Pulling on a warm, cozy sweatshirt from the dryer on a winter day can do it. Sunshine on my face. A Jeep Wrangler passing me by on the street. The sound of laughter, far, far off in the distance. The color of Cool Blue Raspberry Gatorade. An ordinary Tuesday can do it.
Pepper, who was her dog first, can do it. Does it most days these days, now that she is fifteen and her health is failing. Bug barking at the FedEx truck idling in front of the house can do it. Can do it despite never knowing the girl I lost. Can do it because she will never know the way that girl loved animals.
It is not just the birthdays.
The old days and the new days can do it. Joy or longing. The known or the unknown. The love or the loss can do it, and the yet to be found will do it, too.
Everything, anything, and nothing at all can breathe a memory to life. And every memory has the power to undo me. Or to soothe me. Or to bring me peace. No particular time, setting, or frame of mind makes me more or less susceptible to the undoing or to the soothing. And goddess knows my grief has never followed any rules to bring me peace.
It is not just the birthdays.
But it is the birthdays.
The birthdays and the death days and the holidays. Milestones are a cumulative burden upon the hearts of the grieving.
On March 17, 2023, the day Mackenzie would have turned 29, I face another milestone. Another birthday, another her day, another Mack Day. And all I can do is lean the way the memories make me. All I can do is surrender. Bending is so much easier than breaking.
Maybe this year I will be lucky. Maybe this year the memories will arrive gently, possessed with the kindness to soothe me as well as the grace to bring me peace.
I have my father’s hands. My knubby-knuckled fingers upon my keyboard are his knubby-knuckled fingers, our pinkies, inward crooked, brave in their stretch to meet the A and the L. My manner of typing is just like his was, my short fingers tapping furiously like the bones of ancients punching out words that refuse to be quiet. The backs of my small but sturdy hands, are, like his, bony and painted by prominent veins, weathered and textured with life. Since my father died, when he was barely 57 as I will turn myself this year, I have not wished for the smooth perfection of the model hands in skin cream advertisements. My hands are far more lovely, freckled with memories of my father.
Shared, these hands of ours, like our flagrant foreheads, forceful minds, and fierce opinions, delivered through thin lips, not pursed so much as certain in the forthrightness of the words they breathe. I miss my dad, especially since Mack died, the loss of them entangled in a knotty central ache that resides in my solar plexus. Whereas Mack’s spirit sits upon my shoulder every day pointing me in the direction of joy, my dad’s spirit rides shotgun on my conscience. Mack reminds me to giggle in the present, and my dad reminds me to do right and plan for the future.
Every year since Jim Pratt left this earth, I have honored his joyful life by drinking a Pepsi on his birthday. He was passionate about Pepsi, a Pepsi zealot really, preaching its virtues over godless sodas like the Dr. Pepper I favored as a child, although it was not allowed in our household where Pepsi was religion. Even though I no longer drink soda (my dad called it pop), and despite the fact that I observe a tradition of no-sugar Januarys, for love of him I have a Pepsi every January 17. It has been my Pepsi-for-Pops tradition.
Although I have my father’s hands and his forehead, I do not share his love of Pepsi. I never have. I hate it, in fact. It is too sweet, too syrupy, or too something I’m not sure what. My dad was right about a lot of things—like the wonder of words and baseball and candy and ice-cream drumsticks and showing off while shooting pool. (Thanks to my dad, I can still make a great shot with the cue stick behind my back, my ass perched up on the edge of the pool table).
But my dad was wrong about Pepsi, poor dear. And after twenty-two years of consuming 250 calories of the wretched liquid in no-sugar Januarys, I’ve decided to alter the tradition to make it a more palatable one for me. I will still break the sugar fast and have a soda in honor of my dear old dad, loved and missed like the dickens. But henceforth it will be a delicious Dr. Pepper that I consume. I trust my father will appreciate the sentiment of my continued sugar-fast-breaking-soda toast to him on his birthday and also approve of his daughter’s newfound sugary beverage independence.
