Two Too Many

A few of you following this raggedy little blog may know that I have been dealing with the inevitable loss of a very dear online friend, George. Well, on Sunday night I got home and logged on to learn that George's struggle was over. He is gone from us.

There are many of us scattered across the globe, from Liverpool to Puerto Rico, who have been struggling with this. How can you define a friendship, let alone grieve such a friendship, when it primarily existed in the spaces between the ones and zeroes out in the ether of an online community? And yet here we all are striving to do that very thing while trying to grapple with a very real sense of deep loss and sorrow.

I have said before, and will say again, that online communities are the very definition of a "meeting of the minds." There is a purity of communication unmarred by pheromones or hormones or physical distraction that cannot be found anywhere else. Pen pals do not loom large in the physical realm and so their words can be truly absorbed, taken into account, and accepted free of any other consideration. And now we have all lost a great mind, a great friend, a good voice stilled before we had heard all that we wanted to hear. It is strange and hard and the reality seems cruelly surreal.

Tonight I received a phone call that has shocked me to stillness. Another death, this time wholly unexpected. A good, kind, gentle and generous man, a man I worked with four days a week, died suddenly. John had a heart attack, I am told.

What am I to make of all this? One death would be too many. Two deaths in the space of three days? It is too much. It is two too many.

The truly notable thing about all of this is that one loss feels no different than the other. Each of these good men left their mark on my life, on my heart in their own unique way, and the disbelieving grief I feel is the same in both situations. There is a hole in my life where these two voices used to be. I am poorer today by the loss of two good friends. And no matter how I met them and knew them, I did know them. I was fortunate enough to know them.

I am so sad. I am so lucky. I got to tell each of them how special they were to me before it was too late. In fact, one of the last things I said to my friend John before he left the last time I saw him was how glad I was that I knew him, how glad I was that he was with us and doing all the things he did for everyone. And George? I got the chance to call and talk to him in Hospice, and I got to thank him for being my friend.

Thank you both, gentlemen. You were good, gentle men. I will miss you both and I will take your friendships with me through the rest of my life with gratitude.

Good night.

I love you, Infinity

I was talking to my aunt on the phone this evening. She's had a rough time just lately; she's had to stand by and watch as several people she loved fought their battles, unable to lend anything but hope and sorrow as each won or lost their individual struggle.

So when she told me that she went to the beach to recharge her batteries, and that she felt more at peace and close to God there, I knew exactly what she meant and what the ocean had done for her, because it does the same for me, only in a different way.

When life is just too hard, when things have come to a place where I feel that the box full of emotions I keep locked tight inside me is about to burst its chains and spill forth on everyone around me, I make for the ocean. When I stand on the shore looking out to where the sky and the water become a place of mist and illusion, each echoing the other until they are an indistinct, twinned line, I feel as though my seemingly insoluble problems are a waste of infinite space and time.

When I watch the endless, repeating cycle of water lapping the shore, pulling away and overflowing back again forever and ever and ever, I think: How is it that I feel that my little problems are so large? On this scale, where these waters will come in and go away again until the Earth ceases to hold tight to the Moon, my worries are as fleeting as a breath.

When the wind blows the tingle of salt into every pore of my skin, chilling me and sealing out the babble of all of my more trivial thoughts, I am set free from old ideas and old fears. I am able to be alone inside my head, in some way more alone than at any other time. I am able to dispassionately view the things that have haunted and harried me and put them into perspective.

As an irreligious person, I don't feel the need to be close to a creator, but I do feel a great sense of wonder and awe that I am a part of such a beautiful, complex system as this shore, this world, this galaxy. My tiny little self is a part of something so immense, so wonderful, so amazingly complicated, I can't help but revel in that sense of delight, of oneness with all things. I can never forget that I am made of star-stuff:




Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected' (ft... by wamane


So when my auntie tells me she feels better and closer to God after her visit to the ocean, I get it. Oh, I get it. She was reminded of her part in the great Infinite, and how beautiful it is to get to be alive as a part of it all.

