7A (You-logy)

My upstairs neighbor passed away this morning. The backstory here is deep and the echo of her absence will resonate.  She was a great, strong woman who broke ground as an editor and a fashion executive. When I moved into my apartment she was about the age I am now; I was a young single mother and as the coop Board president, she took me under her political wing.  For over twenty-seven years I felt protected.  As she aged and became a widow, we were just two women sharing stories and inspiration.  I trusted her wisdom. Last week she turned 99-- a milestone for anyone, and for those who think they want to live past 100, well... it's not easy.  Trying to process this today, it is quite a life-- begun in the 1920's, conquering the city, managing a marriage, career and family, and hardest of all-- witnessing one's own decline and deterioration into old age.  I participated in the last quarter of her life; the rest was a narrative I treasured.  

This morning the courtyard pigeons were in a state.  A woman claimed there was a white dove on the roof,  as though escorting her spirit. I'm not sure of these things. For me this day was long and rough.  We dread the absence of certain people... and it comes for all of us, no matter how we resist. We interpret signs, we pray, but we are not certain.  She herself was not religious; in the end I'm not sure what remains of one's spirit aside from the memories we carry. Most of her accomplishments were achievements, not product. There are no grandchildren to take her legacy forward-- no judgment at this moment. 

For several years she handed me down various articles of clothing-- vintage Prada, iconic expired fashion symbols.  Some of them-- the black ones-- I wore onstage until they almost disintegrated.  It occurs I have a pair of her lace-up boots that barely fit; the discomfort of wearing them this week will feel like a hair shirt, like a slightly painful reminder of mourning. She was not sentimental.  

We shared a passion for literature, and of the New York School of painting which she'd witnessed first-hand.  She knew many of the artists whose work I admire and who passed on long before I got here. Recent years robbed her of her sight, and her hearing was challenging. She tried her best to keep up with news and museum developments. The current fashion world had forgotten her nearly entirely; her generation had mostly disappeared, but in her day she was on the A-list of events like the Met Gala. 

Processing the breadth of a life like this is overwhelming. Nearly thirty years behind her, I already sense that I have entered a kind of era of obsolescence. Despite the weight of what I've seen and done and read, my existence has little present impact.  We are daily fading into the past.  Some of us have our wrinkles injected and our skin renewed, and maybe delude ourselves with a kind of narcissism that we are still relevant. Not that simple.

I've had a recurring dream... set in the long corridors of a building like the Vatican... an empty museum or a kind of mausoleum. I wander these temporal hallways--  the abandoned niches in the wall stripped of monuments and medals. I can almost smell a kind of familial dust, as though the air is thick with cremated moments. Where are the people, I am wondering?  Where are the sculpted images and painted altarpieces? The emptiness is palpable; it is like an architectural enigma.

Demonstrations yesterday were comforting in Manhattan.  They were peaceful and the solidarity and diversity of the crowd was reassuring. I felt nostalgic and safe, despite the menacing presence of armed policemen everywhere.  The thousands of handmade signs and messages were creative and passionate and human. If something happened to one or many of us-- well, our lives had a momentary meaning, a mission. I felt lifted and hopeful.  

Back uptown I ran into a woman who confessed how lonely she was; she'd never found a partner, shunned online dating apps, and just felt passed over. I tried my hardest to encourage her-- to volunteer, enlist somehow, not to sit and wait for life to disappoint her.  My aging neighbor was a graphic reminder of how precious our moments can be, how difficult the latter part of one's life.  Rage, rage, I wanted to urge her. But the news of this one sole death seemed devastating today. For each of the plane crash victims-- the Iranian, Israeli and Gaza casualties-- there is a hole in a loved one's heart.  One day soon we will all become the hole in someone's heart... or at least a brief obituary, an alumni memoriam, a Facebook post. 

My neighbor lived in her apartment for over 60 years; she was married here... her children were born and grew here.  Inevitably the place will be stripped of the medical aids and the old books and vinyl-- the furniture, the charming improvements her husband crafted.  It will be emptied and renovated and a new family will move in. I was once a young family here; I've moved up the ranks to become one of the senior tenants. Time moves on, and as I commented in a piece long ago, New York is like a Grand Hotel-- people move in and out, and we can't hold onto our personal geographical souvenirs. 

I suppose the ultimate lesson of death is the value of life.  We get a huge grace, most of us... we waste time, we squabble and complain and pine.  Some of us are gone too soon; some of us linger too long and become the burden of others.  And some of us, like the man in 11A, are granted an epiphany-- a near-miracle. How to solve these things? To live and die more or less of 'old age' is another lucky variation of the plane-crash narrative; we all end up the same.  I know my neighbor loved life enough to hang in through the challenges of aging-- the aches and pains and indignities... I, too, love this life too much.  Just to sit in the park and watch people-- to see the sunset across the reservoir... yesterday's bagel and a home-made coffee-- a library book.  To sense the passage of time and its irreversible cruelties and kindnesses-- it's more than I deserve, I think sometimes, but I'm determined to earn the privilege of staying and not quite ready to leave, God willing.

11 A

Since the weekend I've been carrying dread like an unborn child. Literally... the quasi-physical heaviness of a pregnancy, without the joy, without the future. The relentless bad news, the threats to human freedoms and everyday security. It's overwhelming.

