Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (3 page)

For instance, this morning I dreamed I was in the cabin, boxing up things for a move. This very morning, God is my witness. I thought I was alone, but my younger brother kept showing up to help me with the move, taking furniture and books out to a borrowed truck. He drove me to my new cottage, near Agate Beach, where we spent our childhoods walking with our parents, looking for sea glass and fossilized bits of whale bone, peering into tide pools, sometimes falling in. The new cottage was warm and shabby chic, but each time we went back to the old cabin for another load, my heart
ached with what a great little place it had been. After unloading the boxes of books from the truck, we climbed into my 1959 Volkswagen Bug and I drove us to a gathering of sober alcoholics in the old town library. There were the familiar worn hardwood floors, and candles and the lifelike plastic flowers you see on Buddhist altars. There was a man in the parking lot selling
eighteen
varieties of real yellow flowers from a flatbed truck. Then an ancient German woman, whose groceries I’d been carrying because she seemed frail, opened my VW by sharply wrenching the door handle, which had apparently been stuck. She said to me, “Oh, this sometimes happens to my cars, too. It will be fine for the time being. Thank you for your help.”

I said, “You are quite welcome.” And I awoke.

I
n May 1992, I went to Ixtapa with my son, Sam, who was then two and a half. At the time, my best friend of twenty years, named Pammy, had been battling breast cancer for two years. I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me. Then, in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement. The grief was huge, monolithic.

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief;
the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it. San Francisco is a city in grief, we are a world in grief, and it is at once intolerable and a great opportunity. I’m pretty sure that only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed—which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace. I began to learn this when Sam and I returned to the same resort three months after Pammy’s death.

I took him back partly for reasons of punctuation. He was different this time, though. We both were. I had discovered that I could just barely live without Pammy. Whenever I went to her house to visit her daughter, Rebecca, I heard Pammy’s flute, remembered exactly the yellow of her hair, felt stalked by her absence, noted by it. It was like the hot yellow day that Faulkner describes in
Light in August
as “a prone and somnolent yellow cat,” contemplating the narrator. At any moment, the cat might suddenly spring.

Also, I was a little angry with men at the time, and scared; in the aftermath of the romantic loss, my heart felt like it had a fence surrounding it. Now
Sam seemed to be standing with me behind this fence; he seemed to feel safe only around me. He was sweet and friendly but shyer, no longer the social butterfly he had been the year before, when Pammy had still been alive. Back then I could leave him all day in the resort’s child-care program. This time he was clingy and heavily Oedipal. I began to call myself Jocasta; he began to call me darling.

The first year, I’d come here alone with Sam. I mostly swam and ate by myself, walking into the dining area three times a day feeling shy and odd, cringing, with my arms stiffly at my sides like Pee-wee Herman. But this year I was with my friend Tom, an extremely funny Jesuit and sober alcoholic, who drank like a rat for years and smoked a little non-habit-forming marijuana on a daily basis. He also did amyl nitrate, although he said that this was just to get to know people.

His best friend, Pat, was along, too. I found that I could hardly stand for people to have best friends who were still alive. But when Sam and I had breakfast with both of them at the airport the morning we left for Mexico, they made me laugh and forget myself.

Pat is a very pretty woman in her late forties who is about a hundred pounds overweight, and sober seven years.

“Pat has a lot of problems,” Tom told us over breakfast.

“This is true,” said Pat.

“She was sober for four years,” he continued, “until her husband got brain cancer. Then for a few years she had a little social Tylenol with codeine every day, with the merest slug of NyQuil every night for a cold that just wouldn’t go away.”

“I was a little depressed,” she said.

After breakfast, we flew to Ixtapa. Adobe haciendas, cobblestone paths, a long white beach, palm trees, bougainvillea, warm ocean water—and no one back home desperately hoping I’d call.

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence. I was hoarse for the first six weeks after Pammy died and my romance ended, from shouting in the car and crying, and I had blisters on the palm of one hand from hitting the bed with my tennis racket, bellowing in pain and anger. But on the first morning in Mexico, the lazy
Susan stopped at feelings of homesickness, like those I had when my parents sold the house where I grew up.

I woke before Sam and lay in my bed in the cool, white adobe room, filled with memories of my first day there the year before. I remembered calling Pammy and my lover that first morning, how they gasped with pleasure to hear my voice. I lay there thinking this time that I had made a dreadful mistake to return, that I was not ready to laugh or play or even relax, and I wondered whether God had yet another rabbit He or She could pull out of the hat. Then my Oedipal little son woke up and hopped over to my bed. He patted my face for a while and said tenderly, “You’re a beautiful girl.”

The year before, when I dropped him off at the thatched child-care unit, we’d walk holding hands, and on the way he’d cry out joyfully, “Hi, Sky, my name is Sam. I yike you,” because he couldn’t say his
l
’s. “Hi, Yeaf,” he’d say happily to the leaves, “my name is Sam. I yike you.” It seemed very long ago. This year he looked at me all the time like a mournful fiancé and said, “I want to kiss you on the
y
ips.”

On the third day in Mexico, Tom told me that Jung said, sometime after his beloved wife died, “It
cost me a great deal to regain my footing. Now I am free to become who I truly am.” And this is God’s own truth: The more often I cried in my room in Ixtapa and felt just generally wretched, the more often I started to have occasional moments of utter joy, of feeling aware of each moment shining for its own momentous sake. I am no longer convinced that you’re supposed to get over the death of certain people, but little by little, pale and swollen around the eyes, I started to feel a sense of reception, that I was beginning to receive the fact of Pammy’s death, the finality. I let it enter me.

