The sun shone upon her, warming her under the crisp hospital sheets.  If she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could be almost anywhere.  Images washed over her like ocean waves, pulling the sands of time out from under her feet, moving her closer to the ebb and flow of eternity.  “They say your whole life flashes before your eyes,” she whispered to herself.   “They are wrong.”

She settled her head into the cool spot on the pillow.  She was thankful for the sun.  It pulled her mind back to an image of her grandfather, sitting on the enclosed porch of her childhood home.  He was sitting with his back to the brilliant late-May sunlight.  “The sun feels so good on my shoulders,” he told her.  She was young at the time and unfamiliar with the concept of sitting still long enough in one place to acknowledge the sun’s warmth, but she loved her grandfather and took note of his observation.

Calming images of moments past washed over her.  There was no apparent order to them as one flowed into the next, settling upon her heart, validating her life.  She was trying to give a name to what she was feeling inside the shell of her own aged body, but finite words fell short as they always did in such situations.  She settled on tranquil gratitude.  Images of the past danced gently around present thoughts.  She had begun her life in a guilt-ridden world of black and white.  She was ending that life in a peacefully illuminated, sun-warmed pool of swirling lightness.

She tried to think of the first time that the notion of right and wrong had become situational.  Was it when she had decided that loving her boyfriend with her whole body could not possibly be a sin? No, it had gone much farther back than that.  She remembered questioning the concepts of good and evil as early as seven years old.

In catechism class she had been taught that it was a sin if you did not go to church.  She remembered the drawings of the children who sinned in her catechism book.  One child had black speckles upon her heart.  Another child’s heart was as black as coal. A third child–the one with the pure, unblemished heart, smiled a sweet, angelic smile.  She knew she had no hope of ever having a heart as pure as that one, and it made her feel sad inside.

She remembered crying for her best friend who did not go to church.  She wanted her friend to go to Heaven, but she had been taught that one big mortal sin had the power to seal the fate of your soul, closing off the possibility of ever going to Heaven.   Surely, she concluded, God could not be so arbitrary and cruel.  Surely God loved His children more than that.

The irony of those childlike thoughts brought a smile to her lips.  She, herself, hadn’t gone to church in many years.  It took decades of searching, studying, thinking, and reflecting until she finally developed her own belief system.  Heaven awaited her the moment she took her last breath.

More images danced like fog in morning sunlight.  First Communion class each Sunday morning.  Fashioning tissue boxes into prayer cubes.  Stringing homemade rosaries out of plastic beads and knotted yarn.  Stumbling through an explanation of “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” to satisfy the curiosity of twenty-five eight-year-olds.  Reciting the updated version of the “Act of Contrition” in preparation for the sacrament of First Penance:

O My God, I am sorry for my sins.  In choosing to do wrong and in failing to do good, I have sinned against you and your church.  I firmly intend, with the help of  Your Son, to do penance and to sin no more. Amen.

The new version left her cold.

She taught Sunday school for nine years, until her mother’s illness and her own inability to accept  feeling like a fraud had both become too much to bear.

Her mother.

An image of her lying helplessly in bed.  A woman who could not eat, but enjoyed watching cooking shows on the television in her bedroom .  A woman who barely managed to speak in wispy strains, but craved engaging conversation.   A woman who endured constant pain, but refused to cry out.  Her mother had shown her a graceful way to die with strength, dignity, and gentle restraint.

Her mother’s last words to her echoed within her mind as she closed her own eyes—“I am sorry,” she had whispered.  She had spent the rest of her life wondering what her mother meant and what she was sorry for.  After many years of being haunted by them, she was finally able to let those words go once she realized that her mother was sorry for being sick and for putting her daughter through the agony of watching her die slowly, bit by bit.

Now it was her turn.  She worried about her own children. “This really isn’t so bad,” she had told them.  She meant the dying, but she wondered if they understood.

Her children.

Images of walking in the woods with them.  Picking berries and wild mint.  Carrying the bounty home in upturned shirts.   Tea parties afterward.  None of her children went to church either.  In her younger years she had felt like a failure.  She had obviously not instilled the faith in them and they had ultimately rejected it.  But so had she.

