A Still Life…A Life Still

Last night, on a Spoleto stage in Charleston, a dazzling soprano flamed through a new one-woman opera, Emilie, based on the life of French mathematician and physicist, Marquise Emilie du Chatelet.  She, whose translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still used today; and whose Discourse on Happiness fleshes out a woman’s sensual path to joy, took Voltaire as her lover of many years, as well as  other men of great minds with whom her atomic powers collided.  Her thirsty lust for life harbored, within it, a strange foreboding of an early death, even as her fourth child grew in her womb.  True to her harrowing dreams, Emilie’s expansive, solar kind of life ended in childbirth, in 1747.

Elizabeth Futral as Emilie du Chatelet in Kaija Saariaho's opera 'Emilie.'

On the opera stage, enormous geometric screens filled and emptied with scribblings of calculus, math equations, love letters; the science of moon and tides, of sun and desire.  Her quill scratched madly into the night in an urgent effort to finish her translations before fate stepped in.

I miss the colors already, she sang so plaintively, that I did, too.  The scientist explained her treatise on how colors meet the eye, how violet and gold mate in the mind, and yet stay distinct from one another.  Her writings seem adequate to both science and love – she touched them with the same curiosity.  Caressing her crimson robe, the philosopher challenges:  If God has given us pleasure and suffering, then why must we honor him only with our suffering?  Why not our pleasure, as well?  This  blood hue of red, like the breath of her lover, was a pleasure to her – one that brought her closer to the pulse of God.

At the end of the opera, Emilie walks slowly, daringly slow, up a steep incline to the rear of the stage, her back to us in the dark.  Only the far side of her face is lit by the flames of a roaring sun into which she is drawn.  She is silent at last,  feeling the colors passing through her, as Marge Piercy put it: all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.  The immense indigo night, the yellow flame in her lover’s eye, the red blood she will spill.

I want.  I want to live all of these colors through the prism that I am; the pleasure and the suffering alike lending their angle and hue; and make of them, as I can, a blazing happiness.  And then, when it is my time, I want to walk as she walked — bravely and silently — into the roar of many suns.  Into the vast sum of universes.  I want to walk, at last, into the light which receives all colors and worlds back into itself, as a sun enfolds its flames.

And then flings them back out again – leaping, boundless, forever  – into the open sky.

*Marge Piercy, “Colors passing through us” from Colors Passing Through Us (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

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Army fatigues creeping out of dusty boots plop down across the narrow aisle, knee to knee with us in the Atlanta airport.  His duffle bag exhales.  Cropped hair edges out over his sun-toasted face; eyes bulge behind thick lenses.  He peers at us with a leaky need for conversation.  Our plane is two hours late, and counting.

We hear stories of his twelve tours of combat duty:  Grenada, Desert Storm, Kosovo, more.  Reports on his two daughters, now grown; his wife and mother living side by side in small town Ohio.  Iraqi cell phone, he laughs, waving it helplessly; so with ours he dials home.  Probably at the grocery, he explains when his eighty year old Mother doesn’t answer, getting my favorite things.

After some time, we draw our eyes back to the book, the laptop; his monologue motors on.  As a civil engineer – that’s how he survived thirty years in combat zones.  Neither side wants to kill me, he laughs.  I build bridges for ‘em.  After I leave, they blow’m up.  Though his limbs survive, his mind is clearly burnt by the heat of war.  We rose, at last, and wished him well; we boarded for Birmingham.

The van pulls up with mother peering out, searching the crowd for our faces; Dad back in the wheelchair well, clicked and battened into place.  At the Fish Market, strangers graciously stand to let the wheelchair squeeze by.  We close in around a corner table and indulge our common fondness for oysters.  Dad cannot talk while eating:  we prattle on about the projects we are engineering.

My parents live in a combat zone.  It is a battle to get up in the morning, to wrap the uncompliant body in a net that can hoist it from bed to chair. Extra arms assist the rise of food to the lips or the reach of arms to the sink.  Words are won with singular focus,  the concentrated firing of breath.  The breakfast room is indeed a mess hall;  eating is hit or miss.

