Clouds and Lilac
I recently read about a formula for happiness developed by Mo Gawdat, an enigeneer and Google executive. Put simply, the formula is this: “Happiness is equal to or greater than the events of your life minus your expectation of how life should be.” Gawdat’s formula resonated with me as someone who has learned to accept a life less-than-perfect. “Why me?” I used to think. Now I say to myself, “Why not me?” Why did I assume that no tragedy would befall me? My expectations, pre-grief, were unrealistic. As the saying goes, “Into each life a little rain must fall.”
Today is the anniversary of my husband’s death. I posted a picture of him on Facebook this morning with one of my favorite quotations about grief: “The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.” (Colum McCann)
I thought about Gawdat’s formula as I got ready for work, the grey cloud of grief hovering closer and closer to my head. “Ugh, not again,” I thought. “Do I have to go through this every year?”
I looked at the weather forecast to help me decide what to wear. Sixty-nine degrees and cloudy, with rain possible this afternoon. It’s the weather, I thought. Just the weather alone brings me back to Anson’s death. It’s always so humid in the spring. It rains way too much– the air is cool but moist, my hair always falls in my face, and I’m sick of wearing sweaters! When will it be summer?!
The temperatures, the rain, the smell of lilac– all of it brings me back to the week of his accident. We were separated at the time, and my son was just about to graduate from high school. During the night of May 23rd, I had a dream about my son– he was floating down a river, buoyed by a puffy red jacket that was acting like a raft. I was walking quickly along the side of the river watching him and he was calling to me “Look mom! Look at me!” He was happy and excited to be moving so fast. Then he floated toward some rapids and he was suddenly pulled down into a whirlpool. I could see his red jacket, but his head and face were under the water, and I couldn’t reach him to help him. More water– the uncontrollable river of life rushing on, my son drowning in the changes thrust upon him by life and his imperfect parents. My heart raced and I woke up in a sweat. I went to school the next day, May 24th, feeling anxious and tired. The day slogged on. And at 10:00 that night, the police knocked on my door to tell me that Anson had been in a car accident and had not survived.
The cool and humid weather of spring brings back those memories almost subconsciously. As I looked through my closet this morning, I thought “the word to describe spring in the Berkshires is ‘bloated.'” It’s almost oppressive– the cool humidity, the clouds, the smell of lilac. Graduation weekend is always wet. The students and parents stand in puddles of wet grass or inside the pavilion if it is still raining. I taught at the high school for 20 years, I should know this by now. This is spring in the Berkshires. Do I expect something else?
Maybe I do– maybe I’m hoping for the dry, cool springs of my childhood in Indiana. The end of school, when you are a child, means carefree days of sun, grass, swimming, bikes, and fireflies. What lightness! Is that what I’m expecting? Am I lowering my happiness by expecting spring to be something that it is not?
And then we add grief–can I learn to accept that I will feel this oppressiveness every year around this anniversary? Will I be happier if I don’t expect to feel better in May, just because the days are longer and there’s no snow on the ground? I don’t want to set myself up to feel bad, but would I feel less sad if my expectations for how my life is “supposed to be” made room for grief? Spring in the Berkshires is cool, it is wet, it is overcast with clouds and grief and it smells of lilac. So be it.
Every, Every Minute
Last night at a dance, a friend of mine asked me why I hadn’t been out lately. I knew I would hear this question– I had been dancing only once since February and here it is mid-May. I told him it was because I had been feeling more and more lonely at dances and after them. Of course, he couldn’t understand that feeling as dances are social events and because he is married, so he dances and then goes home with his wife of 35 years. I tried to describe the odd loneliness that comes from being single at 52, being hit on by married men or men much too young for me, and he told me I should consider it a compliment that men find me attractive. Then he said what many of my married friends have said to me: “If something happened to my spouse, I don’t think I would even bother with dating. I’d be happy to be alone.”
I said this too once, to a single friend of mine. I regret saying it now, although, at the time it felt true to me. That idea– that after 35 years of marriage he would be happy being alone– falls into the same category as “You don’t need a man,” and “Aren’t you lucky to be able to do your own thing?” Well intentioned sentiments, but they miss the mark for me.
