~ that silence is indeed golden
~that rest is welcomed and embraced
~that worry surely ceases
~that prayer is laughter
~and laughter is prayer
~that Heath Bar Crunch is plentiful
~ and love tastes as good
~ that friends remain steadfast
~ as Roger Federer holds forth
and
…that blowing out candles
makes wishes come true
Stephanie
The vinyl is spinning, the needle grooving over bumps and scratches; Carole King is feeling the earth move under her feet; the sky is tumbling down. Kris Kristofferson, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, the Boss all have risen up from their long sleep in our attic. After 25 years in their jackets, Joni and Janis and Elton John are undressing their young voices again while I dance around the ritual shrine – a new wooden-lidded record player cranking out memories. Side by side with these classics are crisp squares of another kind: Van Cliburn rubbing up against Van Morrison, Horowitz to Jackson Browne, Mozart’s symphonies moving in on Rubber Soul. My father’s top-notch record collection, passed down fifteen years ago with the rise of CD’s, is now warming up its fingers and string sections on bright yellow Deutsche Grammophon labels. With each playing, I feel myself back in the gold sofa of childhood, a refined passion in the air; the click and drop of record after record, keeping the night alive.
There is a precise stylus, I imagine, which cuts every moment of life into memory’s wide, black circle. I label them and stash them in my attic and sometimes don’t even remember how to release their music anymore. But all it takes is a needle, sharp and clear, to sink into grooves I thought I had flattened with time and neglect. The right needle makes memories rise again, and live, like the strains of a song you once knew by heart. Grief is my needle. It awakens music from the bottomless heart. It is loosening voices I haven’t heard in 40 years. It is spinning them around and around and around, as I feel the earth move under my feet; as the sky comes tumbling down.
Susan
Arc-en-Ciel Water Lilly from Duke Gardens, where I often went when I skipped class
I am a freshman, really, in the school of loss. I am green, naive, but confident in my ability to skip class, skimp on homework and still make a good grade. It’s always worked before. My high school classmates begrudged the way I routinely got lucky — tests miraculously postponed the days I failed to study; papers I slipped in late would still get an A. My recurrent nightmare involves walking into a final exam for a college class I’ve totally blown off all semester (after missing the drop/add deadline) and flailing. I wake gripped by panic and guilt.
The course of study I find myself in now (Intro to Debilitating Disease; Grief 101; Mortality for Dummies) leaves no wiggle room. The faculty is demanding, the assignments unavoidable, the curriculum comprehensive and overwhelming. Even so, I get to walk away after class. I’m auditing, at best. I am not the one who must endure labs and practicals in losing the ability to speak, to chew, to walk.
So I defer to master teachers. Primary sources who articulate the reality of ALS, the raw despair of loss, with brutal honesty. Click on the link for today’s required reading: an essay published in the New York Review of Books by Tony Judt. (thanks to Elizabeth, one of my study partners, for pointing me to it.)
~ Stephanie
The rehabilitation center smells heavily of cabbage and alcohol swabs. At dinnertime, his roommate is watching game shows; on the other side of a hanging sheet, he sits in his wheelchair, upright and exhausted, reading a New Yorker. We eat vegetable soup my mother has brought in plastic bowls in an empty cafeteria. Large panes of glass harden the night into flat black sheets. There is nothing beautiful here. The spirit weakens without the oxygen of music, warmth, privacy, poetry, loveliness, purpose. One is left with procedures. He is learning the proper procedure for getting across a wooden board from wheelchair to bed with what strength is left in his arms. This is taking days.
The next morning, in an old jogging suit, he waits in the wheelchair for the van to carry him home. He has negotiated his early release from this prison of procedures. The van driver is an hour and a half late. He is out of control of almost everything. A pool of stillness settles around him.
A nurse’s assistant comes to say good-bye. She takes his hand and whispers gratefully, I have never met a patient so appreciative as you. From another wing, a nurse arrives to thank him for listening to her questions, offering her solace in a tough time; he hands her a book he has inscribed to her. Orderlies drop by, the ones who have washed his feet and fed him bad eggs; they touch him and give thanks for his kindness. Then, the lilting voice of a nurse from Kenya, Dr. Hull! Dr. Hull! her voice sings as she rushes toward him with tears in her eyes. He extends his hand, she says no, please, and takes him in her arms.
Who can say who is helpless? He arrived backside on a gurney, couldn’t lift his head, take a step, speak a clear sentence. Who can say what we have left to give? Into a place poor in spirit, he brought his Blessed Are. It’s all he had left. His words, sometimes cross and frustrated, could yet forgive themselves into poetry. His voice, slurred and slow, could call deep unto deep. His body, punctured, stapled, bathed, and handled, managed to bring warmth to those who touched him. Without beauty, he searched the eyes of each who came to him, and found it there. That’s all. He was present to the heart of things.
Now, as the last nurse turns away from the wheelchair, kissed with peace, I know again: it is all we really ever have to give for sure. Even in the lousiest places, the most dispirited times. Just this, just this: our presence at the heart of things.
Susan
Cross, by Honor Marks (used by permission, http://www.honormarks.com)
In the late 1980s my mom’s choir was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall. We made a weekend of it—shopping at Saks, trying on couture hats at Henri Bendel, eating at Sardis. Choir crescendos make me teary — I can’t explain it — but those choreographed voices, layered, swirling, interwoven, resonate someplace deep. Suffice it to say I was teary, and proud.
I was proud several summers ago when mom and her choir came here to Spoleto, and filled St. Michael’s Church with the familiar voices I’d grown up hearing—neighbors and a cousin or two who were far from American Idol contenders, just aging Methodists capitalizing on the power of numbers.