A Pop for my Pops, a new tradition that honors us both.
In late September 2019, I was emerging from the dense fog of grief, but I was still wobbly with heartbreak, and I was terrified. I was facing a new life on my own, packing and preparing to close on a new house in a new town at the end of the month. Change is a challenge in the best of circumstances. It can uncomfortably bend or break us even when we are strong and well-prepared. It is risky and daunting when you are grieving. It had taken every grain of grit I could collect from the ruins of my old life to set in motion this plan for building a new one. Even small things like a superficial papercut from a cardboard packing box could provoke an anxiety attack. I was a wreck that month, and before I moved I knew I needed to calm my nerves and find my courage.
So the weekend before I was scheduled to close on the house, I drove from St. Louis to outstate Missouri to visit some old friends from my Springfield days. Kurt and Alicia are two of my most calming influences, and I needed to soak up their good sense and soothing natures. I was relaxing on their beautiful deck, just settling in for a peaceful weekend, when my realtor called to tell me that he needed to push back my closing by one week, a minor glitch regarding the title. He said the closing was now scheduled for October 7.
October 7.
I sucked in my breath.
“No…No….No,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t do October 7.” I told him I’d have to check my calendar and call him back.
Oh, Mack, how I miss your face.
I could not possibly start the new life I was planning on the very day my old life fell apart. October 7, 2014, was the day my darling Mack was taken from me, and every October 7 since had been a horrible reenactment of that nightmare of a day. October 7 was not just a day on the calendar. It could not be scheduled or rescheduled. It was a memory, a misery, a mark in angry, black Sharpie upon a terrible page of my life.
Kurt calmed me down, and then I called Savannah. My savvy and sassy elder daughter is my joy and my salvation. She is the reason I keep breathing, and she was my inspiration for taking hold of my life and making this plan for moving forward. I told her the realtor wanted to reschedule my closing for October 7. She sucked in her breath, and then she sighed. “Oh, my God, Mom, they want me to start my new job on October 7. Maybe we both need to say yes. Maybe Mackenzie wants us to remake this day.”
And so we did.
On October 7, 2019, Savannah started her exciting and better paying new job at a tech start-up in Chicago, and I closed on my charming 1919 bungalow and moved into my new life. It has not been an easy path for me. Learning to live alone, to maintain an old house on my own, and to build a new life in a very small town has been a struggle. The pandemic also interrupted my adjustment, of course, and I am still plagued with doubt and anxiety. However, I have made some great strides here in this old house and new life. I have discovered hidden talents, developed new skills, and collected a lot more grit in this effort. Most importantly, I have accepted my new life and my new self as a collective work in progress, an unpredictable journey upon bumpy roads with glorious scenery as far as my eyes can see.
I have survived three October 7s in my cozy, quiet bungalow. This year, I will survive a fourth. I will, if I am lucky, survive many more. October 7 remains more than a date on a calendar. It will always be a memory and a misery, marking the passing of my beautiful girl. But now it also marks the moment I began curating my own peace in my own place in honor of both my daughters. Savannah inspired this remaking of October 7, and Mack’s spirit may well have engineered it.
On every October 7 for the rest of my life, I will relive a mother’s nightmare and feel the loss of Mack more keenly. I will also give myself permission, with a happy license from Mack, to acknowledge every October 7 as the first day of my bold beginning. I have come to believe that all dates on a calendar are more than dates on a calendar. In the end, every day we breathe is momentous, and no date over the course of a lifetime is all darkness or all light. Each date of the year in every year of every life is a collection of stories, snippets of who we are and all we have experienced in our lovely and fragile human existence. Dates on a calendar make up an index of our history, marking our memories in time.
I am a writer. And writers write. That’s what we do.
