I actually am working on a book, and trying to figure out the thread of the focus. It won't be a litany of hurts, that's for sure; it won't be Pollyanna Grows Up In Hell but is GLAD, either. I'm not good at perky. I think that essentially it is The Prince of Tides without the tiger. And it may be that I wind up having to fictionalize, for the sake of some innocent relatives, and, well because the sociopath is alive. Then, too, that might be kind of fun. While I would love to write a memoir, it might be that to talk about my personal journey, it should be fictionalized; to talk about my mom, however, might be something I could tackle. We'll see.
Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.
But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.
I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff. I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."
SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.
Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy . This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.
I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way
When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.
I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.
This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came. Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half! I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name
I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.
Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.
It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me. Cover the fear with love
Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since. It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women
***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.
When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)
This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess
That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book. Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do. I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting. Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read, I'll keep writing anyway.
If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.
Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!
NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic, Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.
Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....
Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.
As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.
I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?
Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.
But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.
The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.
Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!
In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two. And built from there. If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Showing posts with label grief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grief. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Robin Hood and Maid Marion: and All My World Grew Still
Be prepared. This memoir draft is neither funny nor light. It was difficult to write, and my guess is that it will be difficult to read. I understand if anyone chooses to wait instead for Runaways to Red Bank III, which I will put online in a couple of days! Thank you, all of you, who somehow keep choosing to read what's uncomfortable.
It is my story, and I have to be able to write "ugly," as I used to say when I could not write anything that was darker than Anne of Green Gables meets Pollyanna. As always, though, the power for me lies in the beauty, the beautiful power of my brother Jack in the face of evil. And the power of a little girl's love.
My brother's and my journey together is in bits and pieces of other blogs, but primarily in Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love -- "I move to Robin Hood" well down, across from my Blog list. That entry holds pieces that can shed light on more about our years between childhood and his end.
'Tis I, Robin Hood!
When I was three, my brother Jack got a Robin Hood outfit. My mom and Jean Ellen made me a Maid Marion cape with genuine fake diamonds all along the bottom. Together, he and I would listen to our Robin Hood records with the books. You turned the page when Friar Tuck sang. Then we would run into the front yard where the ancient ... magic tree with roots that were above the ground, not just below it, stood.
We had adventures. Sometimes I got to be Friar Tuck or one of the Merry Band, but mostly I was Maid Marion. She was not a wimp, so I got to ride away with my Robin Hood to foil another plot of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham. We had sacks of acorns from the woods to throw to the poor in the village below (our neighbor's three horses in a corral). We smite the mighty smoke-belching Tractor Dragon one evening, sneaking out of the house just before bedtime.
Just as we were about to revel in victory, "John Harvey and Jeannette Louise, YOU GET HOME NOW!" My father's voice could be heard three towns away, we thought.
A typical ending of our days -- mostly running home.
I followed him like a puppy, and not once in my memory did he shoo me away.
I had the measles when I was four, right after we moved, and nearly died of kidney failure and double pneumonia. Jacky was by my side more often than not. A head would pop in my door. "Tis I, Robeen Hoooood!" he would cry, and bow before his lady in her room-darkened bed.
"You sound like an owl, not a hero," I'd say. And he would wing around the room "Hoooooooting" for me, making me laugh. Then I would start to cough and he would stop, a study in worry. He would sit on the side of my bed and hold my hand, stroke my forehead. I was deathly ill, but I don't remember that; I remember how kind everyone was, especially Jacky.
"Jetty, get better, now," he'd whisper. "We have to build that city for my trains, remember? You promised. You know I stink at making the trees and all the little stuff right. I just break everything. I need you." That was the thing, you know; Jacky needed me. I got better.
Our dragon-slaying days had ended, though; we had a greater fight.
The Monster who Lived in our House
Our older brother Jim was the Sheriff of Nottingham. I will never know how Robin Hood truly fared in the tower he shared with Jim. I had Princess Jean Ellen in mine; he had Jim. I was protected until she left the house when I was in third grade, at least at night. But daytime was a different story long before she went away. The Princess was seldom home in the afternoon...
Sometimes the queen fell into a deep, deep slumber, with her royal glass of amber on the table by her throne. Worse still, sometimes she went on royal errands and left the Sheriff in charge. Those days Jack's call held urgency, "Jetty run and hide! He's coming!" Wherever I was in the house I ran like hell for my daddy's bedroom closet. The back had a slanted floor for the bathroom plumbing, but there was a little ledge at the top. I could just crawl behind Daddy's Old Spice clothing and tuck myself in tight, wrapped in a sports jacket, and simply wait. To wait and wait where no one ever came.
I would hear the muffled cries, the sounds of a chair scraped over wood. Other sounds. The laugh, a barrage of staccato explosions. I tried to cover my ears. There were other sounds I could not name. I would wait in the safety of my father-smelling dark. I would wait. Wait for the only sound I wanted to know.
"Maid Marion, the Sheriff has gone!"
Out I would fly to Robin, to my brothers' room. I'd look out the bathroom window first, making sure the sheriff was headed down the road, whistling usually. Then I would go to the boy in a chair, just a boy no more than six or seven, tied up and silent, with dark eyes and long lashes heavy from trapped tears. I would untie his hands and let him be, while I fetched the cotton balls, the iodine, and held a facecloth under the cold water. I did not rush. Robin Hood did not want me to see him cry. Heroes are like that.
Our ritual was silent. Full. Maid Marion dressed the tiny wounds, and turned the dampened, cold cloth on his forehead. I would kiss the places where blood was drawn, but there never were many. The sheriff grew quite skilled at leaving no marks beyond pin pricks all over his skin. He hurt the places that never showed; it was a mission for him.
Sometimes Jim found me, but only when Jacky was not there. Besides which, Jim preferred to find me at night...
And the reign of terror did not end until I was in seventh grade, and Jim moved out for good.
Those years held too much darkness, and so I learned to forget; to forget all but the fairy tale, to forget the reasons my brother's light simply dimmed, and finally went out. I became expert at forgetting the moment something happened, keeping only what I chose. And yet, somehow we know. I began to remember in 1987, after my father died. I wrote this poem after waking from a "nightmare," however, in 1980.
Too Soon Gone...
He was only 50 and I was not yet 48. His son, John, had hanged himself in February and I had not seen Jack for several months when I saw him at the cemetery. He had aged at least a decade and could not walk without a cane. Jack seemed shorter, smaller entirely and his hair and beard were white now. But he eyes were there, the eyes that got to me always, darker brown than the deepest wood, with thick long lashes that made them stand out all the more. And they were so very large and lost that day.
He was surrounded, though, by teenagers. Teenagers with piercings and tatoos. Teenagers with pink hair, purple hair, no hair, black hair. Punked out, gangsta'd, of all types. So sweet, so tender to him. When they found out I was the baby sister of his stories they surrounded me and I saw what the real Jack's life was all about. I will not take away from the love for his children, but in the love Jack gave these emotionally bereft, hurt, abandoned, throw away children, I saw that Robin Hood lived for them. And they loved him back. His colleagues knew me, too. I was surprised, since I had been non-existent in his adult life.
When I walked to him, he opened his arms, but when he held me, I knew Jack was leaning on me, this time. And he was as nothing in my arms. I pulled away a moment, looking him straight in those grief-haunted eyes. "You're dying," was all I said.
"I'll call you," was all he said. But I knew.
His liver was shot and the only answer was a liver transplant. This was now April and he was at my house. It was late. His visits were always at night. His banjo was in his hands, because it was easier for him to talk that way.
"Why don't we test mine?" I asked. "Jean Ellen's not a possibility because of her diabetes, but I don't have diabetes."
He smiled and reached his hand out as Daddy had always done, stroking a wandering strand near my face. "No. Not a possibility. You need your liver."
"I KNOW THAT, But they can take just a lobe and--"
"NO, Jetty. NO." His voice was harsh. "No. Don't you get it? I told you. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not a candidate for a transplant. I don't care what they do for celebrities. It's wrong. I did this to myself and I know it. Just the way Mom did, I did this. And I have NO desire to stop drinking." He stopped a moment, and registered that I was shaking. He took my hand, again with the familiar Daddy gentleness. "Jetty, the fact is, I really don't much care about living. I've had to retire. My back is worse and pretty soon I won't be able to walk at all. I won't be able to take care of my family; they'd have to take care of me. Jetty, you gotta let me go."
And it just burst out of me, "But, Jacky, I just got you BACK!"
And we cried ...
In May, he was admitted to intensive care, where he stayed for the next two weeks. He could not run away from me. I was editing catalogs for Northeastern University at the time, and Jack's wife was still teaching, as were all his friends. So during the day I got to see him. The first day he could still talk a little and he said he' would never go home. I saw tubes coming out of him in all directions. I knew what came next. The hepatic coma, where he could sense everything done to him, but would not be able to speak, where he might come in and out of it, but would slowly become someone who did not resemble himself. I knew the swelling in the feet, then the hands. I knew, I knew, I knew.
I said, "But why do you have to be hooked up? Why can't you just GO, Jacky?" I was sobbing. I was useless to him like this. He looked wildly at me, but speech was so hard for him.
I heard "Family" and I realized. I held his hand and said I was sorry at least a dozen times. I told him I understood and would never mention it again. I promised. He was letting his family prepare; he would let his wife pick the time. It was his last act of love--an overwhelmingly selfless act of love. We both became calm and we simply held hands in silence.
I asked whether I could come back every day and work beside his bed, if I promised not to be maudlin. Jack usually disliked company in the hospital. I awaited the answer. His eyes filled with tears and I felt him squeeze my hand. He nodded. He did not stop nodding for the longest time.
Maid Marion's Turn to Rescue
The ritual became a staple for his longest days. I would get there at about 11, after the cleaning and the poking and the prodding were done. By then there was a tube down his mouth and he was on total life support. The sound of the respirator gave us privacy. I was given permission to untie him every day for the durations of my visits. His hands danced, just as Mommy's had, only they grabbed at the wires and the tubes--randomly, not with purpose. They grabbed at the sheets resting against over-sensitive legs. I knew what to do. I was more experienced than they knew. I would create a tent of the sheet over his legs, so they would not touch the calves, so swollen and mottled purple now. I combed his hair as HE liked it, so the follicles could rest from over-stimulation.
Sometimes he got angry, because I had to grab his hands to keep him from pulling out the wires or tubes and his angry eyes were like Rasputin's. My eyes would fill; I couldn't help it. Robin Hood NEVER looked at Marion so.
I had to raise my voice to reach through this lightest of comas. I don't know why they even called it a coma, but it really doesn't matter. He had slipped into it before his mind was gone, so I could bring him back just enough, at times. "YOU HAVE to STAY ALIVE, JACK. You promised yourself. JACK. I have to keep your hands from dancing there, dance them over here!" And I would point to somewhere safe.
And suddenly, after what seemed like hour-long seconds, something would click and the eyes would soften. On the two occasions when he reallized he'd hit at me, he started to cry and I had to get him to stop by threatening to sing "Muskrat Love" to him.
Gradually the eyes would soften, the hands would drop to rest at his sides, and usually by noon he was thoroughly relaxed. I would sing softly, the songs we both knew, while I'd work for an hour or so. By around 1:00, he would drift into what looked like sleep, and I'd stay awhile longer, watching him when he looked comfortably at rest. When he could not see me cry.
The nurses saw, and would usually come over in another fifteen minutes or so and ease me out of the room so they could do their afternoon care. It was all right then, because I knew his family would be there by 3:00. They did not know I came every day.
I was his only visitor. And all I could give him were those minutes when his hands were free.
Singing Our Way Home
The day came at last; the nurse told me that his wife had made the call that morning. She had asked that they wait until after she had visited at dinner time. I asked how that could work so he would die alone, and the nurse said they expected he would be able to breathe for a little while but that the effort would be too much for him within a few hours at most. I didn't get it; I didn't have to. But I knew it would be the last day.
He was looking for me and I asked him if he would like me to sing the entire Wildflowers album. He blinked and his eyes seemed to smile. I untied his hands, but he seemed almost present there that day.
I began to sing and forgot to sing softly; a nurse came in and I began to apologize.
"No, no," she said. "May we open the curtain a little longer, so we can hear?" It made me shy a moment, but Jacky took my hand.
I knew it all by heart. We had so many songs and I could hear his guitar in my heart as I sang. He began to drift away it seemed, but, well, I AM his baby sister. I got to "The Sisters of Mercy" and deliberately botched the words and his eyes flew open, glaring at me.
I know my grin was evil. "Oh. Gee. Let me see. Squeeze my hand once, for Jetty I love you so. Twice for you colossal little bitch." Two squeezes and all was right with the world; I finished the album without further incident.
By the end, I knew he was resting, and I sang my final song, changing the words just a little. James Taylor's Close Your Eyes. I often sang that to him. Only this time I ended with my own reprise,
"Darlin' close your eyes.
You know ... I'll always love you."