But I’m most proud now when I imagine Mom each Wednesday at choir practice, and each Sunday, as she still puts on the red and white satiny robe and processes down the aisle, hymnal held like a guiding light in front of her. She can barely speak, her tongue weak and obstinate, her words a cottony jumble of flat intonations that refuse to carry their weight. But still she “sings,” lipsyncing like a god-fearing Ashley Simpson. And it’s the most beautiful music in the world, this hymn to the unspoken, this silenced anthem of praise to all that is holy, and all that heals. She may not carry a tune, but the choir is carrying her, and vice versa. And isn’t that all we can do, carry each other?
I’ve never been prouder of her—a lone alto, preaching to the choir.
~Stephanie
Halfway through my evening run; I’m sagging, slow, thick. My thoughts fizz and flatten like an old soda pop; no kick. This is the aftertaste of intensive care-giving and the steady drip of grief.
Just then, just then, as I am fading into a trot and think of calling it quits, I look out over the harbor and see, right there in front of me, a smooth sickle slicing through deep water: dolphin fins glinting fire in the slant of the sun. Everything in me stops, suddenly at attention. Standing on the high battery walk, tears from a low place in me begin to surface — for the gift, the stillness, the emptying. The dolphin rise and fall, silent as prayer. Now a rustling sound is gathering behind me. Swoosh-sh-sh-sh-ing overtakes me in waves, low and electric: woodstork going out to sea. 30, 40, 50 wingspans of white roll over me like the train of a great gown rustling over carpet. My spirit, underfoot, lifts and drafts behind them, rising into light.
So this is how we revive, I’m thinking, after spending all our pocket change. Through the lungs, an ear to the whispering sky, the wild surprise of an arc from the deep. Through an empty heart, open to the world as a begging bowl is open, suddenly filling with this pink, crepuscular grace.
Susan
I have no image to accompany this post. I don’t know what silence looks like. Beautiful and pastel? Stark and haunting? Bold and abstract, or a misty landscape?
All I know is that the last sound of my mom’s voice, before ALS began its slow heist, is gone. Before, I could call her, and if she didn’t pick up, I could still hear her familiar ladylike tone – elegant and assured, straightforward, not too sweet, not too harsh. The voice that woke me on school days, called me to dinner, set me straight and cheered me on. “You’ve reached 883-4645….,” Mom announced, crisp and clear.
But then we bundled her phone and internet service, and her greeting message had to be changed. Now when I call home, some mousy gal at the phone company who kindly helped mom out says, in a too soft, very Southern treacly voice, “Hello, you’ve reached blah blah blah….please leave a message.”
Here’s the message I want to leave: Give us back the sound of our mother. Give us back the old recording. Let me put it in a keepsake box, to listen to, again and again—to frame its gentle inflections, to hold precious its tones of assurance and caution. To offer as proof to some nonexistent insurance company for my claim against this senseless robbery.
Stephanie
Life does not accommodate you;
it shatters you.
Every seed destroys its container,
or else there would be no fruition.
Florida Scott Maxwell
(I took this photo a couple of years ago when, in the midst of a New Delhi street riotous with animal, human, and vehicular traffic, I saw a wooden cart, and on it, the most exquisite pyramid of pomegranantes, its crowning fruit bursting open for all the world to taste.)
Susan
My friends called me “Tree” in school. My last name was Wood, and I was tall, and so “Tree” I became. Little did they know that a giant, magnificent Magnolia at the end of our street was my favorite spot. The perch where I retreated, the jungle gym where I stretched and climbed, the spot where I sat and watched bluejays and squirrels, my earliest form of prayer. My branchy pew.
Noel took this picture of Middleton Oak, a 3000-year old Live Oak on the banks of the Ashley River. 3000 years – a medieval cathedral. A monument to root and trunk, leaf and bark, the alchemy of acorn, time and wonder. She is a mystic draped in Spanish moss prayer shawl. A monk whose liturgy is limb and languor.
Shortly after this image was made, the ancient oak got sick, and now she presides over the river bank with diminished reach. Almost half of her right side has been amputated.
We pilgrimage to her often, and I sit under her wingspan, humbled and peaceful. She whispers “rest,” and I obey. She demands “relinquish” and I say, “I’ll try.” I bow to her beauty, her brokenness, her immense rootedness, and say “amen.” This Tree is home.
~Stephanie
Somehow, from the beginning, I understood in India, as never before, that virtue lies in rushing toward each day with its joys and adventures, and even its pain, and that the only real sin is demeaning God’s gift of each day by turning away.
A.M. Rosenthal
In less than a month, I will return to Rosenthal’s India, with its motion and color and kindly friends, its scent of dung and marigold, its heat, muck, anger, laughter, elegance, decay. I want to find what he found: that running forward into each day, afraid or unafraid, seizing the gift as it is given!
But tomorrow, first, I will return to my father’s Birmingham. To a tiny room in a rehab center where his mind is cramped between blank walls. I’m returning so as not to miss the adventure of his going back home, the careful rearrangement of books and bottles within his more limited reach, the fine tuning of a new electric wheelchair, the installation of an elevated desk, the tender placement of his broken, bound, and booted ankle, the dicey scoot across a board with which he has learned to slide from mattress to chair.
It seems a long way from the red and fuchsia swathing my anticipation of India, this trip back home. But it is not. I pause today and remember in my bones: my home and my horizon; my family and my foreign dreams, all, all are calling me to rush into their arms. Calling me into the muck, anger, laughter, decay that is everyday. Even into the pain.
All I have to do . . . is not to turn away. Which is everything.
Susan
Susan
Stephanie
A Still Life...A Life Still 