I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard nearly every day of my life. In my profession as a scholarly editor, I write annotations and blog posts. As a historian, I write articles and books. As a grieving mother, I blog my emotions. As a wannabe poet, I assemble words in pretty collections of my feelings and observations. As a diarist, I release my pain and share my joy on the pages of a journal. I share my wit (ha ha) and wisdom (ha ha ha) on Instagram. And true to the old-fashioned soul I am, I pen handwritten letters to my friends.
Along with my flesh and my bones, I am words. Words are me. Writing steers the ship of my life across both smooth and roiling waters.
Currently, I am working on a book project. A biography of Abraham Lincoln told through the biographies of the women in his life. I am telling the stories of his mother, his lovers, his wife, his female friends, and some of the women who were his legal clients and political constituents. I am seeing Lincoln through these women’s eyes, as well as through my own, which are cast in the light and the shadow of being a woman myself. I can write this new biography of Abraham Lincoln. I edited Lincoln’s papers for twenty years, published widely on his life and times, and wrote a biography of Mary Lincoln. I have the Lincoln chops to complete this project, and I have the advance contract to prove it. However, this book project is a challenging one. It is personal. The doubts creep in, and I get scared. The fear of failing a brilliant idea, my unique perspective, and my creative approach to tired old narrative biography beats a cacophonous rhythm inside my chest.
I am a writer, yes, I know. Writers write, and that is what I am doing. But writing is hard. It tests your mettle. It is not always catharsis. It can also be a pesky task or a wretched responsibility. At times it is a chore much like washing the dishes. There are some days you get on with it and wash the damn dishes. There are some days you need to let the dishes stack up and go outside to play in the sun.
When the fears and the doubts push aside the confidence and determination it is time for a break. All writers know this is true, even as it is hard to admit it and give yourself permission to do it. I denied my need for a break for a month or so, head down and straining against the reality of it before fessing up and throwing up my hands, prescribing myself a two-week rest. A hiatus. A vacation I never take, but a vacation that was as imperative as air. Stepping away and going away would be deep breathing.
I spent the second week of my book vacation in Washington, D.C., where I communed with the spirit of Mr. Lincoln on the National Mall and at Ford’s Theatre. I spent time with family and friends, enjoyed great food, walked my legs every day to happy exhaustion, and consumed beautiful cocktails and gallons of sweet sunshine. Most nourishing to my writer’s heart and my ever-grieving soul was serving as moderator for the Lincoln Ideas Forum on Grief and Loss at President Lincoln’s Cottage. Mack’s spirit was with me, and so was Abraham Lincoln’s. The public program made me good nervous, allowed me to talk about Mack, evoked cleansing tears, sealed a new friendship, and introduced me to four people who know as well as a I do that grief is the flipside of love, that it is natural and universal, and that in our grief-averse society we all need to do better bearing witness to the suffering of others.
I spent two weeks tending to my heart and my brain and my body. I’ve communed and connected and breathed. I am refreshed and revived. The doubts and the fears are moving away, making room for the full bloom of confidence and determination. It is time to return to the book. To get back to work. To put my fingers to the keyboard.
I took time to sit among the tulips in the sunshine.
Eight birthdays throb in the marrow of my bones, the combined power of a birth and a death propelling the mallet that makes for such pounding.
I am a shell, standing in the sounding sea of sorrow, the pulsing all memory and ache and longing. Still…I…am…standing.
Great love means great grief, and my grit is that I know it. I will not release my death grip on the former and so I cannot forsake the life in my white knuckles.
How does a mother withstand the violent timbre of one birthday, or two birthdays, or eight fucking birthdays? How do I stand this booming echo, bone deep and crushing, I ask every morning of the sun.
To stand is enough, answers the warmth on my skin. To weather is to gain strength against the bitter winds.
Because, there is only beauty in the life we give and the love we know and there can be no death in that human truth.
I am alive, and she is alive. In my breath. In my veins. In the blood beating through a heart half hers.
Resting my mind’s eye on her face, her freckles can dance to the throbbing in my bones.
The dancing recalls her laughter, which composes its sweet symphony upon the painful pounding.
