And then I cried.

 My father is dying, and it is terrible. 

It is terrible because it is death, which is the end, but also because death brings about all kinds of new and surprising horrible physical things, like being bedridden in diapers, and agitation but no way to describe why, and-- if you happen to have lung cancer-- what essentially amounts to slow suffocation. 

In the face of all of this, we are doing everything right-- or at least as right as we can make it. We have a hospice nurse coming in daily, reading his body like a map and telling us how close we are to his final destination. We have held his hand, and kissed his shrunken cheeks, and told him how much we love him. I have only been able to say a few sentences at a time without crying. It always distressed him to hear me cry. I don't need to add desperate hysterics to the complications of organ failure. 

Here are some things I have said to him. 

1) When hospice was called in, and he could still listen and speak for short intervals of time, I told him, "I'm so sorry, because I know I haven't been the best kind of daughter. I hope you will forgive me." (And I cried.) And he said, "Things are alright between us, Martha-Lynn." And then I grabbed this ridiculous pile of poetry books I had taken with me from Richmond, and asked him if he wanted to hear any poetry, and he said "No....no thank you." And I babbled, "OK, well, I'm going to sit them over here on the dresser so they will be near you. I have John Keats, and Shelley, and Famous Poems of the English Language, and The Oxford Book of Christian Verse." (And I cried.) And he said, "I love you, Martha-Lynn." And I told him I loved him, too. (And...I cried.)

2) A few days after that, I brought Eva and Silas with me, and he shocked us all by mustering enough strength to sit almost upright in the hospital bed. He listened to me chatter a little bit about what they were going to do with their summers, and he asked Eva about summer school...and I said we were all looking forward to spending time at the pool... and I mentioned that Silas had been having water gun fights with some of the boys on the street. And he said, "You have? I used to have water gun fights, too! With all my friends. They were marvelous. And sometimes we had pine cone battles!" And Silas perked up, and said he'd never even heard of that before, and that he wanted to try it. And then he asked Eva if she would be going to Camp Chanco again this year, and she said that she would, and he said "Oh, good. I know you love doing that." And then at one point he looked at Silas and said "Silas, I can tell you are going to grow into a fine young fellow." And he said something equally sweet to Eva, too. 

And then we let him sleep, because we had exhausted him, but I was so happy and so grateful that we had those few minutes together. And then I cried. 

3) My younger brother had been having a kind of deep and lengthy conversation with him in which he reminded Leigh how much of his life he'd spent studying the Psalms, and Hamlet. And that despite the fact that his uncle was a revered Shakespeare scholar, he had his own thoughts and ideas about Hamlet, too. And he told Leigh what he wanted his funeral to be like, and that he wanted each of his children and the older grandchildren to read, and what.

Later, Leigh was telling me all this, and I wondered what he might want for his epitaph. And Leigh said that he thought it would be OK for me to ask him, that he was very much in that headspace and OK with being in that headspace. So I did. I opened my mouth and somehow asked him what he might want on his tombstone-- would it be something from literature, or a bit of scripture, or....? And he said, "I don't want anything. Just my name, birth date, and death date." And then I probably said something else...and eventually he told me "I wish there was a way to communicate between heaven and earth. I've been thinking about that a lot." And I told him, "Sometimes, people still living see a certain kind of bird, or hear a line from a poem or a song, and it feels to them like their loved one speaking with them. If you can do something like that, you should." And he agreed that he would, if he could. 

And I told him I loved him again, and I left the room. And I cried. 

Discards and Dreams

 One of the oddest parts of my job as a public librarian is destroying books. It's a truth of the library world that in a back room off the staff area is a grimy, dystopian set-up where books that have not circulated in years ferment in a large bin alongside books ruined at the beach, dropped in toilet, and covered in pet vomit. Discarded from circulation, they wait until some hapless volunteer (or staff member channeling aggression) rips them into pieces. You can literally do this to weak-bound books, or old novels with cracked spines. Other books-- usually the older ones, with the pages sewn to the binding-- need the pages separated with a boxcutter. These can be recycled, and either drop in chunks or flutter quietly into the designated box. 

