my heart is a mausoleum
a secret sepulchre
hidden beneath layers of tissue
muscle and blood and bone
tangled vines and twisted branches
conceal its entryway
a dark, warm, bloody vault
never suffused by sunlight
pulsating… vibrating… rhythm
behind fleshy, bleeding gates
my most sacred treasure lies
and breathes, and laughs, and loves evermore
it is you,
it is you,
it is you.
It’s been two and a half years, almost to the day.
My hands are clammy and I am fidgeting with the big turquoise ring on my right ring finger. I love this ring. It’s one of the oldest pieces of jewelry I own, something I purchased with my own money from a job I got myself, in a city neither of my parents had lived in before. I purchased it at a store with a kind-of “Abercrombie for hippies” vibe called Urban Outfitters.
The stone is real, and huge and just this side of gaudy. I wear it almost daily, even now. Gosh, those were the days, when I was young and having fun and wasting my potential, secure in the knowledge that I had time to figure out my life.
Watching the trees pass by out the window, I strain to see behind them. Every few seconds, if I purposely blur my vision just so, I think I can see through the forest. I’ve become very good at games like this. They help to distract my mind from what’s happening, where I’m going and why.
We are pulling into the driveway now. I take a deep breath and put a hand on my belly to steady myself. “You can do this”, I whisper. Most of the car ride, when my gaze is not on the trees, my eyes are down, concentrated on my hands, my lap, my feet, anything but the route. I feel like a young girl who is waiting to be disciplined, anxious of what’s to come and fighting back tears.
I only drive this way to see my dad, and this time I know he will not be there at the door to greet me. This visit to his house where we shared so many special moments will be different. The beautiful white house he built. Soon it will belong to someone else – to strangers. I do not want to enjoy the scenery, or to recognize the landmarks, or smile at the familiar small-town shops as we make this dirge, my little family and I. So I look down, and I take deep breaths and I fiddle with my gaudy turquoise ring.
*******************************
Thoughts I’m having while drinking tea tonight…
Why do I talk about death so much?
Well… the most significant people in my life up to a point all passed away in the span of a few years, and all unexpectedly. No long illness or time to prepare. One day life is normal and the next day it’s shifted. Parallel. Other.
And they weren’t just significant in my eyes. They were cool people. Good folks. Strangers used to talk to me about my grandparents, my dad. Tell them hello for me, they’d say, or ‘I remember when’. Now the people who knew them are dying too. The ones who shared dinners or saw them at church or remembered when. They are all leaving. So what happens if I don’t talk about my loved ones, don’t say their names, tell their stories?
Some kind of metaphysical black hole, I think. I don’t want to find out.
When I talk about death I’m talking about the people I could point to, as a way to explain myself, as a map to who I am and how I got to be. They gave my life meaning, and me a sense of belonging. Now, I don’t have that, and I find myself grappling at the frayed edges of a faded papyrus chart, tracing my fingertips over ever-fainter sketches of a land that it seems only I have been to, trying to convince others that it does exist. It did exist. I’ve seen it. I was there.
I can never go back home, you see? Home has been buried, and cremated, and scattered out to sea. It was wonderful, and warm, and safe, and real. All I have left of all I have loved is a memory that feels like I dreamed it, made it up. Because no one else has seen it, or remembers it, or cares.
So I talk about it, to remind myself. To steady my heart, to try to re-orient myself with a world without them, without home. To remind others. I came from somewhere, even if that place is no longer. I remember it. It did exist. We were there.
When I opened my eyes, the goblin face had disappeared.
Lying on my dark green velvet bedspread, facing the ceiling, my eyelids flutter open and in an instant I am transported from whatever world I just visited back to real life.
My name is Maisie, and I’m going to die today.
As I lie here contemplating death and all that it means – what will it feel like? Where will I go? Should I write a note? Will my friends be ok? Will I still get hungry as a ghost? – I study the textured firework pattern in the ceiling. Silent celebrations, I used to call them, imagining that my bedroom was just so excited about bedtime that the ceiling was having a party. The fireworks are made with something called a slap brush. I remember watching one of these firework ceilings being made, when I visited a home under construction with my dad. Years ago, my dad built houses for a living, but he’s dead now.
Anyway… before I drifted off this afternoon, I found a goblin in the drywall. Kinda like how you see shapes in clouds? Each white firework-burst is the same, but also different. Like fingerprints. The slap brush touched my ceiling maybe 500 times and left 500 unique prints, and this one looked like a mean goblin. His face was menacing, rude. The way people look at you when they don’t know you but they already know they don’t like you. He would probably be happy when I died.