Her laughter is a joyful, infectious giggle,
Demanding…commanding…compelling
An answer. She always refused to laugh alone.
You are here, I whisper. I hear you. I feel your joyful life.
Sorrow is not the whole of me, my darling girl. Because of you, I know laughter, too.
In the shower the other day, I threw a bar of soap with an uninspired floral scent over the glass shower wall. I am an afficionado of strong scented, beautifully crafted soaps, and this bar was a dud. I deserved better. I was aiming for the sink, where the soap loser could await its fated deposit into the garbage bin. Instead, the thick bar slid down the inner side of the sink nearest the shower, traveled across the bottom of the basin and picked up speed, ramping up the other side of the sink. The soap then flew up into the steamy air before landing with a plop into a small drinking cup perched on the top of the sink. I squealed. It was like a three-point shot from midcourt at the buzzer.
But there were no cheering fans to adore me. No partner to call to the bathroom to share the story of my sensational shot. No handy family member or friend to regale with my dramatic telling. No one but me to care that a story of soap was a joyful beginning to another morning of my life on the planet.
You see, along with the momentous moments of life, I also need to share the mundane and the absurdities. When I read an interesting news article, get lost in a great book, or see a person in a taco suit on my noontime walk, I want to tell someone about it. I need to tell someone about it. For me, it’s less interesting, less great, and far less funny if I can’t share it. Mack was like that, too. She wanted the people around her to take part in the things that amused her, and those amusements were enhanced by the sharing. She is the one I most wanted to call to share the story of Stacy’s spectacular soap shot.
Instead, I threw the soap in the bin where it belonged, got dressed, and went downstairs to my home office to start my day. No one to tell, so I put the soap out of my mind; what do little dogs know of soap and midcourt shots at the buzzer? I did wonder, however, if my ex-husband Kevin got a little twinge in his stomach at the moment I squealed over that soap. The twinge like a ghost of the past giving him a strange sense that he had been saved from another drawn-out telling of a silly story, Stacy’s eyes wide as she told it with her hands and her eyeballs and her words, fast like a child, chattering on and on and starting the story all over again.
Clearly, I didn’t forget about the soap. I’m writing about the soap story because it got me analyzing myself in the context of this new quiet life of mine. I am a storytelling chatterbox living alone, and that has been of surprising consequence to me, I suppose, and I’m just now realizing it. Oh, I text or call my daughter Savannah several times a week, and she indulges my stories when I tell them. My sister will tolerate my stories while she has a cocktail in hand. My mother, who lives far away, always appears to be listening to my stories when I tell them, but really I think she is just measuring the size of my eyeballs as I jabber on, telling the story two or three times to make sure she hears it all. And, I also have friends, near and far, with whom I will relate a story or two, if I remember a good one when I see them.
Yet I think it is true, that living alone has altered the rhythm of my storytelling, narrowed my eyes and dimmed the sparkle. This realization of diminished, daily storytelling is another clue to me that I am struggling to adjust to living alone, to relying on myself for everything that I want and need. For fifty-three years I lived with my family, then college roommates, and then a husband and daughters. For fifty-three years, I had a captive audience. I’ve only been solo for two years, and almost all of that time during a global pandemic. Such a change was bound to be dramatic, radical even, and it has altered many rhythms of my life.
And that’s okay. Good, maybe. Or, perhaps, even great. The altered rhythm of a heart demands attention, requires assessment, suggests treatment. Why not the rhythms of a life?
What the altered rhythm of my storytelling means going forward, I do not know. I realize now that I have always found joy in sharing the stories of my life, particularly the silly ones, and also in sharing my observations about the world. Perhaps that is why since living alone I have taken to Instagram. It is no true substitute, of course, but it has given me an outlet, especially on the many days in each week when there are only the walls and the dogs to hear my stories and random observations.
