Digging in the Dirt

Most young children compete with their siblings for their parent’s affection. My sisters’ and my rivals, however, were my father’s plants.  He adored lush ferns and bright colors, lipstick red summer geraniums and the bold purple of miniature lobelia.  Our lawn was golf-course green and weed-free (and he was not above employing a few chemicals to keep it that way).  Watering, fertilizing, clipping and weeding were his sports arena, his temple and his escape.

When I ultimately had my own home, yard and children, I discovered that growing things, digging around in the soil, was a balm for me, too. 

 

The plants and trees I nurtured existed in a separate sphere from the sometimes routinized and often chaotic world of mothering four children, now ranging in age from 21 to 13.

 

I am drawn to my summer garden in the dawn, before anyone stirs inside. In springtime, I prepare the beds and start my dahlia bulbs and herbs in pots of kitchen compost soil.  By August, the flowers are a tangle of bright colors.  But in October, as I cut back my dahlia stalks, dig out the tubers and turn over the earth, I am reminded how the seasons of a garden mirror those of our lives. 

 

And so it was natural, 18 years ago, when I lost a baby at 14 weeks that I turned to the land to make sense of my grief.  The pain of losing that child was sharp, unlike anything I had experienced.  I had pictured my baby, imagined him in our family’s silhouette.  There were mornings I didn’t want to lift my head off the pillow, days I forced myself to simply get through, and tend to the needs of my two living children.

 

Grief craves ritual, and that summer, I was determined to plant a tree to memorialize our son, to root him in our land and fix his place.  I felt a primal need to make something thrive after something so precious had perished.

 

Feeling barren and broken, I chose a small but sturdy Japanese maple with deep burgundy pointed leaves. We were a transient family in those days, moving from town to town every few years for my
husband’s job as a journalist.

The place we call our “constant home” is on a lake in  the Adirondacks to which my family has returned for five generations each summer.  It was there, in a simple ceremony of poems and prayers, that we planted the tree under the spread of a giant fir.  As I covered the roots with loamy soil, I felt the barest flicker, a hope that my battered heart might begin to heal.

 

Throughout each summer, passing the tree in my walk between beach and house, it’s impossible not to wonder what our family would have looked like with a different configuration.  We were thrilled with the birth of our twin girls in 2000, but a loss doesn’t get erased by joy, only diluted. That sorrow is buried within now, marked in our trunks like the inner rings of a tree. The maple reminds me that life is indomitable.  We may never get over losing those we love, but we can navigate through it.

 

In 2003, the war in Iraq claimed the life of a friend in a very sudden way.  It was our first close brush with the death of someone my age and it hobbled us.  In the autumn after his funeral, a group of friends planted hundreds of white tulips on the grassy bank near his house for his widow and daughters.  The activity connected us all and joined our grief in one supportive web.  That spring, the riot of color that bloomed filled up some space, it lessened the ache.

 

My children are older now, and I’ve come to that place in life where I’m parenting my parents.  The seesaw has tipped for my sisters and me as we head toward the inescapable fact that we will lose them both.  Yet I cannot quite grasp what it will feel like once they are gone.  When I am unable to hear my mother’s voice on the phone, or loop my arm through my father’s on a walk, I imagine it will throb like a phantom limb.

 

I’ve not yet decided how I will honor my mother, but I know what I will do to memorialize the man who loved to put his hands in the dirt.  I will plant a White Birch, the lavender pink bark etched with whorled black lines in the shape of God’s eyes. We will place it near the shores of the lake he loves, by the dock where he spent his afternoons.  And when I cover the roots of the tree with earth, I will know that a little piece of my father will live on there too. 

This blog was published in Martha Stewart Living Magazine, April 2013, pg. 170

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Remembering a Friend

I cannot fall back asleep.  I am stuck on the dentist, the mechanics of how this works, identifying a person by their dental records.  Does he get a call at 2:00 AM, when family members and loved ones are awaiting an answer?  Or does he come to work at a reasonable hour?

