Birthday

Amid all this talk of death, I would be remiss not to take notice: today is my husband's birthday. Thirty two years ago to this date, the most important thing in my life came into being.

When my grandfather died a few months after Chris and I were married, we were both at his bedside with my parents. I started crying, and my dad said, "Do you want Chris to take you in the other room so you can be alone?" I shook my head, pointed at my dad's chest, and said, "You." Dad and I cried together in my grandparents' living room, mourning the man we had lost. Ten years later, when my father passed, it was Chris' shoulder I wanted. He has gotten me through the last few months, ushered me through the darkest moments when I couldn't imagine coming through grief to the other side.

Chris and I met during the summer before eighth grade. He tells me that he remembers seeing my family walk into church when we first moved to town and head for the only empty pew—at the very front of the chapel—and that he was instantly enamored by the red ruffled skirt of my perfectly eighties dress, by the sassy “rat tail” in the back of my hair. I remember him, too: a boy taller than most of the others in a tailored black leather jacket, playing the part of the budding musician. Over the next year, a blissfully innocent courtship ensued: he would ride his bike down the steep, winding hill from his parent’s house to deliver a cassette tape of his latest composition, and I would write him poems, fold the paper into twisting, intricate designs, and leave them taped to his locker at school. We fell in love young and fast, a situation that was ripe for the constant angst of the teenage years. Unlike my parents’ whirlwind three month courtship, Chris and I went through our adolescence together, marrying many years later after my college graduation.

It was art that drew us together. We were both passionate very young about our individual crafts, both driven in a way that many of the friends surrounding us weren’t. Even before we could articulate or understand it, I think we recognized the artist in one another; we recognized that here was another person who knew what it was like to want something so desperately, to be driven by an inexplicable need to be heard. We nurtured that in each other. He read my first stories (sappy, clunky, laughable tales in which someone always died a tragic death) and declared them works of utter genius. I stood behind him, my hands on his back, while he sat at the piano and played his first solo piano compositions (flowery, teenage imitations of the new-age music he would later abhor). I declared through the braces on my teeth that he would someday be playing those very songs on a grand piano at Carnage Hall.

We both believed every word.

Fast forward seven years. Three weeks after our marriage, we drove with Iris, a feisty tabby cat, in an overheated U-haul truck into the Arizona desert so that I could start an MFA program in creative writing. My first day on campus, I sat across from one of the legendary writing professors in the graduate lounge and introduced myself. He asked about my husband when I mentioned being a newlywed, and I told him Chris was a student, too, studying music theory and composition. He looked at me and smiled, then rolled his eyes. “Your parents must be thrilled about that,” he said. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me there might be financial implications for our commitment to follow our bliss. We weren’t thinking about securing our future and financial gain; we were thinking about art and passion.

And sometimes we still are. Happy birthday, honey.

You Can't Take It With You

I have become a walking cliche, the poster child for grief. My silence here speaks to that.

The first things after a death are always hard, they say. The first snowfall. The first world series. The first time you find an old picture in your files and something catches in your throat and hangs there, paralyzing.

What could have prepared me for the first major holiday without my father? I've read this everywhere, how difficult holidays can be. How the urge to skip over them or run away can be overpowering. On Thanksgiving, I stepped into that textbook and lived it.

I woke up happy, ready to pop over to my mom's house and spend the day rolling dough and basting a bird. Before I could go, though, I wanted to stop by the cemetery and pay my respects to my dad. I needed to feel that we hadn't forgotten him, that although we were going on with the same old traditions--the same turkey recipe, the same seven-layered jello, the same antique china plates--but we weren't unaware of the hole at the head of the table.

The cemetery was quiet, and cold. Wind chill near freezing, I pulled my hood up and walked to Dad's grave, only to find that the headstone we had painstakingly chosen and carefully worded had yet to placed in the ground, despite a promise from the funeral home to have it done in September. There were four white stakes coming straight out of the ground instead, markers to show where the stone will be lowered and them placed. In sloppy handwriting, someone has written in black marker on one of the stakes: minor. That's all: minor. Lower case.

I got back in the car and circled the cemetery. I stopped just before turning onto the road, pulled the parking brake, and cried like I did the day of his funeral. Five full minutes, surrounded by pioneer headstones, that same old something caught in my throat. Paralyzed. The thought of driving ahead seemed impossible, and it finally occurred to me why: I couldn't bring him with me. I would have to go on to our family Thanksgiving celebration and he was going to have to stay there, six feet underneath the biting wind, nothing but a sloppy handwritten marker as proof that he ever was.

