too scary.

When the edema showed up last week, immediately I became scared; scared of what was happening, scared of the lack of answers, scared of the fact that this entire month I have just progressed into feeling worse rather than better, and scared of having to go to the hospital. My doctor told me on Friday that she wants me to go to Bangor Hospital and not MDI because it is bigger and has more resources. Immediately I was sent into an emotional tailspin that lasted until tonight, when I caught the truth on the wind and spotted the rise of a crescent moon that I could wish upon. I wished for it to help me alleviate my own suffering; my fear of being alone in a hospital at night. At the moment when I realized it, I realized how scared my younger self was all the time, and I remembered when Kathleen saved my life.

Kathleen is an energy worker of a sort; I can’t really tell you what she does exactly. She “tunes in”, she says, and then pictures show up in your head and she asks you to describe them. Sometimes you lie on her massage table and she does something Reiki-like that isn’t Reiki, moving her hands above your body. Over time, I began to trust Kathleen, and then one day it all came clear; the young version of myself, trapped in a cold cave that was made of stone. After a while, she was coaxed to come out of the cave, and the older version of myself was standing there, tall as anything, with a cloak or wings on, or both, and wrapped her in a hug and told her she was safe and could stay out. Tonight, on the driveway, under the moon rise, I remembered that moment, and sighed and cried at my littler self, the one who was so scared and alone a lot of the time. She didn’t deserve it, and she was just a child, and also, she doesn’t need to drive the bus anymore.

All of a sudden, I knew I would be ok and I just have to figure out how to be. I smiled at the moon and thanked her for always being there, right where I need her to be. I felt relief and that a 100-lb weight had been lifted. Now, my stomach is still killing me and my legs are still swollen, but I know I won’t be swallowed up in fear.

I have been in family therapy for the last few months with my mother and brother, and I have learned to appreciate my mom a lot more than I ever have done, but I have also learned that things were more messed up than maybe I realized. I was, after all, only seeing it from my perspective. Now I see things from my brother’s and my mom’s perspective, too. So even though I felt alone and scared so much as a child, I don’t think it was anything intentional on the part of my parents. My dad was actively seeking to maintain a series of delusional stories that covered up hard truths, and my mom was running around behind him, cleaning up. Tonight our therapist asked her why she did that for so long, and my mom said she was in survival mode until she started her career as a realtor. Our therapist asked, then, a harder question, which was “do you think you were really in survival mode the whole time, up until the point when he died?”. Hard truths. How can you parent your children when you are just trying to survive yourself?

Deep thoughts on a dark night. Everyone has told me that Lyme teaches you lessons, and that part of the disease is figuring that out. I learned tonight that I don’t need to be afraid of being alone in a hospital, breathing oxygen, watching bad tv, and being afraid of dying. When we all took care of Mary Ann, we never left her alone. We watched stupid tv and put on makeup and played with Instagram filters and listened to Tupac at 5am when the morning nurses came in. We took copious notes about treatment and laughed as much as we could and made the couch look like a hospital bed so we could be close together and giggle. That’s how my hospital stay will be, if there is one. If I am to die, and we all will, I won’t be alone. I will be surrounded by people who I love and who love me.

What a gift, what lightness. Let’s not stress when there is so much beauty in the world.

Up Out of a Deep Well

Posted on by
Reply

Waiting.

Time.

Circumstance.

Change.

The decade of the 40s has been interesting because I have experienced many moments of clear reflection. I like to think of them as plateaus of understanding; it’s as if my mind’s eye is climbing mesa after mesa, seeing clearly out to a horizon that, beforehand, I could not see.

Maine has always been a place where I am an artist, first. In Texas, I was always a teacher, first, and had been for years. I am beginning to appreciate the practicality of that choice of vocation, as i am really struggling here with earning a lot less than what I earned in Texas. But, I digress. As an artist, first, I am embarking on an adventure of making more work, finishing a writing project, and hoping to take over a friend’s longstanding artistic business. It is a time of big leaps, and I am waiting for my confidence to catch up.

