Healing through Writing

How do you get back up there? Part I

2012-01-07T10:36:00.009-05:00

When I finally got back to my townhouse with my fractured ankle, this is what I encountered:

Anyone who’s had to step away from a vibrant life—to birth a child, to heal from illness or injury, to bury their dead—understands the metaphor this photo represents. My life as I’d known it was hidden at the top, out of reach, and I stood on one leg at the bottom. My energies had been diverted to concerns of human survival: how to get food and water. How to move safely from here to there in my vulnerable state. How to find some small enjoyment while managing the pain.

How to get to my third floor office and check my e-mail.

Reaching for any aspect of my former, happy life was a strain. My writing, teaching, retreat hosting, editing—that life was all about self-actualization. No wonder I wasn’t feeling like myself. My fall during Hurricane Irene shattered that life as well as my ankle. Circumstance now required that I hang out at the bottom of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Over the next few months, I’d have to find a way to climb back to the top of the pyramid. For now, however, the stairs were enough to face.

Fifteen risers, to be exact. Times two.

That first night home I handed my crutches to Dave, turned around to sit on the bottom stair, and went up on my bum. I made it halfway up before having to stop and catch my breath. As Dave hovered below, spotting me (more likely, should I have slipped, I would have clipped him in the knee and taken us both down), I muttered a quick prayer of gratitude for my general state of health and fitness before continuing up.

When I woke the next morning I did the math. If Dave brought me breakfast in bed, and if I only had to use the bathroom once during my morning computer work, and if I edited downstairs in the afternoons and stayed there until bedtime, I’d only have to do six sets of stairs per day. I’d leave the crutches at the bottom of the stairs to use on that floor, and the walker at the top for use on the second floor. When I got to the third, I’d crawl the fifteen feet to my computer.

My new life.

One morning while I was working in the loft my son Marty came for a visit, and Dave, downstairs fixing lunch, sent him up. We spoke for a few minutes and Dave called up that lunch was ready. An awkward moment passed—no one had yet witnessed my loft evacuation plan. I said, “Marty, I just want to warn you that I’m now going to sink out of my chair and crawl to the stairs.”

I couldn’t imagine the feelings it would stir in me if I’d ever had to watch my mother crawl.

I got better at doing stairs on my bum, over time; the human body and spirit have a capacity to adapt that never fails to amaze me. My triceps strengthened, my heart accommodated, and my palms hardened into a protective surface that eventually allowed 10-12 sets of stairs a day:

See those spots at the heel of my hand? Those are my rug calluses.

Have you ever had to adapt to new circumstances in a way that changed your body? Share your oddest sports injury or overuse syndrome.

One-footed emotional balance

2011-10-26T15:37:00.007-04:00

While I'd missed the tour of the assisted living facility—its floor plan was great for seniors, but too much walking for the recently wounded—two of my sisters determined it was a good fit for my mother. If we moved her in by the end of the month, she could lock in a lower monthly rent. "The siblings"—all five of us, including my brother in Denmark—decided this was the route to go. We had just two weeks to get her moved. From that point on everything seemed to happen in fast motion.

This put considerable stress on my mother, who had only recently returned home to a condo that no doubt felt quite empty. We'd kept her busy in the weeks after my father's death in the spring; she saw a lot of family and friends at the lake this summer, especially during the week of my dad's memorial; and as the summer waned she'd had a nasty adrenaline surge to recover from as her daughter/caretaker lay screaming out in the rain, requiring an ambulance and then surgery. Now, recovering in the convenience of her one-floor living, that daughter was no replacement for my father's constant adoration.

One day she broke down crying. I'd seen my mother cry maybe three times in my life prior to my father's death; since then her tears came readily. She said, "I'm trying to be good about all this, because you all think I should move. But I need time. To..." She couldn't go on.

"To grieve Dad's loss," I offered. She nodded.

I told her I wished that we could give her that time. I remembered the advice from when my own husband died: don't make any major life changes while you're actively grieving. I'd stayed on the farm another twelve years. But my mother's memory decline had been relentless since my father's passing. Some of that might be temporary, due to grief, but the result was clear. She needed more support.

We were at a loss as to how to provide it. If she were in a wheelchair, we could bring someone in to bathe her and make a hot meal. If it were only that she couldn't drive, we could hire a driver. But how do you support someone whose daily life constantly confuses, whose medications overwhelm, whose diet is degrading, and who needs a sane sounding board for most every decision? We felt she needed the support services of assisted living, so I once again told her so.

"But I need to be here," she said tearfully. "Around his things. I can't take all this with me."

This woman had looked me straight in the eye before my first wedding and demanded that there be no tears. I now wanted to put down my head and sob right along with her, but choked it back. I laid my hand over hers and said, "I know. But we'll make sure you take enough."

Unable to put weight on my fractured ankle and still struggling with the walker and crutches, I could do so little for her. But on my last day there, before Dave came to pick me up and take me home, I sucked up the pain and accompanied her from room to room in her condo. We catalogued all the furniture, lamps, and artwork (there was a lot of that; my Dad was an artist) and, on a clipboard, divided items into three categories: things my mom hoped to bring with her, things she hoped would stay in the family, and things that could be sold at auction.

Once she got going she wanted to plow through the whole six-room, two-bath condo (yes, there were even multiple artworks in the bath). I worried that these emotional decisions would overtire her.

"Do you want to rest?" I'd ask.

"No, I'm fine. Do you need to rest?"

Frankly, I was exhausted after the first two rooms. Physically and emotionally. My ankle was throbbing; this was the longest it had been dangling down since the surgery. But I popped another pain pill and pushed on. Undertaking this task seemed to energize her, and I would not stand between her and its completion. By the time we reached the living room I sank to the floor and stretched my broken ankle out in front of me. And when it came time to move to the bedroom, rather than strain that overused ligament on the outside of my "good" hip to stand, I crawled on my hands and knees, pushing the clipboard along in front of me like a trained dog.

By the end of the day we had finished cataloguing the whole condo. The next day, when Dave picked me up, he dropped off the three colors of bright Post-Its I'd requested so my brother-in-law and nephew would have no trouble identifying the items that needed to be moved. The next day another sister arrived; using the list I provided she went through the condo and affixed labels to every single item.

I left knowing I had pushed myself to do what I could. The sibs were really pulling this together, with an extraordinary team effort that continued over the course of the final preparations that next week. E-mails flew between us. Everything was set. It would go like clockwork.

The day before my brother-in-law and nephew were slated to move the furniture, I called my mother, sensing she might need another pep talk. But she was already in a great mood, and asked how I was doing. After my report, she said, "And oh, have you heard my good news?" It had been so long since I heard such enthusiasm in her voice!

"No," I said. "What good news?"

"I'm not moving after all! I'm staying right here, in my condo. I just finished throwing away all the tags Nancy put on the furniture."

I reeled as if I'd just been sucked inside a cyclone; she'd knocked me completely off-kilter. There had been no e-mail chatter about a change of plans among the sibs. And all our work, gone! "How? Why?" My recent surgery had sapped my powers of speech; I was now monosyllabic.

"Someone called me and said I didn't have to go. And I never wanted to move anyway."

All I could think to do was hang up quickly and tell her I'd be back in touch. Then I quite madly started calling my sisters to find out what was going on. I left messages everywhere then simply had to wait it out. My mind and gut churned in turmoil.

One of my sisters called back in an hour. She followed up with my mother and got back to me—apparently, to the abnormal short-term memory loss that instigated her doctor's initial diagnosis of dementia, we could now add the symptoms of creative memory and wishful thinking. It had never occurred to me to suspect anything of the sort; as evidenced in her comment before my wedding, my mother had always been frightfully direct. While I ran and hid, my sister was able to face my mother down and straighten her out.

Her husband and son did indeed move my mother's furniture the next day, completely winging it—and they did an amazing job.

And I learned that "winging it" was not at all in my post-surgery emotional lexicon. Moving about on one leg was not just a matter of physical balance; I'd been thrown for my own loop. I needed rest, away from my mother, in my own home and with my husband, to restore a desperately needed emotional balance, as well.

Perspective at the great 55

2011-10-21T08:38:00.013-04:00

Oprah, at 55:

Bill Gates, at 55:

Martina Navratilova, at 55:

Golum (age unspecified):

Kathryn Craft, age 55:

What do these stellar 55-year-olds have in common?

Those of us who want to preserve our youth must stay in the game. Train our eyes on the prize. Keep moving, even when it hurts. Get out among other people. Follow our bliss. To that end, I'm pictured above, still gamely trying to convince myself I could pull off my fall writing retreat at the lake, despite my ankle fracture, just because I could perch on these stools long enough to chop up ingredients for chicken salad.

I always schedule my fall writing retreat for women on the first weekend after Labor Day—my birthday weekend. Part of this is because the lake has grown quiet but the weather's still good. But it's also pre-emptive: my birthday is the one day of the year that I fear major disappointment.

Maybe it's because, growing up, I'd usually get back-to-school clothes and school supplies for my birthday. (As did my other siblings. On my birthday.) Maybe in another way my mother raised my expectations too high—she'd make me anything I wanted for dinner and dessert, and my answer was always the same: standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, and a dark chocolate cake with seven-minute frosting.

But then came the year in college when we had my birthday at the lake and she bought me a Sara Lee pound cake. In light of her compete lack of elbow grease, I thought, She doesn't love me any more.

I think I've been running from my birthday ever since. During my first husband's slow decline into the bottle, each of my birthday gifts was more extravagant than the last, even though I suspected—and eventually knew—he couldn't afford them. Dave, always paying attention as to how not to disappoint me, over-corrected: he usually takes me out to dinner and gives me a card. In order not to feel left out, I only sometimes give him a gift on his birthday. For two mid-lifers typically steeped in gratitude and joie de vive, we've turned into a couple of non-celebraters.

So I've been happier, in recent years, entertaining a group of women writers at my summer home, doing what I love to do in the place I love the most. This year, though, as the following portrait by my son Jackson shows, my fracture took front and center. No retreat. No husband, either—the day before my birthday, Dave dropped me off at my mother's and drove the additional hour home. I didn't see him again until a few days later. When he brought me a card.

My birthday wasn't a complete bust. One sister, newly arrived from Boston to take my mother to visit an assisted living place the next day, picked up a nice dinner and bought a yummy mocha cake. Another sister, who went along on the assisted living trip, stopped by a drug store to buy me a tee-shirt and some cushy grips for my walker.

But my favorite part was when Dave arrived later that week with a package from my best friend. I'd always cracked up when she'd tell me how pathetic her husband was when he didn't feel well: he'd sulk on the couch in a sweatshirt, its hood up like some sort of signal that said, I don't feel good. Comfort me. We'd laughed about it many times over the years.

She knew exactly what I needed for my birthday. After her gift arrived, I had a whole new "55" look to sport:

Readers, help Dave and I out here! How do you like to celebrate your birthday?

One floor—or three? Ask once, or thrice?

2011-10-19T09:07:00.010-04:00

In my last post I said that Dave was driving me "home."

That wasn't quite true.

I wanted to go home. I really did. Living with my mother (and her dementia, and her grief over the loss of my father) at the lake all summer, while juggling a heavy workload, had stretched my patience (and, apparently, my ankle) to the snapping point. She needed more support than any of us had realized, and fearing her inability to live alone upon her return home, my siblings and I decided it was time to move her into assisted living.

This is not an easy conversation to have with a parent, nor one best initiated by phone, so the task fell to me. Explaining our need to move her was tough, considering that my mother would probably place such a confrontational heart-to-heart somewhere lower than toenail removal on her bucket list. Plus, she didn't want to go. I'd said, "The only other option is if one of us took you in, but frankly, I don't think you like any of your children enough to survive that." She said, "No, I don't." (Score one for Mom for lobbing back some equally confrontational truth.) These conversations wrung me out—over and over and over, since she could never remember the rationale—and sapped what pre-fracture energy I had.

Now that I was just a week post-surgery and in significant physical pain, I had no energy to spare. More than anything I wanted to hang out with my husband. Relax. Soak up a positive vibe in an atmosphere that felt a tad more sane and a lot less tense.

But to do that, I'd also have to choose vertical living that in no way supported my current, non-weight-bearing needs.

We hadn't wanted another vertical home. For 27 years I'd lived in a farmhouse in which we utilized each of the four floors. But you only have to fall down the steep twisting stairs once, and hit the stone wall at the bottom, to own the truth that this isn't the safest choice for an aging body.

So when Dave and I identified the borough of Doylestown as the place where we could enjoy the walkable, small town life we now desired, we sought there the age-in-place comfort of single floor living. But in this town of old Victorians and newer town homes, the only one-floor options were 1) ranch homes that came with mowing (after mowing four acres at the farm all those years we were quite done with that), or 2) 55+ communities well outside the bounds of that small town walkability. We caved on the issue of one floor living in favor of the lifestyle that living in the borough would provide, and determined to make good use of the town home association's gym to keep arthritis at bay so our knees could handle all those stairs.

Of course knees didn't end up being the first problem. Who knew that less than two years later, my fractured ankle would assert a critical need for a one-floor layout?

And guess who could offer me that?

My mother.

I was thankful for the opportunity to rest up at her condo before tackling our Doylestown stairs. But her memory impairment (or the grief, or both?) made it so that she could not anticipate any of my needs.

I had to ask for everything. One. Item. At. A. Time.

Despite the fact that I simplified my meals, and ate the same thing every day to ease her grocery shopping burden, this is how many requests I needed to make for breakfast alone:

"I'll just have one of my yogurts, please."
"That's all?" she says.
"I'll eat up some of that granola, too, if you want."
"No, not the Triscuits, that granola you bought. The one you didn't like."
"You put it over the fridge."
"I know because I watched you."
"No, that's the one you like. Never mind, I just didn't want the other to go to waste."
(She does not "never mind.")
"No, the one in the taller box with the red writing. The Kashi. Thanks."
[sound of granola hitting bowl]
"Oh, I'm sorry, Mom, I can't eat a whole bowl. I just wanted to sprinkle a little on top of the yogurt. Like I did yesterday. Thanks."
"Could I have some juice too, please, so I can take my pills?"
"Now I need my pills. I'm so sorry, they're in by the bed. And while you're there can you grab the extra pillows so I can prop up my leg?"
"Thanks for the pills. And whenever you can get to it, I could use those pillows. I'm sorry you need to make an extra trip."
"Kathryn, for crying out loud. I'm sorry, too, but there's nothing to be done about it."
She plops down the pillows on the couch where I sit and goes to the kitchen table to eat her own breakfast and read the paper. I've clearly harassed her enough.
Meanwhile, I watch news. It depresses the hell out of me. She is not watching it, she's reading the paper, but this frugal woman who followed me from room to room all summer, flipping off lights at the camp that I'd have to flip back on moments later but with my hands full, blares TV news during all her waking hours. The sound keeps her company.
A half hour later she comes into the room. She takes in my yogurt, its sprinkle of granola, my juice, my pills. "You haven't eaten anything," she notes.
"Um, could I please have a spoon?"
"You are so polite," she snaps.

My mother needed support while awaiting her move. She needed help with medication and bills. I needed help washing my hair.

Neither of us treasured our dependency.

But for twelve more days, we were stuck with each other.

(Know anyone interested in single-floor living in Macungie, PA? My mother's condo is for sale.)

Newly handicapped on Rt. 81-S

2011-10-17T11:23:00.009-04:00

Nine days post-surgery, Dave drove me home. For the seven-hour trip from our summer home in Northern New York State to Southeastern Pennsylvania, I sat with my left leg stretched across the backseat of my mother's Camry with my broken ankle propped up on a pillow. The night before I'd taken a muscle relaxant—one tiny pill—to help me sleep, and I still could barely stay awake. This was probably a good thing. I would need all the strength I could muster for our mid-trip bathroom break.

We stopped at the Whitney Point rest area, located between New York exits 9 and 8 on Rt. 81 south. We've always loved this location. As you can see from the photo above, it overlooks the gorgeous valley that runs west of Rt. 81 from just south of Syracuse almost all the way to Binghamton. My little cockapoo Max had always given it two paws up (or at least, one rear leg). Relief would not come as easily for me.

At first everything looked great. The rest area had been redesigned in recent years, allowing cars to pull much closer to the front doors. According the the architects' website:

To rectify the inadequacies a new building was built to include the necessary components to provide for present and future needs. The new and upgraded facility includes increased parking for cars and trucks along with improved services for elderly and disabled persons. In addition, the facility contains multiple public restrooms, which are handicap accessible. Other amenities include seating areas and vending machines as well as public telephones and tourist information displays.

We were able to park right in front, beside a labeled handicap spot. At this point I was still painfully and effortfully hopping along with my walker—I didn't think a public place would be the best place for my first experimentation with crutches since an eighth grade ankle sprain. A ligament on the outside of my right hip was feeling the strain, as for more than a week now I'd relied on that one leg for everything. While my arms were generally strong from working out—thank goodness!—my wrists were not used to bearing my weight. I was heartened that it looked to be just a car length or two to get to the door. I could do this.

The interior of the building was spacious. A real beauty from tiled floor to wooden vaulted ceilings. One of my best friends is an architect, and I have a healthy respect for all aspects of design. But I also believe in the old maxim, "Beauty is as beauty does," and this was never truer for me than during my recent induction into the world of the temporarily handicapped.

The ladies room is just beyond the frame of this photo, at the near right side. By the time I made it halfway from the entrance doors to it, I was ready to collapse. I needed to stop and rest.

Despite a design so spacious it could have held enough pews for a small church service, I could find nowhere to do so.

Let me point out the only seating: see that wooden corner in the foreground corner of the photo? That was the one and only bench—I'd have to hop twice as far to get to it. What was the point? Turning back held no special allure, because I needed to use the restroom. I felt stranded. Shaking and sweating from the effort, I had no choice but to carry on.

I turned the corner and through the doorway, relieved that my trek was almost over.

It was not.