Recently, while preparing for our building to close before construction of a brand-new library, we were asked to rid the collection of everything that was either torn or had food and water damage that might attract vermin during storage. So I sat myself down with some late nineties and early 2000s bestsellers, and fell into a kind of rhythm. Open book, insert boxcutter. Slice through front endpapers, flip to back endpapers. Glance at the author photo (grainy and pre-digital), read the blurb, slice back endpapers and toss the contents. 

After a couple of hours of this, popping an Advil for a baby case of carpal tunnel, I'd come to a startling realization: more than half of the authors were Ivy League. It seemed weird at first, but after an entire bin of Harvards, Princetons, and Yales (with the occasional Brown and one Sarah Lawrence), I realized exactly how many of these people came not just from privilege, but from uber-privilege. (I've got white privilege. It's undeniable, and I would never try. But this was like cashmere blanket, ivory piano keys privilege. Lexus privilege. Never filled out the FAFSA, never worked while taking classes, spring breaks on islands privilege. The kind of privilege that has never seen the little Hamburger Helper hand and wondered why the hand has a nose.)

Never mind that this was just one random box of books pulled for a bunch of random defects. Never mind that there was all the methodology of a car crash in the rhyme and reason for these books ending up in my hands. Nope: fuck all that, in fact, because this is where my brain always wants to go with this kind of information: These are the people who can write books. These are the people who can get published. These are the people taking a sabbatical from jobs at fancy universities, or from start-ups where they made enough to pause for a while and live off the fat. These are people married to engineers who make more than enough on one salary for the other spouse to pursue unpaid artistic self-improvement.

Like the metabolic chain of events in my gut that follows eating a Butterfinger, I feel very good about this train of thought until I feel very, very bad. How can I ignore all the folks I follow on Twitter who have managed to grind it out and do something full-time and still publish? Some of them are raising children, too. Some care for elderly parents. But box of library discards or no, this is always my thought process when I think about how much I'd like to be writing and publishing rather than maintaining secure and gainful employment. I swing from the highs of finger-pointing to the lows of self-reproach. The finger always ends up jabbed straight back into my own chest. Dreams deferred? You. Are. The. Problem. 

On the one hand, it's kind of a gross, disgusting impulse to try and find reasons why we can't live our dreams when we still find time to eat cereal out of the box while watching The Walking Dead. (Hi. I did that. It was me. It was yesterday.) On the other hand, I don't Netflix and Chex during the working day. This is the reward for my reptile brain, which is the only part of my brain still online after 8 hours of work, a trip to the pharmacy, 35 minutes of tears over 5th grade homework (both of us were crying) and a half-assed annotated bibliography cranked out for my grad school class. 

I do still write. It's just kind of haphazard and unscheduled and occurs in fits and starts. Sometimes I "write" on receipts in my purse because I never think to bring a notebook anywhere. Sometimes I push my lunch break 5-10 minutes, knowing I can blame traffic, because I've got a hot idea I know I'll forget by quitting time. Sometimes I "write" while driving and talking into my iPhone Voice Memo app because time alone in the car is strangely fruitful, creatively. The act of moving towards one thing inserts this pocket of space that creates something else entirely. 

I don't know if I'll ever actually publish a book. It might be that when I die, my kids will be buried in an avalanche of Target receipts and business cards with so many nonsensical half-paragraphs that they question whether they ever knew me at all. But maybe I'll make it onto a shelf some day. Maybe some people will pay to read what I've written, crammed into a full-time life, and find hope for their own part-time wishes. And one day, when a harried mom with Cheeto fingers ruins the library copy of the very book I managed to crank out, a daydreaming library employee with literary dreams of her own will savagely bisect my face with a boxcutter and assume that the grinning bitch in the ugly-ass photograph was probably married to money. 

