Grave Thoughts

Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me…over and over in my head the last week,  the over-used Emily Dickinson couplet like an annoying nag, a childhood haunting-- because I never loved that poem… and the image of the threesome in the carriage… Death, the deceased, and immortality-- well, three's a crowd and they seem somehow incompatible.  Death is neither kind nor proud, as John Donne pointed out over three centuries ago… and how many generations of Donnes have stopped for Death-- have thought about these things, have struggled with acceptance or resistance, embraced God in strength or desperation?

Despite the fact that the only absolute certainty of life is its demise, we are universally unprepared when death touches us-- when we are diagnosed or when we lose a loved one.  Some of us obsess and read obituaries daily, commemorate daily passings on our Facebook pages, indulge in private rituals and personal prayers.  Are we thinking of the departed or of our own selves, trying to rehearse the moment, to cope, somehow, with the ultimate thing we dread?  Some cultures celebrate death; my own foray into Goth-dom explored the macabre and dark; it was appealing and brave-- confronting the monster head-on, wearing fear on our clothing, tattooing its image on our skin like a boldfaced dare.

It's ironic that my last post was a sort of Eulogy… just days later my beloved mother died and the farewell was neither noble nor poetic.  I have had altogether too much intimacy with Death this year-- family, mentors…  my friend with whom I sat, whose witness and unwilling end-of-life nurse I became because she was unable to accept her fate and fought until the very end.  It was something I wish I'd not experienced, although I am told I did a humane and sympathetic thing.  There was no closure; the end was hideous, painful, sad and desperate.  The posthumous silence was heavy and haunted; it all felt terribly wrong and as though I'd been let into a private room no human should see.

My Mom-- the version I knew-- had been fading into some emotional and physical place of distance.  I could seldom reach her, although she occasionally came back into the present and looked at me with such deep poignant recognition and love; I craved those brief moments, and was not ready to lose her.  Personal grief is like a wave-- like a tidal undertow that knocks you off your feet and takes your breath away.  It is the end of possibility, the absolute curtain on something that feels like your true love.  It is undeniable and difficult.

Burial feels like a primitive ritual.  For me the concept of burial associates with hiding something-- covering something up which will eventually be uncovered.  Maybe that was the point of the ritual; I haven't researched this… but have read plenty of Edgar Allen Poe, and have noticed the enormous popularity of zombie and vampire films in recent years.  Still, as far as I know, no one has actually yet come back and described the experience.  Seeing my mother's coffin in a hole in a graveyard surrounded by strangers made me feel a little more desperate.  Leaving her there felt wrong; I sensed in my broken heart a calling-- don't go… stay with me, I wanted to scream-- to tear my hair and rub dirt on my face, to lie on top of her and sing to her… but I had to behave, to place my small shovel of dirt with a single white rose and wait for the gravediggers to follow later on with their little dedicated steamshovels.

The gravestone is a symbol, for most of us… but we still visit-- we leave flowers and stones; my friend brings his trucker Dad a coffee light and sweet with a glazed doughnut.  I've even seen a pack of cigarettes in a cemetery… a ball and glove, a Yankee hat.  Does this help?  It is so literal.  Death is literal; the afterlife is vague and unexplained.  We speak to the dead, we pray, we cry-- we write songs and poetry… we find things on the street, we look for signs.  Who knows?   Que sera, sera, my mother used to sing to me, but she didn't really believe that.  She even told me she wanted to be cremated because she feared suffocating.  Her wishes were not honored by my sister who always seems to manage the last word in my little family.  My brand of sympathy is discredited, my rock and roll existence is like a stain on the stiff white-washed facade of her artifice.  She has invented her version of dignity, of shame-hiding and cover-up.  Yes, burials of all types are familiar to her.  She speaks in cemetery tongues.

My Mom's interment took place on the day of the solar eclipse.  This offered some comfort for me, in the cosmic confluence of the heavens and the transition of my Mom who despite her old-fashioned ideas and obsolete code of ethics was rather pure of heart.  It forced us to look upward, to the sky-- a sort of directive to symmetry, and to the place she, in her funny naiveté, along with so many of us, imagined.   She also loved me, truly and deeply, while often objecting to my lifestyle and regretting what to her seemed my shameful and unnecessary oath of poverty and allegiance to a difficult and vague life-plan including single motherhood.   But I never complained, and everyone else did.

As things so often come in threes, I feel almost released this season, although I realize the acceleration of life at my age will bring the next round altogether too soon.  The Houston floods have brought the specter of mass grief and loss into everyone's horizon, and this tempers our selfish personal sorrows,  or inspires in us that much more sympathy.   For me the musician--  timing is everything.  My sleepless nights now are spent watching endless footage of rising waters like tears-- of rescue and sacrifice and devastation.  We are so reminded of our helplessness in the larger 'picture' of the world; for those who have laid loved ones to 'rest' in graveyards and cemeteries… the ravages of nature have as little regard for the dead as the living.  It is tragic and will leave an enormous scar.  And yet, one day, the sun will come out, as it did here all week while the southern coast was pounded, and the universe does not feel shame or grieve for its acts of cruelty. We sad humans must mourn, and save, and help, and love, and try to come to some understanding with Death, because he is surely not kind and will not pass us by, not a single one-- not so far.

