Tag: time

Just a Story

The other day I ran into my friend’s mother, L. We’ve known each other so long and we have such a mutual affection, she is also my friend.  L is also a suicide widow — her youngest child was my daughter’s age when her husband killed himself. Her daughter and I became friends just after this happened and I recall the shadow of sadness that hovered over their home. But the other day when L and I stood in the bookstore parking lot chatting, she said: “It was 36 years ago. You know, now when I tell the story, I think ‘isn’t that terribly sad’ as if it were someone else”.  Time has turned an awful tragedy into a story she tells dispassionately.

For most of my life, I compulsively filled pages of my journal. I still have them all and sometimes crack a tattered notebook for a glimpse of what I was seeing and feeling during a certain time and place. But not much. I don’t really need to remember every joy or more likely, angst.  I recall wondering when I was in high school, why I felt the need to write things down, half-believing that if I did not record it, it didn’t really happen. Oh, if that were true! Now, when I think about writing — about N’s suicide, my bout with cancer, M’s premature birth — I realize for me, writing is a kind of alchemy.  As if by focusing on telling it, the once-unbearable loses the power to haunt me. The balm of time gets speeded up, a healing distance is created.  In telling the story, it becomes just a story. And perhaps, also remembrance.

Wisdom in a Wall

The leaves of our big maple tree seem to be plunging from their branches. I can see other trees in the distance also raining foliage.  Perhaps shedding quickly lest more damage be done by premature snowfall. Were such a thing possible, it looks like a mass tree anxiety attack manifesting in this strange storm of spinning, torpedoing, floating leaves. Just watching the chaos almost triggers one in me: my heart rate increases and jaw sets.

CHANGE seems set on fast speed today. There is catching up to do. (although we actually gained an hour with clock shifts) Or else? Why the anxiety? That’s the question that gets me. It’s an abstract sense of things happening out of control — and maybe those things are not good. That’s my default. But, rather than let my day get railroaded by this irrational anxiety, (triggered by falling leaves?? yikes) I will finish yesterday’s project of rescuing a tree from bittersweet.

Yesterday, with my heavy-duty lopper and a few choice cuts with a chain saw I cleared the lower trunk of the oak.  The woody vines were so thick, this strangling sucker must have been there for years. How had I missed it?  The tree is set by the road, ambiguously close to my neighbor’s overgrown plot and surrounded by the privet hedge and a sprawling forsythia we mostly ignore. Not until yesterday did I notice the trunk of this oak tree was being swallowed — the orange berries gave the culprit away.

For over an hour I tore at and chopped at the vines, pulling branches and years of debris away from the trunk. I followed the trail of bittersweet, yanking, pulling, cutting — and uncovered a beautiful stone wall. Smothered for years, these great old stones set tightly together, have been here, invisible beneath the bramble.  A forgotten foundation weathering crazy seasons, storms and bittersweet. From my window, I cannot see the stone wall just beyond the hedge, but I know it is there and remembering it, my heart slows. The leaves continue their frenetic fall. I breathe easy. 

Too Soon

Unlike yesterday’s leaden start, this morning’s light is bright and stunning. From the warmth of my bed, newly made with a winter quilt, I push the curtain aside to see the tree-tops from a nearby wood. Swaying in the wind, still-green leaves shiver on the branches they clung to through yesterday’s freak snow storm. Downstairs, I peered out at the yard, surveying the damage: a large branch down, fallen on our raised bed. It broke off of a tree we’ve discussed taking down so we could have more light for the new veggie patch. Nature has done the work for us. The only ‘line down’ is our laundry line that had been attached to ‘Weepy’ our 10 year old willow tree, now laying across the lawn. Weepy had been struggling these last few years, only a few sad sprouts of live branches, an almost silly spray of green. Clearly dying, it still supported our drying clothes and towels through the seasons, its distance from the house was an easy pull on the line from the porch.

After donning rubber boots, I stepped outside into the slush to retrieve the newspaper. The frigid air smells like winter. Squirrels frantically scramble around and up trees, their cheeks fat with supplies. In the distance I hear a flock of geese protesting as they fly, “Too soon! Too soon!”

The Woods

I don’t feel my age (just north of fifty) except when it comes time to visit the stable of doctors now assigned to me. Check-ups have gotten more complicated over the last 10 years or so, especially since a slight bout with breast cancer in 2004. Few of us seem to be able to dodge that diagnosis for long anymore thanks to all the intense screening we submit to. And once in this lousy club, regular, thorough scanning means check-ups that were once uneventful are now fraught with anxiety about what might be found this time.