I now faced a long open hallway—one longer, it seemed, than my trip from the car door to the entrance. Clack. Clack. My efforts with the walker became dangerously uneven as fatigue set it. "Rest area"—what black humor. There was nothing restful about it. I presume this design had to be ADA compliant, but it did not take into account a full range of human needs. I finally reached the end of the hall and made another turn into an anteroom with a baby changing table. One more turn...and I face a long corridor of toilet stalls, the very last of which was the handicap stall large enough to accommodate both me and my walker.

I almost cried. My 80-year-old, 115-lb. mother, who was already done, said, "I waited for you." That was incredibly sweet, but there wasn't a blessed thing she could do to help me. I needed Lou Ferrigno to sling me over his shoulder and carry me.

An older woman with a cane stood at one of the sinks washing her hands. She turned to me and said, "I know. Welcome to my world."

I had to move on; my supporting hip was cramping. I made it down to the handicap stall and took a seat, as much to rest at this point as anything else. When I finally thought I could stand, I reveled in the joyous presence of sturdy handholds to help me get up—that right hip ligament had about had it, and I still had ahead of me a long return journey.

I went to the nearest sink to wash my hands. There were no towels or dryers in sight. My mother pointed them out—to get to them, in a separate section, I'd have to backtrack.

To hell with that. In addition to the extra effort, other women had wet the floor with water from their hands while getting to the dryers. It didn't look at all safe for one who had to rely on hopping, or using a walking aid. An aid whose use, of course, required dry hands.

So I wiped my wet hands all over my pants and began the long trek back to the car, looking to all the world as if I hadn't made my destination after all.

Kathryn, meet your new ankle

2011-10-14T10:20:00.013-04:00

Employing a complicated car exchange, my husband Dave and two sons had planned to converge at the lake on Labor Day for one reason: to arrive with one extra driver so we could get my mother and her car home before my fall Writing Partner retreat for women the following weekend. Now, my ankle broken and the retreat canceled, we would all be heading home.

First, however, I had to get my staples removed. I'd seen the x-rays of my foot, and knew about the fibula plate and the fact that I was now quantifiably all screwed up, but it wasn't until eight days later that I'd see what kind of incisions had been made.

I looked forward to the big reveal. As a former modern dancer, my feet had been the subject of much scrutiny. So when the nurse pulled away the layers of surgical wrappings and exposed all that had been hidden, my first thought was:

What the hell is that?

I'm sure some of my female readers will relate to the first thing I noticed: leg hair. I had never before put this particular aspect of my personal growth to the test, so it was interesting to see what it looked like. The skin beneath was yellow from the Betadine wash they'd used to sanitize my skin, pre-surgery.

As for my foot? The color and shape were simply all wrong.

I had a small incision on the inside of my ankle and a much longer one on the left, where the plate went in.

Dave was a real trooper with my cell phone: "Can I snap a few more photos before you take the staples out? My wife is going to blog about this." I include this next shot because I think it speaks best to the Frankenstein-esque nature of my experience: it looked to me as if someone had removed my foot and tacked on someone else's. Someone...purple.

The beauty of the fall colors I sported notwithstanding, the outside of my ankle was as tender as a rotting plum. To that the nurse applied her staple remover.

The staples they used look something like this before they're crimped:

After they're crimped, the sides of the staple pull together beneath your skin. To remove them, the nurse used an instrument that looked like this:

One part of it slips under the loop at the top of the staple, and side pieces press down on the wire in a way that raises each side, effectively releasing the staple's hold on the skin. On the inside of my ankle this was relatively painless. Where the skin was so mushy on the outside, though, each removal delivered a sharp pinch that resulted in some oozing. I'd had so little sleep in the past week that my tolerance for additional pain was nonexistent. The nurse kindly gave me time to recover between staples. After, she applied ster-strips to the incision, first swabbing each ankle with more Betadine to help them stick. She covered all with a Jones bandage, a tube stocking wrapped with gauze and then Ace bandages, that would stay in place for the next four weeks.

Dr. Perrier agreed that I wouldn't heal well if I couldn't sleep. In addition to instructions to continue follow-up care with an orthopedic surgeon back home, I left with two prescriptions: a refill for my Percocet, and one for a nighttime muscle relaxant.

That night, for the first time, I got a couple precious multiple-hour blocks of sleep.

The next day, we went home.

One trial was over, and another just beginning.

Checking in: Who am I?

2011-10-12T10:07:00.007-04:00

I'm currently seeking representation for a novel in which a professional dancer with body image issues must re-imagine her life after a devastating blow to her career is followed by a mysterious accident that leaves her unable to move. At one point, in the hospital, my protagonist concludes,

The harsh truth: without movement, I didn’t know who I was.

I thought about this, holed up as I was with a fractured ankle in a camp that still echoed with vibrant memory. The running footsteps of my youth (my mother: "You better have washed the pine needles off your feet!") and slamming screen doors (my grandmother, now: "Quick girls, the bats!") had been replaced with an eerie stillness. Although this place had made me feel more "me" than any other setting I'd known in my life, my new immobility allowed the dissociation my character spoke of to set in. Floating free from my writing and editing in a sea of pain medication, as out on the lake other Labor Day kayakers and swimmers reveled in summer's last rays, I felt like driftwood of an unspecified nature.

I have always been sensitive to the way change, especially when unanticipated, can challenge your very sense of who you are. A move to a new state in sixth grade, the loss of a beloved cousin while I was in college, my fertility struggle, my first husband's suicide—in the parlance of story structure these are inciting incidents: unexpected forces that tip a character out of her everyday world and that forge within her a desire to create a new reality.

Why a new reality? If you had a good life, why not just wait things out until I could get it back again? After Ron's suicide, at a meeting of Parents Without Partners, a man asked me just that. "Why are you working so hard at this?" he said, after I'd mentioned the therapy I'd sought. "He did this to you. It's not your fault!" He literally shook with anger, as if my choice to heal implied he might be culpable in his own divorce.

My rationale then was the same as it was fourteen years later, after my ankle fracture: why voluntarily return to a world in which such frightening circumstance was possible? While change is capricious and inevitable, I'd rather hedge my bets and reach for a life with different challenges rather than take another spin through the hell I'd already been through. Otherwise I'd feel as doomed as Sisyphus, rolling that rock back up the hill, over and over.

As a result I'm a rather voracious healer. I do not sit well with a disrupted sense of self; I can't muster the hope that time will knit my soul back together as tidily as it will the bones in my ankle. I'm more proactive than that. But a seeker needs motion. How could I rebuild my sense of self as a lively mid-lifer while stumping through the camp with a walker, each step taking such a toll? I'd hoped that "Kathryn Craft + walker" was a good three or four decades down the road.

The universe offered a grace of timing: by Friday night my sons, ages 22 and 24, already scheduled to spend Labor Day weekend at the lake, were on their way.

Their bed-head appearance late Saturday morning made it seem like the stork himself had dropped them off during the wee hours. At once I knew how much I needed their beautiful familiarity; I was more off-balance than even I had realized.

This was the first summer I'd been at the lake without my dad, whose spirit was evident everywhere but whose physical presence was sorely missed. I'd spent all summer with my mother, with whom I'd always had a trying relationship, but who needed me now that her short-term memory was fluttering to a halt. I'd fractured myself: at the same time struggling to catch up with my own interrupted work, I'd wrapped my life once again around her needs. Her dementia's constant assault on my sense of what was real and true knocked me as far off-balance as Hurricane Irene had, and now I had only one leg with which to right myself.

But in watching Marty glide over the water beside Dave in a vessel my Uncle Bob had bequeathed him, or listening to Jackson and his girlfriend enact the tireless debate on which is the best way to build a fire, the camp sprang to a most familiar life.

When my dad's sister left the lake this year—at 92 the only remaining Graham of that generation—she gave me a check for $50 with the instruction to purchase something for the camp in memory of my father. To that end my mother and I had purchased the Jack Graham Memorial Barbecue Grill to replace its dangerously rusted predecessor, at which my Dad had distractedly lorded over many an overcooked hamburger. On Labor Day I couldn't see, from my perch in the camp, my sons out at the grill. But knowing they were out there with chocolate bars, the old marshmallow forks ("Mom—here's a perfect marshmallow for you, golden brown!"), and my favorite—the graham crackers—I reclaimed a core aspect of self.

I am Kathryn, of the Grahams, and through me, tradition lives on.

Letting go is hard to do

2011-10-10T10:14:00.006-04:00

Decades ago my sister was hit by a car while walking past the exit of a downtown parking garage. The impact threw her into the street, where a crowd immediately gathered. Had she survived? Her first words: "I need to get to the subway station or I'll be late for work."

I know this syndrome, born of shock and denial. Even while waiting out the standoff that would result in my first husband's suicide, I kept thinking: as soon as I get home, I'll file the newspaper article that had been due that day. Our plans are important. They organize our lives and make us feel safe; we know what to expect.

So when I broke my ankle two weeks before the fall Writing Partner retreat I was to host at our summer home, my immediate inclination was to forge on. For a variety of reasons I'd had to work hard to do it but I'd finally pulled together an awesome group of women. And after planning my father's memorial service, living all summer with my mother who suffers from dementia, and working 12-15 hour days to catch up with the most editing work I've ever had in a year—adding to that now, the ankle injury—I really needed to retreat, in every sense of the word.

I assured everyone, even from my hospital bed, that the retreat would move ahead as planned. I had two whole weeks to get better. I could do this, I thought.

That was before I realized just how far I would have to retreat.

My first inkling was how exhausting it was for the fiercely independent woman I'd become to ask for every little thing I needed: That a pillow relocated to another room be delivered. My pills, please. More water. Food? My whole life my mom had been dutiful in the nursing department, and she still was, but she couldn't remember where to find anything; I constantly had to fight through my medicated brain-numbness to find the words I needed to help her locate what she needed. Often more than once. Then again.

And let's just say that to depend upon a walker, using only one leg, was akin to walking on your legs your whole life and then being told to instead walk on your hands. Muscles rebelled.

Although I ferried between only two locations—the bed at night, and the couch on the porch by day—at every meal my mother would set me a place at the table, sometimes even starting her meal before saying, "Oh, you're going to eat over there tonight?" As if I was inconveniencing her by my sudden decision. And here I was supposed to be taking care of her. Dave was a big help, but caring for me in such a way was new to him, too. Rather than patronize me, he erred on the side of waiting to be told what to do.

Even as guilt and impotence drained me, lack of sleep screwed with my head. Part of me felt I had to stand guard all night lest Dave—who has no trouble sleeping despite his jumpy leg syndrome—strike out at my ankle. Yet I wouldn't ask him to sleep elsewhere. What if I needed him? I sandbagged a barrier between us with an extra pillow but couldn't fall asleep. And when I finally would I'd jerk awake with continued flashbacks—the slip, the sudden fall. The snap of the first bone, the crunching of the others. The rain, the shivering. In the middle of the night, with nothing to distract me from my hot ankle pain and stranded between pain pill dosages, I'd lie there softly crying for as much as an hour and a half.

My days, once a multi-tasker's mishmash (blogging, social networking, writing on my own book-length projects, editing for others, booking future speaking gigs) were now simply mash: clomping to the bathroom, sponge bathing, getting to the couch, eating, resting, and trying to find new ways to get up from the couch. Every single thing required creative problem solving that sleep deprivation left me poorly equipped to tackle, from washing my face (I put a stool beside the sink to kneel on, effectively creating for myself another leg) to tentative forays into food prep (I could chop veggies if someone washed and dried them, brought me a knife and a cutting board, then came to retrieve them).

It was clear I couldn't provide the type of bed and breakfast retreat experience my ladies signed on for. So I could contact them Dave rigged up this system so I could sit at my computer: a bench-like coffee table shoved beneath my desktop table, with a pillow on it that I could slide my foot along as he pushed in my chair. I went online to negotiate with my retreaters. I'd go ahead with the retreat and return some of their money, I said, if they'd agree to an alternative, commune-like experience where all pitched in.

Turning on the computer meant hitting the wall of hundreds of e-mails missed during the three days I was in the hospital. I opened a few, wondered how the hell I'd ever handled dealing with so much mail, then shut it off. Ten minutes sitting up had my ankle throbbing; I needed to lie down and elevate it. Above my heart; above my passions.

My awesome retreaters quickly agreed to the new terms. But as the days wore on, I was still only capable of staying up until 8 pm, the time when our evening readings would usually begin. My sleep was so fractured I couldn't make it through the day without a nap, either. I felt incapable of leading anything. And for the first time in many years, I needed rest more than I needed to write.

Uncle. I had let go in stages, but I finally faced my limitations: this retreat would not be anything like the experience I wanted for my guests, and further, it would fail to feed my own writing soul, now held captive and inaccessible in some parallel universe. I canceled the retreat, and while I was at it, all but one of my fall speaking engagements.

I had to face my new reality: not only was I no longer the multi-tasking modern writer, I couldn't figure out how I'd ever even lived that life.

For now, I was a simply a woman trying to figure out how to survive, and how to ask for help doing so.

I love that saying, "Life is what happens while we're busy making plans." Have you ever tried to hold onto a plan despite an extreme change in circumstance? I'd love to hear your story.

Going home

2011-10-06T10:44:00.007-04:00

The day after my surgery a physical therapist stopped by my hospital room to display my choice of walking aids: crutches, or a walker. I said I was a little worried about the crutches because of the flooring we'd used when we'd renovated the camp: the wood-look floor could be slippery. Since I wouldn't be weight-bearing on the ankle for three months he suggested I take both, and benefit from the added stability of the walker while at the camp. Dave should remove all the area rugs that were now trip hazards.

"So, let's see you use the walker," the therapist said.

"Now?"

Nothing phases these guys. He got me right up out of bed, hooked all my bags to a movable pole he'd push along behind me, and told me to walk to the door and back.

"Relax your shoulders, move the walker forward, and hop toward it," he said. The choreography was elementary—the trick was performing it while my foot felt radioactive with pain. I held it out in front of me where I could ensure it would come to no additional harm.

I am nothing if not determined. When my college dance students would say "I can't do it," I'd tell them their choice of words would not be honored in my classroom. They were, however, allowed to say, "I'm currently finding this movement a challenge," a response that would both improve their humor and result in some added tips and tricks from me. So I had no doubt that I'd make this walk, no matter what. But it wouldn't be pretty. Even before the edge of my roommate's bed I was wracked with the kind of sobs that make relaxing one's shoulders a challenge.

"That's good. That's enough," the therapist said, but he'd told me the door was the objective and I was only two-thirds of the way there. So I pushed through those final few hops before my return trip. This is how surgery and sleep deprivation sap you: just days before I was lifting weights and doing sprint/walk cross-training and swimming quarter-miles, sometimes all on the same day. By the time I got back into bed after this herky-jerky attempt at walking on one leg, I was completely spent.

Because of his practice in the Canadian border town of Ogdensburg, some thirty miles to the west, my surgeon conducted his rounds in the evening. I braced myself when he came in. I knew our country's health insurance philosophy as concerns hospitalizations: cut 'em and turn 'em loose. The summer before, post-Cobra, Dave and I had spent months shopping for affordable health insurance; we now spent half of his monthly pension check on a major medical policy whose attributes my memory couldn't distinguish from the sea of coverages we'd applied for.

All afternoon I lived in dread of being sent home. I even hated to hear how well my nurses and doctors thought I was doing: my vitals were great, my overall health commendable. And I'm thinking, how could I possibly survive the hour's ride back to the camp, let alone the hobble from front door to bed, which was so much longer than the one I'd pushed through that day?

My fate would turn on the words of Dr. Luc Perrier. I was sure my vitals were fluxing all over the place as he made his determination. With that French accent I was unwilling to yet label charming or hateful, he said, "So try to get some sleep tonight and I'll see you tomorrow." Charming it was: because he did late rounds, I'd have another full day to gear up for my next challenge. I let out the breath I was holding and thanked him. As he signed my chart with a flourish he repeated what he said in the ER: "But don't forget to cast me as the handsome doctor who saved your life in your next novel."

That extra day would end up making all the difference.

Making "handicap accessible" camp

2011-10-06T09:41:00.013-04:00

We weren't the kind of family to spend a summer vacation pitching tents and cooking over a fire, yet I grew up with a healthy respect for "making camp." Five kids, two parents and an Old English Sheepdog would pour out of two cars and stake our claim to what space we could, divvying up dresser drawers and unrolling bags onto sleeping porch cots. My older sister always claimed the cot nearest the screened-in wall that overlooked the lake; if we knew what was good for us, the rest of us didn't even try. Since youth I was drawn to physical obstacle—I'd wanted the top bunk in the room I'd once shared with my sister—so I chose the cot wedged deep beneath the angled beams. A night during which I escaped whacking my head was a night well-executed.

I'd use these skills when returning to the lake after my ankle fracture and subsequent hospitalization. The day after surgery my departure seemed imminent. Even as I was still hooked up to a variety of bags and machines a social worker stopped by my room to ask if my summer home would allow single floor living for awhile. Thanks to my Lifespan Design Studio friends Doug and Ellen, the answer was yes.

After Dave and I purchased the camp from my parents and determined the best way to save it was to pull most of it down and rebuild, we went back and forth on whether to include a first floor bedroom. It would increase the footprint and the cost, pointed out my eighty-year-old father. "Don't do it for your mother and me," he said. "When we can't do stairs we'll stop coming to the lake." I thought of my grandmother, and the many years my uncle parked her wheelchair on the porch so she could continue to take in the view she so loved. My dad may not want that bedroom, but I did.

Once architect Doug was in on the project, he was all for the downstairs bedroom—so much so that he added a wheelchair-width doorway into the room and another into the downstairs bathroom. Because they embrace the philosophies of universal design, Doug and Ellen encourage the kind of forward thinking that allows people to stay in their homes despite future health challenges. The wall sink I wanted to re-use for reasons of nostalgia, Doug pointed out, would perfectly suit someone approaching the sink in a wheelchair.

I had thanked my dad for his input but told him Dave and I planned to add the downstairs room. "Anyway, you know me—I'll probably use it first, after breaking my leg or something." From then on, no matter where Dave and I slept in the camp, when referring to that room my mother called it "Kathy and Dave's room." It could accommodate my folly, but would never touch her aging.

