The Vanishing

 I've always been subject to a little claustrophobia. It could stem from a series of early childhood experiences locked in a closet but that's maybe too simple.  A couple of malfunctioning elevator episodes didn't help.  But the root of it feels deeper-- almost genetic. I've mentioned before that my father kept a packed suitcase in the closet at all times.  As for me, in the deepest, most tender sweet spot of a promising relationship... at the very crux of mutual intimacy, I get the urge to run.  It's a serious flaw; it's caused pain to others and I've paid a price. 

Analyzing, I used to pout as a teenager and warn prospective boyfriends not to wall me in with their expectations.  I even tried a psychiatrist who had the usual theories and a few more, but no cure. Of course, raising a child on my own, I easily laid aside my angst and put his priorities first.  But these days there's nothing I love more than the sense of a new day like a blank canvas-- no calendar, no appointments-- just a wide open time-field waiting for my footprint. It's a sense of security for me-- perhaps a small reassuring exercise in personal freedom.

Last night, at the close of a fairly non-scripted day, I watched a late-night film called The Vanishing-- the one from 1988, in Dutch, based on a book called The Golden Egg in which the heroine suffers from a recurring nightmare of claustrophobia.  In the film, she is part of a couple on a trip-- driving. They argue a bit; she vanishes at a gas station where she is abducted, unobserved, by a villainous character and never seen again.  Newspapers publicize her disappearance, her boyfriend spends years trying to figure it out.  But eventually the abductor begins to contact him.  He will reveal the mystery, he says, if the boyfriend agrees to the very same fate. The obsession for truth overcomes him and he agrees-- is chloroformed and wakes up in the dark where his lighter reveals he is in a coffin, buried alive.  Absolute horror.  Double horror.

For anyone prone to claustrophobia and film-empathy, this makes for a sleepless night.  Coupled with that, I learned of the death of a friend.  In grief, I cannot help but explore afterlife theories.  At least one member of the deceased's family is a devout Catholic and takes great comfort in the assurance of a heavenly transition. I, on the other hand, am not sure, have entertained all possibilities.  

My mother who was interred above my father in a double grave feared burial and begged me to have her cremated. My older sister thought otherwise.  Still, after six years, it haunts me.  Although we know logically the dead do not think or feel, I regret that I was outvoted and could not give her this simple last relief.  

In case we choose to ignore our age, the mailbox periodically reminds us with funeral options, cemetery real estate offers and hospice information. It's wearying and worrying... and while the ultimate choice remains to our heirs, I wish I could make some kind of peace with my ultimate destination.  I find funerals-- while comforting in a way, also appalling.  One of my friends was given a wake with a dramatic presentation in an open coffin. I kept hearing her implore me to tell people to fuck off and stop looking at her.  Some of them she openly disliked.  It was so unfair...  as though here is our final worldly act and we don't get the last word.  

My father the emotional claustrophobic had spent much time in the trenches during WWII.  In the end he lay in his simple coffin, draped with the American flag as a hero, and seemed to embrace his fate in the same manner. It was as though death had been a kind of relief to a life as a 'tough-guy' with its anxieties and unvoiced issues.  For us who have been raised with at least the illusion of free choice, the nightmare is being overruled-- told what to do-- held against our will or tied down or up.

I often wander through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum.  I must say, the custom of buryng the dead with their possessions-- with some space-- is appealing.  Not practical for us Americans here.  Even to name a fraction of a bench in Central Park for my Mom was impossible. They are taken... no waiting list for the dead... they are permanent.

Anyway, I will continue to struggle with my philosophies and ideals-- to weigh logic against belief, to pray for my friends, to deeply speak to God, to thank Jesus often, and nevertheless to wake up periodically in a nightmare of captivity, of immobility.  Imagination? We get up, walk around, open a window, breathe.  For now.

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.

King of Hearts

About a year ago I found a fat envelope in my mailbox from a man in rural Pennsylvania.  He is 88 years old and enclosed a cover letter explaining he is an artist and wants a gallery show.  Then there were maybe 20 small drawings, collages… he tried everything-- abstract, Miro-esque colors-- even a few erotic line drawings like Picasso-- a Calder-ish piece…  "Hurry up," his note urged-- "I don't have much time left."