I got up to go, but he grabbed me and squeezed my hand just once. I kissed him and left.
***
His wife called me at 11 and said he was going and I could go to the hospital if I wanted. I took off. I raced to the hospital, but I was too late. No, I probably was exactly on time for Jack. The doctor was removing the stethoscope and the monitor was turned off. His eyes were open.
I shooed them out and said, "Let me do this." Both had seen me before and the nurse touched my shoulder gently as she left. I slowly removed the restraints for the last time.
"Robin Hood. It's Maid Marion. Sheriff Nottingham's gone for good and no one will tie you up ever again." I smoothed his johnny and washed each hand, then gently crossed them over the sheet I tucked it around him, as if he were sleeping.
And I began to sing "Close Your Eyes" again. I heard a gasp from somewhere nearby, but I kept going. It got so quiet. I brushed his hair as I sang. His silky, pure white hair .. and I combed his beard. Robin Hood lay there so very still. And I finally got there,
"So I'll close your eyes
'll just close your eyes, cause it's all right.
I'll sing you this last love song.
But I won't sing the blues any more.
Cause we have sung our songs.
And I'll still sing your songs, now you're gone.
I've closed your eyes.
You know I'll always love you."
As I walked to my car, making this one last trip, all I could think was this:
Robin Hood slept; Marion wept. Now all the world is still.
It is my story, and I have to be able to write "ugly," as I used to say when I could not write anything that was darker than Anne of Green Gables meets Pollyanna. As always, though, the power for me lies in the beauty, the beautiful power of my brother Jack in the face of evil. And the power of a little girl's love.
My brother's and my journey together is in bits and pieces of other blogs, but primarily in Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love -- "I move to Robin Hood" well down, across from my Blog list. That entry holds pieces that can shed light on more about our years between childhood and his end.
'Tis I, Robin Hood!
When I was three, my brother Jack got a Robin Hood outfit. My mom and Jean Ellen made me a Maid Marion cape with genuine fake diamonds all along the bottom. Together, he and I would listen to our Robin Hood records with the books. You turned the page when Friar Tuck sang. Then we would run into the front yard where the ancient ... magic tree with roots that were above the ground, not just below it, stood.
We had adventures. Sometimes I got to be Friar Tuck or one of the Merry Band, but mostly I was Maid Marion. She was not a wimp, so I got to ride away with my Robin Hood to foil another plot of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham. We had sacks of acorns from the woods to throw to the poor in the village below (our neighbor's three horses in a corral). We smite the mighty smoke-belching Tractor Dragon one evening, sneaking out of the house just before bedtime.
Just as we were about to revel in victory, "John Harvey and Jeannette Louise, YOU GET HOME NOW!" My father's voice could be heard three towns away, we thought.
A typical ending of our days -- mostly running home.
I followed him like a puppy, and not once in my memory did he shoo me away.
I had the measles when I was four, right after we moved, and nearly died of kidney failure and double pneumonia. Jacky was by my side more often than not. A head would pop in my door. "Tis I, Robeen Hoooood!" he would cry, and bow before his lady in her room-darkened bed.
"You sound like an owl, not a hero," I'd say. And he would wing around the room "Hoooooooting" for me, making me laugh. Then I would start to cough and he would stop, a study in worry. He would sit on the side of my bed and hold my hand, stroke my forehead. I was deathly ill, but I don't remember that; I remember how kind everyone was, especially Jacky.
"Jetty, get better, now," he'd whisper. "We have to build that city for my trains, remember? You promised. You know I stink at making the trees and all the little stuff right. I just break everything. I need you." That was the thing, you know; Jacky needed me. I got better.
Our dragon-slaying days had ended, though; we had a greater fight.
The Monster who Lived in our House
Our older brother Jim was the Sheriff of Nottingham. I will never know how Robin Hood truly fared in the tower he shared with Jim. I had Princess Jean Ellen in mine; he had Jim. I was protected until she left the house when I was in third grade, at least at night. But daytime was a different story long before she went away. The Princess was seldom home in the afternoon...
Sometimes the queen fell into a deep, deep slumber, with her royal glass of amber on the table by her throne. Worse still, sometimes she went on royal errands and left the Sheriff in charge. Those days Jack's call held urgency, "Jetty run and hide! He's coming!" Wherever I was in the house I ran like hell for my daddy's bedroom closet. The back had a slanted floor for the bathroom plumbing, but there was a little ledge at the top. I could just crawl behind Daddy's Old Spice clothing and tuck myself in tight, wrapped in a sports jacket, and simply wait. To wait and wait where no one ever came.
I would hear the muffled cries, the sounds of a chair scraped over wood. Other sounds. The laugh, a barrage of staccato explosions. I tried to cover my ears. There were other sounds I could not name. I would wait in the safety of my father-smelling dark. I would wait. Wait for the only sound I wanted to know.
"Maid Marion, the Sheriff has gone!"
Out I would fly to Robin, to my brothers' room. I'd look out the bathroom window first, making sure the sheriff was headed down the road, whistling usually. Then I would go to the boy in a chair, just a boy no more than six or seven, tied up and silent, with dark eyes and long lashes heavy from trapped tears. I would untie his hands and let him be, while I fetched the cotton balls, the iodine, and held a facecloth under the cold water. I did not rush. Robin Hood did not want me to see him cry. Heroes are like that.
Our ritual was silent. Full. Maid Marion dressed the tiny wounds, and turned the dampened, cold cloth on his forehead. I would kiss the places where blood was drawn, but there never were many. The sheriff grew quite skilled at leaving no marks beyond pin pricks all over his skin. He hurt the places that never showed; it was a mission for him.
Sometimes Jim found me, but only when Jacky was not there. Besides which, Jim preferred to find me at night...
And the reign of terror did not end until I was in seventh grade, and Jim moved out for good.
Those years held too much darkness, and so I learned to forget; to forget all but the fairy tale, to forget the reasons my brother's light simply dimmed, and finally went out. I became expert at forgetting the moment something happened, keeping only what I chose. And yet, somehow we know. I began to remember in 1987, after my father died. I wrote this poem after waking from a "nightmare," however, in 1980.
Brotherssong
A hole fills my heart where a childhood should breathe
and a blood-dripping moon floods my dreams.
The bats start flying
In the house of my death and the songs of my night spin to screams.
There's a blank at the table where my brother's face should feed;
his hands in my night sprout to claws.
Then the bats start biting while my brother grins on
while the moon drips blood from his jaws.
A newspaper breathes where my father's face should see,
a dead wind rattles at the door.
While the bats bite deeper and my other brother screams
the half moon's bleeding on the floor.
There's a dead mouse in the dark where my other brother cries
and Mother grows drunk on the tears.
While my father keeps reading and my brother grins on,
while my other brother withers with the years.
Too Soon Gone...
He was only 50 and I was not yet 48. His son, John, had hanged himself in February and I had not seen Jack for several months when I saw him at the cemetery. He had aged at least a decade and could not walk without a cane. Jack seemed shorter, smaller entirely and his hair and beard were white now. But he eyes were there, the eyes that got to me always, darker brown than the deepest wood, with thick long lashes that made them stand out all the more. And they were so very large and lost that day.
He was surrounded, though, by teenagers. Teenagers with piercings and tatoos. Teenagers with pink hair, purple hair, no hair, black hair. Punked out, gangsta'd, of all types. So sweet, so tender to him. When they found out I was the baby sister of his stories they surrounded me and I saw what the real Jack's life was all about. I will not take away from the love for his children, but in the love Jack gave these emotionally bereft, hurt, abandoned, throw away children, I saw that Robin Hood lived for them. And they loved him back. His colleagues knew me, too. I was surprised, since I had been non-existent in his adult life.
When I walked to him, he opened his arms, but when he held me, I knew Jack was leaning on me, this time. And he was as nothing in my arms. I pulled away a moment, looking him straight in those grief-haunted eyes. "You're dying," was all I said.
"I'll call you," was all he said. But I knew.
His liver was shot and the only answer was a liver transplant. This was now April and he was at my house. It was late. His visits were always at night. His banjo was in his hands, because it was easier for him to talk that way.
"Why don't we test mine?" I asked. "Jean Ellen's not a possibility because of her diabetes, but I don't have diabetes."
He smiled and reached his hand out as Daddy had always done, stroking a wandering strand near my face. "No. Not a possibility. You need your liver."
"I KNOW THAT, But they can take just a lobe and--"
"NO, Jetty. NO." His voice was harsh. "No. Don't you get it? I told you. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not a candidate for a transplant. I don't care what they do for celebrities. It's wrong. I did this to myself and I know it. Just the way Mom did, I did this. And I have NO desire to stop drinking." He stopped a moment, and registered that I was shaking. He took my hand, again with the familiar Daddy gentleness. "Jetty, the fact is, I really don't much care about living. I've had to retire. My back is worse and pretty soon I won't be able to walk at all. I won't be able to take care of my family; they'd have to take care of me. Jetty, you gotta let me go."
And it just burst out of me, "But, Jacky, I just got you BACK!"
And we cried ...
In May, he was admitted to intensive care, where he stayed for the next two weeks. He could not run away from me. I was editing catalogs for Northeastern University at the time, and Jack's wife was still teaching, as were all his friends. So during the day I got to see him. The first day he could still talk a little and he said he' would never go home. I saw tubes coming out of him in all directions. I knew what came next. The hepatic coma, where he could sense everything done to him, but would not be able to speak, where he might come in and out of it, but would slowly become someone who did not resemble himself. I knew the swelling in the feet, then the hands. I knew, I knew, I knew.
I said, "But why do you have to be hooked up? Why can't you just GO, Jacky?" I was sobbing. I was useless to him like this. He looked wildly at me, but speech was so hard for him.
I heard "Family" and I realized. I held his hand and said I was sorry at least a dozen times. I told him I understood and would never mention it again. I promised. He was letting his family prepare; he would let his wife pick the time. It was his last act of love--an overwhelmingly selfless act of love. We both became calm and we simply held hands in silence.
I asked whether I could come back every day and work beside his bed, if I promised not to be maudlin. Jack usually disliked company in the hospital. I awaited the answer. His eyes filled with tears and I felt him squeeze my hand. He nodded. He did not stop nodding for the longest time.
Maid Marion's Turn to Rescue
The ritual became a staple for his longest days. I would get there at about 11, after the cleaning and the poking and the prodding were done. By then there was a tube down his mouth and he was on total life support. The sound of the respirator gave us privacy. I was given permission to untie him every day for the durations of my visits. His hands danced, just as Mommy's had, only they grabbed at the wires and the tubes--randomly, not with purpose. They grabbed at the sheets resting against over-sensitive legs. I knew what to do. I was more experienced than they knew. I would create a tent of the sheet over his legs, so they would not touch the calves, so swollen and mottled purple now. I combed his hair as HE liked it, so the follicles could rest from over-stimulation.
Sometimes he got angry, because I had to grab his hands to keep him from pulling out the wires or tubes and his angry eyes were like Rasputin's. My eyes would fill; I couldn't help it. Robin Hood NEVER looked at Marion so.
I had to raise my voice to reach through this lightest of comas. I don't know why they even called it a coma, but it really doesn't matter. He had slipped into it before his mind was gone, so I could bring him back just enough, at times. "YOU HAVE to STAY ALIVE, JACK. You promised yourself. JACK. I have to keep your hands from dancing there, dance them over here!" And I would point to somewhere safe.
And suddenly, after what seemed like hour-long seconds, something would click and the eyes would soften. On the two occasions when he reallized he'd hit at me, he started to cry and I had to get him to stop by threatening to sing "Muskrat Love" to him.
Gradually the eyes would soften, the hands would drop to rest at his sides, and usually by noon he was thoroughly relaxed. I would sing softly, the songs we both knew, while I'd work for an hour or so. By around 1:00, he would drift into what looked like sleep, and I'd stay awhile longer, watching him when he looked comfortably at rest. When he could not see me cry.
The nurses saw, and would usually come over in another fifteen minutes or so and ease me out of the room so they could do their afternoon care. It was all right then, because I knew his family would be there by 3:00. They did not know I came every day.
I was his only visitor. And all I could give him were those minutes when his hands were free.
Singing Our Way Home
The day came at last; the nurse told me that his wife had made the call that morning. She had asked that they wait until after she had visited at dinner time. I asked how that could work so he would die alone, and the nurse said they expected he would be able to breathe for a little while but that the effort would be too much for him within a few hours at most. I didn't get it; I didn't have to. But I knew it would be the last day.
He was looking for me and I asked him if he would like me to sing the entire Wildflowers album. He blinked and his eyes seemed to smile. I untied his hands, but he seemed almost present there that day.
I began to sing and forgot to sing softly; a nurse came in and I began to apologize.
"No, no," she said. "May we open the curtain a little longer, so we can hear?" It made me shy a moment, but Jacky took my hand.