The deep well, I think, is a series of experiences that have emboldened an already highly-developed struggle with self-confidence. People tell me this struggle isn’t obvious to others, but to people who know me really well, it is clear. The deep well of circumstances like: teaching under-resourced students for almost twenty years, moving a lot from place to place, being afraid of commitment and how that impacts decision-making, focusing more on achievement over joy and balance and contentment, the death of my dad, the death of one of my best friends, teaching during the pandemic, discovering two half-brothers at the age of 45, and landing again in a place that I love but is very challenging to make a good living, have all resulted in this moment of clarity. Ah ha! Here I am, after all these years.

I find it hard to internalize that we are where we are because of everything that came before. But, to me, standing on tonight’s metaphysical mesa and staring at a new horizon, this explanation is the only one that makes sense. What now must be is a decision as to what to do next. I feel in some ways that I am taking huge risks in waiting and seeing if the jewelry store dream becomes reality; most of these risks are financial and right now, financial risks seem bad. On the other hand, with our country in the throes of the changes it is experiencing, maybe this is the time to grab the dreams by the hands and jump. I don’t know? I know what I want, which is to own or co-own the jewelry store, be able to save money and pay for health insurance without total panic every month, take a month or two off in the winter and go somewhere nice and sunny, to be able to buy the land around us and run a campground for people in the summer, to pay off our house within 15 years; all of these are the dreams.

But the waiting, the realizing, the digging oneself out of a series of experiences to find meaning within them; it is hard and it is drudgery sometimes, and sometimes it is joyful, like tonight.

I am still sick with anaplasmosis and Lyme disease. I think that something about these illnesses forces me to think about a lot of things while I am sick; they are thoughtful illnesses, to be sure. This experience reminds me of when I got sick my senior year of high school and could do little else but be sick and hope I would get better sometime. I spent a lot of time sitting on the back porch, thinking about the meaning of life. I think I have some sort of understanding of the meaning of life, for now anyway, but I am thinking about a lot of other things. I think about the preciousness of life and time, how fast it all goes, what I want the next ten years to look like and be like, and what I can do to make the world a better place, a little at a time. It is an active time, this thinking time.

Last year, one year ago yesterday, the world lost an amazing person in Kate Shuster. She was a mentor and a friend and a shero and an inspiration, and she is very missed. She left behind lots of memories, photos, and writings, but her death impacted me so much and especially reminded me of the precious nature of our time on Earth. She made a mark, a series of them, in fact, and she left Earth very quickly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died last year, I went and sat on the edge of the ocean and thought about her, and Mary Ann, and Ken, and John, and Meredith; all the friends who I had lost before I wanted them to go. Sometimes I see them or hear them or feel them around the edges of this reality and I wonder what they think or want us to see or understand. I guess we will never know that, and just have to keep on doing the best we can.

Laughing & Clapping Her Hands

Posted on by
Reply

It was a second floor, garage apartment in Hyde Park, in Austin. She moved there during COVID, sometime in 2020. She moved out of a house with people who had been friends who had become controlling and strange, into an apartment with a lease facilitated by a friend who was controlling and strange, but that is another story.

It was a second floor, garage apartment and you gained access by walking up a set of wide, wooden outdoor stairs. There was a landing, a tiny deck, at the top. There were a few plant pots with tropical plants, and a neat row of plastic Birkenstock shoes: colorful. There was a screen door and an inner, wooden door that was white with a small window. In it, she lived with her turquoise furniture, bone collection, shadow boxes, chandeliers made of old sets of silver and chains, and her plants. Her kitchen was small but lovely; everything was small and lovely. There were two rooms and a bathroom and a kitchen. One room was her bedroom, bedazzled with plants and specimens and interesting rocks, a chandelier in the corner. The other was a living room with a white leather hideabed, a round vintage plastic table, low to the ground, and two old chairs covered with interesting, faded fabric. In the corner was the preserved carcass of a roseate spoonbill, suspended in flight and hanging from the ceiling. There was also an antique dentist drill, complete with spittoon, which strangely had belonged to my first husband, years ago.

It was Texas in June, summer, hot, even in the morning. I was there in the morning, and we stood out on the small deck with the colorful shoes and tropical plants, and gazed out through the giant bushes that bordered the property, through their leaves, out to live oak trees and a pond in the center of the backyard. She said, “there is something weird in my eye. Like a cloud?” “There is a cloud in your eye? Both eyes? The same?” “No, just one, like a grey cloud at the bottom of my eye”.