Actually, that makes me want to get away to the ocean myself, and as soon as I can. I need to refresh my sense of my place in the infinite, as well.

Guest Post: MAH BABY

You guys, you guys, my kid is a writer. Holy crap. Here is her composition for English class, called "How It Feels To Be Me." (I've changed names to protect the innocent, and she's going by Brel for the purposes of this post.) Share my joy! (Except the woman part. She's seventeen, so I DISAGREE with the woman part. But I'm a mom. What do you want from me?)

---

I often wonder what people think of me.

By often I mean constantly.

Constantly means when I'm taking a shower. When I'm getting on a bus. When I'm wrestling my coat into my locker. When I'm putting on makeup in public bathrooms.

Sometimes people say what they think of me, but when I hear it, I often decide they're wrong.

I've heard people call me a bitch. I'm not, though, really. I am a know-it-all, I am bossy, I do complain about people who irritate me. I don't go out of my way to hurt people. I don't talk about people behind their backs. In my little neighborhood between Martin Luther King and Dekum street, I learned better than that. I am not a bitch.

According to some I'm a hipster. After watching “Portlandia” I sincerely hope not. I don't think I have the holier-than-thou attitude hipsters come programmed with, and I don't own any old English riding boots or look good in tiny floral skirts.

I spend most (all) of my time with a group of boys. They spend all their time playing Magic™ and talking about their Dungeons and Dragons™ characters. Looking at my friends, it'd make sense for me to be a nerd.

But guess who isn't a nerd?

I'm not so lost in a fantasy world that I can condone myself blowing off priorities and failing classes. I'm not so tangled up in a game that I allow myself to spend upwards of thirty dollars a week on cards. Where I come from, in a little red house full of brown-skinned abuela and a blonde-haired mama, I learned better than that.

People seem surprised when I say I have Latino heritage. I don't think it's so hard to believe. I've actually found myself in arguments over the subject—“Shut up, Brel, you are not Mexican.” I didn't say I was. “You are not Hispanic.” Yes, actually. “You ain't got nothin' but white in you.” You don't know me.

It's almost worse when people believe me, especially adults. It seems like after the fact is public that I'm Hispanic, people expect something different from me—like somehow my entire self changes because they know my racial background.

Well, where I come from, where half the people around me are white Southerners and the other half Hispanic Coloradans from Pueblo, I learned better than that.

If I'm none of these things, then what am I?

I'm a big sister. If I was asked my best friend, I'd say [redacted] or [redacted] or [redacted] (sorry, readers, protecting the innocent, etc. - M.). If I was asked who I'll love for the rest of my life with no conditions, I'd say my baby sister. In a way, she's also my baby. She's my number one inspiration, second to none. She's made of the same stuff I am, only different—she got more of the Southerners, with her honey hair and sturdy body. She's gonna grow up and be tougher than me, but right now she's just irritating, aggravating, impossible, and the best thing my parents ever gave me.

I'm a woman. I'm not a little girl anymore, but sometimes the veil that separates is blown aside, and I can be both for awhile. It takes a woman to look at a situation and say “Let's make the best of this” and then do it. It takes a woman to run interference between a group of seven teenage boys and three teenage girls. It takes a woman to know exactly what to do when [redacted]'s carsick and [redacted]'s homesick and [redacted]'s just plain sick. Where I come from, kitty-corner from J. and her five kids and their however-many kids, across the street from M., down the street from C., and with a little sister of my own, I learned that.

I'm a singer. I sing in multiple choirs and multiple bands, as well as being notorious at home for loud, midnight-showertime concerts. I know how to croon jazz, I know how to open up and sing opera, I can turn my vocal vibrato on and off. I am in the honor choir at my school, I am part of a family that is held together by music. Where I come from, singing bluegrass while stacking dishes into a cabinet, I learned that.

I'm a Brel. I don't know what a Brel is really, but am I supposed to yet? It sure seems to me that if I knew exactly what I was already, there'd be no reason for me to live.

