The Sabbaticle

We live to learn, or at least to develop, or at least to experience. That’s my working theory, and it functions pretty well as a guiding principle, whether or not it turns out to be strictly true. The Task is what the hero thinks he’s trying to accomplish, even when the Ultimate Quest is a mystery. It gives him something to point himself at.

A year ago today, my father discovered my sister dead in her bed. Her death is the worst single event I have ever lived through. I am obscenely privileged, and I tend to have what I want and need. I needed her. It made no difference. So that is a thing I have learned: utter catastrophes can and will happen, and without a clear cause. No event is too unlikely or too terrible.

It’s probably not the worst thing that will happen in my life, and whatever the worst thing is, it’s probably beyond my current imagining. Nameless horror lurks much nearer than it used to.

And my experiences of my mother’s death and my sister’s were completely different. Apparently, one catastrophe can’t necessarily teach me how to weather the next, even if they’re nominally similar.

Also, there are worse things than forgetting.

At first I was sure nothing could be worse than forgetting Melissa in any degree. I was determined to keep her image before me every second of my life. I would be a one-person cult, or at least the cult leader. Our temple would be her heartbreaking, abandoned, picked-over home, or maybe a good brunch spot, or the Aldi Aisle of Shame. Our colors would be coral and fuschia. Our flag would be rainbow; our number, 42. Our anthem and opening hymn would be “Welcome to Paradise”; our recessional would be “Chelsea Dagger.” Our priestly garb would be the patterned sleeveless dress and flip-flops. We’d heap the altar with mountain laurel. I could go on. I did go on, clinging to every artifact and every symbol. I lost myself in every photo of her face and was astounded — I still am, honestly — at how that face is etched into my eyes. These last few years, objectively and literally, I looked at her face more than my own. It’s like a part of my own body. Her face is as familiar as my own two hands, even now.

And I was in Hell. There was an initial period when I reread light fiction series for days on end, just trying to keep breathing. But then I got down to the serious business of never forgetting a single thing, and I devoted myself to keeping her alive somehow, and I was in Hell. I did the math. By my initial estimates, no amount of grief was worth forgetting her. I would prove my love by making that trade. I would buy memory with pain. I tried to. But eventually, that calculus changed, because I had underestimated how much I was capable of suffering. I didn’t know anything could hurt like that and keep on hurting.

Of course, I still think of her during most hours of every day, as I did when she was alive. But I don’t demand anymore that every time I get to the end of that sad mental rosary, I start over from the beginning without a breath. It doesn’t matter the way I thought it would. No amount of trying will bring her back to me. She cannot be reconstructed from memory. And no amount of pious self-flagellation can keep the treadmill going indefinitely. Some things will be forgotten. A year ago, six months ago, that would have been anathema. I raged. But I don’t set my heels against it now, not like that. You can call that learning or just exhaustion.

I learned, very much to my surprise, that suffering connects people, and not just the people who are doing the suffering. In Inside Out, Joy realizes that help comes because of Sadness. I didn’t know I was looking for help, and I never would have believed that anything could help at all.

But I cried out anyhow. Mostly it was an instinct born of panic. Surely if I felt like this, the earth was collapsing. The world was ending. The tribe must be warned! Protect the children! Every time I got on Facebook, it felt sort of like screaming in the middle of the street, like an alarm.

I never used to write, “Sorry for your loss” after fifty people had written it before me. I just didn’t see how it could matter. It wasn’t original, and it wasn’t informative, and I was not an important player in someone else’s moment of crisis, so wasn’t it almost egotistical to insert myself? My being sorry, no matter how sorry I was, couldn’t make even a dent in other people’s pain. But then all these people wrote, over and over, about how sorry they were for my loss. And it was so moving, and so unexpectedly beautiful. And whether they said so or not, every single person who had known Melissa was sorry in a slightly different way, having lost some slightly different facet of her. And every person who hadn’t known her but knew me was wishing me well with some slightly different inflection, just by being another person. My best friend traveled to be with me. Friends I haven’t seen for years saw what I wrote and acknowledged my hurt and I’ve been wrong my whole life, because it matters so much. It’s not something I could explain to the person I was before all this. I think it’s something most people know, that kindness can matter like that. I didn’t know it, but I know it now.

