Category Archives: Living without Mack

Headlines from the Birdfeeder

My daughter Savannah bought me a birdfeeder camera a couple of Christmases ago, and I am not yet tired of it. Every single day of my life, the pictures it captures fill me up with joy. They make me laugh and make be wonder. They tug at my heartstrings, delight me, and spark my creativity.

When the birds land on one of the perches in front of the seed bin, the camera makes a little click that gets their attention, and for a split second they often gaze right into the lens as if posing. The camera captures gorgeous, jaw-dropping, hilarious portraits. It documents movement and life in my yoga garden. And the pictures remind me that most days I don’t have to venture beyond my little corner of the earth to feel at one with the universe.

How ’bout I buy you big sunflower seed?
No, I’m not hiding anything behind my back!
Humans are wrong, I am sooooo cute!
Grackles like birdfeeders, too!
Cheeheeheeheehee, I got the best one!

I anthropomorphize everything. Dogs, squirrels, plants, my car (I love you, Mary Arizona, especially now that you are paid off and all mine!). Everything has feelings to me, even the blue plate I broke last week in the sink. My empathy knows no bounds, and I have made my peace with this odd fact about myself. I used to suppress this tendency and only talk to squirrels, for example, when I was alone. Our society makes you feel weird for caring about the feelings of animals (especially when people around you are eating them). They make fun of you for cooing to the flowers in the bouquet you bought at Aldi and naming and talking to your car, although I know lots of people who have named their cars and talk to them when the roads are slick or the heater is slow to get warm.

But I will apologize no more. Just last night I felt sad for the calf in a food picture my sister sent me (why she keeps sending her vegetarian sister pictures of the animals she is eating is a topic for another blog!). I no longer care what people think of me for feeling the wilt of the tulips in my yard, for worrying about a sparrow being picked on, or for crying over a dead red fox squirrel in the road.

My warm embrace of the emotional connection to all living things, past and present, has come to live in my newfound joy of artmaking. It is alive in the writing of my recent book Loving Lincoln. It was validated by the intensive yoga training I just completed. And it is manifested each day in my reactions to the life captured on the birdfeeder camera, which, I admit, has taken my anthropomorphizing of birds to a whole new level.

The camera has inspired art.

Here I come!
Watercolor
Watercolor
Ipad Drawing
Odd bird taking out the recycling.
Watercolor in my Engagement Calendar

The camera captures me out in the yard, which is always good for a laugh or a piece of art.

Pastel

The camera also inspires stories. The photographs captured by the birdfeeder camera are often scenes from real-life human (I mean bird) drama. The birds land and fly away, jockey for position, tweet and squawk at each other, box out, rebound, defend, and dine peacefully. All walks of life. All colors and colorful personalities. I feel like the birds want me to write their stories, although not all of them would agree, I suppose, with my interpretation of the facts.

Here are a few headlines from the last few months…

Obnoxious Cub Fan Gets Served

Jack Sparrow, the neighborhood baseball bully picked the wrong Cardinal to trash talk this evening. He’s had run-ins before, but the dinner seeds got a little bit jammed down his throat this time. Talk about just desserts, they’ll be talking about this take-down in the backyard eastern redbud for months. No comment or defense from Jackie Sparrow, who witnessed the altercation. Just look at her, looking on, pretending not to know him—everyone in the trees knows she can’t take that husband of hers anywhere. 

Move Over, Blue-footed Booby

There is a new Yellow-footed Old Bird in town who is the talk of Monroe Ave. gossip. Five pairs of morning doves have been hanging around lately just hoping for her to make an appearance with that strange and wonderful big jug she keeps in her crop. There are also reports of house finches, titmice, wrens, cardinals, and the odd blue jay stopping by regularly in hopes of getting a peek and a taste, truth be told. There is a crow who watches from high in the oak tree two houses down, cawing loudly to alert the bird world to the arrival of the Yellow-footed Old Bird. And a red-bellied woodpecker dining on suet was overhead telling the downy woodpecker on a nearby branch: “The blue-footed booby is no longer my favorite other bird!

Near Miss at Stace-Place International

A Northern American Cardinal had to make an emergency landing today at Stace-Place International. He was coming in from the rotting sumac tree, flying low across the fence, when he noticed an obstructed perch. “It was like a big black blob there,” said Cardinal, “All I could see was black and sparkling flecks like stars!” The European Starling who had been hogging up the perch told authorities he was not, in fact, trying to create an international incident. He was just trying to eat a couple of seeds in peace. The Cardinal landed safely on a Cedar branch resting on a garden shed. No one was hurt in the incident, and no tickets were issued.

Domestic Disturbance at Stace-Place

“Jesus, Phyllis, I’m trying to eat here,” screamed Mr. House this morning, as the sparrows gathered for third breakfast (or was it pre-lunch?). Witnesses told a reporter quick on the scene that Mrs. House did seem a little randy. “It is spring, you know,” said the chickadee, “We’re all feeling it right now.” The pair of mourning doves on the ground below the feeder were not interested in sparrow TMI, though, and flew off to a nearby fence to cuddle and coo in private. Once the authorities arrived, Mr. and Mrs. House were peacefully eating with the other sparrows, and no one was willing to take time from the meal to offer any more details of the kerfuffle.

