A Still Life…A Life Still

I dreaded visits to The Hester Girls, my great-aunts aging into a strange, ornery brew at their old home-place in Randolph County, Alabama.  Dot, in a tobacco-wrinkled scrunch, snipped and scowled in the corner.  Wide-plank Polly boomed across the bare floorboards in her black lace-ups, cheek moles quivering.  Eula glowed and smiled, beatific.  Relief from their watchful eyes came in the form of pies.  Always freshly-made and casually arrayed on the kitchen table, I hovered there, watching amber beads collect on the high necks of soft meringue.

The other day, Mother pulled out a tablecloth I had never seen – covered, the full length of it, in exquisite, subtle, demanding, beige-on-white embroidery.  It was a wedding gift from Dot, she said, now almost sixty years ago, made from her own leathery hands.  I was astonished; the skill, the long hours, the generosity of it – secrets I had never suspected.

It was the day my Mother turned eighty.  Friends and family were dropping by to plant their kisses on her youthful cheeks. I would drape the table in Dot’s handiwork, newly revealed, and sprinkle it with meringue-y things to sweeten the day.

It didn’t fit the table.  No matter – I’ll swing it this way; I’ll cover the gaps.  I seemed determined to feast that day from the hand of Dot – her legacy now complicated with this beauty.

I realized then that I will be astonished for a long time by the gifts of those who have gone before me.  I will taste the goodness of life on a table they prepared for me – even the ones I misunderstood.  I will feast, and in feasting be surprised by what unlikely gifts still may be uncovered.

Pies, in their high fantasy of froth, will always please me.  Elegant stitches pierce me with their loveliness.  But the hands of the women who line the story behind me  leave their legacy everywhere.  Hidden in the drawers of my heart.

Happy Birthday, Mother.

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Claire, my youngest, insisted it was time to get with the program and made me brave the attic to rescue the plastic bin of  Halloween decorations. But our Tupperware tomb held only one plastic jack-o-lantern and a couple of wilted spiders, so Claire took matters into her own hands. She made ghosts out of recycled grocery store receipt paper, and hung them in our crepe myrtle, then found some orphaned tiles from a bathroom rehab project, and concocted a graveyard. This from my child who follows me around the house like a puppy  —   skittish and scared to be left alone.  Her safe, happy, little haunting.

I’m fascinated by autumn’s macabre harvest. The desperate, clawing fake hands people plant in their front yards like body parts blooming from the underworld. Sheets lynched in trees and dangling skeletons dancing a jig in the breeze.  Small terror becomes our amusement. We externalize our fears and trick or treat ourselves into comfort. Our days of the dead sweetened by a haul of Tootsie rolls and M&Ms.

Claire engraves her faux gravestones with a Sharpie, and plots her costume (a Greek goddess).  But I’m not quite in the spirit yet; it feels a little close this year. Which I guess is what Halloween is all about, a reminder that it’s always close. That the other side lurks behind a thin veil. A sheet just dancing in the breeze.

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E.B. White’s watched his cancer-stricken wife Katherine in her last October, planting bulbs. There was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance, he wrote, . ..the small hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her days (which she knew perfectly well was near at hand) sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in dying October, calming plotting the resurrection.

Crinium lilies – for its sangria hue, its fountain of ruby foliage.  Tiny hyacinth – because they are brave enough to muscle up while winter still stings. Bluebells, for the chorus of them, humming.  Scilla peruviana:  because I want to be surprised.

I dream of a purpled tide rippling along my garden walk in early spring. The bulbs I ordered months ago arrived in brown paper bags this week.  It is time to press their smooth orbs into the earth, nippling toward the open sky.  Time to cover them in black soil and then wait, wait under the dark blanket of winter.  Each must inhabit its darkness, become one with the worm and mineral, the pine bark and warm oven of sun.  They will root and stem out of their own secret compulsions, with no help from me.

A friend admitted yesterday that she is plunged again into an old and searing pain.  Enormous losses, she figured buried and gone, were only waiting in the dark.  Now she must go back for them; she must go down to the forgotten place where she left not only loss, but the hope of love.  Though her face is swollen with tears, it is already more alive than I have seen in months.  She is planting herself, now by choice, in that loamy darkness, her heart stem aiming toward the still-covered sky.  Something in all of us dreams of color and emergence, of purple tipped songs rising from the cold trenches where we have tucked, sometimes, the best of us.  All of us, dying or not-yet dying, at some time must go down like potatoes, like  tubers asleep in the dirt, like promises of resurrection.