I can’t find him now – the goblin. He was there, a part of the ceiling, and I woke up and he was gone. All I see now are fireworks, and one puffy white dog with a nose shaped like a capital “G”. Maybe I made the whole thing up as I was losing consciousness. Or maybe the goblin was real, and when I fell asleep he went back to his goblin house to make a mold and cobweb sandwich. I shrug to myself. ”Oh well”, I sigh quietly to no one in particular.
My dad is dead, I know I mentioned before, but I still see him. Sometimes he shows up here, in my room, and talks to me. Mostly it’s pep talks or talks about what I’m wearing. Isn’t that just like a dad? He was here too, before I fell asleep, when the world was ending and I was uncharacteristically calm.
(dad convo here)
I must have stared at this ceiling for hours, thinking about my body and why it had decided to betray me. I’ve always been pretty nice to it. Ok not always, there were some months when I ate a LOT of fast food and candy and sat around playing video games where you have to chase cows and chickens and get them into the barn before the farmer gets home. (Resulting, I’m sure, in some percentage of brain deterioration.) But mostly I took care of myself. According to the doctor at my check-up last year, I was as healthy as they come. I ate right, drank water, and exercised. I tried to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, meditate, and avoid stress.
So why did my body decide to kill me? I probably have one of those bodies that LIKES fast food, I think. All that health food made it angry and now it’s growing tumors to get back at me. Stupid hedonistic body. Ugh. I feel so swollen. I am lying still in place with my feet on the comforter, knees up, one hand on my belly and the other at my side. I’m crying. I didn’t realize until just now that I was crying. I look around the room to see if anyone notices, even though no one is here but me. Still… I look around, wondering if the goblin can see me or if he’s moved on to some other ceiling by now.
My belly is full of tumors, full of fluid, just… full… and I feel like a hippopotamus who has just gone on a rampage and eaten an entire village of terrified – and probably very nice – rice farmers. My feet have fallen asleep, but I dare not move them, as lying in any other position would cause me immense pain.
When your body hurts for a long time – weeks and months – the pain is inescapable. It’s there when you wake up, when you shower, when you talk to your teachers about your missing assignments, when you sit in front of the fireplace on a cold Saturday morning twirling Fruit Loops between your index finger and thumb, too full from all the death to eat breakfast.
When your whole life is pain, finding a comfortable position to sit, or stand, or sleep, feels like finding treasure. You’d give anything not to lose it. I reposition my feet ever so slightly, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. If it’s true that sleep is the cousin of death, maybe this counts as practice.
We are eternity.
I’m driving to get lunch today and thinking about what happens when we die, where we go, what we become. I have heard many theories over the course of my life, and my own ideas and beliefs on it have changed and evolved over that time too.
I’m a member of a Grief Support group online, and I read posts every morning while I drink my diet soda (it’s my morning coffee, as I frequently explain to the cashier at Publix). The posts there are equal parts heart-breaking and heart-warming. Both life-affirming – in that I see clearly through others’ eyes that what I do and say as a mom has great impact; and acutely Nihilist, in that nothing we do matters because we are all hurdling towards an inevitable end in which there will be no memory of us.
I debate myself, alone in my car, about which is more likely. Are we all one? Do we die and return to ourselves, like a wave crashing into the ocean? Are we like the Borg on Star Trek: The Next Generation? A collective, a hive, all moving towards the same purpose? We come here to do soul work and learn lessons and then when it is time, we go back to “the one” or “the all”? There was a time that I embraced this idea. We are love, and we return to love. All unique pieces of the same big, beautiful whole. It’s romantic.
But where does that leave us as individual souls?
The posts I read written by heartsick children, brothers, lovers, mothers, daughters, sons, are bitter and sorrowful and also brimming with gratitude. Many of them share a common question. It’s one that I have rolled over and over in my mind since September, like a kid with a Rubik’s cube she just can’t solve, unsure of the answer and unwilling to let it rest.
The question is whether we will see our loved ones again. What has happened to them? None of us knows what awaits us after this life. Have they gone to some kind of paradise where they dress in pressed white linen and mill about waiting for us to arrive? Is it more like a heavenly airport gate? Are there snacks?
Will I be reunited with my dad?
This is where and why the Borg theory ceases to work for me. If we are a part of one big tapestry, and we rejoin our origin quilt (I once read a book by an astrophysicist who described the universe as a quilt and found it fascinating) after death, do we lose ourselves in that union? Do we give up all the things that made us who we were on Earth – our sense of humor, our memories, our favorite kind of donut, our love of westerns and fiercely strong and stubborn nature – for the good of the collective? If so, do we even care? Is it a choice or just something that happens?