Lady Cardinal Finally Wins

Yesterday morning all the neighborhood was abuzz with the news that Mrs. Cardinal had finally beaten Mr. Cardinal to breakfast. 6:00 a.m. on the dot, was her winning time. “It was still kinda dark!” chimed the titmouse, who was up early to catch a flight to a birdfeeder down the block. Mrs. Cardinal was so pleased with her accomplishment, she could barely eat, she said. But she did eat, oh, yes, she did, and and later reported: “Best seed I ever had, and I will see you here first tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that!” The crow in the oak tree just squawked. “Fat chance, orange beak.” Sadly, the crow was right, and Mrs. Crow had to eat crow the next morning. Mr. Cardinal arrived at 5:59 a.m. to take back the win. Mrs. Cardinal later admitted to friends, however, that she was really much happier sleeping in and waiting for the morning rush. “Eating alone in the dark is no fun at all!”

Hello, you!

Young Sparrow Monopolizes the Photo Booth

Yesterday afternoon, a young house sparrow parked herself in front of the camera in the Stace-Place photo booth and refused to leave. She just kept sitting there, setting off the sensor, smiling and cheesing and leaning in too close. The grackle offered to move her, but all the women (a wren, a cardinal, and four house sparrows) said to leave her alone. “She deserves a little time to feel good about herself,” chirped the lady starling, “We’re all feeling the stress this spring.” The lady finch added: “Yeah, with global warming and crazy orange politics and schizophrenic Illinois weather and that insane young cooper’s hawk trying to take us all out, we women could all use a little “me” time.

Still Life

My dad died twenty-five years ago today, and I’m still processing the loss of him. He was a large presence in every room he ever occupied, and still my life feels too quiet without him.

Last week, a childhood friend of mine who was very close to my dad texted me some photos from the 1980s, photos of my dad that he had run across while moving some boxes in his office. How funny these photos appearing on the eve of the twenty-fifth year of Earth without Jim Pratt. What good timing the appearance of these long-lost photographs.

The spirits of our dead have the power to find us. Or we have the power to find them when we need them. However you choose to see it or believe, these reunions are undeniable.

When my dad died in 2001, I was a stressed-out and overworked thirty-four-year old wife and mother of young children. I worked full time, was building a career as a historian, and was a doctoral student. I didn’t have time to pee, let alone process my grief. I administered my dad’s estate, but I didn’t have time to tend to my heart. It was an enormous sorrow to lose my fifty-seven-year-old father, but I didn’t know how to step off the treadmill. I missed my dad. I talked to him. His spirit walked me through every big decision. But life, as it always does, moved on, and I moved on, too, without a proper period of grieving. I didn’t take time to be still long enough to tend to my loss, and so I never really grieved.

The years sailed by, and then Mack died in 2014.

And then, for me, the world stood unbearably still.

I had to be still, and I let myself fall into the arms of my grief. Losing a parent is expected, but losing a child is not supposed to happen, and if you do not stop to grieve the loss of a child the pain of it will kill you. All I did for the next four years after Mack died was grieve. I grieved for Mack. I grieved for me. I grieved for our family, especially Savannah who was now an only child. I grieved for all of Mack’s friends and all of the people who would never get to know her.

And I grieved for my dad.

Finally.

And still.

I am grieving.

Life has moved on, it is still moving on. Without my daughter. Without my dad.

But now I know that when grief steps in I need to slow down. To soften. To be still. To sit in the fire. To process my pain and then make my peace with it.

Because during the last three years, and particularly the last seven months, I have been learning to be still. Practicing stillness and presence. Practicing sitting with my feelings, processing joy on the good days and grief on the sad days, and finding contentment despite my losses.

For my dad, I’ve been sitting still all week. Twenty-five years seems forever ago, but my memories are vivid like yesterday. All week I’ve been sitting with my dad and sitting with Mack, and my favorite grandmother who died in 1993, and some of the bitterness of past disappointments that have lingered in my bones. Grief is funny that way when you are still. It has a habit of bubbling up to the surface from the various vacancies in your heart, testing you, keeping you honest, and making life real.

The nerf basketball hoop was stuck to the sliding-glass door just off the kitchen, and separating the great room of our house from the swimming pool. It was serious business, basketball at that hoop. Here is Jim dunking and my friend Scott cheering him on.
This is classic Jim Pratt. Relaxed. A Pepsi at hand. Shit-eating grin on his face, likely because he kicked somebody’s ass at a game or an argument.

These are two of the photos my friend sent to me. Both made me laugh. Both made me cry. Grateful for both emotions and a little time to sit still with them and remember. Thanks, Matt, for sharing them.

Spirit First

Good morning, spring and birds and the cool breeze on bare feet. Good morning, Sunday and my porch, strong coffee in an antique cup. Good morning, books and watercolor paint to keep me rooted here until the yard work can no longer be hushed.

It was my first Sunday morning of the year on my porch. Dishes in the sink. A bed unmade. The filling of a destroyed dog toy scattered all over the first floor. The yoga garden in need of raking and sweeping and seeding. But life is short. First warm Sundays on my porch come but once a year. This glorious March morning light is fleeting. Sunshine and reading and art were calling, and I listened.

Six months ago I would have done my chores first and then rewarded myself with porch time, missing the morning light and quiet. But my yoga study has made me wise. I now tend first to my heart and then to tasks that can wait. Three and a half hours later, my spirit nurtured, I will turn my attention to my to-do list with ease and mindfulness.

Breathe the soothing fresh spring air, good folks. Listen to the birds. Take notice of all that is budding. Read on a porch. Paint by a window. It’s a time of rebirth for our earth, and it could be a rebirth for you, too, if you welcome it at the door.

Namaste.

P.S. the final pic is Ruby, my squirrel friend, who ate her morning peanuts right at my feet, while I enjoyed my coffee.

