Fate and Grace

Last week, I had three hallway conversations in the school of social work with people with great hearts who are just weary. I have been weary for most of my life, though--ironically--brain tumors and their treatments have given me the gift of energy because my disabilities  now require me to allow space and time in each day for rest and reflection. The disabilities force me to slow down and to accept limitations on how much I can do each day. In this way, my disabilities are a gift. 

When I was growing up, I noticed that I was more tired than most people. On my first camp-out, when I was six years old or so, all of the other campers in my tent got up with my counselors to see the sun rise. Only I continued to sleep. When they returned and I woke up, they told me about the beautiful colors in the sky, wanting to make me regret that I had slept. I was sorry to have missed the lovely sunset, but I did not regret sleeping. 

I was so tired as I was growing that while my peers watched Saturday morning cartoons, I slept. The only cartoons I watched were "Scooby Doo" and "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" because they came on later in the morning. In high school, I had mono, but not from the kissing virus (alas), just from wearing myself out. 

I felt that fatigue was my fate. I connected with the poetry of fatigue, like Tennyson's "Marianna" ("She said, I am weary. I am weary" though thankfully never with the next line, "I would that I were dead.") I recognized Frost's weariness at the end of "Stopping by Woods," when his narrator said "I have miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep." (It was the repetition of the line with which I identified: Frost's narrator and I were on the treadmill of exhaustion.) And I loved Roethke's "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." Yes. That is how I lived my life. 

I believed in the Puritan Work Ethic, not because I had reflected on it and come to believe that idle hands do the devil's work, but because for it was a universal truth that one should stay as busy as possible and work as hard as possible. The first time it occurred to me that this was a cultural value and not a universal law was on a summer adventure in rural Michoacan, Mexico, after my second year of teaching.

I was on a volunteer project with an organization called Amigos de las Americas, and it was our goal to help as many people as possible build latrines at their homes. Only I really thought of it as "I am building latrines for poor people." My fellow volunteer Juan, who was born and grew up in Salinas, California, but whose parents were from Mexico and spoke Spanish in the home, helped me understand that the people we were there to help had values of their own, lives and beliefs worth respecting, and the project was a mutual one, not a charitable one. 

Sometimes I would be digging deep into hard soil and young men would sit around and watch me work. "Something is wrong here," I thought to myself as I continued to dig and they continued to watch. I thought I had something to teach them about hard work, but for sure they had something to teach me about sitting around and watching. (Ann will tell you that I learned this lesson well.)

At a retreat at the end of the summer, my fellow volunteers from various pueblos in rural Michoacan gathered and reflected on what we had learned. I quoted from Simon and Garfunkel:

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

I continued to move too fast in my world back in the states, but I remembered often the lesson of slowing down that I had glimpsed but not learned in the Michoacan jungle. 

When I was married the first time, my husband (yes, husband. It was a long time ago) often called me by the nickname "Weary Mary." It's not that I was lazy or inactive: I loved to hike and bike, and I worked hard at my teaching job, often taking on extra responsibilities like coaching and chairing committees. I was just so tired. 

I could not understand why I was so darn tired all the time. My weariness affected my self-image, my sense of what I could do and be in the world, my studies and my play. I struggled to overcome my exhaustion as I expected more of myself than was healthy. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, when planes crashed into the twin towers in NYC , I took solace in Pablo Neruda's poem, "Keeping Quiet," which read in part:

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Though theoretically I understood that there was violence in overwork, I also taught teenagers who needed skills andy hope, and I believed that they needed me in order to get those things. (At times, I may have been right.) I glimpsed again the danger of overwork from friends in Guarjila, El Salvador, and read the words of their martyr, Oscar Romero:

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
 of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
…This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
 day will grow....

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of 
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
 grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
 difference between the master builder and the worker.

I believed that overwork was unhealthy, but I continued to do it anyway. In my last year before diagnosis, for example, I was at the gym by 5:00 each morning to swim or lift weights and do yoga before getting to school by 7:00. 