I've been meaning to write him, to acknowledge how I appreciated actual paper in this digital email universe, and that among the 'samples' I really could frame and enjoy one or two.  I have yet to do this.  After all, this is not the response he wants.  He wants to be acknowledged, to be known, like so many in this world of cheap fame and public narcissism.  Or maybe he wants to be loved, and he is 88 and this is maybe a path to some kind of invitation.  And like so many artists and musicians in this culture, he is prematurely exhibiting work that has yet to find a purpose-- he is promoting a passion that has not quite matured, and offering goods that are half-baked.  He'll figure this out-- or he won't.  He may be a member of that majority of Americans who walk into MOMA and say their kids are better artists than Pollock or de Kooning.  He can't see the process or the soul-- he can only see his own need.  
And there are just so many examples of contemporary artists whose fame far exceeds their merit-- anything I write him would be a little useless, so I still struggle with this task, see the envelope on my desk every month or so-- worry that his obituary will precede his exhibition, and hope he has found a more productive occupation, or a wall somewhere.

My father died last week.  I should say 'passed away' but he was not an easy man and nothing was peaceful or smooth.   He seemed to have inverted his life in a way; he was a true decorated hero of WWII-- one of the Band of Brothers-- Captain of the 101st Airborne, awarded silver and bronze stars, several purple hearts-- led his troops on the beach at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge-- suffered wounds, took bullets-- and in the end refused to self-aggrandize for the television journalists, knowing the true heroes went to their graves, and for the survivors-- no matter how admirable their victory-- it's not military macho-ethical to bask.

Then he married my Mom-- a true love story-- 75 years together, 70 as husband and wife…had kids-- and somehow suffered in silent stoic self-denial the post-traumatic stress of his heroism.  He didn't like me much.  I was slated to be the ivy-league hero of his version of the fairy tale.  But I took a hairpin turn.   Not exactly a rebel-- just an independent thinker-- someone who learned from watching the parachute of his life become a claustrophobic soft-fall of personal angst and a kind of failure.  I mean, military accolades and medals--presidential commendations at 25-- like starting out playing Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center-- where do you go from there?  Having some kind of fame or acknowledgment too young can fuck us up-- all rock and rollers know that-- it comes with guilt and regret and self-doubt and success is not always good for ambition.

In my generation failure became a kind of cult.  The alternative-- the nerds-- the skinny girls were suddenly beautiful -- the confessional songwriters and Leonard Cohens went straight to our hearts.
I watched my father, witnessed his tough love, his disapproval of my poorer decisions.  He never forgave me for rejecting a Harvard Law scholarship-- I guess to him that was a version of his military medals-a curt and potent reply to the question How is your daughter?  Action that speaks.  And here I am-- farther and farther from his paternal dream… the Princeton girl playing in dive bars, struggling home on subways,  having a baby in a public hospital, raising kids on my own-- wearing used clothing and eating shitty food.  It infuriated him, disrespected him, humiliated him.  I'm a woman now-- a failure, in his esteem… no closure, no accolades that he could comprehend… no house in the country, no husbands he could play tennis with.  He did love my son… an apple that fell just far enough from the tree to please us both.  Then again-- I don't expect kids to fulfill my dream-- I pray only that they fulfill their own.

My artist/'stepmother' who took her own life 2 summers ago at 96-- craved fame.  At the end of her life she had an acclaimed show which could have been a vanity exercise-- we'll never know-- the gallery owners simultaneously took over half of her coveted townhouse, so it was complicated.  But as they say, it didn't suck… and then there was the aftermath-- the future which inevitably comes with more speed than ever, these days… and last month's darling is next month's crumpled flyer.  Her work was difficult-- her physical discomfort at 96 was not conducive to execution and she suffered, more than anything, from a kind of denial of loneliness-- fear of death, fear of losing control--  it obsessed and compelled her to suicide in a sort of elaborate ritual.  She was angry at me at the end.  So was my Dad--
not for anything I did, I must remind myself-- because this is painful-- but because I failed to enhance their personal version of celebrity.  I tried-- I tried hard… but I failed both of them.  After all, as I said-- I embraced the cult of failure long ago.  It is kind of an oath you take when you commit to your own work.  Above all, you must be honest and you must dedicate yourself to finding your truth.  But grieving for these people who are supposed to be your role models and heroes-- is difficult when you have failed them and know that you are not an honored presence at their burial.