Later it was discovered that her cancer had spread to her brain and that was when she had to start radiation and we didn’t get to come to Maine together, which I had been wishing for, but it is ok now that it didn’t happen. Earlier that spring we had gone to Galveston and stayed in an amazing apartment right on the beach, and ate at Gaido’s. Her face was a little swollen then, and she had no hair so she either wore fabulous hats or fabulous dresses with her bald head. It was the last Easter, and we didn’t know that. When she started radiation, they made her this crazy radiation face shield that she said she would bedazzle for Halloween that year. It really would have looked cool.

I will never forget the moment that I realized that she might have brain cancer, after breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone cancer. How exactly did she keep going so long? She is, after all, a miracle. Radiation made her mind muddled and she sort of forgot some things, but the most important things she valued stayed sharp. It was in October, before Halloween and her chance to bedazzle the thermoplastic radiation cap that her doctor told her that chemo had killed her, had destroyed her liver and she would soon die. She said that normal livers were like sponges, allowing substances to pass through them, and hers was like a rock. Quickly, her abdomen filled up with fluid and ammonia, there appeared little white glints, like lenses, in her eyes, and she died a month later. She told me that I had to start working in hospice, and I just finished my training and have my first patient. To be with someone who is dying is a great gift of mercy and trust, going both ways. Today I thought of her and saw her sitting in the corner in a hot pink dress, off the shoulder, bald head, laughing and clapping her hands. What a world. What would she think if she was alive today? I suppose she would be laughing and clapping her hands, about something.

Long Lost Family

Posted on by
Reply

I have been watching a BBC programme (English spelling!) called “Long Lost Family”, and I have been crying alot, watching all the stories about people finding long lost family members; sisters, brothers, children, and parents.

Right now I am feeling super sad about it all, about my dad’s choice to hide his first children, the twins, from everyone except his immediate family, who also chose to hide them. It just feels sad and weird, compounded by how far away we are from our entire family, and that they are probably the reason for that. The information does fill a hole, but maybe the hole is a little bit deeper than I had thought.

I don’t know what to think about this all, today. Sometimes I am so happy about it. I wish so much we could take a train and meet each other and walk around or get dinner or a beer or something. I somehow want to see how tall they are, especially since we match each other in heights – Mark and I at 6 feet and Pat and Carew at 6 foot 4. 14 years and a world apart – and yet, sort of together finally.

I think that lately I have been so mad at a dead person, and also so sad for him and wanting to hug him all at the same time, just to tell him that he didn’t need to do this. I wonder how a parent couldn’t want to see their children and know who they become. The Universe gave me a great gift when I was 34 when I got River as a son after so many years of fraught feelings around having children and being in relationships in general. Cody is my favorite person and I am so lucky to be able to love him and have him in my life, and River is a major bonus, as is his family. I just don’t understand why you would give that up? I am sure that some part of my Dad decided with Carew and I that he wouldn’t give us up, despite being really challenged in the parenting and adulting department.

I don’t know what else to say. It has been grey and rainy here for a couple of days, but I know that spring is around the corner. This winter has been long and full of so much, so many learnings and questions, curiosities. I just can’t get my head around it, this human condition. Sometimes people make these crazy decisions, and what is so crazy is that, in those moments, those are the best decisions of each of these people. They are doing their best, even if their best seems, to us, later, as unnecessary, bad, or hurtful. Blah! I don’t know what to say.

I will say that I am thankful that I have brothers and that knowing them completes a hole in my life that had been there for so long. I didn’t know what or who they were, but I knew that they existed, maybe for my whole life. What a world!

Free Weight

Posted on by
Reply

For awhile, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself; who was that, staring back at me with little wrinkles everywhere, eyelids that are changing, a worried brow, gray hair? For a while, I knew that it was, indeed me, but a me that somehow had changed. Now, they have come together and I see the same old face in my current new face.

