Tag Archives: life

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?

I Cried for a Bird

The bird was dead in the morning
And I sobbed.

Though I hadn’t cried in weeks,
Not for my country,
Or Palestinians,
Or immigrants imprisoned,
Or the attack on the NEH that funds my life’s work.

But for a bird, I cried
For a grackle, who would have grown up to harass my ubiquity of sparrows.

I sobbed for that little black bird
As I buried her in the apple mint,
As I fed the dogs,
As I brewed my coffee,
I sobbed.

Though I hadn’t cried in weeks,
Not for my besieged government,
Or atrocities in Sudan,
Or the erasure of our history,
Or the politics of cruelty that threatens our democracy.

I cried for a bird.

The bird was dead in the morning,
And I sobbed.

The Bird by Stacy Lynn (mixed media)

Mack Day (no. 11)

She is still here, my Mack. She resides in my heart. She dances daily in my thoughts. She is every four-leaf clover. I tell her all the big stuff and the hard stuff and the stuff about which I know not what to do. Her good spirit laughs with me, cheers me on, and gives me courage in the dark. I will always need her, like I need water and air and doughnuts.

Mack Day, her birthday, is always a bad day and a good day. My tears and longing for her are more bitter, but I also celebrate her joy of being a leprechaun, quarter Irish and born on St. Patrick’s Day. As I have done eleven years now, I will take Mack Day to grieve my girl and to give myself space and a little extra grace. To sob alone and feel in my bones the loss of her. To eat something decadent for her. To belly laugh at least once for her.

This year is a discombobulating year of contrasts for me, and I have been thrown off balance.

As a historian supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, my livelihood, health benefits, and life’s work are in jeopardy. The assault on American democracy, the dismantling of our government, and the turning away of our country’s core values are making me physically and emotionally unwell. As a voter, what is happening enrages me. As a woman and a mother, I am horrified. As a human being who cares about the vulnerable people among us, I am terrified. And as a historian of American history, I am profoundly sad.

If Mack were here today, she would have wisdom for me to better navigate my anger, horror, terror, and sadness. She had this way of diffusing catastrophe, of redirecting negativity, and soothing anxiety. Her wit and her silly songs could walk me back from every ledge.

As I am missing her ever so keenly in this difficult historical moment, so too is her absence a fresh heartbreak as I meet my own personal, triumphant moment. I would do anything to have Mack with me to celebrate in April the publication of my new book Loving Lincoln, the deeply personal and most important creative achievement of my life. Oh my, would she have loved the cover of this book. It would have produced one of her famous cackles, and she would have been so proud of her Momma Bear and the book, giddy that her kindergarten drawing of Abraham Lincoln was published within it. I can hear her voice in her favorite refrain, “Lincoln is dead, mom, you know that, right?”  

There are few things in this mortal life we can control. While I must face this Mack Day alone, I will go forth into the sunshine as best I can, with Mack’s good cheer in tow. I will let the tears flow (sorry, my dear girl), but I will also raise a Guinness. To Mackenzie Kathleen McDermott, I am grateful you were here. I was damned lucky to have such a daughter, a bright light who touched the lives of every person who knew her.

As I have always done, I will hug Mack’s spirit close to my heart, keep her quiet wisdom in my mind, and let her joy put the spring in my step. But perhaps during this year—this unbalanced, terrible, joyful year—I will find new ways for Mack to guide me, to inspire me, and to sally me forth through all the darkness and all of the light. And no matter what happens to me or my job or my country, I will endeavor to be good and to be true. To locate a new and lasting peace of mind. To honor Mack’s faith in me. To do justice to all she was and all she taught me.

Cheers and peace and happy Mack Day.

Mack poking fun of the scholarly nature of my first book, The Jury in Lincoln’s America, in 2012.

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.

My Poor Ear and a Little Clarity

Awake under the surgical drape, I can see the torso and knees of the nurse monitoring my vital signs. She is sitting in a chair next to me, and I can read her badge. “Shirley, RN.” A middle-aged name. My age or older, I am guessing. There is another nurse behind her who leans down to peak at me under the drape. “You all right under there?”

“Yes,” I reply, but I don’t believe it. Given the tremble in my voice she probably doesn’t believe it either. She smiles at me with her piercing blue eyes. She is younger than Shirley and me.

I am lying on my right side with only my left ear and cheekbone exposed above the surgical drape, which is adhered to my face with sticky tape. There is a firm pillow at my back and a softer one between my knees. I would be comfortable if I wasn’t on an operating table about to be sliced up and stitched back together. I could be sleeping right now if not for the thumping beat of my heart and the nightmare of the full-thickness skin graft that will soon be cut from a healthy place on my ear to seal the wound at the edge of my ear caused from last week’s removal of a spot of basal-cell carcinoma.