On the day my father died I'd planned to attend another funeral-- a waiter I'd known at BB King's for years-- a proud African with a world-beating smile and a sweetness that oozed from his shining skin.  His hugs were healing and wonderful; he never failed to ask about my son; he was playful and affectionate-- had known him since he was a boy.  Anani got cancer and died quickly; I was only notified after his death.  We knew little about him-- he had no family here, a sole brother in Africa.  He lived in his Jersey City church and the small service was held there.  I received the news about my father that morning; somehow I felt disloyal attending another's funeral and my tears might have been duplicitous.  But at my father's spartan burial, I realized I hadn't loved him; I mean, I honored him and respected him as a daughter; but I had never for a moment felt loved.  Me, who weeps over a fallen bird, and finds lyricism in a key trapped in asphalt.  I failed to love my Dad.  Dropping the shovel of dirt on his grave, I thought of Anani-- the lovely, loving human who was so alone and gave every single one of us so much of his heart.   But I also forgave my father for not loving me.  I apologized for my choices, and thanked some God-- not his-- that I had followed my passion because we can never make anyone happy in this world.  We can love-- we can give generously-- we can comfort-- but for happiness we are on our own.  

When my stepmother died, she was so angry at me for not furthering her career that it was easier to let her go.  I have learned to protect myself when someone withholds.  I am no longer the girl that falls hard for men who cannot give love, like my Dad.  I love easily-- I love strangers, I love my band members.  I looked at my son during the burial service and I know how I love him, but how I would never put a price on that.   I love my nephew and my niece, even though they are cautioned not to trust me.  My Dad was a military man; he chose sides and he chose my sister.  I don't see things that way, but I accept her enmity and do not waste my heart.  We were once children and I had her back and now is now.  I know too much.  I think I have his brain, but as for the rest, I feel even physiologically allied with my Mom.  She has lost her mental capacity, but I know she loved me.  I love her as a daughter and as a woman.  At the lovely cemetery in the country, I looked skyward for strength on a cold and sunny day.  How many deaths were being celebrated and mourned that day… so many… even right there in that place-- they were all around us.  Happy families-- sad families--  widows and orphans--life goes cruelly and mercifully on.  In the sky above formations of birds were providing a silent funeral dance-- visual music.  They fly in unison, these birds-- a kind of harmony we humans must learn and practice.  So many of us do not find comfort in our own kind or kin… but that is okay.

When I got home I cooked dinner for my older upstairs neighbors and some newer friends.  I love my friends.  I felt loved and I felt better.  It has been a week now; I've worked and written and found a version of closure.  Tonight I put one of my pen-pal-artist's pieces in a frame.  At least he will have a private exhibition here, he will be quietly acknowledged, wherever he is, among my home collection of celebrated and uncelebrated artists.. .and that is more than many of us will have.  My friend came by and noticed it-- I love that little collage, she said, and who did that?  I gave his name, without the history… and now Mr. Aubuchon is having his quiet Warholian moment.

A few extraordinary things have happened this week.  Maybe in some version of the story my father will become my angel, my advocate from the afterlife.  As I thought that thought today, the word angel appeared on my screen from elsewhere.  I am remembering going to work with my Dad, having breakfast with him at the Trattoria near Grand Central, and him showing up for Grandparent's Day at my fatherless son's school picnic.  This is progress, this is better.  I will always have my stepmother's lovely paintings on my wall--- the best of these are the ones she liked least.  They speak to me with clarity and strength; they inspire me.  Anani, I will never forget you.  The King, your commemorative poster at B B King's called you… because you had a royal soul.  You were an angel in life and death; there must be some medal for that in heaven-- a gold heart?  Amen. A-women.