In this desert of survival and setback, my father builds bridges, nonetheless.  At the desk, of course, where he still wrings out proposals of peace for the bickering church he loves.  But also in the light of his face, extended to the frightened new caregiver, to the waitress who welcomes him each Sunday noon, to the neighbor’s grandson, little Price, who asks to go see the man in the big chair.  In all of the small crises the day brings, he bridges our worries with a calm, forgiving air.  He glows like the president of a new peaceable world, beyond all barriers, where all is one.

At the airport heading back home, the young man in front of us has no legs.  Chrome shines from shorts to shoes where flesh once lived.  He has no right arm, either; a stump is there.  I am momentarily sunk by the ravages of war.  Or life.  Yet, he speaks with a voice round and strong and solid.  A voice that makes me want to weep, for the compassion and respect it holds in it, his dark face also beaming.  Bridges he is building, too; not with his hands, of course, but with all he’s got left.  All we’ve ever got.  Our broken pieces.  Our broken open lives.  Our presence to one another.

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The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth.

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

(Emily Dickinson)

Sweeping up the heart.  Is that what I was doing, broom in hand, as I rounded up the stray bits of kitty litter? I’d already packed the cans of Fancy Feast and the anti-Fur Ball goo, and helped coax sweet unsuspecting Liddy, my mom’s adored companion, into her carrying box to be carried away to a new home.  I swept as if I was sweeping for mom, cleaning her home as I would if she were going to walk in and inspect.  I folded her clothes and put them back in her drawers, not in the careless way I stuff my own shirts in my crowded dresser, but in the tidy and careful way she did. Putting love away.

In the funeral’s aftermath, the house was empty, my sisters, relatives and friends, eventually, all gone. The silence was too loud, and so I cleaned. I excavated the fridge, filled the recycling bin well past the brim, and swept. Swept the kitty litter, dirt from the comings-and-goings of caring friends, crumbs from the cookies and casseroles that neighbors delivered as the family gathered round. And then I couldn’t find a dustpan. I still don’t know where to put all this. The mishmash of memories, all the bits and pieces of grief.

But I do know this. I know I don’t fully agree with Miss Dickinson  – I do want to use this love again, here and now, in today’s blessed eternity. I’m not ready to put it away, to stash it in a Tupperware container relegated to far reaches of our dreadful attic. I want it to be held close and full, so full it falls out when I least expect it, like a shiny coin or loose lipstick from an inadvertently opened purse—as in the circa 70s photo above.

I am learning this: what we think we have contained, closed up and tucked away has a way of spilling open. Ready to be swept up, again and again.

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Beginning, we never talked about how it would end.

She approached me at the funeral wake of a mutual friend.  Standing among islands of quiet conversation, among women in tailored dresses gripping wine glasses in the September heat, Stephanie leaned cautiously in.  “My mother has just joined your father.”  Her voice trembled a little; tentative, far-away.  I – thick, uncomprehending – looked blankly back.  “A.L.S.”  she said, like the devil had just tagged her, like her draft number had been called.  Fiercely, tears erupted from an underground stream that I did not know tumbled through me until that moment, when I saw it, also, moving through her, and I realized that it was one.

Standing in the still-shallow currents of that stream many months ago, fishing for – what? for some sense of meaning, of solidarity, a more vivid life — we thought to put down in words something of this river itself, how its sorrows flow, how its tributaries join, how its grace moistens thirsty places in us, how it slowly takes everything away.

I know as well as anyone where ALS ends; still, somehow, I never thought about sitting on a hard pew in an unfamiliar church in another state, as I did yesterday, to hear Stephanie speak at her mother’s memorial service.  Or realize how I would drop everything to get there because that’s where the river led, and I, in the simplest way, belong to its flow.

Stephanie looked out on the good people who had carried her mother to Walmart, to choir practice; who cooked her meals, fetched her runaway walker when she fell, who brought messages by her house when she could no longer speak into the phone.  She spoke of gratitude, her voice again trembling with the sheer force of it, as she named the ways we are all carried by currents of kindness, even unto our end.

We never know where the river ends, but only how it carves canyons where we yield, how it deepens our capacity to hold life, how it leads us toward home.  “The river’s injury is its shape.” I’ve learned no more. writes Wendell Berry.  We are what we are given and what is taken away; blessed be the name of the giver and taker.

