A Still Life…A Life Still

I wish I could take credit for the title of this post, but that goes to Patty McClarty, a family friend and faithful Wesley Memorial church member and choir pal of my mom’s.  Patty came up with the motto “Admiration, Love, Support,” like she was Jon Scheyer swishing a championship 3-pointer to beat us in our blog title challenge.

Despite my “damn, I wish I’d thought of that” grudge, we happily incorporated the motto on our prize-winning team T-shirt for the recent Catfish Hunter chapter “Walk to Defeat ALS” in Greensboro.  It was a grand day, an outpouring of admiration, love and support. Two bus loads of my mother’s friends gathered round on the bright, chilly Saturday morning to walk beside her and cheer her on. They donated over $10,000 to ALS research and toward grants to assist local people struggling with the financial burden ALS can bring.

I never realized how far a two mile walk can take you. That short stroll took me deep into my past, walking alongside people I hadn’t seen in decades — the dear McGuinns, the haven’t-aged-a bit Washburns, Mrs. Shaw, the Randalls, Sujette and David Brown, Mary Wood — people whose names, smiles and voices unleashed miles and miles of  memories. And those two miles inched me closer to the future, to a reality I know is on the horizon but I try to ignore,  as concerned friends would quietly ask, “what are your plans when Nancy can’t…?” (fill in the blank).  But mostly, those short sweet two miles grounded me firmly in the present, in the dense here-and-now filled with, yes, one more time — Admiration, Love and Support, which is all that we have, and all that we need.

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In the lush mountains of Nicaragua, the village of Bocana de Paiwas sits quietly beautiful, red dirt paths pumping toward a plain white church at the heart of it. Maria came to my waist, but made up for her height in girth.  She hosted me in her two-room hut by stretching a hammock across the public room where I slept, swinging above skittering chickens and listening to the crackle of fire when she began her tortillas at four in the morning.  As a delegate with Witness for Peace, I recorded accounts of the violence pummeling Maria and her friends; the random attacks of counter-revolutionaries funded by my government.  Her face shone, that was what I noticed.  As she squatted by the fire, as she patted her doughy hands, as she walked through the green jungled mountainside, a basket of tortillas balancing on her head; her face, and the faces of those I met in her village, shone with an aliveness I could not place.

Fillipe had been shot while on watch, guarding the village through the night.  He was not the first to be killed, but the most recent.  The entire village bore this grief.  On a chosen night, after nine days of mourning, they climbed as one body up the dangerous path to the post where he had died and set up camp.  They unpacked coffee and bread and settled into the night singing, praying, and telling stories.  I hunkered among them, feeling into the cadence of their words that I did not understand; the eruptions of laughter and weeping that I did.  Around the fire, wrapped in blankets, they kept vigil; they kept watch; they kept memory and hope burning into the black sky.  Their faces alive with that shining.

At the first morning light, they descended the mountain, crossed the river in canoes, planted a cross by Fillipe’s grave with gestures of finality, and went on with the work of their day.  More alive, it seemed to me, for having been fearlessly present to this death among them.

Maria’s face returns to me each Good Friday, though it has been 25 years since I was her guest.  Still, I remember what she taught me about being a witness to death. I returned to a world that keeps death anesthetized, behind closed hospital doors, darkness shut out; and faces, numb.   Her village taught me about what happens when you take sorrow into your arms, when you enter darkness unafraid, when you welcome another’s sadness into your own soul and hold it there.  When death and life sharpen one another. And what happens is aliveness.  A kind of shining.  You might even say, by the grace of this imense mystery, what happens is an eastering in your heart.

                                                                                                            Susan 

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I miss the click of his toenails on my wood floors — the floors I once worried he’d scratch. I still listen for the jingle jangle of his ID tag, that tinkling symphony that announced “here I come.” I miss the way he’d squeeze his sleek frame, all muscle and sinew, between my legs as I tried to pour cereal or make turkey sandwiches in the morning. I long to rub my hands along his silky black fur, to look into his wise Tootsie Roll eyes.

We were cold blooded people before Casey – the creatures in our care had been iguanas, a cool chameleon, a corn snake, various ill-fated fish. Then, after much mulling over, after weighing the pitfalls and obligations of pet ownership, we warmed up, and adopted a retired racing Greyhound. He of mighty quads and hamstrings, of 40 mph sprints, ears tattooed with his racing ID, six career victories, and a track name that hit me like a message from above: “Stepuptotheplate.”

One never regrets stepping up to the plate. This is what you get when you say “Yes”: a warm tongue that gently licks peanut butter off your finger. A regal hound that turns heads at the dog park and blitzes past other pups. A loyal companion. And eventually, even somehow thankfully, a broken heart.