This blog has existed for about ten years, and so much has happened in those interim ten years. For a long time, I was good at writing regularly, at night, by myself, in my house. But then ten years ago I got together with the man I am now married to, and my evening behaviors changed. To me, writing is a solitary act. I really don’t like to do it when anyone is home, even with the door closed. I somehow feel that it is important not to be interrupted when channeling whatever this is.

Here I am today, writing stream of consciousness style, so please bear with me. Today is my friend Mary Ann’s birthday and she would have been 46. She died two years ago. She visits a lot, but we can’t talk anymore, and that is what I miss the most. I also miss talking to my dad, as we did during his last few years of life. We had had a lifetime of fights (since I was a teenager, so half a lifetime I guess), that we gave up sometime after I got married and we moved Maw Maw into our house after she had a stroke. Taking care of her made me realize that our lives are very finite and we can leave the planet oh so quickly. I vowed to never talk to my dad about anything important ever again, and we began talking all the time.

Today I am thinking about his first, secret-to-us family in England. What is weird about this iteration of thinking, after now knowing for about 2 months, is that I feel the most compassion for him that I have ever felt. I never could feel this compassion for him in life because he never told us about this thing, this majorly big issue in his life that explains so much. When I asked my aunts about him in 2017 and they told me they wouldn’t tell me, I thought all kinds of things.

I thought he had gotten someone pregnant and his parents were really mad. (Partially true)

I thought maybe he had gotten drunk and wrecked a car and his parents were really mad. (No)

I thought he had fought in Vietnam and had PTSD. (Not true; now we aren’t sure if he was ever over there, but he said he was, so……)

Basically all of the things I thought it could be were way more colorful and interesting than a breakup of a marriage in its infancy, and leaving the infants that came along with the young marriage behind, never to see them again. It’s just so damn sad.

Lately, sometimes, I get so sad. It’s like something is literally hanging around my neck with a weight. What’s in the weight? I don’t even know. Is it just me? Am I a melancholy baby after all? It would seem so. I used to be more fun though, I think. Why is this weight so heavy and how do I lift it? I don’t want to feel this sad and anxious all the time; emotions so overwhelming and a general feeling of no one liking me. And coupled with that, a crazy desire to keep everyone happy so that I don’t say things when I am angry or sad or irritated or when I need to. Those two things must be intertwined; some ouroboros that is.

Earlier I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in Texas and we were talking about how reflective the 40s is. This decade is wild and whack. I don’t understand how the shift is perhaps a bit more money in the bank, or perhaps an investment (house) or something, and then people start to die? Right now, I think this trade off, this change, this phase, level-up, or whatever you want to call it, is bullshit.

I also accept that everyone dies and literally they have to die at some point. It just seems that it is weirdly becoming a regular part of life, and I am having to adjust to it and “deal” with it, and try to understand it and be at peace with it. One of the things I learned when Maw Maw lived with us is that death doesn’t scare me. I think I knew this, as I when I got very sick in high school and didn’t die, I think I chose to no longer be frightened of it and be open to it all the time. When Maw Maw was dying, a day that I haven’t written about yet, it was very weird and mysterious. Watching someone leave the planet “is NOT like in the movies” (I said this over and over at that time).

Why can I not seem to get out of thinking about Maw Maw, my Dad, Mary Ann, and my friend Kate (who died this past summer). I am shaken by Kate’s death; I always thought she’d end up working for the federal government and be interviewed on 60 Minutes or something. Mary Ann I just miss. My Dad I just miss. Those two were my phone people; I spoke to them almost every day. I haven’t had my phone people in over 2 years, and I miss them. Maw Maw I miss, but she makes me smile and laugh. She was old and she was ready to roll out. I just miss her, again, because it would be fun if she was here and we could watch a movie. They just seem to live in my mind right now; I am not sure what to do about that.

When I think of my Dad right now I just wish I could tell him that it’s ok, we know, and we just wish he would have told us because everything is fine. It happened so long ago, before he had even met my mom, and I know that no matter what happened, it was not an easy decision and I am sure he didn’t want to make it. My Aunt Margaret told me about his white wedding, and how beautiful it was, everyone in white dresses and my Aunt Helen was the flower girl. She told me she has photos somewhere and I so hope she can find them. I have a hard time imagining my dad as a 26 year old person. How was he ever that young?

