Siblings

 My brother died almost a week ago, and I wrote this almost immediately after I learned.

Siblings

 

My brother died yesterday, suddenly, unpleasantly.

Am I sad? If not, why not?

I was an only child for a year and a half

Then this squalling creature took

My mother away from me.

The skies filled with dark clouds,

Anger turned visual.

He was a thing called a brother.

He lay on a blanket in the sun while

I held a knife-like object over his head.

Two years later came a new baby,

This one a thing called a sister.

Wasn’t I already a sister?

Why did they need another girl?

Thirteen years ago my sister was gone

Done in by her third round of breast cancer.

LIFO, Last In, First Out.

Now the brother is gone, and

I’m an only child again.

Only now I’m the matriarch.

From here on out, it’s all fiction.

30/30: Golden Shovel poem #18

source: A Cautionary Tale for the Age

 

She sat on the bank of a quiet pond, a

Mirror into dark rages. Cautionary

Words wrapped around her neck, the tale

Too lurid for children, too wan for

Adults. What would become of the

bones when she surrendered to age?

 

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Here is how I am using Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

 

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

SOL March (5 and) 6: History

Just a week into the daily slice of life challenge, and I’ve already lost a day.

            Yesterday I could have written about going to the doctor about my eye (nothing serious, it turned out), but I didn’t want to go into the detail. So let’s say this paragraph stands in for Slice of Life 5.

            Today I am searching through old journals to find out what I can about the sale of my mother’s condo in Florida in the months after she died 11 years ago. Why am I doing this? Because last week I received a check in the mail, a check dated July 28, 2010 (11 years ago!), with an unsigned handwritten note on the stub saying, “Please note this is for the wire payment for the purchase of unite #680” — my mother’s condo. The amount of the check is far more than the amount I actually received at the time and the amount in the documentation I have. What is going on?

            So I am searching through my journals for that period to see what I noted at the time. What the journals are full of are my notes of going through my mother’s papers, mixed in with worries about the fate of the magazine I then worked for, which was either going to be sold or killed by the global corporation that owned it, in the midst of the Great Recession, as that corporation was selling or killing others of the hundred or so print trade journals.

            Death of people, and institutions.

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 6 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

Poems for Before I Die, 2

I will die.

I am a human.

Death is always the end

of each human’s story.

Death is there,

Invisible,

Not announcing itself,

Waiting for its chance.

Sometimes it will catch you

Unaware

The sudden heart attack

The massive stroke

Blood clots wandering

through veins, arteries, capillaries.

Sometimes it bangs on your body,

The breathlessness that alerts you

To those blood clots

Collecting in your  lungs.

The abdominal pain that alerts you

To the cancer on some organ

that’s playing Bach’s Requiem.

The cough that whistles

Lung cancer.

Sometimes it’s caught by surprise,

the mammogram,

the pelvic smear,

the EKG.

So many diseases

Waiting to sneak up on you.

If you thought about them

All of the time

There would be no future.

Usually Death comes singly.

You might not know anyone

Who died

All of last year,

Or the year before.

Pandemic is Death made global.

It waves its name in front of your face.

It prances and cavorts and plays

With the doctors and nurses

Who stand between we humans

And Death.

Pandemic assaults everyone

Whether you get sick or remain well.

You are marked

by the fear

by the anticipation

by the relief

of waking up each morning,

Still breathing.

SOLTuesday: Lost and Found Tale

            Yesterday I turned on the desktop computer, which I’d turned off at the beginning of the summer, to prevent it from overheating since my apartment isn’t air-conditioned. The desktop is the computer my husband used; it’s the computer that has seven years of his e-mail, which I’ve been going through just to hear his voice in his words.

            When I turned on the computer, without thinking I logged into my account. After a few minutes it sank in that the desktop did not look right. It didn’t have the photo of Jack that I had installed after he died. It didn’t have the files of e-mail that I had created to save the messages I wanted to keep. What had happened?

            I have a Mac, which has a built-in backup drive called Time Machine. I opened up Time Machine, but no matter how far back I went, I couldn’t find the files or the desktop I expected. What had happened? How had I lost everything?

            A sinking feeling fell over me, and I began to feel I would fall apart. It was as though Jack had died all over again, only now it felt like he was really gone, I had no more access to his mind, his sense of humor, his thoughts. I wanted to wail, to fall on the floor—both terror and great emptiness.

            At the same time, I tried to be realistic, to be the kind of person who didn’t keep memories of her dead husband in physical objects or words on a page or screen. Who now slept in the middle of the bed, removed his placemat from the table. I had to be a person who went on with her life—I’m still here, I have to handle all the losses, whatever they are.