I knew it all by heart. We had so many songs and I could hear his guitar in my heart as I sang. He began to drift away it seemed, but, well, I AM his baby sister. I got to "The Sisters of Mercy" and deliberately botched the words and his eyes flew open, glaring at me.
I know my grin was evil. "Oh. Gee. Let me see. Squeeze my hand once, for Jetty I love you so. Twice for you colossal little bitch." Two squeezes and all was right with the world; I finished the album without further incident.
By the end, I knew he was resting, and I sang my final song, changing the words just a little. James Taylor's Close Your Eyes. I often sang that to him. Only this time I ended with my own reprise,
"Darlin' close your eyes.
You know ... I'll always love you."
I got up to go, but he grabbed me and squeezed my hand just once. I kissed him and left.
***
His wife called me at 11 and said he was going and I could go to the hospital if I wanted. I took off. I raced to the hospital, but I was too late. No, I probably was exactly on time for Jack. The doctor was removing the stethoscope and the monitor was turned off. His eyes were open.
I shooed them out and said, "Let me do this." Both had seen me before and the nurse touched my shoulder gently as she left. I slowly removed the restraints for the last time.
"Robin Hood. It's Maid Marion. Sheriff Nottingham's gone for good and no one will tie you up ever again." I smoothed his johnny and washed each hand, then gently crossed them over the sheet I tucked it around him, as if he were sleeping.
And I began to sing "Close Your Eyes" again. I heard a gasp from somewhere nearby, but I kept going. It got so quiet. I brushed his hair as I sang. His silky, pure white hair .. and I combed his beard. Robin Hood lay there so very still. And I finally got there,
"So I'll close your eyes
'll just close your eyes, cause it's all right.
I'll sing you this last love song.
But I won't sing the blues any more.
Cause we have sung our songs.
And I'll still sing your songs, now you're gone.
I've closed your eyes.
You know I'll always love you."
As I walked to my car, making this one last trip, all I could think was this:
Robin Hood slept; Marion wept. Now all the world is still.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love
I am coming upon the end of my first year of this blog. And I want to say up front that there will be some uncomfortably vivid entries about my life. The hints have been here, a couple of stories ... memoir includes the ugly sometimes, if ugly is there. I do not live in the dark places, but those places made me myself as well. Surviving them and using the gifts of mother and sister, other brother and father--using those gifts of people at their best allowed me to fly out of the worst.
Anyway, I will not include those entries without caveat, so that those who would rather not read, who are used to my blog, have the choice to wait for a lighter day. Abuse is never pretty. Another blogger I follow pointed out the our past has only the weight we give it. I think of it in terms of power. The things that no longer rule my nights, confuse my days, those things have no power left over me. Now that I think about it, nor do they have weight.
Yet they are part of my truth, part of what has ripped me to shreds, part of why I was and am so determined to be whole, to love, to try to act out of love when it is hard to feel love, why I would prefer to slough off anger or bitterness as soon as I can honestly do it after being hurt or wronged. I do not always succeed particularly well, but I try and I'm getting better at it as I get older.
This Entry May be One of Those!
I have no problem if people pass this over. I still have to write it, for my own sake, because I am a writer and because I think every person's story can offer comfort or hope or benefit to others. I see that over and over in the blogs I follow--stories of HEALTHY families offer as many lessons, and offer me joy. I love reading about solid marriages and families that treat each other well. I do not assume there are dark secrets, or that other families are perfect. The voices of the writers and your visions are powerful, from wherever you come.
Enough. It is enough for now to alert you followers, for whom I am grateful. You all are giving my writer's voice a power I never knew I had in me. If I want to write a memoir, I MUST be able to find a public voice for what is not pretty, and this blog is the place where I am finding that voice. Sometimes I may not do it as well as I want, but writing is a learning process. I hope to learn to tell fewer and fewer of the details, but still make it clear what happened. I want the living details to be about seriously flawed, yet remarkably human people bound by MORE than just their illnesses or pain.
***
"What doesn't kill us makes us strong." Perhaps, but sometimes I have wondered whether, I mean really, just how strong do people have to BE anyway? I never liked that statement. Sometimes one can wonder what the definition of "kill" is. Killing innocence does not necessarily make anyone strong. Plenty of people are strong without that. And sometimes those whatevers DO kill. Why should survival of the fittest include surviving what is unconscionable to most of our culture, to most of the world?
Yet I accept that, if we are given tools from somewhere within or without, withstanding enormous adversity has created remarkably strong people in some. I was given something very early on--a child's faith. God is Love. Why I got that at three, I'll never know, but I did. And I am so grateful. I have written of this. And that was my secret weapon against my brother Jim--I loved him out loud and it usually threw him so far off, he would stop... for a while. I loved my mom and it allowed me to see beyond her psychoses and ultimately opened the door to our closeness by the end--a reconciliation that my siblings never had with her.
I did not learn that all by myself. It was a gift given to me... probably BY my mom, when she was neither drunk nor psychotic. I am surrounded by love for much of my life now. The phoenix women, laundry eagles. My sister's love wraps around me, all around me in my home and in my heart, as do my mother's, my father's, and my brother Jack's.
I survived. Sometimes the survivor of suburbia has survivor's guilt. Why did I get the gifts that my siblings did not? It's not an important question, nor even relevant. The fact is, I am here and I love life more than the others did. All I can do is hold onto that, to honor it, and to honor the two siblings who gave me the safety and the love to be here now, ready to start fresh. To tell the whole story to the best of my memory and ability, to include the music of their lives, not just the pain, is my only way to honor what they gave to me. I think their souls are worth revealing, and the stories worth the telling.
In the telling of these stories, I try to recreate them as I experienced them at the time. I write them that way, but understand that I no longer have flashbacks. I no longer feel conflict about my family. There was a lot of work, therapy, pain--all of it. But now? Now there is sadness, sure, but mostly there is love. And a deep-seeded appreciation for that rain forest of a family: lush or rotting, with little in between. And for the exquisite beauty of each member when they were at their best. I may have gotten each person's worst at some point; I also got their best. In that, I think I was uniquely blessed among my siblings. I am not sure that any of the others got the absolute BEST from all five other family members.
It is a hard story, this story of my family. We take it in stride when we read The Prince of Tides because it's fiction. But, in real life, sometimes families hold the same horror and beauty, humor and meanness, kindness and cruelties--and over-the-top stories. We had no tiger. we had other things.
Onward to today's attempt.
***
I move to Robin Hood. My brother Jack.
My protector, when he was big enough to stave off Jim's attacks long enough for me to run and hide in my father's sloping closet, perched on the shelf at the back, wrapped in Old Spiced jackets with patches on their sleeves. I would hear the muffled mysteries. "Whatever" did kill him, just slowly. I watched alcohol kill him by inches, and he died at only 50.
The year before, he showed up at my house one early summer's night. I had not seen him for three years, and he realized inside he was ill, and that his own pain had made him refuse to see his little sister who had been, for 23 years, his best friend and confidante--until he got married. Then he cut me off and cut Jean Ellen off. Just like that. Boom.
I saw death in him that night... I had seen it in my father's and mother's eyes, and it was there in his that night. His skin was just beginning to be tinged with yellow. But his gentle spirit seemed to have returned, and he sat very near me, holding my hand. I tried to remember the last time he had done that.
***
The day my daughter died.
Jacky came from school and sat beside me. We did not know where her body was, how she had died, or even where she had died. We knew only that she had. Jack volunteered to go to Jessie's Mom's house and to go to the police station. I'd been given no answers in calling, but, then, by that time, I had already called our senator's office to locate Jessie's Mom in el Salvador, tried to locate her father and his new wife off on a vacation, and had had to tell my son, on the phone, that his sister was dead, and arrange a flight for him to come. I was all out of practical.
That afternoon he sat with me, silent for ten minutes. Just as we had when we were children, we were face to face, and he leaned toward me and we rested our foreheads together a moment.
"I will find her." He left, and an hour later, he had found out all we needed to know for that time.
That night, her dad had come to give ME the news, having driven seven hundred miles to try to get to me first, and he and I had gone into my sister's living room to escape the twelve women who hated him for deserting me. I'd had to tell HIM what had happened--he knew only that she was dead. The police had called to tell him to come home, she was dead, and had hung up! So I comforted him, to the disgust of my friends. I had had to tell her MOM what had happened--on the phone to el Salvador! EVERYONE came to me for answers, for comfort. Five kids came over to cry. But the women came, and they managed to flutter the rest away. When they, too, left, it was Jean Ellen, Nancy (her best friend and my non-related big sister) and me. We heard guitar music on the front porch. I walked out to Jack and he said, "Come out and set a while and we will sing each other to peace." He was NOT drunk, and Nancy took my sister up to her side of the house.
We sat outdoors, with the nighttime cacophony of August insects, and we sang. I drifted off, and he began some familiar old riffs, then suddenly all was silent. My brother took me by the hand and walked me to my room, sat me on my bed, removed my shoes and tucked me in. I heard him play a while more, the sound drifting through the distance of three rooms and I finally slept.
He came to the funeral mean drunk, though. That afternoon he slurred, "You need anything more?"
"Not today, no. thank you. I'll call you if I need more."
"ONE day offer. You're just like Ma. Give one thing, you ask for it all."
My son said, "Jack, go home now." We looked at one another and Jay said, "I think he's next."
That had been the last time I saw my brother for three years. When I called at Christmas to get together, the response was, "Well, if nothing better comes up, maybe you could come over for a while." My sister and I declined the offer, tempting though it was. I moved to PA the following May, for two years. I sent Christmas and birthday cards from there, but apparently no one noticed. They sent joint cards to Jean Ellen and never looked at mine. I had sent them a note with the card, but it was thrown away.
***
The night he called to come over, it was because he'd heard from his best friend that I was back home after being in Pennsylvania for two years; Jack realized he'd never known I had left. It haunted him. He told me, "Jetty, I made the mistake of throwing out you and Jean Ellen because you both made me remember Jim, just because you are part of my family. I could not look at you without... without remembering things I hate."
"I've been a crappy brother to you since I got married, haven't I."
I looked him full in his impossibly deep brown eyes. "Yes, Jack, you have."
"Is it too late for me to be your brother now?"
"Never. You're Robin Hood and I'm Maid Marion."
The tears made his eyes shine in the dim light. I saw the hollows around them, that muted brown-gray of pain.
"You're not well, Jack."
"Well, no. It seems I'm more like Mom than you ever were or will be. It would seem I am drinking myself to death."
"You gonna stop?"
"Nope. Just some nights, like tonight. I go some weeks sometimes, when I feel like actually seeing my life. Which isn't all that much. But tonight I want to see."
He had my hand by then and I asked, "What is it you want to see?"
"Did Jimmy rape you?"
I said, "Yes, Jack."
"Was I in the house? How come I didn't stop it?"
"You were over at your friend's house, Jack. You weren't even there. Jim was there with Mom and me and Mom was, well. Drunk in her chair of course." The horrified laugh escaped us both.
But Jack was shaking now. "Well if I wasn't there, why do I remember? How come I KNOW?"
I said nothing for a while. We had never spoken of it. Well. We'd never had a conversation. "I'm not sure," I lied.
"Okay, did Daddy backhand Jim into a wall at dinner?"
"Yes Jacky."
Pause.
"Do you want to know more than that, Jack?"
Excruciating pause, and my brother began to shake. And he mouthed "not about that." No sound came out.
"HOW DO I KNOW WHAT JIMMY DID?" He was in agony now. And then, "Did I rape you, too? Oh, GOD, did I do it, too?"
I looked at him, his fear palpable, his pain intense. He had been 21 and I just 19. He had been stumbling drunk and I'd run to his and Jean Ellen's place because Mom had been drinking and was rather more horrid than usual. Dad was "away on business" and I did not want to be alone with her.
Jack shared some more wine with me, and we were sitting together on the couch, watching tv.
"God, you know how gorgeous you are?" he'd said.
His tone was weird, but I simply said, "Yup." And he had his arm around me and I stood up. So did he, and he came at me and kissed me on the mouth.
When I could pull away, he was touching my breasts and I smacked him. Then I shouted and smacked precisely, "NOT"--smack--"YOU"-- smack-- "TOO!" Punch, right in the kisser.
With which he went, "huh?"And he tipped over like a felled tree onto the floor. I stood over him and screamed, "YOU are NOT JIM. YOU ARE NOT HIM!" And I left, humiliated, shocked, disgusted, hurt. But mostly inordinately sad.
But I was absolutely right.
He was not Jim. It never happened again and until that moment, I assumed it had happened in one of Jack's alcoholic blackouts. There, I was only partly right. But maybe that's the nature of blackouts--you remember dim images of the truth, but cannot sort it out. I took both his hands, and I turned to face him full in his horrified and pained face. We tipped forward once more, foreheads touching, tears dropping into our laps. Robin Hood had come home and I did not have to lie or hedge.
I simply said, "No, Jack. Not you, too. You did not rape me." Something made me smile a little, and I added, "Honey, you are not our brother Jim. Nothing like our brother Jim. And you never really came CLOSE."