That's how it feels to be me. It feels like nobody knows, not even me yet, and by the time I've figured out what I am, I'll have lived that definition out. It feels like a book where the end's gone and got lost, and now I've got to go find it. It feels for all the world like I'm alive—and I wouldn't have it any other way.

SUNUVABEE!

Aw, HELL YES.

Tomorrow (well, really today, damn my cursed habit of staying up waaaay too late) I will take my newly-acquired tax refund dollars and I will go to the auto finance company and I will PAY OFF MAH LOAN, SUCKAS! OH, YES I WILL. Thank you, sir, I do not want another!

Then I will call the insurance company and instead of full coverage I will purchase a LIABILITY ONLY POLICY, thus dropping my rates by, oh, a billionty-thousand percent. UH-HUH, THAT'S WHAT I SAID.

Then I will go to the cell phone store and I will buy several months of service for our phone and reopen my older kid's phone account. The happy face I will be seeing when she gets out of school is going to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Then I will go out to my dad's house and pay him back, since he came to our rescue during the holidays, ensuring the kids had a Christmas and we had a roof over our heads (Giftmas 2010 was a real kick in the taint, friends. Oh, yes, it was).

After I get done paying off some other things? CLEAN SLATE, MAN. CLEAN. SLATE.

I can't tell you how glad I am this day has arrived. I can't tell you how hard it has been not to talk about the money and what we'd do with it - one of the truest things in life is that when you spend your money before it arrives, sixty other expenses will burst out of nowhere and mug you, thus making your financial planning a giant joke.

So yeah. I AM THRILLED. Joy is mine. The money won't be mine for more than a few days, but hey. It will have bought me happiness, for reals, and you know? I am more than okay with that.

HELL YES.

March Second

I love and miss you, my mama.

Today is the anniversary of your death. I was watching a show just now and somebody said, "Someday you'll be standing over a rock with your momma's name on it and it will be too late," and I just sprang a leak, silent sorrow dripping down my cheeks and causing one of those I'm-not-crying-no-really pressure headaches.

And it's a weird place I'm in, Mom. I still love you so goddamn much. I still miss you, even though I think we'd have beaten each other senseless several times had you lived into my young adult years. I still wish I had you to talk to. I still think that when you died I lost my very first unswerving ally, a person who, right or wrong, would have had my back without fail, without ceasing, without a question or a qualm.

But I don't hurt as much as I thought I would for some reason this year. I don't hurt as much as I used to. I don't know what that means, if it means I've healed some more or if I'm so numbed and callous that I am a terrible daughter to you and should be ashamed of myself. I don't know.

I just didn't want this day to go by without remarking on the fact that you aren't here. You deserve to be remembered. You deserve to be missed. You were an amazing, talented, beautiful and loving woman. You made mistakes. You hurt me. You were special and funny and I adored you and fuck, you adored me right back and I wish you were still here. I wish you were still here. I really, really do.

So yeah. Disjointed, goofy, repetitive and all, here's my shout to the world that you were here, mama. You were here and now you are not and I wish that wasn't true. Since it is, I do my best to deserve your love and respect even though you can't actually bestow them on me anymore. I am living up to you every day. Maybe, since that is so, I don't need to miss you, since I carry you with me always.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                            i fear 

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-E.E. Cummings

Old Wallpaper (With Hindsight Commentary Added)

Okay, kids, here's a selection of excerpts from one of the old posts I was talking about. I'll make some remarks in italics.

Monday, March 13, 2006
The Saddest Joy Of Motherhood

[My older child]'s going to be twelve in a few weeks, and man, is my mighty heart breaking.

I remember when I found out that yes, I was indeed with child. I thought my life was not only ruined, but just plain over; little did I know that I was about to meet the coolest human being ever born. Not to mention THE most beautiful, THE smartest, THE one person in the wide world who not only has my exact same sense of humor, but who also has not yet heard all my material, and so thinks I am the funniest woman alive. Is there anything better? Is there? No, I didn't think so.

(Ed. Note: these days, she actually does know all my material - and steals it at will. Can't decide whether to be flattered or sue her for copyright infringement. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, MAN! FREEEEDOMMMM!)