Also, throughout my 12 years of teaching in public schools, I promised myself that my public school students would receive from me the same kind of attention and education that my private school students had, though in a private school I taught four classes a day of around 15 students each and in public schools I taught five classes a day of up to 41 students. Therefore, I worked late each night and worked both weekend days, though by the end I took at least a half day off on the weekends. I helped start three new schools. I took leadership positions. I worked for a national education organization. I was always exhausted. 

I knew this overwork was not healthy. I posted Lao Tzu's quotation, "One must know when to stop," on my classroom wall, and a young teacher read it aloud and asked me accusingly, "Do you?" The question was rhetorical. Beside my desk, I posted Thomas Merton's caution about overwork:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of this innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace, because it kills the root of the inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

I knew that I was overworking, but I did not stop. Perhaps this overworking was an addiction. Perhaps this overworking was a reaction to some place in me that knew my time in this world was limited. Perhaps it was connected to an ego that believed that every moment I had was needed in order to do work that I thought only I could or would do. 

My brain tumor was finally diagnosed when I was 43 (diagnosis took a long time, though when they found the tumor it was probably 43, too), and I finally had an explanation for so many physical oddities throughout my life: fainting, trembling with weakness, struggling athletically on my left side, weariness….

My brain tumor diagnosis, though upsetting in some ways, made me feel sane, like there was a reason, after all, for the way I had felt all my life. I was not lazy. I was not crazy. I was not a malingerer. I was sick.

I struggled with my lack of energy after neurosurgery, and I began to struggle even more after radiation for my second brain tumor. I was sleeping 14 hours at night and napping three hours in the afternoons. My allopathic doctors told me that there was nothing they could do to address my fatigue, so I searched for a naturopath and found an excellent one in Dr. Eileen Stretch.

Instead of dismissing concerns that she couldn't explain, Dr. Stretch labelled fatigue and an odd vertigo as "rare and peculiar." She loved seeking to solve the mysteries of my rare and peculiar symptoms. And I loved it that she took my concerns to heart. 

After a couple of years of taking many supplements, I started taking "SamE," a supplement that is in a powder like Kool Aid and tastes bitter like lemon rind. When I experimented with taking two packets a day, I began needing less sleep and feeling more awake during my waking hours. Then some blessed medical researcher souls developed a genetic test, a simple blood test, that confirmed my body's need for SamE, and I started taking three packets a day.

Now I sleep 10-12 hours at night and nap from 45 minutes to two hours, getting maybe 13 hours of sleep in a day instead of 17 hours.  Sometimes, I don't even take a nap. I continue to take rest seriously and to limit the commitments I make, being sure to leave time for yoga and meditation and a nap if I need it. I am less weary and more alive.

Being sick has humbled me, teaching me that the world could survive and lots of good things could happen without me. It has taught me that I am no good to anyone if I am not good to myself. It has taught me to prioritize how to spend my time, limited as it is in my days and in my life. 

In this humility, I am learning to trust the world beyond my efforts.  But still, like Jacob, I wrestle with my angel. I am a student again, and I love what I am learning so much…I love being a student so much…that I am tempted again to overdo it. There is so much in the world that is interesting, and there is so much to learn. There is so much to give. 

So I have not so much slowed down because I have become wiser as I have slowed down because I must. I still want control, which I suppose is at the heart of overwork. Though I feel that I have been a good sport about my brain tumors, their treatments, and my disabilities, I do not want another one. I have learned so much from my two tumors, and in many ways my life has been enriched by them, but if I were in control, I would not have another. (I have my next MRI a week from Tuesday, and these semi-annual MRI's make me think a lot about the possibilities of a new tumor, so if I were to have control, I would like to have it now.)

Friday I had a test about how well I have learned my lesson of unflattering my days. I went to an introduction to doing a master's thesis for my program. The thesis is not required, but it seemed like something to check out: I could pursue a question of my own in some depth, and have guidance in that pursuit. As I listened to all of the requirements, however, I realized that although the project might be great fun, I do not want to invest my limited time and energy in this way. I am learning that I need to make choices. 

I will continue to learn and to love my life, and I will continue to do what I do well, so I will limit what I will do. Perhaps I am learning. And perhaps I needed these tumors to teach me, though by that I do not mean that some intellectual force planted the tumors in me. I don't think of God or God's place in my life in that way. And, to repeat, I do not want another. 