Part of learning about other people’s kindness was learning this: my own suffering pries open my heart. I’m not thrilled to find that out. I consider the opening of my heart an important Task, maybe even the real Quest. But I really, really would prefer to do it on my own terms, maybe by taking up yoga and cuddling babies. But if I’m realistic, I have to say that historically, it’s suffering that’s done the trick. When I was at my lowest this past year, I just loved other people better and more, and I mean all people. My dad, my niece and nephew, but also grocery clerks and casual friends. I hugged more and talked less guardedly and worried less after the fact about what I had said wrong. I wasn’t exactly saintly or anything, but I did care more than usual about others’ suffering while worrying less about protecting myself from their mess. I wished for others’ happiness with more intensity and less jealousy. The implications for my spiritual development are deeply uncomfortable. I don’t want the universe to get any more ideas about helping me with this.

I learned that when someone disappears from the world, the blast radius can somehow be both vast and tiny. A personal tsunami, a cataclysm, can be barely a ripple in the probate court, the car dealership, the HR department, the lawn service. So many people’s lives were diminished — or practically demolished — the day Melissa died; somehow, though, it was business as usual for the water company, the coroner, OKCupid, and the U.S. Postal Service. The cognitive dissonance continues to rattle me.

For those of you interested in the Other Side side of things, I learned much to my disappointment that, again, my dead mother and my dead sister have little to do with each other as far as my experience. I continue to feel my mother around me, but as constantly as I think of Melissa (to whom I was arguably much closer), I seldom feel like she’s very near. Possibly she’s not too good at this after-death communication business: as an atheist, she never seriously entertained the idea before, not that I know of. More likely, I’m sad and she’s not and that’s creating interference. I did see my favorite medium (so? I’m a nut job and a rube. So what. Love me anyhow) who managed to communicate references to both the dryer (presumably the one I was running when I heard from her at her house last fall) and sloths, which were absolutely a thing with us. But the way it was presented was so tangled, I didn’t even get it until later. I’m on my own for the moment (though if you’re interested, I’ll write later about the Girl Scout Cookies, which was a nice trick).

I learned the name of a good lawyer.

I learned that saying, “I am sad” to another person often feels just a little less awful than saying it to nobody. And writing on Melissa’s Facebook wall feels less bad than wanting to but restraining myself.

I learned that my niece and nephew are more resilient than might have been expected, and that I truly do love them. They weren’t just accessories to my love for my sister. No matter what happens or how they’re raised or where they go, they are mine to love.

Oh, here’s a weird one. I learned that I am lovable. Not in some profound existential way, but in the silly quotidian ways I love and miss my sister. I miss her (more) when I come across Highland cows or Memoirs of a Geisha or Uno or Tajin or baby owls or Larry the Cucumber. And one day I will be dead, and no matter how much I wish they did not have to suffer, my loved ones will miss me. It can’t be helped. I’ve wormed my way into their lives and I can’t be painlessly extracted. They will think of me when they hear chickadees or cook scrambled eggs or smell Jour d’Hermès, or, hell, maybe read this blog. Maybe especially then.

This morning someone knocked on my bedroom door and I sang, “Whoooo iiiis iiiit?” the way Egghead and Shively do. And I held my breath, crazily hoping for some miracle that would make the answer, “Mailman Fred!” And then I’d say, “Mailman Fred! Mailman Fred!” and do the Egghead and Shively puppet dance and open the door, and then my life would be put back together.

CIA Superior : What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer : I don’t know, sir.
CIA Superior : I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer : Yes, sir.
CIA Superior : I’m fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer : Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.
CIA Superior : Jesus Fucking Christ.

Burn After Reading (2008)

Amen.