She had tried to fit into the comfortable folds of Catholicism until she was forty.  It began to squeeze her and she stopped going.  She studied the myths of Joseph Campbell, went to Buddhist workshops, read about Hinduism, accepted the flow of Chi through her chakras in jujitsu class until her knees gave out,  believed that the American Indians’ concept of the spirit world was closest to the Real Truth,  took great comfort in Tielhard de Chardin’s belief that all people go to Heaven, and curiously through it all, still retained a fierce love of the Blessed Mother, Mary.

She had finally discovered her authentic self.  It didn’t matter that it lay within an aged body under a crisp hospital sheet.  She was a timeless being, contained for a time, waiting for release. She imagined herself smiling.  Or was she really smiling?  The distinction didn’t matter.  As she settled into her final moments, she hoped it would be the last image her children would see.

Be not afraid of going slowly,

Be afraid only of standing still.

– Chinese Proverb

Name any race–whether it be a grueling marathon or a beginners’ 5K– and you’ll find that the race is surrounded by intensely personal stories about the individuals who run them. The most poignant and often, overlooked stories aren’t about the contenders who cross the finish line in record time, although their stories are certainly worth telling.  The most poignant ones are the stories of ordinary people who cross the finish line just before it’s dismantled, the runners who lurch past water stations while the crew is cleaning up to go home, the runners who, like Rocky Balboa, have only one goal—not to win, but to “go the distance.”

The Boilermaker Road Race in Utica, New York has attracted these first-time runners for over thirty-five years.   I call them the gray-chute runners.

Runners are assigned a place to begin the race based on their experience and previous finishing times.  The elite runners cross the starting line first and all the others follow behind them. First-timer runners and people who aren’t terribly fast begin the race from an area called the gray chute, where they wait patiently to advance forward once the race starts. With computerized chips firmly affixed to their sneakers, they cross the starting line a full seven to eight minutes after the elite runners have crossed.  By that time, the elite runners are well into their second mile.

Gray chute runners–many of whom begin to slow up and become winded by the first mile marker–know they aren’t contenders.  They’re the ones who have silent conversations with God that end with, “Please just help me finish.” Many of them carry stories of sorrow, disappointment, and loss within their hearts.  I imagine them running away from their broken selves, and toward the promise of wholeness. As I wait for the race to begin, I wonder if this is what I am doing.

It is 7:45 a.m. on the second Sunday of July, 2009. The race will begin in fifteen minutes.  We are standing amid a silent sea of 12,000 people with heads bowed and hands over hearts.  The national anthem is playing.  A priest blesses the crowd.  The mayor speaks.  The unseasonable air chills our arms and legs, while a different kind of chill works its way inward to deep and secret insecurities.

I am surprised by the feelings that well up inside of me as I stand in the gray chute waiting for the crowd to advance.  I feel emotional and alone.  I am not prepared to feel this way.  It surprises me. I am here with these thousands of people, amid a throng of runners, surrounded by a mass of humanity, and yet, the memory of one single loss wraps around my heart to define the moment.

I try not to cry.

Right ahead of me is a young woman who has decorated the back of her shirt with a memorial.  She has taped a picture of a man–probably her father–to her shirt.  Three words, written in black marker, stand out boldly above the picture: I miss you.

Tears come, unabated.

I am thankful to be alive, to be able to run and breathe and feel my feet hitting the pavement, but I still feel great sorrow.   I ask my husband’s spirit to be with me while I run, and I pledge to take his memory to the finish line.  I am alive. I can run. He is not. He cannot.  “This race is for you,” I say quietly to him.  “Stay with me.  Help me.”

The starter pistol sounds; the race begins, but we stand still for several minutes.  Slowly the gray chute runners begin to walk forward.  The race begins for us when our chip crosses the starting line.  Our personal journey begins at that moment.

The first mile is the toughest for everyone, and I am no exception. By the second mile of the race, I find a comfortable pace.  I fall into step with a young man and woman.  He is clearly a runner.  He has a runner’s physique: Tall. Thin. Long, taut legs.   Her build is more like my own.  She is not a runner and like me, she struggles.  I surmise that this is probably her first race.  They are running it together.