I miss the chattering, the animated telling, and the instant gratification of getting the words, the thought or the story, into the ears and the heart and the funny bone of someone I care about. Not a great reflection of myself, centered as it is upon my ego. But that statement is the truest statement I have written about myself in a long time.
Perhaps I should learn how to enjoy unusual occurrences like spectacular soap shots all by myself in the same way I learned how to use a drill and to cook for one. With practice. And cursing. Lots and lots of people are content to live quietly, laugh on the inside, and leave it to other people to tell the stories. Why couldn’t I just be one of them? Because, if I am honest, I am not and likely never will be quiet. I’m a talker. Talking is what I do.
Perhaps I should start a special journal to record my soap stories. Writing them out and reading them later might provide a similar feeling to the satisfaction I get from talking to people. Nah. This option sounds like a lot work, a little pathetic, and slightly off the mark. Before this introspective rambling, I never thought of myself as a performer, but now I wonder if that might be part of it.
Perhaps living alone is not for me, after all. Maybe I am one of those people who needs a partner, a captive audience with whom to share my daily soap stories. Or maybe it is going to take so much time to get used to living alone that I will never get used to living alone. Goodness. I hope not. On both counts, I hope not. Because I am a long way from healthy enough to live with somebody else, and I may not be for a long time or ever. Besides, although I admit I am needy of attention, the peace and privilege of making all the rules and curating every corner of my house and my yard, all on my own, is too lovely to give up. And, I know for certain, that having to compromise only with dogs and myself provides the most blissful environment in which to figure out what ails me and what heals me.
For now, maybe I’ll just talk to the walls or tell my stories to myself, out loud, while I take my daily walk. What if some, or a lot, of the people we see muttering to themselves on city streets, aren’t mentally ill, but people just like me. Chatterboxes with no one to tell their stores. Hmm… That’s an interesting idea to ponder on a Saturday afternoon, blustery with indoor weather.
I think, I’ll just try telling my stories to the dogs, and see how it goes.
The Winter Solstice, which I passed with a small group of lovely (vaccinated and boosted) new friends, was, as it always is, a charm against my onset-of-winter melancholy. Though the prairie winds blow cold, now that the days are slowly lengthening as we stretch our way to spring, I am okay. I am well, I promise, but I need to write a few bitter shadows off my heart.
I have survived another set of holidays. Another four seasons. Another year without her, my baby girl, my Mack. I have passed another 365 days of missing her grin and her giggle and her light against my darkness. This year was not easy. Nor was it easier than last year, or the year before that. It is not getting easier, despite the promises of well-meaning people trying to make me feel better. For me it will never be easy. It will just be different. Different the way summer feels different with every additional year between the human I am now and the human I was when I was barefoot and ten in the backyard of childhood.
I know myself well enough to accept and to admit that from Thanksgiving through Christmas, I am the worst of me. Sorrow, anxiety, and impatience override joy, productivity, and peace. The short days and long nights and my false cheer for the holidays and my shame for humbug plague me, and they will, I suspect, forever conjure the ghosts that haunt me. My grieving-mother sadness is the primary source of my melancholy, of course, but I also suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, which rubs like course sandpaper against the raw edges of my grief. This is an annual torment, and it always takes me three cycles of the moon to accept the end of warm and joyful summer.
Yet this December I leaned sadder than usual. My divorce being finalized and my beloved dog Pepper’s health problems cast menacing spells against my spirit and made the melancholy debilitating for a number of days. Burying a female house sparrow who died on my porch on December 19 made the last two days to the Winter Solstice a moody struggle. And although I have tried to keep other negative emotions in check, I have also been angry and filled with despair. My fury and frustration rising with every new report on the climate crisis, deadly tornadoes in December, and the pandemic going on and on and on because so many selfish Americans falsely believe that public health policy is a violation of their individual rights.
“What about my individual rights,” I screamed as I paced through my empty house these past few weeks. “Don’t I deserve during my hardest time of the year to be surrounded by people without having to worry about my health and the possibility of making my loved ones unwell?” Family and friends are my medicine against grief, and this fucking pandemic has withheld in large measure the remedy that sustains me.
