Yesterday was Mom's birthday. She would have been 63. It lands 7 days after the anniversary of her death. I felt peaceful this year around the 11-year mark, wondered how her birthday would feel...all that's predictable is unpredictability. I woke up at 5:30 and sat down with a cup of coffee and my laptop. Turned on Christmas music and started writing an email to a friend and had breakfast and Jonathan left for St Spiridon's and then it hit me like a mack truck and drained me out like a newly slaughtered animal.
I missed her so much I could scream. Hard, wracking sobs that make me just gag. Tears that burned away my skin like sandpaper, scraping away delicate layers around my eyes, leaving the raw exposed. Lonely & unsure & lost. Trying so hard to access her ontology, to know really that once upon a time there was actually this woman in the pictures, and she did know me and she did love me. So angry at God that death exists and that any of this can possibly be ok. How does right even begin to prevail in this?? Trying so hard to get to an actual, felt remembrance of her having been alive, of her having been my mom, for her life to seem real. And even when approaching that place, feeling sickeningly dizzy in my head, disoriented in my body...like all that's real is this loss and it's everywhere in me...and what's real of her just feels illusory in the worst, trickiest way. This year it was way worse than the one right after she died. For that one I was numb. This is much harder.
And better.
Scott Peck says that if it's not paradoxical it may not be true. My entire life feels paradoxical sometimes. It's what helps me know I'm real.
So was she. The battle and the heart's reach help me know it.
When he came home Jonathan folded me in a hug. "Let's make coffee and you can tell me about her," he said. It wasn't what got said that mattered. We had Common Ground last night. The auditorium was cold but most of the quivering came from inside me. He put his arm around me and I felt stillness. Presence matters.
I've been coming back to this for the past month or so as we prepared for last night's program. It speaks to all kind of things in life. It's prayer. The band did it live last night and yes, the tears that fell still stung my skin a little even hours later in the day. Thank God. I had skin. And could feel. And could welcome the tears.
She's still gone. And I'm still ok.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
Monday, November 21, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Grounding
I'm crying again. Eleven years ago I was crying at this time, late morning, on this day, November 10th, as I flew to Walla Walla for Mom to die.
The anniversary of Mom's death doesn't hit me the same way every year...some years it's full of struggle, other years it's poignant laughter. A different kind of struggle for life. You know...the way life is. I'm glad it's that way. But today I'm on the phone again.
Every year I work on a project at Thanksgiving and again at Christmas that involves phone calls to around 100 of the patients/families I work with. And every year those calls inlcude women exclaiming how they'd forgotten it's nearly Thanksgiving. They are so consumed with their spouse/parent/child/friend/ex's process through transplant, serving as the 24/7 caregiver these patients require, that loving toward life takes over the mundane things, like holidays.
The week after Mom's funeral was Thanksgiving -- we spent it with our neighbors, Truman and Nina, celebrating Thanksgiving a couple days after marking what would have been Mom's 52nd birthday on Nov 20. God she was young.
As I go into this weekend, I remember...that flight back to Walla Walla, the yellow begonias at the front door that held on through the frost until Monday morning when she finally died, the smell of the bedroom, the cap on her hairless head...the laughter of Mom's voice as she talked on the phone, the reliability of her green car on the corner when school got out, the notes and lists as she planned holiday meals, her diet Coke on the desk in the kitchen, the beautiful papers at Christmas, the fuzzy black coat that now hangs in my closet, the box i keep of letters and cards she sent over the years, her brilliant blue eyes & glorious red hair.....
And so I'm crying again, talking to these patients because I know why remembering Thanksgiving is unthinkable, is not even on the radar, and how much the call from someone who does remember brings me back to earth.
And I welcome the ground.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
The anniversary of Mom's death doesn't hit me the same way every year...some years it's full of struggle, other years it's poignant laughter. A different kind of struggle for life. You know...the way life is. I'm glad it's that way. But today I'm on the phone again.
Every year I work on a project at Thanksgiving and again at Christmas that involves phone calls to around 100 of the patients/families I work with. And every year those calls inlcude women exclaiming how they'd forgotten it's nearly Thanksgiving. They are so consumed with their spouse/parent/child/friend/ex's process through transplant, serving as the 24/7 caregiver these patients require, that loving toward life takes over the mundane things, like holidays.
The week after Mom's funeral was Thanksgiving -- we spent it with our neighbors, Truman and Nina, celebrating Thanksgiving a couple days after marking what would have been Mom's 52nd birthday on Nov 20. God she was young.