So the only downer to having the single most awesome baby on the face of the green earth is that somehow, the time slips away from you, and then that baby walks into the room one day and you realize that oh, nonono, she's as tall as you. And wears the same size shoes. And has zits and a tendency to burst into tears at the slightest change in the emotional temperature of the room, which you thought was your exclusive domain, dammit.

(Ed. Note: You will have seen this coming, since I wrote this five years ago, but shit, you guys, she's actually got inches on me these days - in the height and foot department. The kid is 17 now, after all.)

And when this happened to me, I asked myself: did I pay attention? Was I awake through all these years when she was growing tall and straight and strong? Because, see, I don't remember this coming on so quickly. It was just the other day that she was two or three or four months old, sitting in her high chair, and when I did 'peek-a-boo' she laughed for the first time. And stole my breath away.

It was such a beautiful, delicious, gurgly laugh, right up out of her round little baby belly, that it knocked me quite literally onto my ass. And I sat there and laughed, and she laughed some more, and we laughed together for that first time, and that was when I finally understood for really real that I have a kid, and thank you whoever's in charge, she likes me. And every time since then that I have been able to make her crack up, I think it again: praise be, my kid likes me. I mean, hey, most kids love their mom; but to have your kid like you - well, there isn't a good way to describe how grateful I am, still, to this day.

And I have a confession to make. Whenever somebody says to me, "Wow, she is so much like you," I am delighted. Not only is that a massive ego stroke that my kid is modeling herself after me, but the fact is, I know this girl, and she is so way cooler than me, way cooler than I was at her age, and so beautiful in ways that I never was and never will be. She is that one girl, the pretty girl that you think is going to be a total snot, who walks right up to you, looks you straight in the eye with an expression that says, "I know something good about you," grabs you by the hand, and says just the right thing to make you her friend for life. I know this. I have seen her do it a thousand times on a hundred playgrounds, and that right there is a gift I would have killed for in school. And that's just her natural self, and I marvel that an anti-social with reclusive tendencies like myself was able to bring this openhearted person into the realm.

But the true thing that makes my little girl the most beautiful and amazing girl ever the world did see? She's mine. My sweet baby that slept exclusively on my chest for the first six months of her life; my little punkin who made friends with the monsters under her bed rather than live in fear; my own sweet girl that I cuddled after shots while she sobbed and snuffled into my neck; my young lady who I sometimes don't recognize in a room full of family and friends, and when I realize that the strange woman I've been wondering about is my girl, my bright and shining girl, I get smacked in the heart by the weirdest combination of pride and sorrow. I know I did good, folks, the proof is there before me. But someday way too soon, some guy will trump me in the cool and funny department (too late - he's here and she's suffering from first love pangs constantly - fuck, this is hard to watch), she'll go off to college and get smarter than me (we're one year out and it isn't any easier to think about now), and all those ties, all this time that I've been living a happy dream with her, will be over. And I hate that I see it coming, but I am eager to find out who she will be.

(She is a delight. She is kind of an asshole, too, but that's because she's my kid and I raised her to not be afraid of being an asshole. Fearless and wonderful and gifted and kind and growing away from me by the minute.

This post, when I wrote it, was so direfully prophetic, and yet under all of the lamentation there is a wellspring of joy. She is so much of everything I hoped she would be, and so little of what I hoped she wouldn't. She is a gift, as is her sister, and I am so glad that these two were dealt to me in the shuffle. I am a fortunate being indeed.)

Falling

I still think about it when the leaves start changing colors. Not all at once, but bits and pieces, little flakes of color from the kaleidoscope, random scenes from that part of my life. Today it shook loose memories of a car ride and the first rumbles of the earth that signified the beginning of the end.

To be honest, I don't know why fall takes me there. I can't even remember what time of year it was when she got the diagnosis. All I remember is waiting in the car with a book, and seeing her come out of the doctor's office, pale and quiet and somehow smaller than she had ever seemed before. In my world, she loomed. Who am I kidding? She was the world. But on that day, she was almost a stranger, a frail and milky woman standing where my strong, scary, vibrant mother should have stood.