 

I am struck by the term “lost his life,” as if it was simply an object he misplaced and someone will find again. As if you could walk out a door, never to return and then somehow walk back in again.  What an odd and inappropriate turn of phrase.

 

I am thinking about his last minutes and hoping that there was no suffering.  As a wife I would need no suffering.  I would want to know there had been that moment of being there and then suddenly not there, before you could even flicker through the fullness of your life, before you had time to tell yourself that it was abundant and well lived and that you had more than you even deserved.

 

I am remembering what that call feels like—to go from a before to “after” with one piece of news, a few words that ripple out to change the lives of an entire clan.  There is the cool ceramic shock that follows, the membrane that appears over your brain to prevent the truth from sinking in all at once.  The information digests slowly, as you toggle between numbness and disbelief at the oddest times. This is the only way a wife can absorb the enormity of that kind of loss, you cannot otherwise compute the circumference of such a thing. 

 

 

She will still expect to hear his shout out from the front hall, see his lopsided grin and wire glasses askew, his full head of ginger hair.  She will listen for, but not hear, his footfall and the familiar sound of his briefcase being hefted up on the counter where they will eat.  “You’re dragging the dirt of Manhattan onto our table,” she might say and now she smiles to think of it.  Impossible that someone could be there one day, taking up all that space and then simply vanish so fully that the dentist must be called.  “Never” is a difficult word for humans to grasp—we are creatures who crave.

 

In the early days following his death, the kitchen is warm and bustling with covered dishes and deli food. The fireplace crackles, the doorbell rings, flowers arrive and then more food.  In these early days there is way too much food.

 

The household spins with industry, the cluck clucking of the community of women and the spiked laughter of his pals, yes laughter, because this is still unreal.  She will not sleep, at least not without pills and aids, because the images both imagined and real and the questions and “what if’s” will swirl in her mind like a thick pudding.  She will replay the film loops of the past, the time they first saw one another in Manhattan, how he held himself, so sure and confident, a boy from a modest home who was determined to make a mark with his good education.  She sees a freeze frame of them in the maternity ward, holding their daughter, how they thought their hearts would burst with so much love.  And then more children, more love. 

 

She thinks about his passion for all things outdoors, of hiking and biking and being out on the water in the Adirondacks.  She pictures him coaching hockey and wakeboarding with his boyhood friends and their children on the lake.  He was a person always in motion, whose presence bulged, so that he seemed to occupy a larger space, in a way that made the people around him feel more alive.  He had a childlike sense of wonder and enthusiasm that made those of us in his presence smile.  He was the leader, the aggregator, the congregator, the do-er.  He was where the fun was.  He was the “Fun Dad.”

 

 

He always said exactly what he thought and he was forthright, never cruel.  Even when he was goading or teasing you there was something still appropriate, still loveable.  He was loveable.  He jibed and joshed and his self-deprecating manner made us all feel we knew him better than maybe we did.  We smile just remembering it, each of us reviewing our own cache of highlights.

 

But then there will come that period in the house when the activity will slow and sag.  All the plates will stop spinning.  The hugs, the calls and the people dropping by will diminish.  The cars that have occupied the driveway will pull out and friends will go back to their lives because that’s what people do.  And then the real life part begins.  The living with it part.  And this will be the difficult part for the family. 

 

In the quiet of their home, grief will settle around her like an unwelcome arm on the shoulder and she will ache for the sound of that briefcase hitting the counter, the small dog’s incessant bark, rejoicing that her husband is home.  I want to say to her, do not fester over recreating your last moments together, the fact that you might have discussed the credit card bill that last night instead of something more weighty.  Do not worry if you can’t recall exactly when you last embraced him or told him what was in your heart.  Do not punish yourself if the last night you slept together - and how could you know that - you didn’t spoon him or kiss him passionately, but instead poked him when his snores woke you.  None of that matters now.  It was a marriage and he adored you.  I saw it.  We all did.  You made each other stronger and more complete in the weaker places.  And that’s simply what the best of couples do.