We keep pace with one another for several miles, but do not speak.  I do not want to interfere with the gentle interplay between them.  He coaxes her along with each step.  “Take it easy.  You are doing just fine.”

I feel encouraged.  It’s as if those words are being spoken to me.  She plods along.  We have the same pace, a similar gait.  He runs backwards, facing her, for long stretches.  He talks gently to her along the way.

“You are doing fine.”

“You look good.”

“How do you feel?”

“Pace yourself.”

“Do you need water? A water station is up ahead.”

He smiles at her all the while.  His love for her is in that smile, in his words, in the way he runs backwards so he can face her and encourage her as she advances.

I lose track of the young couple by mile six.  I come upon another woman with a personal message on the back of her shirt.  It, too, has a picture of a man on it.  “Running in memory of my husband,” it says.  So many stories propel themselves past me.  Each story pushes itself toward the finish line.

Once the race is over, the party begins.  Bands play, beer flows. There is hugging and laughter. I wonder about the young couple.  Did they finish the race? I had lost track of them, but it was important to me to know that they had finished the race.  I checked the results later that day.

Sure enough.

Two runners with the same last name from Rome, New York, finished together well before I did.  Their times were just one second apart.  Her time was listed before his. I smiled at the image: he had let her step over the finish line just ahead of him.

“True love,” I whispered to no one in particular.  “That is true love.”

For those who run knowing they have no hope of winning, there is honor in every step they take. There is hope in each ragged breath.  And in the case of the young couple, that one single second between them contains enough love to last a lifetime.

(Note: I still dream of running the Boilermaker again.)

It is not my memory, so I cannot actually recall the sounds of that night. In the sleepless hours before morning when it is quiet enough to imagine these sounds, they come to me like whispers on fog.

I did not hear the shuffling of footsteps behind her at midnight as she walked home.  She had wisely chosen to walk through a safe, sleepy neighborhood of older houses with tidy front porches—porches with American flags which rippled gently, and window boxes filled with red geraniums.  Surely she was safe in the company of these silent sentries.  Or was she? Her pace quickened as she crossed to the other side of the street.

I did not hear the little hitch in her breath the moment she realized that the footfalls had also crossed over and were behind her once again.  I did not hear her own footsteps hastening to match the wild beating of her heart.  I did not hear the flagpole being torn from its place on a porch, or the sound of the flag being ripped away from its pole and trampled underfoot.

I did not hear the voices behind her, leering and cursing, or the pivot of her shoes on the pavement as she half-turned toward them to catch a glimpse.  I did not hear the whizzing sound of the pole as it cut through the air or the crack of her skull as it split open in the silence of the night.

I did not hear the scuffling sounds as her bag was ripped from her shoulder, or the relentless thuds of the pole as it smashed down upon her legs, her back, her head.  I did not hear her cry out as she scrambled on all fours to the supposed safety of a sentry porch.  I did not hear the frantic banging of her fists upon the front door where the newly-awakened occupants huddled silently together within.

I did not hear the small ragged groan which pushed its way from her throat as warm, sticky red oozed through her hair and past her ear, then spread itself across her shoulder and down her back.

I did not hear the clatter of the flagpole as it was thrown aside, or the scratchy gravel footfalls of cowards retreating toward darkness.  I did not hear her rise to her feet, shocked at first, then angered.  I did not hear her initial tears or the curse words that followed, or her own dazed footsteps on the pavement as she ran–not away from her attackers, but toward them.  I did not hear her strong interior voice—the one that refused to let this happen without a fight, the voice that fueled her inner resolve to catch up to these men and wrestle her purse from their grip.

What I did hear was incongruous jangling from the telephone next to my bed, and the sound of my own heart beating in feral panic at a deep-sleep hour when the news is never good.

What I did hear was a quivery-chinned voice trying not to cry.

“Mommy? I’m at the hospital. Can you come get me?”