As with the many names of God,
I repeat his name often –he doesn’t know
my name, he doesn’t know this
is winter, he doesn’t know
he could kill me with those teeth.
He listens to my chatter, my hum,
my chikk-chikk like a squirrel;
my noises keep him interested
and unworried. He scribbles
along the scent of air, his nails click
on wet black stones, he pulls his way
toward red lights on Fair Oaks Avenue,
he leads me back to start.
From “Black Dog” by James DenBoer

~Stephanie

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For as long as I remember, I’ve recognized the low rumble of my father’s dictation chuffing behind his study door.  The muffled cadence, thoughtful pause:  then a rewind, new punctuation, beginning again.  Rivers of brown plastic ferried his words between home and office loaded with correspondence, instructions, inspirations.  Now, as his writing hand slackens, as his travel options dwindle, a tiny filament of tape still connects him to the world.

Yesterday I called; he was despondent.  The full cassette of dictation, just completed, replayed only static.  He had lost a whole day of words – words he fought to form with his recalcitrant tongue – gone into air.  His voice was too weak to begin again.  He will start all over tomorrow.  Words are meant to travel, go out of us, and land in the soft glove of another; caught, returned.  This human desire to connect is unremitting.

I called to tell him that my niece, his only granddaughter, was visiting at my house with her beloved.  That he had gone down on his knees that afternoon and wagered words that risk a lifetime of love, and the words had fallen into the soft glove of her heart.  Received.  Returned.  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

And for that wide, sunlit moment, my father left the futility of his day and came over into this joy.  Will you?  I will.  He came to rest in the boldness of words that went out of one self and came home in another, that spanned generations backward and forward beyond his scope to see, that met in truth and lit all of those who love them with hope.  And in that spacious hope, he lingered; carried on a long river of yes.

Susan

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Moi, back when I could be anything I wanted to be...

“We become who we pretend to be.”                                

“The purpose of yoga is not to achieve a pose, but to quiet the mind. To stop telling ourselves the stories we make up. To mute the running commentary that says, ‘Oh I can’t do that. Or, I’m not strong enough, or limber enough, or graceful enough.'”

These are nuggets I brought home recently — the first one from a pastoral prayer a few Sundays ago, and the second from this morning’s yoga class.  No major “A ha!”;  no earth-shatteringly new wisdom, but I think I’m finally getting the message, or at least beginning to listen anew to my stories.

My continual inner commentary tends to be a little too Dick Vitale (sorry, it is March Madness) — shrill and grating. I’m quick to shortchange myself, and can be self-deprecating in a not-so-attractive way (you see, there I go again). At the end of a long run yesterday, I chided myself for my achy quads and slow pace, rather than acknowledging the feat of completing 10+ miles. In my work life I beat myself up for all I don’t get done rather than feeling proud of all I do accomplish. I repeatedly tell my girls that they can be anything they want to be, but refuse to sell myself this same storyline. I pretend to be less than I can be, or am, so I am not disappointed.

And then along comes ALS, and I watch as my mother gracefully shifts her narrative. The disease tells her, “I will rob you. You will lose this and that; you will be diminished.”  And I hear her saying, “Ok, damnit. Maybe so, but I’ll do what I can do.” She’s pretending to be strong, and it becomes her.

I, too, want and need a new story. It’s time to make believe.

Stephanie

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New Castle, Kentucky

Eternity is not to be pursued.
Run, and it shortens; arrive, and it is shut:
Forward or backward, nothing but the folds
Of time; that you will tighten, fumbling them.

Eternity is only to be entered
Standing.  It is everywhere and still.
Slow, and it opens; stop, and it is whole
As love about your head, that rests and sees.

Eternity is now or not at all:
Waited for, a wisp:  remembered, shadows.
Eternity is solid as the sun:
As present; as familiar;  as immense.

“Is Now” in Collected and New Poems:  1924-1964 by Mark Van Doren

                                                                                            Susan

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We’re playing games again, the hopscotch of time — springing forward, tossing the numbers on our clock ahead and jumping after it, into elongated evenings glazed with the golden touch of a higher sun. Springtime breeds fantasy, and this is one of its best. There is no daylight savings, no more or less light to barter with based on our sneaky maneuvering of the clock. We pay for longer, brighter afternoons with darker mornings, and boy did I pay this morning. Light is what it is, rhythm holds us. My internal clock is not so easily fooled. We swim as do the dolphins, we fly like the gulls, along for the ride as our mass of rock, ocean and atmosphere tilts and swirls around the sun.