Following up on the “Days” phenomenon reminded me of another occasion where my dead mother somehow pulled some strings and convinced an innocent stranger to aid her in her hocus-pocus. Last time, I had an anonymous poster of song data to thank; this time it was, I suppose, a Fitz & Floyd warehouse worker hassled by rush holiday orders.

You have to understand my mother’s relationship with Christmas artifacts.

When my Catholic mother first proposed to wed my Jewish father in the early 1970s, her local Catholic Church authorities were less than supportive. She did not get a church wedding, and she seldom entered a church after that, though she did enroll me and Melissa in CCD classes. Dad took us. After we moved to Texas in 1988, our new Catholic church was kind of stoked about having its very own Jew. I don’t know if they had ever seen one before.

My theory is that, disenchanted with the traditional Christian godhead, she spent the rest of her life worshipping a personal God cobbled together from her favorite mythical or near-mythical male figures: her great-great grandfather Patrick Balfe, her grandfather, and Santa Claus.

The conflation of those last two is understandable. When her father broke the news about Santa Claus to my mother’s older sister, my mom found out, too. At five years old, she was not ready, and her heart was broken.

That same year, her grandfather died. She would wait on the back steps for him to come get her every Thursday, and they would go for ice cream, just the two of them. But while she was waiting one evening, the news of her grandfather’s death came to the house. No one thought to go and find Patti, waiting on the steps. She waited for hours. Her grandpa always came for her on Thursdays.

Patrick Balfe is the family patriarch, who sailed from Ireland to New York and opened a bakery in the Five Points before moving the family business to Brooklyn. Once my mom’s genealogy obsession unearthed his documents and his photo, she embraced him enthusiastically. His portrait hangs over my parents’ mantel, complete with shillelagh just barely visible in the corner.

The fourth personification of the male principle she was worshipping, now that I think about it, was the Green Man. She was wary of anything that looked like ritualized magic, which raised her Catholic hackles—she didn’t even like my playing Dungeons & Dragons (as an adult!)—but she adored all manifestations of the Green Man. We saw him everywhere, and we considered him a personal friend.

Because we so loved the Green Man, I bought a beautiful carved wall sconce of the associated god Cernunnos from Paul Borda at an Irish festival many years ago. As he wrapped it, he told me the story of the Oak King and the Holly King, and he handed me the heavy package and looked me in the eyes and said seriously, “He’ll take good care of you.”

Later I also bought the female counterpart of the piece, but it was mostly out of guilt—I had been reading up on Wicca and feared I was unwisely neglecting the female principle. Both heads hang in my bedroom now, but I never felt the same attraction to her. She’s beautiful, but he’s the one I can see from my bed. I’ve inherited my mother’s (unfair and probably not even healthy) reflexive affinity with the masculine.

Mom’s worship of Santa Claus eventually took the form of obsessive cross-stitch. She was fiercely ambitious and exacting. That made her a difficult mother, but it resulted in twenty or so of the most beautiful and complex cross-stitch works I’ve ever seen, growing steadily more dazzling even as her arthritis progressed. And the idea of Santa Claus as a kind of patron saint grew and became almost separate from Christmas (naturally—what’s the use of a God who comes out only once a year?).

For one thing, the complexity of her cross-stitch projects required her to start them in March if she cared to have them finished by December, so their production was on a constant rolling schedule independent of the seasons. And their display stopped being seasonal, too, especially as she got interested in less and less standard-looking Santas. She liked Santas in blue or green, or in fur coats. They didn’t have to be fat, or jolly, or even smiling, but they did have to have kindly faces. That was very important.

So the symbols of Christmas were the important thing, and honestly, they were what we truly worshipped every year. Mom wanted nothing to do with Jesus or religion, but she wanted the beautiful things that Christmas occasioned. Her highest compliment for a thing was that it was “special”: handmade, or hard to come by, or rightfully expensive. She loved the things that shine.