He looked as if he wanted to say more, to respond to that crack in the door to come clean, to face that demon. He tried, but the words stuck. We were crying, those big tears that it seems only children have... silent tears. It was more than enough for me, so I did not ask for more.
I released one hand and sang, "Ride, ride, ride, won't you let it ride."
And he picked up his guitar, which he'd brought with him... the same guitar he'd brought to play outside my house, just for me. We moved outside and sang, as was our custom, from back in high school, on the hot summer nights when Mom was drunk, Dad was "away" and we needed the cool of a nearby lake and the peace of music. And our tears ran into the "Song of the Great Silke" and faded into the accompanying chorus of late spring tree frogs.
No brother loved a sister more. No sister misses a brother more. I missed him for those decades he could not face us, could not bear the memories that haunted him until he drank to go numb. I did not force him to remember what I, myself, had blocked for so long. His secrets and pain were not mine to expose.
I had my brother again, if only for that year. I am alive because he was there to save me and to spare me pain he endured too many times. Robin Hood died; Maid Marion lives. That story is for another time.
I have to stop here for now. I have to listen to Judy Collins' Wildflowers CD and sing to him a spell.
***
It's a start.
Anyway, I will not include those entries without caveat, so that those who would rather not read, who are used to my blog, have the choice to wait for a lighter day. Abuse is never pretty. Another blogger I follow pointed out the our past has only the weight we give it. I think of it in terms of power. The things that no longer rule my nights, confuse my days, those things have no power left over me. Now that I think about it, nor do they have weight.
Yet they are part of my truth, part of what has ripped me to shreds, part of why I was and am so determined to be whole, to love, to try to act out of love when it is hard to feel love, why I would prefer to slough off anger or bitterness as soon as I can honestly do it after being hurt or wronged. I do not always succeed particularly well, but I try and I'm getting better at it as I get older.
This Entry May be One of Those!
I have no problem if people pass this over. I still have to write it, for my own sake, because I am a writer and because I think every person's story can offer comfort or hope or benefit to others. I see that over and over in the blogs I follow--stories of HEALTHY families offer as many lessons, and offer me joy. I love reading about solid marriages and families that treat each other well. I do not assume there are dark secrets, or that other families are perfect. The voices of the writers and your visions are powerful, from wherever you come.
Enough. It is enough for now to alert you followers, for whom I am grateful. You all are giving my writer's voice a power I never knew I had in me. If I want to write a memoir, I MUST be able to find a public voice for what is not pretty, and this blog is the place where I am finding that voice. Sometimes I may not do it as well as I want, but writing is a learning process. I hope to learn to tell fewer and fewer of the details, but still make it clear what happened. I want the living details to be about seriously flawed, yet remarkably human people bound by MORE than just their illnesses or pain.
***
"What doesn't kill us makes us strong." Perhaps, but sometimes I have wondered whether, I mean really, just how strong do people have to BE anyway? I never liked that statement. Sometimes one can wonder what the definition of "kill" is. Killing innocence does not necessarily make anyone strong. Plenty of people are strong without that. And sometimes those whatevers DO kill. Why should survival of the fittest include surviving what is unconscionable to most of our culture, to most of the world?
Yet I accept that, if we are given tools from somewhere within or without, withstanding enormous adversity has created remarkably strong people in some. I was given something very early on--a child's faith. God is Love. Why I got that at three, I'll never know, but I did. And I am so grateful. I have written of this. And that was my secret weapon against my brother Jim--I loved him out loud and it usually threw him so far off, he would stop... for a while. I loved my mom and it allowed me to see beyond her psychoses and ultimately opened the door to our closeness by the end--a reconciliation that my siblings never had with her.
I did not learn that all by myself. It was a gift given to me... probably BY my mom, when she was neither drunk nor psychotic. I am surrounded by love for much of my life now. The phoenix women, laundry eagles. My sister's love wraps around me, all around me in my home and in my heart, as do my mother's, my father's, and my brother Jack's.
I survived. Sometimes the survivor of suburbia has survivor's guilt. Why did I get the gifts that my siblings did not? It's not an important question, nor even relevant. The fact is, I am here and I love life more than the others did. All I can do is hold onto that, to honor it, and to honor the two siblings who gave me the safety and the love to be here now, ready to start fresh. To tell the whole story to the best of my memory and ability, to include the music of their lives, not just the pain, is my only way to honor what they gave to me. I think their souls are worth revealing, and the stories worth the telling.
In the telling of these stories, I try to recreate them as I experienced them at the time. I write them that way, but understand that I no longer have flashbacks. I no longer feel conflict about my family. There was a lot of work, therapy, pain--all of it. But now? Now there is sadness, sure, but mostly there is love. And a deep-seeded appreciation for that rain forest of a family: lush or rotting, with little in between. And for the exquisite beauty of each member when they were at their best. I may have gotten each person's worst at some point; I also got their best. In that, I think I was uniquely blessed among my siblings. I am not sure that any of the others got the absolute BEST from all five other family members.
It is a hard story, this story of my family. We take it in stride when we read The Prince of Tides because it's fiction. But, in real life, sometimes families hold the same horror and beauty, humor and meanness, kindness and cruelties--and over-the-top stories. We had no tiger. we had other things.
Onward to today's attempt.
***
I move to Robin Hood. My brother Jack.
My protector, when he was big enough to stave off Jim's attacks long enough for me to run and hide in my father's sloping closet, perched on the shelf at the back, wrapped in Old Spiced jackets with patches on their sleeves. I would hear the muffled mysteries. "Whatever" did kill him, just slowly. I watched alcohol kill him by inches, and he died at only 50.
The year before, he showed up at my house one early summer's night. I had not seen him for three years, and he realized inside he was ill, and that his own pain had made him refuse to see his little sister who had been, for 23 years, his best friend and confidante--until he got married. Then he cut me off and cut Jean Ellen off. Just like that. Boom.
I saw death in him that night... I had seen it in my father's and mother's eyes, and it was there in his that night. His skin was just beginning to be tinged with yellow. But his gentle spirit seemed to have returned, and he sat very near me, holding my hand. I tried to remember the last time he had done that.
***
The day my daughter died.
Jacky came from school and sat beside me. We did not know where her body was, how she had died, or even where she had died. We knew only that she had. Jack volunteered to go to Jessie's Mom's house and to go to the police station. I'd been given no answers in calling, but, then, by that time, I had already called our senator's office to locate Jessie's Mom in el Salvador, tried to locate her father and his new wife off on a vacation, and had had to tell my son, on the phone, that his sister was dead, and arrange a flight for him to come. I was all out of practical.
That afternoon he sat with me, silent for ten minutes. Just as we had when we were children, we were face to face, and he leaned toward me and we rested our foreheads together a moment.
"I will find her." He left, and an hour later, he had found out all we needed to know for that time.
That night, her dad had come to give ME the news, having driven seven hundred miles to try to get to me first, and he and I had gone into my sister's living room to escape the twelve women who hated him for deserting me. I'd had to tell HIM what had happened--he knew only that she was dead. The police had called to tell him to come home, she was dead, and had hung up! So I comforted him, to the disgust of my friends. I had had to tell her MOM what had happened--on the phone to el Salvador! EVERYONE came to me for answers, for comfort. Five kids came over to cry. But the women came, and they managed to flutter the rest away. When they, too, left, it was Jean Ellen, Nancy (her best friend and my non-related big sister) and me. We heard guitar music on the front porch. I walked out to Jack and he said, "Come out and set a while and we will sing each other to peace." He was NOT drunk, and Nancy took my sister up to her side of the house.
We sat outdoors, with the nighttime cacophony of August insects, and we sang. I drifted off, and he began some familiar old riffs, then suddenly all was silent. My brother took me by the hand and walked me to my room, sat me on my bed, removed my shoes and tucked me in. I heard him play a while more, the sound drifting through the distance of three rooms and I finally slept.
He came to the funeral mean drunk, though. That afternoon he slurred, "You need anything more?"
"Not today, no. thank you. I'll call you if I need more."
"ONE day offer. You're just like Ma. Give one thing, you ask for it all."
My son said, "Jack, go home now." We looked at one another and Jay said, "I think he's next."
That had been the last time I saw my brother for three years. When I called at Christmas to get together, the response was, "Well, if nothing better comes up, maybe you could come over for a while." My sister and I declined the offer, tempting though it was. I moved to PA the following May, for two years. I sent Christmas and birthday cards from there, but apparently no one noticed. They sent joint cards to Jean Ellen and never looked at mine. I had sent them a note with the card, but it was thrown away.
***
The night he called to come over, it was because he'd heard from his best friend that I was back home after being in Pennsylvania for two years; Jack realized he'd never known I had left. It haunted him. He told me, "Jetty, I made the mistake of throwing out you and Jean Ellen because you both made me remember Jim, just because you are part of my family. I could not look at you without... without remembering things I hate."
"I've been a crappy brother to you since I got married, haven't I."
I looked him full in his impossibly deep brown eyes. "Yes, Jack, you have."
"Is it too late for me to be your brother now?"
"Never. You're Robin Hood and I'm Maid Marion."
The tears made his eyes shine in the dim light. I saw the hollows around them, that muted brown-gray of pain.
"You're not well, Jack."
"Well, no. It seems I'm more like Mom than you ever were or will be. It would seem I am drinking myself to death."
"You gonna stop?"
"Nope. Just some nights, like tonight. I go some weeks sometimes, when I feel like actually seeing my life. Which isn't all that much. But tonight I want to see."
He had my hand by then and I asked, "What is it you want to see?"
"Did Jimmy rape you?"
I said, "Yes, Jack."
"Was I in the house? How come I didn't stop it?"
"You were over at your friend's house, Jack. You weren't even there. Jim was there with Mom and me and Mom was, well. Drunk in her chair of course." The horrified laugh escaped us both.
But Jack was shaking now. "Well if I wasn't there, why do I remember? How come I KNOW?"
I said nothing for a while. We had never spoken of it. Well. We'd never had a conversation. "I'm not sure," I lied.
"Okay, did Daddy backhand Jim into a wall at dinner?"
"Yes Jacky."
Pause.
"Do you want to know more than that, Jack?"
Excruciating pause, and my brother began to shake. And he mouthed "not about that." No sound came out.
"HOW DO I KNOW WHAT JIMMY DID?" He was in agony now. And then, "Did I rape you, too? Oh, GOD, did I do it, too?"
I looked at him, his fear palpable, his pain intense. He had been 21 and I just 19. He had been stumbling drunk and I'd run to his and Jean Ellen's place because Mom had been drinking and was rather more horrid than usual. Dad was "away on business" and I did not want to be alone with her.
Jack shared some more wine with me, and we were sitting together on the couch, watching tv.
"God, you know how gorgeous you are?" he'd said.
His tone was weird, but I simply said, "Yup." And he had his arm around me and I stood up. So did he, and he came at me and kissed me on the mouth.
When I could pull away, he was touching my breasts and I smacked him. Then I shouted and smacked precisely, "NOT"--smack--"YOU"-- smack-- "TOO!" Punch, right in the kisser.
With which he went, "huh?"And he tipped over like a felled tree onto the floor. I stood over him and screamed, "YOU are NOT JIM. YOU ARE NOT HIM!" And I left, humiliated, shocked, disgusted, hurt. But mostly inordinately sad.
But I was absolutely right.
He was not Jim. It never happened again and until that moment, I assumed it had happened in one of Jack's alcoholic blackouts. There, I was only partly right. But maybe that's the nature of blackouts--you remember dim images of the truth, but cannot sort it out. I took both his hands, and I turned to face him full in his horrified and pained face. We tipped forward once more, foreheads touching, tears dropping into our laps. Robin Hood had come home and I did not have to lie or hedge.
I simply said, "No, Jack. Not you, too. You did not rape me." Something made me smile a little, and I added, "Honey, you are not our brother Jim. Nothing like our brother Jim. And you never really came CLOSE."
He looked as if he wanted to say more, to respond to that crack in the door to come clean, to face that demon. He tried, but the words stuck. We were crying, those big tears that it seems only children have... silent tears. It was more than enough for me, so I did not ask for more.
I released one hand and sang, "Ride, ride, ride, won't you let it ride."
And he picked up his guitar, which he'd brought with him... the same guitar he'd brought to play outside my house, just for me. We moved outside and sang, as was our custom, from back in high school, on the hot summer nights when Mom was drunk, Dad was "away" and we needed the cool of a nearby lake and the peace of music. And our tears ran into the "Song of the Great Silke" and faded into the accompanying chorus of late spring tree frogs.
No brother loved a sister more. No sister misses a brother more. I missed him for those decades he could not face us, could not bear the memories that haunted him until he drank to go numb. I did not force him to remember what I, myself, had blocked for so long. His secrets and pain were not mine to expose.
I had my brother again, if only for that year. I am alive because he was there to save me and to spare me pain he endured too many times. Robin Hood died; Maid Marion lives. That story is for another time.