Dispatches from a Global Pandemic

I woke up this morning in the middle of a YA novel we we entered the beginning of our second week of the COVID-19 societal shut-down. That's here in Virginia, at least, as this virus has been ravaging the world for months. Both Italy and China have surpassed 3,000 deaths, and the US is just beginning to experience what will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better.

The governor and local governments have declared a state of emeergecy. All schools have been ordered to remain closed until the end of March. Our local school systems have commited to closeure until April 14, and the word on the street is that this will last until what would have been the end of the school year. Mr. Milkweed is in the process of moving all his classes to Zoom as VCU has shifted the rest of the semester online. I'm effectively on administrative leave from my own work, though I'm going in twice a week for four hours to help answer the phones with one other employee. Since I'm full-time, I'm still being paid. My part-time coworkers are largely out of luck.

I keep waiting for the part where the dead rise again as zombies, or for the government to declare Martial Law amidst rioting and looting, but so far, those plot points have yet to come to pass. Instead we thrum along in a bizarre, forever repetition of a weekend, except one where we don't go anywhere and don't see anyone as group gatherings larger than 10 have been outlawed. Except for nerve-wracking trips to the grocery or pharmacy where we try not to touch more than we have to and marinate in hand sanitizer before, during, and after, the world has ground to a halt.

Spring weather is here, though. The trees are budding and flowers are bursting into bloom and suddenly, there is ample time for yardwork. Yesterday after dinner I ate some ice cream with Silas on the back deck, looked up, and gasped. The clouds were moving. I haven't looked up at moving clouds in literal years, but there they were, and I was so relaxed and unhurried that I could take them in 100% as myself, unmitigated by anxiety and exhaustion.

What is happening to the world is frightening. I hate not knowing how this will all go, because very much unlike a YA novel, I can't flip to the last chapters to read how it ends. This pause, though? This forced time at home, with my children and our dog and the beautiful, blooming outside world? It's a balm to my soul. It's amazing. I've even taken some time to try and pray, which is a pool I've dipped my toe into so many times over these past six years. This week, to my utter astonishment, I waded in past my knees.

The way I was living was untenable. I see that now. And things will have to change once we get back to normal. I can't short-circuit my very being just to be a full-time employee. Somehow, there has to be room for looking up and noticing the clouds.

Big Mistakes

Lately I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of things that have gone wrong-- specifically, things that have gone wrong that we've caused. Even in a life as relatively priviledged as mine has been, you don't live to the age of 41 without making some mistakes.

You spend a lot of time as a child thinking about what you're going to be when you grow up, or where you're going to live-- what kind of life you'll have, and all the positive things associated with it. Nobody sits around wondering what their life's besetting sin is going to be, but maybe we should. Even if you have a cultural framework for understanding fault-- something like a Juedo-Christian worldview, which is built on the concept of forgiveness and grace-- it's really difficult to wake up and realize you're an alcoholic, or a compulsive gambler, or an adulterer, or maybe just mean. There are more terrible mistakes than ice cream flavors, but the ice cream is where we put all of our focus. There are a million ways to conceptualize what might go right in a life. There's not much support for how to navigate the realization that you've screwed up, perhaps royally.

Even in church we talk about sin and forgiveness, but we don't talk much about what walking those roads might look like. I read a lot of writing by recovering alcoholics and I think those communities (because there are many more besides AA) have the best articulated notions of what it means to rebuild in the rubble. Everything from the notion of twelve steps to spiritual connection, abstenince, support communities-- there's a lot of helpful scaffolding around the idea of reaching a total dead end and making the decisions that lead to new ways of being.

I'm 41, and I have made some Big Mistakes. I'm hoping those will be the worst of my life, since they were so very large, but who's to say? I'm grateful over and over recently for the gift of my life of faith, as shaky has it has been at times, because ultimately in the person of Jesus I find an abundance of the relational gifts-- unconditional love, gentle leading, prioritization of the marginalized-- whose lack in my own upbringing is at the core of the mistakes I've made. We'll always find a way to make up for what we lack, and unfortunately, it's so easy to mess that up. But why don't we talk about it, even with the people we love and trust the most?