There may not be light lost, or light saved, at least by virtue of our creative time keeping, but thankfully, there’s light to be savored. That lost hour that stung so badly this morning is gone for good, but this evening, and next, and on into summer, there will be soft, fading sunshine for dog walks, bike rides, beach strolls, the recalibration of our days  — detox from winter’s closed doors and lamplight.  Oh happy eternal evenings–I’m going out to play.

Stephanie

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There is a field out beyond right and wrong; I will meet you there.     ~Rumi

Rising early, my father wheels to his desk to begin work before breakfast.  For months, he has steeped himself in the history of the Berlin Wall; thick books are veined with his red pen, tracing its surprise overnight rise, its 27-mile outrage severing the lifeblood of a city, and its equally staggering fall.  He once lived in close proximity to the border, and later, when the wall still knifed its way through the heart of a common people, he wrote a book wound around that image calling church and society to dismantle the strongholds that divide us by race, religion, sex, social class. 

Now, thirty years later, Beyond the Barriers is being reprinted; and he is churning through major revisions.  He is making his way through the fallen stones to touch the scar on the landscape, to feel what barbed wires still remain, constrain, and wrongly invade our amplitude.  His weakened hand presses pen to paper the old-fashioned way, slowly, slowly, but with a fierce force of will.  He is devoted with the full length of his life to reconciliation.  To the Oneness we are and can yet be.

There is urgency in his hand, for he is living in close proximity, now, to another wall – the one between the living and the dead. Our cultural mind can no longer imagine this, as perhaps people once did, a permeable boundary.  We have failed to imagine it natural, or graceful, to cross over, trusting the hospitality of the other side.  Death’s realm is severed from us, a fortress surrounds it; and we rarely speak of it, though it cuts through the heart of everything.

Even this week, as a wall is going up in my garden – a strong, tall stroke of definition; my father is leveling his own final barrier to wholeness.  In the mysterious world of ALS, one is allotted time, mercifully or not, to approach the perimeter between life and death, to peer over, to become acquainted, as it were, with the other side – not as an enemy to oppose but as a mystery to enter. One is asked, with each muscle lost, each word eroded, each freedom clipped, to put down that particular stone. One by one.  To dismantle one’s life; slowly dismantle one’s life, and walk knowingly into what is beyond. 

One day, my father will be on the other side of this dividing wall, while I yet grope toward it, darkly.  I want to believe it is not as impenetrable as we think, this wall between us.  That even across this great divide, we are somehow yet joined in a mystery I dare not name. 

There is a place, as Rumi says, out there beyond right and wrong, beyond male and female, black and white, even, I want to add, beyond the living and the dead.  There is a field with no walls at all, where all is one, and reconciled. To my father, I want to say now, I want to say in all the years to come:

I’ll meet you there.

I’ll meet you there. 

                                                                                                                              Susan

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Back to back games on Saturday, and back to back losses. It’s tough going when you’re 9 years old, just learning field positions, getting a feel for dribbling and passing, and barely in shape enough to play an hour long match on a big field, with only 1 sub to bail you out when you’re pooped.  Other players are pushing and shoving; parents, including moi, are shouting on the sidelines:  “Go for it!” “Shoot it! Let’s Score!” “Hustle back on defense!” As if our chorus made any difference.

We’re fresh off the Olympics, done with the Oscars, ramping up for the NCAA tournament. The imperative to win is everywhere. Just do it.

I love the irony that Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for an all-star athlete, presents a different training plan. The battle language so often used with cancer or heart disease or obesity doesn’t hold for ALS. Because there’s no treatment, no cure, we’re not “fighting,” nor will we be victorious, at least not in the way we usually think of wins and losses. Acceptance, not aggressiveness, is the offense. Endurance, more than hustle or might, is the defense.

My daughter was bummed out walking off the field on Saturday. Our consolations and congratulations for a game well-played no doubt sounded lame. There will be more games, and more shouting from the sidelines, hopefully some wins and undoubtedly more losses. We’ve got a long season ahead.

Stephanie

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Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

until they span the chasm between

contradictions. . . For the god wants to know himself in you.

                                                            Rainer Maria Rilke

The power company saw fit to shave one side of our pine tree in its entirety.  Its arms reach only east, now; they beg toward the rising sun.  But its western flank is stripped, powerless to catch the sunset, or mirror the moon.  I ache, looking at it.  It touches a place inside me that needs my opposites branching from the same trunk of self, my new growth needles feeling out in both, in all directions, straining with the tension of holding it all. This is aliveness. 

 I take this from Rilke.  Pray for the other side of everything you think you are to also grow. Stretch till you touch the morning sun, the evening star. Span the chasms of either/or:  choose all.  Only then you will know – from the center, the trunk, the axis, the root – the mystery that you really are.

                                                                                                                             Susan

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