I have to stop here for now. I have to listen to Judy Collins' Wildflowers CD and sing to him a spell.
***
It's a start.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister
I've tried a dozen times to write about her, to capture her. What it was to have a sister who lived her life with on section of her soul in past lives, one part in this life, and one part in whatever came next. She always expressed her spirituality in terms of our being on an eternal continuum, that this time here, now, was just a section along the way. She'd have visceral feelings of déja vu, but talked about them to very few people.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Looking for Signs, Listening for that “Still Small Voice”
New twists in the road this week...
Four times this week I have been visited by an enormous, white-throated stag. I think his antlers have ten points. Until now I have never seen one, let alone at the edge of my yard. And I've seen no does here since about 1994, when more houses were built in this area.
He came first last week, on the Monday when R. blew my world apart. Funny thing. R. said, when I'd mentioned it, that he wanted to think that was him, watching over me. Perhaps I should have listened to the small voice in me that jumped when he said that. It asked, "Why would I need a buck when I have you?" Not so much. But I think he meant it at the time. It's in retrospect we see other things...
But then, I did not see him again--the buck, I mean--until this week. He came on Wednesday morning, Thursday at dusk, and this morning, at dawn. Two out of three times, he seemed to hear me upstairs here, in my kitchen. I stared down at him as he drank from the brook at the culvert, and he looked up at me. We locked stares for a slow five or six counts, then he bounded off, down away from the street,, into the wetlands and woods. Even that is odd. Mostly the deer used to be on their way UP from my house, to cross the street and follow the wetlands to a town sanctuary. The woods cut across town several miles, so they have a good run.
But there he has been. I want so much to believe what I read in Native American lore, and even in Celtic lore. The stag is a power totem/symbol. He watches over the creatures in his kingdom. He is a transcendent figure, a harbinger of love, of peace, of grace. He gives strength to transcend pain. And he has appeared during two pivotal weeks of my life. I wonder if I dream him... then I wonder whether that matters. ... And I need strength, and some sense that I am safe. No. I have seen him. I don't think my mind is playing that sort of trick.
Last week, I lost the promise of a love I'd never known in my life. It was a time of anger, pain, abject grief, confusion. I felt torn apart inside. That, on the heels of realizing my career as I knew was pretty well destroyed. I cannot say I handled that well. I didn't. In fact, there are times I don't believe I was myself at all. I think I went through it pretty quickly, but that's mostly because, at 57 I just don't have the time to waste on something I will not ever understand from my perspective alone. It is a relationship that spans more than forty years, whether or not this latest permutation was short. It can only be understood when there is conversation. I haven't the luxury of angst, or of trying to figure it out any more.
But then this week? I have been having odd spasms in legs and arms. My right hand keeps going numb. I had another headache that lasted three days. I went through the initial phase of applying for disability--have to finish up the application this weekend, then let my lawyer do her thing. But I called the doctor Tuesday. After writing the last angry note in, yes, desperation--I just wanted to figure it out still, at that point, and I was so frustrated and angry. Feh. I am human. I mess up. But I tried to find closure through anger, which is never, EVER a good way to go.
But almost immediately after I hit send, I made the appointment with my doctor.
And I will be having new tests. There may be problems in another part of the central nervous system. There is reason for real worry.
As if there weren't enough reason for worry? And I realized that I had no time for anger. Or hurt. In the space of a sleepless night, I realized that I had to turn everything around, and I had to do it now. I wrote about my grandmother, after my buck appeared again. YES, I will think of him as mine. It is egocentric, and perhaps silly. But sometimes seeing good signs can help. He is so beautiful.
And I began to write to R. My friends would not be pleased. They want me to stay angry. They feel I never get mad enough for long enough, but I disagree. It is not that I do not have reason. It's that it will cause me more pain. It will close doors I do not choose to close, from my end. It will keep me stuck in that place where I pound my head against the wall, trying to understand what will never make sense... because it just doesn't make sense.
Not everything does, though. And matters of the heart have nothing to do with logic. I had to get quiet. I had to stop the static of my friends, of my pain, and find the center that is me. I am human and I don't stay in that place, but I've found it again. And I will stay in it longer and longer, if I give it time. Love. Peace. Gathering the troops for a rough time ahead.
It is hard. Since April I have had three very big dreams placed in my hand, and snatched away without warning. And my spine seems hellbent on attacking me. I call the pain Louise. I named it years ago, when I had pain management therapy. My father's mother's named Louise. She was not a nice lady, though she loved us in her way. She was one of those women who holds grudges. She was the first to give pies to the poor through the church, but would criticize the women for being too fat. Kind to everyone but her husband. And her daughter-in-law. She resented that her daughter moved to Alaska, but my father understood why.
He once said that he thought that all three kids were conceived by fission, because he never saw them kiss. He and my mother used to shudder visibly when they talked about Grandma and Grandpa's marriage through their eyes. I just thought they didn't like each other all that much, but I was very small. When Grandpa commit convoluted suicide because he tried to dig a basement in the cottage--shoveling dirt by the hour and carrying it outside--with a heart condition, Dad always thought that "Paw just couldn't see another ten to fifteen years cooped up with Ma."
I thought that was mean. But maybe he was right.
I mean, Grandma mourned the day her catalog no longer sold whalebone corsets. I was twelve! Tied up and rigid, my daddy's mom.
But she also taught me how to cook, how to sew, and let me make a total mess all over the cottage living room on rainy days. She taught me canasta. She introduced me to a world of books about nature, about life in the old days. She was the one who told wonderful stories about life in the "Skinnah girls house." About old-fashioned weddings, and jelly jars, and how the girls saved bits of handmade lace from their wedding gowns, night gowns, and dresses special for Sundays. She had a rhythm of her own, and her stories sang like a creaky Boston Rocker, and made rainy days fly by. When I was small, I loved to ask her about her childhood.
I grew out of her in a far more serious way. Through her meanness to my mother, her snappishness at Jack, through her manipulation to get Jack and me to tell secrets about our parents, to confess to her about things she did not approve of... I learned a lot about the kind of person I did not want to be. I valued her. I loved her as a child, but grew to learn she could not be trusted. I respected her because she was there. She was a part of me. She made me stronger and some of who I am. But I did not have to like her.And I never, ever wanted to be all buttoned down and tight, closed off to the sweetness of life. And to be safe in the world, to have all things go as expected, to have everything look right--these were her goals, so much of the time. And if things did not suit her, it was never her doing--someone of us, particularly my mom or my brothers, had always let here down. Not that she would complain, mind you. Nothing, to her, was pure joy. There was always something not quite good enough. And once disappointed, she punished for years. I thought it must be so hard to be Granny. There was a heart in there, but so protected by thorns, it was next to impossible to find.
I named the pain Louise. My middle name. I'm named after her, something for which my father will never be forgiven. EVER. This pain is part of me, whether I want it or not. It has taught me lessons and I can only accept that it's here, and learn to live around it, in spite of it... and, if I work really hard, because of it. And deep within, below the thorns, the pain has been a gift. I needed it to grow strong, to battle something other than myself. To stop trying to kill myself, and get up and live, instead.
But Louise is growing stronger these days, and it would seem there are new lessons to be learned. I do not want them. But it would seem, I will be getting these "gifts" anyway. For now, though? I don't have to like it or look for anything other than why Louise is shouting me, and attacking from all directions. I'll figure the rest out later.
So I wrote R. today, but I may have written too late. My anger may have been the last he could bear to read. I hope not. I hope he could see I had reasons and the right to write. I hope he cared enough to read, but it's okay, regardless.
When we throw love out into the universe we have to accept that we may never know whether it is received. I miss the man. The friend. I had found myself writing something funny, totally forgetting for those five minutes, that he is gone. As I said, I am not wholly in my right mind. But I realized in time... I miss my friend far more than the man who would be my love. It's not wanting all or nothing. It's wanting the best of who we are together, and we were always friends. I realized this week that I would not have been able to go on anyway. That friendship's all I have the strength to offer now anyway, and leaning's not an option.
I need to stand on my own through this. Leaning on someone this soon isn't right. My ex-husband courted me in the hospital, and he wanted me to need him. He wanted me to stay needy, and turned away as I grew to be stronger. I do not want to be loved because I am in need. I want to be strong. I want to be loved for my strength, and supported for that. It's a little different, I think. We all want to lean sometimes, but it isn't the place to start. Not for me. Not again. And it seems just wrong to ask or expect support in a time like this, of anyone newly back in my life. I would have asked him to let us step back for a time. Irony hurts.
The last thing I want in my life is to burden my son with me, and we may have some options that will limit that. And I have to believe that my stag came for a reason, one I just don't understand. And perhaps R. came for a reason that I'll understand with time. I don't mean that some puppeteer is in the sky, messing with my life. I use the phrase "for a reason" more metaphorically.
I think I mean that perhaps the lessons that these things have to offer will come with time. And if that small voice in me is saying over and over, "All will be well. There are no lies here," perhaps I should listen. I read Jo's blog today about listening to that voice that warns us. I think we should listen to us when it clearly says "THIS IS RIGHT."
It said that when R. came back to me. All is well. This is right. It says it still, beneath the anger and pain. So I let go of ALL of it today, in the only way I can. I wrote it. I left the door open because to slam it, so that I have supposed control? That is to be someone else. I can let go only with a door wide open, and trust that only my friend will ever come in. If he chooses never to come, so be it. But I felt as if a weight had been lifted from me, so that's the best I can do.
I have done this before; I write. It's who I am; it's what I do. Love beats control, it beats fear. And every time I panic about the money, that voice says, "No. Just stop." And when the pain in my hand catches me off guard and I tip over the water onto my work, it says, "Just breathe. Just breathe."
And I do. I am afraid for my future, but as two friends said, "Even if you are in poverty, you will not fly off the face of the earth. You are not alone."
And my buck stared up at the house, but I was at a different window. I smiled inside. That deer is mine, and he's watching over me, telling me I can do all of this with grace. I named the pain Louise. But Helen is in me, too.
And my mother's and my sister's blue eyes loving me, from wherever their souls have flown. And my daddy's arms and Old Spice cheek enfold me still. And I will let R. go, and the still small voice reminds me, friends, in my life, are the ones who always come back... in their time, in their way. I have to trust the marvelous boy in the man. I have to trust myself. I must stop listening to everyone else. And I will bask in the love of the twelve--the women friends who are in my life. Give where I can, but for now, this time, receive their love--and ask them to let go of their anger, too.
I have had loss. I have had pain. I have had dreams disappear just as they became real. I have never had so much of it happen in so short a time. And the consequences this time are far greater. I may lose my home or my independence or both. And the pain will not go away. The old dreams are gone, and I will need to find some new ones. But not today. I don't have to figure it all out today. There is a poetry chap book to work on, two paintings to finish. I have an application to finish. There still is a little time before it all hits too hard. I must use it well.
There will be lessons enough in all this; I need not rush them. I must rest. I must gather myself inside, be still, and listen.
And, of course, write. It's what I do; it's who I am.
Four times this week I have been visited by an enormous, white-throated stag. I think his antlers have ten points. Until now I have never seen one, let alone at the edge of my yard. And I've seen no does here since about 1994, when more houses were built in this area.
He came first last week, on the Monday when R. blew my world apart. Funny thing. R. said, when I'd mentioned it, that he wanted to think that was him, watching over me. Perhaps I should have listened to the small voice in me that jumped when he said that. It asked, "Why would I need a buck when I have you?" Not so much. But I think he meant it at the time. It's in retrospect we see other things...
But then, I did not see him again--the buck, I mean--until this week. He came on Wednesday morning, Thursday at dusk, and this morning, at dawn. Two out of three times, he seemed to hear me upstairs here, in my kitchen. I stared down at him as he drank from the brook at the culvert, and he looked up at me. We locked stares for a slow five or six counts, then he bounded off, down away from the street,, into the wetlands and woods. Even that is odd. Mostly the deer used to be on their way UP from my house, to cross the street and follow the wetlands to a town sanctuary. The woods cut across town several miles, so they have a good run.
But there he has been. I want so much to believe what I read in Native American lore, and even in Celtic lore. The stag is a power totem/symbol. He watches over the creatures in his kingdom. He is a transcendent figure, a harbinger of love, of peace, of grace. He gives strength to transcend pain. And he has appeared during two pivotal weeks of my life. I wonder if I dream him... then I wonder whether that matters. ... And I need strength, and some sense that I am safe. No. I have seen him. I don't think my mind is playing that sort of trick.
Last week, I lost the promise of a love I'd never known in my life. It was a time of anger, pain, abject grief, confusion. I felt torn apart inside. That, on the heels of realizing my career as I knew was pretty well destroyed. I cannot say I handled that well. I didn't. In fact, there are times I don't believe I was myself at all. I think I went through it pretty quickly, but that's mostly because, at 57 I just don't have the time to waste on something I will not ever understand from my perspective alone. It is a relationship that spans more than forty years, whether or not this latest permutation was short. It can only be understood when there is conversation. I haven't the luxury of angst, or of trying to figure it out any more.