Six years later, my father now deceased after negotiating the camp stairs until the end of his life, I was facing that exact circumstance. Our foresight made the summer home an even more welcoming environment than my permanent residence in Pennsylvania, a three-floor town home that kept me fit while in full orthopedic health but which now provided an imposing challenge. An added bonus at the camp: my cousin had purchased a classy commode for her aging mother to use while visiting one year and had left it behind "for our use." How we'd grumbled to see it fill up so much of the newfound closet space in our rebuilt camp. It was the first thing I told Dave to set up.

Dave drove home with me strapped into the back seat of our Ford Contour, facing sideways with my leg propped up on a pillow. When we got to the lake Dave pulled onto the lawn so he could deposit me right beside the front porch. He pulled my walker from the trunk, snapped it into the open position, and helped me pull myself from the car.

Now what?

I faced the first of many challenges to come: the step up onto the front porch. I stood there with my walker, the clock ticking—gravity was creating an inferno in my foot—with no clue how to negotiate it.

Now that I've had a bit more experience I think I'd turn the walker around and push down on it while hopping up backwards, but I wasn't feeling like such a monkey that day. The youngster who once loved the obstacle course and scrambling into her cot beneath the lowest beam was now completely stumped by a four-inch step. Through some sort of ugly push-me-pull-you Dave and I got 'er done, but I was already realizing how hard the next few months were going to be. I was so thankful for the design of the camp: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, porch: everything I'd need, close together on one floor.

As I made my way to the couch on the porch to prop my leg up so I could eat the take-out we'd picked up on the way home, Dave honored my new reality by helping "make camp": one by one, he pulled all the area rugs from my path. Perhaps the opposite of the "red carpet" treatment, but in my new reality, just what the doctor ordered.

Secret to Happiness?

2011-10-05T11:03:00.008-04:00

That a flower grows from a single seed is a useless metaphor when it comes to reaping happiness. Those of us hoping to buoy our spirits must sow and sow and sow, throughout life, so that when fate nudges us toward the edge of despair we can reach back toward a rich and varied garden from which we might graft renewed happiness.

My husband Dave understands this. When his spirits sink he goes for a run or plays his guitar or reads stories from the Bible in which the stakes were more dire. I tend to write. Or seek water: either a bracing swim or a long, hot bath. I'll go outside for a long walk. Read a novel.

None of my spirit-saving options were available as I lay on my hospital bed, a little loopy (not nearly loopy enough, in my opinion) with my newly stabilized fracture propped on a stack of pillows. I had to cast around for something new.

Granted, some happiness flowed toward me from outside sources. Since I was eight hours from home and an hour from my summer home, I loved the fact that I had any visitor at all. Mine was Emma, the young woman who hired me to teach the Healing Through Writing workshop at the hospital's rehab program, who crossed the lot with a co-worker to say hello (see Emma? You never know when you'll suddenly emerge in a leading role in someone else's life). All the family and friends who played "whisper down the lane" and then called me while I was in the hospital—then reminded me later that they'd done so—all that was precious.

But let's face it. Happiness can't be applied from the outside, no matter how thick someone tries to slather it on. For that reason, strategies that connected with some inner desire worked the best. What I needed the most was hope—and the offer of it pulled me through my days, time and again, no matter how false.

Like the fact that I had an orthopedic surgeon whose sports medicine history suggested I might once again play ice hockey (okay, got me there, I'd never played hockey—but that my ankle would withstand its rigors, should I want to, connected with me). That the nurses promised my surgery would be soon, and that the post-op pain would be more manageable (to which reality said Ha! and Ha, again!, yet the promise of which helped me believe). That the spinal would be great because of fewer side effects (even though it shut down my urinary tract completely, which apparently is not uncommon—some dozen unsuccessful trips to the commode kept me up all night and in significant bladder discomfort and ankle pain; I finally had to be catheterized).

For me, though, my first inklings of happiness grew not from a flower I'd planted but from a wind-blown weed: I coveted something of my neighbor's.

Now, the big reveal. I found a goldmine of hospital happiness in this product, which cost Dave all of 87 cents:

Which meant more: that Dave wrapped up his business back home the morning after the accident and drove straight up to a hospital located just shy of the Canadian border, or that he stopped on the way at my request and arrived bearing the gift of Cherry ChapStick?

I'd like to say it's a toss up. But I suspect it's the ChapStick.

All day the curtain had been drawn between me and my new roommate, who was recovering from a hysterectomy. Local to the area, she had entertained a revolving door of well-wishers. Their attentions were not the focus of my jealousy. Through a crack in the curtain, I noticed that she kept applying ChapStick. I was in a situation in which there was so little I could do to achieve my own happiness—but I, too, could do that.

I'm sure I'll forever associate the flavor of cherry with this ankle break. Six weeks out I carry it still, in my pocket, ready to comfort me with its fragrant, waxy warmth.

Ironic, isn't it? Turns out happiness can result from outside application, especially when slathered on thick. The happiness wasn't the application itself, though, but my relationship to it.

At a time when I felt acutely my own powerlessness, applying ChapStick was one pleasurable thing I could do for myself. It may have done nothing for my ankle, but as for its ability to improve my spirits, I was able to attach to it the one thing necessary to make it work: hope.

Readers: When you faced tough circumstances, what helped you raise your own spirits?

General, or spinal?

2011-10-04T10:16:00.009-04:00

"So I wondering if you want general anesthesia or a spinal?"

It's the morning after my big break and the Korean anesthesiologist has come to call. I'll call him Dr. Lee. He's mostly hidden by his paper surgery hat, gown, glasses. If something goes wrong, I think, I'll never be able to pick him out of a line-up.

I consider his question. My mother had slept through childbirth five different times while blanketed by the bliss of general anesthesia. I'm thinking that sounds good, but hey, he's the expert.

"Which do you suggest?"

"General anesthesia good, very good, you fall asleep, wake up, all over. But sometimes side effects not so good. With spinal you feel nothing, you wake up. Either one good."

I'd had general anesthesia before for other procedures, and had never suffered side effects. I'd had a spinal for my C-section—an injection of opiates right into the spinal fluid. I remembered lying on my side, "curled into a ball" to the extent that a nine-month pregnancy allows, trying to heed the warning to lie still lest the doctor nick something he shouldn't with that needle, even while my entire mid-section was wracked with contractions.

Now my brain was addled with trauma, lack of sleep, no food or water, and pain meds. I simply wanted this show on the road, in the least dangerous way. "I'll have the general," I said.

"Hmm. You sure? Spinal really very good. Also it last beyond when you wake up, which help with pain."

"So you're recommending the spinal?"

"No, no, general very good also. You fall right asleep, no problem."

Dr. Lee would be no help at all. But sleep? That sounded like the antidote I'd needed all night. I craved it. I settled on the general anesthesia.

Take two. Later that afternoon, another guy in scrubs came in. He strode in, shook my hand, introduced himself. I'll call him Dan. He had a red beard and mustache and the kind of stocky build and fresh face that suggested he'd been bow-hunting in the woods earlier that day. Thanks to a scheduling change, he would be my anesthesiologist.

"We're going to be taking you down for surgery soon but I wanted to meet with you first. I understand you want general?"

"Yes." With my work life blown to Hades, my loved ones scattered, and my ankle lying in pieces, it felt so good to feel confident about something.

"No you don't," Dan said. "Believe me, you want a spinal."

"I do?"

"No doubt about it." Dan smiled. "We'll take you into the O.R. and give you a little juice to relax you. We'll have you sit on the edge of the bed, bent over, and you'll feel one little pinprick for the injection. Next thing you know, the surgery will be behind you. Added bonus: complete pain relief for another few hours. Sound good?"

I'm not sure if it was his targeted argument or the thought of Dan out there in those woods, bow in hand, but something gave me faith in his aim. I said, "Where do I sign?"

I was alone when they came to get me for surgery. My mother hadn't come—while she was able to get me the help I shouted for when I fell out on that rainy hill, her grief over my father's recent death and her memory issues had made the struggles of daily life enough for her to worry about. A neighbor was looking in on her. Dave had left Pennsylvania that morning and was on his way. On the ride to the operating suite, as ceiling tiles flew past, I took deep breaths and tried to relax, hoping I wouldn't flinch when the needle went in and inadvertently cause my own paralysis.

They parked my bed next to the operating table and I inched from one to the other. I remember seeing Dr. Luc Perrier, my straight-from-the-pages-of-a-romance-novel surgeon, tying on his mask. Dan said, "Here comes the feel good juice" and I recognized the heat going into my arm...

"Mrs. Craft? Mrs. Craft?" It sounded like someone was speaking to me through a long tube. "The operation is over. How are you feeling?"

All I could think was, How many operating nurses does it take to balance a patient on the edge of a table if she's completely passed out? Memories of half-carrying wasted friends home from college parties came to mind. Maybe I should have told them that when two aspirin are suggested I can sometimes get by with a half.

Oh well. It was over. And Dan was right about the added bonus: then, and for a few additional, blessed hours, I felt nothing but relief from all that had plagued me. I'd had a great nap. They brought me a tray of food that I was able to enjoy with no distraction from pain, and a full pitcher of water. Dave arrived from Pennsylvania and I was no longer alone.

On my left ankle I sported a new wrap made of felt-like material bound with Ace bandages. Hidden within, my new permanent hardware:

That night, my post-trauma flashbacks would recur. But there was a difference in my reaction to them: with respite from the pain, some heavy-duty stainless steel on the inside, and my husband by my side, I now had resources to help hold me together.

Tomorrow: my hospital roommate's secret to happiness.

Awaiting surgery

2011-10-03T11:55:00.004-04:00

I can fall asleep for only a few minutes at a time. Then I hit the mud, slide, hear my bones breaking...and wake up crying out. To try to outrun my repeat fate I have pressed my broken ankle into its stack of pillows, and it is now on fire with pain.

And heat.

The posterior leg splint (right) the orthopedic surgeon made for me in the ER—bent to suit my ankle and strapped onto my broken yet realigned bones with Ace bandages—is curing. It heats up to do so. Every single thing I know about first aid injury treatment says this heat is my enemy. Time's a-wasting; my foot is swelling out of control but no one seems terribly concerned about this. My foot structure (narrow heel, high arch, small bones) never handled well my active life; it turns easily and I have sprained each ankle at least eight times. Experience tells me that the immediate application of ice can be the difference between walking and not.

I ask for ice. My nurse says she'll check my orders. Ice isn't listed, so I can't have it. It amazes me that ice can't be administered unless it's prescribed by a doctor.

What the hell. Guess I'm not walking anywhere soon.

They give me pain meds every four hours but as the interior pressure builds they only take the edge off for three. The last hour is a killer.

It's the middle of the night. I'm in a double but do not yet have a roommate. A hundred cable channels and nothing to watch but zumba routines I won't be able to dance and exercise machines I won't be able to use. I try, again, to sleep. Almost there... I hit the mud. Slip and roll. My bones snap and crunch. I wake mid-stride, ankle searing.

I've been panting. Mouth so dry. No water—can I have ice chips?

"I'll have to check your doctor's orders." I know where that will go.

Although my thirst cannot be slaked I'm hooked to plenty of IV fluids and I can feel them pumping, pumping into my swelling foot—then redistributing to my bladder. I have to get off the bed and onto the commode about every half hour. Lifting my leg from its pile of pillows is so painful as the tissue fluids redistribute, but that's nothing compared to the sensation of the broken bones shifting, and the hot knives that thrust into my ankle once my leg is dangling off the edge of the bed. Thanks to the efficiency of movement conveyed by a previous life as a dancer, I can get from bed to commode in one graceful pirouette (one must take one's small victories).

As I perform this bravura feat my debonaire cavalier (okay, the nurse) holds the commode so it won't kick out from under me. "I'm sorry, you can't have the ice chips, you're scheduled for surgery."

I keep my eye on the prize—that more manageable post-surgery pain, which they promise like offering a horse a carrot, then yank away, time and again. They can't give me water because surgery will be later that morning. Then it won't be until early afternoon, I'm told, so sorry, you can't have breakfast. Looks like the surgery will be later this afternoon, so you can't have lunch. Good news! We've heard from your surgeon, he'll be over after his office hours, so your surgery will be this evening.

I was glad I'd taken the sandwich offered the night before in the ER; I hadn't eaten since noon that day. (Then again, the offered sandwich was ham. I was thirsty.) The night before, when they'd come to the ER to take me up to my room, I'd instinctively wanted to wrap the uneaten half and take it along like some hoarder in a nursing home but they took it away, saying there'd be more of the same up on my floor. No such luck.

Luckily, dawn brought the distraction of my anesthesiologist comedy team—and a roommate who held a small key to happiness. More on that tomorrow.

My Big Break, in pictures

2011-09-26T09:42:00.012-04:00

Today I'm sharing a series of photos of my broken and dislocated ankle. I'm going to go out of order so you can appreciate the mal-alignment after the fracture. This first x-ray is of my ankle after the orthopedic surgeon pulled on my foot and crunched my bones back into approximate place:

Compare that to the next x-ray of my ankle when I arrived at the ER:

I know, ick. If you have a good eye, even in this "scan of a printout of an x-ray" you can see the way the bottom of my fibula (here, on the right) is snapped off to the side.

Here's an x-ray of how the dislocation looked from the side. Without dislocation, the tibia bone should center over that hump beneath it:

The next photos show you what this looked like in the flesh. Although the angle of the photos make it difficult to appreciate the way the foot is twisted down and to the outside, if you let your eye travel along the top line, you should be able to perceive an aberration. (Got to admit, I have to take a deep breath to look at these, even four weeks later):

To make me feel better—and because we know all such accidents happen in the most heroic and romantic fashion—let's review the effort on my part that resulted in this mishap. Hurricane Irene had knocked something from one of the tall trees by our camp, and it had fallen at such speed, it thrust right into the rain-sodden earth! I was talking to Dave on my cell, and couldn't see what it was through the raindrops stuck to the window screens. I had to go out into the wind-driven rain and investigate!

Turned out there wasn't as much of an emergency to report as I first perceived. The object that had fallen from the sky on August 28 was still skewered into the lawn on Labor Day weekend, when Dave and my sons were scheduled to arrive. Indeed it was still there there when we closed up camp on September 8, when Dave snapped this photo, and it was still there on September 19 when Dave returned to the lake to retrieve my car.

Who knows, it may be there still. What do you think it looks like? (If you missed Dave's answer, it's in the post that explains how I broke my ankle.) Here it is:

ER

2011-09-25T10:58:00.007-04:00

I hit the Canton-Potsdam Hospital Emergency Room on a slow evening, I guess—or maybe that's just the kind of service you get when you arrive by ambulance. They wheeled me right into a room, transferred my backboard to a bed, and had me roll off it. Right away a nurse came in. She told me to get changed—I'd never so happy to don a hospital gown. I peeled off my cold, wet clothes, begged her to cut off my wet pants so I didn't have to jar my leg, and asked for a towel. I soon lay clothed in a dry gown and beneath heated blankets. For the first time in two hours, I stopped shivering. With these small improvements, my sense of the emergency felt behind me.

The nurse started an IV and did an EKG (I was thinking, isn't that for older people? It took me a moment to realize that I was just days from my 55th birthday.) They told me the on-call orthopedic surgeon was on his way over from Ogdensburg, a border town on the St. Lawrence River, and he should be here within the hour. I was told how lucky I was: he was the orthopedic surgeon for the Clarkson University ice hockey team. I was also told that if I'd gone to the emergency rooms of Gouverneur or Star Lake, I would have had to transfer to CPH for orthopedic specialty care anyway, so I silently offered up a quick thanks to the EMT who diverted me here, and begged forgiveness for objecting, however silently, to the disgusting cigarette smoke smell on his fingers as he tied on my oxygen mask.

My mother and neighbor Beth, who drove her, soon arrived with my purse. Beth is a real take-the-bull-by-the-horns type; she had already rifled through my wallet, given them my insurance info, and called Dave to tell him we were at the ER. She found my mom something to eat while they took me to x-ray. Thankfully, the tech was able to x-ray through the splint, positioning plates so that I didn't have to move.

When I got back to the ER the nurse pulled the splint from my foot; the doctor would soon arrive. As she put some dilaudid in my IV she explained that some of the pain was from the dislocation tugging at muscles and ligaments now held in an unnatural position. I recognized an opportunity—as gross as it was to look at my foot, I was a bio major with a graduate degree in health and physical education; I knew I'd one day want to study my foot in its current condition. I asked Beth to look in my purse for my cell phone to snap a photo. I hoped it was in there—my mother suffers from short term memory loss and she was quite stressed when I asked her to dry the rain from it and put it in my purse. I also hoped the phone would still work.

Beth pawed around in my purse and said, "Look at this." She pulled out my digital camera, which I never carry around in my purse. For once, dementia to the rescue—my mother had a hard time distinguishing my cell from my camera, so had brought both. Beth took several shots of my foot.

The doctor arrived and told me he'd already reviewed the x-rays. My ankle was fractured in three places (a trimalleolar fracture): the tibia, the fibula, and the talus, the ankle bone that these longer bones articulate with at the ankle. Later research put me right in the middle of the demographic for such fractures. According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons:

During the past 30 to 40 years, doctors have noted an increase in the number and severity of broken ankles, due in part to an active, older population of "baby boomers."

As soon as the doctor found out I was a writer he said I must cast him in my next novel as the handsome doctor who swoops in to save my life. I smiled, but knew this wouldn't be possible: the details would strain believability. Because he was Canadian by birth he spoke with a French accent, his name was "Luc Perrier," he was fit and handsome (as you can see), and, like most orthopedic surgeons I've met in my life, quite full of himself. I try not to adhere to such stereotypes in my creative writing. He marched over to my foot, picked it up by my big toe, and suspended it—I prepared to scream, but this didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. My guess is gravity itself was beginning the process he would soon complete.

"We will add something to your IV now," he said, and I turned to watch the nurse insert a syringe into the port. "Can you feel it?"