Susan

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I felt a bit guilty the two weeks after my dad died, feasting so well on the culinary kindness of friends and neighbors. Jeannie brought delicious chicken casserole, Molly a killer quiche and cookies. Mallory’s twice-baked potatoes and Em’s soups all hit various spots on various nights, when my kids would otherwise have had to settle for scrambled eggs and toast. If an offer came, I graciously accepted, and grief began to taste like homemade bread.

This past Monday night, during the supper hour, I accepted a different kind of feast. I had helped organize an art show as part of a Sophia Institute conference, and Monday evening from 5 to 7:30 was the designated time for artists to drop-off their goods.  Paintings bubble-wrapped and boxed, canvases shrouded in brown paper, larger pieces draped in bed sheets arrived as artists unloaded their trunks (and in one case, a motorcycle compartment, two-wheeled from Ohio) in the rain. The gallery room looked like a UPS store before Christmas. And then we started unwrapping, tearing tape off boxes, lifting the sheets. A creative smorgasbord lay before us. It was as if the artists had brought delicacies to a pot luck supper, and we were tasting everything. Hearty ceramics, yummy oils,  collages layered like lasagna, an accordian-folded book as delicate as a five layer cake.

And after Andrea, our keen-eyed aesthetic mastermind, arranged and hung the diverse assortment, packing big servings and tiny morsels in every inch of space, the room was overwhelmingly delicious. Inspiration worked its unnameable magic, and the artists’ individual interpretations — in pastels, oils, twig, fiber, clay, photograph — and their personal creative passions all morphed into a collective, humbling, robust awe.

The show was titled RealEyes, and artists were invited to contribute pieces that represented what it might mean to look at the world with our real eyes, to realize transformational possibilities. What I came to see is that each of our life experiences, those of illness and health, joy and sadness, wonder and frustration, breakthrough and breakdown, can be made beautiful. I want to put a handsome burnished frame around all that has happened this past year, hang it in on a prominent wall, and wait for the flavors and textures to blend, the colors to emerge, the realizations to continually surprise me.

~Stephanie

Rotunda of Thought, by Bobbi Kitner
part of the RealEyes exhibit, 103 Logan Street, Charleston
through Oct 7

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When I woke early this morning, the dark sky blazed with white light – the lawn strangely alive, the leaves phosphorescent.  A full harvest moon bellowed over rooftops, gleaming off tin and slate and telephone wire.  My husband and I stepped out onto the front stoop in our skivvies to give the auspicious day its due:  autumn, with this white harbinger, arrives.

It means change. Yes, but today I feel the pause inside the change.  It is the season of the autumn equinox, after all, which is the tender balance of all things shifting. The moon says:  be the balance quivering in the heart of change.

At an A.L.S. support group this week, I witnessed strangers around a table poised in the balance of their complicated lives.  A man in leg braces poised between his summer-ripe life and the nearing bite of winter.  A widow poised between her long numbing loss and the exhausting return, each day, of life.   A wife torn between tears and rage, fear and love, strength and emptiness.  It is the season’s story:  we all live in this in-between.

I take the moon’s white light into the place of my heart.  I hold in either arm the contradictions given to me, this day, to love.   I feel the earth shift underfoot.  Nothing is certain, but this constant changing.  And yet.  And yet.  Everything is here, and strangely lit, spinning under the night sky.

Susan

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First of all, thank you, gentle readers and friends, for your kind and loving comments on my Abrupt.Leaving.Slowly post. It’s been three weeks now since my father died. Time begins to work its singular magic. The sun rises and sets; days spin by, each shortening as the planet tilts further toward fall, and grief softens, giving way, gradually, just as summer’s heat dissipates into autumn’s lapis skies. The light changes come September — it’s cleaner, brighter, more forgiving. We’ve endured summer’s  intensity, and now go into this “handing-over time,” as Marv and Nancy Hiles dub autumn.  I for one, am ready. Handing-over is the constant lesson.