            Among the scraps of paper I found the other day in my latest fit of decluttering was this quote from Gilda Radner: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without know what’s going to happen next.” It was so appropriate to where I was at that moment.

            As I was about to write this experience into my journal, it hit me. What I was missing wasn’t on my login, it was on Jack’s. Sure enough, I logged out, logged in as him, and there it all was. The photo on the desktop, the e-mail files. Everything I thought I’d lost was found.

            I still felt a bit shaken, not sure what I can rely on. Jack is still dead, but only once, not twice. And last night, I dreamt of him, which I rarely do. I dreamt he returned, and we were in bed together, one of our favorite places. 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOL18: Where Do Memories Belong?

            For about a year after Jack’s memorial, this photo board was in the living room, across from where I sat, in his chair. I would see it every day, and it was almost (almost!) as if he was still here. It was also an occasion for people who came over to talk about him, if they wanted to. I always wanted to.

            After a year, I thought, maybe it was too much, to leave it where I would see it whenever I looked up from whatever I was doing, on the computer, reading a book, watching a baseball game (the photo board was right next to the television). So I moved it into the bedroom. That was also more appropriate, considering how much enjoyable time we spent in bed over the decades.

            In the bedroom, it stands in

front of a cabinet holding linens. So I have to move it once a week when I change towels and sheets. Yesterday, when I moved the board, I was pricked by irritation. This should not be the way Jack still exists in this world, pinned to a board in bits and pieces. It felt wrong that he is dead. Yet that is still a fact.

            I’ve just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which is in many ways all about death, and life, and death in life and life in death. I am still struggling with the reality and immensity of all of that.  

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

Big Words: Backsliding

(I want to acknowledge Tanya Shirley, a Jamaican poet, whose “A Chant Against Fear” inspired part of this.)

            Backsliding – should I be afraid of it or look forward to it? Mainstream culture says backsliding is bad. We must always be moving forward. Like sharks, if we don’t keep moving (forward, of course), we die. If we take one step forward and two steps back, that’s a tragedy.             What if there’s a time for backsliding.

            Jack died. Did I tell you that? I’m supposed to be moving forward, finding closure, healing. But I’m not backsliding into grief. Grief is beside the point.

            We met when we were 21, married at 22. We were children. I know, some of you may be 21 or 22 and think you’re adults. We thought we were adults, thought we knew who we were and what we were doing.

            We were lucky, together for the next 52 years. At the beginning, I was a shy, reserved person afraid to speak up because I knew no one would listen to me. I’ve becomw confident, outspoken, standing up in front of classes, sometimes crowds, like this, becoming a boss, hiring and firing, traveling to many countries with strange languages. Women’s liberation had a lot to do with this transformation, but Jack supported it, too. Without him, I’m afraid I’m backsliding to that earlier me.

            When we met, I was on my own and supporting myself, but I was still unformed, malleable. Going from family to roommates, I’d only ever lived alone for two weeks of my life. The first time I was completely on my own, in my own place, I sat on my sofa/bed and cried, for half an hour. I retreated home, to my parents. Then I was afraid, of the silence (no radio), no one to talk to (on the pay phone out in the hall).

Fear of loneliness.

Fear of not knowing who I was.

            A few months after Jack died, fear came roaring back. Now I was home, and my fears were different:

Fear of losing the person I’d become via loving Jack and he loving me.

Fear of being old as a single person, as a single woman, as a woman who’s 75.

Fear of forgetting Jack if I’m successful in learning to live without him.

Fear of the open-endedness of freedom, with no one to share it with.

Fear that having a daily plan will constrain me, but

Fear that having no plan will leave me unmoored.

Fear of dying.

Fear of being a person who is afraid of dying.

            The fear ebbs, but never disappears. I remember what the great Negro Leagues xpitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.”  But if I look back, if I backslide into that fear, perhaps I’ll learn something I need to know.

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I read this at the July 24 Big Words series, which had the theme word "Backslide."

#52essays2017, Essay 10: K Is for Keep On Keepin’ On

(I’m way behind the essay a week writing challenge, and have clearly not kept up with the daily Blogging AtoZ Challenge for April. So I will combine the two for my essays and try to catch up, which could mean writing two or three essays a week for the rest of the year. Haven’t checked a calendar yet for a real schedule.)

My husband died last year. I keep saying that, and it’s probably getting boring for other people. But it still feels like the most important thing that’s happened in my life recently.