I watched a kind of forum on human empathy-- and identified as one of those people who prioritizes others-- known popularly as a 'people pleaser' which is not really a positive thing.  We do no good either for ourselves or others, yet it's built-in-- layered-- a little like a second heart which doesn't serve or beat, but simply aches.  There is no surgery for this; I suppose a high dosage of meds would temper it, but my friends know overstrict emotional self-parenting makes me reluctant to even use aspirin.  

My Irish nanny told me at the age of four not to tell my parents but I was a natural-born Catholic.  I asked her all kinds of questions about things, and I was perpetually preoccupied with the reviving of dead insects, plants, birds... tearing up in Church at the hymns and prayers, obsessed with but unable to fully fathom the Jesus story.  I watched magicians pull rabbits and living things from boxes... the personal metaphor of my personal hat somehow implies this secret belief that something mystical is hidden there-- that life is not all objective-- music, most of all, maybe. 

So while we cannot all be heroes, we can perhaps be conjurors... we can be fixers or healers.  Watching a concert at the Central Park bandshell Tuesday evening I realized how completely altered I was with each piece-- as though I physically melted into the cosmic architecture... I could almost sense the composer and his vision.  To be a musician is such a blessed thing... how I miss the gigs of old. Even those sweaty crowded dive bars-- to be part of the crowd-shaping thing... it was a blessing. 

And the actual heroes... well, they are passing with acceleration. Rick Derringer... we all disagreed with his politics in the end, but I had ties to him through various people I worked with.  One night he came into one of those east village bars in the days when cabaret laws enforced a three-people-only-rule onstage.  We were  a well-working trio... Rick, to participate, sat on a barstool across from the bandstand, plugged in and played like a phantom genius inhabiting our amplifiers.  I tried to remember that, and to honor his passing.

There are times when politics must take a back seat.  The irony of that plane crash yesterday-- in a second we recognize tragedy... the enormity and horror of a scene like this... the human grief... the families... and yet daily we hear news of missiles and war, and equally devastating destruction-- death and hideous injuries... and we digest this. What is wrong with us?  How have we grown immune to the architecture of suffering on a large scale?  Because it doesn't affect our neighborhood?  

I read and I read.  I watch way too much television.  I have friends who tell me they don't watch news... it's too terrible.  I cannot help feeling this responsibility-- just to know, and yet I cannot help. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading books... they are both comforting and alarming... the past has taught this generation little; we seem to be repeating the same mistakes in different clothing. There is no DNA to identify a situation, but the parallels are disturbing.  The suppression of freedom-- the support of freedom to be racist and uncompassionate... what is our human responsibility? If a nation decides to attack another, it's a hideous barbaric choice. But still there are good people on both sides; and one cannot condone anti-semitism because the actions of Israel are aggressive and inhumane.  No religions teach this kind of thing. 

People like me, my psychiatrist friend tells me, get cancer.  They suffer and cannot exorcize what compels them to live inside this chronic empathic cloud. If it's not one thing, it's another.  I worry.  My son is my absolute source of light.  He, fortunately, has not inherited my emotional impairment.  He is smart and forward-thinking and extremely functional. Hats off to him, truly.

Yesterday I tried a local pharmacy-- sick of the lines and the monopoly of these huge drugstore chains and the whole profitable medical industry. It is right by a local mosque; the owner is Muslim and so kind.  When he walked from behind the counter, I saw he was a huge man, with a terrible disability... unidentifiable. I immediately invented this narrative that he'd been somehow beaten and tortured in a torn country and survived with a twisted architecture.  Painful to see him walk... and yet he was happy and smiling and grateful for my tiny business.  When I got home I realized my prescription was nearly at expiration.  I will not complain. I know this is wrong-- I'll simply wait and get a refill eventually. This is medicine; this is a business... and yet for me it is not.  I have adopted the pharmacist into my massive family of those for whom I worry.  

11A.  I hate flying... the slightest turbulence gives me terrible anxiety.  In 1988 I took Pan Am flight 103 the night before that horrific crash; I felt like a survivor in a way.  But I cannot imagine processing the miracle of walking away from a wreck like yesterday's. One man.  Defying a lethal diagnosis... dodging an executioner's bullets.  It's unfathomable... the burden of being that person, if you're someone like me-- how to process, how to return a massive 'favor'... the one home that survived the fires in a neighborhood destroyed... the one standing tree after a tornado. Nothing compares.  Inexplicable. 

Many of my friends have no religious beliefs.  They take a scientific perspective on death as a full biological stop. How does one explain the rapture of music?  I don't know. The thousands of movies that interpret and explore an afterlife-- angels and heaven and ghostly hauntings.  Like a hunting dog, I have often picked up the scent of previous lives, the déjà-vu.  I wonder if the passenger in 11A sensed these things.. how his life will change.  Already real estate brokers are asking a premium for 11A apartments.  People are booking the seat first... they could charge a premium.  

I'm hoping somehow to unburden myself of this weight.  Not hopeful because the news is cumulative;  problems outweigh solutions. Sicknesses far outnumber cures... and will continue. Death will relentlessly equate births... one cannot exist without the other, really... sort of a paradox.  We can only hope that each of us provides a little relief to someone-- sharing a sandwich, proverbially. It's contagious, kindness... really the only thing we can control-- our personal space, the way we manage it. A different kind of pandemic... maybe it's my ingrained vague version of Catholic belief... and the importance of mercy-- to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc.  And maybe the victims of the plane crash were taken to heaven... but 11A was given a mission.  We are all, those here reading-- given a daily second chance.  Trying to decipher mine, today.