"It feels all hot going in there," I said, looking at my arm, and with that he grasped hold of my dislocated foot and pulled. I heard and felt the crunching of the bones as they realigned, but whatever anesthetic he'd given me had done the trick—it didn't hurt, at least not any worse than it already did. I now understood the orthopedic surgeon stereotype: it certainly would take some mad hubris to do something like that and believe you were helping the situation.

Before I was wheeled off for a set of post-reduction x-rays, he told me he'd admit me tonight and perform surgery tomorrow. The need for this didn't surprise me. Beth, however, followed him from the room and demanded to see my x-rays, she told me later. She doesn't think people should be operated upon without some proof of the necessity.

But even to her untrained eye, she said, after seeing the x-rays, she knew he spoke the truth.

Tomorrow: a photo montage of my ankle, inside and out, and a special tribute to the cause of my accident.

My first ambulance ride

2011-09-24T12:15:00.008-04:00

The sound and sight of the ambulance backing down our driveway finally drew the attention of some other neighbors. I recognized the voice of Ken, two doors over, as the EMT reached into my makeshift tent and strapped oxygen onto my face. He apologized that he now had to touch my foot, and strap it into a splint to immobilize it for the ride. I was so focused on the implied promise—that I would soon get out of this weather and get some help—that it only hurt a little more when he cinched the straps that kept my foot in its twisted position.

I rolled to one side and they slipped a backboard under me. Later, Ken would tell me he became one of the "pall bearers" that carried me up the hill and into the ambulance. I said over and over, "Be so careful. It's incredibly slippery." It's odd how safe you feel in the world until something like this happens—now, I could perfectly picture them all falling on the hill, dropping me, and sending my newly sledded body down the hill and into the lake.

But we made it to the gurney behind the ambulance without mishap and they set me, with the backboard, down on top of it. They asked what hospital I wanted to go to. I knew Gouverneur was the closest, but my aunt had had such a bad experience there a few years earlier she made me promise that if I had any emergency with my parents I would take them to Star Lake. So I said, "Star Lake."

The guy actually laughed, which isn't surprising—Star Lake, like most destinations any farther east into the Adirondack National Park, was kind of in the middle of nowhere. He said, "It's Gouverneur or Canton-Potsdam."

I said, "Take me anywhere where I can find a good orthopedic surgeon."

As they pulled the raincoat off of me and pushed the gurney into the ambulance he yelled to the driver (without hesitation, I noticed): "She's going to Canton-Potsdam."

Potsdam was an hour away, over many back roads with plenty of painful bumps. To make me comfortable for the ride (please note intended sarcasm), they left me on the backboard. They claimed I was strapped on but every time we went around a turn I reached over my head to hold on for fear I'd roll off.

Surprisingly, the man and woman in back with me kept me distracted for most of the ride. They checked me over for other injuries (none), kept asking me if I had chest pain or difficulty breathing (no). All I wanted at that point was to get warm, and they did crank up the heat and cover me with dry blankets, which made me feel a bit better. They were kind of surprised when from beneath my shirt I produced the damp rice sock that had been keeping me warm.

Then he told me he had to cut off my sneaker.

I was wearing my MBTs, the mother of all the new knock-off toning shoes. I was rarely without them: they'd greatly improved my feet in the past year and eliminated my need for the custom orthotics I'd previously never been able to go without. Since they're so expensive, and since my feet had never complained that the shoes had "broken down" the way other sneakers usually do, I had delayed replacing them as long as possible. I have no doubt that their complete lack of tread was the main reason I went down so fast—with no channels for the water in the lawn to seep into, I'd hydroplaned.

As he snipped through the laces, I told him that this pair of shoes had cost me $245. He said, "Look at it this way, then—cutting this one off only cost you $122.50."

Every few minutes they asked what my pain level was, on a sale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain I'd ever experienced. The first time I answered I looked at the woman: "I'd say it's a five, but that's only because I've had a child. If I were a man, I'd say a nine."

They finally started to orient me: we're past Canton, we're past the new Wal-Mart, this will hurt a bit because there's a bump here but the hospital's just ahead. They told me my mom and Beth, Ken's wife, were in the car behind the ambulance, and that they had my purse.

And I thought, this is just so ironic. I'd never heard of this hospital until earlier this summer, when a social worker whose family summers at the lake hired me to teach my "Healing Through Writing" workshop in the building across the parking lot. That had been at the beginning of August.

Now, at month's end, I was being wheeled into the hospital in desperate need of my own healing.

Awaiting help

2011-09-23T08:40:00.005-04:00

On any other Sunday the lake would have been busy with waterskiers and kayakers and the shore would have been lined with parents watching young children splash in the shallows or fish from docks, but Hurricane Irene had chased them all inside. I lay on the sloping lakeside outside our camp, where decades before two of my sisters had done their great Sun-In vs. hydrogen peroxide experiment, and where more than once I had fallen asleep on a grass mat while drugged with sun-comfort only to later regret the hot pain of my reddened skin. But late in the afternoon on August 28, groundwater seeped through my shirt, hoodie and pants from below and rain pelted me from above and I held my calf so my disfigured ankle wouldn't touch the ground. My body temperature lowered, and I started to shiver.

I was shaking uncontrollably when my mother arrived, holding loosely over her head a long camo coat in dual shades of green from our resident rainwear supply.

"Charlie's coming," she said. My mother, 80, looked so little as she hovered above me. She had lost weight since my Dad's death this spring and weighed a mere 117 pounds—I knew because she'd recently recovered from a bad case of bronchitis and a double ear infection that required I take her to the health clinic in town. I had cared for her, helping her sort out the meds since she kept thinking she should take the antibiotic four times a day and the cough syrup only once, instead of vice versa. Now she said, "What can I do to help you?"

I was shaking so profoundly I had trouble getting her to understand my words. "Take my c-c-c-cell phone inside and d-d-dry it off. I'll need it." She took the phone and covered me with the raincoat she'd been wearing. "And be careful—it's so slick out here." I pulled the raincoat over my head—it covered most of me—to wait until help arrived.

After another minute or two I heard a man's voice. "Kathy, it's Charlie." I moved the raincoat aside so it shielded me from the rain, but allowed me to peek out. "I've called 9-1-1, but it will be a while till they can get here. What happened?" I gave him the shaky, Reader's Digest version. Pat, his wife, arrived too. Both stood over me in hooded raincoats. My mom arrived with an umbrella and several more jackets, which she used to cover my legs. Now, only the twisted foot remained uncovered.

"I wish I had a tarp or something, " Charlie said. He might not have had one, but we did—we had several on the shelves in the garage. I told him where to locate them. What I didn't factor in: like any 76-year-old Charlie needed light to see, we have no electricity in the garage, and the hurricane sky offered little light. He came back with our hot pink, fully inflated float. "This is all I could find," he said. "Here." He laid the lightweight float over the broken ankle.

Distracting me with chitchat was the best medicine available just then, and Pat and Charlie are masters of the form. Yet even they could find a limited number of things to talk about in such a situation. "I wish there was more I could do," my mother said during an awkward lull. My number one complaint at that point was the wet and the cold—my foot was screwed and I knew there was nothing to be done about that. It was then I remembered the rice socks.

I host writing retreats for women at the camp at the beginning and end of the summer season, when nights can be chilly in our unheated camp. So I keep tube socks filled with rice on top of the fridge—3 minutes in the microwave to heat them, slip them beneath the covers, and your bed will be toasty when you climb in. I asked my mother to heat me one. When she passed it under the raincoat to me a puddle of collected water spilled onto my face, but I took the sock and held it to my chest. When the heat dissipated some, I stuck it right beneath my shirt. I couldn't stop shivering—I assumed at this point that might be from shock—but I did draw some comfort from the heat source.

Pat went into our camp and found paper and pencil and opened the window so I could shout up to her with Dave's phone number. She said she'd call him as soon as the ambulance left.

EMTs were in the firehouse in Hermon when Charlie's call came in, so they responded instead of the crew from nearby Edwards. I had shivered on the ground about a half hour when I heard the beeping of the ambulance backing up. Charlie went to greet them. He told me later that the EMT said, "Where is she? I told you not to move her." To which Charlie replied, "That's her—down there, under that heap of coats."

I've heard they're canceling All My Children so feel free to stop in here daily for your daily fix instead! Sorry, no sex scenes, but plenty of drama. More tomorrow...

The edges of the storm

2011-09-22T11:57:00.003-04:00

Up in Northern New York State, where my mother and I were staying at the family summer home, we didn't expect much damage from Hurricane Irene. We were located at the storm's feathery edges, meteorologists said—although to my untrained eye it doesn't look like that in this satellite image. All day the wind pushed whitecaps towards us down the lake and blew a onslaught of water at us, making it difficult to see out through the rain-spotted window screens.

I called Dave back in PA and asked him how bad the flooding was near our home. As we spoke I went from window to window, trying to see if we had any tree damage to report. On the short hill between our camp and the lake, I noticed something skewered into the lawn. It was small, but sticking up straight. Curious. Like an on-the-spot reporter I carried my cell out into the storm so I could tell Dave what it was. I didn't bother with a coat—I'd only be out there a sec—but three strides later I was skidding on the water-sodden hill as fast as if it were wet ice.

It all happened so fast. Between heartbeats. I rolled over the inside of my left foot as I fell and heard a loud snap then more crunching sounds. Even before I saw my foot stuck in a goddawful, unnatural position I knew what had happened.

The cell call was still open, but the phone had slid several feet down the hill.

Powerless to help from Pennsylvania, my husband stayed on the line and heard me screaming, "Oh god I've broken my ankle! Mom! Mom, you've got to hear me! Mo-o-om!"

Inside, my mother did not hear this. She was enjoying the thrumming of the steady rainfall on our tin roof, a sound my whole family finds comforting, blissfully shielded from any intrusive noise by the double-paned windows we installed when we renovated the formerly screened-in porch.

I screamed for a few more minutes, my throat raw, my shirt and hoodie soaking up the groundwater that was the cause of the accident, new rain pelting me from above. I held my left calf so my foot wouldn't touch the ground—dear god, the sight of it, twisted that way—and somehow eased myself downhill a foot or two so I could kick the cell up toward my hand.

"I've broken my ankle and my mom can't hear me," I told Dave. "The phone's all wet. I've got to shut it. I'll call you back when I can." My mother finally peeked out to see what was taking me so long. "Get Charlie," I yelled, referring to my neighbor. I knew she couldn't help me. I was up there caring for her after my dad's memorial service this summer; losing him after almost 60 years of marriage had worsened her dementia. "I've broken my ankle."

As I waited for Charlie, an uncontrollable shivering began.

***

Well, I've done it. After three weeks I've finally committed the edges of my personal hurricane story to the page. I'll keep writing every day until I'm spent on the issue. I knew that writing about it would help me heal, But I've suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms that gave these images way too much power over me and until an hour ago, when I once again dissolved into tears about it with my sister on the phone, it turned my stomach to blog about it yet. But crying helps relieve pressure, as I hope writing about this will, so I thought I'd give it a go. More tomorrow.

But to end today's post I'd like to skip ahead to my return to the camp after my hospitalization. The storm is now over, Dave is with me, and I am on the couch with my leg propped up on pillows, doped up on pain meds. He is looking out at the lake, and says, "I see it. The thing that's skewered into the lawn. It's a pine cone."

The pine cone had blown from the top of a hemlock standing some sixty feet high above us, and the hurricane winds combined with gravity and the soaked earth created a situation in which the first 3/4 inches or so skewered into the ground and the rest of its length, some seven inches or so, stuck straight up.

Dave says, "You're right. That is weird. It looks like the lawn has an erection."

Granted, I've had to pay dearly for my curiosity. But I ask you: wouldn't you have wanted to check that out?

Healing: You've got to play to win

2011-08-15T16:02:00.011-04:00

Even my first husband, who suffered from alcoholism to the point of suicide, would have drawn a line between him and the seventeen men and women in my Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit workshop (read the first post on this workshop here). Ron would have said he had nothing in common with them. I heard that same line-drawing from one of the participants, who upon hearing that I was an editor, was eager to share some of his poems with me.

“This isn’t court ordered for me or anything,” the poet said. “I’m here to get clean for my wife and kids.” I hoped that would be enough incentive—I noted he left himself off that list. “And the piece I wrote says I used heroin but I didn’t, I used cocaine. I just thought the rhythm in that line benefitted from the sound of ‘a needle in my vein.’”

This guy was tall with big blue eyes and sun-kissed hair and he followed everything I said with great interest, nodding his head and offering insightful comments about work read by others.

I was thrilled to find two poets among the rehabbers in my "Healing Through Writing" workshop. Emma (left), the social worker who hired me, had told me that some of these people would not be willing participants. Although the workshop was a required component in their treatment, some of them may have no inherent interest in writing. Even she didn't really know what to expect, as the arts component in the program was new, and they'd never had a writing workshop before. She warned me that the participants might be so freshly parted from their addictive substance of choice that they’d be physically unable to sit still and pay attention. Which did happen—at one point, Emma gently chastised a man who, in the middle of the workshop, suddenly snapped open a newspaper and held it before his face as if checking sports scores. Gambling is one of the addictions represented here, Emma had told me.

So I wasn't expecting much. A recovering addict I know, an experienced rehabber, suggested I might expect to reach one person. Then, if I connected with two or three, I’d be pleasantly surprised. But I wasn't without hope: Emma said that this was a motivated group.

Any anxiety I felt was immediately relieved as we dove into the first interactive element‚ filling in the drawing above. It's supposed to be a man, but the rehabbers called it a gingerbread man. My questionable visual arts talents aside, this illustration is an effective tool. The man starts out empty. "What goes inside here?" I asked, and the room bounced to life. As participants called out suggestions, I filled them in. Among other things we added a heart, bones, kidneys, and a stomach. “Vomit,” one of them said—okay, that was a new one. I drew some speckles in the midsection, to their delight.

When they had reached the limit of their biological awareness I said, “How about anger. Is there anger in there?” “Hell yes!” I heard. When I asked where I’d put that, one called out, “All over the place!” We added other emotions and then the title, “The Person With Too Much Inside.”

I moved to the next whiteboard and, as the participants called them out, listed the reasons people might want to write. I've given this workshop in many settings and I’m usually thrilled to get five answers; I’ll fill in the few extra needed to illustrate my talking points. So imagine my joy when this crew came up with 17 reasons—so many I had to go back and squish them in, leading to jokes that I didn’t know how to number correctly. This is what they came up with (excuse the cell phone pic):

They really got into this part of the discussion so we lingered there, talking about all the ways writing can help people. I modified the drawing of "The Person With Too Much Inside" to relive some pressure: the opening in his brain lets inspiration in, the opening through his hand lets his feelings and ideas out. After a break I prompted them to do a writing exercise and to my great surprise, all but one of them shared what they wrote. Some of it was quite good.

Even though the workshop exceeded all expectations, I couldn't help myself: my gaze kept drifting to the one non-participant, a guy with heavy lidded eyes who would alternate between nominally paying attention and checking out. In looks and attitude, of all the people in the room, he reminded me most of Ron. He didn’t call out answers. He stared into space when the others wrote. And during the sharing period, when he finally moved his hand and I looked hopefully in his direction, he was pointing to the person on his left, signaling that I should call on his neighbor rather than him.

When the workshop was over, I saw this guy one last time. As I walked to my car I saw him outside smoking. He was petting Strawberry, the unit's therapy dog, as if the animal were the only being capable of loving him and accepting his love. As our lives diverged I wondered if he was going to make it, because in so many ways, this young man was Ron.

Yet this time there would be no suicide drama. I was free to walk away. And as I did so, I was able to smile at him one last time, and say goodbye.

Healing with the Enemy

2011-08-04T10:51:00.005-04:00

The young man reads his hastily scrawled words from a spiral notebook. He has soulful eyes, a short, hard body, and bad teeth. In his story he is high and drunk and stealing and crashing two trucks. While he reads he reaches beneath the table to pet Strawberry, the lab mix therapy dog curled up at his feet.

“I was scared and went to the only safe place I could think of—my grandmother’s house,” he reads. “It was there I was arrested for the theft of two vehicles and DUI and a bunch of other stuff I was too messed up to hear.”

The writing prompt I’d asked him to incorporate into his story: “grandmother’s house.” Is that how you would have used it? Not me.

But this is not my milieu. This young man is now out of prison and doing a stint at the Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit in Potsdam, NY, where yesterday I gave my “Healing Through Writing” workshop. Previously I’ve given this workshop at libraries and writers’ groups and bereavement groups. None of which bandied about words like: Addiction. Prison. Court-ordered rehab. Heroin. Cocaine. Relapse. Escape.

I tried to pretend this was just another workshop. "Healing Through Writing" has always worked its magic before, and I prayed it would do so again. But somewhere deep inside I felt I was crossing enemy lines. For a good eight years after my first husband Ron committed suicide, I’d explain gently to my children (and anyone else who would ask) that Daddy was sick with a disease that had eaten him up from the inside out. I was speaking from my head, through the filter of obtained knowledge. Even my heart wanted to jump on board. But inside my muscles and bones, I held tight to my anger that he would choose alcohol over our children and me. I released that anger, slowly, through my writing.

In any other setting, I would have been afraid of this young man, who told me he writes so that he won’t beat up on people with his fists. Except here in Potsdam workshop, there's a difference: during the break he came up to show me his poetry. It contained sweet, sensitive, insightful musings on life and death—the same kind of stuff I like to write about. I told him his writing moved me. "You have to do something to pass the time in prison," he said, telling me that when he wasn't writing he was reading and re-reading books obtained through the black market.

He told me he writes as if speaking to his best friend, who was killed in a car crash by an erratic driver three years ago. The young man was to pick up his friend that night; instead, he went to get high. This odd fact may have saved his life, and he has some survivor guilt. “But he’s always with me,” the young man said. He shyly rotated his forearm to show me his friend’s name, tattooed on the white vulnerable skin of his forearm.

I asked him if he had hope. Without missing a beat, he said, “Every day. And I’m going to work on my poetry even more when I get to the halfway house.”