For instance, yesterday I had a mammogram, bone density and ultra-sound.  Tomorrow I will get the news – hopefully a home-free card for one more year. Or maybe it will be a call-back — for another squishing in the machine or worse, a needle biopsy. I hate those. Hate it all – but try to breathe deeply in these waiting days, savoring the preciousness of thinking I am perfectly fine rather than drown in dread.  But the thing about accumulating years is the increased vulnerability to illness, sadness, tragedy. Once in this part of the forest, we never really get to be ‘out of the woods’ again. I try to focus on patches of light through the trees.

PS: All clear!

Stories to Tell

For ten years now, I have been a board member of a group that works to give little libraries to children who might otherwise not own a single book. The goal is to give at least 10 books over as many months to a child participating in some kind of literacy program. Hopefully, they will develop a life-time love of reading. First Book Fairfield County has provided about 10,000 books a year to children living in financially challenged communities that border the wealthiest towns in this county.

Our group of volunteers has worked together for years. We get together once a month or so for about an hour to review grants, award them or to organize our next fundraiser. We are fond of each other and share a passion for getting books to kids. We also share an easy, warm rapport. But I recently discovered, there’s plenty we probably don’t know about each other.

Last night we held a wine tasting at a beautiful space at Bridgeport University with a view of the Long Island Sound to knock your socks off.  While moving glasses and spreading table cloths, one of my fellow board members and I gabbed about our high school juniors and their college search process. He is a fantastic mortgage guy, warm and generous and funny. He grew up around here, and I always presumed, had spent his life in these suburbs working conservative banking jobs to provide a good life for his family.  The usual story. But I was wrong.

“I told my son, he can go anywhere he wants — and he says he wants to go to Sacred Heart and live at home! As soon as I turned 18, I was on a ship to Africa,” he said.

“Really? Where in Africa did you go?” I asked, always curious to hear about people’s world travels.

“Dakar.”

“Why Senegal?” I asked.

“I’m a tap dancer and I went to meet up with a cruise ship. You didn’t know I was a dancer?” He looked at me incredulously. But how would I have known he was tap dancer? He’d never shared this information, turns out, with any of our group – but I quickly did and we all looked at our friend with new eyes.

An award winning tap-dancer, he worked on cruise ships, traveling all over the world. He was once in a movie with Sandra Bullock. But the best part of the story was:

“I met my wife on that first cruise. I was 18 and she was 16 and lived in California. But we wrote letters for 2 years before we saw each other again – and now we’ve been married for 20.”

With a look of love he glanced over into the corner where his beautiful, vivacious blond wife laughed with friends.

“A tap dancer!” I kept repeating – retrieving my jaw from the carpet. I watched my friend move throughout the night, his grace, his ease, his adoration for his wife and it all made sense. Knowing just that little bit about his adventures has lent a richer dimension to my perception of him. And now, I wonder what amazing stories you have to tell?

To Every Season

Something about autumn – my pining for summer has (mostly) faded and changing leaves, temperature and wardrobe triggers a vague hankering. I too, think about changing. Oh, only abstractly.  My daughter is a junior in high school so I’m not going anywhere yet and savor these last sure two years of her at home. But then… I have begun to think: what next?

I would also be a bit of a fool were I not to ponder this question.  With the business in such a state of flux, who knows how much longer I will have my lovely gig at the bookstore? I should think of alternatives. And I like to.  ‘Alternative’ is a way of being that I embrace – that’s the direction I’d head. This long spell of diligently working 40 plus hours a week, maintaining the mortgage, the life – the stability my daughter craves and loves, has had plenty of joys – and is hopefully not quite over yet. But still healthy, strong and with my wits about me, it’s not terrible for me to imagine doing other things to bring in the bucks. I remind myself not worry too much about the reading-gadget wars and online shopping closing down this era in my life — and have started reading up on raising Alpacas…

We Would Be Haunted


This morning I finished a memoir by an American woman who met and fell in love with her husband in Sarajevo during the war, prematurely gave birth to her longed-for baby in a beautiful European location, and struggled unsuccessfully to sustain a marriage to a tortured soul with an addiction problem. No, not my memoir, The Things We Cannot Change (still agent-shopping) – Janine di Giovanni‘s just published, Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption. 

Reading her compelling story was sometimes eerie – as if some Balkan spell had been cast over us who, by choice, lived through those dark days in Bosnia. So much struggle and sadness in our lives, so many unhappy endings where there once seemed such promise – bright love out of the bleakness of war. And yet, of course we would be haunted: what were we thinking?

Janine di Giovanni’s time in Bosnia and mine overlapped although my experience was very different. She is much braver than me and as a journalist, hers was a very clear and admirable mission. As an international civil servant with an administrative job, I lived a comparatively cocooned and frustrated existence. Traveling from New York to be part of a very cloudy ‘Mission’ – I harbored the short-lived illusion, I might be serving the cause of peace.  My war experiences do not compare to her powerful accounts. But as women in love – with love, adventure, romance, our respective babies, our men – it was like reading my own story. And for the battle against addiction, there is no armor.

