keeping abreast | keeping a breast

It was a way out. Out of myself. Out of the brokenness and business suits of K street, the asshole lawyer in the elevator who asked me what kind of a cheap place I would work at to be able to wear sandals to the office.The sweltering swamp filled with self-importance. The white rich boys, their khakis and their rapey advances. The relationship and the cheater, not once but four times. The bedroom eyes worked on many.

I came to San Francisco because my grief put a hole in me, through the torso, the heart center too. I weighed less than my drivers license from when I was a 16-year old. I drove with the sunrise at my back and the sunset in front of me.

I came to San Francisco because it was the urban center I yearned for, where everyone was everyone, and everyone could be a different everyone tomorrow and the next day. It was fluid. And celebrated. And proud.

I came to San Francisco for the job. In that sweet Presidio barracks with a view of the Golden Gate bridge and the golden hills surrounding it, when the light would capture the fog, lighting it up like a scene from heaven. But I knew I would always go west, to the end of the continent, to blow at the Pacific’s shores, to see if I could cause a wave that would cause a wind that would carry me away. So far, drifting into the atmosphere, only to look down and believe, if I could, that stillness is there, inside me, outside this place, if I’m at the right altitude.

It’s golden, creamy when warm, hard when soft. It melts in my mouth, or on a slab of freshly-baked sourdough bread. Transporting itself into an unforgettable liquid gold. The Illinois state fair’s dairy barn fashions a statue of Abraham Lincoln out of it. My mouth waters for old Abe. It makes the cake or cookies or biscuits taste deeper, richer, flakier. Sometimes it gets fancy, with sea salt from the Celtic sea sprinkled on top, those little pop rocks making a flavor explosion in my mouth. Country crock offers a cinnamon-spiked option that I can lick straight from a spoon. And on a good day, a day where there’s space and time and sunshine, I take rosemary from the garden to get that savory, umami floral feeling, finely chop and mix it in. and it goes where I go. On potatoes or blanched vegetables, inside the chicken, even dressing up a basic saltine. Dreamy and devourable. Everything’s better with butter.

On the eve of my 40^th birthday, at a moment when I’m at the peak of my life and crossing over to the other side of the hill, I thought I’d know more. I thought I would understand more. I thought there would be cake and party dresses, not face masks and pandemics. I thought I would feel like I arrived, when this whole time and for the rest of time I will still only be becoming.

I don’t know the exact moment he will die. Or how a body breaks down after nine years of a disease that ravaged him, bone by bone. Which system goes first? His remaining kidney? Or his heart? Or maybe the lungs? When will he run out of air to breathe? I don’t know what pain does to a body, the kind of pain that comes with a crushed vertebrate and rib. I don’t know how sleep is a natural response to anxiety, how one can quiet their heartbeat enough to go away, to another place, even for a few minutes. After I wake up, I don’t know how long the moment lasts before I remember.

I don’t know how my mom will live with a shattered heart, an open space in it that my dad filled with his stories and laughter and commitment and hustle and generosity and love and only later with pills and treatments and quietness and sleep and pain and loss and loss.

I don’t know what fall will bring and if the ache I feel every autumn with the earth exhaling its breath to head into the darkness of winter, if that ache will be so much greater because he is gone.

I don’t know if I will be able to remember his voice.

I don’t know what happens after he dies, I die, we die.

I don’t know when we can all hug each other again.

I don’t know if I will ever see him again.

I don’t know how to have a funeral without people.

I don’t know what I’ll be doing a year from now on the eve of my 41^st birthday

***

I do know that I have a finite amount of conversations left with my dad.

I do know that my dad really wants to live. That he doesn’t want to miss out on anything. Ever.

I do know that I don’t want him to miss out on anything. Ever.

I do know that it feels like I have a hole in my heart, the appetite of grief eating away at me, as it anticipates more grief. I do know that I feel too much.  

I do know that there will be church bells that ring when he dies. 72 bells, the precise number. I do know that I love church bells.

I do know that I like watching wind as it ripples through a grove of trees, and the masses of water in the ocean knocking up against each other. Wind is invisible. Currents in the ocean are invisible. When wind and current become visible is the moment they touch something or someone. I know that grief is like the wind, as is love. It’s out there moving through the universe and has to touch a heart to be seen, heard, held, felt.

I know matter is neither created nor destroyed.

I know gravity holds me to this earth.

I’m sipping alpine tea, a daily ritual I have been trying to commit to and practice. Seems simple, the act of turning on the faucet, filling the kettle, flicking on the gas stovetop, and waiting as the water begins to boil. But in the before time, where seconds were compressed by a commute, a calendar, a competition, even that felt like too big a hill to climb. I stare at my cup. A few wisps of blue cornflowers have slipped out of the tea ball and are swirling around at the top. They remind me of my mom.