Oh, no, my poor ear. My perfect, cute, little ear.

But this is what happens when you are a sun worshipper who spent the 1980s lathered up in baby oil and sunbathing on foil. This is what happens when anxiety keeps you away from doctors for ten years because the medical profession failed your daughter. Basal-cell carcinoma bores through cartilage if you ignore it, like I ignored it. How long did I know that spot was no bug bite? How long did I pretend it wasn’t there? So long. Too long. Long ago and away in my denial.

So here I am on a Monday morning in an operating room. Naked under a thin, cotton hospital gown, I am helpless in the hands of five medical professionals who do not know that I am a historian, a mother, a yogi, a lover of dogs and birds and Abraham Lincoln. How weird it is … how unreasonable … how crazy … how amazing … that we give ourselves over to doctors and nurses, human beings just like us, who sometimes burn their toast and forget to water that lonely Monstera adansonii on the sideboard, so far away from all the other plants that get watered on Fridays.

Be careful with me. I have two dogs at home, and I need to water that plant on my sideboard.

I am untrusting and petrified and scared like a wide-eyed child, but no matter my circumstances I am always compelled to be observant. My eyes dart around to see all I can see through the narrow opening of the drape, expertly tented to quell claustrophobia. A steel cabinet with drawers stands against a gleaming white wall. A gray power cord trails below a table. The black scrub pants of the blue-eyed nurse are cinched by flat, gray drawstrings with a single red stripe at each end. Shirley’s chair is a standard black office chair, which seems odd to me and makes me smile. There is a green light on the bottom of the monitor tracking my vital signs. I guess that means I am alive.

Wow. This experience is almost cool. I mean, it’s not every day you get your ear reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. It’s not every day you are awake in an O.R. I pretend I am an attractive patient on Grey’s Anatomy. That gorgeous Dr. Avery will be here any moment to make me gorgeous, too.

I am ridiculous.

I inhale deeply and slowly and then count down my exhalation. Seven … Six … Five … Four … Three … Two … One.

Gasp.

My first surgery is plastic surgery! And I’m awake for it? I am so afraid of the cutting and the pain and the stitches. I want to go home. I need to go home. Now. Please.

“Hush. You are strong, and you are lucky.”

It is my inner warrior speaking to me now. That warrior born from the husks of a grieving mother has arrived to do battle for me. “The skin cancer is gone, and this is a simple repair. You heard the plastic surgeon; this is nothing in the realm of plastic surgery. And look at you. You made it to fifty-seven without surgery, major injury, or serious illness. You delivered two humans into the world. It is okay to be scared, but you can do this.

Oh, shut up.

Inner warriors are so annoying sometimes.

The surgical nurse is now cleaning my ear. I can hear her working, and I feel the cold saline when it arrives at the back of my neck, beyond the reach of the lidocaine. She stuffs cotton in my ear. I know it because I can hear it, THUNDEROUS and SMOOSHING. Now faded away is the jazz music I selected, because, did you know, that awake patients get music dibs over surgeons?

A bright light comes on above me, immediately hot like the Midwestern sun I have tearfully broken up with, because it has, like a cheating lover, betrayed me. I start to sweat under the heated blankets the surgical nurse had so kindly draped around my body to keep me safe from the blasting chill of the operating room, even as she pushed me so dangerously close to a silver tray of scalpels.

Damn. I wish I had not seen those scalpels.

My surgeon arrives and taps my shoulder. I struggle to hear what he is saying, his gravelly voice difficult to understand even without the cotton muffling. He has decided on a different approach, he says, to improvise a better repair. “Watch this,” he says to the nurse. “You’ve never seen this surgery before, because I just made it up.”

Do I look like a guinea pig to you?!!

Oops. I said it out loud. There is muted laughter. “Two incisions instead of three,” he says. “You’ll like it.” He taps my shoulder three times.

Blue eyes smile at me again. “You still okay under there?”

No.

“Yes.” This time I want to mean it.

Then the cutting begins. I hear it. I feel pressure and pulling. The surgeon gets traction or steadies his hand by leaning on my left arm. Then there is sewing. Loud, unapologetic stitching. My ear is a megaphone turning the slipping of delicate sutures into the sound of rope and tug of war. Slip. Tug. Slip. Tug. My face is pulled taught. I feel pressure, but there is no pain. I feel my heart in my throat, but I don’t stop breathing as I listen to Dr. Frankenstein making his monster.