As I go into this weekend, I remember...that flight back to Walla Walla, the yellow begonias at the front door that held on through the frost until Monday morning when she finally died, the smell of the bedroom, the cap on her hairless head...the laughter of Mom's voice as she talked on the phone, the reliability of her green car on the corner when school got out, the notes and lists as she planned holiday meals, her diet Coke on the desk in the kitchen, the beautiful papers at Christmas, the fuzzy black coat that now hangs in my closet, the box i keep of letters and cards she sent over the years, her brilliant blue eyes & glorious red hair.....
And so I'm crying again, talking to these patients because I know why remembering Thanksgiving is unthinkable, is not even on the radar, and how much the call from someone who does remember brings me back to earth.
And I welcome the ground.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
Monday, November 7, 2011
How did you meet? And then what happened?
Eight of us gathered 'round the candles, voices swinging across the planks, stories spilling laughter and tears, resonance and incredulity, criss-crossing here and there as life is wont to do when four couples start passing pasta.
"So tell us the story of how you met," went the refrain, and each couple filled in blanks. Our marriages are 8 and 9 and over 30 years long. They include a boatload of talents, regional and global long-distance, letters and emails, high regard, college love affairs, arranged marriage, some altered states of consciousness, many kinds of intelligence, deep hurt and healing, transitions, children and no children and grandchildren, foreign languages, crises and near-misses, passion, trust, varying plays of other people, and the mysteries of time. Searching for and abandonment to love and its remarkable ways.
The next morning I woke up early and unloaded the dishwasher, wondering about the point at which people stop telling those stories of meeting and marrying....because people do stop....other stories stand out more and take their place. Or after time, recollecting can lose some sparkle...for some times, for some folks, remembering becomes bittersweet, painful even, depending on where the relationship has gone. I suspect there's not a couple on earth that can't look back at their early relating and find inklings of their relationship's eventually more developed pathologies. I suppose that sometimes in very early marriage those meet & marry stories are the ones that couples tell partly because not much else has happened in their lives together. Later we tell them because they are charming and fun and as the song goes the beginning is a very good place to start. But even where the eventual strengths are sturdy, and even as the sweetness prevails, we didn't all get married to have that one early chapter be the whole book.
When you read good novels you should be able to find intimations of the whole story in the very first paragraph, like harmonics that ring at the slightest touch. Those lines should suck you in, whirl you around, and stir your bones in such a way that the story lives with your very breath, every sentence a respiration. I'm reading a book like that right now -- it's almost 542 pages and I can't put it down -- I read the first half in two sittings. The opening paragraph starts like this: "It's so hard to explain what the dead really want." You're with me, right?
Openings are gates. And open gates are irresistible.
It's well worth it to write good openings in novels. And no less so in life. We all want good starts, right? So the novelist rewrites those first lines endlessly. The editor reads the manuscript and you make pre-printing revisions; but in real life you don't get that luxury. Or is it a luxury? Isn't the essence of craft life? We get redemption, we get transformation, we get process, but not re-writes. Our lives flow -- sometimes roughly, sometimes smoothly. Each story its own paragraph and flowing from the previous. At some point the story has to be let loose to tell itself. The only way that first paragraph gets sweeter is with the liberal permeation of time's release. The constant becoming. Not the re-writing....the writing. And I can't wait to keep reading.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
"So tell us the story of how you met," went the refrain, and each couple filled in blanks. Our marriages are 8 and 9 and over 30 years long. They include a boatload of talents, regional and global long-distance, letters and emails, high regard, college love affairs, arranged marriage, some altered states of consciousness, many kinds of intelligence, deep hurt and healing, transitions, children and no children and grandchildren, foreign languages, crises and near-misses, passion, trust, varying plays of other people, and the mysteries of time. Searching for and abandonment to love and its remarkable ways.
The next morning I woke up early and unloaded the dishwasher, wondering about the point at which people stop telling those stories of meeting and marrying....because people do stop....other stories stand out more and take their place. Or after time, recollecting can lose some sparkle...for some times, for some folks, remembering becomes bittersweet, painful even, depending on where the relationship has gone. I suspect there's not a couple on earth that can't look back at their early relating and find inklings of their relationship's eventually more developed pathologies. I suppose that sometimes in very early marriage those meet & marry stories are the ones that couples tell partly because not much else has happened in their lives together. Later we tell them because they are charming and fun and as the song goes the beginning is a very good place to start. But even where the eventual strengths are sturdy, and even as the sweetness prevails, we didn't all get married to have that one early chapter be the whole book.
