BORROWING MAGIC

Borrowing  -  I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. ~ Woodrow T. Wilson

My first book incident occurred when I was eight. My mother discovered me hiding under the covers late at night with a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and a flashlight. She ordered me to turn it off and get to sleep. She did not see the tears streaming down my cheeks – you can tell where I was in the story – so did not perceive that there would be no going to sleep until I finished it. Despite my generally compliant nature, I waited about ten seconds after she left before I flipped the light on and plunged back in. Any reader would understand.

When I was 41, I moved to a new town that left me with a 40 minute commute five days a week. Looking for a way to make the most of the time, I borrowed my first book on tape. At the time I’d been too wrapped up in child-raising and business-running and personal exhaustion to fit in anything so self-indulgent as reading fiction. I worried a little that I might drive into a ditch as the story took off, but a new channel seemed to open in my brain to allow me to keep track of both listening and driving. With the first words of Maeve Binchey’s Glass Lake, I was transported to midcentury Ireland by the lilting narration. I grabbed the case expecting to see a good old Irish name – O’Connell, Murphy, Duffy, but no, the narrator with the perfect brogue was named – Barbara Rosenblatt? I was hooked – this was some new world. Ever since, like any addict, I monitor my supply of audio books, and carry two or three backups in case I finish the current one far from the library.

This summer I had another book moment. I was caught up in The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s story of a young Southern woman with progressive leanings who tries to fit back into her traditional hometown after college, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The author depicts the intersection of her character’s privileged life and the lives of the black servants employed by her family and all the other white families of means. Stockett took chances, in the use of black dialect that could offend, for instance, and her failure to include any white characters with a conscience beyond her heroine. But you could tell where her heart lay.

I reached that familiar stage of sadness that the book is almost over and urgency to find out how it ends. When I shut the book for the last time, I began my conversation with the author: why did you have to wrap it up so neatly and so quickly? When didn’t you spend more time on the central mystery – what happened to Constantine, the main character’s nanny? I was disgruntled. I was disappointed. I was mad.

But I knew better. Where do I get off telling someone else how to tell her tale? I guess I get off because I just invested hours of my time in her story. I had formed a relationship with this book and felt it let me down at the very end.

What makes up this relationship? It begins with the author’s impulse to write, in this case about an era she witnessed and had some unfinished business with. There are plenty of other reasons to write. Some of us get through life by scratching out journal entries that put our thoughts and feelings in order. And we write, well, email, to keep our relationships current. And we write to make ourselves clear, in business and in life. And sometimes, we write because someone asks us to, about things we would rather forget.

Looking to understand the effect of writing things down, researcher James Pennebaker (Opening Up, 1990) asked subjects to write for 15 minutes 4 days in a row about the worst trauma they’d ever experienced. Control subjects were told to write about trivial nonemotional topics for the same amount of time. Afterwards, the trauma-writing group had fewer doctor visits, greater success at work, and long term mood changes for the good. This powerful effect held up even if no one ever read the words.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation – the reader. Beyond our private diaries, if we bother to write things down, most of us want to be read, and we make decisions about how to best tell our story so that other people will want to keep going. In nonfiction, we sort through the facts we can recall using our imperfect and selective memories to pick out the juiciest ones; in fiction, we imagine the most vivid “facts” that could be true for our characters.

Even though new writers are told to write what they know, there must be questions to answer and discoveries to make or both writer and reader will nod off. One of my favorite quotes (attributed to various authors, Patricia Hampl and Margaret Atwood among them) is “I write to find out what I know.” Exactly.

Knowing the lengths that authors go to to engage in this process, I used to feel compelled to finish every book I started. Now, I am comfortable setting one aside, knowing that there is an audience out there for what the author has to say, it’s just not me. Besides, I already am going to have to stay alive until I’m 105 just to finish the books stacked up in the giant basket in my office where they collect dust and watch me disapprovingly if I’m goofing off instead of reading them. Given that pressure, I don’t have time to read a book that was meant for someone else.

Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to listen.” We each read for our own reasons – for pleasure, to soothe loneliness, to visit other places, to escape the drudgery or uncertainty of daily life, to learn, to fire our own imaginations. But how does that hold up in the age of texting and Tweeting and whatever is next?