I mean this literally — that grief gives way. I’ve found, thus far, that it is unpredictable, surprising, catching me in unguarded moments with quick, sharp pangs, and then I get right back to checking email or tossing the dinner salad. Grief has given a way to learn more about who my father was by listening to memories shared and stories offered by his friends.  And it has made way for simple pleasures, too —  getting handwritten cards with a real postage stamp on them; the bittersweet rich indulgence of Bert Wood’s chocolate cake, baked (with a boozy kick) by my cousin Mallory; the gracefully bowed orchid presiding over the living room coffee table, sent by Noel’s family.

The permission to unplug and be unproductive for a bit is perhaps the best gift that grief has given me. In the lackluster days post-memorial service, I did what I almost never do — curl up with a book, in the middle of the day. Anne Tyler’s most recent novel, Noah’s Compass, proved to be the perfect literary balm. Light enough reading — her typical tragicomic novel — but with masterful depth of character and Tyler’s quintessential quirkiness that makes my dad’s eccentricities seem ever dearer. It’s the story of 61 year old Liam Pennywell, who’s never amounted to much and faces his later years newly laid off from a lame job and mired in quiet desperation. And yet the novel is touchingly funny and a grand celebration of life’s unglorious moments, when we neither sink into despair nor force some faux self-delight but instead, settle for what we have, as mundane and odd as it may be, and accept it as a gift.

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Silence blanketed me after Stephanie’s last post.  We had put our pens together to scrawl our way through our separate parents’ passage with A.L.S., and now, without warning, her other parent plummets into the strange purgatory of Alzheimer’s.    Silence held the sheer swiftness of it, the severity of it slicing through my friend’s already full and overflowing life.

Recently, my father recounted a moment, now almost 40 years past, when he attended his dear friend, John, as John attended his only daughter, dying of leukemia.  My father sat in John’s home, listening to the sound of feet running to and from the bedside above, the sound of moans and terrible aching pain, a child’s fear ringing through the house.  And then, suddenly, all sound was gone.  Silence rushed in, crawling through the house on heavy feet, bedding down.  At last, John emerged out of the bedroom, he descended the long stairs.  My father had the presence to know that there was nothing to say.  Two men of golden tongues; they had gone beyond words.  For thirty minutes and more, my father sat there in the deepest rung of silence, determined to stay faithful to his friend for as long as silence needed them.

Resist the urge to prattle in, I remind myself. Wherever your friend goes, be there.  This is not a time for thought, or reason, or hope.  There is only this dun-colored day, as yesterday laid out its palette for the funeral of Stephanie’s father, without color or the clarity of light.  Attend the silence, opaque as it might be.  It is holding everything.

Susan,
with a favorite remembrance from T.S. Elliot:

“I said to my soul be still,
and wait without hope; for hope would be hope of the wrong thing;
wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith.
But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

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The anti-bedsore mattress puffs in and out, the heaviest breathing in the room. He is framed now by metal bars of the hospital bed, cold to the touch. My father’s face has sunken into something I barely recognize, but still, his cheekbones retain their elegant architecture. I touch them, trace my hand around his sturdy brow, run my fingers through his silver hair.

A sticker by my bathroom mirror reminds me that, “Beauty is a state of mind, not a state of body.”  Not death, I learned this week.  Death is sheer physicality, the body’s brutal work.  First his sharp doctor’s mind gone haywire under Alzheimer’s cruel spell, then a hip fracture, then this fierce, swift descent into emaciated skin and bones I barely recognize.  It happened so fast.  While much of my focus was on my mother’s health, on work and whats-for-dinner?, and volleyball and soccer practices.

I’m practiced at tilling the emotional and spiritual depths of what illness, loss and living all means, dressing deep thoughts up with pretty words and ripe metaphor.  And yet it has nothing to do with blog posts and stringing sentences together, with whether I should have written “sunken” or opted for something more interesting, like “sallowed,” up there in the 3^rd sentence. It comes down to a hospital bed in the condo’s guest bedroom.  A long, wrenching week as a strong heart and good lungs do the slow work of winding down.  Ambient music on the “Soundscape” cable channel, watching a concave chest rise and fall, holding a hand that still feels supple and able, a surgeon’s careful instrument.  Tender words whispered, memories shared, regrets visited and revisited and then somewhere, like a tear-wet tissue, like a last breath, dropped and let go.