(Note:  My youngest daughter was mugged almost twenty years ago.  After being beaten and robbed, she picked up the flagpole used to beat  her and ran after her assailants to try to get her belongings back.  Once she realized she was hurt, she gave up the chase.  She lost her brand-new camera, her purse, and all its contents.  We both lost a sense of security.

The assailants were caught almost a year after the attack, due to the dogged diligence of the local police force.  We both went to the sentencing.  The prosecutor spoke on our behalf with great passion and eloquence;  the judge handed down the maximum sentence.  I often wonder if those two men have changed their ways.  Do they have jobs and families of their own?   Are they living on the straight and narrow? One can only hope.

My daughter is a strong young woman and I am proud of her.  Weeks after the attack, she resumed walking the dog at night even though the sound of leaves rustling behind her had the ability to put her heart into overdrive. She believed that changing her habits out of fear meant that her attackers won.

They may not have won, but then there are still those wicked headaches.  And there’s that little thing she does when walking together:  she doesn’t allow anyone to walk behind her, even if she knows them.  Twenty years later, and she still steps aside and lets them pass.)

Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of her.  All my experiences with adults up until that point led me to believe that being an adult was serious business.  “Act your age” had been one of many directives that followed me around, so naturally I assumed that the older you got, the more serious you were destined to become.

Before her, becoming older seemed a little like being doomed.  I thought maybe we were all allotted a certain number of hearty laughs at birth and that most people used theirs up somewhere before their eleventh birthday.  In school I had learned that your bones stopped growing once you became an adult and I imagined that once you stopped getting taller, an invisible lid clamped shut on the part of you that allowed for wild abandon, loud, shrieking laughter, and silly craziness.  Maybe “act your age” was the adult way of preparing us kids for that. It scared me. I was ten and I liked my silly craziness.  I didn’t want to be doomed to feeling lukewarm, smiling politely through life.

But then there was that moment in the car with Mrs. Kornbluth that gave me hope.  Mrs. Kornbluth wasn’t like the rest of the mothers in the neighborhood—adults who stifled their laughs by covering their mouths with the tips of their fingers to prevent anything more than a demure sound from escaping their lips. Mrs. Kornbluth was different. She was the kind of adult who threw her head back and laughed with her whole body.  I was fascinated by her.

It was a warm day in the beginning of the summer. I don’t know where the four of us girls were going, but Mrs. Kornbluth was our ride.  We talked silly talk amongst ourselves in the back seat and she joined in, as if she were one of us.

Then she did the “wild thing.”  She depressed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor then let it up just as suddenly—not once, but several times.  She looked into the rear view mirror and laughed at the sight of us lurching back, then forward.  From the outside, the car must have looked like a mechanical monster with a mind all its own, heaving in spasms down our quiet neighborhood street.  To the giggly girls inside, it was like being on our own personal fun-house ride on wheels.

It’s probably important to mention that we were not in any danger. Our neighborhood street was deserted, and the experience lasted less than a minute.  It seemed so harmless and so much fun to me that I had to share it.

“Mom, Mom!” I shouted through the back screen door.  “Guess what!”  As the words tumbled out, I knew immediately that sharing this with my mother was a big mistake.  All I had to do was look at her face.  Her lips did not smile and worry lines creased her forehead.  I could accept that—my mom was always worried about our safety–but there was something more: a dark cloud of disapproval settled on her face, a look that told me I would never be allowed to ride in Mrs. Kornbluth’s car again.

The unabashed delight on Mrs. Kornbluth’s face as she watched us four girls lurching and giggling in the backseat of her car has stayed with me for more than fifty years.  It was a defining moment—a catalyst for questioning myself about the kind of adult I wanted to become. Certainly there are times that call for being serious and occasions that call for the decorum of a lady-like laugh.  But there are also those times when I get silly and throw my head back laughing with my whole being, letting loose a raucous, open-mouthed, wild-abandon laugh.

At those times, I secretly thank Mrs. Kornbluth.

Togetherness.

When I think of the word togetherness, one image jumps to mind: the image of a man and woman in their fifties who lived around the corner from my house when I was growing up.  I don’t remember much about the man, but his wife intrigued me. She always wore her dark hair in braids which she pinned around her head like an Alpine maiden.  She dressed simply and never adorned herself with make-up or jewelry.