I don't remember what was said exactly, but I remember quickly decoding the cryptic speech they were using as Dad drove us toward home. I remember knowing, knowing, with a bladder-loosening terror, that it was bad. Really bad. As bad as when Grandma got sick; when Grandma died. That we were falling toward a dark, terrible place, and there was no way to stop the descent.

I remember that she said, "Stop me by the store. I can't deal with this without a beer. Just a couple, then I'll quit." She hadn't ever said anything like that before. Mom and beer, beer and Mom, that was the combo. And Salem Lights, of course.

Everything else from that day is a blur, but those few little vignettes keep popping into my head, driving me to my computer to pull up old Bob Dylan tracks (god, how she loved Dylan, and I love him, too, because she made him a part of the soundtrack of my childhood) and Judds songs and even, lord help us, Elvis singing "In The Garden," a song I hated off an album I hated by an artist I hated for most of my life. Tonight? It made me cry. And I listened to the whole song.

Tonight, Bob Dylan's harmonica and organ and weather-beaten drone sounded like lullabies, like connections to a pair of hands that I can no longer touch, to a lap in whose comfort my head will never again rest, to a face I will never see except in a kaleidoscope of pain and loss and lifelong lonely regret for all the things I will never get to ask her. Show her. Go to her for comfort over.

More than two thirds of my life have gone by since she died. You would think that all these memories would be shadows by now, vague things, and that the hurt and sheer solar plexus-punch gasping shock of it all would be gone away and over with by now. But it isn't. It isn't. It isn't.

It's still able to step up and stab me in the tender places, randomly, viciously, slyly. I can go for months without even thinking about it, and then it's in my face again, biting, bitter, freezing-hot and hideous.

I used to love the fall. I used to love the smells, the feel of the air, the gray skies. I used to look forward to the metamorphosis of the leaves and the first smoke from the chimneys and the ozone-scented streets after the first serious rain. Now I hate it all, because, regular as clockwork, the kaleidoscope kicks up another little shard of sorrow for me to cut myself on. And I bleed, and I cry, and I wonder: Will this ever ease? Will it ever not hurt? And what would that make me, if it didn't hurt me anymore?

Just another broken soul, falling, falling toward the dark?

I will accept the pain and the stealthy grief. But I will resent for the rest of my life the fact that death has stolen from me another thing that I love, and that it has done so across the span of time the way it has.

I don't have so many beloved people or ideals or dreams that I can afford to lose any more.

Invader

You insidious, hateful monster, how I loathe you.

Slowly, slyly, you spread your tendrils and coils through her brain, taking from her first this small memory, then that one. Then you steal her sense of recent things, making her ask for reassurance in a small, frightened voice every few minutes that she is indeed who she is, she is where she is, and inquire timidly who all these people are.

Stealthily, you stretch out your fog-filled hands, taking more and more in greater and greater portions until she sits, silent, tiny in her favorite chair, eyes dark with the shadows you've cast over her mind and spirit. I see the child you've left behind in her eyes, without even the comfort of knowing she will soon understand how it all works, because from moment to moment she forgets even that she would like to understand.

And then your friend attrition joins in, adding first one small problem, then another, then piling on still more, until her frail little body can't handle either the causes or the cures.

Meanwhile, we all watch, and mourn, and wait for the moment when we will be sorrowing and rejoicing at the same time; sorrowing because we have lost a beloved and beautiful being from our lives, rejoicing because she has won free of your filthy, vile fingers.

Oh, yes, I loathe you. I hope they find the way to destroy you very soon. We aren't alone in our vigil, not by a long way, and the fact that so many others know exactly how this feels just enrages me more, fuels my hatred. The only consolation I have is in knowing that you will die when your host does, and so you taint even a clean grief.

Someday we will find a way to bar you out, you invading filth, and I hope I am alive to witness it.

I will be waiting and hoping for just that very thing.