In loving, complicated and dearest memory of Tom Wood — January 13, 1934 – September 2, 2010

~~ Stephanie

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Men in blue sarongs bring papaya, jackfruit, and melon to the garden table, already bright with orchids tipping in the tropical breeze.  The banana juice arrives, sweet with date palm syrup, along with a mound of poached eggs, announced by deep warm voices calling me ibu.   Mother, woman. I try to plug my groggy brain into this unfamiliar voltage, halfway around the globe from where I started two days ago.  I’m waking to my first morning in Bali.

It was 3:30 before I crawled under the mosquito netting the night before, so my body buzzes as it re-calibrates time zones, thirty hours of flight, the damp, fragrant air.  I sit and sip as long as the banana frosty holds out, watching barefoot women on the grass weave fronds and blossoms into altar offerings, wondering when the rest of me will show up.

When I find the computer to email home, I am already too late.  A message is waiting for me there, politely waiting through the long funnel of flight, through Detroit, Seoul, Dempassar, Ubud, breakfast – a tender message telling me that my mother-in-law has died while I was slicing through the air over Russia.

My stomach drops.  The thick air spins.  My bare feet touch the cool tile floor; far, far away from the only place I belong at that moment.

There is a fitful surge of calls to airlines and tour operators, the hungering cry to retrace my steps, be home now, lace my arms through my husband’s.  It takes extra brain cells to focus on flight schedules while my heart opens and grieves; while the fresh faces of my traveling companions arrive to begin an adventure I am bent on bailing.

There is not an airline seat leaving Bali, I learn, for eight days.  I will miss the family gathering, the celebration of Phyllis’ life.  My brow is covered in moisture.  Lovely women in sarongs offer me paper napkins and fans to compose myself.  I look down and see that I’ve put on my dress inside out.

So I enter the weaving tour of Timor and Bali.  Divided. I swim at sunrise with monkeys, attend cremation celebrations of other’s people’s mothers, hold the indigo-tipped hands of dyers and weavers.  All the while, my heart is at home.

And isn’t grief, in some ways, just that?  The state of being divided?  While one’s feet move through days, however pleasant the light or kind the people, the heart is underground in a dark, unarticulated place to which we seem to belong for a time.  You cannot focus.  You cannot get things done, in that simple, single-minded way to which you had been accustomed.  When a friend says their heart is broken, I understand they are broken into two pieces.  They are living in two time zones at the same moment.  Both here in this conversation with me, and also far away, in a thicker, silent one. No wonder grief is exhausting.

When I finally got on a flight bound for home, waiting on the tarmac at 2:00 in the morning for take-off — it was cancelled.  Two night later, I got as far as Hong Kong.  On the third day, I was lifted all the way home.  During that long wait of days, I held a beautiful hunger  for home.  For my husband.  For the simple, tender passages we make together.    And now, at last, I am here.  I wake up to breakfast, and the sound of my husband’s voice as he cooks me eggs, as his warm deep voice calls out to  me, as he calls me by my name.

Susan

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The one looking stylish here would not be me, though I suppose that’s debatable.  My sister resurrected this Kodak moment and gave me the faded jewel on my last birthday, no doubt to immortalize my six-pack abs. I love thumbing through childhood photos, oohing and ahhing over pudgy, unselfconscious innocence. But after having children of my own, I look at them differently now. I no longer hone in on cute knock-knees and chubby thighs; I focus on the background. I study the landscaping, the decor, notice books and ash trays on coffee tables, hunt for clues that conjure the past now that I can interpret it from an adult perspective. I see my parents —  take note of what they’re wearing,  how relaxed or happy or stressed they look, and try to imagine who they were back when they were younger than I am now, though that realization (how could they ever have been younger than I am? — they always seem more sophisticated than I ever will)  never fully sinks in.

And in every photo, mom always looks pulled together. Her hair neatly brushed and Aqua-Netted, her clothes tasteful and ironed.  She is a woman of elegance, and even now, especially now, despite the fact that her mouth droops open and saliva doesn’t stay put, she defies the goddesses of mediocrity and sloppiness. She teaches me that beauty is more than skin or muscle or neuron deep. That elegance comes from fortitude, not fashion. That a little girl in pigtails might as well take on the world. Naked or not.

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