At an Iowa writing event this summer, writing teacher and author Kyle Beachy explored whether literature is dying, as many predict. Relax, he said; it will never go away because it is irreplaceable. Its purpose is empathy – to allow us to feel what another feels, to put ourselves in another’s place to see what it would look like from there. At the end, we know something we didn’t know before.

When we read, we temporarily borrow another’s place on earth, hear their thoughts, see their challenges, feel their feelings. We get to time travel and see the past, consider the present and imagine the future. We go there to discover meaning beyond the obvious. There we see that what seems like a low point become the entryway into a whole unimagined new direction? Point of view is more than a literary device. It is the point.

Sure, the methods of distribution of what we read are changing. I’m reading, well, listening to on CD, A Moveable Feast by Hemingway about his Paris days in the 1920’s. He and his pal F. Scott Fitzgerald are described waiting for the check in the mail from each magazine story or even better, book advance, to buy their wine and pay their rent. There were no blogs, no social media, no viral posts, no shortcuts back then. It was write, sell, wait.

So we can rest easy. Nothing is dying. There will always be little girls sneaking a book after bedtime, and magical narrators to transport listeners to foreign places, and snapshots of life in a world that we missed. And if an author wants to write her ending in a way that disturbs me, I’ll have to get over it. I have all those other books waiting for me, and some to write as well.

CBH 08/10

WHIRLWIND

COMING HOME - There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits. ~ Robert Southey

It was an end-of-summer organizing day at the house. The kids were just starting 3rd and 6th grades and I’d taken the day off to whip things into shape for the new school year. We took a lunch break at Show Biz pizza, played a few games, and came back home to finish up.


Eleven-year-old Ben worked in his room and probably sneaked in some reading, while Katy and I worked in hers, attempting to contain her many collections into the smallest room in the house. Clouds loomed, no rain yet. Disk jockey Steve Dahl reported that there was some weather coming in from the west. He made fun of how alarmist meteorologists and their weather-spotters get lathered up every time the sky darkens for a few minutes. He scoffed at a report that cars were turned over near I-55 in Plainfield.

In a way, we had our own weather-spotter right in-house. Ben had for some months been scanning the skies and worrying himself sick if the conditions looked right for severe weather, especially tornados. He tried to recruit us to his vigil, but as clueless parents often do, we dismissed his concerns and assured him that there was nothing to worry about. His dad was fond of telling him, “Ben, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting hit by a tornado.” Our wise Ben continued to watch the skies, and to try to warn us.


The phone rang and I ran downstairs to answer it. “Carolyn, this is Pat Henry. Is David home?”


That was weird. Pat was a consultant David worked with on some of his architectural projects. Certainly he should know that he’d be at the office at 3:30p.m. Why would he call here?


“No, Pat,” I said, “I’m sure you can get him at the office.”


“Sure, okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.” And then he said nothing more.


“So, okay,” I prompted. “Good to talk to you.”


“Right,” he said, “Same here.”


A minute later I was fully absorbed in the back to school project, and for the next hour traveled between the two bedrooms, the laundry room, and the big garbage can in the garage. I was trying to fit yet another box of crucially important belongings under Katy’s bed when the phone rang again.


It was David, husband and father to us three. “Hi.” His voice sounded a little husky. “I’m okay.”


“Good,” I replied. ‘I’m glad. Me too. We’ve just about got…”


“You haven’t heard anything, have you?” he said.


“No, what?”


“I was in a tornado. In Plainfield. The building came down around us,” he said.


“Wait, what?” I started to sneak away from the kids until I could take this in. “You were what?”


“Turn on the TV. You’ll see.” He proceeded to tell me a few details. He and his partner Cliff had been meeting with a group of teachers in the school administration building when it hit. The teachers had the wit to dive under the tables. He and Cliff stood up and tried to walk out into the hallway. They were blown back into the room. David clutched the door frame until it blew away and he was down. He watched concrete blocks swirl above his head like popcorn. When it was over, they stood up to find the building around their knees. They looked straight up to see the sky filled with lightning and pouring rain.


First, they helped the teachers to safety to wait for help for their broken bones, then stopped to attend a man also waiting for emergency help. They gradually realized that the reason he wasn’t moving was that he was impaled on a plank of wood. He survived.


