Hush, Hush

If you are of a certain vintage, and especially if you have frequented small musical venues in New England which tend to occupy stone or clapboard churches in seacoast towns, you may hear “hush, hush” in Aimee Mann’s voice. I mean it in a far less ethereal and poetic way.

There have been gaping interruptions in my writing here, and among my photographs and indeed everything else in my life, because for the first time I have had to refrain from writing about an event central to my day-to-day life for well over a year now, and I have found it nearly impossible to write my way around it in these cyber-pages.

I am going to find a way. Complete silence has never been for me, and a good hush is only initially hard to find.

I find myself holding my breath and hoping no human noise intrudes when I catch a glimpse of a butterfly or moth flickering through a lattice of leaves, or see a fledging cardinal or mourning dove’s black eyes peeking out from under a bush while considering whether to attempt to take flight. I do not want to frighten them. Only in surrounding silence, bereft of traffic and chattering sidewalk runners, do I hear the approach behind me of skittish downtown deer, or catch the swishing of a coyote in the distance, camouflaged by sand and seagrass at a nearby Wildlife Refuge. 

I feel the serene hush as music is about to commence, and of its wordless initial notes. Yo-Yo Ma as he sits, eyes closed, about to play. My mind gifts me with the silence before Thaxted, from Jupiter, The Planets Suite, the one hymn I knew absolutely had to be played at my husband’s service. I could not have spoken afterwards had it not unlocked a new path to him when he was just four days’ and also forever not here.

I remember the more and less soothing spaces among words spoken by people no longer in my presence and no longer here. I still hear the way my husband’s quick mind would instantly produce a clever pun or bit of wordplay, and in the silences of every day I hear his soothing voice as he measured every serious word with such uncanny honesty and clarity. My father’s lengthening pauses as Parkinson’s robbed him gradually, but never even close to completely, of the brilliance of his theoretical physicist’s grasp of the silent unseen and he began perseverating about the concrete noises intruding within the room to which he became limited. My mother’s voice before a pandemic infection made it so tentative and sparse as she retreated into her own patches of silent memory, and we could only hope she found more peace there.

Two weeks ago, on another wedding anniversary as the spouse remaining in this world, I had the joy of being able to see both our best woman and best man. I was reminded that I not only hear their voices in my quiet world when they are not with me, but I can recreate conversations with them over decades and find much comfort and laughter there. I can even still hear their parents’ and siblings’ voices, and transport myself back to the less aching portions of growing up and of adult life which are forever leavened by true, enduring friendship.     

There is also a variety of noiselessness that overwhelms all our senses. I have felt it when frozen in time, in shock just from the power of the words which preceded it (“This is your tumor….”). I have, more than once, sat dazed in a busy, noisy hospital cafeteria and heard absolutely nothing around me as indeterminate static filled my head.

But whenever I have been able to, I have taken in sublime views in the profound silence that lets me commune not only with quiet creatures and the anthropomorphic clouds in which I sometimes spot them, but with the beloved ghosts who accompany me everywhere.  

Learning Curve

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December 2012 (c) SMG

Last January one of my daughters shepherded me through the relatively minor technical work needed to begin this blog, giving me a nicely calendared progression of posts upon which to reflect.

Recently I found on my husband’s computer the 500 digital photographs–among tens of thousands he took–that he rated highest.  I studied them to try to discern exactly why these were so special to him.  Some were obvious: pictures of all our children, and other family members, and me (I am a very reluctant subject and he cleverly captured the latter from afar, without my noticing); pictures of nature–from an up-close tiny blue newt on our daughter’s shoe to panoramic mountain ranges–from three continents.

Some–like some of the favorite photographs I am posting here–may require a little bit more interpretation.  One I took at a farmer’s market after depositing a child at school on a gorgeous late August day; another was taken at a wedding, on a boat in Boston Harbor; another, an observer would be unlikely to know, is of flags waving atop a white picket fence in the aftermath of a murderous shooting spree just up the street from our home last spring.  Our little town’s police chief was shot to death, and four other officers grievously wounded.  The town’s lone elementary school’s parking lot had become a staging ground for an armed standoff.

Sometimes the story behind a photograph is nothing like you would imagine.

I decided to take yet another cue from Jim and try to wrap up this year on the blog by finding one photograph and post from each month of this blog’s brief but extremely therapeutic (for me) existence: not necessarily technically the best photograph I took that month, or the best-written post, but the ones which have some special meaning to me.  I may not even know yet why, but I’ll take a stab at it.

HPIM3681
January Sky (c) SMG 2012

January is a close call, because the single poem I would want everyone I know to read, Kindness, is found in another of the month’s first dozen posts (The Other Deepest Thing).  But the post to which I return most frequently is The Things He Carried.   The title is a take on Tim O’Brien’s novel (with the intriguing narrator of self-consciously dubious reliability), and writing this post about the few small things my husband–who was not tied to material goods in the way most people are–carried to the end truly helped me to think about the ways in which an object without any monetary value can be rendered priceless, imbued with stories, with love and friendship and the fondest of memories.

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February 2012 (c) SMG

I had the sense that I wrote nearly constantly in February, although in fact it appears that my roiling winter mind churned out only a few more posts than it had in January.  Again I have a close runner-up (Renewing Rituals), but it was closely followed by Coletanea de Death Cab–the post in which I reflected on being alone–but not entirely–during the long drive back from a memorial service in New Jersey. Continue reading “Learning Curve”

A Couplet and Complicated Compassion

Mill Pond, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
(c) June 2012

Yesterday it did not seem as if today it would be raining.”

Last night actually did give just a hint of rain, after a glorious evening outside at Prescott Park in Portsmouth.   This time Shawn Colvin was not driven from the stage by lightning.

And today it is not raining; it is a perfect summer day, and one of my sons is leading a pack of children up a magnificent mountain.

But I don’t believe Edward Gorey was speaking of the weather.  I think he was addressing those unpredictable, turn-on-a-dime reversals in life that almost all of us will experience and witness with the people we love most.

Today is an odd kind of anniversary, which left its mark like only a handful of other days has.  The word “anniversary” itself seems too inherently festive, because there is nothing celebratory about this day.

It is not the day we found out that my husband’s condition was decisively incurable.  That came a handful of months later.   But on this calendar date, after several hours of waiting for a CAT scan at a hospital outside Boston, a surgeon pointed to the image of Jim’s pancreas on her computer screen in a windowless room and said, gently, “This is your tumor.”

Continue reading “A Couplet and Complicated Compassion”

A Broken Link

Summer Sky (c) 2012 Stephanie M. Glennon

I went back in time, through many dozens of posts, after being alerted that one of a post’s links no longer worked.  In repairing the link by finding another iteration of the same late-in-life Kurt Vonnegut interview, I could not help but re-read the entire interview.

What can I say?  I like to read.  Especially when drudgery beckons.

Strangely enough–given a much more recent post–I realized Vonnegut had mentioned Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and how it “is one of his best and most realistic comedies, but there are some interesting tragic elements.”

I of course had been mentally reclassifying the same play, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, as a tragedy.

I paused at the line in Vonnegut’s interview I once had meant to revisit but long ago forgot: “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.”

It describes Jim so well.

Continue reading “A Broken Link”

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