Sitting in the pew listening to Stephanie’s benediction upon her mother’s life, I could only say,  Amen.  Blessed be the name of the giver and taker.

And blessed are the names of those who join you on the way.

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I live in a beautiful neighborhood with well-kept homes flanked by chipper annuals and gardens featured on garden tours. Our lovely neighbors have lovely manicured yards.

We do not.

We are the rough and tumble rogues who barely know a hedge from a hydrangea. We favor the “natural” part of “natural landscape,” though I dream one day of tending lush cascades of roses and having a lawn that’s not mistaken for a thicket.

This past weekend, we hit a new low. A potty chair and a shower bench, graciously on loan from the local ALS Chapter office, are now parked by what used to be a robust creeping fig, just beginning its post-pruning ascent back across our brick wall. I’d borrowed the seat and bench to upfit a beach house where my mother had hoped to spend her last Mother’s Day. But her recent rapid decline means, instead, they simply sit stacked in my yard, looking like something R2D2 might dance a jig with.

They are reverse souvenirs — remnants of a trip my mother wanted more than anything but did not get to make.  If I leave them there long enough, the fig will nestle up to them, cover their sterile plastic covering with greedy green tendrils.  My neighbors will roll their eyes.

Handicapped accessible yard art.  A topiary of assistance. A totem of  dashed dreams. A cairn pointing to a path I do not want to go down.

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The roses are ridiculous – how they bower my garden walk with more petals and  romance than any day, even in April, can make use of.  Further down the brick path, the lemon trees exhale a fragrance as extravagant as the mock orange just next to it – either one alone would take me to my knees.  Were it not for the jasmine stealing the whole show, up the length of the stair railing — its old, gnarled vines letting go a thunderous clap of perfume.

On Friday, after a long, slow sniff through the garden, I push off into the streets of morning – the play of muscles on pavement, the practice of still mind/still-moving calves. Toward the end of my run, I see the opened iron gate to Saint Phillip’s cemetery, and I slip into the shade of oak trees, walk among  azaleas and tombstones.  As my blood slows, my heart fills with the presence of those buried there whom I have known, and the presence of those, not yet buried, whom I have loved. I invite them in. It has been a practice of mine for many years, this meditation on the grave.

Not just on Good Friday.  Medieval monks, on any ordinary day, dined with skulls on their refectory tables, reminding all of their quick turn at this cafeteria of life, searing this moment, this tasty ale, with new attention. Like them, I find reflections on our common end not morbid, but galvanizing.  They sear my feet to this garden path, nostrils flaring.

On mornings when I am brave, I take this meditation a step further. I ask myself to enter the unimaginable loss of my beloved, just in case life should one day ask me to lay down my most intense joy.  I want to know that even then, after shattering, there could be something solid left of me, and to know what it is.

On this day, already shaken with real losses all around me, I sink down into this bottomlessness.  I breathe in the roses; they will be gone soon, thorns will muscle up.  The jasmine, in summer, is sticky and mean.  Beauty is easily lost.  And love, happiness, can be snatched from our back pocket in a silly minute. A child, vanished. A blood test, insinuating. A note left screaming on the table. In just a random month, these have exploded lives in my orbit.  We are walking through mine fields.

Right there in that beautiful old cemetery on the breeze of an April morning, I go ahead and step on all the mines. I detonate a life without the people and things that just a minute ago I thought I could not live without.  Strip off all my illusions of permanency.  Of entitlement.  Of solidity.   I enter something liquid, like the movement of atoms in space, like the transfiguration of matter into light.  I enter the fantastic, floating, fluctuating present, utterly emptied; no more than a bee on the petal of morning.

When I emerge back out onto the sunny pavement, I gather up my shorn selves, I turn toward home.  This is only practice.  But, through it, I’ve found that what’s left, when all that I cling to is stripped away, isn’t exactly solid.  No, but there is something there; for that I’m grateful beyond words.  More like a feathery thing at the center of if all; glinting in the easter light, aloft on the wind.