She always dreamed that her eyes would be that shade of blue. Instead, she sardonically refers to them as dirty dishwater blue. A light shade, not quite crystal and not quite sky, not even midnight or deep ocean. But I remember as a young girl, thinking that if I blinked hard enough, maybe my dark brown eyes would become blue like hers too. Blue, such a multilayered word, peeling it down and down to its heart. Blue. I feel it, a deep and soulful sad. Maybe that’s why they name jazz clubs “the Blue Note” with their low saxophones and drawn out bass notes.

We are talking on the phone, it’s still early here. I woke with a start, an urgent need to call her and hear her voice. Imagining her pacing around the house for hours now, checking in on my dad and making sure he’s still breathing, doing all the things she planned for the full day within only those first few hours of morning dusk, leaving the rest an open, seemingly endless ellipse. She picked up on the first ring, and said she knew I would be calling. I guess this is one version of motherhood.

We jump right in to the important stuff. What are you eating. What did you read. Who did you hear from. Are you still in your pajamas, if so which ones. Did you get that picture I texted you of the garden.

I tell her that on my neighborhood walk, I came across a perfectly sprouting row of tulips. She tells me how my aunt and uncle planted several hundred and are patiently wondering, waiting to see if the fat neighborhood squirrels left any of them alone to grow.

Tulips. I love tulips, I think. Their hope, the bursts, their impact, their multiplicity, so many identities that are an annual surprise – the purples and whites and yellows and reds and pinks and zebras. But instead, for reasons I don’t yet want to explore, I say, aloud, tulips make no sense. They grow and grow, a singular life, their long fragile stems folding, bending, snapping because they are not sturdy enough to carry the weight of the bloom on top, the thick petals, the abundant sepals, pollen-laden stamens.

She’s silent for a few minutes. I imagine her blue eyes darting back and forth, most active when she’s deep in thought. She’s lifting her tea bag in and out of the hot water as it steams up towards her face, a free facial, she always jokes.

And she replies to me, nothing makes sense.

You’re a lightning bolt, a piercing passageway of violence leading to us, the hair standing on the back of our neck now at attention

You’re a zipper, opening up with raw force and dissonant sound to reveal what’s underneath, the underbelly of the world

You’re a rupture, splitting us into two, then four then dozens upon dozens to millions

You’re a concussion, leaving fog and blurred vision

You’re a silencer, filling lungs, stealing breaths, debilitating voice

You’re a wave, with each realization rolling over us, pushing us deeper underwater, into the dark unknown

You’re dusk, neither darkness nor daylight, eye straining to see, blurred shadows lurking at the edge of the forest

You’re a tornado, leveling this house and its scattered about baby dolls and q-tips and wedding pictures and the detritus of lives well lived, well-loved, and skipping over another house, nary a shingle out of place

You’re a before and you’re an after.

do dragonflies bite, he asked? 

mmmmm. i think they’re carnivores. like those plants that eat flies. or tigers.

we were lazing on a giant raft, shifting with the current from one end of the lake to the next. trying to avoid the mosquito havens, the bogs and cattails. the dragonflies always zipping around us, their rainbow iridescence captivating. i loved it when they would land on my toe. why the toe, i wondered? it was 1pm. or maybe 11am. actually, it could have been 4pm. that was what the day was like. time an expansive mix of sweat, angst, lake water, being alone together and together alone, lightning and thunderstorms. the air heavy. the summer of my 16th year.

we were on the world’s biggest inflatable, or maybe the inflatable was our world. bright yellow. was it 10 feet or 15 feet in diameter? no matter. it took approximately 4 years to blow it up, i do remember that. my cheeks were sore from the huffing and puffing. we both worked up a sweat.

we lived on that thing before and after our lifeguard shifts up the road, tending to the other rowdy high schoolers who played games of chicken on each other’s shoulders, or the middle schoolers who would stick the hose down their swimming trunks. no running on the boardwalk! you can’t eat your french fries in the pool! our favorite shift was early to watch the grannies do their water aerobics – we called them water babies – we loved it because they would dote on us and cut a piece of their gooey butter cake, or bundt cake, or crumb cake, or whatever the cake du jour would be. they worked up an appetite, bouncing and twirling and squealing at the loss of gravity in the cool angle of the morning sun. 

i was an old enough soul to know that he was not the love of my life, yet i was also a young and naive enough person without much heartbreak and loss yet to think that this was pretty workable for now. 

maybe my true love was the lake on nuthatch lane, and that giant floaty that had just the right amount of crevices for budlight and potato chips.

i like your swimsuit, he said. maybe you should take it off. 

nah, i said. i don’t need a nipple sunburn.

he shoved me off into the water.

i still dream about that bikini. it was the first bikini i owned. a red, blue, yellow riot like a patchwork quilt. i wore that thing until the elastic fell out of it. typically with cut off jeanshorts that i distressed and tugged and shredded myself with my grandma’s sewing implements. i was wearing that bikini when i snuck out of the house to go to a grateful dead aftershow in st. louis. when i took my first hit of acid. he snapped a photo of me that night, eyes wide, leather ties holding my hair in place. young and alive.

our dinner dialogue is sometimes amusing, and sometimes not.