I struggle with this thought, with the notion that we are rain drops falling into a bucket of water and once we hit the surface we are indecipherable from every other drop. We blend. We are all the water.
It doesn’t make sense to me because the people I read about every morning – the ones so loved, so treasured, whose loved ones are trying to navigate a brand new life without them – are individuals. Only they lived the lives they did, learned the lessons, took the risks, made the mistakes, carried the regrets. Only they loved the people they did, in the ways that they did. They are brilliant and beautiful because of all the qualities that make them dynamic and distinctive. How could it be possible, then, that in death, (which is commonly seen as either culmination or a celebration), they would lose (or willingly sacrifice) all of that?
The larger – and perhaps more selfish – question for me right now is, what does it mean for those of us who are left?
So, this is where I am tonight. Still debating. Are our loved ones waiting for us? Are they aware of us? Or are they blissfully aggregated back into some celestial all-knowing hive? I don’t know the answer. I twist and twist the cube but so far I can’t make it make sense. I know love is eternal, but I don’t know if the eternal love we speak about is between individual souls or between us and the creator/all that we come from. I wonder if it’s possible that both are true.
You’re the home I always came back to.
The solid foundation, the roots, the teacher whose words echoed in my thoughts and informed my decisions.
The warm, comforting place I could come to for respite, to laugh, to eat a good hearty meal, enjoy a story about the old days, and even just to hide for a while from everything outside.
When I missed home, I was missing you. When I talked about home, I saw your face. When I told people about where I’m from, it was you I described.
I feel homeless. A vagabond. Wandering. Lost. Disoriented.
Condemned.
A mess of a thing, a remnant, vaguely recognizable as that girl who lived in that big house up the hill for a while.
I lie here, on the grass where we used to lie together, wondering when the ground beneath me might open wide and swallow me up.
I hope it’s soon.
At night, when I tuck my kids into bed, we say affirmations. It goes something like this:
Me: Repeat after me.
Kid: Repeat after me.
(Years of doing affirmations and they still laugh at the ‘repeat’ thing.)
Me: I am brave.
Kid: I am brave.
Me: I am kind.
Kid: I am kind.
You get the idea. A few more generic ones, and then I deviate according to the kid’s personality, something we struggled with that day, or something silly. I love to make up songs on the spot and they enjoy my goofiness as well, which I know won’t last forever so I’m soaking it in. We always end with “I love myself, I’m proud of myself, and I can do great things.”
I love myself and I’m proud of myself were not part of my original formula, they came to me a couple of years ago when I was thinking about how to have the kids’ validation come from within, rather than from others, including their parents. I’m not of the opinion that me arriving on Earth earlier makes me any more of an authority on how to be human, it only makes me responsible for their care, safety, and guiding them with things like manners, potty training, and when it’s acceptable to yell “Go Dawgs” at strangers. (Hint: Always. It’s always acceptable.)
Some nights I thank them for choosing me to be their Mama when they were souls preparing to come to Earth. I feel so grateful and honored that they chose me, knowing they’d be vulnerable and I’d be so very … well, flawed. Human. Ill-prepared for the task.
When I was young enough to have a bedtime, Bonmama tucked me into bed most nights. My mom worked late nights as a radio DJ, so she was usually gone and Bonpapa was downstairs working in his office or occasionally asleep in his recliner in front of an episode of Dragnet.
We walked down the narrow hallway, Bonmama and I, feet scuffing on the vintage green carpet (it had odd sections that looked a lot like the tops of cauliflower to me and I liked how it felt underfoot) until we reached her bedroom. I had my own bed in my own bedroom across the hall, but didn’t sleep in it because it was big and I was small and afraid of the dark.
So she had an antique bed brought in from Lacanau – her mother’s home – and squeezed it beside her bed, the foot of it nearly touching her delicate dark wooden vanity, and that bed, pushed back into the corner of her room, is where I slept every night. That was our room. Bonmama, Bonpapa, and me.
[[Side note: Eventually, I acquired an ugly gray radio/alarm clock and I was allowed to listen to the public broadcasts each night until one of them came to bed. It helped me to sleep and not feel alone. Usually, my choices for night time listening were the grainy audio from some mediocre stage production of Macbeth, or an opera with commercials interspersed. I always chose the opera. It’s so romantic, dramatic, and while I couldn’t ever understand what was being sung about, I could tell it was earnest and urgent. As an idealistic young dreamer, I loved the sounds of catastrophe, climax, and resignation. If Bonpapa chose the station – which he sometimes did – it was Beethoven. I still listen to music when I nap, usually Italian opera or Beethoven.]]