When you read good novels you should be able to find intimations of the whole story in the very first paragraph, like harmonics that ring at the slightest touch. Those lines should suck you in, whirl you around, and stir your bones in such a way that the story lives with your very breath, every sentence a respiration. I'm reading a book like that right now -- it's almost 542 pages and I can't put it down -- I read the first half in two sittings. The opening paragraph starts like this: "It's so hard to explain what the dead really want." You're with me, right?
Openings are gates. And open gates are irresistible.
It's well worth it to write good openings in novels. And no less so in life. We all want good starts, right? So the novelist rewrites those first lines endlessly. The editor reads the manuscript and you make pre-printing revisions; but in real life you don't get that luxury. Or is it a luxury? Isn't the essence of craft life? We get redemption, we get transformation, we get process, but not re-writes. Our lives flow -- sometimes roughly, sometimes smoothly. Each story its own paragraph and flowing from the previous. At some point the story has to be let loose to tell itself. The only way that first paragraph gets sweeter is with the liberal permeation of time's release. The constant becoming. Not the re-writing....the writing. And I can't wait to keep reading.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
Friday, November 4, 2011
What are you?
A few months ago three friends started coming to my house every Wednesday afternoon. Shannon, Colleen, Jana, and I fill our coffee cups and settle in. I love autumn. It's a good time to settle in. We range in age from 36 to 61. The first time we met, we watered our laps with tears...tears for ourselves and for each other...and I knew that the meaning of life was present. I've known each of these women for a long time, years, but never in this way and every week my heart is astounded at the richness of it all. Our conversations usually overflow the clock. We take turns emailing something ahead of time...poetry, quotes, pictures, stories...so we have time to reflect a bit before filling our cups together. Conversation is never boundaried by those words from others...they do not define...but they do weave, inspire, assist.
This past week, the text below was our launch. I haven't studied Maya's life and I've only briefly read the Unity School's "Lessons In Truth" and whenever this remarkable woman is mentioned I always think about the remarkable women who Oprah will never notice and I want to be in the room with them instead. I love being in the room with them. At the same time, Maya's poetry is beautiful too and I too hope to be more amazed the older I get and Mamma's faith seems so solid. So on Monday these words landed in my in-box and on Wednesday Shannon read them aloud to us, her northern Alabama accent lilting the words warmly, and then followed with this question: What are you? And so I ask you: What are you?
Many things continue to amaze me, even well into the 6th decade of my life. I am startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me that they are Christians. My first response is the question, “Already?” It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian. I believe that is also true for the Buddhist, for the Muslim, for the Jainist, for the Jew, and for the Taoist who try to live their beliefs. The idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.
One of my earliest memories of Mamma, of my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible. That incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time Mamma drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked up into a distant sky, and said, “I will step out on the word of God.” The depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman in the South tending her crippled son and 2 grandchildren, caused her to make the statement of faith often.
She would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the word of God. I will step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her. Naturally, since Mamma stood out on the word of God, and Mamma was over 6 feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the word of God had power.
In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around in the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Christianity.
One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him. I was 24, very erudite, very worldly. He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section that ended with these words: “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.” He said, “Again.” After about the 7th repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?
That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.
This past week, the text below was our launch. I haven't studied Maya's life and I've only briefly read the Unity School's "Lessons In Truth" and whenever this remarkable woman is mentioned I always think about the remarkable women who Oprah will never notice and I want to be in the room with them instead. I love being in the room with them. At the same time, Maya's poetry is beautiful too and I too hope to be more amazed the older I get and Mamma's faith seems so solid. So on Monday these words landed in my in-box and on Wednesday Shannon read them aloud to us, her northern Alabama accent lilting the words warmly, and then followed with this question: What are you? And so I ask you: What are you?
One of my earliest memories of Mamma, of my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible. That incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time Mamma drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked up into a distant sky, and said, “I will step out on the word of God.” The depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman in the South tending her crippled son and 2 grandchildren, caused her to make the statement of faith often.
She would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the word of God. I will step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her. Naturally, since Mamma stood out on the word of God, and Mamma was over 6 feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the word of God had power.
In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around in the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Christianity.
One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him. I was 24, very erudite, very worldly. He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section that ended with these words: “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.” He said, “Again.” After about the 7th repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?
That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.
- Maya Angelou, from Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now
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