Everyone has a story, and if willing to share it, you can find common ground. That’s what I love about these workshops.

I’ll share more about this amazing experience in my next post. For now, I’ll leave you with this:

I just conducted a Google image search for “Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency” to try to find a picture to accompany this post—and while scrolling through the images, on page four, I found the picture of Ron and me “torn asunder” that I created for a previous post. Why would it be there, I wondered—“chemical dependency” wasn’t even a keyword phrase associated with that post. Then, on page five, I found my headshot. When I put the cursor over my face, it said, "Healing Through Writing."

Maybe Google knew something I didn’t. Maybe I was right where I belonged.

From retreat prompt to memorial tribute

2011-07-22T19:09:00.005-04:00

While retreating with the above crew at my summer home in Northern NY State in June, I posed a writing prompt I lifted from a post by Kim Pearson, a fellow contributing editor at The Blood-Red Pencil:

Describe a room in your house, perhaps the room you are sitting in now. Describe everything and anything in it – without using any adjectives or adverbs that imply opinion (such as pretty, or dirty, or jarring, or too anything). Use only words that cannot be disputed.

Since it was a beautiful day, I suggested my retreaters might also choose an outside space. Yet when we began writing, no one moved from the room we were in. So I went outside and sat in an Adirondack chair to serve as a role model. The first thing I saw was "Mahn-Go-Taysee," the canoe pictured above. I started writing from this prompt through a filter of loss; my father. who died at the end of April, had loved this canoe. With a little adaptation my writing became the piece below, which I read last Saturday at his memorial service.

[Note: When trying to get your writing life back to normal after suffering such a loss, I recommend you refrain from posting a picture of your father looking youthful and handsome on your blog. It's been very hard for me to add something that would push him from the "front page," scrolling him into my past. I'll do so gently, by sharing here my tribute.]

* * *

Mahn-Go-Taysee

The overturned canoe graces the lakeshore as it has every year, vivid yellow against green growing grass. This year fore and aft seem more neck and tail, curving over sawhorses in a reverent bow. Above it, in the pines, birds twitter strange syllables as if calling its name: “Mahn-go-taysee.” If they could tell the story of that name, I’d love to hear it.

The name was from Uncle Bob’s Hiawatha period. Translated, the Ojibway means “loon-hearted brave.” I never heard anyone venture a guess as to what that meant, exactly. Perhaps Dad approved simply because of the name’s reference to the majestic bird that returns to the lake with its mate every summer to raise its young, just as he did.

I think of this as I place my palm on the canoe’s back. Its warmth surprises me. I almost expect a heartbeat, as if it has absorbed and reflected the life around it. My fingers skim blemishes formed by hardened sap, and stuttering scars left by generations of children navigating submerged rocks discovered too late.

It seems like only yesterday this canoe wintered over in the basement of our Maryland home, its ribs exposed, although in truth it has been some forty years. Dad had asked that we each take short shifts with the sanding; with seven in the family it would be done in a jiffy. But my memory is of my father’s hands on the sanding block, swish-a-swish-a-swish, raising dust into the air that tasted sweet on my tongue. I watched him from a perch on the basement steps. At fourteen I knew nothing of endurance, and tired too quickly to be of much use. But I sensed the importance of the project, and of witnessing it.

I run my fingers over the letters. With a sure hand and the flourish of the artisan, Dad had painted them so bold and thick that even the blind might read them with the hands: Mahn-go-taysee. Was being loon-hearted anything like being “crazy as a loon”? I suppose that phrase refers to the bird’s giggle-laugh that, like the cries of a child relentlessly tickled, is actually a sign of distress. What if being loon-hearted is to be crazed with love to the point of foolishness?

Perhaps it was foolish of my father to spend so much time preserving this old boat, with so many other low-maintenance, hi-tech materials becoming available. Yes, it sliced through the water leaving only its thin wake in evidence, but it was tippy. Dad taught us to paddle in this canoe, as soundlessly as an Indian whose very life depended on stealth. To abandon our mother’s hand-caned seats and kneel in the center if paddling solo while caught in a stiff wind. He taught my sisters and I how to switch places, one crawling through the straddled legs of the other. Balance and harmony were paramount; a canoe was no place for squabbles. And within the confines of this vessel we kept the peace well—as far as I know, it did not once overturn.

I can still see my father in the basement, working night after night within the glow of his worklamp, as alone as the loon can sound with its haunted, hollow call. The restoration would end up taking ten years. Maybe to be loon-hearted means to carry on despite what one knows of abandonment and lone effort. Yet in the end our ever-buoyant father painted the canoe the color of sunshine, building the brilliance coat after coat.

My hand skims the chipped keel. I was married by the time I helped fashion this finishing touch, to Dad’s specifications, from a hard-to-find length of oak with no knots. It is rough now from running the boat onto the sandy shore, time and again, like Mom told us not to. In ways both constructive and destructive, this craft was a family work of art.

The breeze bends long grasses and pushes ripples against the shore but the canoe continues its vigil with the patience of an elder. No one is immune to the ravages of age, not even Mahn-go-taysee. Upon the completion of her restoration in 1985 my dad wrote, “My modest assessment is that it is absolutely gorgeous!” Now deepening cracks cause mildew-edged canvas to peel from her gunwales—but inside, bathed in the spirit of the loon-hearted brave who revived her, resilient ribs have clung to both strength and beauty.

A motor starts, a dog barks in the distance. Beside Mahn-go-taysee, I watch as out on the lake a child or perhaps a renter flails oars, sending a rowboat into a spasmodic circle. I smile; they too will learn. I pat the canoe, soon to earn temporary respite from such training sessions.

One day we will restore her. Even Trout Lakers who’ve traded in double-seater outhouses for indoor plumbing understand the importance of clinging to some aspects of bygone eras. And I am one of Jack Graham’s children: if what stands between one of us and something we find meaningful is simply the acquisition of new skills, the scraping together of elusive funds, and monumental effort over an indeterminate stretch of time, why not go for it?

But before sending her to her well-earned rest, unable to resist the way she is stretched before me, soaking up the sun and the view as my father himself so loved to do, I slip my arms around Mahn-go-taysee and lay my cheek one last time against what warmth remains on her flawed, beloved surface.

My new, smaller family

Men watching

2011-06-14T11:13:00.004-04:00

Okay ladies, truth time: if you saw this handsome dude in the mall you'd look twice, wouldn't you?

I'm lucky. I was watching him my whole life.

This is my father, before I ever knew him. He passed away on April 27 and I haven't posted since then. Even dedicated writers experience seasons: a time to record their lives, and a time to set down their pens and immerse themselves so fully that they might live something worth writing about.

I could have written sooner of the shock when I got to the hospital and heard my mother, so small in the waiting room, say, “He didn’t make it.” I could have written of the panic urging me to connect with the only sister within striking distance—“Can you leave work? Come to the ER right now”—so she might witness with us the cooling evidence of this loss. I could have written of the way the chaplain tugged at the wedding band ensconced on my dad's hand ever since my mother placed it there sixty years ago, and the way that struggle left my dad’s fourth finger lying unnaturally straight, never to curve again alongside his others.

But these are observations, and since what I seek on this blog is perspective, I had to wait until I gained some. And this is what I keep coming back to: the differences between my first husband and my father.

I’ve written about Ron a lot on this blog, because for fifteen years I watched him as well. In choosing death, he taught me a lot about life. Because he was fourteen years older than I, one could posit that I sought in my first husband a father substitute, and one might be right [I totally wrote that sentence in my Dad’s voice]. Ron was the hugger my father wasn’t, giving freely the affection I sought to earn from my father. But both men were aloof, and unpracticed in sharing their inner emotional lives. What I learned from them both I learned by processing my observations.

But unlike my father, Ron was overwhelmed by life’s challenges and possibilities, and he committed suicide at just about the same age my dad was when he faced off against the first of many life-threatening illnesses: cancer, encapsulated on a kidney he would lose. He didn’t need it—spirit would fill in what the body couldn’t provide. My dad would continue to fight for his life for the next thirty years, pummeling into remission two more kinds of cancer. During those years he would have and enjoy all of his eight grandchildren.

By the time his first grandson was born—my son Jackson—my father was already well into a string of heart attacks that would lead to angioplasties and stents and quintuple bypass surgery. So worried was I for his life that when Jackson and I left the hospital in 1987 we went straight to another: Ron drove us from our room downtown to my dad's in another section of the city. I wanted to show Dad his first grandson...just in case.

My dad would live beyond Jackson’s college graduation because time and again he reached death's threshold and bounced off. When my mom called that last morning of my father's life to say he’d had a massive heart attack and that the ambulance had just left, I didn’t know what to expect. I grabbed the living will and power of attorney, dutifully, but also his med list. How many times had I driven the hour to get there to find him holding court in the emergency room, greeting my arrival with a hearty, “Well hello, Kathryn. What are you doing here?” On that final drive, until I would observe for the last time his silent, unmoving face, I held all possibilities aloft.

These past few years my dad was frustrated by dementia and a tremor that kept him from two of his great loves, reading and painting. Yet still his body continued to carry him proficiently through all his daily tasks, and he accepted the challenge of finding what pleasure he could in life, much of which involved the treasured company of my mother. When his heart seized this time the end was astoundingly complete. He lived to be 86, beyond any doctor's expectations, and there is some small measure of relief in the fact that this brilliant, creative man did not have to suffer any further the ravages and indignities of dementia.

Ron’s death at age 54 was also sudden and complete, and offered some measure of relief in a household that had weathered the storm of his psychological torment. We hope he rests with a peace he never knew in life. But the torment that was his continued for those he left behind.

My dad, on the other hand, left behind a precious gift: peace. All things must come to an end, we know this, and that includes the life of Jack Graham, fighter pilot, industrial designer, corporate executive, weekend carpenter, artist, writer, devoted husband, father, and grandfather. It was clearly his time to go, and we can rest in this knowledge. Because if it were within his power to stay, he’d be calling to me now from the porch of our camp: “Kathryn, is there any more maple cream?”

I licked it from my fingers this morning, Dad, thinking of you. May the toast in heaven be slathered with it.

Facing Mortality: A challenge

2011-04-25T10:38:00.003-04:00

Lately, in addition to writing about my past, I’ve been losing weight and getting fit—in many ways, attempting to turn back the clock. Beyond living life to the fullest, I haven’t spent a whole lot of energy preparing for my own death. And why should I? I’m a busy lady. With so many other people expecting things of me, and me expecting so much from myself, how can I work something like that into my schedule? I mean, come on—like many writers, I don’t do anything unless it comes with a deadline.

Oops. I guess when it comes to preparing for death we all have a deadline. We just don’t know when it is.

You might think I’d be the last person to be caught without the proper documentation when I reach the pearly gates. After all, I’m a writer—how hard can it be to slap together a last will and testament when there are templates to work from? Furthermore, I’m assisting aging parents as they deal with dementia, and have already reaped the benefits of the attention they paid to their advance directives and powers of attorney. My husband’s mother even planned her own funeral, and told Dave she wanted balloons at the party afterward; at his time of grief all he had to do was decide the order in which to sing her chosen hymns.

I should have learned this lesson after my first husband’s suicide.

For reasons that seemed practical at the time, Ron never added my name to the farmhouse he already owned when we married. We were just starting out our happy lives together; who was thinking about what might happen if Ron died?

I found out what happened—as concerns the farmhouse, there was no clear right of succession. You might think property would go to the spouse; after all, I’d cared for it and renovated it and called the place “home” for fifteen years, and raised my children there. The State of Pennsylvania had other thoughts. According to a pre-set formula, the boys and I inherited jointly—and because of that, I entered into a business relationship with my eight- and ten-year-old sons.

Ron dying without a will or power of attorney also meant that after his suicide—at a time when I was in deeper shock than at any other time in my life, and my kids needed me more than ever, and I had, literally and figuratively, a huge mess to clean up—I also had to go to the courthouse and get administratrix papers just so I could close our joint bank account or sell our jointly owned cars.

I did move forward with a will in those first years after Ron’s death, but in a test of resolve that I failed, when I went to sign it, the lawyer’s computer had crashed and she’d lost it. I could not scrape together the energy to do it again…and now it’s more than a decade later.

So it was with great interest I attended a recent series of programs at my church on preparing for the end of life. It was quite well attended—I wasn’t the only one who had put this issue off, and it seemed we all needed to hear the message one more time.

Yesterday, with both sons sitting around the table after Easter dinner, we talked about my will, how I planned to handle things, and what their wishes might be as concerns a few business details. I’m finally going to tend to this.

I have no more time or disposable income than I have had any other week in the past ten years, but I’m going to do this because that church series reminded me of something I’d already known: such preparations are both responsible and a huge gift. Acting on this knowledge is long overdue. I love my children, and should I predecease them, I want my passing to be a time of reflection and remembered joy and allowable grieving, unsullied by legal hassle. And should I linger, I want them to be clear on what I believe is a viable living state so they can make decisions not associated with inner turmoil.

I can help them with that, and I will. My appointment is at 10 a.m., May 2. How about you: are you prepared for your own demise?

The Thing You Can't Do

2011-04-17T20:24:00.010-04:00

Last week I wrote about Ron burying one of our goats, something he had to do although I’m sure he never wanted to. Ron loved a challenge—as long as it was related to the carpentry trade. To renovate our farmhouse, he learned wiring and stone pointing and all sorts of framing, drywall, flooring, and finishing techniques.

In other words, he loved to acquire anything he could hang from his tool belt. He shied away, though, from challenges that would stretch him from the inside out. Instead of staying as his father lay dying in the hospital, he offered to take his mother home—a move he regretted so much he mentioned it in his suicide note five years later. I was the one who stayed with Lloyd that last, long night. I’d never seen anyone die before, either—but I didn’t think he should do it alone.

Due to my need to commit Ron to psychiatric treatment against his will, and his subsequent suicide standoff, Ron continued to give me ample opportunities to do things I thought I couldn’t. It seems odd to call them “opportunities,” but in the long view, that’s what they were: each impossible challenge I met made me a larger, stronger person.

It wasn’t a lesson I sought to learn from him, but Ron taught me that sometimes you’ve got to do that thing you think you can’t.

Here are a few of the challenges I faced after Ron’s death, which I write about in my memoir:

1. I had to contest a lawyer’s invoice when, unbeknownst to me, divorce services originally valued at $3,000 had transitioned, upon Ron’s death, into a $15,000 estate case (I had no experience with lawyers; until then I had only ever bartered for the purchase of a Christmas tree).

2. I had to tell my eight- and ten-year-old sons that their father had killed himself.

3. I had to scrape pieces of my husband’s brain off the wall of his woodworking shop, where the Hazmat team missed them.

4. After six months, I finally found a service that could clean up after mace—the police who shot it into Ron's shop, to try to get him to come out during the standoff, had no clue how to help me.

5. I sold my husband’s guns (I knew nothing of guns, was scared to touch them, and felt faint standing in the gun shop).

6. I took a weekend after Christmas, waiting on one toll-free number after another, to cancel 29 active credit cards I didn't know about (I’ve refused every offer of new credit since, no matter what the enticement).

7. Dealt with #s 1–6 above, and more, while teaching my sons—who should never have had to witness any of this—that hope is always possible to find.

8. Watched as a vet euthanized my dear dog Max, because he too suffered from the suicide standoff, and while life left his body I was determined that my loving eyes would be the last thing he’d see—then brought him home and buried him on the farm.

9. Stayed on the farm to raise my children, facing down again and again and again what happened there.

10. Through all of this, held tight enough to my belief in the possibility of a healthy, enduring love that I was able to marry again.

I've learned that all sorts of things are possible. I remember once thinking that I’d never be able to swim a half-mile—then I swam two.

I, like my husband Dave, am afraid of heights—yet we climbed the Beehive at Acadia National Park in Maine (pictured above).

I thought I'd never travel abroad then Dave and I accompanied the boys on their school choir trip to Italy and watched them sing in the Vatican.

I recently thought I’d never be able to lose weight at my age—then, with hard work, lost 15 lbs.

I didn't think I could face caring for my parents, who suffer from dementia—but I am.

I once thought I’d never amass enough words or ideas to fill a book, but the memoir I’m writing is my third. Can I get any of them published? It's harder than ever for a first-time author to break into print and yet... Who knows what other feats I’m capable of?

I've decided there’s never shame in falling short of a goal. Because if you don’t try, you’ll never know. The trying, in and of itself, can add value to your life.

What have you done, that you thought you’d never be able to do?

One hot April day

2011-04-12T10:41:00.006-04:00

While it always feels like an anomaly, it’s not that unusual for Pennsylvania to experience a “heat snap” in April that shoots temperatures into the 80s. Since April weather is more likely in the mid-50s, the spike creates an event remarkable enough that we can tie a memory to it. One of mine has to do with the death of Jeremiah in 1989.

Jeremiah (above, background) was an Alpine goat, and quite smart. When we went to meet him, the breeder looked up into his herd and called “Jeremiah!” The goats were spread across a wooded hillside—Alicia, Bettina, Carlotta…all of their names ended in an “ah” sound—but only one perked up his head and trotted down the hill. This farmer sold milk, yogurt and cheese products, so kept only a few intact males for breeding purposes; other young neutered males he sold to butchers. But when a special goat like Jeremiah came along, the farmer would try to find a good home.

We already owned one goat, a baby Nubian named Clementine (above, foreground) that I’d bought Ron as a Valentine (yes, the card I wrote rhymed). When she went off her feed and wouldn’t even accept the bottle of mother’s milk we’d retrieved, we quickly learned that goats are herd animals and need socialization to thrive. That led us to bring home “Uncle” Jeremiah—in the back seat of my Chevy Nova.

Clementine’s interest in food revived. They were so cute together. At first Jeremiah was twice her height, and she would run back and forth underneath his belly.

Lives come to an end, though, and years later Jeremiah died one morning of what we believed to be bone cancer. One April morning, with that day’s temperatures suddenly expected to climb past 80.

My participation was off the table—I was six months pregnant with Marty, and had toddler Jackson to care for. Burying the goat would fall to Ron and my brother Scott.