Mack and the Light

Time has not healed my heart from the loss of Mackenzie. Acceptance did not soothe my spirit from the pain of her absence. Family and friends and dogs are some days no remedy whatsoever for my yearning for her freckled face, her silly jokes, and her unflappable ease. Work, writing, and art have not filled the void she left. Six years of therapy has not ended my grief. My daily practice of yoga and meditation has not altered my status as a bereaved mother.

But

Yet

Despite the limitations of all these remedies, and because of them, I can sit still in the presence of Mack’s absence and my grief. Even on her birthday. I can hold all the pain and all the longing and still be present in my life and live on for Mack, for Savannah, and for me.

Because

Time keeps teaching me how to tend to a fragile heart. Acceptance is the license for my spirit to keep on marching forward. Family and friends and dogs remind me every day that a broken heart and a shattered spirit can still know love and joy and connection to things beyond the self. Work, writing, and art give me purpose. Therapy offers me perspective and dispassionately guides my emotional and mental well-being. My daily practice of yoga and meditation has shown me that bereaved mother is not the entirety of my being and that I can choose to suffer or not suffer and that Mack would be so sad to know that I have suffered.

Time, acceptance, family, friends, dogs, work, writing, art, therapy, yoga, and meditation have nourished my body, mind, and spirit in beautiful and different ways. They have each tended to my tender heart. They have made me resilient and courageous, qualities that have healed my suffering. I know now that I need to be soft as well as strong. That bending is not weakness. To feel my pain is to be able to witness the pain of others. That life is hard. That to be open-hearted might break you but that being open-hearted is the only way to travel this terrifying, beautiful human journey.

Mack knew all of this. She was only twenty, but she knew.

And now I know what she knew, and I am free. Not free of missing her. Not free of the pain of my grief. Rather I am free to miss her, free to feel the pain of my grief however I need to, and also free to live a joyful life that would make her proud. She would be so happy to know that her once stressed-out, hard-nosed, unhappy momma bear is finally content.

On this Mack Day, what would have been my remarkable daughter’s 32nd birthday, I am grateful for her. I am grateful for time and acceptance as well as my yoga and meditation practice. I am grateful for a cozy house and a comfortable life with access to therapy and yoga classes. I am so damned lucky in family and friends and dogs. I am grateful for the peaceful life I have painstakingly curated and for intellectually stimulating work and a creative life that keeps me challenged. I am grateful to have made it to 59, through more than eleven years now without Mack. I am grateful to still be learning and growing while at the same time content with where I am and who I am right now.

I am a different woman than I was before my life was shattered in October 2014. Better in many ways. Softer and more tolerant. Less hard on myself and less bitter about the world. I like myself so much more than I ever did before Mack died. It is hard to know that surviving trauma with grace results in an improved human being on the other side. I would do anything to have avoided that trauma, and if it was within my power I would take Mack back in a second and give up my evolution. I would always choose her over me. Alas, I must simply be grateful that Mack’s spirit inspired me to survive my terrible loss by choosing the light in me instead of the darkness.

Mack was ever the light. So as long as there are Mack Days as well as ordinary Tuesdays, and as long as there is breath in my body, I will endeavor to keep choosing the light.

On Mack Day it is easier on my heart to remember Mack as a kid. She loved having a St. Patrick’s Day birthday and embraced the leprechaun inside of her. The photo of Mack dressed for Halloween is one of my favorites. The watercolor painting above I’ve posted before, but I think it captures the dancing light of Mack’s spirit as I knew it and see it now.

Past Lives: Lincoln Scholar

Studying yoga is teaching me to let go, to stop clinging to the past, to acknowledge but also to release old versions of myself. This mixed-media self-portrait is the first of a series I am calling Past Lives, representing identities that served me and shaped me, but no longer rule me nor define my inner peace. Through Svadhyaya (Sanskrit for self-study), I am doing the hard work of finding and speaking my personal truth.

I was a Lincoln scholar for thirty years, I edited his papers, wrote a biography of his wife, appeared in documentaries, served on boards, and delivered dozens of lectures and speeches. Studying Lincoln paid the bills, provided my growing family with health insurance, and allowed me to collect some of the best people. Studying Lincoln was a joy and a privilege.

Yet being a woman in Lincoln studies was not easy. I was unwelcome. My focus on the women in Lincoln’s life and my defense of his wife Mary Lincoln sometimes made me a pariah. There were painful experiences during my tenure as a Lincoln scholar and, in the end, when the Papers of Abraham Lincoln fell apart, it was devastating.

I have no regrets about any of it, because all of my experiences led to the publication of Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln’s Life and Legacy. Published in 2025 by SIU Press, it blurs the boundaries of biography and memoir, history and personal history. It was written straight out of my heart, the most creative project I ever accomplished and some of the best writing I’ve ever done. All of my experiences in Lincoln studies made the writing of such a creative work possible, and I am grateful for all of it. I am the woman and scholar I am today because of my imperfect professional relationship with Lincoln studies and my inspirational relationship with Abraham Lincoln, the second coolest American hero.

However, as I work to release my true self, live in the moment, and face a different future than I previously imagined, I need to let go. Now that I have published my book on Abraham Lincoln and given voice to my unique perspective of his life and his legacy, I am ready to move on, to turn my entire professional attention to Jane Addams, the coolest American hero.

More shedding to come, more identities to process and to release. More art and more writing, too. And, most importantly perhaps, more grace.

Mack, Compassion, and America

I haven’t written a post on this blog for too long. I’ve been busy. An edited volume for my work at the Jane Addams Papers. The promotion all summer of my own book Loving Lincoln. An intense yoga-training course. And doom scrolling because the world is crazy and I am so damned sad about it. Yet this is the hardest time of the year for my personal grief, and I need to write. Last Saturday morning, Mack popped up louder than usual. She knew that I was overtired and faltering.