Once they reached the periphery, they looked back to see the high school on fire, missing its roof, a disaster scene. The building they’d been in was the pile of rubble over there. Cliff’s car sat atop a pile of cars at the edge of the lot, its emergency flashers blinking on and off.


With no car, no phone service and loved ones to check on – Cliff’s son was supposed to be at the town pool– they headed to Cliff’s father’s office on a nearby busy street. His dad, the town doctor, knew nothing since his office windows faced away from the route of the storm. He took off for the hospital for emergency duty that would last into the night. Several phone calls later, Cliff located his son, and David made the call to me.


“Should I come and get you?” I asked.


“You’d never get near here. Cliff’s going to borrow a car. He’ll drop me off.”


You know how kids are with their radar for trouble. While I was trying to play it cool and not alarm them, Ben and Katy hovered to hear the whole story. I hung up and chose my words.


“Okay,” I said. “Dad’s fine, but he and Cliff were in a tornado. In Plainfield. He’ll be here.”


I turned off the radio while Steve Dahl apologized for his earlier dismissal as reports of the severe damage and loss of life – 29 in total we eventually learned, 3 at the school complex – came in. We switched to TV but there wasn’t much to see yet, and we already knew the most important thing – David was coming home.


I tried to reinstate normalcy in the house. We resumed our project, and ran back to the TV when there was a new report. Each of us began to take in the enormity of it – this could have been the worst day of our lives, and it wasn’t. I began to formulate my apology to Ben who tried to tell us that this might happen. To his credit, he never demanded it.


Katy spotted David first. “Dad’s coming up the walk and he looks terrible!”


Sure, he was covered with dust, his glasses were wrecked, his face was cut, but here he came. I had to disagree. He looked pretty good to me.


A whirlwind of another kind followed. After telling the story and answering all our questions, he gobbled a sandwich, and went to Lenscrafters where they beat their new-glasses-in-one-hour promise, and he could see again. I went along when he headed for Plainfield and Joliet to help figure out how to start a school year with 1200 students and no building.


The next night was our 20th anniversary. We spent it at an emergency school board meeting, which was more romantic than it sounds. In the past 20 years, much has changed – the kids are on their own, years of new events have layered over the memory of the tornado. But when he shows up every night, or calls me during the day, there is something that still remains of that day, a whiff of gratitude, and recognition of what might have been.


CBY 07/10

GRIEF AND RELIEF

RELIEF - Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow, too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief? ~ William Blake

My mother called me, incensed. She’d just found the receipt from her doctor’s visit a week before. Uh oh. How did I let that fall into her hands?
“Do you know what that doctor wrote down?” she demanded.


Yes, I did know. I had taken her in for an opinion on her increasing forgetfulness.


“Dementia!” she sputtered. “How could he say that?”


I summoned my reassuring reasonable self. “Mom, remember we went in to talk to him about your memory?”


“We did?”


“Yes. We discussed it,” I said. “That’s just medical language for that conversation.”


“Well, what did he say?” she wanted to know.


“That your memory isn’t what it used to be,” I said, “But we knew that.”


She chuckled, “I guess.”


She didn’t ask the next question and I didn’t answer it. Where would this lead us, and when?


Like many others, just you reach the point when your kids are launching their own lives, and you think that your life is about to become your own again, your parent begins to need you in a whole new way. As she teetered on the precipice of neediness and debilitation, you realize that it threatens to take you down too. Your narrative changes. The one about the largely joyful journey toward your kids’ independence is replaced by the one about the descent into your parent’s encroaching and eventually total dependence.


The best thing to say about this experience is that it gives you the smallest peek into what she must be going through. The worst thing is that it won’t go away until she dies. The dance between grief and relief has begun.


At first, I deny. I explain away the crumpled fenders, forgotten appointments, inability to work the remote control. I tease her, “Good thing your head is attached or you’d lose it, huh Mom,” when I really want to scream, “We talked about this two hours ago – how on earth could you forget?”


After the totaled car, the terrified call that a hallucination of a boy is in the corner, the forgotten pan on the stove that led to the condo building being evacuated, I couldn’t deny anymore.


That’s when the first unexpected wave of relief arrived. Once I used my energy to face reality instead of run from it, I gave up my dreams of someday getting to say, “Yep, she’s 94 and sharp as a tack.” Instead it became, “Well, she’s 79 and her memory is a problem, but she still knows me, so that’s something.”