The old neighborhood couple mostly kept to themselves and didn’t seem to have any family or friends, but I never saw them alone. Wherever I saw one of them, the other was always close by.  When their car passed us on the street, we could see the woman sitting right next to her husband in the middle of the front seat as if there were an imaginary third passenger sitting next to the door.  (Fifty years ago cars had bench seats in the front and back. It was common to see teenaged girls sitting in the middle of the front seat when riding with their steady boyfriends, but older women always sat by the door.)  At first, it seemed sweet and kind of romantic that she chose to sit right next to her husband as they drove, but after a while, something about it seemed off-kilter–it began to look clingy and desperate.  I wondered if she felt stifled or if he felt trapped.

Togetherness.  What is it anyway?  Can too much of it become a problem in a relationship? To begin I needed a definition, so the first place I looked was in my treasured two-volume Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary, copyright 1937. I found the word together easily enough, but togetherness wasn’t even listed as an entry word!  Togetherness, it seems, had not even been invented yet!

On-line dictionaries gave neutral definitions such as “affectionate closeness,” and “warm fellowship” and mentioned “a feeling of being intimate and belonging together.”  Within that context, it hardly seemed like a potentially divisive issue. I continued to search for essays and articles mentioning togetherness.

I found something interesting by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite writers.  I feel a kinship with Rilke because, like my grandparents, he is of Bohemian-Austrian descent and was born about the same time as they were. His writings are tender and wise and painfully lovely.  In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke defined togetherness as “a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement, which robs either one part or both of his fullest freedom and development.” When I read that quote, it hit me right between the eyes.  I wondered what he meant by “reciprocal agreement.”  There was no reciprocal agreement in my own young marriage.

My husband and I began our lives together flying blind.  The issue of togetherness never came about through an agreement; it had never been discussed or agreed upon.  It simply emerged and solidified on its own because of our unspoken, unacknowledged neediness.   It took us many years of trial and error to examine our relationship and learn to balance togetherness and individuality.  By breaking free of our old, constricting habits of relating to one another, we finally gained an understanding of one another’s needs and weaknesses.  It was only then that we were able to forge a truly loving relationship.

Getting there was gut-wrenching and grueling.   We were only twenty-one years old when we got married.  We were scarcely twenty-two when we became parents.  My husband needed someone who he could count on to be faithful and never leave.  I needed someone who would shelter me from the outside world.  We tried to squeeze ourselves into the traditional marital arrangement of our parents–breadwinner-caregiver.  It was all we knew.  The result was that each of us became broken approximations of our true selves.  He felt duty-bound to be a good provider, but was daunted by the immensity of the task. Financial struggles meant personal failure to him. He worked two jobs and had no time for himself. He became resentful.

I hid from the world by throwing myself into the role of homemaker and selfless wife and mother.  I was puzzled by the anger that simmered deep down inside me, and then I felt guilty for feeling angry.  Wasn’t this what I wanted?  What was wrong with me?  Why did I feel like I was shrinking with each passing day?  I felt like I was in danger of disappearing altogether.  Depression and joylessness set in.  I needed help. We needed help.

There were times when our relationship felt hopeless, but neither one of us was willing to quit.  We were both stubborn and proud and loved one another with startling ferocity. That alone made it impossible for either of us to walk away from the other.  Counseling helped.  So did self-reflection and growing up.  We had struggled mightily and finally got it right.

I understand the old neighborhood couple now, especially in the context of Rilke’s quote, read in its entirety:

“Togetherness between two people is an impossibility and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement, which robs either one part or both of his fullest freedom and development.  Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them, which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.” (Letters to A Young Poet)

Like the old neighborhood couple, my husband and I had finally achieved our own “wonderful living side by side.”  And I think maybe it’s possible that in those last years if we had owned a car with a bench seat up front, I, too, would have slid over to the middle and sat right next to him wherever we went.