The Snow that Never Drifts

One of my very early childhood memories is the day I nearly drowned.  It was a non-dramatic incident; I was 2 years old, standing in a pool-- at someone's beach club, maybe… my Mom was sitting on the ledge in her sexy black one-piece (she had that Jackie Kennedy vibe back then) with her sunglasses, and her long legs, and her manicure and her cigarette, holding me with the other hand...and I decided I'd lie down on the lovely blue wavy bottom, only to discover that I couldn't quite find the surface.  I could see my Mom, clearly… fanning her hand carelessly through the water--- laughing, joking with her friends in that language I couldn't quite grasp… and I was rolling awkwardly, trying to yell, breathing in water…

Anyway, I guess they fished me out and cleared my lungs, and I was fine… and no one ever spoke of this, that I remember; I was too young to blame, or even to feel sorry for myself, and I grew up with this childhood sense that my mother belonged to some slightly removed womanly 'cult' that I'd never quite infiltrate.  I never pointed a finger at her, or resented her for her failings, or even her politics, until she began to dislike me for mine, and by then I'd left the house.

There are lovely old photos of my Mom in maternity clothes, with a cigarette.  Middle class women didn't nurse babies in those days; they were given diet pills immediately after birth to lose extra weight. We drank milk-- not formula.   Babies in strollers were left in the sun outside the market while mothers shopped.  They nearly always travelled in packs or cliques, and the kids were expected to form alliances and amuse ourselves.  We didn't nag or beg for food or whine.  We wanted them to like us, to give us their attention willingly, to turn their powdered and lipsticked faces on us and smile like magazine mothers.  There was a sort of innocence in this negligence; no one was policing our parents and they were a little carefree and careless.  We walked ourselves to school, we played unsupervised in dangerous dirt piles and woods,  and we grew up.

Something about snow always takes us back to our childhoods, when snow seemed more plentiful, more omnipresent-- cleaner, quieter, less problematic.  Something about the disappointment of the much-hyped Blizzard of 2015 underscored my sense that some innocence has been lost forever.  I had this image of patients in their hospital beds overlooking the city-- feeling comforted that even healthy people would be paralyzed and unable to participate in their own lives-- that the world would stop, beneath a blanket of magical muting white fairy dust-- that every building, squalid or grand, would for a few hours look exactly the same-- -that Porsches and old battered Buicks would all be rounded white mounds on the side of the road.  That everything would be whitewashed and quieted and blessed… and for those of us who have already failed at our New Year's resolutions, well-- we could all have another slate.

Last night I went to sleep with hope and a sense of relief, in a second-chance-Christmas fog.  I'd have a 366th day-- no schedule, no counting, no obligations.  I'd be a shut-in; I could clean my house, or not-- I could turn on the last string of Christmas lights I've yet to put away, and read poems.  But it didn't happen.  It hiccuped and embarrassed and bombed.  People woke up feeling guilty they had overslept.  People felt duped.  We got sort of a tainted snow-day. By afternoon, I could pretty much navigate the streets in sneakers.

My Mom, who is perpetually covered in her own snowdrift of dementia, called to wish me a wonderful summer.  I've begun to save her messages, because they're so unpredictable they actually seem brilliant and philosophical, like that Peter Sellers character from whatever 1970's movie that was.  She leaves her telephone number incessantly, because she has no idea where she is, but worries that I won't find her.  The number has evolved.  It used to be my number, the one she'd called.  Now sometimes it rhymes; sometimes it contains letters, names.  Her television set has become a kind of God in her bedroom.  The Bloomberg commentators are her neighbors; the commercials provide the weather, her music, animal visitors, friends.. .a narrative of non-sequiturs that populate her life.  Sometimes she consults the TV for her own telephone number.  It can mirror the price of gold, the Nasdaq, or, last night, she carefully spelled out 'Celebrity Apprentice' on my voicemail, after the area code.  'Words', she said.  You know, it's 'words'.  'Call me back if you can,' she says, and then 'Call me back if you can't'.  

I can't help thinking in some way she is apologizing for all the childhood milestones she glossed over, or downplayed, or refused to process.  The school plays and concerts she attended but was careful not to applaud because everyone knows that women who become performers or artists don't have happy marriages.  Sometimes she even tells me she detests her husband.  Those are the conversations I like the best.  But I realize I am grasping at honesty straws in a bathtub of milky memories where snow both melts and falls at the same rate.  And I know for my father snow was quite a different symbol.  It was the responsibility of shoveling, and maintaining the cars, and the claustrophobia of being shut in with children and a wife who performed and cooperated but never really understood things.

I remember reading in college about the many words for snow among Eskimo people; how there was a word for fresh fallen snow and another for snow on water, and another for deep, soft snow.  It was sexy.  In college everything is sexy.  I also remember a word for 'snow cornice' which actually meant snow that was about to collapse or avalanche.  Father snow, for me.  I told my Mom about this tonight and she laughed like a child.  Lately she either laughs or cries when I tell her things.  She no longer knows how to react, but has all the inflections of normal conversation.  In a way, on the telephone, she is the same watery Jackie Kennedy silhouette I saw through the surface of the water--in 2 dimensions, as she is, as she needs to be.  She waves, she laughs--- she doesn't process sorrow or disappointment or shame, or guilt, or the weather, or the season, or the time of day.

I used to dread certain seasons-- they meant being sent away, or going back to school.  But I have never dreaded winter.  It feels safe and dark and the promise of snow is the promise of forgiveness, even if it disappoints us and doesn't arrive, because we still have the dream of snow, the sleep of snow-dreams.
Fuck the salt and the plows and the shovels and the MTA.  We New York dreamers got our snow day in spite.