And so, Mack and I have been on a weeklong retreat together in my mind, and she’s got me thinking. About me a little bit, but mostly about the crazy world that is making me sad. Her presence in my thoughts and in my aching heart space has me pondering where we are and who we are in America. About what I revere about my country. About what I would change if I could change anything to heal all the fractures I see. About what we all need to do to get through this shocking, terrifying time in our history.

I am grateful to Mack’s good spirit for inspiring the conversation and making me find my words. She’s good at that, my Mack, at nudging me back to my writing, my remedy, the only way I know to untie the emotional knots of my fragile, beautiful condition of being human.

Deep breath in…

Long sweet exhale…

Now, let’s talk.

**********

Every single human being wants and deserves a comfortable place to live, good food, and good health; they want to be able to pursue a productive passion, to be safe, and to feel a sense of belonging. All human beings want those simple comforts and pleasures for their families and for their friends.

Compassionate human beings also want those simple comforts and pleasures for ALL people—no matter their gender, race, religion, politics, sexual orientation, economic situation, or immigration status, and no matter that we might not know those people or understand them.

Selfish human beings care only about themselves and their own kind and are willing to demonize others to allegedly protect themselves and those they define as worthy.

The United States is not perfect. It has never been perfect. As a historian of the American past, I could regale you for hours with stories about how we grossly failed to live up to our ideals. Yet the United States of America, a nation of dreamers and immigrants and brave free-thinkers, is a great country because of its diversity, ingenuity, eclectic variety of souls, and lofty, albeit sometimes faltering, aspirations. American democracy—despite all the ways it could be better, despite all the ways it has left people behind—is the best form of government on the face of this earth.

Why else do so many immigrants dream of life in America? Why has the United States for the last 80 years been such an inspirational force throughout the world? Our freedoms and our Constitution, yes. Our legal and educational institutions, yes. Our affluence, yes. But in great part the reason the American experiment has endured and inspired freedom-seeking people around the globe is because America is a free country made up of mostly generous, kind, and hard-working people. People who want to live their own lives in peace and let other people live their own lives in peace. People who care about the wellbeing of their communities, their states, and their country. People who want to feed starving children around the world. People who want to help people facing catastrophes like hurricanes or genocide. People like my working-class American grandfather, who put his body in harm’s way and endured the horrors of the battlefield to liberate Europeans from the Nazis.

I am not willing to give up on America, and I think most Americans are not ready to give up, either. But as our country is imperfect, so is our politics. Political discourse is ugly right now and political norms have been broken. I know many people are feeling fear and despair; and that fear and despair is not crazy, it is real. The political party in power rejects democratic standards of negotiation and compromise, and it has committed itself to policies that protect only like-minded people, rejecting an ethos of compassion for the vulnerable people among us. The opposition party consists of many individuals who have taken far more than their fair share, have clung too long to their power, and have propped up companies and policies that have harmed people, even as they have voted to ensure the basic human rights and comforts of the vulnerable.

I am an unapologetic political partisan; I have always been a liberal Democrat, and I believe with all my heart and my brains that if we want to save our country from the authoritarian threat we are facing, we need to elect Democrats to public office at every level of government. It is abundantly clear that the party in power disrespects the Constitution and is trying to dismantle our democracy. The Republican Party is an existential threat to American democracy and to our inspirational standing in the world.

We are in a full-fledged political crisis. But I also believe that this is not merely a political crisis that we are facing. This is a moral crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis. This is a fight not only for freedom and democracy and justice for all people, but it is also a fight for the soul of America.

Good Americans look out for their neighbors, and they care about people they don’t know. If we are going to save our democracy and write the next, better chapter of our democracy, we need to remember that at the root of everything we do for good in the world is love and compassion and the idea that all human beings deserve security and dignity and peace to pursue their own, individual happiness.

If you believe that some people because of their immigration status or their gender or their difference in any way makes them unworthy of rights and compassion, then you need to have your version of a come-to-Jesus meeting. If you are demonizing others to make yourself feel better about the deportations or to justify your hatred of mythical liberal demons, you need to look in the mirror to inspect yourself for horns. If you are supporting political candidates who believe due process and the rule of law don’t apply to all people equally, then you need to ask yourself if you really wish to live in a democracy at all.

Because here is a little truth for you: there will ultimately be no freedom for you if there is no freedom for your neighbor. Your right to pray to your god or to love who you love or to pursue your happiness in peace is impossible if you stand in the way of another person’s right to pray to their god or love who they love or pursue their happiness in peace. If you support leaders who hurt people and talk about human beings like they are animals or monsters, you are no better than they are.

I don’t wish to deny you your American right to advocate for immigration reform, for example, or to reduce or reform government agencies and policies. I believe in democracy and free speech and the civil exchange of different ideas. But when you advocate for the things you want at the expense of humanitarian concerns and, in the end, at the expense of your own humanity, you will fail every time to create anything that is lasting and good.

If we are going to save our democracy and move forward with a bigger and bolder vision of what American democracy can be and could accomplish, which I think we will do, we have to start from a base of compassion and human decency for all the people in our country right now, whether they are citizens or not. For the sake of our human souls as well as for the soul of our democracy, we need to take care of people who are living in fear of our government, who are in danger of losing their freedoms and their American lives. We need to fill up our bodies with love, despite our vast differences, and stand up to the authoritarians who are trying to destroy everything that is good in America.

And, here’s the thing about authoritarians: every damned one of them is a bully. And bullies are cowards. They are weak, and they have to punch down to feel good about themselves. All we have to do is declare our allegiance to every proverbial little kid who is getting pummeled for his lunch money. It might be scary, but if all the good and compassionate Americans stand up and stare down the bully, the bully doesn’t stand a chance in hell of survival.