Did I know, on some level, when I left for the cemetery that I was hoping to pick my father up and bring him to dinner? I can't say. If I have learned anything in the past two years, it's that the human brain is a mysterious organ, prone to tricks and deception.

So we had Thanksgiving without him. A first. It was hard, but the truth is, we had a great time as a family. We laughed, we ate until we had to change into stretchy pants. And we missed him.

Monday Poem

One of my dearest friends, in her comment to my last post, pointed me in the direction of this poem. I've read it before, years ago, before I had experienced many significant losses. It's a different poem for me now. Thanks, Shannon, my dear friend, whose blog I would link to right here and now if she would only take it public.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 -- Elizabeth Bishop

Bringing Down the House, Part Two

So, if the ghost of that heartbroken woman, heavy with child, knocks on the door of my new house and demands to know why I approved the demolition of her haunting spot, what will I tell her? How do I assuage the guilt of the apparitions I misplaced, the history I betrayed for an attractive price?

My feelings about the demolition of our old house become even more complicated when I admit that they have more to do with philosophy and idealism than my own sadness at seeing the house go. When we first drove by and saw only the chimney of the cottage standing, the rest of it reduced to a pile of rubble mounded into the center of the 10,000 square foot lot, I felt nothing. Not a tug. I was surprised by my lack of sentiment--I am, after all, the woman for whom every inanimate object is somehow imbibed with hidden meaning, the woman who can throw nothing away, who cried as a school girl the first time I heard the song "If These Walls Could Speak" because I believed walls really could speak. Any yet, when I saw the house where we built our small family of five had been knocked down as artlessly as if it were built from playing cards, two words immediately emerged in my mind: good riddance.

Because yes, old is cool. Preservation is important. The built-in bookshelves and dressers in every room of that old cottage were a million times cuter than our new house with its more modern lines. But I had become so worn down by the issues that come with owning an old house. It was our third old house (the newest of the homes we had owned to that point; our home before that one was built in 1892). Worrying about lead paint and faulty wiring and invisible molds is only fun for so long. Cramming our clothing into closets smaller than our carry-on luggage got old really fast. Although we've owned four homes over the last ten years, Chris and I call our current house our first "grown-up" house. It's still only a measly 1500 square feet, but for the first time in our marriage we have a closet big enough to hold both of our clothing, a master suite with a bathroom attached, and (gasp, gasp, gasp) a two car garage.

Hush, listen, I'd tell that pregnant friend from my old house's past. You can haunt old halls and hold onto the past all you want, honey. But at the end of the day, no house can heal your sorrow. This is something I've learned in the last year: that you can cling to things with the tightest grip you've got, worship them for what they represent, package and store them with care, keep them from the children, and they're still only temporary. I once loved something that weighed over two hundred pounds, stood six feet tall, something that I tried to cling to with every cell in my body, and a disease came and took him down to the earth almost as quickly as the wrecking ball that tore through our old yellow cottage.

What meaning do inanimate things have now? How important is my great-grandmother's old syrup pitcher in the light of such reality? How can I possibly care about the skeleton key that might or might not have once opened the front door of my depression-era cottage?

Bringing Down the House, Part One

When we tore up the kitchen floor of our last house, a 1940's cottage with yellow shake siding and red fir floors, I found a handwritten note wedged into the heating duct. In a woman's curvy scroll, it said, Please come home and I love you and I know you were surprised about the baby, but we can make this work. I had stumbled upon someone's distant heartache, the history of our old house, writer's gold. Always the romantic, always a sucker for anything with history, I imagined a woman running her hands along the plaster walls of the house that was now mine, pregnant and alone, crying in the same kitchen where I fixed my morning oatmeal. She sighs, and I sigh, and we both go about our days, separate times, separate worlds, same old house, same old heartbreaks.

We sold that house last summer. We spent six years gutting and remodeling that old house, never feeling able to keep up with its needs, always hampered by a lack of money and time. Six years of disrepair, of optimistic hope over what the house could be, given the right funds and the right talent and the right time, six years of hair-pulling and anxiety over every unpainted molding, unframed window, unplumbed sink, unpatched plaster hole. It's been four months since we signed the papers on that little cottage, and as of today it looks like this:

Which is to say, of course, that the new owners wasted no time in demolishing the house entirely and building a lovely McMansion in its place. How original. How utterly suburban. While I love the urban growth boundaries of the Portland metro area, I hate that it means in certain areas, all the smaller, older houses are quickly razed to make way for these monstrosities. I hate the new American notion that each family with an average of 2.3 children needs a 4,000 square foot home. But then, maybe this is the guilt talking: I knew when I signed the sale papers on our home that we were handing our house over to a development company, that the walls were coming down. The last two weeks we lived in that house, I wandered from room to room, feeling like Judas must have when he planted that fateful kiss on Jesus' cheek.

