Tag: grief

Sliding to the Solstice

Light Play

The light is pretty much killing it this morning. It bashes into the white wall, plants itself on full-moons of log-ends. Shadow shapes appear on the painted cabinet: a crown! a microphone! a fishing line! A hunk of sea glass washes up next to the coffee maker. Light ricochets off snow in valiant sparks, then throws itself at me through window glass. When I try to meditate, it yells orange through my closed eyelids. I tilt my head into a beam of shade and inhale. Oooh, the light says, Aren’t I warm? Don’t you wish you were me? I exhale, inhale. Instead of peacefulness, a bouncy castle in my third eye. Light careens around the house screeching like a three-year-old, yapping like a collie running happy circles on the beach.

Bubbles

Our beloved recreation center closed indefinitely; we restart our membership at the club my salary once subsidized. When I worked downtown, I swam in this deluxe saline pool, killing off my stress by training for triathlons. One grief-coated spring, I counted laps using daisy petals in my mind’s eye and discovered—a month after my sister died–that I hadn’t fully exhaled since her funeral.

Emails and websites chant, “these times,” “these difficult times.” But the late fall rays bounce from the same glass tower across Larimer Street into the morning water. Sun rests on the bottom of the pool in wavy patterns, like sand shaped by ocean currents. Today I am a meatloaf swimming uphill. But my outstretched fingertips launch bubbles that rise, shining, to meet the skin dividing water from air. I approach the wall and flip, then glide through hundreds of miniature circles held in light.

In the lane next to me, a wormhole spouts opens, and—with one graceful kick–my niece swims over from Africa. Her dancing woman tattoo shines through the water, and her smile flashes as she glides by. Heat sears between my shoulder blades in the shape of the equatorial sunburn I earned swimming with her in Lake Malawi, in that time before “these times.” In a blink, she is gone again, and I haul my December gravity up the ladder, then plod my way home.

Night

We stand on the cabin deck under a scatter of stars. Elk have tracked holes that stretch in long shadow lines through the snow. Thousands of Americans died today, and even more will die tomorrow. Today, I forgot to look up at all. The cold air holds the darkness, and I remember how ancient is the starlight, how finite this speck of humanity. The next morning, I sleep late. 5:45 pitch black turns to 6:45 faint light, making me second in line for coffee. We wait out the chill in scarves, under a blanket on the couch. Slowly, the sky brightens. One of us writes. One of us meditates. At 7:20, the switch is flipped, and a spotlight blazes over the ridge of Black Mountain. I yell upstairs, It happened, look! The bare trunks of aspen, standing in a penitent circle, are washed in pink.

Tags 2020, grief, solstice, stargaze, sunlight

Uncategorized

Happy Mother’s Day?

For the grieving moms, children lost to overdoses and gun violence, to illness or accident, all of you who have whisper-sung their lullaby at a funeral.

For the hearts carrying unmarked loss by miscarriage, for those who tried and tried, whose fertility couldn’t meet the call. To the adoptive parents, thinking of the woman who birthed this child you love with every fiber of your own body. For the ones who stepped in through marriage, and stayed, even when the marriage didn’t.

For the pastor mom, working on Sunday. For the trans fathers and trans mothers, on a day when maybe no one really gets it, and the gay and lesbian parents wondering why, even today, we have to use these labels.

To the mothers whose own moms have died. For the stay-at-home fathers and mothers, unpaid and too often unsung. To the mothers living in poverty, no home in which to stay.

To the woman after her abortion, grieved or relieved, and to the terrified teen in Georgia today.

To the incarcerated parents and to the grandparents standing in, to the soldier mom and the brave woman who knows Not this body, not this lifetime.

To all of you, I send comfort. To all of you–not a Happy Mother’s Day–but the day you have, the day this life has given you.

Tags abortion, childless by choice, comfort, grief, infertility, injustice, mother's day, pastor mom, soldier mom, trans mom

Memoir Writing

Blind Spots

When she was a lanky teen, miles taller than I was, my sister Kristin once let our mother pluck her eyebrows. Her blond head on Mamma’s lap, face contorted into a grimace, she allowed our mother to tweeze the rectangles above her eyes into surprised arches. Then Kristin stood in front of the hall mirror, fuming, as tiny red welts appeared where errant hairs had been removed. In the weeks that followed, brown spikes grew back into their natural place above Kristin’s eyes. They were not plucked again.

My mind’s eye sees clear memories like this one only after a year of struggling to write anything worth keeping about Kristin. I stopped every single time I re-read this odd statement of mine: “Over the years, Kristin and I had managed a polite but respectful distance from one another.” It didn’t strike me as a lie so much as just a weak sentence. But those easy words lifted me into a comforting cloud of dishonesty, far away from what I really felt about my adored and feared big sister.