I breathe with my eyes wide open. I breathe with my eyes shut tight. I think about the new walking shoes I need to order this week. I wonder what my sister is doing out in the waiting room. My stomach rumbles, and I think about what I will eat for lunch before the lidocaine wears off. I imagine Bug, at home, sleeping on the back of the couch. I hear the surgeon singing. Is that Jimmy Durante? The sound is deep and lovely, and I think how funny it is that a person’s singing voice can be so different from their speaking voice.

After a month or forty minutes, the surgeon taps my shoulder. “You did good, kid,” he says.

No yoga or strenuous exercise for at least two weeks, so I’ll be leaning a little more on watercolor. Painting my poor ear was oddly therapeutic.

He’s right. I did do good. I did not deploy my plan to secure the strings of my hospital gown and run like the wind for the Illinois prairie. I breathed through all the fear and the disconcerting vulnerability. I breathed through all the cutting and the stitching. I managed my anxiety like a warrior.

What’s more, I am still a kid, but not only a kid to my chubby, singing surgeon who is in his mid-seventies. At fifty-seven, I am still a kid to me. With every new experience, in the face of change, or when standing on the precipice of the unknown, we are all babies. In these moments of course we are scared, because in these moments we are actively learning about the terrifying, wonderful world and learning how to survive what life is throwing at us. In this particular fascinating moment in my ordinary life, I am, indeed, just a kid. Young and scared and hopeful.

Hell and My Next Big Project

Seventy-two hours to fill was daunting at 7 a.m. and took a turn for the worst when Dorothy Parker Doodle acted a fool at the farmer’s market. Wrapping the leash around by legs and jumping up on vendor tables as I purchased pea shoots and spring lettuce and an apple pastry, she wrecked my concentration on Zen. By 8 a.m., back at home, the colorful list of goals I had written on the white board on the fridge was laughing at me.

Ha ha ha, bah ha ha, silly lonely old woman, just try to make that lazy list last until Monday at bedtime.

I added “work ½ day Monday” to reduce the time by three and a half hours and to calm my nerves. I stood there, with marker in hand, thinking about what else I could add.

Shampoo the rugs? No, you did that last weekend, and it only filled an hour anyway.

Pull the weeds on the brick sidewalk? Really? You want to hang out with a million cicadas?

Promise to make three watercolor paintings, one for each day of this interminable Memorial Day weekend? No, hell no, you know you should not promise final paintings, that is too much pressure for art therapy.

 Ok, how about a long walk up to campus and back? Sure, that’s ninety minutes down and time to think up ways to take down a few more.

This is the dance I do in my head every weekend when I don’t have plans to travel or see people and don’t have a big project going. Such dancing is why I am sitting on my sofa writing a blog post about how messed up it is that I struggle so much to see my way to the other side of a lazy weekend.

When I was a young working mom with a husband and a big old house and giant garden, I would have sold my soul to the devil for a long weekend to do nothing more strenuous than trimming one bush in the yard. I can remember the regular dejection of facing even a two-day weekend with not one hour of free time to read a novel in a comfortable chair. Now that I live alone, have a job that lets me let go at the end of a reasonable workday, and a porch that is heaven, I struggle with down time for even a few hours on a Tuesday, let alone a three-day holiday weekend with no travel or social plans in place.

It is mental. I know it is mental. It is also the audacity of privilege to be so, um…privileged to fret about my lucky leisure. But this is the anxious, still-learning-to-live-alone-and-be-alone me, with best friends far flung, and sitting right now in the uncomfortable space between big projects. I’ve learned enough about myself these past five years to know that my peace is thwarted by a steep learning curve to feel at ease with all my leisure time. Though I try to let the spirit of my cucumber-calm, easy-breezy Mack be my teacher, she sees no passing grade in my near future. Unlike her, I am incapable of happily passing one hour with only a family-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos to entertain me.

Heaven may be waiting for me on my front porch, but hell is a lazy day not working.

In so many ways, I am a super woman with superpowers. I am creative and productive, confident, wise, and comfortable in my beautiful, wrinkling skin. I get to spend my workweek with Jane Addams earning a queen’s ransom to study and write about history, one of the great loves of my life. I’ve just written my third book; and I know that not just anyone can write a book, and I am so proud to be among those who can. I have also curated a home perfectly suited to the peaceful path on which I have set my own two feet. I am well, and yet too much time to think can undo me.