I developed a plan. I scheduled appointments for us to visit assisted living facilities which she forgot to get dressed for and then declined to attend. I went alone and chose the one that had daily current events discussions over the one that had residents paste construction paper into mosaics.


Then I tried to scale the mountain of her resistance, “I’m perfectly fine. I don’t see why I can’t just stay in my condo.” I got nowhere. Then she fell again and the doctor forbid her to return home without 24 hour supervision. Reality trumps desire.


I picked the nicest corner room overlooking a pond, and moved her in, staying over the first night to ease any confusion. When I walked out the next morning into a gorgeous fall day, I realized that from now on there would be people looking over her all day and all night. This day that I had dreaded for so long brought another surprising wave of relief.


Weeks later, after I had cleared out her condo and put it on the market, I drove her over there, wondering if the sting of her forced departure had been soothed by her new safe surroundings. She looked at the building without recognition. She wasn’t pining for her old independent life because she couldn’t remember it. More relief.


As her awareness of her plight faded, other ties with her past and expectations for the future fell away, and she lived more and more in the moment. We regularly perused the scrapbook my daughter made for her. One day, she no longer recognized the picture of Bob, the love of her life who died when they were 34.


“Who’s this?” she asked.


“That’s Bob, your husband, my father,” I said.


“Really,” she said. She took a closer look, bewildered. How could you forget your own husband?


Rather than continue my campaign to get her to remember, I could let each visit focus on right now – how the sunlight looked on the trees in the courtyard, how the breeze stirred them. By now, she was in the memory unit of a nursing home, which became a godsend. A multi-cultural team of caregivers somehow managed to see through the fog of her dementia and find the bright, funny, kind person she had always been. Thanks to them, there was lots of laughter still to come. Who knew to expect that?


As she lost language, we no longer struggled to get ideas across to each other but settled for sharing the moment. Every couple of weeks the hospice social worker left me a message like this: “We had a wonderful visit today. I held her hand and we listened to music. She watched me with those beautiful green eyes and I felt that she was really with me.”


I learned to do that myself and be satisfied. This new way saw us through to the end. My daughter and I were present, my son on the phone. We had music, and the hospice nurse whispered a message into her ear. “Go Jessie, and dance with Bob.”


Surprised, I found myself smiling. What a thought. We held her hands and soon she did, peacefully.


Almost right away, I began to regain memories of happier times and had an easy time recalling her backbone, her independent streak, how we’d collapse in laughter at the same oddball occurrences. It was as if I could finally detach from her ten-year decline and reclaim the whole of her. Again, the dreaded worst happened and comfort appeared. If only I’d known that from the start.


CBH 06/10

DANGEROUS ROMANCE

NARROW ESCAPES - Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; whenever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable. They go together. ~ Earl Nightingale

Have you ever been seduced by a house, or in the case of this tale, a townhouse? When I fell in love with it, it didn’t even exist. It’s the way a lot of romances begin, with a vision of something that isn’t really there.

It was shingle-style, with stone foundation and two porches, one screened in. It was roomy for a townhouse, meaning I wouldn’t have had to get rid of any of my lifetime accumulation of furniture I’m apparently not done with yet. The English basement even had room for the pool table and the juke box.

The sales team had it conjured on a full-wall video mural depicting the full sweep of the new neighborhood, to be constructed on the site of a recently leveled downtrodden apartment development. The sales office stood on an adjacent property, accessible via a circuitous route involving three left turns.

As sales teams should be, this group was bursting with predictions - the units would be snapped up in a flash, several people had already put down deposits, the building would commence in accordance with the speed of the closings. It would start with the first row of townhouses and the first condo building, close to the elegant entrance, so new residents would not have to drive through a construction zone while the rest were completed. The landscaping would be done right away, not to worry.

I went home clutching gorgeous brochures and memories of the quality cabinet and hardware options. I could just imagine the sunlight streaming in through the bay window in the breakfast area. It reminded me of the house in the movie with Diane Keaton I can never remember the name of where Jack Nicholson recovers from a heart attack or something at her fantastic seaside house. (Remember? He is dating her nubile young daughter which pretty much turns your stomach so imagine how the Diane Keaton character must have felt, but came around to falling in love with her [Diane] instead.) Something’s Gotta Give, that’s it.

