JANUARY 28, FOREVER

 

My mother Nina Naomi, born November 6, 1922-died May 25, 2005

My son, born January 28, 1972-died July 17, 2005

His daughter, born July 29, 2005

His nephew and our younger grandson, born January 28, 2005 

Everyone has a hardest year.  Ours was 2005. Our house was filled with love and grief so intertwined that swirling molecules of one collided with molecules of the other.  My mother was in a nursing home dying of cancer and her first born grandson could not visit her because he was dying of his own cancer. She was 82 and he was 33. My daughter had a 4-year old son and a baby born January 28 (today as I write this) the day her brother turned thirty-three. We have a photo of them together, our son, a tall man with soft light brown hair worn long in front--now bald from chemotherapy--and his nephew with the downy scalp, held high, matching bald head for bald head. Our son looks quizzical. 

Twelve days after our son's death, his daughter was born, a healthy amazing child with straight-up punk-style strawberry blonde hair. 

I still remember being in the hallway when a nurse asked me, is the new mother your daughter?  No, she's my daughter-in-law I said.  She made the connection and looked stricken for me. "Oh, I'm so sorry," touching my arm. 

But even then, just twelve days after our son's death, his daughter closed the circle. Our grief was cushioned by our love: for him, for her, for her mother.  Our daughter-in-law was sleep-walking.  She went from nursing a husband to nursing a baby; flush with all her new-mother hormones, yet asking God "why?"

I got through the day of the funeral holding the precious baby who had been born just six months before.  Our daughter handed him to me as we came home from the church, knowing who I needed to stay upright as friends came by. I focused on his silky soft head (99th percentile, his father bragged). By six months this baby boy was already saving a life.

From the moment of her birth our son's daughter filled the family with joy and admiration. She is a smart, willowy college junior.  As God's gift to her and to us, she has never shared our grief. She has her own knowledge of loss, I believe, but not with the depth of ours. When she holds out her arms for an embrace, no person is luckier than I.  

I am writing this small remembrance on January 28, the birthday of my son and my younger grandson.  Now, 21 years after the death of my son, it is my grandson who I awake thinking of.  His happy birthday, away from home in Scotland at St. Andrew's University, living his best life and sharing it during long phone calls, with us. 

In the midst of this remembrance of love and sadness, I get a call from our granddaughter.  It is Daddy's birthday, she says to me, and I am thinking of you.  Who raised such a girl I wonder.  How can she know I need her voice today?  

We are home with the flu and she drives partway up our icy drive, then walks the rest of the way carrying a bag of cough medicine and spicy Peruvian chicken.  She leaves it all on the back stoop and taps on the window and waves.  We are snowed in and feverish but now we have enough chicken, rice, beans and Robitussin to last till weekend. There are yucca chips in the bag too.  

The hardest year is long over.  We survived it.  We do, don't we?  Our daughter-in-law stayed a widow for ten years, until that no longer seemed right, and then married the man our granddaughter calls Dad.  But Daddy is still our son, a man who has filled her with his tenderness of spirit and so many other qualities.  More than any other feeling, I feel lucky and blessed.  I feel hope in the younger generations. I feel God's gifts in my marriage, in the snow softly falling again, in the candlelight glowing by my computer.   

In Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) said, "I can't go on.  I'll go on."  This is supposed to reflect the essence of human persistence despite despair, and it does.  But to Christians, surely a statement of God at our side. 

Thank you for reading.  Nina Naomi 

 

DEEP THOUGHTS FROM HARD LIVES

Sometimes the deepest thoughts come from those with the hardest lives.  Maybe always.  And what those with difficult lives touch in us are our vulnerable places;  places where, like it or not, through trial by fire our weaknesses become strengths. 

Look again at the poem I posted on December 21, 2021.  It's worth re-reading.  [I've spaced it differently here.]

 ONE ART

by Elizabeth Bishop (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956)

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.  The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.  The art of losing isn't hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.  I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.  

Elizabeth Bishop lost her father when she was an infant, her mother to mental illness just five years later and, as an adult, her lover to suicide.  Knowing this about her, we have no trouble believing that she's acquainted with the art of losing.  But mastered it?  As we read through the poem we begin to feel that she protests too much. 

Not that many of us have ever thought of surviving loss as an art.  Or a skill.  Bad luck maybe.  Inevitable.   And of course that comes through in her poem as the tension builds.  "Then practice losing farther, losing faster."  The pace clips along, the poet knowing that we--like she herself--have no choice.     

We can feel the apprehension in the poem.  For most of us, our loses do mount.  The predictable loss of objects of course, but then memories ("places, and names") and keepsakes (the watch), the future (trips we envisioned), the past (whole continents, rivers) and finally the loss of a person we deeply love-- which may happen at any age.  That loss does seem like disaster.  We must work hard to survive the greatest losses. And yet against all odds we do. We don't crumble into dust.  It's not permitted somehow, maybe even when we'd rather. 

At the end we see that she has not actually mastered loss.  Not because she's lying ("I shan't have lied" she demurs), but because no one does.  She has had to analyze it, parse it, write about it.  Like ours, her losses are incremental.  She does miss the "you"  with the joking voice, the intimate gesture.   And--even though succeeding, as must we all--she is working overtime to accept this vaster loss and buoy herself up.  

For me, this poem confronts those experiences most universal and profound.  It reminds us how grief, loss, disaster and survival live side-by-side in our lives. But she tells us this gradually, slant, if you will.   She begins with the inconsequential, like misplaced door keys or a squandered hour, then moves in stages to the death of one we love.  And if we do survive even this greatest of losses it must be at least in part because,  as Robert Frost says in Out, Out-- we are not the one dead.  A truth that could blind. 

One Art is hard to exhaust. And isn't that a gift?  It  is one of my favorite poems for its depth and beauty. Perhaps it is, or will be, one of yours too. 

Thank you to all who create.                   Nina Naomi