And then there was the added insult of writer’s block.
In early November, I began a new scholarly project, which during my struggle season was unfortunate timing. At the beginnings of big projects when I am setting my head to a difficult task, the intellectual power that effort requires zaps my energy, stealing away the creative power I usually ration so well for my personal, therapy writing. The writer’s block this year has been as difficult as anything to endure. Writing is my solace, especially when I am at my worst, in my seasonal doldrums, when I need most to turn my emotions into words and sentences, paragraphs, prose, and bad poetry. This year that coping mechanism failed me. Next year, I will be more cognizant about keeping safe the ration for personal writing, because although I make a great many mistakes, my grief has made a good student of learning what I need to survive the difficult and beautiful condition of being human. Already with the packing away of another year of holidays, made as joyful as absolutely possible by my good and cheerful sister Tracy, and with my new project well underway, my attitude is brighter even as I pen this last blog essay of 2021.
You see, I really I am okay. I struggle, yes, but I am capable of finding my way back home. Now that I have written away the bitter shadows, I feel lighter. I am lighter. Even as my head is filled up with the brains of a cynic who ascribes no tangible value, no magic, to the turn of the New Year, I am hopeful I will find purpose and peace in 2022. Perhaps it is simply the pleasant surprise of my survival of another year which has provided this shift in perspective. I forget sometimes that I can do hard things, and when I am reminded that I can I am grateful. Gratitude frames my mind to see the long winter in front of me as time to work on another book, to rest, and to wonder. And as each passing day gets a little longer, I will be stretching my spirit toward the spring.
Here is to a productive and peaceful winter to us all.
The Dorothy-Parker inspired ditty below is the only thing of any value I managed to write in the past two months. More bad poetry, I know, and I’m sorry! But Mack would appreciate it, and that makes it okay by me.
Writer’s Block Some days I can write on for hours, So clever I am with my pen; But then comes a clog in My thick, stupid noggin, And I think I shall never write again.
In our front yard in Springfield, May 2012, this is one of my favorite photos of me and Mack (although it is a rare serious pose and one of her in a dress!). To me she was was always larger than life, and in so many ways she still is.
I don’t cook much from scratch anymore—since Mack died, there are a lot of things I don’t do anymore—but every year for Thanksgiving at my sister’s house I make egg noodles. They aren’t hard to make, although making them is a little annoying and a lot time consuming. And messy. The flour gets all over me and the kitchen, and dried, eggy dough gets stuck to the counter top. I can’t stop rolling the dough until all dozen eggs and three pounds of flour are rolled out because my hands are encased in wet dough and getting it all off my fingers takes almost as much time as the rolling.
But no matter all of that. I make the egg noodles. For more than thirty years, I’ve been making the egg noodles. For all of the years Mack was here to eat those noodles, I didn’t mind making them. But Thanksgiving, a food holiday, was Mack’s favorite, and making noodles and eating noodles and thoughts of passing another Thanksgiving without Mack suck some of the magic out of those damned noodles. I half-heartedly try every year to get out of the noodle-making business and suggest that someone else pick up the tradition. But my egg noodles are special, pillowy and delicious, a family legend, and no one, particularly my niece Zoe, will let me off the hook. I need to make the egg noodles, and that’s okay. Some traditions should continue no matter how annoying or grief provoking, and I suspect I’ll make the family egg noodles until I’m dead.
So here I am, standing in my kitchen working up the courage to make noodles. It is quiet like death in the house and I shudder at being alone with my pre-holiday grieving and my noodles. I used to love to cook while listening to music, but one of the other things that I don’t really do any more since Mack died is listen to music. Music summons the ghosts, which stir up my grief into a hopeless melody of sorrow and self-pity. But a few months ago I started listening to 1920s jazz for brief intervals; and a couple of weeks ago I started listening to the blues. Shemekia Copeland specifically. Something about the old music calms me, and the spirit and humor of Copeland’s songs and the bad-ass-I’m-here-and-you’re-gonna-like-it sound of her voice give me strength.