But then this week? I have been having odd spasms in legs and arms. My right hand keeps going numb. I had another headache that lasted three days. I went through the initial phase of applying for disability--have to finish up the application this weekend, then let my lawyer do her thing. But I called the doctor Tuesday. After writing the last angry note in, yes, desperation--I just wanted to figure it out still, at that point, and I was so frustrated and angry. Feh. I am human. I mess up. But I tried to find closure through anger, which is never, EVER a good way to go.
But almost immediately after I hit send, I made the appointment with my doctor.
And I will be having new tests. There may be problems in another part of the central nervous system. There is reason for real worry.
As if there weren't enough reason for worry? And I realized that I had no time for anger. Or hurt. In the space of a sleepless night, I realized that I had to turn everything around, and I had to do it now. I wrote about my grandmother, after my buck appeared again. YES, I will think of him as mine. It is egocentric, and perhaps silly. But sometimes seeing good signs can help. He is so beautiful.
And I began to write to R. My friends would not be pleased. They want me to stay angry. They feel I never get mad enough for long enough, but I disagree. It is not that I do not have reason. It's that it will cause me more pain. It will close doors I do not choose to close, from my end. It will keep me stuck in that place where I pound my head against the wall, trying to understand what will never make sense... because it just doesn't make sense.
Not everything does, though. And matters of the heart have nothing to do with logic. I had to get quiet. I had to stop the static of my friends, of my pain, and find the center that is me. I am human and I don't stay in that place, but I've found it again. And I will stay in it longer and longer, if I give it time. Love. Peace. Gathering the troops for a rough time ahead.
It is hard. Since April I have had three very big dreams placed in my hand, and snatched away without warning. And my spine seems hellbent on attacking me. I call the pain Louise. I named it years ago, when I had pain management therapy. My father's mother's named Louise. She was not a nice lady, though she loved us in her way. She was one of those women who holds grudges. She was the first to give pies to the poor through the church, but would criticize the women for being too fat. Kind to everyone but her husband. And her daughter-in-law. She resented that her daughter moved to Alaska, but my father understood why.
He once said that he thought that all three kids were conceived by fission, because he never saw them kiss. He and my mother used to shudder visibly when they talked about Grandma and Grandpa's marriage through their eyes. I just thought they didn't like each other all that much, but I was very small. When Grandpa commit convoluted suicide because he tried to dig a basement in the cottage--shoveling dirt by the hour and carrying it outside--with a heart condition, Dad always thought that "Paw just couldn't see another ten to fifteen years cooped up with Ma."
I thought that was mean. But maybe he was right.
I mean, Grandma mourned the day her catalog no longer sold whalebone corsets. I was twelve! Tied up and rigid, my daddy's mom.
But she also taught me how to cook, how to sew, and let me make a total mess all over the cottage living room on rainy days. She taught me canasta. She introduced me to a world of books about nature, about life in the old days. She was the one who told wonderful stories about life in the "Skinnah girls house." About old-fashioned weddings, and jelly jars, and how the girls saved bits of handmade lace from their wedding gowns, night gowns, and dresses special for Sundays. She had a rhythm of her own, and her stories sang like a creaky Boston Rocker, and made rainy days fly by. When I was small, I loved to ask her about her childhood.
I grew out of her in a far more serious way. Through her meanness to my mother, her snappishness at Jack, through her manipulation to get Jack and me to tell secrets about our parents, to confess to her about things she did not approve of... I learned a lot about the kind of person I did not want to be. I valued her. I loved her as a child, but grew to learn she could not be trusted. I respected her because she was there. She was a part of me. She made me stronger and some of who I am. But I did not have to like her.And I never, ever wanted to be all buttoned down and tight, closed off to the sweetness of life. And to be safe in the world, to have all things go as expected, to have everything look right--these were her goals, so much of the time. And if things did not suit her, it was never her doing--someone of us, particularly my mom or my brothers, had always let here down. Not that she would complain, mind you. Nothing, to her, was pure joy. There was always something not quite good enough. And once disappointed, she punished for years. I thought it must be so hard to be Granny. There was a heart in there, but so protected by thorns, it was next to impossible to find.
I named the pain Louise. My middle name. I'm named after her, something for which my father will never be forgiven. EVER. This pain is part of me, whether I want it or not. It has taught me lessons and I can only accept that it's here, and learn to live around it, in spite of it... and, if I work really hard, because of it. And deep within, below the thorns, the pain has been a gift. I needed it to grow strong, to battle something other than myself. To stop trying to kill myself, and get up and live, instead.
But Louise is growing stronger these days, and it would seem there are new lessons to be learned. I do not want them. But it would seem, I will be getting these "gifts" anyway. For now, though? I don't have to like it or look for anything other than why Louise is shouting me, and attacking from all directions. I'll figure the rest out later.
So I wrote R. today, but I may have written too late. My anger may have been the last he could bear to read. I hope not. I hope he could see I had reasons and the right to write. I hope he cared enough to read, but it's okay, regardless.
When we throw love out into the universe we have to accept that we may never know whether it is received. I miss the man. The friend. I had found myself writing something funny, totally forgetting for those five minutes, that he is gone. As I said, I am not wholly in my right mind. But I realized in time... I miss my friend far more than the man who would be my love. It's not wanting all or nothing. It's wanting the best of who we are together, and we were always friends. I realized this week that I would not have been able to go on anyway. That friendship's all I have the strength to offer now anyway, and leaning's not an option.
I need to stand on my own through this. Leaning on someone this soon isn't right. My ex-husband courted me in the hospital, and he wanted me to need him. He wanted me to stay needy, and turned away as I grew to be stronger. I do not want to be loved because I am in need. I want to be strong. I want to be loved for my strength, and supported for that. It's a little different, I think. We all want to lean sometimes, but it isn't the place to start. Not for me. Not again. And it seems just wrong to ask or expect support in a time like this, of anyone newly back in my life. I would have asked him to let us step back for a time. Irony hurts.
The last thing I want in my life is to burden my son with me, and we may have some options that will limit that. And I have to believe that my stag came for a reason, one I just don't understand. And perhaps R. came for a reason that I'll understand with time. I don't mean that some puppeteer is in the sky, messing with my life. I use the phrase "for a reason" more metaphorically.
I think I mean that perhaps the lessons that these things have to offer will come with time. And if that small voice in me is saying over and over, "All will be well. There are no lies here," perhaps I should listen. I read Jo's blog today about listening to that voice that warns us. I think we should listen to us when it clearly says "THIS IS RIGHT."
It said that when R. came back to me. All is well. This is right. It says it still, beneath the anger and pain. So I let go of ALL of it today, in the only way I can. I wrote it. I left the door open because to slam it, so that I have supposed control? That is to be someone else. I can let go only with a door wide open, and trust that only my friend will ever come in. If he chooses never to come, so be it. But I felt as if a weight had been lifted from me, so that's the best I can do.
I have done this before; I write. It's who I am; it's what I do. Love beats control, it beats fear. And every time I panic about the money, that voice says, "No. Just stop." And when the pain in my hand catches me off guard and I tip over the water onto my work, it says, "Just breathe. Just breathe."
And I do. I am afraid for my future, but as two friends said, "Even if you are in poverty, you will not fly off the face of the earth. You are not alone."
And my buck stared up at the house, but I was at a different window. I smiled inside. That deer is mine, and he's watching over me, telling me I can do all of this with grace. I named the pain Louise. But Helen is in me, too.
And my mother's and my sister's blue eyes loving me, from wherever their souls have flown. And my daddy's arms and Old Spice cheek enfold me still. And I will let R. go, and the still small voice reminds me, friends, in my life, are the ones who always come back... in their time, in their way. I have to trust the marvelous boy in the man. I have to trust myself. I must stop listening to everyone else. And I will bask in the love of the twelve--the women friends who are in my life. Give where I can, but for now, this time, receive their love--and ask them to let go of their anger, too.
I have had loss. I have had pain. I have had dreams disappear just as they became real. I have never had so much of it happen in so short a time. And the consequences this time are far greater. I may lose my home or my independence or both. And the pain will not go away. The old dreams are gone, and I will need to find some new ones. But not today. I don't have to figure it all out today. There is a poetry chap book to work on, two paintings to finish. I have an application to finish. There still is a little time before it all hits too hard. I must use it well.
There will be lessons enough in all this; I need not rush them. I must rest. I must gather myself inside, be still, and listen.
And, of course, write. It's what I do; it's who I am.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Where We Head When We Heal
Prism Women ©2002
Tucked in dark corners to collect dust
What are prisms but broken glass?
Yet strung gleaming, spinning in the light?
Sun-dancers
Diamond-catchers
Rainbow-throwers.
Every shining cut casts the spectrum,
Each twirl offers a rainbow dance.
Then our gray days spin wonder.
Each polished cut hordes our light
To toss, teasing with every turn.
The trick to being a prism is to face the light,
Polish all the cuts,
Then let the magic happen.
†††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††
This may be kind of short tonight. It's strange when the old ways no longer work. I have allowed my heart to be completely accessible for the first time in my life, having saved some part of it to come out again when I thought I would be safe at last. Turns out that I was mistaken, and that my heart was even less safe with him. And with having every corner of my life vulnerable, this particular misstep on my part has taken a toll.
We can, as I said, reach a wall and feel there is nothing left. And I don't know that I can find a way to keep my home. And I really have no idea how I will make a living at all, and the disability application process is appallingly slow--I've been through it twice before. I worked my way off it twice before. Not this time.
I think that this is where it is all so hard. I've reached the end of my back's getting better. And losing my home ... I can't even talk about that fear. And losing the career that I worked so hard to create, the career that my central nervous system could handle for so long. At this time of life, it is hard to create another. To have no retirement. To have no health insurance within the next three months. Possibly to lose one's home.
This, my friends, is why this man's desertion, his betrayal hurts to the core and has had such an impact. It was the hope he created that is the hardest to lose. No hope is better than false hope. I was foolish; he was worse. But it's the timing of the thing, that has made it so very hard. It's done; he's gone. Faster than he arrived he's done. And I have to get on with this life.
Then I thought about my friends, my "laundry eagles" who are hovering around me now, closing ranks. The flock is here. They call; they send notes. They let me know I am better than any man who would betray and leave me. They tell me all the things to make me remember I'm whole. We talk about Christmas and children and chocolate. We laugh about nothing at all. They make me remember to shine, these women. All by myself, to shine.
The strength of their love begins to sink in. They tell me he's stupid to leave, that he's weak and he's blind if he cannot see he's left the best woman behind. And I smile. These are not things that I say to myself, they are things I find hard to believe. They tell me I'll find a way to fly, to earn my own way, to do anything I want. My friends think I will soar. They think that I am better than I ever believe of myself.
That's what women do, when the men feed and just leave. We close ranks. We lift one another up, put her on a pedestal and unabashedly worship while she heals. I turned 50 in 2002, and it was a difficult year... among difficult years. One of my friends, when she read this poem said, "Well, that's the thing Jetty. You have so many cuts, you are the brightest prism of the bunch." Lucky me ... or maybe I am. Too soon to feel that just yet.
My women friends are busy polishing just now. This newest cut is so sharp and so new, they are busy polishing the sides, smoothing the edge so that I stop cutting myself in all this pain. They won't let me go back into hiding, I'm afraid. They keep drawing me out, reminding me that I will always have a home, or perhaps I'll have twelve and just move from place to place. The Gypsy Jet, they call her. I offer to take my tambourine. We laugh and for moments at a time, I forget the ache, and just be.
And here is this heart of mine, that he so carefully drew out, looked at from every direction, kissed, held, promised to cherish for life... and kicked to the side of the road. Here it is. And now I have written about putting it away. Tying the whole mess up in a box and throwing in a closet. I did that with the horrors for years, the ones I have only hinted at yet. I did it before, like an artist. I could reduce a memory to a bit of tissue and stuff it where I could not see or feel or hear or taste the pain, where it was dead to me. I am an expert at stuffing the pain. And that's what I'd done with this man before, this love of my life. I stuck him far away so I barely remembered his name. And here I am again, ready to put it all away.
Only now I don't know how.
I have lost the ability to hide. I have lost the knack with turning the phrase to make what is poison palatable. I think to put all those parts back in a box would kill something more precious still. He woke up all this love in me, all this sparkling faith that life could be good. He said he wanted just to make it so I would not have to worry, so that I could get up every day and CHOOSE to write or to paint, without having to worry about keeping my home. Such a pretty wish from him. Yes. There is bitterness here... but there's something else I've not named.
Perhaps the only way I can salvage my soul from the damage is to keep that sparkling heart. I loved without conditions, without artifice. For once in my life I did not hold back, I did not pretend, I lived in each moment with him.
