Dear Pádraig, since you mentioned the writing about your friend, I wonder if you’d share an excerpt of it here? I had a similar experience as my mom died. I wanted to keep her present, so I wrote about her and shared it with others, but then my writing kind of subsumed the experience of the loss a bit. Here’s what I wrote:
To Be Still Is Also To Remain
True story:
I don’t know why Mom
Wintered her orchid in the back corner
Of our basement laundry room
But in the spring
When we went to retrieve it
The stem had woven itself
Into the tripod of our childhood telescope and
The flowers had bloomed
In the dark
So that to separate the two
Would have meant destroying the
Whole Enigma
Cancer can be like that
But so can any attachment
I don’t know what happened to the orchid
But what happens to me
When I already grafted her name to my heart
And we grew through each other
And now she’s gone
Here’s how we spent her last days:
Each morning
We would lift Mom from her dim bedroom
Where the rhododendron bush writhes
Around the window into the backyard
And carry her to the den
With a fireplace
Where she would close her eyes
And smile and agree with us
Later we would carry her outside into the sun
Visitors left flowers by her head
And flowers were painted on the cards
That came in the mail
A stinkbug I swear was my father
Kept vigil by the same chair we used in his last days
And after I tossed it out back
Somehow returned
Watching her from the wall, then the side table
Then it was on her collar and waved a leg at me
We carried her back to bed each night
While everyone stood and cleared a path
I’ll remember that
Every time I lifted her
Onto Dad’s chair or the commode or the wheelchair or the bed
I remember the slumber of a summer afternoon when the world enveloped in the summer heat was safe asleep except for the cicadas singing their mating song indifferent to the siesta hours of human time.
I remember a gravel road and three kids walking on it.
I remember an endless line of cypress trees on the backdrop.
I remember the sea just beyond those trees.
I was one of the kids, the youngest one, the last in line, trying to keep up with the others.
I remember the flip-flops I wore that day, but I can't remember how to be that child again. She's long gone, leaving me with a faint afterimage of a midsummer day—that too, long gone.
In my mind, the scene unfolds like a movie reel, but I know it's a semi-constructed thing. But this image of the three siblings on their quest to discover the world is engraved in me, and I always come back to it when in need of some magic in my life.
We are blessed to have a housekeeper who I call our Home Caregiver for 20 years now. We have a challenging home with twin sons with signicant developmental disabilities. She has become a true member of our family. But within the first year of her tenure with us we were having a conversation and in the course of it she used the expression "he jewed him down". I took a deep breath, left the room after the brief conversation and came back in. I asked her if she knew what the expression meant. Her eyes filled up with tears suddenly realizing she was now connecting it to the fact that she was using the expression while in conversation with a Jew. She was mortified and open to understanding. As soon as her eyes filled I too had a sudden realization. That ingrained prejudice is not the same as enshrined prejudice. While the latter is self-perpetuating, the former is waiting to be undone. From that moment on there has not been a day without a great mutual respect and valuing of each other.. This memory and realization has served me well often especially when advocating for my sons. It is also true that as humans we are an unusually cruel species. But initial fear, even exclusion of our sons has often shifted to acceptance even attachment when the prejudice was given the chance to breathe in the presence of its adversaries.
I'm somewhere in the middle of a hard year, and last fall I was sitting at a brewery with my husband after an appointment with a breast oncologist. I don't remember most of that conversation which would have been full of big fears and the beginning of hard plans, but I do remember this:
As we stood up to leave, my husband stopped to pull me into a hug and said, "That move with your hand. That's your tell. You do it when you're really nervous." He had seen me repeatedly touching each of my fingers with my thumb, a quick rhythm I use to reconnect with my body when my head is too swirly.
I remember as a young teen, being half asleep, and dissolving into a state of peace. In a troubled family, it was a deep letting go. This memory returned in my later years and I breathe often into that knowing, that memory, that remembering.
Before my brother died this week, I went over early one morning to speak with him for the last time. I asked if I could hold his face and then gently pulled his forehead to mine to love him one last time. Touching foreheads brought back all the closeness of my childhood buddy. Touching foreheads. That moment in time. That wee gesture. That.
I remember wanting to run away. Teddy bear arm in hand, ninja turtles hoodie on- ready to run away from my surroundings. I remember the feeling well in my body- every organ wanting to climb over the other to exit me. The memory serves as a reminder- a warning. When the feeling returns, I get to stop and explore what I am running from. And what I am running towards.
What an exercise this prompt is… retrieving memories to pluck one from the ether to share here. I realize that most of the specific memories that have come to my mind are of events that bring back moments of sadness, like the large white snowflakes falling in front of the gray county courthouse from a gray sky while riding in a white van after my mother’s funeral. While trying to find happier memories of time with my mother before she died when I was 18, I find it harder to pull up specific memories; what is coming to mind are general feelings of warmth, safety, sweetness, and of being embraced, in other words, of her love…carrying her love all these years without her is what I have and what I have needed.
The memory of the stillness in my parent’s living room, as my father lay dead on the couch is one that I carry like a talisman. The priest, my uncle (my father’s brother), my older sister, my mother, and myself, stood arrayed like the cast of a play looking over a fallen patriarch, none wondering what had killed him, but all relieved that he was no longer in pain.
The order we stand in shifts in my mind, but there is a moment that is crystallized. It is when my uncle put his arm around me. He was a man that I had grown to dislike as I aged from childhood to that moment as a young adult. He leaned into me and told me that it was ok to cry. I didn’t respond to him vocally, knowing how it would have sounded, but in my head I told him that all of my tears had already been shed. So we stood in the dim light waiting for the ambulance to come and take the frail and withered body away. And I have yet to experience such a silence again.
I remember, just once, my maternal grandfather, Papa, taking me with him to church. What comes through with the most vivid detail is the memory of his carrying me home, his arms around me, the burnished metal pin in his lapel etching its soft echo in my cheek. This has reminded me through my long life and many experiences with difficult men that there are good men in this world who will care for me and safely carry me home.
When I was in eleventh grade, I returned to my locker at the end of my last class and found blood smeared on it. (ok, it was probably fake blood). A group of kids gathered around me and started accusing me of rigging the homecoming election, the voting of which had taken place that morning during homeroom. At that stage and age, my concerns in life had become protecting the environment, the AIDS crisis, homophobia, and yes, getting good grades… and I could not have cared less about something as “shallow” as homecoming king and queen. It was ludicrous! I denied it, and started crying (my response to many kinds of distress), and the next thing I remember is my friend Elsa and her boyfriend Randy stepping in to defend me. There was a lot of yelling and threatening and puffing of chests, at which point one of the English teachers appeared to break it all up, and called me into her room, as if I was the culprit! She asked me what happened. Through my choppy breath and tearful gasping, fighting back full on sobbing, I started to tell her, “you know how in The Crucible, there was a witch-hunt….” and went on and on - “well that is what is happening to me. this is just like the Crucible!” I don’t recall how the rest of the conversation went… I remember what I was wearing - a black babydoll dress with over-the-knee socks and my long dark shiny hair. The next part of the memory is my mom picking me up from school to drive me to CW Post, a local college, to my extra-curricular activity, a Psych 101 class. I had taken an Intro to Psych class in 10th grade and fallen in love with it so much and thought that I would devote my life to it, so I made an appeal to the local college to allow me to take a class there. In the car, my mom noticed I was upset. I tried to deny that anything was wrong, but she pulled over, stopped the car, and insisted I tell her.
~
The purposes of this memory are, I think, to affirm aspects of myself… i.e., in some ways, to make me feel good about myself, for better or worse. 1) I love that I made a literary reference invoking The Crucible to defend myself. After HS, my academic and non-academic readings have been almost entirely non-fiction, and the part of me that loved/loves this other kind of literature almost seemed to disappear… this memory reminds me of the existence of this other part of myself; 2) it reaffirms a sense of how I was “walking to the beat of my own drummer” for much of my life… being a racial and religious minority in an overwhelmingly white Judeo-Christian school, something I had no choice over, I claimed even more difference by the way I dressed, and by following interests that were unlike my classmates; 3) remembering how my mom insisted I tell her what was going on when I tried to pretend otherwise… this was a moment when the unspoken rules of “we don’t talk about it” fell away…
Thank you Pádraig for this invitation to reflect on memories… and for the poems this week, both of which were breathtaking. When I heard you read Ray Young Bear’s poem, I heard the last line as, “He meditates on the loss / of my younger brother—and my custom / suppresses his emotions.” That stopped me in my tracks. WHOA. “My custom / suppresses his emotions.” Whoa whoa whoa. So I went to read the transcript, and had a good laugh when I saw that “my” was actually “by”! Both versions bring a “whoa.” But I like the actual version much better.
Holding my mother during the week my father was dying. She whispered, "I'm scared" and I told her I was too. A fleeting moment of vulnerability and humanity. I Iove my mother but our relationship has not been easy. I replay this moment when I need to call up compassion for her. Sometimes it's enough
Once a loved one dies, you are left only with memory. There are no new plans, there are no new events, no new moments. I think memory does serve to ground us, to tell us, yes, this was real, this happened. For me, it is a way of holding on to love.
I have very many memories over the course of the years. One that I hold dear to me is the first embrace we shared after 15 years apart. Sometimes, in my mind I can “see” it as if viewing a short clip of a movie, as if someone was videotaping and caught that anticipation of being together and the ensuing embrace. In that memory is both the moment of touch, the ensuing years, and the end of his life and our life together. It is sometimes a struggle to continue on and that memory holds so much. It was a change of the life I was leading. I know I cannot really see that moment as I remember it but thinking of it, reminds me it was real, not imagined, not wished for but lived.
So, your musings this morning landed. I am preparing to go to Romania next month on a kind of memory tour. 50 years ago, I was one of four English speakers in the far northeastern corner of the country. I was twelve when we arrived in Iasi. Fourteen when we left. Friends made. Memories seared. An Iron Curtain silenced any possibility of talking through what was re-membered and mis-remembered. Now, I go to stay with a friend who remembers me/us…fifty years later…our pasts and our presents colliding and collaging and creating new memories.
Your words - needless to say - are tilling the grey matter, freeing me to dig deeper and to beg more questions of what I remember and have forgotten.
Dear Pádraig, since you mentioned the writing about your friend, I wonder if you’d share an excerpt of it here? I had a similar experience as my mom died. I wanted to keep her present, so I wrote about her and shared it with others, but then my writing kind of subsumed the experience of the loss a bit. Here’s what I wrote:
To Be Still Is Also To Remain
True story:
I don’t know why Mom
Wintered her orchid in the back corner
Of our basement laundry room
But in the spring
When we went to retrieve it
The stem had woven itself
Into the tripod of our childhood telescope and
The flowers had bloomed
In the dark
So that to separate the two
Would have meant destroying the
Whole Enigma
Cancer can be like that
But so can any attachment
I don’t know what happened to the orchid
But what happens to me
When I already grafted her name to my heart
And we grew through each other
And now she’s gone
Here’s how we spent her last days:
Each morning
We would lift Mom from her dim bedroom
Where the rhododendron bush writhes
Around the window into the backyard
And carry her to the den
With a fireplace
Where she would close her eyes
And smile and agree with us
Later we would carry her outside into the sun
Visitors left flowers by her head
And flowers were painted on the cards
That came in the mail
A stinkbug I swear was my father
Kept vigil by the same chair we used in his last days
And after I tossed it out back
Somehow returned
Watching her from the wall, then the side table
Then it was on her collar and waved a leg at me
We carried her back to bed each night
While everyone stood and cleared a path
I’ll remember that
Every time I lifted her
Onto Dad’s chair or the commode or the wheelchair or the bed
She would hold me around my shoulders
And bury her face in my chest
Trembling on the leg that still stood
So often, especially toward the end
When I set her down she would forget to let go
There were many times when we
Got stuck like that and
I didn’t remind her.
I remember the slumber of a summer afternoon when the world enveloped in the summer heat was safe asleep except for the cicadas singing their mating song indifferent to the siesta hours of human time.
I remember a gravel road and three kids walking on it.
I remember an endless line of cypress trees on the backdrop.
I remember the sea just beyond those trees.
I was one of the kids, the youngest one, the last in line, trying to keep up with the others.
I remember the flip-flops I wore that day, but I can't remember how to be that child again. She's long gone, leaving me with a faint afterimage of a midsummer day—that too, long gone.
In my mind, the scene unfolds like a movie reel, but I know it's a semi-constructed thing. But this image of the three siblings on their quest to discover the world is engraved in me, and I always come back to it when in need of some magic in my life.
We are blessed to have a housekeeper who I call our Home Caregiver for 20 years now. We have a challenging home with twin sons with signicant developmental disabilities. She has become a true member of our family. But within the first year of her tenure with us we were having a conversation and in the course of it she used the expression "he jewed him down". I took a deep breath, left the room after the brief conversation and came back in. I asked her if she knew what the expression meant. Her eyes filled up with tears suddenly realizing she was now connecting it to the fact that she was using the expression while in conversation with a Jew. She was mortified and open to understanding. As soon as her eyes filled I too had a sudden realization. That ingrained prejudice is not the same as enshrined prejudice. While the latter is self-perpetuating, the former is waiting to be undone. From that moment on there has not been a day without a great mutual respect and valuing of each other.. This memory and realization has served me well often especially when advocating for my sons. It is also true that as humans we are an unusually cruel species. But initial fear, even exclusion of our sons has often shifted to acceptance even attachment when the prejudice was given the chance to breathe in the presence of its adversaries.
I'm somewhere in the middle of a hard year, and last fall I was sitting at a brewery with my husband after an appointment with a breast oncologist. I don't remember most of that conversation which would have been full of big fears and the beginning of hard plans, but I do remember this:
As we stood up to leave, my husband stopped to pull me into a hug and said, "That move with your hand. That's your tell. You do it when you're really nervous." He had seen me repeatedly touching each of my fingers with my thumb, a quick rhythm I use to reconnect with my body when my head is too swirly.
He had seen me, and that's what I do remember.
I remember as a young teen, being half asleep, and dissolving into a state of peace. In a troubled family, it was a deep letting go. This memory returned in my later years and I breathe often into that knowing, that memory, that remembering.
A woman. A station. An arm. My waist.
Before my brother died this week, I went over early one morning to speak with him for the last time. I asked if I could hold his face and then gently pulled his forehead to mine to love him one last time. Touching foreheads brought back all the closeness of my childhood buddy. Touching foreheads. That moment in time. That wee gesture. That.
I remember wanting to run away. Teddy bear arm in hand, ninja turtles hoodie on- ready to run away from my surroundings. I remember the feeling well in my body- every organ wanting to climb over the other to exit me. The memory serves as a reminder- a warning. When the feeling returns, I get to stop and explore what I am running from. And what I am running towards.
What an exercise this prompt is… retrieving memories to pluck one from the ether to share here. I realize that most of the specific memories that have come to my mind are of events that bring back moments of sadness, like the large white snowflakes falling in front of the gray county courthouse from a gray sky while riding in a white van after my mother’s funeral. While trying to find happier memories of time with my mother before she died when I was 18, I find it harder to pull up specific memories; what is coming to mind are general feelings of warmth, safety, sweetness, and of being embraced, in other words, of her love…carrying her love all these years without her is what I have and what I have needed.
The memory of the stillness in my parent’s living room, as my father lay dead on the couch is one that I carry like a talisman. The priest, my uncle (my father’s brother), my older sister, my mother, and myself, stood arrayed like the cast of a play looking over a fallen patriarch, none wondering what had killed him, but all relieved that he was no longer in pain.
The order we stand in shifts in my mind, but there is a moment that is crystallized. It is when my uncle put his arm around me. He was a man that I had grown to dislike as I aged from childhood to that moment as a young adult. He leaned into me and told me that it was ok to cry. I didn’t respond to him vocally, knowing how it would have sounded, but in my head I told him that all of my tears had already been shed. So we stood in the dim light waiting for the ambulance to come and take the frail and withered body away. And I have yet to experience such a silence again.
I remember, just once, my maternal grandfather, Papa, taking me with him to church. What comes through with the most vivid detail is the memory of his carrying me home, his arms around me, the burnished metal pin in his lapel etching its soft echo in my cheek. This has reminded me through my long life and many experiences with difficult men that there are good men in this world who will care for me and safely carry me home.