When I was in my twenties, we visited a Fitz & Floyd outlet store near my house to see what was special there. Oh, did my mother love that Fitz & Floyd ceramic glaze! It was very special: both expensive and shiny. When we found an entire Fitz & Floyd nativity in the outlet store, she couldn’t believe our luck. She had already given me my great-grandmother’s little carved nativity, so I didn’t feel I needed another one, but that old thing looked like nothing next to these figures: large, elaborately decorated, colorful, gilded, glowing with that signature pearly sheen.

She couldn’t stand to see me pass it up, so she and Dad bought it for me on the spot: Joseph, Mary, Jesus-manger-lamb (all one piece), three Wise Persons, donkey, cow, creche. All the basics covered. She tried in later years to convince me to buy the remaining pieces, but they were so expensive. What would I even do with all those camels on their spindly breakable legs?

Of course I was thinking of my mother that first year after she died, pulling my exquisite creche out in late November with all its cheerful red boxes of figures nestled in Styrofoam. And I thought perhaps I’d get myself a little present from the Fitz & Floyd Web site (the outlet store had closed long ago): I could spring for one camel, the one lying down so I wouldn’t worry so much about breaking the legs off. And there was a cute salt-and-pepper set that looked like chickens. It was on clearance for five bucks; I bought that too.

Partly, I settled on the camel because Mom had specifically urged me to buy one a few years before. Really special things aren’t available forever. So was it really my idea to place this order? I certainly thought it was. I will admit every time that I don’t know the first thing about how it all happens. I only know it happens.

When the box arrived, it seemed overly large for two smallish items. When I opened it, I found the box for the camel; the box for the little chickens; and a third, large box, about fifteen inches square, that was utterly unrelated to anything I had ever purchased, looked at, or thought about.

This box was not on the shipping list or the receipt. It had somehow slipped in unnoticed, even though it was easily five times the size of anything I had actually purchased.

It wasn’t only that it was such an unlikely surprise. It was so obviously from my mother—even my sister, who thought Dad and I were delusional, had to admit it was exactly Mom’s taste. It was so clearly what she would have bought me. It was gilded, shiny, elaborate, eye-catching, and unmistakably special.

You could reasonably say, in fact, that it’s a bit much. But it’s not like I put it out every day. For everyday use, I have my mother’s spirit and her carved and cross-stitched gods, their kindly faces in every room.

I find letters from God drop’t in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”

Note: This was written before the most recent post, about the margarita glasses. So they’re out of order.

When I was in high school, my mother used to joke that she could devastate my social life in less than five minutes. The cafeteria was open to the front entry hall of the school, so all she’d have to do was walk in and wave a pink Barbie lunch box, screeching, “Meggieeeee! You forgot your lunchieeees!” And that would be that. Over the years, the threatened prank got more and more elaborate: an unlit cigarette, a shower cap, curlers, a muumuu, a ratty bathrobe, slippers. And always, the dreaded Barbie lunchbox.

I was walking into a rec center yesterday and feeling just the slightest bit sorry for myself because my mom had her own mother with her through all the feminine mysteries of menopause. I won’t have my mother around for that little miracle of nature. I was pouting about this and washing my hands in the bathroom when another perfect song came on in answer. I just stood and listened.

Oh, I’ve always got the memories
While I’m finding out who I’m gonna be
We might be apart but I hope you always know
You’ll be with me wherever I go

“Wherever I Go,” written by Adam Watts and Andy Dodd

Oh, my heart. I didn’t know the song, but after the confusion with the Kinks’ “Days,” I figured she was giving the singing telegram approach another shot. And I looked forward to having another wonderful story to tell. And then I looked it up, and I knew for sure it was her, and I knew why. The song is “Wherever I Go” by freaking HANNAH MONTANA.

I swear I can hear her giggling. Hannah Montana, Mom? Really? So there it is. Essentially, knowing that I’d write about her, she just told all my friends I love Hannah Montana. But I don’t! I didn’t know the song! I didn’t even like it that much! And I only ever had ONE Barbie, and she wasn’t even blonde!

Obviously, most of my mother’s “greetings” can be put down to coincidence and confirmation bias; she’s not going to send fireworks every day, and she doesn’t have to. Usually, it’s more like today’s “conversation” at Sprouts.