Perhaps by slowing down and giving myself space for breath and poetry, I am learning about grace. I do feel great grace in my life now, since my tumors, in a way that I did not before my tumors. In this way, though I would not have chosen them, my tumors have brought me grace, as Ann and I pray together each night before dinner, "Oh God, Remind me that all of life is grace. Let me respond in gratitude." 

The Road Not Taken

Perhaps you think fondly of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Less Traveled," and of the way that you, like Frost, have taken a road less traveled in your life. If so, you're not thinking about Frost's poem but about M. (why the "M"?) Scott Peck's popular psychology book.

Frost's poem, English teachers will tell you, is not about the road less taken. In fact, it's not even clear that the road less taken was taken less, because early in the poem Frost compares the two roads in front of him and writes, "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black."(I added the underlinings.)

Frost's poem is about the road he didn't take, a road he would never return to. It's about two ways his day and his life might have gone and about how he'll never know about that other road and the people and paths where it would have led him. The poem is a "sigh" about that life he'll never lead.

I wonder often about that paths I didn't take. Perhaps we all do. I don't wonder with regret but with a kind of amazement that my life has turned out as if it were destined but might not have turned out this way at all.

My niece Isabella will soon ring her hands over what university she should attend. She knows that the decision will lead her to a particular life and away from another one. Though she's only 18 years old, she has of course made these decisions before: her decision, for example, to relinquish super-competitive tennis and to pursue her education at a boarding school with a middling tennis program.

I fretted about my college decision the whole time I was in college. What was I missing at the schools I didn't attend? And then when it came time to decide whether or not to marry my college boyfriend (I didn't, and it didn't feel like a choice), I worried about the life I had decided not to live, and I worried that maybe I would regret it as Yeats's narrator in "When You are Old" warns. I worried that I might "Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars." So much anxiety at such a young age.

I've made thousands of decisions when paths have diverged in yellow woods over the almost fifty years of my life. For example, I didn't marry one man, and then I did marry another, and then we divorced, and then I came out, and then I married the woman I love.

For another example, I didn't go directly into graduate school or law school after college. Instead, I taught high school, and then I stopped teaching high school, and then I started again, and then I stopped again, and now I hope I'll be a therapist, but who knows.

And yet another: When I pulled out of that gas station in 2010, I looked left and looked right, but I guess I started pulling out before I looked left again, so I pulled into the path of a racing jeep with a distracted driver. When I saw the jeep coming, I braked, then sped up before he his car hit mine right at the transom. I didn't have time to think much about the braking and accelerating paths, but the paths I chose, luckily, probably saved my life.

I've been thinking about the roads I've taken through my life, and the ones I've passed by since Ann and I went to see her previous school's performance of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits Friday night. I've been thinking about all the times "I kept the first for another" and way led on to way and I never went back.

Seeing the performance stirred Frost's poem and these thoughts because, just before I was diagnosed with my first brain tumor, I was teaching in a public school in a poor area and Laura Ferri, Ann's school's brilliant theatre teacher, and I had been talking about a joint project between her private school and my public one, in which students would perform their families' immigration stories.

Laura and I hadn't yet talked specifics, but I was excited to bring her talent to my students. Though I was nervous about mixing her students of so much privilege with mine of so little privilege, I trusted Laura intuitively and figured that our students would create something lovely together.

We never got the chance. My doctors sent me down the "you need brain surgery soon" road, and I've gone from way to way. I don't regret the paths I've taken, but I am "telling this with a sigh." I wonder where that road might have gone.

Friday night as I was thinking about this road not taken, the possibility of a new road opened to me. During the second intermission (it was a long play based on a long book), Stephen, who teaches math at the school, told Ann and me about the band he plays in. All of their proceeds support a program using art therapy with victims of sex trafficking.

"I'm in an MSW program now and am thinking about writing with people who've been through trauma," I told him. I gave him my email address and perhaps way will lead on to way.

I can see why some faiths believe in reincarnation. We just can't live all the possibilities of our lives in this one life.