She writes beautifully – her heart pulsing in each word as she relives her life with Bruno. I vaguely remember him from the Holiday Inn and remember seeing Janine – such a majestic, striking woman. And I remember her friend Ariane, a French journalist who never seemed to leave Sarajevo yet always appeared to be cheerful. I wonder if they would recall the crazy, dashing Englishman, smartly dressed with an ascot tucked into his Barbour, who drove the ICRC around and certainly flirted and flattered them? He never missed an opportunity to leap from the balconies inside the Holiday Inn connected by the climbing lines one of the journalists set up. I think it was Paul who did this – Paul Marchand, the elegant, warm French photographer with a perpetual cigar was one of Neil’s favorite people in Sarajevo. Just this morning, from Janine’s memoir I learned that in 2009, five years after my husband ended his life, Paul also hung himself. So many memories stirred up – and so much sadness. But regret? No. Like Janine, I marvel at my child and cherish the love from those ashes.

Season Switch

One afternoon last week a cold wind began to blow and in the course of a few hours, the weather switched from summer heat to an autumn chill. Summer’s final days usually make me melancholy — the end of long hours of light and evenings of warmth. Not this year. I feel done with the heat, ready to drag my sweaters out and stop feeling guilty about neglecting the garden.

Between relentless high temperatures, the groundhog’s appetite, invisible creatures that made skeletons of my chard, and my own neglect, the garden is mostly a mess. I wade through weeds to salvage what veggies remain. A variety of peppers, a handful of cherry tomatoes and an eggplant or two.

Basil is hanging in there. But mostly, it’s a wash-out. One sunflower lays bent in the garden although I planted over a hundred seeds.

In a nod to autumn growing possibilities, I replaced the remains of the hanging petunia with a mum but otherwise, am ready to let it all go.  There are still a few weeks left of my CSA vegetable deliveries. Squash, black kale, potatoes and carrots galore fill the crisper in my very small fridge. I am ready to make soups and other slow cooking meals to fill the house with smells of simmering garlic, onions and herbs.

I retrieved my fuzzy slippers and heavy robe from the back of the closet to bundle up for these morning sessions. This quiet hour of writing is now dark and cold. While I sit, morning light gradually seeps into the room and so the day begins. I am ready.

 

Remembering

A friend from the neighborhood dropped by yesterday evening. She was out for a walk and just stopped in on a whim – it’s that kind of neighborhood. We shared a glass of wine and caught up on life. She and I have been friends for many years. When it was time for her to go, I walked her out through the breezeway to the driveway.

The evening was balmy, the full moon rising bright just above the horizon. We stood admiring it a moment and then she turned to me, motioning to the garage and said, “Whenever I walk by here, I think of him, don’t you?”

The garage is where my husband died. Where I found him.

“No. Not really. I mean, when I go in, yes… but… I can imagine others do. I once ran into one of the policeman who came that morning and he told me he thinks about it every time he drives around here. But no, I don’t.”

From the beginning, I was determined that the awful morning would not define me nor my daughter. I thought briefly about moving away but there would have been no moving away from what happened, only the place. And how could I live here if I remained haunted? There were hundreds of mornings when I relived the day but now, the worst images of more than 7 years ago, are tucked away in the recesses of my mind.

It took time – maybe it was years – but mostly, I no longer remember him in that terrible way. In fact, especially of late, my memories and … psychic sense of him, if you will, are benevolent. There have been moments when I have had a profound sense of him watching over our daughter with me. And that he is at peace.  I have not forgotten, but I have healed and I like to think, he has too. Today, when memory triggers will be rife, I wish the same for the lives hideously shattered on a brilliantly clear morning that began like any other day.

Pausing for Death

Yesterday, I caught up with a friend. We gabbed outside her workplace on a busy city street when she stopped mid-story and looking out past me, said, “Bless that person and their family.” A procession of cars moved at the same slow speed, yellow “Funeral” cards on each dashboard. Her eyes filled with tears, the grief of her father’s death only a month ago, still raw.

We watched the motorcade of grievers pass. When an impatient driver scooted across, momentarily breaking the flow, she said, “Now I hate that. You know, in Alabama, even on the highway, everyone stops and waits, even traffic on the other side of the road. That’s just what is done there.”

I’ve been thinking about that image: everyone stopped. Waiting in their cars, people might fiddle with their radio, maybe make a call or, say a prayer and meditate on this passing life.  I think Alabama does it right. A beautiful break in the day-to-day if we are lucky enough not to be in the procession but still hit ‘pause’ for the moments or minutes it takes for a family to follow the body of their loved one to the cemetery and reflect on our own mortality. Just because, as my friend said, that is what one does.  To respectfully pay attention and simply to breathe deeply because we can.

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