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“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”                                                                             Anne Lamott

It was worth it, yesterday, at 4:35 p.m. to arrive at the Sullivan’s Island post office, IRS envelope in hand, to find that my favorite USPS outpost with the helpful cheerful post people had closed at 4 p.m.  It meant I got to backtrack across the yawning causeway, crawl through Mt. Pleasant  traffic mayhem, toward the much busier and grouchier main PO, where I had to fight for a parking space and shimmy inside before they locked the door to become the LPILLOTD (last person in a long line on tax day).  It  meant I got to stay in the car long enough to catch the brief NPR interview with Anne Lamott, who shared Easter week reflections.

In typical deadline daredevil mode, I watched the clock digits slip to 4:57 as I sat in the PO parking lot listening to her calming dreadlock voice, matted smooth and mangy from years of hard living and praise singing. Lamott tells it like it is, dishing out deep thoughts with hilarity and compassion and no hint of bullshit sentimentality. She spoke of “being Easter people in a Good Friday world,” a world reeling from quakes, Kadafis, tornados and rogue, naughty neurons. She recalled the sober words of her friend Pammy, who told Lamott on a shopping trip just two weeks before Pammy would die of breast cancer (in response to Anne wondering whether a certain spiffy little dress she’d tried on was too tight around her hips), “Annie, you just don’t have that kind of time.”

What is Easter time? I didn’t have the time yesterday to lolly-gag in the PO parking lot listening to the radio, but I did anyway. I don’t have adequate time for most of what’s important to me. My “time” at my mom’s gets spent doing chores, scheduling caregivers, worrying, changing the cat litter — the heavy lifting of daily life, the equivalent of trying on a tight black dress.

As Lamott says, “Easter is about the resonance of (Pammy’s) simple statement…  that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that, ‘You don’t have that kind of time,’ you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back.”

Today, like a child hunting for hidden jelly-bean-filled eggs, I’m going to find time. Take time. Spend time. Recalibrate time. And hide it to find yet again.

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The week after graduating college, a car collided with his collarbone, shattering the frame of his face and the easy architecture of his arm, where a guitar had loved to cradle.  His brain, his bones, his life took days to choose their course; weeks to recover, months to reconstruct themselves.  Mouth wired shut, Andrew did time behind the bars of silence, held for a while by the patient attentions of love.

When he arose and walked out the door, at last, he was as Lazarus, given life again, and knowing it for the first time.  He started over.  Got a job, bought a house and filled it with what he loved, took the blonde beast, Stella, into his heart.

At nine o’clock each evening, Andrew unlocks the door at his grandfather’s house and wheels him into the night’s ablutions.  He knows the routine like a musical score and plays it with quick grace and the strong grip necessary to hoist his grandfather into bed.  They laugh over the details of the day.  Andrew soothes the fiery feet, calculates the meds, affixes the bipap mask, all in nineteen minutes flat.

In the middle of the night, sleeping in his grandfather’s third floor study, Andrew hears his name called over the monitor.  Like Samuel, he slips quickly to his elder to tend emergencies, call nurses, change equipment.  In the morning, he is up at 5:30 to rouse Grandfather Bill, dress and cook him poached eggs and grits.  The sausage sizzles; his smart phone plays blue grass in the morning dark.  His day will grow into grocery lists, medicine refills, doctor’s visits, caretakers schedules, new flowers for the deck.

My father’s father was one of nine children; and yet, two generations later, Andrew is the only male descendent left to carry their name forward.  As my father’s light dims, he passes a candle in the night to his grandson; their faces are both lit by it.  When Andrew is old, he will speak of the crossroads where his own life could have slipped away, but didn’t.  He will tell of how he returned to health, the better to tend the sick. How he returned to life and learned to hold the dying.  How he returned from silence to become the voice of those who cannot speak.  He will tell of how he inherited the family name at his first birth; and how, in the dark hours of his second, it became his own.

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At times this blog has seemed largely to be a catalog of loss — it’s been that kind of year.

Among the losses I wrote about early on was the departure of our beloved minister, Bert Keller (with whom Susan shared a pulpit for 3 years), and his wife, Lucille. Spiritual beacons, deep-thinking teachers, gentle wise souls, dear friends and pretty good drinking partners. They fled old Charleston for even older Wooler, England, tucked way far away in the distant corner of North Northumberland — land of moors, horse pastures and sheep.  In the void where their physical presence was, words have spilled in and expanded, filling the emptiness. Big, lovely, voice-drenched words. Lucille’s words, her distinct voice, via emails that are the best damn travel writing I’ve read. Stories of people and customs in their new small town, of the tiny country churches where Bert now pastors, and most recently, a story of an anniversary dinner with their friends Doz and Joyce, and the witnessing of the small blessing and earthy work of a country shepherd.