            It was a moment, the moment Jack died. Up until that moment, our lives were entwined. We were not the joined-at-the-hip type of couple, like my husband’s brother and his wife. We had our own friends, we traveled separately often, we shared housework—and we kept our money separate. He went to the gym almost every day, I went maybe three times a week. But we both loved baseball and went to games together, went to the movies, had some friends in common. And we were both storytellers, though he was much better than me.

            When he got sick and said things like “if I’m here next year,” I ignored the implication. I continued to believe our “moments before,” alive, would go on forever. Denial, much? It’s the “moments after” that continue to mount up, to add on, to move me steadily away from those moments when Jack was alive.

            Yet I have to keep on keepin’ on. Remembering the past is not the same as living in the past. But integrating the past into the continually-moving-forward present is a paradox when one member of that past is no longer present to continue that work. His memories have evaporated, or live, imperfectly, in the memories of others. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, I don’t want to lose the past, and I want to keep on keepin’ on with the past as companion. 

#52essays2017

#AtoZChallenge: D Is for Death

            Yes, that death. That thing that comes at the end of life. That thing that causes a person to stop breathing, to stop being alive, to end up buried in the ground or turned into ashes. That thing that modern Americans, at least, barely talk about, let alone think about.

            If you’re religious, maybe doesn’t feel quite so final. If you believe your dead loved one is in heaven, still thinking about you and caring for you, in some ethereal way, and that you will see each other again once you die yourself, perhaps death doesn’t feel so final. So like a thick wall banging down between you and the person you loved and lived with for 50+ years.

            My husband, Jack, died last year, on January 5. He had recently been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He’d been in the hospital for a month, disabled for the previous two years after a fall, in moderately ill health for the 16 years before that from a clotting disorder and multiple complications. For years, he continued to say, “I can live with this.” On the last day of 2015, he said, “I can’t live with this.” Hospice, then death.

            Those are the facts. But what do they mean? How do they feel? How do I accept the finality of Jack’s being gone, forever? I have no religion, I don’t believe there’s some nonmaterial existence where he might still be. I can only hold onto the Jewish belief that dead people live on in the memories of those still alive. But my memory is weak where my memories of Jack are.

            I feel like I wasn’t paying enough attention. It feels like I need his physical presence to remember. I miss his body, his differentness, his unique thoughts and feelings. I don’t miss the fights we had over my saving things – or maybe I do miss them. In one of my few dreams about him, I was showing off the bookcases I’d emptied, and he laughed because I’d waited until after he died to do that.

            Why haven’t I dreamed of him more? Why is he dying out of my dreams as well as my life? As he lay dying, I told him, “From now on, your story will be my story. Is that okay?” And he nodded. But it’s not okay.

#AtoZChallenge: C Is for Chaos, Confusion, Climate Change...

            I had a hard time coming up with what I wanted my “C” to be. I had written “coffee,” “Cuba” (my daughter, Christie [another C], and I had gone to Cuba last December), but as I lay in bed last night, what floated into my mind was chaos and confusion.

            Perhaps that is my state of mind these days. It’s partly because of the current political state of this country, with a president who seems to think his job is to sign executive orders and show his signature to the camera, whose nominations show an inclination to destroy all parts of government except the police and military, who is at heart a con man and entertainer. I fear only chaos will be the result, chaos not only in this country but around the world. And climate change, which that president ignores, may make all of our futures obsolete.

            But my psyche also feels chaotic and confused. My husband of 51 years died a year ago. I was going to save this fact for tomorrow, when D will be about Death, but this fact is at the root of my personal chaos and confusion.

            We had a good marriage; in many ways, we meshed very well. But we were also quite different. All the ways we were different that caused conflict are now gone, and while I often feel relieved (oh, I can cook whatever I want; I can pile up books and magazines on chair arms), I also feel, yes, confused. What do I do now? I’m 74, soon to be 75, and my life is not as open-ended as it would be if I were 35 or 40, or even 50.

            I’m not looking for another partner. Relationships are hard work, and I’ve already seen one partner through ill health, hospitalizations, rehab, and I don’t want to do that again. When I think of that, I think, it’ll be my turn next. And yes, it would be helpful to have a partner to take care of me, someone I’ve known only a short time wouldn’t be any more comfortable than someone I would hire.

            Do you think I’m being too utilitarian here? What about love? Even sex? I’m confused about those, too. What is love when you’re not young and full of lust? I’m not a romantic (my husband was). I feel more like the uncertain young person I was when my husband and I first met.

            I’m having to learn to be a grownup all on my own, and that is confusing and chaotic. Wish me luck.

