Perspective, again

Photo by Lucky Tran via @illuminator99

I hate this.

My heart is breaking.

For my friends.

For my family.

For perfect strangers.

For my country.

I do not understand people who want to do this.

To inflict harm upon strangers.

To turn a joyful occasion into terror and sorrow.

To kill children.

I know human beings can lose their humanity.

It happens in war.

It happens in homes with the doors closed and everything looking just peachy from the outside.

I understand it with my head.

But not my heart.

Never.

~~~ * ~~~

After a long (for me) hiatus, with my head too wrapped up in other things, I was finally ready to post yesterday. About something lovely that happened with Jake the other day. Something small. Sweet and joyful.

And then Boston.

And then I just couldn't.

And I know life goes on.

But still, we must take pause.

I was walking home with Ethan, after school pickup yesterday, when we heard a man yelling; shouting, screaming on Broadway.

Fearful it was another crazed homeless man (one had badly frightened him a few years ago) I looked about and saw just an ordinary young man with a cell phone.

"No, no, no, no, no! What happened?" he said when words returned after the screams of anguish subsided. "Were is Meagan? Is she all right? Is she alright?"

Ethan and I kept walking. He was concerned. I assumed it was a personal matter, a car accident, maybe.

And then we got home, and Danny told me what had happened.

Ethan wanted to know more, and didn't. And I was torn between sheltering him from the horrors of this world and trying to honestly explain the evils in it without unduly frightening him.

I settled for a middle ground.

And he fell asleep last night easier than I did, sitting benumbed on the sofa, parked before a TV showing me over and over again things I did not want to see or hear yet couldn't tear myself away from.

I have dear friends in Boston. Family. All safe. (There but for the grace...)

~~~ * ~~~

In days to come I will tell you of Jake's small triumphs, of Ethan's growing obsession with Magic the Gathering; share photos of the boys' spring haircuts, talk about how wonderful this year's Listen to Your Mother show is going to be and encourage you to buy tickets.

But today, now, I will simply take my pause.

Reflect on how tiny my troubles appear in the light of larger tragedy.

I am getting tired of how often the world gives opportunity for this sort of perspective these days.

Wishing peace for those suffering.

And light and love to enter the hearts and minds of all those who would do such a thing, rendering the unthinkable, unthinkable once more.

The view from here

In the dark of a too early morning, I crack open the door of the boys' bedroom to wake Jacob, still deeply under, in the top bunk.

I entreat him to rise with whispers, remind him to stay quiet himself, so as not to awaken his brother, asleep below, as he sits up uttering his usual first word of the day “Stupid.”

“Jacob…” I whisper-scold.

“Don’t say the bad word” he repeats in a singsong voice.

“Shhhhhhh.” I remind, again. And in a louder, more urgent whisper “Come down now, Baby, the bus will be here in a half hour and it won’t wait, you have to get ready for school.”

“Stupid” says Jacob, one more time, as he lumbers down the ladder, his ancient blue bear firmly clutched in one hand.

Then, at the bottom: “Can I have a hug, Mommy?”

And thus begins our day.

By the time Ethan is up - after three visits to his bedroom, progressing from a cheerful “good morning” through a gentle shoulder shake, the flashing on and off of lights, the radio blasting an obnoxious rock station and the (idle) threat of a cold water dousing – Jacob is long gone, sent off with a kiss onto his long bus ride to his wonderful Special-Ed school on the far, other (lower, East) side of town.

(I try not to think about it too much, because it makes me sad when I do, but, yes, my boys, my twins - due to luck, genetics, a whim of the gods of autism & neurodiversity, and probably something I ate or didn’t eat when I was seventeen - lead very separate lives.)

Ethan and I talk, always; words his currency, as they are mine.

We talk a lot or a little, depending in the day. Did the Knicks win last night? How about the Nets? Chatting away through breakfast eaten, lunch made, bags packed.

Some days I take Ethan to school, yet others I send him walking with the neighbors, two boisterous boys whose testosterone-filled company he favors lately.

Already he has begin to resist my goodbye kisses when others are present. "Mooooooom" he protests as I hand him over in the lobby, though I know tonight he will still curl up into my lap as we watch the game together, after homework has been done (please God, let the homework get done without torture tonight).

<*> <*> <*>

And then I am alone, with too much to do, but no heart for any of it.

I am supposed to be writing my mother's eulogy right now. With the snow delaying her memorial service, I have had a long time to accomplish this seeming simple task, even longer to contemplate it, as I knew, bone deep, that the end was coming soon.

And yet I just... cannot. Words are failing me.

I wrote a beautiful eulogy for my father. Poured all my love and crystal knowledge of who he was into it.

But my mother... my mother.. my mother...

All I want to do is keen and cry.

In spite of so many words spilling out of me immediately after her death, I am now experiencing my grief in a visceral, animal way.

I am angry, bereft, pained; and in no space to make pretty words of it. For even at the very end, drifting away from her memories, from the shaped, sharpened form of herself, my mother was still filled with light and love.

And when we held hands the bond between us thrummed, strong as the day that I was born and we became mother and daughter.

My mother was unwavering in her love, and the space it took up in me is now dark, hollow, memory's embers being a paltry substitute for the heat of a living presence.

And there has been, yet, barely time to mourn, so filled are my days with the minutia of things that must be done; mountains of laundry and paperwork; all the threads that I dropped when constantly dashing off to my mother's bedside must now be gathered and stitched back in, the fabric of my life holey, like tattered lace.

<*> <*> <*>

The boys mourn my mother, each in their own way.

"I see Grandma, in my brain" says Jake. And I am never sure if that means to him what it does to me. He still asks to go see her sometimes, the concept of death as a permanent state being perhaps too abstract for him to fully grasp.

Ethan and I bake blueberry muffins, Mom's perennial favorite. No matter how low her spirits or appetite, I could always entice her to eat a blueberry muffin and a cup of hot cocoa.

Come to think of it, we're drinking a lot of cocoa, too.

Mom...

I raise my mug to you.

Mom, enjoying cocoa & a muffin with me, December, 2011

Packing

Mom, last time I saw her, healing but sad

I spent much of the day today in my mother's apartment, sorting the final wheat from the chaff. She has pared down and pared down and pared down again and again in all the many moves of the last seven years.

But this one is extreme.  Everything must go, except what will fit in one dresser, one amoire, one nightstand. Half a room. My mother's sphere of influence, the breadth of her ownership is now half a room. In a nursing home.

Like going away to college. Only not. So. Not.

I am so filled with emotion I am nearly paralyzed. But I must not be. I have a deadline for this job. That it coincides EXACTLY with my son's first day of school is nearly killer.

I have a bottled up ocean inside me to spill out over this. But not yet. I am beyond words for now. Tucked deep into my sorrow, steeling myself for the endgame that lies ahead, be it months or years.

My father's beautiful sculptures

I keep stumbling upon bits of my childhood everywhere I look.

A baby shoe.

A book I read on my father's lap.

A hand-blown glass bauble from the gallery.

A tiny blue pitcher I gave my mother for her birthday.

How do I choose what to let go of; what to hang onto? I can't. It's impossible. But I must, so I do.

It is so hard to keep myself from tumbling down the rabbit hole, getting lost in reverie.

But I can't. I can't. I can't. I... oh my, what have I found here...