See? That’s where the fantasy took over. I floated through the next few days, researching the developer, visiting their other properties, imagining the cleansing process of a move for the first time in 15 years, and dreaming of my new life with no landscaping bills.

My husband sobered up first - why would we want to live in a construction site? The floor plan was awkward and the entryway a disaster - come in the front door and three feet later you have to climb up or down to get to the living space. How would his dad in his wheelchair ever visit?

Oh, good point. Is there room for an elevator, we asked the bright sales lady. Well yes, she stammered, if you give up a chunk of the kitchen, and a bedroom, and the bar in the basement.

Hmm. The dream started to fade. Also influential, the consideration of whether to commit before selling our current house, which wasn’t hard to decide since we’d once owned two houses for a spell and swore to learn from our mistake. The brakes engaged. We told them no the next time they called, crushing their dreams, and mine.

I used to drive by sometimes, watching the project begin. True to their word, they started with the two buildings they’d promised, and the gate looked great. The recession was starting to show itself though and I noticed that the newspaper ads that used to feature snob appeal of living in the village, now took on a budget tinge - townhouses for only $700,000, condos in the $300,000s. Wait, weren’t they vastly more expensive than that when we looked; where were those brochures?

The recession won, the salesladies are long gone, their sales office still perched above a vast empty parking lot. There is a leaning chain link fence around the whole property with No Trespassing signs every six feet. Giant puddles collect in the unpaved streets. Piles of building materials dot the property, stacks of concrete curbs, concrete blocks, and stones. Lengths of giant sewer pipe rest against rolling hills of dirt with new grass poking through straw. A mountain of landscaping boulders sits near the entrance. A lone trash container sits imprisoned behind the fence.

It reminds me of Pompeii, life frozen in the moment of disaster. But now life is taking over again - the grass, dozens of birds chirp crazily because it’s finally spring. A neighbor walks her dog through the one paved street that leads from the sales office to the gate. The two buildings sit, stickers on each window, paused just before happy people were to move into their new lives.

Except for the first townhouse of the four. It’s the unit we picked out - for best sunlight both morning and evening, best view of the treed neighborhood behind, in view of the community gazebo. In that unit, the stickers are off the windows, Venetian blinds and shutters are up, and the porch light is on. Two cars sit out back alongside a basketball hoop. An urn holds flowers. Someone is living in our unit, carrying on life in the middle, well really at the edge of, the stalled construction site. They have a very short ride until they are out on the street driving past the construction sign no one ever took down that promises access to the office and exciting deals 11-6 every day.

Narrow escape? Yes, except for one family who may feel foolish, or unlucky, or philosophical, depending on who and how they are. Give them credit for pulling the trigger on their new life, even if it didn’t turn out quite as they expected. A little part of me still longs for the new start, the sun in the morning and all that. It looks cozy in there in the rain, a good place to read a book. Looking too closely feels a little dangerous, like looking back at an old boyfriend and wondering, even when you know better. Thank goodness you snapped out of it, but the dream lingers, of how things might have been.

CBH 05/10

WHAT TO LEAVE BEHIND

TURNING POINTS:  The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt. ~Max Lerner

There I was, two years old, crazy about my father (I’m told, because of course I can’t remember), and he dies. Over the years in waves that come years and sometimes decades apart, I launch into projects in an effort to get to know him and figure out which parts of me are linked to him. As a child who can’t remember her parent, I am a walking advertisement for ethical wills.


Here’s what I’ve learned about him: he was a great guy, more a poet than a salesman (he worked for a book publisher), talented musician who had his own band in high school, who fell hard for my mother when they met at a Christmas party and found a way to send her roses while she visited her family in the North Carolina mountains the next week. His boss told me 50 years after his death that he might well have become president of the company and I believed him since he still had my dad’s picture on his office wall. I read the stack of condolence letters from colleagues and clients that poured in after his death, describing his intelligence and good will. I read narratives his sisters wrote about their growing up in Chicago. I memorized the photos of my early life. Since he took most of them, he rarely appears, which allows me to see through his eyes, in a way.


I can glean a good deal about him from all this, but it’s a poor substutute. If only I could hear directly from him, I’ve always thought, had something in his own hand, to me.