Here's where I slept with my newborn babies under my chin, I'd think, walking past the couch, knowing a wrecking ball would soon come plowing through the very space.

Here's where Elias split his eyebrow on the coffee table, skidding around this corner.

Here's where Chloe used to twirl for hours on end like a ballerina, a towel wrapped around her middle for a makeshift tutu.

Here's where that unnamed woman and I cried together next to the kitchen sink, she from the past, me stuck here in the present.

My husband reminded me: here's where we couldn't keep the rodents from getting underneath the house. Here's where the mold grew unchecked. Here's where the fir floors were so old and cracked that they left splinters in our children's feet.

We signed the papers. Kissed the house on the cheek. Didn't bother to lock the doors behind us when we moved, two blocks away, into a newer house right next to my mom's. It's a huge shift for me, someone who has a ridiculous passion for all things old: furniture, books, names, houses. Especially houses. I'm a "stuff" person, like my father was, ascribing emotion and meaning to objects and places. He held onto old cars and boy scout patches from his youth; I hang onto plaster walls and old quilts and antique dinnerware. I've always liked the secret energy of historical things, the romantic notion of unearthed treasure.

When we tore down the living room ceiling in that old house, an old skeleton key fell down from the rafters. We imagined it the original front door key, framed it, displayed it on the wall. We ripped down four layers of wallpaper underneath wood paneling to unearth the original plaster walls; on the back of the last layer--a heavy muslin material--someone had painted images of flowers and leaves, as if practicing on whatever material was on hand. I framed that, too, and hung it next to the key. I imagined us all living in that house together, us and the ghosts from the past: a man in a zoot suit and felt fedora opening the door with that skeleton key, a teenage girl practicing her flower paintings, my heartbroken abandoned pregnant friend from the heating duct. Where are they now that the plaster has been reduced to rubble, this gigantic wooden frame in its place?

Love Become a Decision

In the past month, I have received a number of emails from readers of this blog that have been eye-opening, emails that pronounce the relationship I've had with my parents as unusual in its intimacy. My own husband, after my father's funeral, wondered aloud if I knew how amazing it was that I have as many fond memories of my friendship with my father from my adulthood as I do from my childhood. While I've always been unabashed in placing my parents among my dearest friends, I admit it never fully occurred to me how lucky I have been to be able to do so. The truth is, I like them as people. Were they not my parents, I would still want to hang out with them all the time. Most of my close friends eventually become close friends of my parents, too, for this reason.

(I must divert from this post to add an aside: that paragraph was hard to write, technically speaking. I want to speak of my parents together, as a unit, and yet it sounds strange to use the present tense with my father dead, stranger still to use the past tense with my mother living. Such are the logistics of death you can't prepare for, the proverbial salt on an open wound.)

So this has led me into an inner dialogue about the nature of love and family. At what point is family about blood, and at what point is it about choice? This week I've been reading an amazing memoir by Ralph James Savarese, Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. I came to this book because our family has struggled through the rugged terrain of childhood neurological disorders, but I think it's an important read for anyone interested in the bond of parent/child relationships and the nature of family. Savarese quotes a Molly Peacock poem titled "Altruism:"

What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside there, not just
our insides turned out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well--just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self's heat, love become a decision.

Love become a decision.

How lucky I've been with that decision in my life. How lucky to have had the choice to make.

The Dance of the Cranes

Yesterday, my mother turned sixty. To commemorate the event, we had each of her friends and family members fold an origami crane out of paper of their choosing and write a message on the wing. The result is spectacular--close to two hundred cranes, strung into garlands in the entryway of her house, a very real symbol of the lives she has touched.

To say my mother likes birds would be akin to saying that Ichiro can sort of hit a baseball. Mom is passionate about birds to the point of weirdness. Last month, she rescued a goldfinch that had injured a wing in her atrium. She built it a nest, hand fed it, let it perch on her finger in the sunshine. She named him Orville, after another individual who had difficulties learning to fly but eventually mastered the craft. We received "Orville" reports several times a day until Orville was able to fly on his own out of her atrium, back into the wilds of suburban Portland. The woman has so many bird feeders in her atrium and backyard that during the summer, you can easily count thirty or forty birds in a five minute span while you sit at the kitchen table and sip a cup of tea.