A story not of loss, but of brand new wobbly-legged life. A birth story for spring.  And so, to add balance and grace to this blog of loss, I share Lucille’s story, in her words (and Bert’s pictures), from the ancient stone-fenced hills of Northumberland:

~~~

“ Oh, what hard work Doz has tending 1200 sheep singlehandedly—I want to begin listing it all, but it would take all night and I wouldn’t scratch the surface.  Man, there’s so much more to being a shepherd than sitting by a brook and composing Psalms!

Most of the sheep are up on the other farm, where the lambing will take place and he has facilities all ready with sheds prepared with individual lambing pens, and holding pens to move them to.  As soon as it starts, he’ll move up there with them and just sleep right there on the hay with them til all the lambing is done.  Ready to step in and help if any ewes have difficulty.

Down where we were the shed had two huge pens filled with random other sheep, some year-olds fattening up for market, some Doz and Joyce’s personal sheep (he’s just the shepherd for the landowner—not the owner of the farms).  As he was pointing out how he crossbreeds, and various characteristics to look for in prize-winning sheep, he pointed to one ewe who was standing apart against a wall.  He said that she’s one of Joyce’s and will be lambing early, probably by the beginning of next week.  (Apparently a tup got to her ahead of schedule!)

As we stood there looking at her, Doz began to revise his estimate.  He said, “Look at her, you can tell she’ll lamb soon by the way she’s acting.  It may be in a day or two.”  We kept looking.  She began pawing the hay-covered ground.  Doz said that was an early sign.  Then he said, “Watch her head.”  She began to lift her head high in the air, stretching her neck.  She began to bleat.  “She’s lifting her head to strain.  She’s talking to her lamb.  Well, she may lamb tonight.”  I couldn’t believe it!

We ran up to the house to give Joyce and Bert the news, Doz put logs on the fire and Joyce dipped up plates of roast turkey & gravy, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, balls of dressing, sausages wrapped in bacon, carrots, beans, new potatoes, and broccoli.  Doz had cleared his plate before we were half through, trotted off back to the barn, and returned a few minutes later to say that the ewe had had the first one, which was—unfortunately for him—a  female (he’d planned on this one being a prize ram).  I couldn’t get my Wellies on fast enough.  Bert joined us this time and brought his camera.

What a thrill—there she was, just struggling to stand, bleating little high-pitched baas, with mother answering, then within a minute wobbling all over the place!  Doz determined that there wasn’t another (they usually come in two’s) and he decided to fence off an area just for mother and lamb so all the other curious sheep wouldn’t crowd them out and damage the little one.  Doz let me pick up the wet and wooly little newborn and put her in the private pen.  He says she’s not as heavy as he’d like her to be, but she has beautiful, perfect ears—the mark of a show sheep.

We walked in the full-moon light back up to the house, back out of Wellies, and sat down to a fabulous dessert of trifle, tea, chocolates, and great conversation by the fire.

I’d like to explain this high I’m on tonight.  Yes, it was thrilling to see a newborn lamb, but that’s not all of it.  I’ll get to see them actually being born when the proper lambing starts.  But there was some kind of magic to it tonight.  It was a surprise, unexpected.  We saw a mother doing what comes to her instinctively—moving away, pawing the ground, straining her whole body, calling to her unborn.

And something more.  This magic happened in these ancient hills, at an old stone farm in England, with a shepherd who is part of a dying breed of men.  There’s little money in wool anymore, and mechanization has made it possible to employ fewer people for large jobs.  In the old days a shepherd was expected to care for no more than a few hundred sheep.  There were many shepherds then.  Now they are expected to care for one or two thousand.  New apprentices are not being trained, and shepherding is a dying art.  Yes, it is an art.  And the magic happened with friends, folks whose musical Northumbrian accents are my own heart’s psalms.

So here we were in a sort of time/place warp, being handed a moment of surprise at the tail end of winter, under a brim-full moon, on our anniversary.  This is a time to hold in memory—and mystery!  “

 

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