We could not ask for more

This is one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. The horses are so utterly calm, perhaps due to the skill of their riders. If one of them panicked, it might all be over.

It has been, incredibly, almost two months since I lost my best friend David. Right now it's a lonesome trail indeed, for I don't even know if he will have a memorial. I have to wait to hear, there's nothing I can do. Things were complicated with him in his small community, with his relationships, with his church. He may have been excommunicated for doing some sort of bizarre healing. (Imagine, trying to heal someone!). For a while he was involved with a druggie, and had a very hard time scraping her off. Yet he was a genius in his own way, and his calm acceptance of me in my time of hell was a balm when no one else seemed to understand or care.

I hope I offered him similar solace. But the trail remains teetering, narrow, requiring or demanding a faith I just don't have. David had it in spades, and I honestly don't know how he sustained it in a too-short, too-difficult, largely solitary life. 

Some people seem to come from nowhere, to have no one, no "people". Certainly he had no roots, or else they were vague. When someone I know on Facebook finally found David's great-aunt (or someone like that) and told her David had passed, the answer was, oh, thanks for telling me. I'll pass it along to his half-brother.

Families can be, as Sylvia Fraser once famously said, "killing fields". Friends are, as the saying goes, God's way of apologizing for them. I spent Saturday at a soccer game trying not to weep, while my granddaughter, glorious Caitlin, she who had been so close to me for so many years, literally turned her back on me and would not speak to me or even look at me or say hello. Raw from the loss of David, I felt my heart drop out.

What had I done? I must have done something. At half-time I couldn't stand it any more and switched chairs with Bill, sitting next to Jim, her other grandpa. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "Well, maybe she's not so much turning away from you as turning toward her phone." It was a wry observation, but it gave me pause.

At one point I thought I heard my daughter whisper to her, "This is embarrassing!" But you can't physically turn a 15-year-old kid around and force her to speak a few words to her grandma. And adolescent girls - you can hear them ticking, you know? Just waiting for hissing pinwheels and Roman candles to explode.

It was awful, but my husband kept saying, don't take it personally, she's just being a kid. But how could I feel so wretchedly alone in my own family, my only refuge in the whole world?

Today, totally unexpectedly, she agreed to have lunch with us (maybe, just maybe, prompted by her mother?), and for a half-hour chattered away in her usual, delightful, wry, funny way. A totally different person? Or two sides of the same person? Maybe she was just honest enough with herself on Saturday to say: I don't want to talk to Grandma today, so I won't. Most of us don't have that luxury with people.

Or she was just being a hopeless brat, selfish and inconsiderate. There's that.

There's no point to this, at all, except to say that I had to wait it out, not fuss (for surely that would have made it worse, made her NEVER want to talk to me). I had to find an atom of faith in me somewhere. With my harrowing family history, estrangement seems to almost disembowel me. I know that it is generally irreversible, and to lose any more of my tiny band of kin might be fatal.

But it was just some mood, wasn't it? Why the change of heart? Or did Shannon really take her aside and say, look, you wouldn't talk to her at the soccer game and it was embarrassing, so TALK TO HER this time - ?

At this point, I don't even care. I'm just glad this wasn't a crying day, but tomorrow might be. I just hope I hear something. I hope I get to stand with people who loved David too. The trail is lonesome, and it is long. But please, just don't let it go cold.

Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean
Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you
All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people
With people that we knew

Outward bound upon a journey without ending
Outward bound, uncharted waters beneath our bow
Far behind, the green familiar shore is fading into time
And time has left us now

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Outward bound upon a ship with tattered sail
Outward bound upon a crooked lonesome trail
Things we learn, we'll just be satisfied in knowing
And we'll tell it to our kids as a fairy tale

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

When will this strong yearning end?

Weekend in New England

Barry Manilow

Last night I waved goodbye,
Now it seems years
I'm back in the city
Where nothing is clear

But thoughts of me holding you,
Bringing us near

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

Time in New England
Took me away
To long rocky beaches
And you by the bay
We started a story
Whose end must now wait

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

I feel the change comin'
I feel the wind blow
I feel brave and daring
I feel my blood flow
With you I could bring out
All the love that I have
With you there's a heaven,
So earth ain't so bad

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you
Again

This is the song I almost couldn't find. It needed a post of its own, not to be tacked on to a piece about garden snails! When I set out to find a good YouTube version to post here, I heard ten-year-olds sing it on those big splashy TV talent shows, and even if they could hit all the notes (always over-decorated, as all singing is now), they fell flat because they had never experienced ANY of this. They simply had no idea what they were singing about. Most were too strident, too screamy, and trying too hard to get a "wow" effect, a thumbs-up or high-five or whatever these people get when they win on those shows. They were all getting in the way of the song.