So the cranes seemed fitting. To the Japanese, cranes are a symbol of honor, loyalty, and peace. Honor and loyalty are two qualities that ooze from mom as part of who she naturally is, and peace--well, after the past few years, she can use all the peace that she can get. The cranes' association with honor and loyalty must have something to do with the fact that they are among the rare species of birds that mate for life. Now only do they mate for life, but in the wild, both parents feed and raise their chicks, which provides lots of romantic fodder for anthropomorphizing humans like myself. Whooper parents jointly teach their chicks to drink and eat, catching insects, mice, and small fish, and showing the little ones how to gobble them down. They both stick with their young until they're ready to forge out on their own. It's a feat that, let's face it, most human couples have trouble mastering.

What I love the most about cranes, though, is the dance. When it's time to choose a mate, cranes court each other. They act out a ritualistic dance: each facing the other, they bow their elegant necks, then leap into the air with wings extended and feet thrown forward. They bow again, then leap again, then skip, then leap, then bow, all the while their wings opening and closing spectacularly. Sometimes they'll bow so deep they grab tufts of grass in their beaks and toss them in the air when they come up for their next leap. I respect you, the bow seems to say. I'll work for you, the skip seems to say. I'll rejoice in you, the leap seems to say.

My mom and dad might not have leapt and skipped and bowed on the night they first met, but they fell in love fast and hard. It was a blind date that began with an orange-and-black themed Halloween dinner and ended with passionate embraces, both knowing they had found the person with which to share a life. Four months later, they were married. It was not a perfect marriage. In some ways, they were not compatible. But in many ways, they were. They stuck together. They fed and raised three of us, together.

One of the cranes hanging in my mother's entryway is printed with a photograph of mom and dad in a passionate kiss, seemingly oblivious to the camera aimed at them. It was taken just weeks after their first blind date:



Bow deep, the photograph says.

Stretch your wings.

Leap.

Milepost

I remember having vivid dreams of my grandfather after he died, dreams where he came back to me and he was so exactly him, every single detail, that for days afterword I wondered whether it had actually been a dream or not. It's been disconcerting to me that since my father died, I haven't dreamed of him. There were some random nightmarish dreams in the sleep-deprived week following his death (dreams of him on his deathbed, tumor ravaged; corpse and grave dreams), dreams I can't think about months later without a visceral quiver running the length of my spine. Other than that, he's been absent in my sleep, lurking on the outside of my dreamworld the way he now lurks in my waking one. I think it's a product of readiness--there are mileposts in grieving that we need to pass in order, and there is no way my brain was going to allow me to dream of my father until I was ready for it.

Last night, he came.

I dreamed I was sitting with my family at dinner and there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find my father--my father as he was several years ago, pre-tumor. And it quickly became a lucid dream: I knew that my father was dead, that this was a complete impossibility, that I was dreaming. And I didn't care. I rushed to him and hugged him and he actually even smelled like him, wearing the gray suit he often wore to work, topped off with a Jerry Garcia tie. Bear with me, because I know how cheesy and cliched this sounds, but he hugged me, hugged me, hugged me. I was ten years old again. I heard his voice, the voice I haven't heard in three months. And in my dream I kept thinking to myself finally! finally the dream I have been waiting for! In the way of dreams, we were soon offering bus passes to a Greyhound driver who apparently couldn't see my father (tricky thing, death) and I looked at her smiling, told her I didn't care that he couldn't possibly be alive and boarding this bus, that he was here anyway and she better take his pass.

I woke up refreshed, quiver-filled and grateful. All day I've been carrying it around like a secret gift: how last night, against all odds, I saw my father again. What amazes me the most is how exactly perfect he was--my brain's ability to recreate him down to every last detail, despite how cloudy his death has made my memories during my waking hours. Douglas Hofstader posits a theory of consciousness in I Am A Strange Loop that allows for our brains to physically hold within our neurons and synapses imperfect copies of other people's consciousness. He lost his wife to brain cancer thirty years ago and came to believe that her consciousness, her "sense of 'I'," lived on in his own brain. It's a theory that allows individual consciousness to transcend our own bodies, and lends credence to the idea of one overarching collective soul.

So did my father really come to me in a dream last night? Given what I know about parenting and the young brain, images of my father are literally etched into the wrinkles of the three-pound mass under my skull. All the hugs, the late-night snuggles, the frustrations and arguments, the pictures of him in his gray suit and funky tie, leaving for work after breakfast: they are written in my personal hardrive, unchangeable, a physical part of the adult that I am today. They made me who I am. When I was able to pull from those files last night and have him back for a brief and wonderful time, it was as real as it felt.