Category: Love and Loss

The things which strike me and my family, day by day, as we deal with life without a husband and father whose life was cut short by pancreatic cancer.

Sensational Sunrise

 

Already in this young calendar year, I have become irrationally upset at having missed a sunrise.  This dazzling world‘s irreproducible morning display.

I voiced my sadness to a colleague later that day, telling her how extraordinary the color had been, white-gold waves seeping into bright pink and variegated plum.  It was, I told her, similarly as saturated as the Valentine’s Day sunset I had chased into her west-facing office (from my windowless one) last year, sliding her vertical blinds aside and pointing to the enormous bruised purple heart cloud floating on a wavering sea of yellow-orange crepuscular rays.  (Mmmhuh, she nodded politely.  Evidently I was the only one to see it that way.  It was another particularly tough February 14th.)

Quite rationally, she wondered how I could so vividly describe a sunrise that I had missed.

It took me more than a few beats to realize I hadn’t missed sunrise at all.  I had seen it at its glorious peak as I exited the highway just as the sun was about to emerge on the horizon.

What I had missed was the chance to take a picture, to commemorate a part of it–to be able to share it, to pass it along to someone who had indeed missed it.

I collect sunrises, but do so very imperfectly, and without the overwhelming synesthesia of solitude.  My photographs don’t dance with the glittering indigo diamonds of cross-wakes as fishing boats glide out to sea.  Living things become one-dimensional shadows–a viewer can see only the  most recent vogue pose struck by a silent cormorant atop a mast.  Looking at a picture, you cannot taste the sea air or feel the crunch of underwater barnacles or hear the morning light lyrically unfold.

And in my friend’s observation I may have discovered a key to my writer’s block.

All I can ever capture of loss, of my husband and all other missing beings who have become some part of me, is what I can put into the language of words and pictures.  I want to tell their stories, but the tools I have are, in the supremely elegant words of Primo Levi in A Tranquil Star, “inadequate and [seem] laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather.”  That language “that was born with us, [is] suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are. It doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us.”

Perhaps it has become difficult to write because I feel I should have moved forward–that I have nothing useful to say now that I am somehow on the cusp of a second decade of living with this never-ending grief, now augmented by the half-life of the additional losses we all accrue.

All I can ever capture of a sunrise is what it looked like, but maybe that is–or should be–enough.  Maybe that dollop of beauty, which I am almost always the only person in sight to behold, is enough to share.  And maybe it’s enough to be able to write about what you know of the people you love and have loved, especially those who can no longer tell their stories.

I did not, after all, miss that sunrise.

Let me tell you about it.

I have known people who live and have lived lives filled with kindness, humor, wisdom, and grace.

Please allow me to tell you about them…

 

 

 

 

In Spite of Spirit, In Spirit of Spite

In Newbury, Massachusetts, a lone house stands only a few bubbles short of round on the giving surface of acres of marshland.

In daylight’s glare the exterior is a Pepto pink not found in nature.  Decades of gusting winds with nothing else man-made to stand in their way have aged it less than gracefully, peeling striations away to a jaundiced layer of naked wood.

I had passed by this house for years, but it was not until last year that someone described it to me as a “spite house.”

Now every time I see it I can think of nothing else.

An oxymoron: a gift of spite.  Like sending black roses, or purchasing a roach in an ex’s name to be fed to a meerkat for Valentine’s Day.

It may be that one should never look a gift horse–or house–in the mouth, but the lingering story of this bright pink edifice’s creation is one of malice.

It is said that in the mid-1920s, a divorcing lawyer agreed to build his soon-to-be ex-wife an exact duplicate of their downtown New England home.  He reportedly availed himself of what, in legalese, comprised a contractual “gotcha” in the absence of a term (here, location).  In 1925 his former spouse found herself the owner of this unusable twin, in a desolate location so unfit for human habitation that its pristine pipes could access only salt water, the better to continue malevolent mockery of the marriage’s corrosion.

Salt marsh in the wound.

My own work involves people who have committed violent felonies, yet even I had to pause and marvel at the concept of building something–and I wince at the word “building,” because it embodies creation, an inherent affirmative and additive–for the very purpose of spite.

It seems a betrayal of human expectations and decency, particularly if the back story here is true: that someone could stir the embers of a human connection that began in love and turn them into a “gift” of hate.

I am stymied by the kind of person who would expend assets and energy not in a burst of  creating–or even in an off-the-cuff emotional release of tearing something down–but in twisting something so far from its purpose.  A home as hate, not hearth.  It seems several steps into an abyss beyond neglect, or even retribution.

But I am somewhat heartened not to have encountered anyone who remembers the name of the villain in this story.  He seems to have evaporated but for the community’s collective memory of his misbegotten treatment of a fellow traveler in this world (and that it was an attorney who, as it were, did the deed).