I finally found this one, presumably by an amateur, but exceptionally well sung, so I used it. A simple karaoke version, sung by someone I've never heard of, a man who has a Malaysian accent. It came closest to what I was hearing in memory. Now that I hear it again, the sweet overtones in his voice are phenomenal, not anything that can be created by a machine. 

It was in the middle of all this listening that the line, "When will I hold you again?" triggered something, and I began to sob. It was like a cloudburst, just unexpected, out of nowhere, except that it was somewhere. My dear friend David, someone I loved for 27 years, died two months ago, and it has been a strange time as I've passed in and out of the revolving door of grief. And this is the first time I have cried.

I wondered why I hadn't, but I knew there was no schedule for it, no timetable for any of it, because grief is its own country and has to be traversed, travelled through. The ground is bumpy, rocky, with sheer drops. There are oases, green spaces. But these are only lavish memories, things which now must be stored away, without the presence of the one who meant so much to you.

So it's over.

When will I see you again? Never. It's not enough in the mind's eye. Memories are not enough. Right now I feel shredded, as if my heart has been through a mower.

He may have been the one person in my whole life who "got" me, quite apart from people in my family whom I know love and accept me with all my quirks. But he was what L. M. Montgomery called "of the race that knows Joseph", more than kindred, even though he wasn't kin. No one "got" me more than David, ever, and vice-versa, and it lasted for years, and years, and years, through everything.

This is pain, intense pain, and though I don't want it, I have known people who have traversed all of life and never once felt this, this heart-torn-out feeling, snapped strings dangling. I feel sorry for them, safely entombed while their hearts are still beating. They tend to die relatively young, and leave a bad trail, strewn with fragments from the casual damage of others.

I don't know what to do now, and the rest of the day will be lousy and I will feel tired and defeated, with raw eyes from crying so much, run over. But I'd rather have this. I'm not sure why, but I'd rather, perhaps because if he could see this, I know he would appreciate the fact that someone mourned him to this depth. I would not be without that certainty.

Christmas blues: the gaiety of grief

Dylan Thomas was once quoted as saying, “There is no gaiety so gay as the gaiety of grief.”

Somehow I sort of know what that means, though I can’t explain it.

Yesterday I was making gingerbread cookies with the grandkids (having had to throw out the entire first attempt at dough, so stinking horrible from the molasses that we ended up throwing it at the wall), and more or less feeling OK, but it was an effort. I had to pull myself up for it. For the first few days after my mother-in-law’s passing, I was laden with memories, great waves of memory breaking on the sand, so deep that they went back to when I was a girl of eighteen.

I said to someone I am close to, I have no bad memories of her, and she said to me, that’s because you didn’t see her that often. This is the way we “deal with” grief now. A kind of slamming of the door. Put up or shut up, she was 96 and had her life and a peaceful death, so just forget about it and get on with the cookies.

It’s hard.

Hard this time of year, which is hard already, for reasons I can’t even begin to probe.  Of course the child in me loves the sparkle and twinkling lights and angels and good food and having the family around. But I don’t know of a family that is universally loveable.

A family without tensions and trouble.

I feel over-grandma’d these days. It’s not that I don’t love it. I feel stretched thin sometimes, and I’m not even supposed to feel it, let alone acknowledge it. Everything I do seems to disappear into a black hole, leaving no trace.

I suppose my line of work is a factor. People don’t see me as “working”, in spite of writing six novels, 350-some book reviews, thousands of newspaper columns, dozens of published poems (and two anthologies), essays in text books, and serving as a juror in several competitions. It all just kind of vaporizes as it happens, and I know I am seen as “not working”.  In fact, people’s attitude probably mirrors that of a woman I knew (hardly a friend) who said, once my kids were both in school, “Goodness, Margaret, what on earth are you going to do with yourself all day?” (I was writing a novel.)