The path forward won’t be easy, but it is very simple.

Do you want to be a bully or a protector of the bullied? Do you want to live in a democracy that cares about people or a dictatorship that doesn’t care about anything or anybody?

Like I said, this is a moral crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis. This is a question about who we are in our hearts as human beings and who we are and will be as Americans.

I know what side I am on. Do you?

Peace in War (or Ode to My Anger)

“Slow down” are the words I wrote in the front of my 2025 engagement calendar.

It was warm in October when I wrote those two aspirational words, after two years of writing and rewriting a book of history and my heart. Slow down, body and breath and mind. Yes, ssslllooowww dddooowwwnnn. Slow down, you tired old writing woman with stacks of novels waiting for you.

Slow down sounded so goddamned good.

Before the election.

Before November 6th when I woke before dawn in a panic.

Not good at all, slow down. Slow down? Never. Not now with a madman occupying Abraham Lincoln’s office.

There is no slow speed speed for a liberal political junkie when the people on the good side of good and evil are out of power and evil is destroying our government.

No down time, no do-nothing time. Not so many novels now that there is more political reading and doing and calling representatives and screaming. Not much chance of slowing down for this historian of American stories when America is in jeopardy and history is in crisis.

What now? What then, what words? What word? What theme for this new era of Nero? What aspiration when America burns and Republicans fiddle?

There may be no political peace this year or next year or, goddess help us, maybe never.

But personal peace is what I will need now more than ever.

Peace is my new word. Peace. Among family. Peace. In communion with friends and dogs, birds and soon with flowers. Peace. Of community. Peace. Inner peace. Peace. Peace. Just give me a little goddamned peace.

Peace of mind and peace of home will fortify my body for battle.

Peace is the word I rewrote in the front of my 2025 engagement calendar.

It was cold in January when I wrote that aspirational word, a new want, a better offering, after just one week of the political hellscape, America’s fading landscape, fear pressing its awful shadows against my body and breath and mind. Yes, peace. Pretty please, peace. You must seek peace wherever you can find it, you tired old warrior woman, because this is war and your country needs you.

Mary McDowell and Jane Addams weren’t fucking around in 1915, and neither am I in 2025.

Life on the Anxious Seat

Opening apologies: what started out as a short blog post about one day in my life has become a short treatise on anxiety. Heaven help the grossly pensive woman alone during a winter weekend.

Oxford English Dictionary

Anxiety [noun, early 16th century; Latin anxietas] 1 The quality or state of being anxious; uneasiness, concern; a cause of this. 2 Med. A condition of distress accompanied by precordial tightness or discomfort. 3 Earnest or solicitous desire for a thing, to do something. 4 Psychiatry. A morbid state of excessive; or unrealistic uneasiness or dread.

Anxious [adjective,early 17th century; Latin anxius] choke, oppress: see ANGUISH 1 Troubled in mind about some uncertain event; concerned, solicitous; being in disturbing suspense. 2 Distressing, worrying; fraught with trouble. 3 Full of desire and endeavour; eager for a thing, to do something.

Anguish[noun, Middle English; Latin angustia] straits, distress, narrow, tight; squeeze, strangle: see ANGER n., ANGINA. Severe bodily or mental pain, intense suffering.  [verb] to distress. 1 Distress with severe bodily or mental pain. Now chiefly as ANGUISHED [Middle English]. 2 [intransitive verb] Suffer severe bodily or mental pain.

A Dictionary of American English

On the anxious seat, in a state of uneasiness; troubled. 1839 Knickerbacker [N.Y.]. XII. 345. He did look as if he had been on “the anxious seat,” as he used to say, when things puzzled him. 1862 Stowe Pear Orr’s Island II. i. What a life you did lead me in them days! I think you kep’ me on the anxious seats a pretty middlin’ spell. 1865 Atlantic Mo. XV. 454 Almira … had long been upon the anxious seat. 1887 Francis, Saddle & Moccasin 226 Oh, the boys kept him on the “anxious seat” for two or three days, and that cured him [of card-playing]. 1894 Congressional Record Feb. 2382/1, I am glad to see so many gentlemen on the “anxious seat.” 1906 N.Y. Evening Post 4 Jan. 4. All the men present were on the anxious seat, seeking to learn whether their new judge was ‘easy’ or ‘tough.”

I woke up that morning in a state of uneasiness. By 10:00 a.m. I was in distress. By noon I could no longer sit still at my desk. My heart was pounding so hard in my throat that I feared I would choke on it or that it would burst right through the small hollow of my neck. My pectoral muscles were jammed up against my collar bone, and I could hear the whoosh of blood in my ears. The sound tingled and tapped on the skin of my reconstructed left ear where it attaches to my face.

I stood up and began my coping ritual of pacing and ringing my hands and clutching at my chest. My entire body was being squeezed in a menacing invisible vise. Heart attack crossed my mind at the exact moment I made eye contact with the sweet, heart-melting face of my chihuahua. Bug can almost always calm me, but this was not a troubled mind out of control. This feeling was not unrealistic dread, it was a response to my body in serious trouble.

My sister was out of town, so I texted a neighbor. She took my blood pressure. Twice. Very high, she said. I had no idea what the numbers meant but I could feel the surging of blood in every vein. I could hear my heart screaming.

Anxiety Is Real began as a failed watercolor painting and ended as a moderately successful digital drawing. A metaphor for my life as a work in progress!