Sometimes I write poetry.  Things just come to me at the oddest moments and I need to drop everything and write them down.  This poem is short and it’s tight.  One might think it took a short time to compose. It took many hours.

This poem was prompted by a student’s question about a word he found in the table of contents of a book he had taken out of the school library– A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  Instead of using the word “chapters,” they used the word “staves.”  He asked me what “staves” meant and we looked it up together.  After that, the word grabbed ahold of me and wouldn’t let go until I wrote this.

Life’s Blows

Life’s blows cruelly stave a heart,

and bring it, pleading, to its knees.

A heart once shattered,

opens slowly,

letting love leak in.

Loving truly saves the heart,

and lifts it gently with great ease

toward what mattered

all along.

Love’s where you must begin.

This single poem uses very few words to describe what it’s like to grow older.

“Yes”

We are oxymorons, we…

Young minds encased in ancient housing,

full of expectant possibility.

We argue with our groaning bodies,

who tell us “No,” when really,

all we want to do is

live the “Yes.”

Be Loved and  Beloved—I play with words sometimes.  This is a celebration of second chances.

“Be Loved”

Gentle balm

enough to calm

a man of worldly cares–

To my beloved,

I once was thus.

And now,

I am again.

Aren’t we all a contradiction in terms?  Our feet walk in two worlds while our hearts know that our truest selves belong to only one of them.

“Hanes, Her Way”

A “Hanes Her Way” gal stuck inside

“Victoria’s secret” world,

I fail to see that she can know

what I have come to learn:

That love begins inside your head,

and oozes through your hands,

and spreads upon the one you love,

while clear-eyed hearts approve.

My story really isn’t that much different from the stories of other women my age. Born into a Catholic family in 1950, I was raised to be polite, obedient, and self-effacing. Somewhere along the way I got the message that it was better to blend into the background, not make a spectacle of myself, and put everyone else’s needs before my own. None of these things came easily to me at first.
As a young child, I was loud, demanding, bold, and headstrong. When I played, I played hard, got dirty, and came home with bruises and skinned knees. I was often told that I “didn’t know my own strength.” I grew up in a time when you could be strong or you could be a girl, but you couldn’t be both. My stride was too long, I walked too fast, and I talked too loudly. I was not graceful, or petite, or ladylike. I was bossy, argumentative, and a show-off. To top it off, I had big feet, toes that resembled talons, and a pair of hands you’d be more likely to find on a boy. I was a mess.
As a young child I remember my mother calling me “a mental case.” I wondered what that meant. I thought she was saying “metal case.” I’m still not sure what I did to prompt that reaction from my mother. Two things were very clear to me though–that I was a disappointment to her and that she loved me anyway. In desperation she often warned, “You are a reflection of this family.” Clearly she feared I would tarnish our family’s reputation by my actions, a heavy burden for anyone to bear. It took me a long time to realize what a tortured soul she was. The unrelenting expectations of my grandmother breathed down her neck day after day. Familial history was repeating itself.
I remember being with my mother in the grocery store when I was about seventeen years old. The young woman just ahead of us on the check-out line was trying to cope with her little daughter who was clearly in the midst of a very loud and squirmy temper tantrum. My mother touched the young woman’s arm and in her most knowing voice said, “It does get better, really it does. My daughter was the same way and now she is a sweet young lady.” It occurred to me that I had finally become the person my mother wanted me to be. I remember feeling proud and happy. The feeling was a fleeting one.
Considering the question “Who am I?” dredges up all the memories of being an unacceptable little girl, a conflicted adolescent, a misunderstood wife, a guilt-ridden mother, and a woman who, ultimately, threw herself into her life’s work to prove to herself that she really was a good person. Those stages of life are behind me now. I am older now. I am a widow. I am retired. My children have children of their own.
Writing memoir is an act of reconciliation between my heart and the sharp edges of my personal history. It demands a kinder and gentler perspective. It reveals and begs for understanding. Because I write, I understand my story more fully. Once blame and shame are allowed to fall away, the love that was hiding behind it all along feels safe enough to peek out from its hiding place. Examining one’s life is difficult work, but necessary. The question “Who am I?” is a question for an old soul. I am ready.