If only he had heard about ethical wills, an awkward name for the very thing I longed for. Instead of a regular will that hands down property and financial assets, an ethical will hands down beliefs, values, stories, and hopes, whatever is important to leave behind.


I thought I invented them myself when I was a young mother and had to leave my two children to take a three week trip to Europe with my husband. I say “had to” because even though I knew intellectually that this trip was a great opportunity – my husband was president of his service club and was being sent to the international convention – I could not bear the idea of leaving the kids. To be honest, I could not bear the idea of something happening to me and never coming back to the kids. I knew they could handle three weeks without me, but a lifetime?


To soothe my anguish, I sat down to write them a letter about all the things I needed them to know if I wasn’t around to tell them myself – about me, my hopes for their futures, about how to meet challenges, what they meant to me. I left the letter at home just in case.


Of course I came back in one piece, having had stimulating and moving experiences on the trip. I can still see the faces of the varied group that traveled to Dachau one day to take in the worst of humankind. I can hear the music in a Hungarian restaurant in Munich where we partied with another international group, and the earnest and overly optimistic declarations that our organization would eradicate polio worldwide in ten years. But the only way I could get myself to leave home and have these experiences was to leave myself behind on those pages.


It turns out I wasn’t alone in my impulse. When I eventually tripped over the work of Barry Baines, a Minneapolis-area doctor involved in end-of-life care, I learned that ethical wills had a name and a 3,000 year history. The first phrase in Barry’s book Ethical Wills is, “At turning points in our lives….” When we know we are up against a life-changing experience – when we walk down the aisle, or the baby is born – we take stock. When we learn of our coming demise as Barry’s patients do, we know that our time to share is limited. For me, faced with the imagined re-creation of my own childhood loss in the lives of my children, it became the right time to put down my thoughts and feelings on paper.


What to include? The things you believe in, experiences you have learned from, advice you can give, apologies and forgiveness, things you wish you’d known, family stories, memories you cherish, hopes for your loved ones, requests about how you hope to be remembered, and thanks you want to offer can all come up. Once you start, it writes itself.


All you need to know is who you are writing to, and why. This is not a place to settle scores or issue blame or instill guilt. This is a place to share your spirit so it can live on in your loved ones. You can write one document to everyone, or personalize a letter to each loved one.


In the old days, the ethical will would be attached to the standard will to be read after death. Now we can choose when and whether to share it while we are still here, in writing, orally, on video, your choice. It is recommended that even if you use new media, you produce a paper copy too that will live on after the technology goes obsolete.


As the walking advertisement for ethical wills and also briefly the imagined inventor, let me offer some final selling points and invite you to consider writing one yourself. In the end, values are of greater importance than valuables. Writing one takes the accidental legacy you would leave if anyone bothered to remember, say, your greatest moment, which they might not know because you never told them, and turns it into a lasting legacy.


The benefits include:

• The process may leave you knowing more about yourself and what you hold dear.
• Since we don’t sit around the fire and share stories much anymore, being too busy watching reality TV shows, it gives you a chance to direct your loved ones’ attention to more important matters.
• In case your messages to your children are often delivered as corrections or criticism, sometimes at the top of your lungs, it offers a way to share the love and concern that underlie all of that in a calm and loving voice.
• You get to say how you would like to be remembered, you control freak you.
• It serves as a refresher course in what is most important to you, so you can double-check to see if you are living your 168 hours each week in accordance.

I relaxed as soon as I wrote mine. When it needs revising, I do so, but if I got hit by the cosmic bus tomorrow, I know I’ve had my say.


For further tips, see http://www.ethicalwill.com/.


CBH 04/10

ANNIVERSARY

LEGACY:  What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. ~Pericles

Every year it creeps up on me. In late February I start feeling uneasy, not myself. I wonder if I’m coming down with something. Why can’t I sleep? It’ll probably pass, I tell myself. But anniversaries are hidden things that can seep in and seize you unaware. The light bulb goes on when my son Ben calls from Boston or D.C. or Texas or wherever he’s gotten off to and says, “Tomorrow is the day that Lauren died.” Of course.

The first time I met Lauren was in front of the library. Accustomed to awkward middle-schoolers with little to say, I was captivated by this short confident exuberant 12 year old who looked me straight in the eye, stepped forward and stuck her hand out for a shake. Introducing us was my son, also 12, and, I think, also captivated by this new friend.