On the other hand, why should I expect them to understand? Margaret Atwood was once famously quoted as saying, “I can’t be fired because I don’t have a job.” I don’t either, though I have work. I even have paid work, the steady if not too thick income from my beloved alma mater, the Edmonton Journal. I’ve been reviewing more or less steadily since 1984, starting with the Journal and continuing with at least a dozen other publications. Most of these gigs were paid.

So if you’re paid for it, even if only an honorarium (meaning, a chintzy cheque), doesn’t that make you a professional?

YES. But it’s so much more than that.

This post was once another post, and I cut the second half because it was becoming just too bleak. Having a death in the family right at Christmas is hard. Already you’re assaulted by waves of memory that are beyond your control. But these layers run very deep and no doubt stir up my complete estrangement from my family of origin.

Okay, the “Sisters” post was me. No one saw it anyway, or only a few. And as usual, the person who needed to see it didn’t, or wouldn’t have cared even if she did.

So I had a sort of adoptive family when I got married, but didn’t really realize it for years and years. It grew slowly and without my awareness. Alliances have surged and faded, beyond my power to choose. (Do we choose to love? “Gee, I think I’ll love this person now. Stand back.”) There has been a sort of evolution. Now the lynch-pin has been withdrawn by the natural course of things. We will have to regroup. It remains to be seen who the new matriarch will be.


http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Make me an instrument

It has come home to me once again that life can be overwhelmingly difficult, even crushing. I see, looking back, that I have a certain tendency to be, uh, er, critical. Or negative. Or not celebratory enough. I need to correct this, but I don't know if I will.

I know several situations in which people have suffered an almost incomprehensible grief, in particular a mother whose small daughter died on Christmas Eve two years ago, her snow-covered sled hit by a truck turning a blind corner. My granddaughter was her best friend, and she still talks about her, misses her terribly.

Jesus, God, are you there? I did used to believe, quite fervently, but since I left the church, I don't know. I don't believe there is a God who gets us out of trouble. No Big Guy in the Sky, no lucky rabbit's foot. Faith is not a lottery, and God doesn't give us the things we ask for just because he's nice like Santa, or loves us, or thinks we deserve special favor. In fact, there may be nothing there that helps us, independent of other people and their goodness, or the strength implanted deep down in our own hearts.

Is that, then, what we call God? I don't know. I look out my window today, and I see cedars tossed angrily, shivering as if traumatized. Then they are still again. I need to go out in it so I can order flowers for my daughter's mother-in-law, who has just had successful heart surgery and is recovering by leaps and bounds. (God - ?) I need to look for Christmas presents for my four dear ones, my little grandkids, without whom I - well, let's not finish that thought. And I haven't even started, can't get started because I haven't the heart.

I can't get going. We have this dim understanding, maybe. Or else we don't need it, I don't know. I can't leave life alone, I pick it apart. It's no use, of course. The good is the good, but there is a dangerous estrangement in my own family that I fear will blow us apart at some point. It has happened before, in that other family I grew up in, and I know it is never repaired.

If I let this particular weight press all the life out of me, it would be difficult to continue at all. I know I am blessed, tremendously blessed, compared to others - but how can we compare, when everyone's life is so complex? No one knows what is going on in the mind of another. This is called existential loneliness, and it is built into the species. But I am convinced some people feel it far more than others.

I was looking for an image a few nights ago when my daughter updated me on the mother who lost her child at Christmas. Since then, she has suffered several wrenching twists. Even though I officially don't believe in prayer because God let me down so badly, I lit a candle in my computer room and turned out the lights. The effect was eerie, a glowing screen and a guttering candle. I wanted something to focus on, googled up the name of the little girl who died, and came up with multiple images of a Catholic saint. Small children wore crowns made of holly and candles and walked in solemn processions down the aisles of huge churches.

Somehow this led to St. Francis and his famous prayer, "Make me an instrument of thy peace. . . "

St. Francis, batty as a loon, may have been on to something. Today he'd be put on antipsychotics and resocialized, though he might still end up under a bridge. Still his prayer persists, that is, if he wrote it at all. Truth is so slippery, so humanly influenced. We make things the way we want, or need, or desperately desire them to be. Truth gets lost, we get lost, and we grab. Still, we grab.

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down. . .

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

my highest joy.

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did

on the day Jerusalem fell.

"Tear it down," they cried,

"tear it down to its foundations!"

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

happy is the one who repays you

according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants

and dashes them against the rocks.

Psalm 137

Margaret, are you grieving?

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By & by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep & know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins