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.

T Wrecks

Has anyone taken the train at 4 AM lately? The population is a pretty accurate socio-economic profile of New York. There are the few Mexican restaurant workers brown-bagging it on the way uptown from their below-minimum-wage restaurant jobs; one or two homeless black men monologuing away; the token Untouchable shrouded in hefty bags with various carts chock full of cans, bottles, rags, newspaper and garbage asleep in the safe florescent warmth of an MTA semi-private-- several square meters space around him for the stench. Next but not least, there are the straggling, drunk, xanaxed club girls--- Balenciaga shoes, Prada bags-- slumming it on the 1 or the 6 train up from ecstasy to their parental-sponsored apartments on the Upper East..cellphones misplaced, wallets lost. Loud they are, these girls… either from the habit of talking on cellphones over the music, or just drunk. Some of them have jumped turnstiles--- the cops will just smile…because their credit cards are scattered on some dance floor like a post-modern collage. The train is an adventure. They are bold and unafraid. They have been date-raped and live to tell.

Oh— of course there is yours truly, the observer-- diligently dragging my guitar and whatever the chef could spoon into an aluminum take-out container for late-night sustenance— protecting the girls, representing the disappearing working class-- entertaining myself with the homeless mime-acts which are at least original compared to whatever is waiting at home on late-night cable. I prefer my reality MTA-TV. Last night this guy was actually sticking a toothpick all the way into his ear… and then checking it for… God knows. Much itching and scratching and hair-picking, shoe and sock removal and muttering about B.B. King. How could he have known? The random psychic synchronicities at 4 AM. Trains stop at this hour for long minutes; no one seems to complain; the girls twist their hair and remove their Balenciagas. Between 59th and 96th no one boards. We ride on; the toothpick man applauds each stop...has learned not to take motion for granted.

The rest of the regular New Yorkers are home passing their Ambien-laced troubled hours dreaming about collection agents and looming mortgage debt. About how to get their kids a reasonable education, about bedbugs, their dwindling pensions-- the consequences of corporate takeovers for the mere padding of these club girls’ family fortunes. About the looming comfort of suicide when middle age is lowering their earning capacity like Bear Stearns share-values. About getting through the next day.

So here we are in New Year’s Eve. I’m off tonight while New York parties on. I’ve asked a few casually what their plans are….of course the parents of these Prada girls are off in St. Barts’ so the apartments will be well-stocked with stumbling young adults. The upscale restaurants are full, the tourists are having a last hurrah. The cute kid with dreadlocks who works at my gym is thinking about his new baby, and how he can move from cleaning bathrooms to getting enough schooling to learn how to use a computer. The Africans who work at my neighborhood thrift store… they’re doing the overnight, taking inventory and re-plastering the leaking ceiling. Smiling. The doormen on Park Avenue… they’ll be reaping. They compete for these nights. It’s warm… I should take advantage and go see the ball drop —one more time. That phrase gets me.

I miss the old East Village. I miss the artistic psychos and the trend-setters and dirty brilliance. Edgy film-makers were not red-carpet-ready but wearing smelly jeans and scuffed motorcycle boots. Drugs came in rolling papers and needles… alcohol in brown bags and barely-washed glasses. People were painting and singing things. Using coins to call their boyfriends from phonebooths and slamming heavy receivers in emotional pain.

My son is out--- his first legal-drinking New Year’s Eve. He is in that small window where suddenly he is old enough to screw the Victoria’s Secret models and his future is like a department store free-for-all. Where he doesn’t realize one post-partying day he’ll wake up and this year’s model will look young and maybe his own face looks a little puffy and his hair is losing that teenage shine.

Four hours to go in this year. I feel like sitting it out and feeling time. Watched the eclipse last week in the cold air… took a while, but that old moon came through unscathed. Like nothing. No scars, no memories. For us here it’s all running together now… the acceleration of the future, the boulder getting bigger, rolling downhill breakneck and you can’t stop it--- you can maybe only comment, yell Happy New Year out of the rear window as the 2011 train comes speeding by and almost takes your breath away heading for 3000, 4000…no brakes on the present-- only you and I —we are already relics of the new year, ruins of the old… our photos on pathetic Facebook while those assholes bank our loneliness, our pasts trying to reconcile with the present, losing the future, eclipsed.

To all those who died at 27: you fooled no one. Still, we salute you, we the sad scanners of our own obsolescence. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Or would we?

Auld Lang Syne.