And so, yet again, way leads on to way. I wonder where my life will go and where it might have gone. Only now I'm more curious than anxious, perhaps because I'm older (a classmate referred to a 30 year-old man as "middle-aged" last night, so according to her formula I've gone over the hill and down one side and am now headed up another hill).

I'm also curious about the ways that I can't see: not just the future of my life but also the journey into what seems the darkness of death. I'm not in a hurry to get there: I'm no cat, and I won't be killed by curiosity.

I'm just curious. 

Eternity in a Flower

At the end of fall quarter, in her farewell to the class, my history professor Morna said, "Only the past and future exist. The present does not exist. It is ephemeral." I love Morna, and I want to agree with her, but I didn't understand this. In response, I said out loud (though I meant to keep it to myself), "Or the opposite."

The next week, at the close of my class on Death and Dying, my professor Bonnie said the precise  opposite of what Morna had said. Even Bonnie's language and sentence structure were similar: "The past and the future do not exist. Only the present exists." In response, I said out loud (though I might have kept it to myself), "Last week my other professor said exactly the opposite!" And then, because my classmate Abby knew and loved both Morna and Bonnie, as I do, I said, "That was Morna."

Apparently, the University of Washington's School of Social Work does not have a policy on the present. Or on contradictions. This was, as my Dublin philosopher-cabbie said to me decades ago, "a conundrum."

I thought (to myself this time) about one of my favorite quotations from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I contain multitudes.

What multitudes are here?

Though I know that Morna and Bonnie are not one, I struggled with what this contradiction meant. I thought about Morna's comment. I thought and thought. But I could not make sense of it. I emailed Morna to say thanks for being such a great teacher, and I told her that I would like to understand what she meant when she said that only the past and future exist, and the present does not.

Monday morning Morna came over for tea, and we shared stories, and then she reminded me that I had had a question. (I hadn't forgotten, but she was kind to give me an opening: fortunately, we are both nerdy enough for this conversation.)

So I asked Morna again what she meant by, "The past and the future do not exist. Only the present exists." I described Bonnie's similar but opposite statement, and I told Morna that in my readings in Buddhism and Hinduism and my yoga practice, I have always learned that only the present is real, and this makes sense to me. Meditation also tells me that the moment, and only the moment, is real. My life tells me that, too.

Morna tried to explain her thinking to me, and though I'm sure it's quite deep, it is apparently beyond my depth. I will try to share what she said here, and you can try to understand. (As the writer Osho is always saying to me about understanding the Hindu poet Lao-Tsu, "Try to understand.") Perhaps you can understand it and explain it to me. Or perhaps in the writing I will come to understand it better.

Morna began by describing the Buddhist idea that the coffee table in front of her did not really exist, but the table exists as a concept. She was already beyond me. I know that as an idea of Plato's but not a Buddhist idea. I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about, encouraging her to continue. Perhaps I would understand if she said more.

I didn't.

Morna explained that she thinks in spirals. I do not. Though I think change happens in spirals, and maybe time moves is spirals, and I think such thinking must be awfully smart, I don't think in spirals myself. Perhaps I've written too many outlines in my day. (It won't surprise you to know, however, that I don't write outlines for my blog entries: they just take me to some new place of thinking…not exactly a line but not exactly a spiral either. Perhaps more line-like than spiral-like, more path-like than aliens-in-wheatfields-like.)

Morna kept explaining and told me that the two statements, which seemed like opposites to me, were in fact the same thing. The idea that the present does exist and is, in fact, the only thing that exists is the same, apparently, as the idea that the present does not exist. I suspect that this is something like string theory.

I thought--and am still thinking--about all of the linguistic expressions of the present, of a kind of eternity in the present. Of course, I thought of Annie Dillard's chapter titled "The Present" in An American Childhood where she describes being absolutely in the moment until she realizes she is there and analyzes it and then she's lost it. But for a moment she was part of the eternal moment. I realize that these moments in literature are not about the narrative arc: they are not part of the plot's rise and fall. They always descriptive and poetic.

Last night, for instance, Ann read to me Mary Oliver's "The Pine Woods," in which Oliver described deer munching "as if the moment were nothing different / from eternity." When Ann read that line, I thought--and I wondered if Mary Oliver thought--that the moment in which we truly live, the moment in which we are absolutely present, is in truth like this moment for the munching deer: "nothing different from eternity."