Welcome to life, says life and then she adds:

Come on now, super woman old gal, you know that life is a constant journey to find balance and to be at peace when your center of balance is shifting. You know it will always be a struggle for you to be comfortable living alone, even though you want more than anything to be a bad-ass independent king-free Queen. You know you are a work in progress like every life is a work in progress, and you know you don’t need straight A’s in every goddammed thing in order to make good progress.

Yes. I know it. I know it all, especially that I am well. This is just an anxious space between big projects. This is simply the passing through Saturday to Sunday and Monday and into my future. This is an imperfect me still getting used to living alone. This is the anxious me learning to be as comfortable with my growing-learning-becoming times as I am comfortable in my beautiful, wrinkling skin. Some day, I hope Mack will give me a B+ for happily spending an hour on the sofa with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and doing nothing else and thinking about nothing else but eating those chips and enjoying them. I will dutifully and steadily march onward toward that day.

Although I spent the first morning of this long holiday weekend wobbled by the unfortunate trip to the farmer’s market, I realize upon reflection that this long holiday weekend feels a little less angsty than the last one. The list I prepared to survive this long weekend is more balanced. This time I feel more willing to give myself grace. And as I write this blog post (and knock off one of the items on my survival list), I feel considerably calmer. I am still afraid I have too much time on my hands and am worried so much leisure time will result in too much thinking and overthinking and anxiety. However, I am feeling freer to lean in the direction of leisure and, who knows, maybe I will pass this planned lazy, three-day weekend and almost like it.

Especially if I succeed with the most important item on the white-board list: “settle on my next BIG PROJECT.”

And there it is. The pressure. Right back on and screaming. I really am a long way to those lazy Doritos and a Mack passing grade, aren’t I? I said I was a super woman, not Superwoman. I can only promise to find a little heaven during this hell of a three-day weekend; and if I succeed in selecting my next big project, I’ll have enough good work to get me through at least the next year or two of long weekends.

Never 30

Mack should have turned 30 this year, but the world will pass another Mack-Day St. Patrick’s Day without her. I cannot picture Mack at 30, and it has cracked my broken heart wide open.

Mack in 5th Grade, 2004.

When Mack comes to me, tempting me to eat two donuts or telling me to be silly and stop it with the fretting, she is 10-years-old. Her freckled-face is dirty and grinning, her knees are scraped, her basketball shorts are five sizes too big, and her eyes are sparkling with mischief.

When I summon Mack for a chat, she is 20-years-old. Her hair is cropped short, her perfect eyebrows are framing the beautiful face she has only just grown into, and although her posture is casual cool, the cast of her gaze, straight into my eyes, is seriously wise.

When Mack comes to me or I summon her, she is never 30.

Mack and Me, 2014.

Mack will never be 30.

In October 2024, I will have known this fact for ten terrible years, but the truth of it hit me like blunt force trauma to my chest three months ago when the first of Mack’s best friends turned 30. Up until then, I was always able to imagine Mack living a life in her twenties, traveling, learning new things about herself, making new friends, and finding her professional path. Before three months ago, I could write stories of a life Mack might be living if the cosmos had given her the time she deserved. I could picture her as a junior writer for a sitcom, living a flip-flop life in Los Angeles with a St. Bernard and a Pomeranian, just a Mack-short walk from the beach.

Yet as time passed, I began losing the plot of every story I was writing for her. And now I have lost the plot entirely. Mack will never be 30. Not in life. Not in my stories. Not even in my dreams. I knew this failure of imagining would happen. I knew that time would buff out the sharpness of the future I envisioned for Mack as I coped with the loss of her. I knew it would be impossible to see any lines of time etched upon her beautiful face. I knew it. I knew it. I know it.

Mack will never be 30.

Recently, when I was walking my dog in the quiet of morning, listening to the birds and feeling the sun and the breeze upon on my face, I caught a glance of my reflection in a shop window. There was light all around me. My face was joy. My eyes sparkled. I was carefree, and it startled me. I had not been searching for joy or for peace when I set out on my morning walk, but both had found me.

The reflection I saw that day was not the face of a grieving, aging, lonely 57-year-old woman. It was the face of a 10-year-old, carefree girl. It was the face of a confident, easy-going, 20-year-old woman. It was the face of a bittersweet but hopeful middle-aged woman capable of finding simple joys and locating a moment of inner peace.

The 30-year-old Mack is not here. But the 10-year-old Mack is here. The 20-year-old Mack is here. I am here, too. And I will just have to do enough living for the lot of us. The spirits of that mischievous, fearless child and that grounded young woman will guide me, give me strength, and lead me ever onward to bloom joy and to paint my sparkle.

My two reasons for being: Mack and Savannah, 2004.

My Father’s Hands (but not his soda)

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.

October 7

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.