First of all– I know there are true introverts in the world who relish their alone time. I like some alone time too. And maybe there are people in the world who truly don’t want to live with another person for the remainder of their years on earth. Could be. I’m just not one of them.
Secondly, as a person fascinated by social psychology, I know that we are social creatures. We like contact with other humans. Solitary confinement kills our souls. This is not just a matter of personal preference, this is who we are as a species. To tell someone “You don’t need a man” is true– I don’t need a man to complete me or to make me “valid” as a human being– but it ignores the basic instinct that I have as a hetereosexual woman to be in contact with a mate. I won’t pretend that I don’t have that drive.
And lastly, what bothers me about people’s well-intentioned admonitions is this: I don’t think married people understand what it means to be alone for years at a time. I don’t think people can fathom what it means to come home to an empty house day after day after day after day after day. Not just for a week or two while your spouse is away on a business trip, but day after day after day stretching out with no end in sight. In my world, the sweetest four words I can think of are “How was your day?” If I could just hear those four words every day– how rich I would be!
Last summer, my dance teacher asked me to dance with him at “Third Thursday”–a street party in our city that happens every summer. I was thrilled– not only would I get to dance on stage, but we would be promoting our new dance group and maybe inspiring people to take up salsa. There was a live band playing, and several of the people from our class danced in the streets while Alan and I danced on stage. Other women came up and danced on stage with him too, and then we all joined in a conga line and wove through the audience and around the street picking up willing spectators as we went. It was exhilarating– the band fed off of our energy and vice versa, the audience cheered for us and smiled, we had a blast and people were impressed by our skills. After the performance, people from our class stood around and talked with the members of the band and each other. Alan’s whole family was there– his wife and four of their kids, including their new baby. His aunt and uncle were visiting from Spain as well. We talked for a few minutes and then the kids started tugging on Alan’s hand and asking for food, so the whole family set off together looking for dinner. The other students from class found their significant others in the crowd and two by two, they wandered away. I found myself standing in the middle of the street alone as the next performers set up on stage. Should I walk around Third Thursday alone? I wondered. I went half a block up the street looking for a food vendor, and then felt awkward, so I turned around and went to my car. I drove home feeling a wave of loneliness building. What a blessing to have someone who you can turn to and say “How did I do?” or “Did you see that??” To hear someone say “You were awesome! You did great!” Such a simple exchange.
How many people notice those exchanges as they happen? I’m often reminded of the line from “Our Town” when Emily goes back to a normal morning from her childhood and watches her family interacting. She says to the Stage Manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” He responds: “No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.” Well, I am definitely not a saint and I am sure I lack the patience to be a poet, but here again is one of the gifts of grief– to appreciate those small, every day exchanges and niceties that so many people miss or take for granted. To my married friends, I say this: You may not be able to help me find a partner in life, but please–at least–as a favor to me–be grateful. Realize life– and love–while you live it– every, every minute.
A Son By Any Other Name…
Choosing names for our children was– like so much of our marriage–a struggle. Looking back, some of the memories make me laugh. When I became pregnant for the first time, my husband and I were wanna-be hippies planning a home birth. We toyed with names like “River” for a boy, and “Honesty” or “Cadence” for a girl. My mother went apoplectic when she heard “River” and told us we should name the baby “Oliver” if it was a boy and “Olga” if it was a girl. Since our last name started with O, the child’s initials would have been “OO” which she thought was hysterical. Anson and I agreed to never discuss the topic with her again.
But that was about all we could agree on. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I had a rush of insterest in family history. I loved the name Margaret which was my grandmother’s name. She represented the Irish-Catholic side of my heritage and her intense love of family was one of the traits I admired about her. I suggested naming the child Margaret and calling her Maggie. Anson didn’t like that idea, saying “If we’re going to call her Maggie, let’s just name her Maggie.” But I wanted to honor my grandmother who went by Margaret all her life. So I stupidly put away the name “Maggie.” I also had a beloved great-aunt, Kitty, who had spunk and energy and humor– her full name was Katharine, and I had always loved the name Katie for a girl. Again, “If w’ere going to call her Katie, let’s just name her Katie.” We ended up naming her Kate Elizabeth, and even so, we called her Katie. (Isn’t that the same as naming her Katherine and calling her Katie?) I wish now that I had pushed harder for my choices– but I was young, insecure, and didn’t want to fight about it.