Prompt care. EKG. Nitroglycerin tablet under my tongue. A Xanax. Blood pressure almost immediately easing. My sister arrives, which calms me further. The doctor comes back in, her face is concerned which is concerning to me while I wonder why I no longer think I am having a heart attack as her hand presses down on my own, telling me she’s called an ambulance. EMT’s hook me up to wires and the ambulance delivers me five minutes later to the hospital ER, where a beautiful male nurse whispers that I am in good hands. I say this is all ridiculous. I am fine. I must be, right? Or is that the Xanax talking? Another EKG. Chest x-ray. Blood draw. Blood pressure cuff on a fifteen-minute cycle, a monitor of my vital signs quietly beeping. My sister tries to sneak a photo of the beautiful male nurse. We laugh. I am calm. My heart is not pressing against the small hollow of my neck. It is resting in my chest where it belongs. I am not going to die today, even as all the wires attached to my body are no picture of good health. The attending physician enters the room.

Your heart looks good. No evidence of a heart attack. I think you’ve experienced a rather severe panic attack. Has something happened? Are you under a lot of stress or worried about something in particular?

It was November 15.

Ten days after the election.

Yes. The fucking election.

I said it out loud. And no one in the room contradicted me.

**********

The first time I remember experiencing a condition of distress accompanied by precordial tightness or discomfort I am six. A first grader on the school bus, I am silent and watchful, a nervous observer of the noisy chatter and laughter all around me. But there is a little boy crying, and I think, why is he crying? Should I be crying? Should all of us be crying? I notice that my heart is beating hard against my throat and my arms feel impossible heavy.

I think in part because I was a worried child, I became a determined and cerebral child, a self-disciplined and serious child, a skeptic always asking questions, collecting information, believing or hoping or begging that knowing would give me power to quiet my worries. I was a mother hen to my friends, always counting them and watching for loose gravel when we rode our bikes in the subdivision. My dad called me a nervous nelly and a worrywart. My mom often told me to calm down before I worried myself to death. My grandmother once said that if I didn’t stop it and breathe, I’d give myself a damned heart attack.

I became an adult believing I was responsible for my dread, that it was incumbent upon me to swallow it. There is no blame in this statement, because although anxiety was a recognized ailment in clinical psychiatric terms in the 1970s and 1980s when I grew up, such mental and emotional struggles were not everyday topics for discussion. As a kid, I had no way to define or understand the anxiety I frequently felt and, in fact, my privileged, middle-class childhood with luxuries like my own room, competitive gymnastics, and summer vacations to Disneyworld, made me believe I had no good reason to worry.

Lincoln biographers have written that Lincoln’s greatness was fueled by his melancholy. I am on the fence with regard to this historical interpretation while at the same time harboring a personal belief that my anxieties, at least a little, fueled some of the qualities that made me a relatively successful and accomplished human being. As I lived my first thirty years as an adult on the anxious seat, and accepting that perch, I developed healthy (and less healthy) copy strategies. My anxiety manifested itself in detailed organizational tactics, long-term planning, thoughtful assessments of life choices, close surveillance of my daughters, the creation of sophisticated spreadsheets and complex to-do lists, and self-disciplined goal setting. My husband saw me as a control freak, and he wasn’t wrong. I was trying desperately to control what I believed I could control and sometimes to freak level and with freaking-out ferocity. Control freak was another negative moniker, like nervous nelly, that I accepted with my desperate efforts to ease the dread I felt in my body about all of the bad things that could happen to me and my loved ones.

Control never fully soothed my unease, however, and, in fact, it sometimes exacerbated it. I still worried about death, the safety of my kids when they were away from me, family members and friends driving on freeways with semis. I fretted about tornadoes and wild animals outside in the snow and the kids that didn’t make the basketball team and melting polar ice.

Even the healthy strategies I developed only masked the anxiety. I didn’t know it then, but I was trying to hide the pathology of my distress instead of facing it head on and eyes wide open. All of the self-control I mastered within my life and all the pushing aside of all my distress and worry with excessive doing could not protect me from my greatest dread. And when my darling Mackenzie died and life as I knew it unraveled, forty-eight years of living had taught me nothing about how to survive the anxiety her death and my unbearable grief wrought upon my body, my mind, and my spirit.

That all seems like a lifetime ago now. I am not that woman anymore. I am altered, and my life is fundamentally different. My struggle with anxiety, however, did not die with that woman standing in the ruins of her life. As I had to collect new strengths to survive grief, so too I had to reevaluate my relationship with anxiety. And so, in the end, even the anxiety embedded in my DNA has, in many ways, shifted.

For five years now, I’ve been in therapy, wrestling with my worries and gaining acceptance and knowledge about how my brain is wired. A daily practice of yoga and meditation is teaching me that even a person like me who so easily leans into a morbid state of excessive and unrealistic dread, has the power to find inner peace. Simply having the words to define my unease and to better understand it has been a sweet release. I no longer blame myself for feeling anxiety. I no longer call myself a nervous nelly. In basic terms, my struggles with anxiety are no different than my struggle with seasonal allergies. While it is my responsibility to be as mentally and emotionally healthy as possible, I no longer blame myself when all of my best strategies fail me.

Whereas a good spreadsheet will always help me quell a particular financial worry, an orderly house inspires my calm and creativity, and a fastidiously kept calendar gives me confidence in my abilities to navigate the chaos of modern life, sometimes the outside world gets in, dammit, and I am, ultimately, only human. Anxiety is not who I am, but I am a person who experiences a level of anxiety that can make me unwell. To live with it gracefully will always be a work in progress.

