The black hole trampoline.

Tags

grief, life, Mother's Day

As much as my mother enjoyed certain kinds of attention, she wasn’t insistent upon Mother’s Day. Maybe it was her Scottish upbringing, maybe it was her aversion to overt commercialism (and ain’t that the truth about Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, and…), but I don’t really recall ever going out for any big special Mother’s Day outings. No noisy brunches in crowded restaurants, no fanfare. There would always be a card from me, sure, and perhaps some small gift—like some little tchotchke to add to her miniatures collection, or maybe a Rod Stewart cassette that she didn’t already have or that needed replacement—but otherwise it was always just another Sunday morning at church, and then maybe a drive to the ocean if the weather was nice, just the three of us, but no big deal if it wasn’t. Nothing boastful or social—kinda like all the rest of our holiday traditions, actually.

My favorite Mother’s Day memory is this—that she always insisted (often in conversation with others) that my father never ever under any circumstances buy her any sort of Mother’s Day gift. Not even a card. ‘I’m no’ yer m’ther,’ she’d exclaim with a chuckle. To her, the idea of a husband giving the mother of his child/ren a gift on Mother’s Day made no sense.

Oh, and her feelings about flowers? Hard pass. She did love her flower gardens, though, and once in a great while, Dad would bring home flowers if he had screwed up and had run out of gestures to get things back on track. Otherwise, my mom felt how I have come to feel at times about fresh cut flowers—they are beautiful to behold and it’s depressing to watch them disintegrate.

She did, however, insist that Dad call Grandma Mary every year. ‘She’s th’ only m’ther y’ve goat,’ she’d remind him every chance she got.

And she was right, of course.

Dad’s relationship with his mother was troubled. Kinda like mine with mine. Misunderstandings a mile wide and probably, truthfully, only an inch deep.

Mom died 14 years ago, and I’ve written a number of songs about her, including a few that speak directly to the grief I’ve experienced since her death, like Did I Mention, Goodness Knows, Edith, and Lines and Spaces. I experienced a particularly strong wave of that grief as it came suddenly out of remission this past week—not because of the coming second Sunday in May, but… just because. Something, usually an unexpected something, will remind me of her—or remind me of her absence—and that black hole of grief in whose orbit I have spun since even before she died will pull me closer, until I cannot help but fall in for a little while. With lots of practice, I can think of that black hole as a trampoline off of which I am able to bounce, and as I come to rest again on the solid ground of this joyful, beautiful, tragic world that we all share, I am reminded of how lucky I am to experience grief—because it means I’m alive, and that I love with my whole heart.

Feeling grief and awe in one’s nose.

Tags

grief, life, songwriting, winter

It’s been really cold here in my neck of the woods lately, and it’s been reminding me of some moments from throughout my life, particularly from childhood:

• the radiator in my second floor bedroom that never worked all that well (despite all of Dad’s earnest tinkering)
• sledding and tubing in ‘The Bowl’ on the Hebron Academy campus and making that trek up the hill again and again and again after every sun-soaked, thrilling ride down
• watching the chickadees hopping about in the snow and feeding on the seed that fell from Mom’s beloved feeders (usually from the crafty hands of the squirrels)
• my feet and face and hands getting so cold from playing outside that stepping into the bathtub or the shower seemed like a form of medieval torture
• nose hairs freezing with every inhalation

This last image is one I remind myself and others of regularly when I introduce my song ‘Starlight’. It was a bitterly cold night that inspired me to write the song, and it’s a story that I’ve told from stage many times—still living in Maine and standing in the driveway and staring at the impossible dome of stars sparkling in the crystal clear night sky, pondering the words of Carl Sagan: ‘We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.’ It was a beautiful moment that I’ll never forget.

The part I’ve always left out of the banter is the circumstances of my life at the time. What my particular part of the cosmos knew at that time was grief—paralyzing grief over the loss of my mother and, with her, the hope that she and I would ever reconcile our deep and devastating differences. I was getting to know grief quite well in those days—because Mom and I had been estranged in the last couple of years of her life, I didn’t know that she hadn’t done anything with any of Dad’s, well, anything. All of his books, clothes, tools, his eyeglasses on the living room table—every last thing he left behind, along with everything of Mom’s, was awaiting my shaking hands and broken heart as I made my way through the impossible task of being the only heir sorting through it all, buttoning up their lives and life together, and cleaning and preparing the house for sale.

Throughout that whole ordeal, I was still working multiple jobs, including my job at the hotel playing piano. I was also grieving something that felt like a long, slow fall into losing my own hopes and dreams—I was longing desperately for expression and sharing of my deepest and most authentic creativity, and at that time, aside from brief glimmers at the hotel or at Norway UU, there was none of it, save for those rare evenings at home when I could work on songs like ‘Starlight’. The night I stood and felt the wave of awe that inspired ‘Starlight’ was a hotel night, and despite my state of utter exhaustion, I allowed myself a moment to put it all down before walking into the house.