I’d already buried enough cats in that rocky soil to know what they faced; it would take hours to make a small hole three feet deep. They had to go six feet deep and a whole lot wider. It was a Sunday, so hiring someone with machinery wasn’t possible. With the heat climbing, they had no choice but to get started.

They left Jeremiah in the relative cool of the barn as they dug. I brought water out to them by the gallon as their bodies, unused to laboring in such temperatures, struggled to adapt. Scott was young, and a fitness nut to boot, but I wasn’t sure how 46-year-old Ron would hold up. As home renovators we were used to some manual labor, but nothing this heavy. He engaged in no regular exercise, and he smoked.

More importantly, he was emotionally under-equipped: Ron showed his love for his animals by fawning over them with hugs and kisses. He didn't do the tough stuff. I typically handled their medical care and end-of-life determinations. I’m sure the water running down his face was as much tears as sweat.

By mid-afternoon they’d had it. Ron and Scott deemed the hole ready and went to retrieve the body. Removing it from the stall, which required a few tight turns, was a trick in itself because by that time rigor mortis had set in. There was no way Ron could hold his breath and avert his eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening.

At long last they got the body out to the hole and laid Jeremiah within it.

At least, they tried.

Jeremiah’s rigid legs wouldn’t fit down into the hole. Scott was quick and decisive. “I’m not digging any more.”

“But—?”

“Turn around if you can’t watch.”

Seeing no other choice, Ron turned away while one at a time Scott dropkicked his work boots through the goat’s legs, breaking each until the goat dropped into the hole. Once Scott had covered the body with enough soil to cover the evidence of his act, Ron joined in and completed the burial.

Life on the farm offered up many opportunities to stretch ourselves in unexpected ways—more about that in the next post. Now that I live in Doylestown, though, when the temps hit the 80s yesterday, Dave and I had a bit more fun.

We walked up into town, as may others did, and got an ice cream cone.

Last night though, I watched 127 Hours through On Demand while Dave was at a meeting (if you've seen the movie you'll know the parallel to Jeremiah's burial right away). I may have moved on, but I will not forget.

Do you have any memories tied to a hot day in April?

A storyteller is never alone

2011-04-03T15:08:00.006-04:00

Friday night I had an extraordinary opportunity to do a public reading of the first chapter of the memoir I’m writing, Standoff at Ronnie’s Place. The event was held at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where the editors of Mason’s Road, the journal that published this piece, were throwing a launch party to celebrate the journal’s first two issues.

Now I’ve done plenty of public readings. What was different about this one was the fact that until that evening, I had not met a single one of the 75 audience members assembled. In addition, many of them had never heard of Berks County, Pennsylvania, the all-important setting for my piece. If I hoped to gain these people’s interest in my tale, I was going to have to earn it.

Elizabeth Hilts, my creative nonfiction editor at Mason’s Road, introduced me. She explained that the issue’s theme had been pieces with a strong sense of setting, and added that when she first read my submission, “I walked through that door with Kathryn and stood out in the rain with her and felt everything she felt. Her language would not let me go.” [Paraphrasing possibly impacted by author's inner excitement.]

What a wonderful thing to hear said about your work, in front of witnesses, no less. And I’m thinking Okay, this was worth it, I can go home now. But then people clapped, and still expected to hear me read.

I was prepared. I had my black three-ring binder that opens flat. I had my pages printed out in a 16-point font that allows me to scan—even quickly memorize—entire lines so I can look out into the audience and connect with them.

I'd handwritten large asterisks where I sensed that an extra beat of silence would allow my words a tad more resonance. I’d put the pages in plastic sleeves so my dry fingers wouldn’t flub while turning pages.

In my hotel room, I’d repeated the biggest tongue-twisters so that I might rely on muscle memory for correct delivery of “squashed plastic seat pads” and “the telescopic sights of their rifles” and “marking with blood splatter”—it’s my heart that still stutters on those last two.

I replaced Elizabeth at the podium; she moved to the back of the room. I began: “I wrapped myself in a parka and headed into the storm.” The story pulled me back in time, where once again I headed through the door of our farmhouse to try to impact what I could of my fate. But it wasn't the same; Elizabeth’s comment was already changing my experience of that day.

As I looked into the audience for my oh-so-cleverly planned moments of staged connection, emotion welled in me when I found something I hadn’t bargained for: real connection. My voice pushed through the silence in the room and the audience tipped toward me to receive it, some of them with their hands to their mouths as if saying, “Oh no, I fear where this is going.” Yet they came with me. By the time I had fully transported myself back in time to enact once again the events of my story, I no longer stood alone in that driveway, with the rain pummeling my face. Around me stood 75 silent witnesses, willing to take the soaking right along with me.

My awareness of this new camaraderie built all the way to my final line: "My children would soon be home, and they needed me." Speaking of the way Ron's act impacted the boys often breaks me, and this night was no different. When I closed my notebook, I could only mouth the words "thank you," yet my gratitude was sincere.

Of the readers that night, I had driven the farthest (although in a fun twist, three of the contributors read via Skype from India, Tel Aviv, and Savannah, Georgia). A few registered surprise that I had made the trip. After all, I was paid nothing for the story, burned a half a tank of gas at $3.50/gallon, and had to shell out $120 for the hotel room.

Yet not going, for me, had never been an option. We can never know what gifts are hidden within the opportunities offered us unless we show up and say “yes”—even Ron’s suicide standoff, with its forced participation, eventually offered up hidden gifts.

This time my gift was a new awareness: a storyteller is never alone for long. We may have to navigate solo through some challenging events in life, but our aloneness is a temporary discomfort. Through story we can later invite people to become part of that world—and there, together, we'll all be less alone. I entered the worlds of others who read that night, and even after the reading, I had the privilege to bear witness to several stories offered me by people moved to share their own life experiences.

Through story, magic happened in Fairfield that night, and all of us who attended were transported and transformed.

Embrace negative feelings? Yeah, right... Part 2

2011-03-14T12:46:00.008-04:00

My last post introduced some common negative thoughts that can stymie writers, creative artists, and anyone undergoing an arduous healing journey. Here I revisit them to show why we should embrace them.

This is too hard. Yes, hallelujah! This is why great thinkers are so drawn to creative endeavor. Like life, it challenges us in almost every way possible: our ability to juggle detail while tracking the large picture in our minds; the ability to research fact at the same time we are willing to surrender to imagination; the ability to construct surface tension while adding emotional, philosophical and psychological underpinnings; the willingness to invite inspiration and then thank it and let it go when the time comes so that the work can evolve on its own path. And doing all of this while employing both natural and learned aspects of craft that from the beginning of time have kept the listener/viewer/reader tipped forward in her chair in breathless delight. Creative endeavor taps everything we are. The artist creates something that before didn't exist—and couldn't exist, without her perspective. If it were easy, it wouldn't be half as seductive.

I thought I'd be farther along by now. That yearning for more, that need to reach ever higher, is what makes it possible to embark on such a trying ordeal without the guarantee of any reward. Yearn away!

I'm not as good as I first thought I was. Your accomplishments will never be great enough and your work will never be good enough—this is the nature of the creative process that one best stop fighting, and learn to accept. Be glad for the irritation of your self-criticism, for it's that left-brained, self-critical element that allows us to improve.

The economy will not support what I'm trying to do. Creative endeavor is front-loaded to the extreme, even in better market conditions. The world has not conspired against you, all artists are in the same boat. Our fear reminds us how important it is to keep trying. If we give up, the arts will continue to atrophy, and society will suffer a great loss. Let the unfavorable odds incite us to try harder.

My uncle gave up on his novel because "the back of his bedroom door was plastered with rejection slips," according to my aunt. His DOOR! What would one door hold—ten, twelve pages? Some of us could plaster the exterior of our houses!

When dissatisfaction and disappointment rear their ugly heads, thank them for visiting you, because they're a necessary part of the creative life. Listen for what information they have for you—"you must now learn to confidently wield point of view," for instance—and then dismiss them, go for a long walk, and get a good night's sleep.

Then get back to work.

Embrace negative feelings? Yeah right... Part 1

2011-03-14T11:07:00.008-04:00

You stumble, as humans are bound to do. But this time it isn't a skinned knee, it's a wound to your creative soul, and it hurts enough to make you want to go back to bed with a bag of cookies and someone else's novel. Your inner critic takes control, pummeling you with its negativity:

This is too hard.

I thought I'd be farther along by now.

I'm not as good at this as I first thought.

The economy will not support what I'm trying to do.

Do any of these emotions sound familiar to you? As someone whose personal growth began while ensconced in an emotionally abusive relationship, then tried to heal from her husband's suicide while powering up a creative writing career, I've adopted a few strategies for engaging with negative emotions.

1. Allow yourself these feelings. I'm done with people telling me that what I feel is wrong or unimportant—and that includes myself. Denying my feelings only separates me from my personal truth. Remaining optimistic isn't about hypnotizing yourself into always thinking good thoughts, it's about being able to regain your equilibrium once bad thoughts try to knock you down.

2. Change the script. As with all feedback, creative perception can help us transform discouraging words into something that's helpful to hear.

This is too hard = I need rest or some additional skills to face this challenge.

I thought I'd be farther along by now = I must reinvigorate those things I can affect—my attitude and effort—and stop focusing on what I can't control.

I'm not as good as I first thought I was = I need to take stock of the ways in which I've made progress.

The economy will not support what I'm trying to do = All of us are struggling within the same conditions, and together our struggle can change the world.

3. Thank negative emotions for the information they bring. When I was a choreographer, the start of each new dance felt like a love affair. But the initial euphoria of creative expression was soon supplanted by the doubt that I could ever master the skills needed to complete the task. Two-thirds of the way through, quite predictably, I tired of it. I failed to believe in it. Convinced myself it was drivel.

I've interviewed many artists who feel the same way, during the difficult yet critical transition from initial inspiration to full creative birth. A comparison to miscarriage is apt, since most miscarriages occur after hormones alone can no longer support the pregnancy and before the sustaining connection to the mother is yet established. We need not allow emotional shifts to end our work. We can expect them, thank the negative emotions for the information they bring, and send them on their way.

4. Embrace negative emotions for all they're worth. Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend." As creative individuals, our negative emotions can seem like enemies—but they're crucial. Befriend them. If you've never lived conflict, and experienced heartbreak, how can you write, or sing, or paint of it? This is the material that drives creative effort. Thank God for our trials and our missteps!

Embracing negative emotions can nurture sustained artistic endeavor. More on that in my next post.

Are you good enough to be a writer?

2011-03-14T07:39:00.007-04:00

As a freelance editor, most of my clients, on some level, want an answer to this question. But I'm not even sure the question is valid.

You either are a writer, or you're not. Because you either write, or you don't. Those who write, over time, will get better at it.

Most people who write are drawn to the lifestyle as much as the activity. The stereotypes are fun—camping out at a coffeehouse with a laptop, tucking yourself away in a secluded cabin, or working from home in your pajamas. I've done all of these. Call it method acting— these behaviors strengthen my writing persona, inside and out.

But at a deeper level, writers don't want corporate structure ruling their days. They're entrepreneurs, willing to gamble that they have something to offer that the world will want to buy. For me this transcends want; it's what my soul needs to thrive. Writers need the freedom to explore ideas that seem meaningful to them, and to follow unexpected tangents to their inevitable conclusions in a way that would drive a corporate manager insane.

Some of us choose this life even while hating to give up a steady paycheck and health insurance and the inherent benchmarks a corporate ladder provides. On a ladder everyone knows if they're good enough—just check out the rung and you'll see where you stand. At some point we want writing to be a meritocracy, where those who have put in their time and learned their craft will suddenly be discovered and rewarded with bestseller status and mounds of cash.

The harsh truth: if you eschew corporate America and embrace the writing life, you lose its ladder as well. Until a publishing company starts telling you what to do ("Simon & Schuster owns me," author Judith Viorst once told me), you are both your boss and your employee.

To succeed, both must be equally developed. My boss (left brain) is always coming up with some new plan that my inner writer (right brain) would be happy to derail.

Boss: "Kathryn, this week you're going to get up at 5 a.m. every day to write, when you'll get no e-mail to derail you."

Employee: "Thanks! I love to write!"

Boss, Monday morning at 5:15 a.m.: "Hey, what are you doing writing that e-mail? Get back to your writing."

Employee: "You can't make me."

Boss, patiently trying to re-motivate: "But you love to write. I set aside this time just for you."

Employee: "But I keep forgetting to to e-mail Ellen about something. Anyway, writing e-mail counts. There's a long precedent: letters of authors can get published."

To keep your inner employee on track you must do your own performance reviews. Instead of hoping your critique group or freelance editor will tell you you're a good writer, listen to your own writing to decide whether you've communicated effectively. If you've accomplished what you set out to do (not what others hoped you would do), you can give yourself a good review.

If you haven't, you can revise--and give yourself a good review.

If you're struggling in an aspect of craft and need more education, sign up for a course or buy a how-to book to improve—and give yourself a good review.

If one day your energy is low and applying more words to the page overwhelms, let your boss give you the afternoon to research, instead, and the next day you'll be up and writing with new ideas to apply. Then give yourself a good review.

The writers who are in it for the long haul benefit from recognizing their work as a calling, or vocation. I feel that way, although according to author and theologian Frederick Buechner, I'm only halfway there. Buechner defines a vocation as "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Hmm. I've got that "deep gladness" in spades. But does the world have a deep hunger for what I have to offer? Time will tell. Until then, I must urge myself on. (Blogged today! Good performance review—because it's only in getting my work out there that I can discover whether the world hungers it.)

Is being a good writer really as easy as being your own cheerleader? As long as you're writing, and moving ever closer to effective communication through the stories or articles you choose to write, I believe this is true. And we'd better develop this trait now, because we'll need it, commercial success or no. If we allow money to define success, how will we weather market fluctuations? If we hand away our performance reviews to others, how will we withstand the critics who'll be happy to tell us that our freshman efforts were pap?

There's really only one way to be a bad writer, and that's to stop.

But then, by definition, you aren't a writer at all.

How do you stay motivated?

2011-03-07T08:44:00.006-05:00

A writing friend e-mailed me this weekend, desperate for words of encouragement. She hit me on a good day—I'd just hit the skids the week before.

Discouragement is an integral part of the creative life in any economy, let alone one in which the likelihood is diminishing that our talents and passions will be able to support us. I'll talk about why we should embrace discouragement in my next post. But today, let's bolster ourselves up.

The inspiration I'd like to share comes from dance, the art form that gave birth to my creative spirit. When I need encouragement, I visit the words of modern dance visionary Martha Graham (1894-1991). I'll let Martha tell you why in this series of pulled quotes:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose, I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life. When any young student asks me, "Do you think I should be a dancer?" I always say, "If you have to ask, then the answer is no." Only if there is one way to make life vivid for yourself and for others should you embark upon such a career...

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

Many of these quotes are from Martha's autobiography, Blood Memory, published in the year of her death. What powerful words from an amazing woman. Could I hear an amen?

Martha was the daughter of Puritan-bred Presbyterians who were none too thrilled to have a daughter at the cutting edge of American modern dance. Martha was both admired and reviled for her work. Her success was never guaranteed—there wasn't even yet an audience for the type of work she did. She created her genre, seeking out top-notch collaborators.

Martha continued to perform until she was 76 years old. But even Martha, whose words have re-energized me time and again, fell prey to discouragement. When she stopped dancing, she wrote:

I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded. My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma.

Yet her spirit proved indomitable. She rallied. She continued choreographing until the age of 96 from a chair; by then arthritis had crippled her hands to the point that she wore gloves to hide the disfigurement.

I never met Martha Graham, although I saw her ushered onto the stage to take a bow at the end of her company's performances. I too loved modern dance. My maiden name is even Graham.

But these aren't the reasons my connection to her feels so personal. Her own words tell us why: she was inside my head, knowing what I needed to hear. All artists, famous or not, share a vulnerability that allows them to do what they do. Deep inside, Martha Graham and Kathryn Graham Williams Craft aren't so very different (okay, she was wiser not to take all of her husbands' names).

If she could resurrect after drinking herself into a coma, I can forgive myself the occasional lapse of confidence. I draw strength from her story time and again, hoping to by-pass the coma by listening deeply to words that even she struggled to live up to.

From what sources do you draw your encouragement?

Coming of age at 54

2011-02-28T18:01:00.011-05:00

Last summer, while staying at my summer home in northern New York State for several months, a combination of benign neglect and the lack of a good hairdresser kept me from tending to hair that for a good decade I'd been trimming and dying as a matter of course. As my hair grew richer (I'd added a silver crown to my gold), I became more curious: what the heck did I really looked like these days?

By the time my guests were due to arrive for my fall writing retreat, I had collaborated on the sly with one of them, a hairdresser: for the first morning’s writing prompt, we had a bit of performance art in store. Roxanne would cut my hair. Short.

My resolve was immediately put to the test when Lisa walked in the door. “I love your hair!” she said, referring not only to its inordinate length but also its sun-bleached state. And I thought, "I love compliments!" I smiled and thanked her and wondered if I’d really go through with this.

But the next morning, when the women had assembled in the living room, I marched straight to the sink to wet my head, threw a beach towel over my shoulders, and sat in a chair in the center of the room. The other women were quite surprised when Roxanne pulled out her scissors and began combing my hair. She explained that she’d been watching my hair since she arrived, and that it had told her what it wanted to do. (And I'm thinking, thank God it knew!)

I then described the writing prompt, which was one part a theme of transformation, and one part a randomly drawn lyric from a Kinks song (I’d printed those up ahead of time—the Kinks were big my with my lake friends while growing up).

Retreaters Ellen and Nancy took these pictures of the process. All was fun and games until I started seeing four-inch sections of my hair fall to my lap. Fear and anticipation duked it out for dominance.

To me it felt no less important than carving out an authentic sense of self.

That's a re-emerging theme these days. As I write my memoir, I seek a sense of my own developing character within a story over which I had little control. In a parallel process, as I strive to lose weight, I feel I’m carving out a physical sense of self from the excesses that protected the unfurling woman whose shell shattered from Ron's suicide. I see all of these events as connected.