The cut that he made is so deep in this newly revealed heart, this child's soul who finally came out to dance. He cut her; I bleed. But the women work on just the same. She is not doing too well, but I think... I think perhaps ... she has a name to me, a child in me, the part I would let no one see. I think I must let her stay here.
Little Rita has come out at last. The quiet, somber, big-eyed child who sat up with the dying,
who turned on her brother when he did his worst, and simply asked him, "WHY?" So he ran.
who dropped the knife, choosing not to attack her attacker,
who closed her sister's eyes.
This child came out for this man who is gone. She slipped her hand in his, one sunny afternoon, certain of his love, of his honesty, certain that this man was her home. She had waited for him to come back; and he did. Never once did she think he would leave ... again. And this tiny child, with the strength of the mighty has, for the first time in my life, been walking through my life with me for six weeks. Since the first time he was here, when she came out only twice, she's appeared only when I needed strength to walk with grace through times when I had none to give. She would come. But mostly she stayed in the shadows, rarely daring to come out just to breathe. I have loved having her out. She does different things with paint. She takes no crap from him or anyone at all. Rita dances without moving at all.
And now she's been ripped open again.
But something's changed; I tried to start putting her back into that box, to that cold, gray place, she shouted me down. She clung to my dress. She begged me to stay with the lights. I told her I didn't want her to hurt any more, that we just can't take the pain, but she made me turn and look.
"LOOK AT THE LIGHTS!" My little girl screamed and I turned and I saw and I cried.
Paige, Martha, Judy, Andrea, Laura, Sue, Linda, Sue G., Nancy, Ann, Gail, Martha L.,
Came the Dozen, Dancing
Twirling, laughing, throwing rainbows every where...
skipping toward us
with tea and with cookies,
with puff quilts and stories,
with hairbrushes and pillows,
coming toward us with nothing but love.
I think I need Rita with me now. I think I need to not stuff one single thing anywhere at all. For the first time in my life, there are no secrets left.
And I am terrified.
And I am heart-broken.
And I am weary to beneath my core.
I am revealed.
I cannot allow his abandonment to cover this newest light.
The women will polish,
But we are finally whole.
No matter what the pain ahead, or loss.
No matter where we make our home,
The women will help us heal.
... and we will dance rainbows at last.
Tucked in dark corners to collect dust
What are prisms but broken glass?
Yet strung gleaming, spinning in the light?
Sun-dancers
Diamond-catchers
Rainbow-throwers.
Every shining cut casts the spectrum,
Each twirl offers a rainbow dance.
Then our gray days spin wonder.
Each polished cut hordes our light
To toss, teasing with every turn.
The trick to being a prism is to face the light,
Polish all the cuts,
Then let the magic happen.
†††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††
This may be kind of short tonight. It's strange when the old ways no longer work. I have allowed my heart to be completely accessible for the first time in my life, having saved some part of it to come out again when I thought I would be safe at last. Turns out that I was mistaken, and that my heart was even less safe with him. And with having every corner of my life vulnerable, this particular misstep on my part has taken a toll.
We can, as I said, reach a wall and feel there is nothing left. And I don't know that I can find a way to keep my home. And I really have no idea how I will make a living at all, and the disability application process is appallingly slow--I've been through it twice before. I worked my way off it twice before. Not this time.
I think that this is where it is all so hard. I've reached the end of my back's getting better. And losing my home ... I can't even talk about that fear. And losing the career that I worked so hard to create, the career that my central nervous system could handle for so long. At this time of life, it is hard to create another. To have no retirement. To have no health insurance within the next three months. Possibly to lose one's home.
This, my friends, is why this man's desertion, his betrayal hurts to the core and has had such an impact. It was the hope he created that is the hardest to lose. No hope is better than false hope. I was foolish; he was worse. But it's the timing of the thing, that has made it so very hard. It's done; he's gone. Faster than he arrived he's done. And I have to get on with this life.
Then I thought about my friends, my "laundry eagles" who are hovering around me now, closing ranks. The flock is here. They call; they send notes. They let me know I am better than any man who would betray and leave me. They tell me all the things to make me remember I'm whole. We talk about Christmas and children and chocolate. We laugh about nothing at all. They make me remember to shine, these women. All by myself, to shine.
The strength of their love begins to sink in. They tell me he's stupid to leave, that he's weak and he's blind if he cannot see he's left the best woman behind. And I smile. These are not things that I say to myself, they are things I find hard to believe. They tell me I'll find a way to fly, to earn my own way, to do anything I want. My friends think I will soar. They think that I am better than I ever believe of myself.
That's what women do, when the men feed and just leave. We close ranks. We lift one another up, put her on a pedestal and unabashedly worship while she heals. I turned 50 in 2002, and it was a difficult year... among difficult years. One of my friends, when she read this poem said, "Well, that's the thing Jetty. You have so many cuts, you are the brightest prism of the bunch." Lucky me ... or maybe I am. Too soon to feel that just yet.
My women friends are busy polishing just now. This newest cut is so sharp and so new, they are busy polishing the sides, smoothing the edge so that I stop cutting myself in all this pain. They won't let me go back into hiding, I'm afraid. They keep drawing me out, reminding me that I will always have a home, or perhaps I'll have twelve and just move from place to place. The Gypsy Jet, they call her. I offer to take my tambourine. We laugh and for moments at a time, I forget the ache, and just be.
And here is this heart of mine, that he so carefully drew out, looked at from every direction, kissed, held, promised to cherish for life... and kicked to the side of the road. Here it is. And now I have written about putting it away. Tying the whole mess up in a box and throwing in a closet. I did that with the horrors for years, the ones I have only hinted at yet. I did it before, like an artist. I could reduce a memory to a bit of tissue and stuff it where I could not see or feel or hear or taste the pain, where it was dead to me. I am an expert at stuffing the pain. And that's what I'd done with this man before, this love of my life. I stuck him far away so I barely remembered his name. And here I am again, ready to put it all away.
Only now I don't know how.
I have lost the ability to hide. I have lost the knack with turning the phrase to make what is poison palatable. I think to put all those parts back in a box would kill something more precious still. He woke up all this love in me, all this sparkling faith that life could be good. He said he wanted just to make it so I would not have to worry, so that I could get up every day and CHOOSE to write or to paint, without having to worry about keeping my home. Such a pretty wish from him. Yes. There is bitterness here... but there's something else I've not named.
Perhaps the only way I can salvage my soul from the damage is to keep that sparkling heart. I loved without conditions, without artifice. For once in my life I did not hold back, I did not pretend, I lived in each moment with him.
The cut that he made is so deep in this newly revealed heart, this child's soul who finally came out to dance. He cut her; I bleed. But the women work on just the same. She is not doing too well, but I think... I think perhaps ... she has a name to me, a child in me, the part I would let no one see. I think I must let her stay here.
Little Rita has come out at last. The quiet, somber, big-eyed child who sat up with the dying,
who turned on her brother when he did his worst, and simply asked him, "WHY?" So he ran.
who dropped the knife, choosing not to attack her attacker,
who closed her sister's eyes.
This child came out for this man who is gone. She slipped her hand in his, one sunny afternoon, certain of his love, of his honesty, certain that this man was her home. She had waited for him to come back; and he did. Never once did she think he would leave ... again. And this tiny child, with the strength of the mighty has, for the first time in my life, been walking through my life with me for six weeks. Since the first time he was here, when she came out only twice, she's appeared only when I needed strength to walk with grace through times when I had none to give. She would come. But mostly she stayed in the shadows, rarely daring to come out just to breathe. I have loved having her out. She does different things with paint. She takes no crap from him or anyone at all. Rita dances without moving at all.
And now she's been ripped open again.
But something's changed; I tried to start putting her back into that box, to that cold, gray place, she shouted me down. She clung to my dress. She begged me to stay with the lights. I told her I didn't want her to hurt any more, that we just can't take the pain, but she made me turn and look.
"LOOK AT THE LIGHTS!" My little girl screamed and I turned and I saw and I cried.
Paige, Martha, Judy, Andrea, Laura, Sue, Linda, Sue G., Nancy, Ann, Gail, Martha L.,
Came the Dozen, Dancing
Twirling, laughing, throwing rainbows every where...
skipping toward us
with tea and with cookies,
with puff quilts and stories,
with hairbrushes and pillows,
coming toward us with nothing but love.
I think I need Rita with me now. I think I need to not stuff one single thing anywhere at all. For the first time in my life, there are no secrets left.
And I am terrified.
And I am heart-broken.
And I am weary to beneath my core.
I am revealed.
I cannot allow his abandonment to cover this newest light.
The women will polish,
But we are finally whole.
No matter what the pain ahead, or loss.
No matter where we make our home,
The women will help us heal.
... and we will dance rainbows at last.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Just a bit of an Illness
To those of you who noticed I had not posted, thank you for letting me know. It is a shock to me. This blog represents the first time I have allowed my personal writing out of the box... out of a classroom... into the big marvelous, messy mish-mash that is the Web.
It is taking a while to sink in that people like my writing and are moved. This is my training ground for a memoir. I have been warned and supported in being careful of what I put here, but, by the same token, one sends a memoir into the world.
My back's been a mess and my regular work has suffered. When you write for someplace like Stanford, you cannot write in short bursts as I can for my blog. The entries take time and love and attention, but my work requires that I sit too long sometimes. Doesn't sound bad, I suppose, but I have had eight spinal operations. At 57, now, it has taken a toll. I've had to face some tough decisions over the last two weeks, so I've been away from the writing I love so much.
You nine who follow me regularly, and others who visit from time to time? For the first time, I am thinking that perhaps, if I wrote a memoir there are those who would want to read it, who might connect with what I say and how I say it. All of you have given me some confidence there.
I will write about what's gone on, but not today. I write from a position of objectivity, ironically enough. Only when I have processed the event can I feel free enough to attach the force of my emotions to it.
So. I'm in a state of flux, wondering whether I take the risk to focus on the work I want--my poetry and memoirs, and fiction and painting. Or do I keep pounding my head against the wall because it's what my MOM and the RELATIVES would say is wise. How do I find work to replace it?
It is not easy to admit limitations. I've fought doing that now for thirty years; it's why I walk. What I had to remembered is that I have ALSO stayed walking because I do recognize when the word "enough" is the right word. When it is pounding my head against a wall. And it is always better to walk away from something before it's blown out of the ater and taken out of our hands, don't you agree?
Anyway, thank you for letting me know that you look forward to my words. It means so much more than you know.
Today is my daughter, Jessie's birthday. She would have been 38. I am missing her today--that's the age I was when we bought this home, this last place my daughter lived. I'll be back.
It is taking a while to sink in that people like my writing and are moved. This is my training ground for a memoir. I have been warned and supported in being careful of what I put here, but, by the same token, one sends a memoir into the world.
My back's been a mess and my regular work has suffered. When you write for someplace like Stanford, you cannot write in short bursts as I can for my blog. The entries take time and love and attention, but my work requires that I sit too long sometimes. Doesn't sound bad, I suppose, but I have had eight spinal operations. At 57, now, it has taken a toll. I've had to face some tough decisions over the last two weeks, so I've been away from the writing I love so much.
You nine who follow me regularly, and others who visit from time to time? For the first time, I am thinking that perhaps, if I wrote a memoir there are those who would want to read it, who might connect with what I say and how I say it. All of you have given me some confidence there.
I will write about what's gone on, but not today. I write from a position of objectivity, ironically enough. Only when I have processed the event can I feel free enough to attach the force of my emotions to it.
So. I'm in a state of flux, wondering whether I take the risk to focus on the work I want--my poetry and memoirs, and fiction and painting. Or do I keep pounding my head against the wall because it's what my MOM and the RELATIVES would say is wise. How do I find work to replace it?
It is not easy to admit limitations. I've fought doing that now for thirty years; it's why I walk. What I had to remembered is that I have ALSO stayed walking because I do recognize when the word "enough" is the right word. When it is pounding my head against a wall. And it is always better to walk away from something before it's blown out of the ater and taken out of our hands, don't you agree?
Anyway, thank you for letting me know that you look forward to my words. It means so much more than you know.
Today is my daughter, Jessie's birthday. She would have been 38. I am missing her today--that's the age I was when we bought this home, this last place my daughter lived. I'll be back.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Equal Time for Daddy
I hint about him, his gentleness, his womanizing, the big man on the periphery. I mostly focus on my mother with my brother Jim in the shadows, lurking.
But I had a Dad and a Daddy, both. Too absent, sometimes, but not always. Not at bedtime when I was smaller than the length of his legs. Not when I had to be lifted into his big chair, the chair that held the scent of him a full year after he died. Old Spice and something uniquely him. Snigglefritz and bitty bit. I was his Jetty, mostly.