I climbed into my little bed, nestled amongst my “menagerie” of stuffed animals, including a mangy-looking white Persian cat and its equally scruffy black sibling, and Bonmama sat beside me arranging pillows and blankets around us. Once I was still, she prayed with me, beginning with the Lord’s prayer in French, and sometimes invoking Archangel Michael to watch over me. “You are special to Michel,” she’d say. “You’re named after him.” There was something about the way she said it. I believed the fiercest of Heaven’s warriors might actually have taken time to check in on me as I slept, if I asked him to.
Some nights she rubbed my back or chatted with me about the day. Every night without fail, she said to me and I repeated back to her:
Bonne Nuit,
Bonne Reves, and
Je t’aime beaucoup.
Those are French for Good Night, Sweet Dreams, and I love you.
Not exactly affirmations, but no less affirming to my heart and soul.
It’s been a hard week, mostly due to missing her, and today was a welcome reprieve. I spent all day with my boys, just the three of us. We began with breakfast, then painting. We went to the field and kicked the soccer ball around, threw a football, raced, and fell down and laughed with each other. We shared a pizza for dinner, and they played video games while I sat in my big chair and read a book.
Forgive me if my writing is scattered. All of these thoughts are strung like twinkling patio lights in my head, a web of love and comfort and tradition. Tradition in the sense that no one is really gone as long as you remember, and echo, and say their name and – here’s the important part, the reason I’m writing this tonight – pay their love forward into new hearts.
A lightning-strike realization. Another revelation. They keep coming, unexpectedly, as I think and overthink my life and hers and that sweet spot where they intersected, and I wonder if this isn’t another unrecognized stage of grief:
Epiphany.
Honoring Bonmama is not just about saying her name or making her bread. It’s about the love she’s given me, that can never be divided, only multiplied, and pouring that devotion into my children so that they meet her, and know the best parts of her, even if they don’t know it’s her they are meeting.
I felt like a good mom today. A Bonmama – type of mom. At the end of the day, my kids knew without any doubt just how treasured they are. Cherished. That’s a word she liked to use. I like it, too. (As I type this, my boys are asleep in my bed, surrounded by 15-20 of their “favorite” stuffed animals. This is the kind of history I don’t mind repeating.)
What I’m thinking about over and over as I listen to them gently snoring is, I am so grateful for the choosing.
That Bonmama chose to be more to us – and give more to us – than she was required.
That my sons chose me in the “before”, and that they continue to choose me every day despite my shortcomings.
Grateful, too, that I am choosing and choose in each moment to show up for them, to be better than I might have been, to give more than I sometimes want to, to try again and fail and apologize and cry and keep working at it.
The words are a comfort and certainly, we like to say them. I want to hear the words, repeat the words, have fun with the affirmations. But the love – the evidence and proof and depth of that love – exists, I think, in the choosing.
It’s been one month. The time has flown but in my heart, it feels like it’s been 5 years. What does it feel like there?
I get turned around, don’t know what day it is a lot. I can’t do math or count very well, though I have no idea what that has to do with missing you.
Talking to mom on the phone and even as we are talking about your passing, she said: “Maman’s here!” I jumped. Totally expected to hear your voice. Gut punch.
Mostly I look forward. Life is a gift, I know. I remember the Lauren Hutton interview where she quotes King Lear while talking about reminiscing. “Not that way, never that way. That way madness lies.” That way madness lies. So much truth in that line.
One month down. All of them to go. I love you. Je t’aime.
Some days
I can fool myself into thinking
I’m alright.
A walk outside,
A giggle or a conversation,
Pleasant distractions.
Two or three moments
Strung together
That do not wound me.
False confidence, as I think
Perhaps it’s not so bad,
This new life.
Maybe I can live it.
When
Suddenly, quietly,
Like a fox slipping through
The fence at dusk
It comes…
Creeping into me,
Cyphening the light from
My chest and the love
From my bones
I am destroyed
As
Ever so slowly
(Yet somehow all at once)
I die, I die, I die.
Je suis prest pour apprendre le francais.
That’s what I was going to say when I called. We had so many conversations about having those conversations in French if I wanted to try. I did want to try, of course, but I was embarrassed at how bad I might be and I didn’t want to be bad – in front of you – at something we both loved so much. Sounds stupid now. I’d give anything to rewind a couple of weeks and chat with you in your native tongue.
