One Year Later

It was a year ago today that my mother left this world. I feel her presence inside of me--what she might say or do, how much she enjoyed her life on Earth, how much she loved it when family or friends came to visit us.

Family will be arriving tomorrow for a spring break visit; after that old friends will come from afar for  a visit in April, and after that, another friend. Life keeps delivering its pleasures and I am grateful for every joy, large or small.

I want to thank all of you who left your messages of condolence on my blog, or on Facebook, or by mail or phone a year ago. It meant a lot. We are all on this winding road together, and yet it can be easy to forget that. Thank you for reminding me.

How to Sing Auld Lang Syne With the Dead

My dearly departed number enough to make a chorus. In 2016, the year we've come to revile for its loss of so many beloved celebrities and the loss of hope for a woman president, I also lost my mother. It's a common thing to lose one's parents at this stage of life, but nothing is more unexpected than the expected death of a loved one. We tell can tell everyone about the many trips to death's door and the seemingly incessant knocking there, but once the door swings wide, there's nothing to do but gasp with disbelief. 

What surprises me these many months later is how close I feel to her at times. How I can clearly hear what she might say in a given situation. How the hairdo or the shape of a daughter's lipsticked smile makes me feel as though my mother is just inches from my grasp.

And what surprises me these many months later is how far away she feels. Her clothes are gone, her room repainted, the wheel chair at the dining room table donated. Some days I cannot find her in any room of the house we shared.

It's the same with the man who loved me, my friend Dale, my ex-mother-in-law. I can open my eyes in the deep middle of the night dark of my bedroom and see Dan's bass leaning in a corner, and I can almost hear the strings humming. They are playing George Michael songs on the radio a lot these days, and I'm transported in front of the TV with Dale talking about rock-a-billy. I pick up the pen to write my mother-in-law's name  on the order form for the same box of Christmas oranges  I've sent her for decades. The body has momentary lapses.  

I never look heavenward when searching for the dead. I don't believe in heaven or hell. For me, there is no old man with a beard, standing at a gate. I find neither solace nor fear in those images, though if  I hold fast to those convictions, I must also mourn the loss of  the myth of reunion. How do we all meet again in paradise if there is no paradise? Lately I've come to believe that these stories are translations of a cosmic reality so profound that we mere mortals cannot grasp it. Somehow though, I believe our spirits will merge; we'll be one with love and each other in some indescribable universal song.

New Year's has long been my favorite holiday. I want to start over. I need to start over. But should auld acquaintance be forgot? Do we go forward without the dead? We do and we don't. If it's true that we are stardust (and it is), and if it's true that our carbon atoms were once "part of volcanoes, giant redwoods, Apatosauruses, diamonds, plastic bottles, snakes, snails, lichens, nematodes, photosynthetic algae, the very first cells," as a recent science article in the Washington Post tells us, it's easy to imagine how we are and could become part of each other. "It’s certain that your carbon saw the interior of a star, survived a supernova, sailed through the solar system and splashed down on Earth long before arriving at you," Sarah Kaplan writes. And now for the best part of the article. "Now breathe out. Riding an invisible cloud of carbon dioxide, a carbon atom just left your body, headed for its next great adventure." 

I was holding Dan in my arms when he took his final breath. I was stroking my mom's hair and her hands at her bedside when she breathed out and the next in-breath never came. But I breathed in. I breathed in.

It's fairly certain that if I've ever breathed in the carbon atom of a singer or a musician, it's rendered no effect on me in terms of musical talent. I can't carry a tune. But on New Year's Eve, I'll sing Auld Lang Syne inside my head--or maybe out loud if I've had a third glass of wine.  I'll sing it, arms wrapped around myself, wrapped around cosmic love, while looking up at the stars.  2017 will be a brand new start.

Happy New Year. 

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Thank you for your kind words, your sympathy, and your condolences.

I appreciate each and every expression of your love and understanding.

Dispatch from Los Angeles--Part 2

The book salon feast and its creator, reflected in the mirror.

"Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it."--from Anthony Marra's novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena."

A story set during the two recent Chechen wars, Marra's novel has a lot to say about loss, love, cultural identity, betrayal, survival, war, and the art and objects we humans use to connect, commemorate, and remember one another.

The meal was sublime. Yes, of course there was vodka. We poured it into white creme de menthe to make a cocktail called a stinger and we poured it into pomegranate lemonade. There was also dovga--yogurt soup with greens and herbs. There was beef manti and stuffed grape leaves and a dish with peppers that I wish I could be spooning into my mouth right now. And you might want to lie down in case you feel faint when I tell you that we had homemade halva ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce and salted peanuts for dessert.

Then I dove into my bed for the night where I looked out over the City of Angels. Really.

I went to LACMA again this morning, as has become my habit, where I visited the Art of the Americas Building. It lives up to that rather broad name. The heyday of American furniture and decorative arts, and all that, and in a sort of reverse chronology, on the top floor there's this:

The photo can't capture the experience at all.

I gasped when I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of this gallery with its draperies of reds and greens floating above and its curving walls fashioned of wooded slats. There are one of a kind chandeliers and  lighting that cannot be captured in a photo, and in about 5 seconds you forget all of this because the ancient art is positively stupendous.

And there's this somewhat more modern piece, which was different from everything else, but quite fitting with the larger theme of this 24 hours.

And downstairs, before I walked up the steps to the long, long ago past, there was this:

It fits right in. There were several conjoined couples in the ancient Mexican/Central American clay pieces.

Monday Beach Report/Addendum to the Guy in the Party Hat Cod-Piece

Another Beach walk. Another bag of trash. To follow the thread of this post, you might want to read about the trash I found on Saturday. The comments on that post--on the blog, on Facebook, in person were far less cynical than my own take.

Okay.

So I had the almost-sex dream last night (scroll down to this morning's post) and then at noon I took a 20-minute walk and filled a grocery bag with trash. This is what I found (among other things).

Paper plate and Trojan wrapper

Ribbon

Okay. 

Hahahahah, Dan. What are you trying to tell me? 

Now excuse me, I think I have to go walk the beach looking for a party hat. Or something.

Oh, and while I do that, might I suggest that you all take a look at this New Yorker story  by David Gilbert. It's about love. It's about co-incidence. It's about risk.

Weekend Recap

In chronological order, beginning with Friday afternoon:

My mother weighed in during her doctor's visit at 99 pounds.

On Saturday Piper, our beloved and ancient cat, died.

Later that evening, the man who loves me was taken by ambulance back to the hospital.

I came home from the E.R. in the wee hours of Sunday morning to find I'd forgotten to take my house keys with me and was locked out, thus having to awaken M, who due to Piper's final hours the night before, had barely slept.

Today I turned off my phone and, after briefly checking in with my mom to say good morning around 8:00 a.m., went back to bed and slept until 3:00.

I might be coming down with a cold. But as I sit here with my cup of tea, I am aware that the figurative cup overflows. Many loving condolences re the cat; daughter C's offer to come to my side; friends who've left messages saying that no distance is too far, if I need them; a friend who proofread the galleys for my book while my brain went out of writer mode and into survival mode, another friend who came today and allowed me to do some hard thinking out loud, helped with chores around my house, and brought us strawberries; my mom, who in her frail state is still more than willing to pitch in and help in any way she can; M doling out love to Piper, me, and my mom and offering to drive me to the hospital.

I sit here in the dark, replaying it all. Re-evaluating, re-grouping, readying myself for tomorrow.

Thank you. All of you.

Have Heart; Will Travel

I have forsaken the elderly and the infirm and traveled to be at the side of the brokenhearted. My serene cell-sized room in St. Paul is home base for a few days while I tend to my daughter.

I remember heartbreak. I remember that the morning after I got the news that my marriage was over three friends took off work to take me out for breakfast; that my daughters seemed to take turns watching over me. C. was working in Nova Scotia, but if M. left me alone at home, she was barely out the door when C. would give me a call. The phone rang relentlessly then. Dinner with friends on their backyard deck, the scent of roses on weekend afternoon patios, "no, this one's on me," and "hey, I have an extra theatre ticket," and "how would you like to learn to play poker?" There was an avalanche of care and kindness.

So here I am. A different sort of St.Paul fix-it trip. Hearts are trickier than remodeling a closet though. Much more complicated than a coat of paint. Taking a door off its hinges is child's play compared to closing up the fissure of heartbreak. Heartmending is like building a ship in a bottle, or painting a cityscape on a grain of rice. It's slow and close, and sometimes the tools have to be improvised.

Meanwhile in Maryland, bones continue to mend without me. My brother can get in and out of his recliner without anyone to counterbalance his walker. He can hobble down his back steps to the gazebo. My mother is buoyed by a visit with her sisters. I'm already planning my next trip back there. She and I will go to Baltimore for her treatments, and if she has the energy, I will treat her to a shiny new hearing aid.

But before any of that, there will be California. Three or four years ago I dreaded each return. When the plane pierced L.A.'s layer of haze, the bird's-eye view of the geography of my marriage had me asking where I could escape to next. The terrain is different now.

In a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles there is a signed document that tells me what is mine, and what I have lost. And in my heart there's a smoothed-over place where loss is no longer the defining feature. There's a little paper drink umbrella in that spot now. Love is dozing under it, humming a tune, feet propped up.

The man who loves me will be returning to L.A. a day or so before me. It'll be him I see through the smog when the City of Angels reveals itself. And some emerald summer when my daughter flies into the Twin Cities she might see that the Mississippi curves in a way she never noticed before, or that a certain configuration of lakes and trees seems different somehow and more beautiful than she remembered.

Christian Louboutin Shoes: 700.00 to 5500.00/My Family: Priceless

Watch and read.
Or read and then watch.
Whatever.
The Science Behind the Perfect Home-Wrecker  

And here's the beginning of an essay that's looking for a home.

Red Soles

            “Christian Louboutin shoes have red soles,” my husband told me in the middle of a conversation I should have paid more attention to. I never suspected that a few months later he’d fall for someone who has a closet full of these $800 fashion statements.

            It was a sweltering Sunday afternoon in July when my husband pulled out a dining room chair and informed me that he wanted to marry his new love. Our marriage of three decades undoubtedly had a few worn spots in it, but with our youngest child about to leave for college, I was thinking of a trip for just the two of us. Slowing down. Spending time not wearing shoes. 

 The red-soled shoes had been hovering between us for months.

photo credit: iheartluxe.com