While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there
were potholes and too many trees by the side of the
winding road. The first to go were two juniors who
were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do,
driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl
while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed.
They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by
the road. They died. There were others in high school
who died in car accidents, too, though at this point
I mainly remember the names of the survivors
(thanks, Facebook,
with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother
died,
I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my
own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and
dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits
me more than others, generally when I’m feeling
low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in
weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an
hour or two a day writing out the details of
illness and death for my novel manuscript. And
I’ll have dreams about these
people,
the dead from high school, usually as represented
by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one
who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time
the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like
Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of
birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone
for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my
dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather
shows up less and less now as I deal with the past,
though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is
to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people
who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest
times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad
it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past,
something that I keep thinking should be a “dead”
itself at this point, as I was having a good cry
after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our
Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the
kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and
inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat
or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and
was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years
old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room,
petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur
was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind
her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't
stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite
transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the
lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies
and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams
into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep
cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory
of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was
in seventh grade, about six months after we left my
grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out
when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the
mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was
halfway across the street when a car came tearing
past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver
didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my
grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail
lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's
brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and
added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the
touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and
I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown
and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a
game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under
the door. Louise
curled up on the
dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I
brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by,
late for class. And my grandmother croaked out
"Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the
swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree
is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my
memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment,
knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And
the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood,
Writing
Salon mistress and photographer
extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us
in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various
versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high
school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had
forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes),
just to check on some of the facts. There was David
Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at
the front of the book was a dedication to three other
people from our class who had died, two of them in
car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and
Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I
was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in
the first paragraph of this post, though I could have
some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died
in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally
monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even
after death. The fact that there was no trace of
these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they
had never existed.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't write
about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand
that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three
cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I
may mention this in passing, but not in great detail,
since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it
is indeed laborious, like work-on-the
same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours
laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is
long-term, of continuing through it without the
instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're
figuring out where the kid will go to school for
kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's
sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with
an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr.
T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the
wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of
the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the
blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to
really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for
this space. I'm not sure that many people want to
read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers
are interested in my personal pieces, either angst
from the past or my depressive musings on current
life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness,
exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the
average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue
sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the
whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer
Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is
working on something. I just need a few hours with a
keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the
time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just
feels like the right thing to do right now, a
necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify
my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the
moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and
offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may
be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps
reposting some of the oldies but
goodies.
We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded
by my computer.
The bottom of the sea
Tom was pinned to the sea floor,
staring into the gloom of pale green water, when his
family started drifting past like surreal floats in
an underwater parade. The first one to show was Faye,
his father’s girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece
bathing suit with a plunging neckline. It was the
same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and even in
the murk he couldn’t stop staring at her cleavage,
worried that something would pop out. Faye was
bounteous, but untidy. She was a concern. He tried to
speak, to get her attention, but his words came out
as a giant bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open
and unseeing. Tom watched with increasing tension,
staring into them, not noticing the pocket of air
that contained his voice had winnowed its way to the
surface. It was the same with all of them, his sister
Veronica, his parents. They floated past one by one
without purpose or reason, looking as they did in
life. Except for their eyes. Unresponsive, flat and
always open, their eyes were sightless. It was as if
they were dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one
of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their mother
insisted on buying, clutched a leash with a stiffened
hand. Tilly was on the other end of it, pulling in
undeath as in life, stretching the girl’s arm past
her head as she floated by on her back. From the look
on his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows raised,
mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he were in
mid-shout – the man was surprised to find himself
there with the rest of them. He was dressed for a
pickup ball game, with catcher’s mitt and a ratty
Phillies baseball jersey over a pair of running
shorts and his legs, weighted down by over-technical
sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.
It was only once his father floated away, became a
speck in the water, that his mother showed up. She
was almost within touching distance, if Tom could
have moved his arms. Her body slowly began to turn,
the white terrycloth robe twisting around her legs
and then spinning out again. With each turn the
fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion dance.