I thought, too, of Blake's line of eternity in a flower, which I love, but then I looked it up to make sure I had the line right, and it turns out that Blake wrote of "heaven in a wild flower" and "eternity in an hour." Oh right, I remember that now, but I like "eternity in a flower" better. So that's my line, not Blake's.

Maybe poetry, with its spaces and surprising line breaks, is best for being in the present. Maybe the punctuation mark, the period at the end of a sentence in its silence and stillness, is the mark of the eternal, stopping us as it does.

Or maybe Calculus, stopping in movement to measure a moment, is the language of the present in the midst of swirl. Maybe that symbol of infinity, the sideways and elongated eight with the intersection at the middle, holds Morna's idea that infinity is both the ever-moving past and the future and the still moment at the center. I can visualize that, though I can't say it in words.

Perhaps you are thinking, "Oh good grief. Why does this matter?" Perhaps like Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians in the 1980s you think, "Philosophy, is the talk on a cereal box." That's what my mom is thinking. I can tell you that for sure. My partner Ann might be thinking that, too, except that I'm guessing the part about Calculus has her attention. 

But to me this matters. This idea of needing a language for the eternal present is wrapped up in my needing a tense to talk about my dear friend Chris, who died two weeks ago, who is gone and is not gone.

And so, I've gone where I always go when my mind whirls and I feel unsteady: to poetry. And again to Mary Oliver. And I find her poem, "When Death Comes."

When Death Comes

--by Mary Oliver (Oct 03, 2006)

When death comes 
like the hungry bear in autumn; 
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; 
when death comes 
like the measle-pox

when death comes 
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: 
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything 
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, 
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common 
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, 
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement. 
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

--Mary Oliver

What could be truer than that? I want to live lovely and loving, like a common flower, a daisy, in the present and in the eternity of this world. And I want to bow in the slight breeze to the other daisies and Indian paintbrush and bear grass on the hillsides of Mt. Rainier. 

And now my mind wanders. With the flowers, I am reminded of Jesus's call to us to remember the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin. This was Jesus's way of saying, "Chill out." 

Now I think Morna's right: being that lily in the field is being in the present, the past and the future all at once. Maybe that's the eternal moment. And maybe I can find peace in that. Maybe I can just chill out. 

Our Dear Chris

My dear friend Chris died last Friday, January 24 at 4:02 pm. The week before, she had had a massive stroke, and in the end, she died at home. Thursday morning, the day before she died, Ann and I went by to say goodbye.

Only I don’t feel like I was saying good-bye. Chris and I have been friends for almost twenty years and soul sisters since my brain surgery seven years ago. Often, she would give me a ride to someplace where we would visit together, and as she pulled up in front of our house at the end, she would pause at the disabled parking sign and say, “Hey, I want you to know that your friendship means a lot to me. We have become deep friends so quickly….” Once she said, “I don’t know why that is. I have some idea, but….”

I didn’t ask her at the time what that idea was. It seemed like she was talking to herself more than to me, and I didn’t want to push into her privacy. She was, as her partner’s twin sister Ellen said, “an open private person.” Now I wonder, and she will never tell me, and so I’m guessing.

The most obvious reason is that we both lived with disabilities, she from diabetes and me from brain tumors, though I am more at peace with my disabilities than I think she was with hers. Chris and I know what it’s like for our lives to change while the world does not. We know what it’s like to slow down. We know what it’s like to feel great love and grace and gratitude along with our pain. We love the world and people, books and poetry.

Chris and I laughed together a lot. I remember once when she was talking to me about her diabetes and told me how irritating she found it when people talked about “the three times I ran around Green Lake today.” I may have talked about that in the salad days of my youth. No more. A decade or so ago, she was the librarian for the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. Now I’m a student in that school, and there’s no library there anymore, but I think of her every time that I go to the “research commons,” a large room that used to be the library. Now it has tables and computers but no books.

Chris was more radical than I am, though I’m moving in her direction. Though I was more a child of the sixties than the seventies, the era when I grew up, my preppy add-a-beads and pink and green skirts, tempered my natural tendencies.