What if there was more conversation around the huge mistakes we all make? What if children were raised with a vocabulary of sin that was more than just a vague sense that we're all capable of immense wrong? What if we named some of the common pitfalls and, most importantly, could speak of healthy ways to cope? Should conversations like that be relegated to therapist's offices, where you unpack what you've already done? What if we could talk enough about the ways we try to fill the various holes inside ourselves that the langauge of mistakes and their warning signs is just something we know to talk to our children about? Or even, barring that, something we can talk to our right-now/fallible/flawed adult selves about?

More than warning signs, even-- is there a way to talk about these mistakes as GIVENS? As things that we'll all do at some point? Can we name some ways to hold on and hold up through them, and do it often enough that there's a language of healing that's as robust as the language of sin?

I'm going to be returning to this again soon, I think. There's so much to consider, for me personally, for the church, for society as a whole. We need to talk more about big mistakes. I think the person of Jesus has A LOT to tell us about how to hold such mistakes in a compassionate way.... and I also think it can be so very difficult to allow ourselves to accept such compassion.

Nope. We Can't Afford It.

My last post here is schmaltzy and sentimental and not particularly well-written, but I don't really have the energy to try and fix it. "Not having energy" is kind of the theme of my life these days. I can't figure out of it's because I'm over 40, because I'm a full-time working mom, or because I have some rare form of blood cancer. Hopefully it's not the latter.

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But anyway-- on to the story of having to tell Eva, for the very first time, that she couldn't do a thing because we simply don't have the money.

When I was growing up as the daughter of a community college professor and a part-time registered nurse, life routinely dangled opportunities in my face that we just could not afford. A lot of it took place in little daily economies-- off-brand groceries, second-hand clothes-- but some of it played out on a grander scale. Every time there was some kind of special school trip planned, whether a bus trip to Disney with the Honor Society or an excursion to Costa Rica for Environmental Science*, we just could not afford it. Early on I got used to not even daring to hope about these sorts of things, shoving them instead into a kind of seperate category with other things I couldn't have, like fancy sneakers or big birthday parties (or, for most of middle school, friends).

But my daughter is not like me in virtually any sense of the word, aside from an attraction to reading and creative pursuits. She's lovely, extroverted, and both trusts and has made friends with the world, which in return showers her with a kind of acceptance I've always had to wrestle to achieve. She does know that we are not the most well-off family out there. As the daughter of a non-tenured professor and a librarian, she's pretty much swimming in the same lane that I was growing up. For various reasons, however (including the generosity of her grandparents, who helped install us in a neighborhood we never could have hoped to afford on our own), I don't think our budget realities have ever really hit home with her.

Until yesterday, when she asked to go with the Drama Club to New York City to see the sights and take in a Broadway show.

This conversation took place over text, which is a super weird form of communication because it's completely devoid of any kind of body language except exaggerated smiley emoticons and little hedgehogs or whatever. Still, as she told me what they would be doing and how long they would be staying, part of me was like "What the hell? Why are you even asking about this?" Then I remembered that she wasn't me, and didn't really understand why we wouldn't be able to drop $600 on a school trip (heart eye smiley, cavorting unicorn/rainbow).

I broke it to her as gently as I could, which resulted in a full screen of crying emojis and competing texts from my husband asking why she was so upset. I was busy at work, so used that as an excuse to peace out from the rest of the real-time fallout. By the time I got home, she'd reached that place of resigned acceptance from which I basically live when it comes to luxuries.

It hurt, though. It's not going to be so easy for me to resignedly accept that this is her fate. It pains me to imagine her in conversations with girls from her Girl Scout troop that are also joining the Drama Club, and whose families can absolutely afford to send them on this trip. She's going to miss out on something social for almost the very first time in her life, which has been crowded with birthday party invitations and sleepovers and inside jokes and dozens of fawning yearbook signatures. I've marveled from the very beginning of her life at the ease in which she navigates the things that still keep me up at night: things like small talk, and neighborly chats, and making fun plans with friends. It sucks to have to throw a financial roadblock in her way, but such is reality.