I wish I could tell him that it’s ok because it is. It explains so much, almost everything. It explains why we came to the US, and why his family didn’t know that. It explains, perhaps, why we fought so much. Did he feel guilty every time he looked at me? Did he feel guilty all the time, ashamed, anxious, afraid, and did he transform those feelings into rage and anger? (Seems so). It seems so sad, what a waste of time and energy. My mom said that she would have welcomed the boys into the family, but who knows if they would have wanted that, or their mom. I know that with Cody’s situation with his baby mama, she was (metaphorically) driving the bus and made it extremely hard for him to see or have partial custody of his son. It took many thousands of dollars and hours of time to secure those rights. But, he did it, he chose to fight for them. Why didn’t my dad fight for his boys?

I can only imagine how sad he must have been, and that is how I have compassion for him. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t working when they were living in Scotland and found out they were pregnant. I wonder where they moved after that. Did they own their house or rent it? Was it near my grandparents or her parents or neither? How much was he working then, and doing what? I know that he was a cigarette salesman at one point down in Devon/Cornwall, but was that before when he first got back from Australia, or between Outward Bound and Noble Denton?

It is such a drag that I probably won’t know the answers to many of these questions. The tragedy of this story, or at least one of the big ones, is that the boys’ mum died the same year that he did. She died still with his last name, after all that time.

I feel better after writing a bit. Please bear with me as this all comes pouring out. I am so scared to let it, but it feels like a weight lifted when I do.

Grief, again. Grabbing hold of my heart and squeezing it in a vice. Some people describe grief as being shaken by a wild animal, but mine is a cold squeeze and I feel like I can’t scream out even though I want to. If I scream, someone might get mad at me for being too dramatic or sensitive or overly-emotional. If I scream, people might know and worry or be mad at me for making noises in quiet places. I said this to my therapist two weeks ago and just remembered it:

“If I look at it, then I may be sad forever.” Where does that come from? When I say it outloud or read it, I know that it is some part of my brain trying to trick me. I can’t be sad forever, and how would letting this out make me sadder? Perhaps it’s the weight? It doesn’t want to let go?

Indirectly

Posted on by
Reply

My Dad was an incredible storyteller; when he was dying, nurses at the hospital would ask my brother and I if the stories he had told them earlier were true. One asked, “did he really jump out of planes?”. After he died, we received card after card after card telling stories or sharing condolences about the loss of him, and the loss of his stories.

My brother and I always said that we knew that parts of the stories were true, but we never knew how much, or if some of them were real. Turns out that he spoke around a core truth, a center story, about which we only learned three years after his death.

Before he died, he said to my brother and I a great many things. Just before he went into a coma, in which he laid for 9 days, he told both of us individually that he wasn’t afraid to die and he knew this was the next step in his life, in his journey. This conversation, to both of us, was comforting and I think it was to him, too. He repeatedly told us that we had to take care of our mother.

One of the common themes of his stories was his time in Outward Bound, both teaching in Devon and helping boys of under-resourced backgrounds who had gotten into trouble, known as “Borstal Boys”, and trying to get another school started with little success. We always assumed the school he wanted to start was also in Devon. He spoke about it and told us that it was his biggest regret that he didn’t just try harder, that he was sure that it would have worked eventually, but that he felt that he had to earn more money, and so he eventually abandoned it.

It turns out that there was a story at the core of this story, and probably, at the core of all the others, too. It turns out that he was married in 1966, had two twin boys in 1967, and somehow left that relationship and his sons by 1971. He never told my mom this, or my brother, or I, and his family kept this secret until this last October.

This has been so hard for me to write about, despite peoples’ suggestions that it will help. For some reason, writing about this has been difficult because it scares me. My brother and I found our half-brothers (we think) and last week, sent them handwritten letters asking them to speak with us. They are 58, we are 44, and 40. Writing the letters was hard, and putting them in the mail required a lot of energy and focus, Why? I cannot tell you, although all I know right now is that I feel that knowing this story, and sending the letters, put something in motion that I now can’t take back.