With my second pregnancy, I looked through my family tree and scrapbooks my older relatives sent me. One of the richest stories about my own family came from a couple– Daniel and Katherine Heffernan– who moved to Indiana from Ireland in the 1800’s. I loved the name Daniel– it reminded me of the gentle Daniel Tiger on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and the song by Elton John. My grandmother Margaret had a brother named Daniel and the name Danny to me sounded confident and dashing. Anson rejected Danny because he had been bullied by a boy named Danny as a kid. Again, I didn’t want to fight, and I let Danny go.
I think it’s important to mention that I was surrounded by his family. We actually lived next door to his parents, and his sister and her family were 15 minutes away. My family was spread out all over the country– New Mexico, Florida, Georgia and Indiana. We were dirt poor, and travel is expensive. When I asked to spend more time with my family, my husband said he didn’t enjoy being around my family. His mother literally said to me once “Yes, but….our family is better.” So I guess I didn’t feel like I could win in these discussions. There was so much psychic support behind him and his preferences, and so little behind mine, I felt. So I turned to his family history.
In my husband’s family tree, I noticed that there had been someone named Anson Jonathan in every century. It started with a Nathan, who named his son Jonathan, who named his son Anson Jonathan in the 1700’s. There was an Anson Jonathan in every century after, although Anson, my husband, did not have the middle name Jonathan. I was in the midst of my American Studies degree and I had just learned that, in the 1700’s, John was the stereotypical name used for a British citizen (as in John Q. Public) and Jonathan was the stereotypical American name. So Jonathan, for me, represented American culture, and it reminded me of apples and apple trees, which are connected to my father in my mind. So we agreed on Anson Jonathan. Neither of us wanted to use “big Anson” and “little Anson,” or “Anson, senior” and “Anson, junior.” We toyed with Andy and A.J., but we finally settled on calling him Jonathan, which I came to love.
Still, my son’s legal name is Anson Jonathan, and when he transferred schools in the seventh grade, his teachers called him Anson. He never corrected them, whether out of shyness or preference I’m not sure. But here and there, people started calling him Anson to my surprise. When he and his dad started working together at a ski area, my then fourteen year-old son had a badge that said “Jonathan.” The next year, he asked for “Jon” on his badge. And the next year, it was “Janson.” Then his dad, Anson, died.
Jonathan started community college and introduced himself as Anson from the start. He told his cousins and other relatives to start calling him Anson. I remember when he officially “came out” to them as Anson and the discussion we had later, just the two of us. I explained to him the family history I had wanted to preserve and the way his dad had rejected my ideas for baby names. I told him about how hard it would be for me to call him by his dad’s name– for many reasons. His dad was an alcoholic, our marriage was difficult from day one. We had been separated when he died and his behavior had been erratic and hurtful. He died in a car accident– suddenly, tragically, unnecessarily. I know my son loved his dad and misses him terribly. But I just can’t bring myself to call him by that name.
I don’t know what to do with all this. I still call my son Jonathan, or J. He says he’s fine with it. His cousins and aunts and uncles on his dad’s side call him Anson. I’m sure it brings them comfort and pride. My siblings and their children, who he rarely sees, call him Jonathan. This morning, my brother saw a post on Facebook and aksed me why my son was using the name Anson. And here it is all back again–what struggles are worth arguing over? What can we bend on? Now it is his name, his identity. I absolutely respect that. But what if I just can’t call him by that name?
Silver
I sat down today to look at my silver. I have two sets now– my mother’s tarnished silver, which I inherited last year when she died, and my mother-in-law’s set, which she gave me after her daughter and son said they didn’t want it. My in-laws are moving from their home of more than 30 years, passing on and throwing away bits and pieces of their past.