We curled up in his chair, Jacky and I, one on each leg, while her read Wind in the Willows, doing every single voice just so. Or Robin Hood and, finally, the Scarlet Pimpernell. I do not remember the stories, just the rumble of his voice against my ear. He tickled. I never stayed awake, and somewhere between Toad and Mole, Marion and Friar Tuck, somewhere in the halfway world of voice and sleep, my daddy's arms held me above the mess. Held me above the dangers, the worries, the day's trapped noises, carrying me to my bed as if I were nothing but a rather small pillow. I hear him talking to Jack, falling deeper, I feel the sandpaper on my cheek, smell his late day, tired smell.
And the covers would tuck beneath my chin, just so, cool sheet folded so the scratchy wool never touched my skin. He always remembered to prop the extra pillow for turning, against the plastered walls. Gone already, some part of me heard his "Night Snigglefritz." Feel his dry kiss on my hair, and one last barely felt drift of his long hands across my hair.
And when the monsters attacked in the night, my father came. He came bigger than anything, fiercer still. He heard the scream before it left my mouth, I swear. And he taught me more important things, like how to make the Bahbo go. My first room, with Jacky, was haunted by a giant creature, sometimes rabbit, sometimes unknown creature, I called the Bahbo. After four nights running, my dad said, "Let me teach you secrets of chasing monsters, Jetty. They are cowards. All they want is to THINK that they can scare you, you know."
I would grab the sides of his pajama top and bury my head in his chest mumbling something profound like, " I AM scared, Daddy."
He made me sit up and said, "Now. We're going to practice. Say, BOO. Go a-WAY."
"Boogoaway."
"Jetty, I've heard you yell at Jacky better than that. Okay. BAHBO. BOO. Go a-WAY."
And we practiced until I passed muster. The next night, I woke again and Daddy wasn't there. IT WAS, though. Leaning over Jacky's bed. I SCREAMED, "BOO! Bahbo! GO AWAY!" It turned and walked toward ME, but I did it. I shook my three-year-old finger at it. I was mad. "GO AWAY!"
And it did.
And Daddy came to let me know he was proud of me. I buried my head in his top anyway.
It was the in-between years that were a bit rough. He was gone. He was busy running like all hell from OLD. I understand that. I think I understood it then, and it wasn't so much I minded the fact that he was cheating on mom. We ALL knew that, somehow. It was the leaving that hurt. He left me to the sickness. The torture. The madness. He left his little Jetty to slay dragons that I never seemed to see in time.
James, Sr. was human. Go figure.
But when I was graduated from college, he came back to me. He gave me What Color Is Your Parachute, first edition. He told me that I should never, EVER seriously pursue a traditional line of work. "You'll try, my Jetty. You'll think you should because your mother wants it. And you'll think you are supposed to fit. It's okay. It will eat you up and spit you out, but you'll learn. Don't worry about change. Enjoy change. If you learn nothing else, Snigglefritz, get these two things. Change can be a wonderful thing, and that the comment 'life isn't fair' is wholly irrelevant to anything that matters. FAIR has nothing to do with life. And security is an illusion that we all will try to make for ourselves. You were not made to fit any mold I've seen, honey." He kissed me and got me a job when I was floundering, at the university where he worked.
We commuted together. I saw that he promoted every woman and person of color he could, before anyone said he should. He would say, "Why not give the underdog the shot? Usually they will work harder and do a more creative job anyway." He was beloved and we would have the most wonderful, far-reaching, leaping conversations with other faculty at lunch. He opened my eyes to the idea that education should be part of our whole lives, and he was so proud when, after two semesters of Spanish, I was offered an upper class independent study.
I was one of those daughters who got to move into friendship with her father, all the while I knew his failings. I watched my mother sink as he rose, worshiped by women around him. Mommy dimmed. But I shone too, so I did not defend her. Perhaps I was too young. I was not yet twenty-five. On my own with my sister. Free, wild, working, on fire intellectually and physically.
Silver hair, long hands, and the voice that rumbled across the room, though it was seldom loud. I could write of the flashes of temper, the difference in how he loved me better than the rest. I'll get there. Not tonight, though. Tonight I remember when I visited him in the hospital, the night before exploratory surgery. I sat by his bed and held those long, smooth hands and he looked up at me. I was married. He already knew my marriage was in trouble. He already knew that the light had gone from his Jetty's eyes.
But we looked at one another and he said, simply, "You know, don't you."
I said, "Yes, Daddy. I know. But I guess you need the surgery to let everyone else know?"
He nodded. "You'll be around?"
"Always, Daddy."
And the next morning, I drove to a nearby Lake. Late August morning, and I drove there, to be by the lake at dawn, when I knew they were getting him into surgery.
Canada Geese © 1986
I grabbed his hand and looked in the darkening eyes. "You DID, Daddy. Most days you did. You lived them more often than most, Daddy. It's all done now."
But I had a Dad and a Daddy, both. Too absent, sometimes, but not always. Not at bedtime when I was smaller than the length of his legs. Not when I had to be lifted into his big chair, the chair that held the scent of him a full year after he died. Old Spice and something uniquely him. Snigglefritz and bitty bit. I was his Jetty, mostly.
We curled up in his chair, Jacky and I, one on each leg, while her read Wind in the Willows, doing every single voice just so. Or Robin Hood and, finally, the Scarlet Pimpernell. I do not remember the stories, just the rumble of his voice against my ear. He tickled. I never stayed awake, and somewhere between Toad and Mole, Marion and Friar Tuck, somewhere in the halfway world of voice and sleep, my daddy's arms held me above the mess. Held me above the dangers, the worries, the day's trapped noises, carrying me to my bed as if I were nothing but a rather small pillow. I hear him talking to Jack, falling deeper, I feel the sandpaper on my cheek, smell his late day, tired smell.
And the covers would tuck beneath my chin, just so, cool sheet folded so the scratchy wool never touched my skin. He always remembered to prop the extra pillow for turning, against the plastered walls. Gone already, some part of me heard his "Night Snigglefritz." Feel his dry kiss on my hair, and one last barely felt drift of his long hands across my hair.
And when the monsters attacked in the night, my father came. He came bigger than anything, fiercer still. He heard the scream before it left my mouth, I swear. And he taught me more important things, like how to make the Bahbo go. My first room, with Jacky, was haunted by a giant creature, sometimes rabbit, sometimes unknown creature, I called the Bahbo. After four nights running, my dad said, "Let me teach you secrets of chasing monsters, Jetty. They are cowards. All they want is to THINK that they can scare you, you know."
I would grab the sides of his pajama top and bury my head in his chest mumbling something profound like, " I AM scared, Daddy."
He made me sit up and said, "Now. We're going to practice. Say, BOO. Go a-WAY."
"Boogoaway."
"Jetty, I've heard you yell at Jacky better than that. Okay. BAHBO. BOO. Go a-WAY."
And we practiced until I passed muster. The next night, I woke again and Daddy wasn't there. IT WAS, though. Leaning over Jacky's bed. I SCREAMED, "BOO! Bahbo! GO AWAY!" It turned and walked toward ME, but I did it. I shook my three-year-old finger at it. I was mad. "GO AWAY!"
And it did.
And Daddy came to let me know he was proud of me. I buried my head in his top anyway.
It was the in-between years that were a bit rough. He was gone. He was busy running like all hell from OLD. I understand that. I think I understood it then, and it wasn't so much I minded the fact that he was cheating on mom. We ALL knew that, somehow. It was the leaving that hurt. He left me to the sickness. The torture. The madness. He left his little Jetty to slay dragons that I never seemed to see in time.
James, Sr. was human. Go figure.
But when I was graduated from college, he came back to me. He gave me What Color Is Your Parachute, first edition. He told me that I should never, EVER seriously pursue a traditional line of work. "You'll try, my Jetty. You'll think you should because your mother wants it. And you'll think you are supposed to fit. It's okay. It will eat you up and spit you out, but you'll learn. Don't worry about change. Enjoy change. If you learn nothing else, Snigglefritz, get these two things. Change can be a wonderful thing, and that the comment 'life isn't fair' is wholly irrelevant to anything that matters. FAIR has nothing to do with life. And security is an illusion that we all will try to make for ourselves. You were not made to fit any mold I've seen, honey." He kissed me and got me a job when I was floundering, at the university where he worked.
We commuted together. I saw that he promoted every woman and person of color he could, before anyone said he should. He would say, "Why not give the underdog the shot? Usually they will work harder and do a more creative job anyway." He was beloved and we would have the most wonderful, far-reaching, leaping conversations with other faculty at lunch. He opened my eyes to the idea that education should be part of our whole lives, and he was so proud when, after two semesters of Spanish, I was offered an upper class independent study.
I was one of those daughters who got to move into friendship with her father, all the while I knew his failings. I watched my mother sink as he rose, worshiped by women around him. Mommy dimmed. But I shone too, so I did not defend her. Perhaps I was too young. I was not yet twenty-five. On my own with my sister. Free, wild, working, on fire intellectually and physically.
Silver hair, long hands, and the voice that rumbled across the room, though it was seldom loud. I could write of the flashes of temper, the difference in how he loved me better than the rest. I'll get there. Not tonight, though. Tonight I remember when I visited him in the hospital, the night before exploratory surgery. I sat by his bed and held those long, smooth hands and he looked up at me. I was married. He already knew my marriage was in trouble. He already knew that the light had gone from his Jetty's eyes.
But we looked at one another and he said, simply, "You know, don't you."
I said, "Yes, Daddy. I know. But I guess you need the surgery to let everyone else know?"
He nodded. "You'll be around?"
"Always, Daddy."
And the next morning, I drove to a nearby Lake. Late August morning, and I drove there, to be by the lake at dawn, when I knew they were getting him into surgery.
Canada Geese © 1986
Late that summer at dawn,
I sat shivering on the still warm hood of my car.
Clear-eyed sky above mists
Blanketed geese sleeping, still, on the beach.
I heard your cry.
Then geese and fog rose together.
They fled, calling, one cacophony of joy.
Crying, I called after "Please!
Take me with you--" but they didn't hear me.
Silly geese.
Later, holding your withered, gentle hand,
Your death-stamped eyes said more than your words
As I stood by your too-sterile bed.
I realized in horror, the geese had made a mistake.
They took you instead.
You know I've always said
that's the trouble with geese, Daddy;
they just never listen.
My father was opened at 7:30 a.m. that day, and closed up at 8:05. I don't think most children of my generation are given the opportunity to escort their fathers with full disclosure to their final departure. He had six months to make as much right as he could; he did well. He wasted no time with dancing around difficult truths, and he bluntly admitted to his conceit, his need to feel younger than his years, how it hurt his marriage and his relationships with every child except me. Somehow or other, he thought that I had been oblivious to his lies. I let him know that I had always known the truth, but that I'd loved him. But he was increasingly worried long after he could no longer eat. After his feet had become too bony to stand, even to pivot to the bedside commode.
I had been the one to insist we wrap the mattress before it was necessary, learn the bedroll to change his sheets without disturbing him unnecessarily, and shift his position on schedule, although the bedsores appeared despite our efforts. I bought the swabs for his mouth, made the crushed ice, found the nurses. My mother sat helpless and hopeless in her chair.
"I'm glad you are here," she said, "He needs a wife. I can't be one." She couldn't. She was too far gone. And I did the dance with them, daughter, head of household, living by day in my parents' dissolving world; returning in the afternoon to a dissolving world of my own, but trying to hold on. I do not regret being there. And it is too many years ago to even feel anger toward my absent siblings as anything more than the return of a horsefly. I shoo it away.
There was far more grace to hold onto. The House of Extremes had as much Love and Light as it did sickness and darkness.
****
I had been the one to insist we wrap the mattress before it was necessary, learn the bedroll to change his sheets without disturbing him unnecessarily, and shift his position on schedule, although the bedsores appeared despite our efforts. I bought the swabs for his mouth, made the crushed ice, found the nurses. My mother sat helpless and hopeless in her chair.
"I'm glad you are here," she said, "He needs a wife. I can't be one." She couldn't. She was too far gone. And I did the dance with them, daughter, head of household, living by day in my parents' dissolving world; returning in the afternoon to a dissolving world of my own, but trying to hold on. I do not regret being there. And it is too many years ago to even feel anger toward my absent siblings as anything more than the return of a horsefly. I shoo it away.
There was far more grace to hold onto. The House of Extremes had as much Love and Light as it did sickness and darkness.
****
The day he died, I was on the bed next to him, reading something to him. His bony hand covered mine and he said, "I should have listened to the words in the shower, when I bellowed them."
His favorite wake up song was, "Ah, sweet mystery of life at last I've found thee."
"I was so damned busy with the sound of my own voice. I should have listened more, honey. For it's love and love alone the world is after. Why didn't I listen?"
I grabbed his hand and looked in the darkening eyes. "You DID, Daddy. Most days you did. You lived them more often than most, Daddy. It's all done now."
"Really?"
I remember his hanging onto my face, hoping for something. As if I could absolve him somehow of sins I simply sensed rather than knew. But I let him keep my gaze and simply said, "We know you love us, Daddy. It's okay. You can go now."
And he did.
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