The trip to the ER in November was not at all graceful. It was terrifying and humbling and life reaffirming. (And that short ambulance ride was all kinds of expensive). But the caring health professionals who saw me through that panic attack and my wonderful therapist have helped me see that medication can be a useful tool and that given my proclivity to sit in an anxious seat, my trauma and grief, and the very real political and planetary uncertainties, I am doing okay. In the two weeks since the inauguration, I have experienced several days of heightened anxiety, particularly stressing the threat that changing federal policy poses to my livelihood and my life’s work.

In last week’s therapy session, I expressed a feeling of guilt not only about all the health care consumed for a panic attack but also for having the luxury of all this naval gazing when so many less fortunate people are in real jeopardy. A holdover from my childhood that my life is too lucky to feel debilitating dread. My therapist reminded me that the anxiety I feel is as real as a heart attack and that I can help no one if I am unwell. She also urged me to consider the idea that my anxiety over the election and all of the chaos and uncertainty since the inauguration is exacerbated by my empathy and heightened concern as a historian for the wellbeing of my country.

She is not wrong to refocus me in this manner. There are real worries in the world AND I am a person wired to worry and vulnerable to unrealistic dread. Thus, my unfortunate trip to the emergency room. It is much easier for me to feel the pain of empathy, however, than to breathe through anxiety, even as I must admit that I worry so much in part because I care so much. Still, empathy was never my problem. Empathy did not cause my panic attack in November, and it is not the reason I have been sitting on the anxious seat these past two weeks. The reason I am anxious is because my messy beautiful imperfect brain is misfiring. Knowing this doesn’t make my brain better, but it makes me feel better, if that makes any sense at all.

It is absolutely true that all of the processing of anxiety I have done over the past five years has been worth the effort, even as I could see that it failed me in November. I understand myself better than I did five years ago. I am more accepting of my human imperfections, and I honor every experience. From the stresses of writing a new book to the worry I am feeling about promoting the book beginning this summer and from the dread that sometimes creeps in late in the night to a troubled mind that makes me spin out the worst political and historical consequences of a disastrous election, as distressing and uncomfortable it all might be, it only becomes debilitating anxiety in the manufactured mess of my dear old brain.

Anxiety. Anguish. On the anxious seat. All of it is me and it isn’t all of me. When anxiety rises in my body, it is real and it is emotionally and physically painful. It is not a figment of my imagination. It is my struggle, part of my story, a colorful descriptive inset on the perfectly ordinary crazy map of my life. And the only difference between me and so many other people I know who experience anxiety (it is a common struggle in our society) is that I find solace and affirmation in writing about it. I have a lot of fears, trust me, but sharing my truth is not one of them. I share because it gets the sharp edges of hard experience out of my body and there is always the chance that I will reach someone out there in the world who thinks she is all alone. Okay, so that can be my excuse for this anxiety treatise. These are anxious times, and I believe a lot of us are feeling anxious.

I wonder. If all the people sitting on an anxious seat all alone decided to sit together on one giant anxious seat, we might just have evolutionary power to rewire the future. 

Falling

I stepped outside into the warm sun and despite the brisk Autumn air, too cold for bare legs, my summer-loving heart was smiling. My freckled face was a feeling-good grin and giant sunshades, framed by freshly crimped hair. I was puffed up and downstate pretty in my Lotus-for-POTUS t-shirt, wool lumberjacket, leggings, and purple Allbirds sneakers with chunky white soles. I was a little full of myself if I am honest; and that vanity pause to congratulate my casual, put-together cool was my downfall.

I should have gone back into the house to humble up and check my conceit at the door instead of skipping down my porch steps and up the sidewalk toward the town square.

Because thirty seconds later, I was falling, tumbling down in instantaneous slow motion, landing hard on my right knee, a victim of my mirth and the broken, sidewalk slate at the corner of my front garden.

My hands burned from catching myself on the ground, but I pressed them down and rolled myself over onto my back. I grimaced. A flaming hematoma was blooming on my knee. I looked up at the blue sky and accepted my prostrate position. I breathed into the vulnerability of my human, middle-aged body.

One minute you’re open-hearted and skipping. The next minute you’re flat on your back and humbled. Hello, life, you bastard. I didn’t need this metaphor from the cosmos, by the way. I know full well that every day and life itself is up and down and sideways. And falling.

Some people say: “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I now will always say: “when life brings you down on your knees, roll over onto your back and have a little think.”

I cared not that someone might see me and look away or pass by and not see me at all. I did not rush myself to get up and get going. I am not British. I do not keep calm and carry on. I am a grieving mother. I take my time to gather all the good and the bad and the ugly before continuing on my way. In part, I stayed still on the ground because I worried about my ability to get up and walk. But mostly, I just wanted to be still for awhile, feeling the cold ground holding me up.

A European starling flew overhead. I imagined that her affected screech was for me. A greeting or acknowledgment, a shared moment between fragile creatures confronting their particular days.

I noticed the sedum turning fall, the grass still emerald, house sparrows conferencing in the barberry bush, and a dog barking far off in the distance.

I rubbed the dirt from my hands. I touched the leggings on my throbbing knee. The fabric was not torn, but I could feel the swelling and the scraped skin underneath it.

I thought about Mack and the election and the novel waiting for me at the public library’s circulation desk. I thought about the difficult week I had just had, my lovely birthday party with my family, and the quiet, restful, lazy weekend in front of me. I thought about summer gone, fall’s arrival, and the coming of winter. I thought about falling and walking. I thought about my dogs inside the house and the pumpkin-bucket of Halloween candy on my dining room table.

When I was ready on my own terms, I stood up, gingerly testing my knee. It was boil sore but bravely bearing my weight. I was hobbled but strong enough to get on with my day. I was no longer full of myself, but I was okay.