My mother’s set is incomplete and very plain– “Hannah Hull” is the style, and like my mother was, it is very practical and unadorned. It came in a beautiful dark, wooden box with my mother’s initials– JNH–in felt on the inside of the lid. My mother-in-law’s set is more delicate and has fine ornamentation– nothing ostentatious– and I feel it is more like me. The box it comes in is cleanly organized, but the bottom is falling out, and my plan was to switch the two sets so that my mother-in-law’s set is in my mother’s box.
The flimsy box has a pamphlet in it from the early 50’s when my mother-in-law got married. “The Care of Your Silver” from the International Silver Company of Meriden, Connecticut. It is basically an advertisement for International Silver Polish. There is also a small card from some relatives– “A Wedding Gift” with a blonde bride in flowing white half obscuring the groom’s face. A small silver insert shows through the cut-out church window and the inside reads: “To shower you with wishes / For happy years together, / And sunshine always in your hearts / No matter what the weather!”
It is raining today. It has been raining since last night, and it is cool for July 4th. The room I sit in is filled with the few possessions I brought back from my mother’s apartment in New Mexico a year and a half ago. I have a picture of her and my dad on their wedding day framed and sitting on the dresser here. They look like teenagers to me in that picture, so young and so thin and so innocent. This room also holds the files of my late husband– the paperwork he had in his apartment when he died. His ashes still sit in the box from the funeral home.
I look at the wedding card and the silver in my mother-in-law’s box and I look at my mother’s plain and sturdy silver on the floor next to it, and I start to cry. I wonder if those women– both married in the fifties– felt that the weight and richness of this silver would sustain their marriages? The idea of marriage seems so simple in these images from the 50’s– get a husband, get a set of silver, have children– and everything else will fall into place! My husband and I shunned these kinds of gifts when we were getting married– saw them as materialistic and unnecessary. But how many times have I wished I had this nice heavy silverware for my table! It seems so solid and long-lasting– is that what my marriage lacked? Tradition? Stability?
My mother, with her no-nonsense approach to life, left my father when I was thirteen, thumbing her nose at the 1950’s era model of family life and insisting that women don’t need a man in their lives to be happy. For her, the weight of the silver was a burden that connected her to her past– the snobby east coast, Vassar, and her parents’ expectations. She lived alone in New Mexico for twenty years, painting the landscape and smoking like a chimney until her silver became tarnished from lack of use and the box it came in became sticky from the bacon-greased, cigarette smoky air of her apartment.
My mother-in-law’s silver is clean and polished. We used it at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the 20 years she hosted them. How can she part with it? I do know that her heart was not always filled with sunshine in the almost 60 years she has been married. But the silver served her well. That I cannot deny. She has taught me more about love than anyone else in my life.
And did my mother’s austerity serve her well? I think I am crying because I do not believe it did. I see my mother’s plain silver and remember her eyes rolling at other people’s frivolity. Then I remember her cramped and dirty apartment, so far from the people who loved her, and I wish, instead, that she had used the silver, polished it, laid it out on the table and invited us in for dinner. She was not meant to be June Cleaver, that I know. But I wish she had not shut herself away in a box.
So, I will take her silver out of the box and I will put my mother-in-laws silver in. I will take my mother’s no-nonsense grit and strength as I navigate my own years of loneliness since my husband’s death. I will take my mother-in-law’s delicate, well-used silver and I will use it– that’s all– just USE it, to serve my children a meal when they are home. To share food with good friends. To be with people with love.
Fuddy-duddy
Being a 49 year-old high school teacher has its pluses and minuses. The kids do keep me young– they are funny and energetic and curious– most of them. But as I age and go through the hard knocks of life, they never get more than four years older. My students are always between the ages of 14 and 18– I’m always swimming in the same adolescent stage– the crucible of conformity, identity formation, and burgeoning sexuality. The older I get, the further away I get from their hormonal, anxious lives.