I wish I could remember the next time I saw her and the next, but I do know that she became a loyal pal of my son and a participant in many of the school and social gatherings that swept the kids along from middle school into high school. We got acquainted with her parents, and our family conversation included which part Lauren got in the upcoming play or her take on Student Council. Lauren was a big presence in a small package. She was also complete and fully-realized, so herself at an age when most of her peers were riddled with self-doubt and angst. Lauren didn’t have time for any of that.

It was a normal night at our house in late winter of Ben’s freshman year. Homework was done and he was in bed early because he was coming down with something. My friend Peg called late, too late for a regular call. I asked her to repeat what she said three times because I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t want to take it in. Lauren had been in the family car, her brother driving her to play practice. He made a teenage mistake and tried to make it around the crossing gates and they were hit. Lauren was dead and he was injured. Peg said her husband had passed by the tracks soon after the accident and came home shaken, hoping no one had been in that car when it was hit. When they later got a call from a friend and learned that it was Lauren, Peg called me. She knew what good friends my son and Lauren were and wanted to save him from walking into school the next morning to face this news.

The early loss of my father had marked my life and I had so hoped my children could escape grief’s reach. As I climbed the stairs that night to wake Ben and break his life in two, I cursed the gods all over again. Of all people, why Lauren, and by extension why Ben?

Every year, once Ben calls, I go to the florist and pick out the one most vivid bloom, this year a salmon-colored rose. While the clerk adds greens and wraps it in cellophane, I surprise myself by blinking back tears. It’s been years since I did that. Lauren should be thirty this year and full of the challenge of a whole new stage of life. Like memory, grief doesn’t go away. It just lies in wait for a moment like this.

All winter they pile snow in the parking lot at the town pool. By the time March 2 comes around there is a mountain of it. I park there and walk across the street to the tree, the one where Lauren’s car came to rest. There is a permanent bouquet secured there of pretty spring flowers. All year, when I drive by I check to be sure it is still there. In the early days there were piles of flowers, which would disappear, no doubt cleared out by some civil authority, to gradually build back up soon after. Now when I see the occasional addition I smile, reminded that others remember too and feel moved to act.

I bend down to place the flower at the base of the tree and whisper to Lauren that we miss her and that Ben is fine and happy. I figure she would like to know that about her old friend. I linger a moment before I climb back over the snow bank and return to the car. My mood starts to lighten even as I think of her family who has found a way to live on, and the others who love and remember her too today. The year turns soon after, spring comes, renewing energy and hope. But it doesn’t come until we’ve remembered Lauren.

First, I loved Lauren because she loved my son. Then, as I got to know her, for being so vividly herself. And for making everyone she met feel included and important. And for making her 14 years of life just as full and complete as much longer ones. And now I love her for her legacy – to be smart and provocative and unafraid – that makes me want to be more like her every day, and to tell her story to you.

CBH 03/10

THE BREAKUP

LOVE: Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. ~Zora Neale Hurston

Here is what you say to your heart:

Broken is overdramatic and unnecessarily hurtful. You are not broken; bruised is more like it – alright, perhaps it’s a severe contusion if that pleases you more. You will discolor and feel exceedingly tender for a while; in fact, you’ll hurt in places you didn’t know you had. But no one has to perform open heart surgery to fix you, and you don’t need the paddles to shock you back to life. You’re still beating. You know how to mend yourself, with time. Either you’ve done it before, or it’s time you learned. Over your lifetime, you’ll beat 2.5 billion times. That’s what you’re here for, not to moon over this insult. I can’t get along without you, you know.

Here is what you say to the retreating back of your person of interest:

Goodbye. No pleading, no demands for explanations, no stalking of his/her future activities. From now on, that person is the person who used to be at the center of your life. Old news, out of date, no longer qualifying as the focus of your attention. You need that attention for yourself. He/she is best viewed from a distance, both geographically and emotionally.

Here is what you say to your mind:

Okay, snap to. What were you thinking, investing so much of my capital in this person? Healing up, that’s what you need to be thinking about.