Life is hard. It knocks us down. It leaves us with bruises. We are always falling, I suppose, in this way or that way. Falling reminds us to be in the moment, that we are human, and we are alive.

Dissonance

Recently I began a new project that combines writing and painting. Since I am a comfortable writer but a novice, unskilled painter, I planned to write a series of short essays and then illustrate them with watercolor. My therapist suggested that I experiment with the reverse, paint first and then write an essay. It was a terrifying prospect, so I put it off until  two weeks ago when I had an idea for a safe test, a photograph of myself doing a cartwheel in my yoga garden.

The painting is ridiculous, much like the photograph, which I thought would provoke a funny essay about how bad I am at painting, how weird it is that I like being physically upside down, and how unusual it is to be a 57-year-old woman who can and frequently does turn cartwheels. But it was not a humorous essay, even as my right humerus bone in the painting is a hoot of disproportion. The essay had nothing at all to do with my joy of cartwheels and the good rush of blood to my head. The words that came out of me instead were an emotional outpouring of how upside down I have felt all this year. Not the good kind of upside down, like a downward dog or a cartwheel, but a bad upside down like discombobulated. Dizzy. Dazed and confused. The kind of upside down that makes me want to vomit.

Grief and loneliness and the uncertainty of this damned, crazy world always make me feel sideways. Feeling sideways is just life. Nothing special about me. We all have forces that knock us askew. I have learned to balance the kind of sideways that life inflicts upon me. I counter it with creative and calm remedies I daily employ to stay upright. I practice yoga. I write. I paint. I walk, cuddle my dogs, and watch birds. Yet all during this productive year, this contented, creative, cathartic year, a new and different force threatened my uprightness. Numbers. Stupid numbers. All in my head, but these seemingly real numbers had done a number on my equilibrium; 10, 30, 57, and 80 had turned me upside down.

Mack should have turned 30 in March, and on October 7, 2024, she will be gone 10 years. Mack has been gone half the time she was here on this earth, and it is a fact that astounds me. I cannot bear it. The truth of it has been impossible to face, and spending the past twelve months being the age my dad was when he died made it more difficult. Being 57 has been like having an anvil of death hanging from a thread above my head. My dad should have turned 80 this year, and though I know so well the sharp edges of living, year after year after year, without my daughter, I want to see 80. I need to keep Mack’s memories for so much longer than a decade.

A week after painting and writing the upside-down essay, I sat at my laptop to write this annual blog post to commemorate the anniversary of Mack’s death. I couldn’t do it. I was worked up by what the painting-first, writing-second process had unearthed and unleashed. It is not at all a bad thing to examine my emotions but looking for answers to my upside down made it hard to find the words to express my state of disorientation, my fear of the numbers.

But while I was stumbling and struggling to right myself, I got an unexpected email. A watercolor of mine was accepted for publication in a quirky online journal called Waves. It was a self-portrait I had done while recovering from the deep removal of skin cancer from my ear. I painted it to find humor in my fear about the plastic surgery I would have to repair the damage. The issue of Waves in which “My Left Ear” appears is entitled “Dissonance.”

Dissonance. Yes, that is precisely what I was feeling.

Dissonance: the lack of harmony among musical notes.

Dissonance explained my year, my numbers, and my false belief that I was upside down in a bad way. Some notes of my life this past year have been lovely chimes out of creative flurry, the completion of a new book, professional accomplishment, and the establishment of new friendships. Other notes clunked from fear, exhaustion, and physical pain. The note of those damned numbers clanked. The note of no yoga for five weeks of convalescence honked like an injured goose. The note of my trepidation of a new project I wasn’t sure I had the talent to do justice thumped a little too deeply to be good bass. And grief, oh my dear constant grief, is always an unharmonious whisper.

Dissonance is awkward and unpleasant, but it makes you long for melody. It makes you want to hear and see and feel your life differently. I had lost my tune. My song was, indeed, dissonant, but I was still singing.

In painting, perspective is one of the hardest skills to master, much as perspective in real life is almost always hard learned. Recasting my year as dissonance didn’t erase the worry that had plagued me, nor did it give me hope that the next year of my life will be harmonious or even a little less dissonant. It didn’t help me figure out how to write about what it means to me that I’ve passed ten years without Mack, either. A perspective of dissonance does, however, give me back my beautiful and necessary upside down, my downward dogs and my cartwheels. Oddly, too, the idea of dissonance is a gentle reminder that I am only human.

A definition of dissonance might also have soothed my dread of those dastardly numbers.

No.

No, actually, as Mack’s spirit is reminding me as I write this, it is just that the year of awful numbers will soon come to an end. After breathing and sobbing through another October 7, I will turn 58 on October 9, and then I will fall sideways into whatever future starts for me on October 10.

There is precious little we can control. Life will blow us off our feet in terrible and beautiful directions we cannot predetermine. Dissonance is just the range of all emotions, the far and wide of the good, and the depth of the sorrow that life gives us. Dissonance keeps us awake and alive. It helps us appreciate the precious melodies. Mack is alive for me in my dissonance and in my melody. She is with me in the joyful upside down. She will be with me ever still, going forward, laughing at my ridiculous paintings, teasing me out of the dark hours, and singing be back into tune so I can keep her stories and continue writing and painting my own.

On painting Mack: I find it very painful to paint her face and to imagine her in watercolor. Watercolor is like a dream, and I long to paint her alive. I have tried and failed to capture her lovely spirit. When I paint anything else, I am fearless, but painting Mack opens a vulnerability that is terrifying. But, when I am brave, I will keep trying to do her justice. My painting, after all, is not art, it is therapy. It will remain a work in progress, just like me.