Okay, then, I think, let’s invite Shemekia to this noodle-making party and see what happens.
I ask Alexa to shuffle Shemekia Copleland, and I get started on the noodles. The next thing I know I’m singing along and my hips are swaying and I’m rolling the dough in time to the music. I am shaking off the cobwebs of ghosts and grief with Mack laughing and cheering me on, helping me face another holiday without her. I am happily making noodles for the people I love most. Savannah will be here for the holiday, and she enjoys my noodles almost as much as Mack did. We will eat them together and remember our Mack, the food-loving, silly, joyful girl whose motto was to eat until it hurts, baby, and then eat some more.
I roll out the last of the dough and think to myself, wow. Instead of dreading Thanksgiving and letting my grief weigh me down low, I’m just here in my kitchen making noodles and singing the blues.
Good grief, it’s a process!My tasting bowlThe last time all of the Pratt girls were all together, December 2013
I talk myself out of doing things because I feel awkward about doing them alone. All the time I do it. I talk myself out of doing things I enjoy because I don’t have a partner or a friend to do them with me. I’m afraid to be out in the world alone, and that is ridiculous. People go out in the world and do things by themselves all the time. I don’t need to be strong or cool or brave. I just need to make myself go, push my pathetic butt out the door. I don’t want to be a crazy old lady hermit.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I purchased a season ticket for one to attend all of this season’s premier shows at the performing arts center here at Eastern Illinois University. I figured plunking down $180 would be the answer for every excuse I might use to keep from taking in good shows that are right here in my little town. I went to the first show of the season last Wednesday, and I didn’t talk myself out of going because I already had a ticket. I felt a little self-conscious and uncool finding my seat alone, among hip college students, but it turned out that going alone was not that hard. I survived it. And although the show itself was not that great, I felt pretty great when I stepped out into the chilly night air after the show and walked myself to my car.
A good friend of mine suspects I might eventually like to do things by myself. I am less sure about that. But here are three things about which I am certain. One: I live alone now. I am a single woman without a partner, and I have no interest in finding a new one. Two: locating joy is hard enough for me in my melancholia without giving up the simple things that still have the power to make me smile and to lift my spirits. And three: I need to cut myself some sack for being tentative and shy about being on my own. I am an old dog trying to learn new tricks. I’m living alone for the first time in my entire life, it’s only been two years, and most of that time, good grief, has been during a global pandemic.
Change that makes us better takes time and patience. Change is a challenge. It demands hard work. And, hey, that is a fourth thing I know: I can do hard work.
Not today, I said.
So, this morning I didn’t let me talk myself out of taking my bike out to explore the Lincoln Prairie Grass Trail, just four blocks south of my house. It was not easy to beat down the excuses hammering in my head while I sipped my morning coffee on the porch. I am my own worst enemy, after all. What if I fall, who will pick me up? Should a woman be alone on a bike trail in the country? Who will tug me back home if the wind is too strong and I can’t make my heavy bike move forward (this really happened to me once, back when I did have a partner). What if I get a flat tire or get lost or what if what if what if wtf if… See? This is what I do. This is why I have been so unsuccessful taking myself out into the world on my own and doing things all by myself.
Today, I am riding alone.
I got on my beach cruiser, which always makes my heart skip rope like a girl. I smiled and pedaled all the way to Charleston Country Club and back. Just eight miles round trip, but a long ride for me. I enjoyed the sunshine and the lovely breeze, and I stopped by a few butterfly gardens along the way. I waved at passing cyclists, many of whom were alone, like me. None of us wallowing in the self-pity of loneliness. In the bargain, I didn’t fall or get a flat tire and it wasn’t scary. Not really. It was delightful; and I grinned the whole time like Mack always grinned when she was delighted.