There was a beauty to it. For a second Tom thought he
caught her eye, thought he saw a flash of
recognition, but then she, too, was gone, carried
away by the current.
He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave him tied
to the bottom of the sea where there was no air? But
he was alive. The air just came. He became aware of
the heaviness in his chest, how his lungs, thickened
and clogged, would fill like balloons, suddenly
buoyant. His chest would start to expand and his
body, reborn, light, would pull against its tethers,
and then his lungs would empty again. He would wait
for the next breath to push into him, to refill his
body with lightness.
An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital bed, his
body a pale thread under bleached sheets. A cap of
greasy blonde hair clings to his forehead and
underneath his sallow skin blue veins trace a map of
the body. Sleep glues his eyes shut. White Velcro
ties bind his wrists to the bed frame and his arms
are so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth,
rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic port in
his hand to an IV stand. A tube snakes from his mouth
to a ventilator sitting to the left of the bed. The
night nurse re-taped it a few hours ago,
inadvertently placed the tube at a rakish (though
more comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if he
should be holding a candy cigarette between his teeth
instead of a ventilator line. For the moment, his
lungs are receptacles. They expand and contract at
the ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the
machine does the work with quiet hums and hisses. His
breath is external. Electric.
The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a slate blue
reclining chair by the window, mouth slightly open,
head slumped against her shoulder. A copy of the New
Yorker lies open on her lap. In this light the
circles under her eyes look like shadows and her
unwashed hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she
keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are mossy and
her breath sour. When the respiratory therapist, a
large square man named Joseph, walks into the room,
she doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the
strange cadence of hospitals, where day and night are
delineated by the migratory patterns of doctors and
residents, the dominant physician leading his or her
flock with authority during business hours. The way
they trample! At night, residents travel alone or in
whispering pairs, quiet in soft-soled shoes, not
wanting to bring attention to their drawn faces and
wrung-dry minds.
Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on Tom’s
numbers and clean the vent line. He pulls a pair of
gloves from the box by the door, struggling to get
them on. Underneath the latex, his pale hands shimmer
with a thin layer of sweat. He smells of cooking
grease and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed up;
he has pneumonia and the thick secretions interfere
with his breathing. As the man bends over him and
attaches the vacuum line to the vent tube, his body
exudes heat. Tom feels the warmth of breath, of
Joseph’s proximity, followed by the industrial pull
of the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of mucus.
Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips the tube into a
glass of clean water. The water rushes with the joy
of movement, of life.
With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They deflate, go
limp, until they spasm in protest. He begins to
cough. The coughs are productive and Joseph continues
with his careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he
leaves the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed
mother who has just woken up. Exhausted, scraped
clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep while his mother
adjusts his blankets and smoothes her hand over his
forehead. She is grateful to feel his skin under
hers, is even relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom
is still here and fighting.
The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the green, a
small shape moves toward him. It travels in a nimbus
of light made blurry with disturbed silt. The slow
movement is hypnotic and Tom is filled with a sense
of calm. As the form emerges, he recognizes the fine
long hair of his maternal grandmother, white as bone,
a flash of brightness in the deep. The mud and sand,
the irregularities in the sea floor slow her down.
She catches his eye and waves. Tom feels warm,
well-fed, almost satiated. Gram will catch up with
him. Everything will be ok.
But someone is tugging on his elbow. His mother has
returned with purpose and animation. Tom looks into
her eyes, her face a series of hollows, furrowed brow
over darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around her
head in crazy corkscrews. We love you. Stay here with
us, she
demands. Gram waves again, smiling, encircled by
jaunty bubbles. There is no hurry. When it is all
over, the end will only matter to the people left
behind. He has infinity stretched out before him. His
suffering will eventually be a memory and such
memories are stored in the body, destined to rot.
Give the living a little more
time.
Image: "Murky Water"
by -Ebil-Bils.
A virulent strain of grief
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin,
my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in
short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our
lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really
the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was
living in the Little House with disastrous results
and he and my mother were at the thin edge of
eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting
to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human
in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak.