Chris moved to Seattle in 1973, when she was 25, and I was in third grade in North Carolina. She was for a while a Wobbly, and she always loved Pete Seeger songs. Her longtime friends Bryher and Gude returned to Seattle to be with her and Donna as Chris died. They had some photos from Chris’s early days when her hair was brown. Funny, it had not occurred to me that her hair had ever been anything different from the white I knew. (Of course, I would have known that. It just never occurred to me.)

Though Chris would get an advanced degree as a librarian and do jobs like being the Health and Sciences librarian at the University of Washington, she always identified as a working class person. Once she told me that her favorite jobs had been the jobs where she was a cook. She was the first cook at what I think was the first lesbian tavern in Seattle, her friend Bryher’s Wild Rose.

Chris had a great spirit. She has always been so present to the person she is with. In this connection, I was always present with her, too. I think she invited me to be present. I honor that presence, and aim to be like her.

(I really need a new verb tense to write about Chris. That’s because part of her “was” and part of her “is” and in English we don’t have a tense for the eternal present, which is what I need now.)

When Ann and I visited Chris and her partner Donna’s home to say good-bye to this gentle person whom we loved, we went into the room where her hospital bed was situated. She had always loved color, and she wore a tie-dyed t-shirt. When she opened her eyes, she could look out the windows to the mountains and the trees, and in her last two days, to sunlight. As I held her hand in mine and said, “Hi Chris, it’s Mary,” she opened her eyes and looked directly at me, with those gentle blue eyes that have always taken me in. She could not speak, but she grunted a little which may have meant, “Hi Mary. I’m glad to see you,” or “I’m in pain and need more morphine,” or both. Ellen says this grunt was her new laughter, so I’m hoping that it was one of those expressions of joy that I have become accustomed to hearing from her. I like to think that seeing me might have brought her some joy towards the end. So much of her life was joyous.

I read the poem, “God Says Yes to Me” and held her hand for a while. I chose this poem because it is down-to-earth, amusing, sweet and generous, as she was. I’m guessing she loved the “Sweetcakes” part, and if I were still to call her name in the ways I have been, I might call her “Sweetcakes.” I think she’d like that.

God Says Yes To Me

Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic


and she said yes


I asked her if it was okay to be short


and she said it sure is


I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish


and she said honey


she calls me that sometimes


she said you can do just exactly
 what you want to


Thanks God I said


And is it even okay if I don't paragraph 
my letters


Sweetcakes God said


who knows where she picked that up


what I'm telling you is


Yes Yes Yes

Having been a patient in the hospital for brain surgery and then returned home to a bed on the first floor myself, I remembered how glad I was to see people and how quickly I tired, so after Ann and I each held her hand for a few moments, we left to join her partner Donna and her dear friends Gude and Bryher in the other room.

Donna has lost weight (maybe it has been water weight from all the tears), but she was gracious and gentle with us. She told us how much Chris had loved us and had talked about us. I said something like, “Our spirits connected. We were very much present together.”

Though Chris and I were soul sisters, we were relatively new friends. I think we were both more listeners than talkers, but we talked easily together and sat comfortably together in silence. So in some ways we knew each other well and in some ways we were absolutely new to one another.

Last year, we attended a writing group together once a month, and we talked about that writing and shared it between sessions. We were once invited to answer the prompt, “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” We were both more explorers in our writing than answerers, so I wrote about three animals (cat—how I see myself—dolphin –how others see me –turtle –how I truly am) and she wrote about two (elephant—her spiritual center—and basset hound—her mentor).

When Chris wrote about the moments she was in love with, of course she wrote about cooking: “When I was a cook, I felt like a ballerina dancing to get all the ingredients added….I was definitely a ballerina.”

Chris’s favorite poem that she wrote was about her experiences on trains with her mother, which in the beginning was about their early rides together and became in the end a metaphor for her mother’s ride into death, “a train [Chris] could not ride.”

At the end of the poem, Chris wrote, “And I know everything’s OK when she’s on a train. / I have always believed that and still do.”

Chris is on that train now. And she’s okay. And so am I. And so are we. And we are more than okay because we knew each other. We are loved and lovely, all of us.