I was terribly erratic, some moments feeling so holy and serene that I was sure I was going to end up dating the Dalai Lama. Then the grief and craziness would hit again, and I would be in Broken Mind, back in the howl.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away. After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes. It was like giving a dry garden a good watering.

Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life,
of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, achieving as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t for me, although I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood-altering. The bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will want to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination.

Every afternoon when I’d pick Sam up at the kids’ club, it was as if he’d spent the day in a workshop on Surviving the Loss of Your Mother. When I’d appear Lazarus-like to take him back to our room, his joy was huge. We always stopped to watch the iguanas that gathered on the grass near
the lagoon, the giant adults like something out of
Jurassic Park
, the babies from Dr. Seuss. They were so wonderfully absurd and antediluvian that it was like communion among you and them and something ancient.

We spent a lot of time in our room, too. It was air-conditioned. Sam, so solemn and watchful, frequently brought up the last time he had seen Pammy, on Halloween, three days before she died. He was dressed as a sea monster, and he sat on her bed and they sang “Frère Jacques” together. He went over and over the facts of the evening: “She was in her jammies?” “Yes.” “I was in my sea monster costume?” “That’s right.”

I thought a lot about the effect of Pammy’s death on Sam, my own stunned attempts with that, the worry he voiced every few days that if Rebecca’s mother could die, then wasn’t it possible that his could, too? I somehow felt that all I had to offer was my own willingness to feel bad. I figured that eventually the tectonic plates inside me would shift, and I would feel a lessening of the pain. Trying to fix him, or distract him, or jolly him out of his depression would actually be a disservice. I prayed for the willingness to let him feel sad and displaced until he was able to stop slogging
through the confusion and step back into the river of ordinariness.

The sun beat down, the hours passed slowly to the drone of the air conditioner. I kept starting to cry and then falling asleep. Sometimes grief looks like narcolepsy.

One afternoon in our room I had been crying a little, while Sam dozed in his own bed. Then I fell deeply asleep. I woke much later to find Sam standing by my bed, tugging at my sleeve, looking at me earnestly with his huge googly extraterrestrial eyes. He cleared his throat and then said something I guess he must have heard on TV. He said, “Excuse me, mister.”

It made my heart hurt. I thought I was going to die. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman wrote, “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.”

There was a man at the resort with a prosthetic leg. I’d seen it lying around by the pool a few times before I actually saw him, and when I did, he was climbing a trapeze ladder in the circus grounds. Circus school was held at the resort every afternoon at three, on the lawn between the haciendas and the beach, using an elaborate rig of ropes and swings and netting. The man, whose name turned
out to be Steve, was wearing shorts, and his stump was visible an inch or two below the hemline—and I’ve got to say that this kicked the shit out of my feeling self-conscious in shorts because of my cellulite and stretch marks.

He climbed the ladder with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung, focused and steady and slow. Then he reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze as he swung back and forth, finally letting go. A teacher on the other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on, and swung back and forth for a while. Then the man dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in victory. “Yes!” he said, and lay there on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.

I approached him shyly at lunch the next day and said, “You were great on the trapeze. Are you going to do it again?” And I had this idea that he might, so that I could do some serious writing about spirit and guts and triumph. But all he said was, “Honey, I got much bigger mountains to climb.”

Life does not seem to present itself to me for
my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere. Now, at this stage of my life, I understand just enough about life to understand that I do not understand much of anything. You show me a man with one leg climb up a trapeze ladder, and the best I can do is to tell you that when I saw him, he was very focused and in a good mood.

The next day I saw his plastic leg lying on a beach towel at the far end of the beach, where the windsurfing lessons take place. Oh dear, I thought. The shoelace of the expensive sneaker on the foot of the plastic leg was untied. I went and tied it, and then sat down in the sand. I really wanted to ask how he’d lost his leg and how he got back on his feet, when one was now made of plastic. I remembered how, a few months before Pammy died, we read a line by the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” Pammy and I talked at the time of a sunken ship on the bottom of the ocean, full of jewels and gold; it was there in the heightened sense of existence and of the sacred that we felt in the midst of the devastation of her illness. It was there in the incredible sense of immediacy and joy we had felt some days
toward the end, cruising malls and parks, Pammy in her wheelchair, wearing a wig, lashing me with a blue silken scarf to go faster. I sat on the beach hoping to see the man again, thinking of how much we lose yet how much remains, but it was getting late and I needed to go pick up Sam, and I left before Steve returned.

My new friend Pat had gone snorkeling almost every afternoon and loved it more than any other activity, although because of her weight it was impossible for her to climb back into the boat unaided. On the day before we left Mexico, I decided to give it a try. The snorkel boat left at three in the afternoon and took a group of people to a cove twenty minutes across the bay. Over lunch, though, I started to chicken out, until Pat said I had to go, that we couldn’t be friends if I didn’t. “Then tell me what you love most about it,” I said. She thought for a while, and a faraway, almost sensuous look came over her face. “I like picking out the guys who are going to help push my big, wet, slippery body back up the ladder onto the boat,” she said slowly.

Tom and I ended up going together. The little cove was hidden around the corner from a beach with grass huts and umbrellas on the white sands; cactuses on the ancient neighboring hills framed
it all. We donned our gear and jumped in. The water is not crystal clear, and there are not a million brilliantly colored fish to watch, but if there is a heaven—and I think there really may be one—it may be similar to snorkeling: dreamy, soft, bright, quiet.

At first my breath underwater sounded labored and congested, like the Keir Dullea character’s in
2001: A Space Odyssey
when he’s in the pod outside the mother ship. I floated off by myself. Then, in the silence, I felt for a while as if I were breathing along with everything in the world. It is such a nice break from real life not to have to weigh anything. Beautiful plants swayed in the current; funny little fish floated past.