SOLSC 27: Envious Relief? or Relieved Envy?

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            My husband died about 15 months ago. When I see couples around my age or older on the street, I feel pangs of envy; why do they still have each other and I don’t have Jack?

            But when I see older couples and the man is disabled, using a cane or walker, or in a wheelchair, my feelings are more mixed. There is still envy, but also relief. Jack had become disabled enough before he was hospitalized that we both had a sense of what that meant. And it was very difficult. Were either of us ready for, or able to deal with, those difficulties? Jack definitely was not, and he said so.

            Today, as I was leaving my bank’s ATM center, a couple who might have been Jack and me in a possible future were entering. She was pushing him in a wheelchair. He was wrapped up in blankets, head covered with a beret. She was short, maybe about five foot two; he did not seem so short. Someone was holding the door for her. I heard him speaking to her, so it sounded like he was coherent.

            How long had she been caring for him? How did they manage personal aspects like getting him into and out of the wheelchair? Surely she needed home health aides to help with his care; I know how expensive that can be. Maybe he lived at the nursing home a block away, and they were just on an outing. But that too is very expensive. And either scenario is emotionally wearing for both caregiver and care receiver.

            What was I feeling? Envy? Relief? Both? The impossible?

SOLSC 11: What Is the Meaning of Life, and Death?

            Can you imagine a medieval morality play adapted as a 21st century performance? Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has, and I saw his work, Everybody, at the Signature Theatre this afternoon. It was very cleverly done, and it would be useful for our current president and vice-president to see it as well, though that’s not likely. It’s only playing through March 19.

            It’s based loosely on the 15th century English play Everyman, which may have been based on an earlier Dutch play, we’re informed by the usher, who shortly is possessed by God, who is rather angry at what his creation humans are doing to the rest of his creation on Earth. God orders Death to bring Everybody to Him to give an account of themselves.

            Death is an elderly white woman (God was, temporarily at least, an African-American woman), who picks several people out of the audience – at first we’re not sure whether they are ordinary spectators or plants, real actors. They are needless to say not very happy to be summoned by Death, and they are not even sure it’s happening. Maybe it’s a dream. Death concedes that Everybody can bring someone with them, but can’t tell them how to give that account of themselves.

            One actor (and a different one at each performance, chosen by lot, as so much happens to us all by chance) takes on the role of Everybody and tries, successively, to get Friendship, Kinship, and even his Stuff to die with him, but each one demurs. Friendship’s speech is a perfect amalgam of all the generic ways we think friendship exists (“Remember that time...?” “We had the best night...” “You know that joke...” without any specifics). Everybody’s encounter with his Stuff hit particularly close for me, as Everybody described all the ways that I use my stuff to remember my life and reveal its meaning to me.

            Love is the only character who finally agrees to go with Everybody, not a Love that a Hallmark card would recognize, forcing Everybody to humiliate himself. But once Everybody can surrender to this Love, the strobe lights and disco music come on, and two larger than life skeletons come out to dance, a perfect 21st century recreation of medieval visions of death.

            This play deserves more than its brief run, and there’s so much more that could be said about it. It made me think not only about everyone’s inevitable death, but about my husband’s so recent one. I found myself wishing I could tell his dead self about the play and ask whether he identified with any of Everybody’s thoughts or feelings

-->  as he was about to die. An eerie, thoughtful experience.

SOL Tuesday: Cosmic Coincidences

This is a day late, but I don’t want to wait until next Tuesday for this story.

            I usually do the crossword puzzle in the New York Times on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday it gets harder, also on Friday, and Saturday you have to think like Will Shortz, puzzle editor, to have even a chance.

            So last Thursday, January 5, I was doing unusually well, I thought, even figuring out some answers by the letters that appeared in crossing words without having the foggiest idea how “?they related to the clues. “Versatile worker” was “of all trades”? “Putdown of an ignorant person” was “you don’t know”? I had the answers, but I didn’t know why.

            A few days later a friend called to say she wondered if whoever made the puzzle had known Jack or that January 5 was the first anniversary of his death – obviously, those puzzle answers made sense because they were “missing Jack.”

            Indeed. The puzzle creator’s name was unknown to me, but I didn’t know everyone Jack had known. So Monday I wrote a letter to the Times, laying out the facts, and asking whether the creator knew Jack or was this a cosmic coincidence?

            On Tuesday I had an e-mail from the puzzle maker. No, he did not know Jack, and the puzzles are created months in advance. But he had his own “cosmic coincidence” to relate. His father had died just about a year ago, at home, and the puzzle maker found a bird’s feather on the floor by his father’s bed, with no idea how it got there. He picked it up and put it on his father’s coffin at the cemetery. About a week later, he found a nearly identical feather at his own home.