He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully,
though that of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning:
The below goes into detail about an illness and a
harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some
readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well,
it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages
of myelofibrosis,
a bone marrow disease, though it was probably
pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With
myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and
hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the
bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the
liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a
phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary
hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail,
to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad
blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that
does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they
bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and
bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this
disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell
transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you
have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will
eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection
will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you
will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will
cease to work (because of the extramedullary
hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and
accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent,
Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of
it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care
unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying
to write about that time in a way that makes any
sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up
with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a
ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was
admitted and how early on we thought he was going to
slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker
hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius
solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin
couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged
from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat
and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death
because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going
to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the
former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the
vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He
was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax
scares and work closures, of mail that came to the
federal library where I worked months old, crispy and
irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end,
a journey that required great vigilance on my
mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large
number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six
months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and
stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin
was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the
professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they
want to do things, think that action is always the
best course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all
those details of his hospitalization came out,
details I have stored away for years: the sound of
the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need
attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I
suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin
trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so
fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the
too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate
for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations,
emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially
jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen
levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at
Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and
that eating in front of him when he was getting his
food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would
have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly
skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and
hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound
frame and a walker and did halting laps around the
CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month, disguised
under a new premise with a much younger protagonist.
After the month was over and the first draft off my
head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For
example, I know next to nothing about the disease I
had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And
what do I know, really, about parental grief, which
is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing
research, reading books and looking at websites.
There is one blog out there, very detailed and
well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling
her little boy's fight against cancer. That little
boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly
sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I
doing this?).
When you are in the middle of a
life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping
someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all
you can think about. Everything becomes medical and
you find out all you can. You learn about the
strength of nurses and the support system that crops
up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you
never thought were possible before. You are steeped
in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like
it will never end. You don’t want it to end with
death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go
of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this
family and the little boy that will never grow up. I
hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to
all the people who have experienced such prolonged
pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore,
April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm
looking for now is authenticity, a way to write
something that sings and is true and real, that
doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings
it to life and honors those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top image: Kevin at Georgetown
University Hospital, January 2002, about three months
before he died.
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II:
Resonance
OK, OK,
OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a
family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that
had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was
going through my old stuff, looking for something,
saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get
after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I
haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I
did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my
mother, though Kevin's
absence would still be
palpable.
Sometimes
I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression.
Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in
the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning
various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I
prefer to
dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and
light.
I write about what resonates and I have a complex
relationship with both happiness and the past. The
past is always present for me; it informs the
present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with
great material. Don't even have to think about it. As
for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm
generally happy, except when I'm
not.
The hollows, shadowy,
cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is
meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough
patch here and there, a little complexity and strife
to make it more interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More
likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband
wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will
be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough
to eat.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one could
possibly cope with
losing a child. Or maybe it started before
then, in my first grief at nine over the death of
my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my
obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts.
Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by
the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline
Sheba, or the demise of acrobatic Regis, whose
neutering stitches became infected, or the abrupt
disappearance of Hector, my future ex-stepfather's
dog who had to be put to sleep because of his
epileptic fits.
The themes of death and grief and how we cope with
them have been on my mind, simmering under the
surface. I watched Kevin fade away in puffs of
canistered oxygen and piped-in morphine. I've had my
own sad mourning story, the first line written in the
Little House when I became responsible for someone
else's death, when what was left of my childhood was
stomped into flatness.
So when I just started writing without a plot in mind
for National Novel
Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I
shouldn't have been surprised at what was coming
out of my fingertips.
If I say anymore, I might just stop writing. I seem
to be on a roll and I don't want it to stop. And I
can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead Boys out of my head.
She wrote it after her 11-year-old son was killed in
a car accident. She had to go on living, because it
was her only real choice.
An
excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt
One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.
Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.
I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And
five days later cold.
Image
from Celestial
Dome.