And the driveway in which I stood was the one I shared in Fryeburg with an abusive partner who was slowly squeezing the air and the joy and the life right out of me. I’ve blogged in the past about this, so I won’t belabor it now, but the writing of that song—and the rare solitary moments I had to work on it and the others that would become my 2010 Make It Mine album—kept the flame of hope alive in my heart during that dark time.

About three years after that moment in the driveway, I broke free from those tethers of abuse and self-doubt with my heart full of songs and the overwhelming drive to, as I sing in ‘Starlight’: ‘let [my] light shine now for every woman, child, and man’. And though the grief is in remission most of the time these days, the cold January air freezing my nose hairs can bring me right back to that one starry night, drinking in that grief-stricken awe inspired by a world that can so easily and so completely both break your heart and fill it back up achingly to the brim.

Saturday Morning Musings – Rosie.

Tags

cats, death, dogs, grief, housesitting, letting go, life, pets

As I type these words, I am flanked by two canine friends, Lucy and Torro.

Here’s Lucy:

and here’s Torro (and Shawn):

Aren’t they adorable?

Their human family has been away this week on vacation, so Shawn and I have been house-sitting.

We were also left to take care of several tanks of fish and frogs, and two cats, Rosie and Dog:

Winter has had a strong grip on the Northeast and there’s been a tremendous amount of new snow in the brief time that our friends have been away.   In fact, when the temperatures reached the 40s on Thursday, Torro was having a grand old time and did not want to come in at all (as evidenced by this Instagram)!

It hasn’t all been lighthearted this week, though.

On Tuesday, Shawn had an apres ski gig, so I spent the day at the house snuggling with the dogs on the couch, watching yet another snowstorm from the window, and catching up on House of Cards.  As soon as I’d finished the last episode, I got up to bring a dish to the kitchen and Rosie walked by, bright-eyed with her tail up.

“Hi Rosie!” I called.

Just a few minutes later, I heard a strange thump in the front room.  “UPS maybe?” I thought, knowing that they were expecting a delivery that day – but it didn’t sound like a booted foot on the front steps.  Torro started to bark a little.  I got up to investigate.

Rosie – beautiful, two year old, black, impossibly soft Rosie – had collapsed.  She was lying on her side, breathing laboriously.

I immediately ran to grab a towel, then put on my coat and boots, scooped her up in my arms and rushed her to the vet.  By the time I got her there, it was too late.  She was gone.

“What happened to her?” I asked the vet through tears.  She speculated that, since she didn’t find anything in her airway or feel anything unusual in her belly, it was either her heart or her brain.  Some sort of unknown defect.

Poor Rosie.

I stepped out of the vet’s office into the snowy afternoon and gave in fully to the sobs that persisted for the rest of the day.  I had to calm down – I had to drive home!  But before I even left the parking lot of the vet’s office, I had to call our friends to deliver the sad news.

After that difficult call, I sat in the car, gaining my composure enough to drive the couple of short yet slippery miles back to the house.

Walking back into the house, the whole world seemed to match the gray and dreary mess that was gathering outside.

Until I saw the dogs, that is.

Torro, in his usual over-exuberant state, came galloping over to greet me at the door with a toy in his mouth, jumping up the back of my legs, whimpering with joy.  I didn’t snatch him up in my arms as I usually do when I see him like this.  I was still crying, still so shocked at the last forty surreal minutes, that I just didn’t have it in me to respond to his enthusiasm.

Lucy greeted me, too – and maybe I’m assuming too much here – but she was subdued.  She’s an older, wiser gal.  She had witnessed the entire frantic scene when I found Rosie on the floor.   She had to know something was amiss.

For the rest of that afternoon and evening, I struggled to pull myself out of my grief.  Lucy and I both curled up in balls on the couch.  (Dog has seemed lonely, too – I’ve been giving him lots of extra love and treats.)

But not Torro.

He periodically would try to engage me – even more than usual, now that I am reflecting on it – by bringing a favorite toy onto the couch, by licking my arms or my toes, by jumping onto the chair across the room and chasing his own tail.  Certainly he must’ve been bored with my inertia.

Finally, I began to thaw to Torro’s youthful warmth and began tossing the ball around.  My spirits immediately lifted.  Shawn got back to the house later that evening to share in both the grief of losing Rosie, and the joy of being greeted at the door by two lovable and awesome dogs.

Life comes and goes.  Good things happen and terrible things happen.  And as I reach the end of this week’s entry, Torro and Lucy are still on either side of me, snoring slightly.  How wonderful is that?

All that’s left to do now is to enjoy the moments all of us critters find ourselves in – and to take time to remember Rosie.