When I was in eleventh grade, I returned to my locker at the end of my last class and found blood smeared on it. (ok, it was probably fake blood). A group of kids gathered around me and started accusing me of rigging the homecoming election, the voting of which had taken place that morning during homeroom. At that stage and age, my concerns in life had become protecting the environment, the AIDS crisis, homophobia, and yes, getting good grades… and I could not have cared less about something as “shallow” as homecoming king and queen. It was ludicrous! I denied it, and started crying (my response to many kinds of distress), and the next thing I remember is my friend Elsa and her boyfriend Randy stepping in to defend me. There was a lot of yelling and threatening and puffing of chests, at which point one of the English teachers appeared to break it all up, and called me into her room, as if I was the culprit! She asked me what happened. Through my choppy breath and tearful gasping, fighting back full on sobbing, I started to tell her, “you know how in The Crucible, there was a witch-hunt….” and went on and on - “well that is what is happening to me. this is just like the Crucible!” I don’t recall how the rest of the conversation went… I remember what I was wearing - a black babydoll dress with over-the-knee socks and my long dark shiny hair. The next part of the memory is my mom picking me up from school to drive me to CW Post, a local college, to my extra-curricular activity, a Psych 101 class. I had taken an Intro to Psych class in 10th grade and fallen in love with it so much and thought that I would devote my life to it, so I made an appeal to the local college to allow me to take a class there. In the car, my mom noticed I was upset. I tried to deny that anything was wrong, but she pulled over, stopped the car, and insisted I tell her.
~
The purposes of this memory are, I think, to affirm aspects of myself… i.e., in some ways, to make me feel good about myself, for better or worse. 1) I love that I made a literary reference invoking The Crucible to defend myself. After HS, my academic and non-academic readings have been almost entirely non-fiction, and the part of me that loved/loves this other kind of literature almost seemed to disappear… this memory reminds me of the existence of this other part of myself; 2) it reaffirms a sense of how I was “walking to the beat of my own drummer” for much of my life… being a racial and religious minority in an overwhelmingly white Judeo-Christian school, something I had no choice over, I claimed even more difference by the way I dressed, and by following interests that were unlike my classmates; 3) remembering how my mom insisted I tell her what was going on when I tried to pretend otherwise… this was a moment when the unspoken rules of “we don’t talk about it” fell away…
Thank you Pádraig for this invitation to reflect on memories… and for the poems this week, both of which were breathtaking. When I heard you read Ray Young Bear’s poem, I heard the last line as, “He meditates on the loss / of my younger brother—and my custom / suppresses his emotions.” That stopped me in my tracks. WHOA. “My custom / suppresses his emotions.” Whoa whoa whoa. So I went to read the transcript, and had a good laugh when I saw that “my” was actually “by”! Both versions bring a “whoa.” But I like the actual version much better.
Holding my mother during the week my father was dying. She whispered, "I'm scared" and I told her I was too. A fleeting moment of vulnerability and humanity. I Iove my mother but our relationship has not been easy. I replay this moment when I need to call up compassion for her. Sometimes it's enough
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou
Once a loved one dies, you are left only with memory. There are no new plans, there are no new events, no new moments. I think memory does serve to ground us, to tell us, yes, this was real, this happened. For me, it is a way of holding on to love.
I have very many memories over the course of the years. One that I hold dear to me is the first embrace we shared after 15 years apart. Sometimes, in my mind I can “see” it as if viewing a short clip of a movie, as if someone was videotaping and caught that anticipation of being together and the ensuing embrace. In that memory is both the moment of touch, the ensuing years, and the end of his life and our life together. It is sometimes a struggle to continue on and that memory holds so much. It was a change of the life I was leading. I know I cannot really see that moment as I remember it but thinking of it, reminds me it was real, not imagined, not wished for but lived.
So, your musings this morning landed. I am preparing to go to Romania next month on a kind of memory tour. 50 years ago, I was one of four English speakers in the far northeastern corner of the country. I was twelve when we arrived in Iasi. Fourteen when we left. Friends made. Memories seared. An Iron Curtain silenced any possibility of talking through what was re-membered and mis-remembered. Now, I go to stay with a friend who remembers me/us…fifty years later…our pasts and our presents colliding and collaging and creating new memories.
Your words - needless to say - are tilling the grey matter, freeing me to dig deeper and to beg more questions of what I remember and have forgotten.