When my Dad got together with their mother he was around 24 years old. I can’t even imagine my Dad as a 24 year old. For some reason, he was always old. Like my brother says, he will be 50 in our minds forever. But he was 24, and then he got married when he was 26, and had two boys when he was 27. Just like my husband Cody did. Just like so many people did. And then 4 years later, he no longer had them, had left them, and had asked his whole family to keep the secret, which they did.

For about a month, I was really mad about this. Sometimes, I still am. Right now, though, I think – why? And I know that there must have been a reason why. Tragical romance? Raising twins as babies gone awry? Lack of involvement in child raising on the part of my dad who was a rig worker and was 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off? Parents didn’t like him? All of the above and so much more?

This is the first time I am writing about this. I keep having emotional outbursts that are inappropriate. I keep thinking about my Dad. I have so much compassion for him now; more so than I ever have. I also want to shake him sometimes and I wish I could talk to him. Somehow I feel that this is the core issue that the whole family rotated around, even though we didn’t know what it was. Years ago, in 2017, I asked my aunts (his sisters) if there had been something that had happened that stopped him from having a close relationship with his family, and especially his mother. They told me it wasn’t their story to tell. Now I understand that, and they were right to tell my mom first. But, I feel somehow ok, good, accepting, forgiving, and curious about how I knew something was off.

For years, my heart has ached at my lack of family. I always wondered why we moved to Texas in 1983, and why we never went back to England. Now I know. I feel like I knew about my brothers even before I knew who they were or what they were to me. It’s as if their absence was a presence in my heart, all along.

I hope to write more about this and explore how it is changing my perspective toward myself and my dad and my place in the world. It is wild. I just turned 44, and I have decided I will live to 88. This means that my life just started its second half; just started over again. Right now I feel so sad sometimes, so angry, so confused; what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I supposed to be? But I suppose Destiny interjected the need for me to know the answer to the big question. The answer is: two brothers, twins, born in January, fellow Capricorns. I hope they want to speak to us.

Something New

Posted on by
Reply

It is the end of August – the light is sharpening in its angle and the sun is moving ever lower on the tree line each day. I did something wild and left my public school teaching job about 2 weeks ago, and here I sit, in my favorite armchair, which I share with my favorite dog, wondering.

We moved to Maine one year and two months ago. Moving cross country in your forties is no small feat and it has been harder than I thought it would be. Peoples’ lives have changed and everyone has aged. Houses are so expensive, if you can even get one. Wages, if you’re lucky, just barely keep up with the costs. There is this other aspect of middle-aged life that I am curious about, too. It is the sadness; I wonder where it comes from, and does everyone share it?

With middle age comes a lot of experiences, and I think quite a bit of loss. There are a few people that I know who have made it to their mid forties without significant losses of loved ones, but, on the whole, it seems that the decade comes with an acceptance that people you love are going to die, and sometimes, a lot of them are going to die, closely together. Some of them will be old, and so their deaths will be understandable, but some will be young, and will die so quickly that it is like whiplash when they go.

My friend Kate passed away last month, a week shy of her 50th birthday. She died after being sick for 11 months. I will write more about Kate later; she deserves a deep-dive into my many times and experiences with her and learnings from her, but suffice it to say for today, her death scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know that that could happen: that you could be diagnosed and pass away in 11 months. It cemented a decision I had already made to jump into the unknown.

Here I am. Seems a little nuts. I own a house and in a week won’t have any health insurance. Somehow, it will work out. My husband is such a sweet person but he, too, is struggling with his own middle-aged sadness. I am not sure where his comes from, because he has trouble identifying his emotions. I think he was taught at a young age that emotions were a weak enemy to be vanquished and sent away; he did that, to his current peril. He says his brain feels like mud. I worry about him and want him to have dreams again.

This place is so seasonal, and here we are, in a transition again. A great friend and I were talking today about how fall feels early, but it’s possible that it just feels that way because we spent most of our lives living in a place with no seasons (Texas). I found a red maple leaf on the driveway two days ago, and today I saw an entire red maple tree on the drive home.

Today I drove into Northeast Harbor to go to work and was struck with a feeling that I don’t feel about it the same way that I did before. I am not certain that I have lost some magic feeling, or just that my feelings on the whole are a bit muddled right now. I am worried that I might struggle to be happy anywhere, and what that means to me. I am curious about how I find peace in accepting myself. How do I keep my inherent loneliness at bay? Or, alternatively, how do I welcome it in and befriend the feeling? My husband and I were speaking about that yesterday; about being people who have always felt lonely, and yet, are together.