After taking a moment to contemplate the new me, the women and I got writing. Having these women witness my transformation raised the experience to the level of ritual for me. It was fun, and meaningful—I think all aging women should gather their friends to celebrate the dropping of the hormonal veil that keeps us from truly knowing ourselves. I tried to wrestle my feelings into my usual prose style but they just wouldn’t go—these images felt more raw and untamable. The result was this poem. I've put the Kinks lyric in italics.

The Urge to Push
by Kathryn Craft

An urge asks no permission.
The body simply knows
how to accept a lover, or birth a child.
Yet I needed pills, thermometers, surgeries.
Split second timing. Chemical induction.
With no urge to push, a monitor’s line graph supplanted instinct.

Growth seeks its own path.
The soul finds a way
to bend toward ample light.
Yet I needed journal pages, tough circumstances, therapy.
Life or death choices.
I would be a widow before I could call myself a woman.

Gravity will have its way
with materials meant for temporary use.
It breaks down bone, washes out hair, tugs on skin.
Yet I dammed the inevitable with calcium and hair dye,
pitting my desires against erosion and entropy
and the very spin of the planet.

Time offers up trials
that blister and bolster the enduring spirit,
rubbing, peeling, revealing.
Growth and gravity and time have finally made me
so swollen with experience
that I sense, at long last, a true urge to push.

Impulsive courage seizes me.
The lie of my hair weighs heavily
and I seek rebirth to self.
The scissors snip and shape,
a glimmer of silver feeling freer than
the lock of brass that falls to my lap.

Naked truth emerges,
seeking the light, embracing the gravity, honoring the time.
People take pictures of youth to prove it really existed.
I push my aging self into the open

while I have the chance
before modesty dictates that I don the robe of the crone.

It took four months before the blond was all cut out. Here's the final result:

How old will you be tomorrow?*

2011-02-20T10:12:00.010-05:00

Now that I’m fifty-four-and-a-half I’m starting to feel it, you know?

Younger, that is.

When it comes to aging, not all is equal. If my life were equal to my first husband’s, for example, I would be dead in another 191 days.

That’s sobering. In so many ways I feel I am still awakening to myself—how could all this be over any time soon? There is so much to see and learn and do. And READ!!

If my life were equal to my grandmother’s on the other hand, I’d have a leisurely 15,888 days remaining to accomplish all I’d like. (Excuse me—may I choose this option?) My grandmother traveled with my uncle to Europe in her eighties, and read many a book while rocking in front of the fireplace at our summer home in northern New York. When I project forward to think of myself at that age, I mix in a little Laura Ingalls Wilder so I can still be writing. Why not?—Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books were published while she was between 65 and 76 years of age.

My grandmother’s life was no picnic. Her physician husband worked long hours and died early, so she raised her four children largely on her own. A series of small strokes left her wheelchair bound and unable to speak for several of her final years. But I never sensed she had left us. She never had that frighteningly blank look I saw on so many faces in the nursing home where I once worked. Even when she couldn’t speak she looked as if she were listening, and wore a sweet smile. (She also smiled while rocking and reading—Harlequin romances.) Thanks to my ever-attentive uncle (pushing her wheelchair in the above picture, which was taken at my wedding to Ron), my grandmother always looked put together, wearing rouge and lipstick and a dress (never once in the thirty years I knew her did I ever see my grandmother wear trousers).

My grandmother died in her sleep on February 13, 1987, at the age of 97. It was a Friday the 13th, and the moon was full. I hope she'd understood when I told her I was pregnant—in a wonderful affirmation of the circle of life, my son Jackson, left, was born on her birthday that year.

So why bother thinking about this? I know I can't control the number of my days here on earth.

But I can allow the days of the people I’ve known to inspire the way I choose to live them.

As to the 191 days: To honor that, by the time I reach Ron’s “deadline,” I aim to finish my memoir. To put the story of that part of my life to rest at a time in my life that corresponds with his decision to end his life. It feels right.

As to the 15,888 days: If I am lucky enough to have a marathon of days still before me, I’d better get in shape. I’ve always been active, and at fifty could walk and run and swim farther than I could in my early twenties. Yet I had belly fat that just wouldn’t budge, putting me at risk for all sorts of physical maladies that could shorten my life, or worse, disable it.

Thanks to fitness tips from my younger brother, who’s a personal trainer, I’m finally losing that weight (more circle of life here: new science has supplanted the fat burning principles I learned in exercise physiology when I got my master’s degree in health and physical education in 1980). My arthritis bothers me less. I’m fitting into clothes I hadn’t worn in over a decade. And whose arms are these? In many ways I'm turning back the clock, and becoming my younger self. Any wisdom accrued is mine to keep.

*I borrowed my title question from the tagline of Lifespan Design Studio, an architecture firm which utilizes universal design to support the comfort and function of people of all ages and abilities in commercial and residential settings. It's run by my friends Doug and Ellen Gallow, who printed the question on the back of the tee-shirt advertising their business. (We've been friends a long time—Doug took this picture of my grandmother.) I guess when they read this they’ll know how I value the question on that tee-shirt. It adds a philosophical punch to my workouts.

So: How old will you be tomorrow?

Are you living a chosen life?

2011-02-17T10:18:00.007-05:00

At Thanksgiving I learned that my son Marty’s winter band tour would dip into Mexico. Monterrey, to be exact. Due to increasing drug war violence—and despite the fact that Marty has been gunning for banditos since a young age, as this picture shows—no one in my extended family thought this part of the tour was a good idea.

As the facts filtered in, I forwarded them to Marty in an unrelenting push. From Thanksgiving until Christmas, when the tour was scheduled to lauch, an additional 8,000 people had died, bringing the total killed due to Mexican drug violence to more than 30,000. Travel advisories had been posted. The children of diplomats in the very city where he was headed were evacuated. Monterrey was listed as an increasingly dangerous locale.

The evidence was overwhelming: for one show, this trip was too dangerous to justify.

In response, Marty pointed to the odds of getting killed on his daily drive to work. My experience tells me this about about odds: someone is always on the losing side.

Current estimates are that one out of four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. I was on the wrong side of those odds.

The chance of repeat miscarriage decreases to one in ten. I was on the wrong side of those odds.

One in 10,000 American takes his own life. My husband took his.

Only 3 out of 1,000 guns owned by Americans will be used in a suicide. My husband used one of his for this purpose.

Like many who’ve seen too much in their lives, I know bad things don’t bypass you just because some statistician says it’s unlikely.

To his credit, Marty read and responded to e-mail after e-mail full of reasons why he shouldn’t go. In addition the band was set to go, he had a renewed passport burning a hole in his pocket, and there was an irresistible a groundswell of interest in hardcore among Mexican youth.

His conclusion:

[Because] I will either be on a bus, in the guy running the show's van, or in the venue, I feel like my safety is fairly well accounted for. I'm never going into any public places or interacting with locals outside of the hardcore scene. We are strictly going in, playing, and leaving.

There's probably nothing I can say to you that will make you think it's a good idea but I hope some of this at least helps.

If Marty died I would miss him terribly, but death will one day claim us all. I was more concerned about reports of kidnapping. Starvation. Torture. Dismemberment. Ugly, drug war-fueled stuff. Americans unable to ever find out what really happened to their loved ones after they disappeared in Mexico.

Because Marty was 21, once I delivered the facts there wasn’t a whole lot else I could do. But while I still had the chance, and so I wouldn't regret it for the rest of my life, I took the opportunity to say: “Please, don't go.”

He went.

And he came home, praise be, and once he was back in the country he called to tell me that.

Despite a small snafu with paperwork that required him and his bandmates to return to the border, all went smoothly. They had their guard up, but ran into nothing frightening, although their host told them he sometimes hears shots in the night.

Once Marty left for the tour I was surprised at the way my worry lifted. This wasn’t about keeping him safe, after all. I realized then why I went to the wall on this: if Marty was going to put his life on the line, I had to make sure he did so while living the life he wanted to live.

In failing to waver despite the mounting evidence against that trip, Marty told me: This is the life I want to live, and I’m not going to let the odds determine my pursuit of it.

That Marty. A chip off the old block.

I too am living my dream against phenomenal odds—I’m trying to get a novel published. But every now and then, someone does succeed. And I’ve fit within the small odds so many times before, why not now? Granted, getting published might not kill me, but I might just die trying. On my tombstone I want written:

“She died pursuing her dreams.”

I want nothing less for my sons.

As for Marty and me, we weathered this storm. We’re still tight.

But when his band left the country on a three-day tour last weekend?

Even though their destination was peaceable Canada, Marty decided not to tell me until he got back.

Are you pursuing your dreams? Are your children? I'd love to hear about it.

Is optimism cockeyed?

2011-02-08T14:33:00.005-05:00

Sometimes you can record life. Other times, when multiple opportunities beckon, you just have to live it.

That pretty much sums it all up for a writer, doesn’t it?

Okay, I’ll admit it: when I first drafted the second sentence, above, I wrote: “when multiple obligations beckon.”

That’s the expected verbiage: I’m too harried, too many people are pulling at me, it’s all about what I can give, give, give, and nobody ever asks me what I need. We Americans do want to feel put out and put upon, don’t we? Maybe overfilling our plates until we explode, whether in McDonald’s or our day planners, is the only way to feel self-important. Anyway, the party line of this modern sorority is so pervasive it even infiltrated my language as I began this post, thereby hijacking the topic I’d planned to write about today.

But that’s okay. I must redirect, because I rejected the party line long ago. That’s just not the way I feel about life.

My obligations are my opportunities; I chose each and every one for what it can bring to my life. I’ve missed blogging for—ack!--two weeks now because the living of my life swelled to the point that my recording of it had to take a back seat.

But I’ve been writing my memoir, which is so meaningful to me. I've been editing steadily, which is work that I love, and provides some income. I’ve been exercising daily. I took a quick road trip with my son to look at a graduate school program, and on the way, introduced a fourth generation of my family to my favorite pizza in the world (and that has been a serious competition): Twin Trees Pizza in Syracuse, New York.

I’ve been preparing for several talks about writing that are coming up (you can see them in the sidebar). I LOVE to talk about writing! I went to my new neighborhood’s book discussion group, attended the Writer’s Coffeehouse and a book launch party, and met with my new Doylestown writing group—the only thing I love more than living here in Doylestown is combining my life here with literature.

Can we tame time? While I can try, by selecting my projects carefully, I can’t really control it any more than I can control my fate. Things come up; things I long to embrace; things that make me feel wonderfully alive. I have surrendered: my life is a constant, free form triage. The activities I choose are nothing less than the expression of me in this world, and for that reason I will get them all in.

Living this way makes me happy to get up every single morning. I’m a glass-is-99%-full kind of gal.

But when the milk starts to spill over the edges, I hope you’ll forgive me an occasional brief absence from this blog. Just picture me in Doylestown, mopping up the spill, with a big smile on my face.

But I don't think it's just me—I believe optimism is in the air. After only spotty editing work since the economy tanked, I suddenly face a 7-week backlog of manuscripts, that I am steadily (and happily!) chipping away at. Maybe others are sensing what I thought from the start: the economy is simply the economy, and we’re all in the same boat. And now my personal economic indicator (my self-employment income) tells me that either 1) the economy is on the upswing, or 2) writers are sick and tired of allowing the economy to dictate their writing dreams.

Either way is a cause for optimism. Fellow writers are even talking less about the "death of the book" and looking for ways to embrace the unknown possibilities of e-books.

What hopeful signs have you been seeing?

Are your knuckles turning white?

2011-01-23T17:43:00.004-05:00

Today I have a guest post up at the blog of my friend and colleague Jon Gibbs, the author of the young adult book Fur-Face. The theme of my post is the illusion of control—and why that can be a juicy topic for writers. Please stop by:

Kathryn's post at An Englishman in New Jersey.

Recycled effort

2011-01-20T19:46:00.011-05:00

I believe an event such as a suicide, whether acknowledged or ignored, becomes a force on a family compass that pulls on the directional arrow. For me, it has influenced in some way almost every decision I've since made.

It was even the reason I switched waste management companies.

I regularly walked the hilly roads within four miles of our country home. Before the suicide it was a way of shaking off my dying marriage by tending to self; after the suicide it was a necessary metaphor for putting one foot in front of the other. I loved the views my walks afforded of woods and farm animals and rolling countryside, and tried to ignore the fact that the roads were lined with litter.

I became increasingly aware that this litter was not only the evidence of rowdy teens out for a joy ride, dumping beer can evidence before they got home.

My trash company, at the time, had recently raised its community consciousness by offering recycling services. One such service had a revolutionary twist: they took properly disposed of trash and recycled it into roadside litter.

One day I watched as the driver of the open-bin recycling truck tried to improve on his zero-to-60 record while barreling down a narrow road near my home. As the truck hit uneven surfaces, two-liter soda bottles popped out of the bins onto adjacent yards.

That made me angry enough. Then, it got personal.

Weeks later, I walked out to the curb on trash day to pick up my mail to find a busted bag of trash. It was raining, and the bag’s contents were smeared all over the road. Dirty diapers, bags of a dog food brand I didn’t use—this was not my trash. I thought of the resume client I was expecting to pull up my drive that afternoon—this would not do. I took pictures and called the trash company. I told them if they didn’t come immediately to pick it up, I was sending the pictures to the newspaper. Within the hour, the manager was out there in a dressy raincoat, shoveling the waste into a few plastic bags he placed in the trunk of his sedan.

Anyone can make a mistake or two, right? I tried to forget about it. In those first years after Ron's death, I had bigger things to worry about.

While I pushed forward through the first few months of dealing with Ron’s death—the mountains of paperwork, the therapy issues, taking his clothes to Goodwill—there was one task I didn’t relish, and that was going through his desk in the house. Especially its second drawer, where we had kept all of the cards we’d exchanged over the fifteen years of our marriage. Valentines, birthdays, anniversaries. Three years later, when I got engaged to another man, I knew I finally had to face this drawer.

I wrote poem about it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Words of My Own

Years of greeting cards
lined the drawers of the old desk
Hallmark words
offered a hollow history
of spent emotion
in a failed marriage.

How long did I stand
in store after store
searching for “my words,”
instead of listening to what was
inside of me?

At the dawn of a new marriage,
a hunt for the perfect wedding poem
once again has me searching
through book after book,
hoping to tap someone else’s wisdom
to give voice to my thoughts.

But a need for genuine expression blossoms within me
and won’t let me resort to old tricks.
And from deep within I hear the alpha queen whisper,
“It’s time to use your own words.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I went through the desk drawer, card after card, reading for the last time Ron’s handwritten promise that he would always love me. Then I filled two large trash bags, sealed them in the toter, and wheeled them to the curb.

The next morning, walking a quarter-mile from home, I found one of the bags broken at the side of the road. The driver must have taken the turn too fast after leaving my house, and lost it. I lost it, too, seeing those cards spilled all over the shoulder of the road. Intimate exclamations of misguided love, our names written all over them, hanging out for any passerby to see.

I walked home, got the car and a few new bags, and began once again the process of saying goodbye.

Then called my waste management service and canceled our contract.

When there are no words

2011-01-16T14:49:00.011-05:00

Perhaps it's odd to hear a writer say this—especially one like me, who loves nothing more than to tuck into a fine conversation with plenty of of verbal storytelling—but here I go:

Sometimes there are no words.

Especially when emotion runs high, or low, and I find myself reaching for hyperbole that will still fall short of the intensity of my experience.

It's been one of those weeks of emotional tumult for me, in relation to my writing. When pondering those final years of Ron's life, I see that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us... oh never mind, Dickens has already perfectly described my experience.

Because I couldn't put any of it into words, I didn't put up a second post this week.

That brings me to Captain America.

Earlier this week Marvel Entertainment published a free issue of Captain America on the theme of suicide. You can link to it here, and I invite you to look at it before reading any further. "A Little Help" was written by psychologist Tim Ursiny and illustrated by Nick Dragotta.

In graphics alone, this issue shares the story of someone who is thinking of ending his life because of problems that, at the time, seem insurmountable. Yet its message is hopeful: it speaks to the life that hides within us even at times of extreme disappointment, loss, depression, and shock—life that still has the potential to be recalled to use.

(If the leap from Dickens to Captain America feels like expired literary license, I give you this: Book One of Tale of Two Cities is titled "Recalled to Life.")

I loved the comic, and I'm curious about your opinions of it. Its lack of words made me think of those early weeks after Ron's suicide, when television and reading would painfully overstimulate me, and all I could do after putting my children to bed was to sit in silence until sleep claimed me as well. Some things must simply be endured.

But I've gained an appreciation for countless acts that can be performed with perfect meaning even if no words are ever formed. Silence can even elevate their importance.

I would love to share some of them here. And if you would like to add some of your own, in the comment section, I'd appreciate the gift.

• praying

• lighting a candle

• petting an animal

• remembering

• meditating

• watching the snow fall

• painting a wall

• baking a pie

Your turn.

Gotta crow!

2011-01-10T13:41:00.006-05:00

Okay, yes, this image is a fun homage to my former life on the farm. But it's also a pretty accurate representation of how I'm feeling today, now that the first chapter of my memoir, modified as a stand-alone essay, has been published.

If you’d like to read my essay, you can get to it here.

If you already heard this news through other means, I apologize. My approach to public relations is basically to amass a whole lot of interpersonal relations, so sometimes there’s overlap. Last year for example, as chair of The Write Stuff, I spent 14 hours personally e-mailing everyone in my writing group's database to invite them to the conference. In addition, I sent out personal e-mails to contacts within other writing groups; this was in addition to our national advertising. It worked—we sold out the conference—but this was not the easy route, by any means.

But I’ve never really embraced the easy way. Even as a kid—do it just because my mom tells me to? No way. Use the formula just because the algebra teacher says to? Show me how to derive it first, Mrs. Arnold. That same depth of focus (okay, bull-headedness) would one day allow me—a teen who could never make it across the half-mile width of the lake while swimming with her sisters—to become a woman who, since turning 50, has several times swum its 2-mile length.