At her last school in our little blue-collar, redneck neighborhood, we were one of the most well-off families. Here in suburbia, we're kind of barely hanging on to the middle rung, and the fact that we can even afford piano lessons is entirely dependent on our crappy 12 year old van continuing to be even remotely roadworthy. The second there's a car payment, extras like after school activities are going to go up in smoke.

But maybe our saying no to this trip is just the inevitable first step all families must face. No matter how much income parents are bringing in, their kid's dreams are going to outpace finances. I'm just saying no to a field trip, not a small island or alpaca farm or whatever it is that gilds the dreams of the uber-wealthy. (European shopping excursions? Space rides? Sentient food?)

There's no question that it's part of our job as her parents to prepare her for the real world, and no matter what the reason, there will always be fun things that are out of reach. As much as it hurts, this resigned acceptance to missing out on New York City is a coping skill that will serve her well in ways I can't even imagine. Like most parents, I want my child to be happy. I just need to be able to step out of her way when she inevitably faces the disappointment that comes with not having everything she wants. The alternative would mean setting her up for certain failure when she leaves her stable four-walled, green-grass childhood and steps into the real world, where no one gives a rat's ass if she gets to do fun things. With any luck, we will begin to help her develop the qualities that will allow her to strive for as much luxury as an honest living can afford her, and be relatively happy with whatever that may mean...from an in-home blacklight bowling alley to the occasional self-indulgent Target run.

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*Totally and compeltely legit-- this actually happened, though it seems insanely extravagant and even dangerous and in hindsight only like 5 kids actually went on this trip

Onward to Middle School

I left work early today to take E to her middle school orientation. It was loud and large and busy and confusing, but eventually we puzzled through her schedule, and found all her classrooms, and found the cafeteria, and worked through her locker combination a couple of times.

Scrolling through Instgram later I discovered that I was supposed to have taken a picture of her opening her locker. No fewer than five other moms had posted one, but somehow taking out my phone to capture the moment never even occurred to me. I wish I had, of course, but missing the mom boat is not new to me. It's just frustrating to know that I could have even done that-- taken a simple photograph, with my daughter and 15,000 hormonal middle schoolers jamming up the hallway. I'd made a pact not to even take my phone out of the car, lest I use it to somehow embarrass her and mark her for life in some miserable, after-school-special way. Turns out she probably wouldn't have even cared.

I don't feel prepared for this next step. I don't feel prepared for the tween she is, the teenager she's about to become. I was barely functioning well in the years when she adoringly agreed to (most) of whatever it was I suggested we do together. Now the sands are almost through the hourglass, and I'm racing to catch the last few precious grains before she's lost to me, down a long corridor of friends and phones and crushes and heartbreak and a thousand, thousand things she'll never tell me. What I will be told will be curated, smoothed, selected. It is my most fervent hope that we can avoid the permanent severing my own mother and I went through, and still endure, but the prospect of anything even remotely like that happening between us quite literally keeps me up at night. You'd think I'd be a walking click-bait article of "Perfect Mom and Daughter Moments to Share With Your Tween," but most days I make it home from work with fumes in my tank. I'm propped up a little by dinner, and can at least listen to her happily chatter. On the weekends I do stand a fighting chance to spend some quality moments with her. I just need to make more of an effort. There's so very little time left.

Last Sunday, she told me she very much wanted to read with me on a blanket in the park, and I roused my exhausted lump of a body because this was not a request to be refused. She took the copy of the Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth graphic novel that she'd recently purchased, which is based on Little Women. We sat together, under the trees, and she read no less than six chapters to me. Every so often there was a letter from one of the girls to their father, who (in this retelling) was away serving on an unspecified mission in the Middle East, and I read that to her. And she lay on her back and gazed up at me and truly enjoyed the feeling I put into what I was reading (which possibly made me over-emote in acomical way, but she didn't call me out on it).