I know people see me drowning in this and they think, “what’s the big deal? Everyone has lost a grandmother.” They only think that because they don’t know who you were, who we were. I won’t attempt to write that here, because I think it would be impossible, but I have gathered a few thoughts to keep for myself.
When other people hear the term “Iron Lady” they probably think of Margaret Thatcher. Maybe some younger, stupid ones think of the Statue of Liberty. I always think of you. Strong and unyielding, a real force of nature. A woman who would plunge her hands into scalding hot water because that was the best way to wash dishes, walk 15 miles in a day without complaint (and in fact, prefer it to driving), the woman who caught me by my hair and pulled me up when I slipped and fell off an actual cliff.
Having grandchildren softens a person, and I think it made you – as Goldilocks would say – “just right”. I hear stories about you being conservative with your praise but with me, you gave it so freely. I felt empowered by your true and steady belief in me. You were my compass, my North Star, encouraging me to try new things and have adventures. At the same time, you were an anchor, helping me feel safe in knowing that I always had a home to go back to. A refuge.
To be known, seen, understood – and to have that revelation of understanding DEEPEN love, not repulse it – is something I have only ever felt from you and Bonpapa. You did not tolerate me, you did not chastise me, your love was based on nothing that might be taken away or failed. It simply was. I could sit next to you and FEEL the love radiate from you. I know that in thousands of instances, you made a conscious choice to see and speak to only the good in me.
You were otherworldly. We both knew it. Your psychic dreams, your knowing. Remember when you called to ask me if I was pregnant? I lied to you, but you had known. When you realized I had similar gifts, you pointed to me and said I was witchy like your grandmother but the sparkle in your eye and half-grin on your lips always betrayed how much you liked that about me, related to it. I wasn’t like her, I was like you.
A tri-lingual translator for the allies who lost her home and family’s title in the war, lost her beloved father at 9, ate grass sometimes to survive and cursed the Germans frequently. An athlete and raven-haired beauty queen who held every man’s heart in the palm of her hands. Coy, coquettish, playful, talented, quick-witted, smart. Strong. Unyielding. Unashamed. Different. Proud. I didn’t meet this young enchanting version of you but I could see her in your eyes, hear her in your voice.
The version I met was still a beauty, still playful. She had a radio in the kitchen playing Lionel Ritchie while she cooked. She took me to the symphony and the ballet so I would have a love for the arts. She made French bread every Sunday after mass, always pointing out that it wasn’t perfect because the “American” ingredients aren’t the same. She took my brother and me to France – twice – so that we could understand and appreciate her history and our own.
There was nothing you could not do, my fiesty fearless conqueror princess. Not many people know what a magnificent woman you were. There should be books written about you, epic movies made. They wouldn’t do you justice but you deserve them.
My sister, the mother of my heart, my partner in crime. The first – maybe only – person I really wanted to tell about returning to Paris because I knew that you wouldn’t just listen, you would understand. You wouldn’t just understand, you would feel. Describing that day, when I turned and saw the Eiffel Tower with the sun rising behind it and I wept, we wept together. I felt happy to have someone to share that with, and a little sad because I knew that some part of that sadness in you stemmed from knowing you would never get to see your beloved France again. My heart ached for you.
I hope that you are there now. I hope that you and Bonpapa are together, traveling as you liked to do, laughing, free. I hope that being all-knowing hasn’t changed your opinion of me. I hope that you can feel my love and see my heartbreak and be honored by it. I hope that you are already planning when you might visit me in a dream.
My whole life changed in a moment. My reality shifted. This is the biggest, the most profound loss, and that is why I am drowning in it. If you are the thing I held myself up to, defined myself with, what am I now? I am empty, floating, directionless. I am filled with guilt that I didn’t call you when my intuition provoked me. I am filled with sorrow that by the time I got to you, you couldn’t speak to me or laugh with me.
I will miss all the secret things that I have not written here. I will cling to the memories of my childhood, which you built around me from scraps my parents left lying around and your own beautiful love and strong will. I will be grateful every day of my life for every day of yours. I will do my best to love my children the way you showed me, and to travel with them and talk to them like grown-ups and empower them. We will eat pastry for breakfast and send postcards to ourselves and I promise to speak French with them. I will wear dresses for no reason and rings on all my fingers and I will stop apologizing for who I am.
Je t’aime beaucoup, my beautiful flower. My soul cries out to yours in separation. I will count the days until we meet again. xoxo bisous I love you, Bonmama. Beaucoup beaucoup.
Attitude Soup 