Does it come from my 0-3 formative experiences? Is it genes? Is it the crazy stressful harsh and intense family of origin I come from? Probably. But what do I do with this?

I am working on a book that is based on many of the writings I posted here about 10 years ago. Over the next month or so, I will be removing those posts as this blog goes in a new direction; this version of me, not the older version. So many lives in this one life, if we are lucky. One of my mentors, one of my professors from grad school, told me to write everything down. I had said that to someone else, so I have decided to take my own advice, and his, and be here now, writing and musing. I think that I am finding some kernels of truth within the annals of my mind, but it is a deep labyrinth in there and will take some time.

Thanks for the love,

The Grasping Hands of Primates are an Adaptation to Life in the Trees

Posted on by
Reply

There was the first spring, when the roses bloomed in February – or perhaps it was even January – I have forgotten. In the front of the garden lay the double pink and the yellow roses, standing stalwart against the North wind. A late February ice storm beat them back to the ground; I almost thought they were lost, but no, roses are strong.

The second spring came similarly; why were all the storms so strong now, as if sending us a message from on high, something we were supposed to notice? There was the hail storm that felt as if someone was pouring golf-ball size hail from the roof amidst a green sky like one of a tornado. The tornado came later, and we all learned that the scariest parts of tornados is that they are invisibly powerful as they tear off your roof.

My roof remained unscathed; my friend sent me a photo of the tornado traveling just above our house on its way out of town where it wrecked a fine line of homes and barns in a path of destruction.

The changes happen slowly; perhaps we should have known this. I should have known this, as an armchair scientist and teacher of critical thinking, discernment. How could it be fast like in so many stories? It was slow.

I often wonder about princesses in carriages; gazing out the windows at the landscape. What did they think about? Were they in conflict with their material possessions in contrast with the lives of their people? My doctor said to me two weeks ago: we all had gotten way too used to all the Amazon, click-a-button and have it shit, it was time for a change.

A change is here; I feel it settling around me and I am trying to choose how to respond. I keep planting trees. I have planted six so far. My husband said last night, “I will be working in the garden on the day they blow the world apart”.

Could it be? Every day I go into a classroom and turn on lights, log into the internet, kids come in and go and get breakfast and later, lunch. We walk up a green hillside dotted with dandelions and if we have time, go into the woods to walk the trails. Children are friends, get mad at each other, stare into their phone screens, cry, laugh, and make fun of me. I love it. The children everywhere are the best part of the gig. I think every day about children in Israel, Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Russia, the Congo, the Sudan, etc. and I wonder do they get to walk into a classroom?

I remember teaching in Philly 12 years ago and how surprised I was at the world within the world I was then a part of. The other day there was an article about that same neighborhood in the New York Times and it made me so sad. Why? I think because I know now that it is worse than it was when I was there, and that fact is so shocking to me. I remember walking to the Dominican restaurant down the block to get lunch or to the little shops under the El to get candy or cookies for kids. There were no homeless people sick from drugs then; there were simply drug markets selling the drugs that would then populate all the blocks, all the corners. I remember taking a photo of a vacant lot with a hurricane fence, overgrown with weeds and wondering why there were no trees there.

For me, peace is coming in tiny moments and I have to actively pursue them. Dusting furniture, looking at the ocean, cooking dinner, planting a tree, refilling a bird feeder; all are tiny moments that are expanding into a greater peace. I look at the pine boughs in late afternoon sun and the way clouds look early in the morning and remember that we are all so tiny in this cosmos, and it will continue long after we are gone, whether through simple mortality or grave human error.

During the eclipse, I watched with awe the power of the Sun, and thought, without that one thing, all is lost! How amazing. We used to think that we were so powerful, before. Now we understand that nothing is certain, clear, or real. Perhaps it is time to jump into the unknown? Perhaps it is time to recognize that our hands are empty, but when we reach out to grasp another, the grasp and the hand are real.

Good night.

I love you, Michelle!