It was another baby step on the road to confident single womanhood. It was a badge earned on this journey of mine to be at peace in my head and confident in my place in the world, as a single woman doing my own thing.
I can ride alone. I am riding alone. And that’s okay.
In the shade beneath the feathery emerald branches of a weeping white pine in a secret garden, I closed my eyes. My yearning for the spirit therapy of the dawn redwoods I left behind, along with the rest of my life in St. Louis, was quiet. I had arrived at the new altar of my peace. I breathed in the joyful air of finding a treasure, and I exhaled the end of a two-year search—or, rather, a waiting—for a new spirit place.
I am curating a new life and redefining peace for myself in a charming, craftsman bungalow on a corner lot in a sleepy college town. It is still a restless, sorrowful, lonely journey, but I am well most days and comfortably tethered to the earth. But now that I have found The Whiteside Garden, I have a place for my spirit to wander, for my mind to wonder, and for my heart to continue its journey of healing. I finally have a place to contemplate life, to contend with grief, and to get the hell out of my head for an hour or two each week, away from home. A place to amble and write and commune with trees.
I extract a great deal of the vitamins I need to be emotionally healthy by tending to my old house, reading on my breezy, shady porch, and spending meditative time in the yoga garden I created all by myself. But I have spent two years looking for a replacement for my health-giving, Wednesday morning strolls through the Missouri Botanical Garden. I’ve spent two years pining (pun here intended) for a place that is serene but engaging, bright and shady and lovely, restorative and transcendent. The Lake Charleston trails are too rugged, the sidewalks of my historic neighborhood too noisy, the college campus too populated with ghosts of the past, and the bike trail, although vibrant with wildflowers and butterflies, too unsheltered from the punishing Midwestern sun.
The dawn redwoods and the Missouri Botanical Garden helped me begin my spirit’s healing. And now the weeping white pines and The Whiteside Garden, just two miles east of my new home, will tend to my spirit going forward.
Who knew I only needed to get in my car and drive across a state highway and a corn field, to find my new spirit place? It’s funny how simple the remedies for our sorrows often are. Funnier still how long it sometimes takes to find precisely what we need, although the remedy is so close, within shouting distance, or just around the corner. And isn’t it frustrating that some of our remedies, the life-altering, precious, restorative life medicine we need is often hidden behind an experience or acquaintance that has not, as yet, crossed our path? Is it not unfair that we must sometimes wait for that remedy to emerge from the randomness of life, from serendipity and stupid luck?
Oh, that life is short and still we must be patient.
The planets do not align for our singular benefit, but sometimes we do win the universe’s lottery. In fact, I find it to be mostly true that the elixirs and balms that have helped me to survive my grief have found me when I wasn’t looking. It is no surprise to me that I would find my new spirit place by happenstance. That at yoga one Friday morning at the end of summer I would meet a woman, and that the yoga teacher would introduce us and tell her I was new to the area. That the woman would give me her docent elevator pitch for The Whiteside Garden. That I would venture out into a dangerous heat wave to visit the garden later that morning. That a weeping white pine would greet me like I had known her my entire life. That I would stand under her gentle branches, sheltered in the impossible coolness beneath them, and know that my spirit was home.
The Whiteside Garden, the lifelong labor of love of Eastern Illinois University botany professor Wesley Whiteside, is small and charming, hemmed in by a busy state highway and central Illinois fields of corn and soybeans. Yet to me, it a grand thing, a majestic replacement for my beloved Missouri Botanical Garden. The weeping white pine a gracious gift to fill the void of the dawn redwoods. This glorious new spirit place is the perfect size, the perfect setting, for me right now, where I am in time and space, where I am in my journey of healing. Opened to the public just three months ago, The Whiteside Garden is also a new kid in town, just like me. Yet, as Professor Whiteside, who died in 2015, began cultivating the gardens surrounding his home in the early 1960s, before I was born, his legacy garden will be a wise teacher.
Being Mack's Momma Bear 