The truth about my relationship with Kristin–and about her life–is complicated and painful. She was adopted by my father and his first wife, making Mamma her third mother. She had unpredictable bursts of violence when I was little, leaving me watchful and wary. And when Kristin died unexpectedly, six years ago, she was only fifty-four. Honest and graceful words elude me. Kristin was a nurse and a daughter, a sister and a rebel. What I called “polite but respectful distance” in our relationship was simple fear. I was slow to open my heart to Kristin, almost to the end.

A few weeks ago, I received a personal and encouraging rejection email from a journal editor who asked for a revision of an essay I had submitted, an essay about my mother and her Icelandic homeland. The rejection note included the words “very well-written” and “interested and invested in this essay”. I was—and am—thrilled. The editor suggested that I expand and clarify the relationship dynamics between me, Kristin, and my mother. I had included Kristin in my story, but only as a ghost, not as the girl who had hit, or the high school graduate who had left for Iceland, then come back, before leaving again, for nursing school in Chicago. In that essay about my mother, I had blindly left Kristin’s story out.

So, day after day, I re-write, giving Kristin real space on the page. I try and I try not to lie. I describe her awkward place in the middle of our big family, where she stormed in justifiable outrage. I see her body, recovered from anorexia and from alcoholism, but never fully healthy. I write about Kristin’s decision not to see any of us for a long time, and about the grace in her decision to come back to us while our parents were still alive. As I write, the tears flow and the words float like icebergs freed from a glacier shelf. I sit at my keyboard, tapping with one hand and wiping tears with the other.

The more I write, it seems, the more I get to trust the process, including my blind spots. And today I am so happy to see the Kristin who looks out of this photo, holding and shielding me. I have missed you, big sister.

kristin & me (2)

Tags grief, Kristin J, Recovery, Sisters, Truth telling, Writing

Memoir

Coffee with Mamma

Every time I make coffee on a cold afternoon, my mother stands next to me. We watch the first splash of boiling water dampen the paper cone and soften the grains of coffee. Our shared breath breathes in the winter aroma. We wait patiently to pour more water, tempering our eagerness.

And I see my mother, gone so long now, standing in my childhood’s turquoise kitchen. She is letting me “help” serve dessert at a dinner party. In the middle of the kitchen table, a round platter holds a ginger brown cake that has been dusted with a flurry of soft, white sugar. Mamma heats the silver coffee pot with scalding water then empties it again. Soon, the surge of hot coffee fills the gleaming container like the will to life. In the dining room, she pours its black heat into delicate cups, and tiny wisps of vapor rise over the winter tablecloth. Candle wax has overflowed into puddles on the fabric. I want to dip my fingers into its warmth and feel the wax form stiffly to my fingertips. But I don’t. Being Mamma’s helper means being allowed to watch her—close enough to touch her, but not moving at all.

A kettle sings fresh steam into our kitchens. The skin of my face tingles with my mother’s tension about how to make everything, always, just right.

And I miss her. The sadness drips, drips, drips. But I’m with her all the time. Every time I smell coffee, every time I doubt myself, and every time I cook a meal. I miss her food–fish cooked into so many different forms and flavors that it expands its skins, dives past its limits. I crave the long, white scar on her left elbow, marking where she fell onto an Icelandic country road from the over-sized frame of her brother’s bicycle. I seek out her mingled scents of cigarette smoke and Chanel perfume. I perceive in myself her outward gaze and her habitual remove.

I want her back, but she’s right here.

I see her everywhere when I go to Europe, in the dignified elegance of the dark-haired women who withstand the unflinching north wind, who wear wide silk scarves and line their lips in red. I see her small feet in every shoe store, and I watch her firmly set mouth as she considers something, then decides. I see my mother in the shape of every island. All fishing villages are hers. All forbidden romances are hers, and every mental illness.

A year ago, on the tram sliding into Edinburgh, my mind buzzed with excitement about a new city, about solitude, about seeing my son. And it washed over me like warm light, a zephyr, how much my mother loved me! I saw her sparkle of joy every time I showed up at her house with or without my little boys. I saw how happy it made her to see me and how far she came to be with me. I sat on that train and remembered the long dazzling years of her health and sobriety. I gave thanks for the hours of travel I’d taken on to savor a seafood extravaganza for my middle boy’s 24^th birthday, just to have time together. And the tram floats along the track. Soon, Mom gets on and sits down next to me. She takes my hand and presses it to her heart. We sit quietly as roads and fields turn to old stone walls and a castle comes into view on the hillside.

edinburgh coffee