on good days, we talk politics, listen to fantastical podcasts about comedians and economists and black culture, or scroll through a playlist on spotify meant for ‘dinner parties.’

on other days, i wouldn’t say they are bad days, just other days, we delve into more serious topics. managing millennials. what color to paint the kitchen. and whether or not we should have children.

on the whole kid thing, i created this game called ‘worst case scenario.’ it goes something like this. the worst case scenario is that we have a kid, and _fill in the blank.

he’s a sociopath. she eats live bats. he watches us when we sleep. 

and other worst cases, that maybe aren’t the worse cases, but it’s my game and my rules. he can’t read. or speak. or learn. she picks her nose and eats it. he can’t do sums in his head.

no amount of pros and cons lists will suffice.

or maybe it’s letting go of the control that we somehow believe we would have.

home, maybe for you it’s a shell. a castle. a nest. maybe it’s a hut or a reef or a cardboard box. an adobe, an igloo, a ranch, the beach.

home. 

it’s 2433 miles away. southern illinois. 

it’s summer where the monarchs migrated through, hundreds of thousands of them in a swarm of stainglass windows. we threw rocks at them to see them flutter. i’m not proud of that. and then we ate mrs. steinman’s strawberry rhubarb pie and swore never to tell another soul that we abused butterflies. 

home.

it’s the house my grandfather played ring-around-the-rosey in when he was a boy. a big old 1800s farmhouse at the end of town, with exposed beams and eaves where bats tuck away to sleep for the day. it has no doors and even fewer closets. the floor boards give away your every move. it’s where i had to pass through my brother’s room to get to my room, the pathway like a puzzle, an adventure, and a torture chamber all at once. it abuts the country, the soybeans and the graveled roads of a place people still go for meandering sunday drives to check up on the relatives long dead and buried in the cemetery. 

home. 

it’s the kid who drove a tractor to school.

home. 

it’s the huffing and puffing we did when jogging up the gentle slope of the old abandoned mine, as if that exercise in soccer practice would be our ticket out, some athletic scholarship to a no-name school to end up getting married in a wedding that’s advertised in the newspaper and only to have babies by age 22 and become a teacher or nurse or receptionist or other respectable career woman.

home. 

it’s the yard i ran barefoot in. almost stepping on a copperhead snake. watching my brother’s thumb pop out of its socket when he slid into the makeshift homebase of beanbags and ball gloves. climbing the sturdy maple in the frontyard and picking off the skeletons of locusts long since retired.

home.

it’s the fort we built alongside the railroad tracks. the collection of pennies i hoarded, after they got run over by the trains on a scheduled clip from chicago down to new orleans, full of coal and oil and wheat and lonely conductors who always waved and pulled the whistle for us. 

home. 

but, why am i here? 2344 miles away?

cherie has been on my mind so much lately. the last time i saw her, we were in the closing circle of our commonweal retreat, tears staining our faces, our hearts open with gratitude, chins up high and eyes clear, taking in the group of women, some of us bald, cherie in a wheelchair. we were going around the circle and sharing all the things that each person did that touched us, that we remembered, that we loved. cherie received all of those, a gentle and knowing smile on her lips, like she had a deep secret that all of us would learn over time. she thanked us. she said we were like little packets of love that she’d carry in her heart. 

she died later that month.

i started writing love letters to strangers this year. little packets of love.

on the first of the month, i get an email with 4 or 5 stories in them. sad stories. heart-wrenching stories. real stories, now that i think of it. we all have stories.

a man rowen who came out as transgender and attempted suicide last year. a woman named lala who is deaf, has leukemia, and just left her abusive husband. a teenage girl emma who is getting bullied in high school. kathy, who is caregiving for her husband in the final stages of his life. and devon, facing kidney disease and wondering if her fiance will marry her in the end.

what do i say to these people? 

what little packets of love do i send them, a stranger, writing from my kitchen table in san francisco? 

i won’t tell them to be strong or keep their chins up. i won’t tell them that they’ve got this. that things will get better. i won’t tell them that i know what they are going through, or that someone will come and save them. empty statements and false promises don’t help. we know there are no guarantees.

rowen might follow through and commit suicide. lala might go back to her abusive husband. emma might end up a hermit from all the brokenness. kathy might fall apart after her husband dies. devon might not recover from kidney disease or get married.

cherie died. 

so i’ll sit there, doodling on the letterhead, until i have to empty the dishwasher or go to work or otherwise be occupied and my time seems to be running short.

and i’ll start writing. i’ll write about the weather in san francisco, how the light of the city – maybe it’s the moisture in the air – is golden and thick. how my cat whiz plays fetch but only with his stuffed monkey. i’ll write about the cerulean blue color of the snap pea blossoms in my backyard. and how my favorite sea creature is a leafy sea dragon. i’ll write about my life with cancer. and how i just learned how to make homemade ricotta cheese.

and i’ll write about what i’m still trying to learn and what cherie likely knew. and i think it’s this:

there’s beauty in the world. and if you can’t find it, create it, create the little packets of love. on the days it’s impossible, persevere.