I related so well to the exhausted mother in the book. I felt damned and condemnend when the girls talked about how much they missed her, and how they wished she didn't work so hard, though in my defense I'm just a full-time librarian, not an ER nurse pulling doubles to keep food on the table. But I was also able to get my head out of my miserable asshole and recognize the absolute joy in Eva's eyes as she shared this book with me, and how she giggled, and how she said several times that she loved being with me and loved reading together like this. What a lucky, lucky mother I am to have had that afternoon.

Middle school is coming-- I can't stop it. May I get out of my own way enough to let such moments between us blossom into whatever they can become. May I even stop being so morabund as to imagine that their time is short, but it might be. I love my girl so much and want us always, always to have a connection-- through these middle school years, and on into her high school years, and on beyond forever. I want it enough that I think I can be sure that no matter what happens between us, I'll be able to say that I tried as hard as I could to keep ahold of this golden thread. To stay conencted to the tiny baby whose picture is in the very first post of this blog, anout 11 years ago. The absolute light of my life.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

We put Rivkah to sleep on Friday afternoon, and brought her home in a white box with a pink lid to bury her in the backyard. Now she is out there, a dozen feet from the door where she used to sleep in a sunbeam, and I piled laundry where her food bowl used to be and every single one of us coming downstairs for breakfast this morning looked over at the balled up sweatshirts and thought it was her, sitting there, eating.

I posted about her death on my Facebook wall, as one tends to do. I put a letter there that I wrote her and recieved many heartfelt condolences. One co-worker posted a poem called "Waiting at the Door." It rhymes like a greeting card, and the sentiment should be schmaltzy, but the essence of the poem is that the cat that is no longer waiting at the door when you come in your house will be waiting at Heaven's door to welcome you in when you, too, eventually die.

That's not schmalzy to me right now. It's huge and metaphysical and everything I'm wondering about, have wondered about, and will probably remain undecided about until my very own earthly light goes out. Is there a heaven? How do I feel about the whole idea of heaven? Are the people and pets you love waiting for you, in some sense? Will you see them again? Is there even any afterlife at all, or is it comforting enough to know that the world is wonderful and strange and beautiful and that the end means fertilizing the grass, and trees, and flowers, and nothing more?

I used to be a pretty fervent Christian. Sometimes I think I still might be, but that strong belief has been lost in the closet of myself somehow. I might unbury it, or I might not, kind of like the box of journals that's probably in my closet upstairs if I look enough, but who has the time? The thing is, even as a strong Christian it's not like I spent a lot of time on the heaven question. It was more about the liturgy, and giving 1,000 hours to church meetings/groups/initiatives, with some Jesus as a model for social justice, a splash of trauma-informed theology and a pinch of women in the ministry.

Then I lost my path in a very big way, in that I made some mistakes and got very, very, tired and took a full-time job and realized just how little time a full-time job plus two children, a husband, and a cat leaves for endless volunteer work in the church. And in unplugging from the church, I unplugged from God, because my relationship with God was so bound up in showing up that when I needed to sit down, I wasn't sure how to bring him with me.

All of this is to say that I sound so very different now when I frame these big questions, but it's only because I'm not approaching them the same way I used to. But I still really, really want to believe that my cat and my grandmother are going to greet me in those bewildering and unknowable moments after death. I want that, because I want to believe that someone greeted them there-- that they still "are," in some spiritual way, more than premium-grade fertilizer.

On Friday, my cat died, and on Saturday, Rachel Held Evans died. I loved her work, her writing. She embodied the kind of faith I had myself-- fractured, questioning, but still leaning ever onward towards a story we are willing to be wrong about. I looked for the exact and beautiful way she said that, but the Internet is so clogged with tributes and grief that much of what she wrote is buried underneath it.

I couldn't help but thinking that, if the poem is correct, and there are loved ones waiting at the door in heaven, that Rachel looked back a long, sad while at what she was leaving behind. She was only 37, and the mother of two little children. Who gleefully crosses any threshold leaving that behind? Could I do that, even for Jesus?

Is there a heaven, with cats and grandmothers? Where is Rivkah right now? She's in the backyard. Is that all? Will I ever know?