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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yoga in the park this morning was all about the spine. My soft-spoken teacher stretched and twisted and cooed us into shapes that make the back-body purr. The rising sun cast majestic shadows on the concrete of the pavilion. Shadows of my body, reaching and breathing into beautiful movement in the already-warm breeze of a Midwestern day in late summer.
This stretching reminded me that I am alive, like yoga always reminds me that I am alive. These shadows made me grateful. I am able-bodied. I am here. I am breathing. Imperfect and grieving and uncertain, yes; but also accepting and peaceful and hopeful that life might still bring me gifts. That I am deserving of those gifts.
The mantra of my first yoga teacher, more than two decades ago, was: “You are only as young as your spine is flexible.” I didn’t appreciate her mantra back then, because my spine was flexible. It was also young and supple and strong. I was in my early thirties. I did not yet know that my body would change and that life would make me rigid. Back then, I could still do flips in the backyard with my daughters, the muscle memory of competitive gymnastics still lithe in my muscles and bones.
Not so much today, now that I know the weight of living. In my fifties, I am starting over and feeling green, despite my graying hair. I am unbending, even though life has done its damnedest to bend me. I am strong, in spite of all I have endured. But I know all of this, and that is the difference. Knowing is what makes me flexible.
And this is, precisely, the point of yoga. To practice. To learn. To bend. Not just in body, but also in spirit. To remind us to breathe. To make us sit in our moment with all of the crap life heaps upon us. To witness our shadows. To know the beauty of our bodies to bend without breaking.
Sometimes, I think I am old and inflexible. But in reality, I am young and bendy. I am strong. I am human. I am flexible.
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.
Being Mack's Momma Bear 