To your guilt:

If you are implicated in the breakup, you need to deliver at least one clear and complete statement of regret to your ex. This must be done with compassion from the high road, and cannot be a backhanded passive-aggressive blame-filled slam at the other person designed to get you off the hook. You don’t get to transfer your guilt and anguish to them so you can walk away more comfortably. Guilt exists for a reason, to call you to be a better version of yourself. So take this opportunity. Say to your guilt: Teach me, let me have it, show me where I should have behaved differently.

If you are not the one initiating the breakup but suspect that you facilitated it by doing or failing to do things that mattered, fine, but don’t twist things around so that you place this whole thing on your shoulders. Also, do not expect and especially don’t demand an apology from your ex. That trivializes your experience, as if this pain could be eradicated by a few words from an outside person who no longer deserves any power over your feelings. This is a collaborative process between you and all your parts. No one else has a say except your steadfast and loyal friends and family. Do not attempt to short-circuit this process by going after a cheap apology. Whatever relationship your ex has with his/her guilt will play out outside of your view, and is now none of your business. You will never know the outcome, and don’t need to.

To your emotions:

Sure, you will be all over the place for a while. I know you can’t help it. But try for a little balance. At some point there will be a few glimpses of good feelings, like freedom and excitement for your new future that will begin to leak through. Usher them to the front and see what they have to say. In the meantime, lay off the sad music and don’t you dare watch An Affair to Remember more than once a week. There is some healing in all that wallowing, but you mustn’t to overdo it or you may end up in a trough. Instead, be the star of your own movie. Cultivate resilience; remember that you are strong, or if you are not, this is your big chance to become so. And cultivate hope. You have no idea what is around the corner for you.

To your body:

You ache, you don’t want to get out of bed, you can’t imagine getting off the couch, but do it anyway. About food, if you can’t eat, think of what used to be your most yummy treat, get some and jump in and then follow it up with a protein bar. If you are stuffing your face, put your fork down and go outside. Food can’t fill that gaping hole, but activity can.

Walk, run, go to the gym and work out. Let one of your exercise nut friends accompany you. Sign up for tennis lessons or go swimming. Either start some new activity or revert to something you loved before the person even came into your life. Reclaim your body from the relationship and strengthen it. Get a massage in order to get a human touch without any complications.

To your friends:

Take me surprising places, get me moving, tell me the truth about my worth and my prospects. Tell me what you wish you could give me. Tell me what I’ve forgotten about myself; tell me who I was before this relationship began. Don’t try to fix me up yet, but start a list of people you think I should meet when I’m ready. Don’t be surprised if I don’t want to use it. Right now, I don’t think I’ll want to risk going through this again very soon.

Don’t tell me to snap out of it – it doesn’t work that way. Just walk with me.

And to the special few: Can I call you in the middle of the night if I am having a really tough time? As soon as they say yes, vow never to do it. Unless you have to.

To your expectations:

Stomp out any thoughts that this will reverse itself and the relationship will come back to life. The chances are slimmer than slim and even if you gave it a try, you would soon remember why you needed to part ways. Everyone sooner or later suffers through this and now it is your turn. Stand up and take it.

Tear your ex off that pedestal you keep trying to construct. See him/her with brutally clear eyes, imperfections and all. Use this information to create a revised account of what would please you in the future. And erase any notions that exceptional good looks have anything to do with character and desirability. That comes from a primitive desire to show off your ability to snag a looker, which has nothing to do with your happiness. Remember the lesson of Charlotte in Sex and the City: a plain partner may be the one worth having. Make a list of the gorgeous people you know and compare them with your desired qualities. Bet they don’t match.

To your self-pity:

Scram. You will weaken me. I am a survivor, not a victim. If I am disillusioned, it means that I just learned that I was illusioned in the first place. If I was trusting when I should have been suspicious, if I was secure when I should have been wary, if I was naïve when I should have been cynical, well, that’s just me and I don’t plan to let this experience take away my nature. If I was true to myself, I will take credit for that and walk away with regret but without self-pity.

To your history:

If your hold over me from my upbringing and prior relationships figured into the destruction of this one, then I have to ask you to loosen your grip on me. I want to go on from here without hauling you around as baggage. I’ll unpack you and keep the best parts, but I’ll leave the junk behind. Don’t try to follow me.

To your mirror:

You look like hell. Look at those bags under your eyes and the vacant stare. But look beyond them. You’ll get through this and you’ll be wiser in the end. There are unexpected gifts waiting for you. You’ll see.

CBH 02/10