 

And when you are ready to feel us, we will all be woven strong.  Each of your varying and diverse communities, all of the places you have lived and worked, played and learned, will be interconnected, like the reeds in a basket.  Although we will never come close to replacing him, we will hold you up, and cradle each one of you.  We will be here to remind you how well you are loved.

 

 

In memory of Tighe Sullivan—devoted father, husband, friend, brother, Colgate University alumnus and lover of Silver Bay on Lake George. 

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A FUNERAL, A BIRTHDAY AND A DOG

I had one of those days yesterday where I bumped up against the goal posts of life.  One announcement of the sudden death of a little boy, another old friend’s funeral and then I capped it off with a friend’s 50^th birthday party. 

The vicissitudes of life.  I like that particular word, not only because it is chock full of consonants and sibilant sounds, but it captures exactly what it means to be in this middle place in life.   The dictionary defines it this way -- “of constant change or alternation, as a natural process, unpredictable changes or variations that keep occurring in life.”

I didn’t know the little boy.  I only know his grandparents and I know that kind of pain has no words attached to it.  There are no dictionary definitions that can accurately describe the loss of a child.  It’s not the natural progression of life.  No parent should ever outlive his or her children.

As I watched the elderly mother of my friend Jeff, whose funeral was yesterday, I saw the pain etched there too.  He was 52, had made it through the better part of his life presumably, the parts where he’d filled in most of the blanks.  He had wonderful friends, a successful career, had married a great gal and been the father to three beautiful and generous daughters.  But there was so much he wouldn’t get to do now.  And that pain was just as fresh and as real for that mother as it was for the mother of the 11 year old.  A child is a child.  And a mother’s job is to protect, even though none of us can fashion armor against the randomness of cancer or a drunk driver, a blood clot or an accidental fall.

As we all remembered Jeff yesterday, some of us who had not seen one another in too many years, it was really what all good funerals are supposed to be – that clichéd celebration of life.  And so it was. He touched many lives.  He seized it by the neck and left his mark.

Later that night at the birthday of my friend David, we raised a glass to his life.  A birthday is less about looking back than it is about looking forward.  Yes, we celebrated his three beautiful sons, his wise choice in a wife, his accomplishments.  We roasted and jabbed, poked at self-confessed weaknesses.  But a birthday says, “I made it this far and I’m still going strong.”   It was hard not to see the juxtaposition as I thought of Jeff’s family, sitting, I imagined, with the left-over’s from the funeral reception.

There is no takeaway from a day like yesterday other than the old chestnut about living life in the moment.  It’s a lot harder to do it than to say it.   But those of us who’ve made it this far have to give it the old college try.  Loss is something we get more comfortable with over time.  We respect it.  And if we’re good and wise, we let it remind us to live a little lighter, worry a little less about the silly things and tell the ones we cherish how much we love them.  Whenever we get the chance.

Today will be another day with both a birthday and a funeral.  I'm about to head out to the disco bowling alley for my twin's 11th birthday party.  As they move into "tween-hood," this might be our last goodie bag gathering.  Next year they will be in middle school and they are already needing me in different ways than they did eight months ago.

Our little dog Tucker was hit by a car three weeks ago.  It was very traumatic for everyone and it happened in front of my eyes.  I had to wake my girls that morning and tell them.  At 10, they haven’t really experienced much loss.  They have all four grandparents and all of their aunts and uncles.  They were too young to remember the scary parts of their Dad’s injury.  They only see the recovery.  Today we will plant a bush in the yard to remember Tucker and his absolute zest for life and unconditional love.  My girls will each read things they’ve written about how much they loved him.

Today will be a lesson in celebration, like all rites and passages are.  They are one year older.  And they have also lost their puppy.  Today will be an opportunity to remind them that they, too, can survive the vicissitudes of life.