For those who wonder what I’ve been thinking about other than my mother for the past two weeks, the answer is…not much. But she died less than two weeks ago. Gimme a break, here. But I do occasionally have a thought of my own, and I wanted avocados. This has nothing to do with Mom: she doesn’t eat them. I mean, I guess at the moment she doesn’t eat too much of anything (like Polonius, she is at supper, not where she eats but where she is eaten! Actually, she was cremated, but I couldn’t waste that reference), but you know what I mean. She does not find avocados interesting.

But, typically, she seemed to be interested in some other things, so I roamed. When I saw the bulk bins, I remembered her fondness for Sprouts chocolate-covered walnuts.

Very good for the brain! she enthused. Antioxidants! Yum YUM!

I know, Mom. But honestly, I didn’t like them that much.

But they were so good! I shared, remember?

Yes. Thank you. But that shiny chocolate coating just didn’t taste like anything to me. I’m sorry. It was like shellac.

Oh, just go look.

Which I did. And it is good that my mother knows me. I am not especially attentive to detail or subtlety, so I’m glad she’s not relying on me to be perspicacious. ONE bin had the big red sign I couldn’t miss.

And they were different from the old shellacked walnuts, and they were quite tasty, and yes, I’m sure they’re just jam-packed with antioxidants. I know.

What was notable when I thought about it later was the complete normalcy of it all. If I had texted her a month ago that I was in Sprouts, this is more or less the same conversation we would have had. And I find that deeply, deeply comforting. She keeps telling me, No, whatever it is, you don’t have to do it alone. Menopause is barreling down on me, but I can complain to her anytime about the depletion of collagen in my neck. She’ll sympathize. Not that she has a neck anymore.

I guess I’d better say something about the darkness of the family humor. My mother always had a quirky, not-too-respectful relationship with death. And physical handicaps. And a number of other things that civilized people do not laugh at.

Us crazies who believe our loved ones stay with us forever… Well, on occasion, other folks, like my sister, take exception. And they say, “What about when you’re pinching off a loaf, huh? When you’re dropping a deuce, are all those old dudes dancing on the back of the tank?” Now I don’t know, obviously, but my guess is that yes, in fact, they are. They are admiring your technique, wishing you luck, cheering you on! Who is better qualified than they to assure you that, indeed, everything does come out all right in the end?

I’m guessing Mom would frown at the lowbrow turn this has taken, but also she’d love the absurdity of the whole question, the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. We once had collective family hysterics around the dinner table because we started wondering about the Pope’s undergarments. The spiral into madness was swift and enjoyable.

A story from the files: When my mother was in her late teens or early twenties, I guess? she went to the wake and viewing of an elderly great-aunt. And this woman, I’m told, had been blessed in life with enormous bazooms, such that my mother started to wonder how they would close the casket. So there she was, checking out the dead woman’s bosoms from the side of her eye, and she noticed…a change in her figure. And she whispered in astonishment to her Aunt Kathy, “Where are her boobs?” For indeed, they were not in evidence.

And Kathy whispered back matter-of-factly, “They’re in a bag by her feet.” Evidently, my mother was not the only one to anticipate the cup-size-to-casket-size-ratio issue.

And the more Mom coughed and wheezed and tried not to laugh, the more hysterically she giggled, until finally my grandmother threw her out of the funeral home and was most displeased.

My mother, who could be so generous and so compassionate, could also be callous, insensitive, shockingly perverse. She was a conundrum: anything at all could become sacred, but generally nothing was. Plenty of people are still bitterly angry at the memory of how awful she could be.

But as she got older, she changed: for instance, she dialed back the sarcasm noticeably (though not the twisted sense of humor). And I think that, freed of her ego and her body and their onerous exigencies, she’ll change even more. What might she be now, when she has nothing to fear and nothing to protect? I would like to find out who she’s going to be. I hope I will, later if not sooner. I’ll keep you posted.