Catching Up, II

On Sunday, I attended a Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon in Brooklyn(link). Nandi Kaye led us through a mental, then we wrote, then we wrote some more and we had a physical writer warmup. Here is what I wrote.

I

I remember because that is all I have left. Someone once wrote, "Death ends a life, but not a relationship...." Death ends the accumulation of new memories, while the old memories remain as fresh or as stale as they want to be. Memories hide in the weeds of my forgetfulness, they jump out to startle me as I lie abed. Memory cannot wrap arms around me, cannot kiss gently, or passionately. Memory rouses grief and mourning, but forgetfulness erases life, us, me. Memory wants me to forget loss, to move on, to move ahead. But memory also anchors me to the moment of death, with a rope stretching, stretching, stretching without breaking.

II

Happiness comes from my pink hair. Jack loved my pink hair. When strangers say they love my pink hair, I feel 50 degrees warmer. I glow. I feel connected. My pink hair is the magic token I've looked for all my life. My pink hair is the guardian angels protecting me from despair. My pink hair is punk, is rock and roll, is a happiness drug. My pink hair matches all of my favorite clothes, well, almost.

 

Slice of Life (and Death)

A week ago today, my husband died. We were together for 52 years, married for 51. (That still feels as unbelievable as the fact that he's dead.) We sometimes thought of ourselves as the last married couple in America. The day after he died, I wrote this paragraph, perhaps the beginning of something longer.

I always thought I had to get married until I learned that I didn’t. By then I’d been married for six years. On our first date, he asked me out for a drink. I had a drink while he had a dozen. I looked at the 12 empty glasses of Scotch and water lined up between us on the table and thought, “That’s exciting.” On our second date he recited Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft and Sullen Art.” I was impressed; reciting poetry meant he wasn’t as cynical as he usually sounded. As he lay dying, I read “In My Craft and Sullen Art” to him. I felt I was going to cry as I read “The lovers lie abed” and I thought, I’m such a cliché. Our third date was a party. He sat in a big armchair, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, and beckoned to me. I sat on the arm of the chair, then on his lap, then we were necking. I said, “At every party, there’s always a couple necking in the corner. Tonight we’re that couple." He was a WASP from Kansas, and I thought he was exotic. I was an East Coast Jew, and he thought I was exotic. As he lay dying, I held his hand and said, “Now your story will become my story. Is that okay?” His eyes closed, he smiled and nodded.

Poem a Day, #19 (a moment)

The Moment My Mother Died

It was quiet in the hospital at 7 p.m.

She was hooked up only to the morphine drip

And pulse oximeter glowing green

As its number dropped, 53, 45, 40.

When we arrived in the morning,

her eyes were closed, her breathing rough.

She gasped for air like a guppy.

But she was aware. She turned her head

Toward her doctor’s voice.

“Do you want more oxygen?”

She shook her head.

“Do you want to be more comfortable?”

She nodded.

She pushed down the sheet, the hospital gown,

Till she was almost naked.

Did she want to leave this world the same way

She’d entered it?

She swallowed water from a sponge.

My sister talked her through a guided meditation,

Holding one hand while I held the other.

She turned her closed eyes toward my sister,

Then toward me.

Did she want an alternative from me?

I wished I had words to say,

“I know you don’t believe in this spiritual bullshit,

“I know you’re ready to go,

“But we’re not ready to let you go.

“There’s still so much you have to tell us,

“There’s still so much we haven’t asked you,

“There’s still so much we went to know.”

The skin of her neck fluttered with

Each slowing breath.

The oximeter read 25, 14, 9.

When it read X, I watched her neck,

A minute, two, three. No movement.

The room was quiet, empty, lonely,

The moment my mother died.

 http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_carriage.png

Retirement = Death?

That is stark.

But think about stages of living: after high school comes college (often), or perhaps a job; after college comes a job (or maybe graduate school); after a job comes moving in with someone, usually eventually getting married; after getting married, having a kid(s); after working for a while, getting another job, perhaps changing careers if you're lucky enough to have that freedom. After working for a long time, retiring. And what comes after retiring? A new career, yes, that's always a possibility; travel, if you've got the money. But what comes next? There's always something coming next. Until, inevitably, the end. Death. There's no avoiding it.

So retirement makes death feel that much closer. Leaning over your shoulder, perhaps. Breathing down your neck. Poking its hands in your pockets to keep warm.