Posted on by
Reply

With her goddess-like beauty (blonde wavy smooth 1920s hair with her beautiful bod! Her smile! Her laugh!), immeasurable intellect, wittiness, caring heart, and a little bit of sass-spice-wicked-impishness, I say goodbye to my friend.

She was lost in the blink of an eye, just. like. that. Gone.

The last two days I have been remembering Michelle and mostly what I find so funny and graceful and beautiful is that I can see her smiling and laughing across a table, like we are sitting at a diner. Her sister today asked me to say a prayer for her and I said I already was: prayers upon prayers upon thoughts and memories and pictures in my mind of her. When I was 18 years old, I thought Michelle was the coolest girl I had ever met. I had met her a few years earlier but actually became friends with her when I moved to Austin. She lived with her smart, cool boyfriend who I had loved and respected for years as one of the good guys in speech and debate. Their apartment was in West Campus, in a small building with a central atrium, open to the elements. They had a patio that looked out on it, and we sat out there and shot the shit. One night she taught me how to make everything I baked vegan by using a banana and some flax seed powder in the place of an egg. Her apartment was painted in all these amazing ways including a room that was matte light blue and metallic silver vertical striped.

Like all of us, there was tragedy as well as success and hilarity. I am beginning to wonder so much about our generation and our tendency toward a) having a history of traumatic childhood experiences b) coupled with addictive tendencies for alcohol, drugs, relationships, etc. There seem to be so many of us that struggle with these two issues, and I suppose that the addictions are the coping mechanisms for the childhoods. I hate to blame the parents, but there is something in our generation; kids raising themselves as parents were absentee due to work or their own addictive tendencies or whatever it was. Parenting now, speaking as a parent myself, is so different than the parenting that I remember experiencing.

Michelle was one of the first people who encouraged me to say “fuck off” to parents who said hurtful, shaming, or mean things to their kids. She was an advocate for the no bullshit philosophy that many of us now understand is this thing called “having boundaries” and “standing up for oneself”. In the 90s, this wasn’t common especially among women who had grown up in the South (or in English-Texan households, like myself). Her attitude of being ok with who she was was inspiring to me as a young adult, and I wanted to be just like her. She took me in like a friend or like a little sister, showed me a world that was new, and was always loving and laughing.

A few years ago she asked me to go to breakfast with her at Kerbey Lane, a small cafe in central Austin that used to be so easy to get into, and now, like everything else in that super-saturated town, is impossible. But Michelle was worth it, so we went and we talked about divorce and how terrible it is, about bad boyfriends and husbands (turns out that the smart, cool college boyfriend became a not great husband (there’s so much of that, too, but that is a meditation for another time), and about what we do next once we learn all this information. That was the last time that I saw her, and she looked great with her beautiful blonde hair and her smiling face and her laugh and her true beautiful self. Since then, we have talked alot, consistently every few weeks, chatting here and there about things both meaningful and not.

In August we lost another mutual friend who I wasn’t as close with but still respected as another one of the good guys of debate (they were few and far between), the person who introduced me to David Byrne and the Talking Heads, Henri Foucault and disciplinary power, the importance of developing our own mechanisms for complex, critical thought and the role that music and art have in helping us find joy and calm amidst desperation. It is terribly hard to know that Brian died the way he did when so many people loved and respected him. It is terribly hard to know that Michelle died so randomly, so quickly; we still don’t know her cause of death, but I know what I want to say to her.

Dear Michelle,

I am so thankful for the people who gave me the time of day when I couldn’t see anything clearly. Now, being older, I realize that I know very little except the importance of being available and loving to others. If I could say this to you in person, I would. I want to tell you how formative you were to who I am now and how thankful I am for that and all these years in between. When I found out that we had lost you in a moment that no one planned for, no one could have expected, all I guess I can do is pray and hope that wherever you are, your energy is at peace. I love you.

Love, your friend, Patience

I hope to take more time to pay attention to my life and the friends in it, spending the time wherever and whenever I can. The one thing I do know after living these last 5 years is that life is so precious and it can be taken away in a moment, a day, a few weeks, a month. You never really know. Grief-love is our ultimate learning experience, I think. That’s all for today.