When I first started teaching, I felt young. I was 32 and I had a 3 year-old son, a 6 year-old daughter, and a teenage step-daughter. I remember supervising detention and listening to the high school kids talk about their plans and dreams and complaints about life. One young man was talking about his dream to open up a clothing store that would sell only “cool” clothes. “Like what?” I asked. And he said “Nothing these people are wearing.” I looked around and saw a room full of denim and sweatshirts, and said “What do you mean? You’re all dressed in jeans.” He rolled his eyes, pointed to the person next to him, and said “You don’t get it. My pants are NOTHING like his. Look at the hem on his pants!” Then he mumbled to himself, “Old people, jeez…” I realized at that point that aging is not a choice; no one wakes up one day and says, “I’m going to be a fuddy-duddy from now on!” The young people come up underneath you and push you into that status. They think they’ve invented the world, and your insistence that you will never get old means nothing to them. Our music, the rebellious rock-and-roll that made Tipper Gore’s hair stand on end? They’ve never heard of it, or they think it’s “boring.” The dancing that made parents in the fifties keep their daughters home at night? Child’s play.
That first year of teaching, a student wrote an article for the newspaper in which she used the term “clueless adults.” I had to chuckle in a stupefied way– clueless? Really? Had this high school junior ever applied for a mortgage? Bought a car? Paid her taxes? Now, at the age of 49, the idea that I’m “clueless” seems even more sadly comical. I’ve been through a 21-year marriage with a man who struggled with many demons. I’ve raised two children and watched them learn to crawl and walk and face the world, fail, get back up, cry, and move on. I’ve seen a man broken by love for his daughter and I’ve seen people being horribly mean to the ones who love them the most. Nasty politicians, hypocrisy, senseless wars.
I chaperoned the prom last weekend, and I couldn’t stay in the room with the dancers because their dance moves were so sexually suggestive. My colleague told me “You’re getting old!” and I agree that I am. But why is that statement tinged with a warning? I don’t want to get old and obsolete. I want to stay in tune with the world and its changes. But getting older is not simply a series of losses. I have gained such insight from what I have been through.
I see subtlety and nuance in the world that I would never have seen in my twenties. As I search for “true love” since my husband’s death, I am surprised by the way my concept of love has changed. I love my husband in spite of his demons and in spite of the pain we went through together. I love his parents and sister and brother. I love the men who dance with me, who are willing to share an embrace with me on the dance floor even though I am not young, not their spouse, not the best dancer in the world. I love the women I tutor who endure hardships that Americans do not understand. I love my father with all his eccentricities, and I forgive him for his human frailties.
The smallest gestures of kindness can have such deep meaning– a thank you, the holding of a door. The smallest details can be masterpieces of beauty– the fog on the river in the morning as I drive to work and the perfect V of ducks parting the water.
And then there’s sex. After 21 years of marriage, sex took on many different meanings. It was passionate, athletic, fun, and sweaty, but it was also tender, deeply loving, and vulnerable. As a non-religious person, I found that my sexual relationship with my husband was the closest to a spiritual experience I had ever had– a feeling of unity with something greater than myself and the most profound sharing of love I had witnessed. To make love to someone who is attractive and loving, who makes you laugh and who shares in life’s joys– that is easy. To continue to make love to a person with whom you fight, argue, cry over, who frustrates you, who knows how to push your buttons– to continue to LOVE that person–that takes great strength and maturity. Our sex life was a reflection of all that.
One year, when I taught the novel Catcher in the Rye, we discussed the scene in which Holden sees a couple in another building spitting water on each other. Holden says “I really don’t understand sex,” and a young man in my class said “How can he not understand sex? What is there to understand?” I just shook my head. These are the things I want so badly to explain to my students but just can’t. I said to him “Come see me in 15 years and tell me what you think.” Watching my students “grinding” on the dance floor makes me feel the same way. They lack subtlety; there’s so much they have to learn about intimacy and tenderness, about fog on the river, about love.
These are the appreciations of life that only experience and age can impart. This richness is the prize for aging. It is not flashy, it is not loud. It would not make a good music video for Beyonce. But I would never trade it for youth.
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