Nearly a century later no one pays any heed to the original marital home, or seems even to know if it still stands, while the orphaned pink house remains tenderly cared for notwithstanding the physical disrepair that attends its inaccessibility.  There remains collective support of a symbol of the person who found herself so abandoned and alone.  At least one society is dedicated to the house’s preservation, and pink stickers of support abound.  Children leave hand-made Valentines fluttering by its worn front post.  Snowy owls protectively cast their golden eyes from its roof.

When the rising sun completes its winter rotation, it bathes the house in such sublime bright orange-gold that one cannot focus on its imperfections, much less its poisonous origin.

The house is no longer a monument to spite; it is more even than a single house, just as Virginia Wolff’s lighthouse was more than a lighthouse:”For nothing was simply one thing.” The lighthouse was not just a yellow beacon; it also was “true.”

The other pink house is true, too.  A thing of enduring beauty and imagination, a memorial to the person whom it was designed to isolate.  A symbol of one man’s unkindness alchemized into the kindness of strangers.

Ringed Round by Green

“If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,
I would rebuild it:
Green inside of green, ringed round by green.
There’d be nothing but new flowers anymore.
Absolute Christmas.”
Donald Revell’s poem of never-ending green, the “furnace of” an emerald eye, is titled “Death.”
I had always thought of black as the color of death, and of green as occupying the opposite end of the metaphor spectrum: the ephemeral lime green of incipient spring flower petals before alchemy renders them in magenta; crocus leaves’ broad, flat matte green, thirstily reaching through fall debris in search of stormy April skies; winter’s verdant evergreen perfume.  Jim’s color.  My own mint green eyes, encircled in teal-tinged steel blue, gifted me by my father before the furnace took him, too.
Green eyes open, studying the horizon, crying in the rain, not heavy-lidded in pain or closed in death.
In Revell’s poem, green eyes are not windows to one person’s soul, but the soul itself–a collective being of its own, holding the dead and the living, children never born to murdered children who did not grow old enough to bring them into this world.
Here closed eyes offer infinite sight.
One flower’s dismantling makes perpetual flowering possible.
Death is life and rebirth.
Black is green.
Green is never gone.

Blindside

The title came first.

I had something else entirely in mind when I arrived on my own blog in the wee hours of this morning to find a season’s worth of recent posts inexplicably wiped off the face of the internet.

They hadn’t just disappeared into the ether, but all previous drafts (but for one weak early one) had evaporated, never to be reconstituted.  I have no idea how that happened; it’s never happened to me before.

I couldn’t truly rewrite a post any more than I could recreate a quilt, or ever fully repair my bruised heart.  The only things I can replay in vivid photographic detail are technicolor memories of human connections.  Some of them are glorious, some quotidian, some so terrible thy hover beyond the limits of language.  As we grieve we shift the balance among them.

It’s impossible to entirely rebuild something that emanates from your heart and mind, to which dimension and nuance is added by revisiting and reevaluating.  Even something as simple as a blog post.

Were I to even have the heart to try, I think I would re-write tightly and tentatively.  I might wonder if the words now were as apt as I thought, whether even the experiences I wrote about were, after all, what they seemed when I first wrote it.

A college classmate wrote “The Blind Side,”   which I only just realized has an extended title: “Evolution of a Game.”

I’ll get back to that.

“The play is now 3.5 seconds old,” he writes, describing an infamous football game that resulted in a grisly on-camera injury.  “Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see.  Now it — and he — is at the mercy of what he can’t see.”

Anyone who has experienced reactive depression, or I suppose life itself, will understand the power of momentum that gathers out of your sight before you find yourself with the wind knocked out of you.

“Surprise me,” I or one of the children would say.

“Pleasantly, or unpleasantly?” their father would reply with a twinkle, and the infinitesimal crinkle of a winking eye, though he would never grow old enough to display what would have been gloriously earned laugh lines.   

And some of us are far more susceptible to the blindside than others.

An even, “That’s disappointing,”  as Jim raised his eyes to the surgeon who had handed him a report on his tumor’s invasive offshoots, while my own healthy body and heart crumbled.    

It’s been very close to eight years since my husband died.

At about the two-year mark, I met someone who had lost a sibling to cancer at the same young age and very close to the same time.  If I’d written about this just four days ago an entirely different story would have been preserved in amber, about the person I considered my best post-widowhood friend through all those years.

As Edward Gorey once wrote, “Yesterday I did not know that today it would be raining.”

But after nearly six years, deep into an exceptionally stressful winter, which anyone who knows me must know swaddles my soul in degrees of icy darkness, I found out–through a single flipping email (terse, yet encompassing abuse of the adverbial form; anyone who knows me is aware that’s going to be poison icing on the cake)–that, at best, things were not as they had seemed.  That maybe I was even part of the “evolution of a game.”

So that can’t be reworked, rewritten, rebuilt.

Maybe I’ll start on those missing posts instead.