I would lean heavily upon that stick-to-it-iveness in life. There is nothing easy about healing from the suicide of a loved one. After reading my published essay, one writing friend was surprised to hear it had happened 13 years ago, because when she was reading it had felt so immediate.

I’m glad I captured that, because that’s the paradox that exists in my mind, as well—the events of that time are both distant and near. Ron’s suicide both repels my attention and seduces it; its power is both centrifugal and centripetal.

Given that the perception of time is not a constant, and the path forward is never uniformly groomed or even evident, I’m glad I didn’t leave my healing to time and distance alone. I’m not sure that would have done the trick.

Developing the skills to write about these events has been as effortful as the healing. Although I was published for 19 years as a journalist, creative writing is an entirely different challenge, and doing it well enough to get published has been no walk in the park. I sought publication for two reasons, really: like any writer I wanted the validation of my skills, but I also want to communicate—and because that requires both a speaker and a listener, writing is only the front half of the equation.

By extending my reach, the publication of the first chapter of Standoff at Ronnie’s Place has allowed me to find readers. But I found an unanticipated gift hidden in this process. The audience I’ve found isn’t just listening—it’s talking back. The comments and private notes from those who have read this piece, like the comments of those who have read this blog, are precious to me. Like building a conference, I am now building a readership—one interpersonal relationship at a time.

Thank you. My life is so much richer for this.

The way I see it: I triumph once by making my way through the dark forest of horrific events, sorting through and taming the brambles threatening to ensnare me. But I triumph again when publication shines its light on the many souls who surround me on this path. I am not alone. We are sisters and brothers all, finding one another.

That’s something to crow about.

The still small voice--that nags

2011-01-06T10:14:00.008-05:00

PETER vs MOTHER

I want to thank the readers who have been sending me private e-mails in response to my blog posts. It means so much to me to be connecting with others about matters that I find so important.

In this case I specifically want to thank Linda B. Glaser, whose response to the question posed in my last post was so brilliant I'd really rather use it than give the answer I had prepared! With her permission, I pass along her comments about how to recognize the voice of God:

I love what that insurance salesman said: “If you don’t think your life is worth recording, you aren’t taking your life seriously enough.”

Your mother’s words, on the other hand, essentially invalidate the value of the past. As the saying [by American philosopher George Santayana] goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Without looking backward, we’ll never know if the patterns unfolding are ones we are repeating over and over and over.

How does one know the voice of G-d? It resonates in our bones with the clarity of a ringing bell. It transforms our understanding and our outlook. As Yeats wrote, “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” When we are privileged to hear that still, small voice, and we are honest with ourselves, we do recognize it.

Your mother’s words, on the other hand, sounded very human to me.

Linda exemplifies the process of listening for the voice of God in my story. She did not look for who was right and who was wrong in what Peter (the insurance salesman) or my mother said; she looked for what seemed divine and what seemed inexorably human.

Some context: My mother's father was an alcoholic; he committed suicide when she was seventeen. This happened before therapeutic support became commonplace, so "that was then, this is now” was the prevailing attitude toward “healing,” and it suited her disposition. I didn't know about my mother's father until I was sixteen, when I finally asked her how he died. Enter Linda's admonition that we are bound to repeat history if we fail to examine it: my mother was "coincidentally" stuck with me the full day of the standoff at the farm, when my own alcoholic husband committed suicide. My mother says she remembers nothing from that day.

With our psyches as with physical danger, human personalities exhibit the fight or flight sensibilities more prevalent in other animal species. To the casual observer, "fighting"—my choice—might seem harder. But it takes great energy to sustain a lifetime of flight away from the fact that, as Yeats said, "all changed," denying the unwanted ramifications of this choice, reaching for fantasies that evaporate in our grasp, and suppressing the still small voice that begs attention. I don't have the strength for that.

So I choose to keep my feet firmly rooted in life's realities, and seek its "terrible beauty." When the time comes that I must face death, I want to know that I have truly lived.

So to answer the quandary put forth in my previous post: in whose voice did I hear the voice of God?

Because I want to learn, because I want to be challenged and long to be transformed, because I believe we are all characters in a common story, and because I believe in the resiliency of the human spirit, the still small voice inside me—which has been nagging me ever since that insurance party to stop with Christmas break already and get back to work—resonated with Peter's statement.

I will honor the precious gift of my life by continuing to write the memoir.

I sense another voice, now, not quite so small. It's Linda, saying: "Get back to work."

A "Voice of God" moment

2010-12-27T14:51:00.002-05:00

I have come to believe that God speaks to us all the time, and that people who are looking for affirmation of this will find it. Ron’s suicide was just the sort of bone-rattling chaos that made me seek this affirmation.

Once tuned in to the “divine communication” frequency, however, there’s a trick to its interpretation. Messages with that “special resonance” can sometimes conflict with one another. I experienced this over the recent holidays.

The first time was at a Christmas party for a bunch of insurance salesmen. (I know—yawn.) I went to support my husband, who is new to this field, but I didn’t despair—you just never know when a special gift might be sent your way. And because I was looking for one, I found it: in the form of a man with an open, friendly face, and a sweep of thinning gray hair. He made his way around our table, shaking hands and introducing himself. His name was Peter. Yes, he was an insurance salesman, and networking, so I assumed he’d move past me soon enough (there’s no insurance in my line of work whatsoever).

But what was that interesting accent? Yorkshire, he told me—and the conversation opened.

He asked me what I do. I was immediately drawn to him and hated to lose his favor so early; these guys are all about the money, as the evening’s award litany illustrated.

“I’m a writer.”

“What are you working on?” (I liked him even more for not asking, “Where can I buy your books?”)

I answered, “A memoir.”

“My mother wrote her memoirs when she turned 50,” Peter said, his face animated. “It was the best gift she ever could have given me, and her grandchildren.” He then tapped my arm with his index finger, to make sure that within this crowded room he had my full attention. “If you don’t think your life is worth recording, you aren’t taking your life seriously enough.”

He left me with that thought. Its positive message was enough to get me through several draining days of writing that challenged me to recall, in great detail, the final years of my first husband’s decaying life.

But by the time I finished writing, the day before Christmas Eve, I wasn’t in the best shape. My current self was mourning for my younger version, carrying on in those final days unaware of all she had already sacrificed, unaware of all that was still to come.

I had to call my mother about Christmas and worried that I wouldn’t be able to disguise my emotional fatigue—an actress I’m not. So when she asked me how I was doing, I answered truthfully. “I’m okay.”

“Just okay? What’s the matter?”

“I wrote myself into a bad place today while working on my memoir.” [I realize that in alternate universes, this might be a reason for a woman to place a call to her mother. You know, for comfort.]

Absolutely sure of the truth of her stance, she said, “That’s why you shouldn’t be writing a memoir. Always look forward, never look back.”

These words had resonance because I’ve heard them before. It is the motto of her life; her way of coping with a difficult childhood that came with its own bag of horrors.

Voice of God recap: You should be writing a memoir; you shouldn’t be writing a memoir. Each speaker bringing a message of which they are most sure. One a stranger, one the woman who raised me.

If one of them spoke with the voice of God, how do I tell which one? I have a few thoughts on that, which I’ll share in the next post, but in the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Ring of Truth

2010-12-27T14:42:00.011-05:00

Weeks of engagement ring shopping later (catch up with this story here), I was trying even my own patience. Dave had asked me to marry him in March, and we were coming up on May. Telling people I’d gotten engaged had been fun, but the “Let me see your ring” part, followed by an embarrassed silence, was getting old. I began to see a “setting event”—or two, or three—in my future.

Luckily, Dave actually dug this about me—my search for meaning, my perseverance, my recently discovered, don’t-settle-for-second-best attitude. Made him feel special. Plus, with his two natural children, two adopted foster children, and a divorce that registered on the Richter scale, he’d been engaged with his own search for meaning. “You’ll find the right ring,” he said. Note the “you’ll”—even he had dropped out of the search.

I finally stopped in to see the local jeweler, from whom my first husband purchased my engagement ring. I’d hoped to avoid the location (reference breaking old patterns, in my last post), but short of daytrips to larger cities, which my schedule would not support, my options were running out. I ordered a ring on spec—a round diamond surrounded by a gold swirl that required a matching band. It was a little different, a little artsy. I convinced myself it would be just fine. Since the first ring had been bought there, the jeweler even offered to give me half of the original purchase price with a trade-in.

But I had settled, and the relief of calling off the search wasn’t enough to keep that knowledge from eating at me.

That night a friend from church, also recently engaged, told me about the place where her fiancé had bought her ring—a location that had somehow ducked beneath my radar. Slapping on a smile to brighten my voice, I told her that I had no need to continue shopping. I already had a ring on order; I was done looking.

“Go to Engle Jewelers,” she said.

Hadn’t she been listening? I said, “I just told you I ordered a ring today.”

“Go to Engle Jewelers,” she repeated. There was a resonance to her tone I couldn't ignore, like Moses channeling God.

When Mr. Engle unlocked the next morning, he found me waiting at his door. I scanned his display—by now, all rings were blurring into variations of the same half-dozen styles. And then I saw it, in the back corner of the case.

I immediately recognized what I’d been looking for all along: a braided band with strands of yellow, rose, and white gold. A symbol of a blended family. I hadn’t seen anything else like it. The matching engagement ring had an oval cut solitaire.

Once I’d found it, everything about the purchase was easy. Mr. Engle offered to let me borrow the wedding band for a week, wear it, and make sure I liked it.

"Really?" I said. "How much money do you want me to put down as collateral?"

"Just take it. I trust you."

I insisted on producing my driver's license for photocopying, just in case I could be held legally culpable for taking advantage of a kind and generous jeweler.

At dinner that night, I showed the ring to Dave, and explained the meaning it held for me. When I asked him if he would wear a matching band, I think his answer held as much emotion as mine did when I said I’d marry him.

Then, another bonus. When we placed our order—not the following week, but the very next day—the jeweler honored the full purchase price of my first engagement ring as a trade-in. This was twice what the jeweler who had made it had offered! When I mentioned this, Mr. Engle assured us that the value of diamonds and gold did not diminish with time. I admit it was hard to part with my three-stone ring; I had loved it so. But there was meaning in that, too.

My ring still reminds me that in order to move on with our lives, we must take the best of the old and keep weaving it in with the new. So when Dave and I did marry, there was one aspect of my first wedding I did not change—my best friend, Ellen, once again served as my only attendant. She has been an unconditionally supportive witness to my flawed yet ongoing search for what is real and true. In church that day, it was she who handed me the colorful threads of gold that I would place on Dave's hand, to match mine and symbolize our union.

When we hear those "important" messages, how do we know their source? I had a few conflicting messages arise recently about the writing of my memoir. More about that in my next post. Until then, Happy New Year! May you take the best of the old and weave it in with the new.

FYI: Regrettably, Mr. Engle retired and closed his wonderful jewelry shop.

How do you know if it's "the right one"?

2010-12-27T11:39:00.011-05:00

In recent weeks, television viewers have been inundated with jewelry ads. They have failed to move me. As far as I'm concerned, Jared can keep their chocolate diamonds (too hard to digest), and Kay can keep that idiot who rewards his girlfriend with diamonds for being afraid of thunder (next he'll feed her when she begs for food). And as much as I loved Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, when I look at Jane Seymour's open heart designs, I can't help but see glittering fishhooks.

But I'm picky—ask any of the owners of the jewelry stores within a two-hour driving radius of my home. I visited them all after Dave asked me to marry him almost eleven years ago. Some might say I was as unforgettable as the feel of grit on sandpaper. I didn’t set out to earn a reputation. I’m simply a person who struggles to find meaning, and since there isn’t an occasion more meaningful than a wedding, I struggled a lot. In public.

Perhaps the jewelers would have been more empathetic if I’d told them the whole story—that I’d done this all before, eighteen years ago. That it hadn’t ended so well. That my new beau recognized me as a potential life partner right away because of the newfound honesty with which I expressed my vision for my life—a vision that almost word-for-word echoed thoughts he had written down himself, years before. With that knowledge, certainly anyone could understand my need to find the perfect ring, right? I mean, past childbearing age, why remarry at all unless the union adds meaning to your life?

Since the average length of each store visit was already pushing the one-hour mark, I spared jewelers the narrative and picked my way through dozens of rings that any less demanding woman, they’d quietly inform me, would be thrilled to own. Dating again had offered a similar quandary—it’s hard to find the right one when you have no idea what “the right one” looks like. The ubiquitous answer: you know it when you find it.

I had loved my first engagement ring, a round-cut diamond with two smaller stones on either side, and kept finding myself attracted to similar rings. But wasn’t this why I’d undergone therapy in the first place—to break the habit of seeking out the same old relationships? I forced myself to look at styles to which I’d never before been attracted—marquis and pear cuts, unusual shapes that required a matching band, estate jewelry, different kinds of stones.

While shopping for rings that spring, one exasperated chain store owner told me to come back later—much later, in July—for his setting event, when he would have at least a thousand different settings to choose from. “It’s your only hope,” he’d said, a smirk on his face. But Dave and I had planned a September wedding, and I’d been hoping to feel engaged, complete with ring, for longer than two months.

“If only you could describe the ring to me,” said another jeweler, pulling out a pile of catalogs. If only. I half-heartedly flipped through the pages. These rings looked so...flat. I knew one thing—I wouldn’t find what I wanted on paper.

In fact, I didn't find what I wanted at all until the voice of God spoke to me. More on that in the next post.

Have you ever recognized something as "right" the moment you saw it? I'd love to hear your story.

Light in the midst of darkness

2010-12-22T06:21:00.005-05:00

Last night, for the first time, I participated in a longest night service at church—a service for those who need extra emotional support at the holidays due to a loss of one sort or another. It was lovely, and included harp solos and two songs by the Doylestown Comfort Choir, a group of women who will come sing at the bedside of people nearing the end of life's journey. They sounded like angels. When the time comes, if I could have the privilege of crossing the threshold from this world to the next ushered by their voices, I'd choose it.

For last night's service I wrote a prayer. I remember how hard it was to pray in the early weeks and months after Ron's suicide, because I couldn't find the words. If ever in my life there existed a need for prayer this was it, but I didn't know what I was asking for, or from whom. My girlhood prayers had been a bit like lists delivered while sitting on Santa's lap, and now that I was grown, and paralyzed with horror and shock, I didn't even know what I wanted.

Maybe I did: I wanted to feel less profoundly alone. I remember sitting still with my hands upturned, hoping that all those extra sense receptors along my fingertips and palms might literally feel God's presence. And while I didn't feel anything like Santa taking my hand, I did feel a golden presence fill my body. Light coursed through my veins. It was beautiful, wordless prayer and I knew I was not alone.

Now that I have reconnected with my words I hoped to share something of that with those who came to Doylestown Presbyterian Church last night. I share my prayer here for those who might need it. I began with an introduction:

Friends,
The winter solstice is wedged between a holiday in which we give thanks and a holiday in which we give gifts. But as we gather here on this longest night, many of us recognize that we don’t have a whole lot more to give. I want to assure you that you have found respite from all that giving within this sanctuary tonight. Tonight we are here to receive. Our God is glorious, our God is merciful, and our God can restore us. As we now bow our heads together, I encourage you to place your hands on your lap, palms up, to receive God’s love. Let us pray.

Heavenly father:
We gather before you, on this longest night, in a posture of surrender. Some of us feel used up. Exhausted. Broken, from the burden of loss. We pray for healing, for ourselves and for those we love.

We remember Christmases past, and how easy it was to be thankful for the gifts that came in beautifully wrapped packages—for gifts that smelled like freshly baked bread, that tasted like chocolate ice cream, that sounded like laughter, that felt like sun-warmed sand.

We’d rather not accept the challenge of gifts that arrive in less desirable wrappings—for gifts that smell like fear, that taste like defeat, that sound like trouble, that feel like loss.

Lord, restore our faith that while gifts with such wrappings are not immediately appreciated, or easy to open, you have the power to hide within them gifts of spirit that bring us closer to one another, and closer to you.

So often we have prayed to you, our hands tightly clasped, hoping that if we are grateful enough for the loving gifts in our lives, they will never be torn from our grasp. Tonight, help us to let go enough to accept the greater wisdom of your will.

Let our upturned hands feel your presence in this room. Keep us safe as we grieve our losses fearlessly, that we might honor the love we have known. Help us to leave some of our burden here at your altar, on this longest night, for we can no longer carry it alone. And as the nights grow shorter in the coming weeks, help us, with returning hope, to reach again for the warmth of the rising sun, in faith that all things come and all must go, and that this is as it should be.

We feel closer to you when we recall that your greatest gift—the gift of redemption through Jesus Christ—was ultimately wrapped in torture and sorrow. You too have suffered. Yet still, you loved. Tonight we ask so very much, yet nothing more than what you promised us through the sacrifice of your own son: we ask that you grace our upturned palms with your healing love.

In Jesus' name we pray,

Amen.

I wish you all meaningful moments of reflection this holiday season, and as much peace and love as you can handle.

What have you done with your gift today?

2010-12-17T10:38:00.010-05:00

Every now and then, to slap myself out of complacency, I read stories with headlines like the following, that I pulled today from Google:

Dec. 4, 2010. Virginia man kills estranged wife, self.

Dec. 4, 2010. Ohio man kills estranged wife, self.

Nov. 22, 2010. Georgia man kills wife, self.

Oct. 17, 2010. North Carolina man kills wife, self.

Sept. 27, 2010. South Florida man kills wife, stepkids, self.

Aug. 13, 2010. Chicago man kills wife, self.

July 30, 2010. Hyde Park man kills wife, self.

June 12, 2010. San Francisco Bay area man kills wife, self.

And I remind myself that I'm safe. My kids are safe.

So many headlines testify to the fact that many men who feel my first husband's brand of despair take their families to the grave with them. The corporal in charge of the Special Emergency Response Team operation on the day of his standoff told me as much: once a man loses his appreciation for the sanctity of human life, he becomes a dangerous and unpredictable creature.

They don't send dozens of armed troops to your house or dispatch a helicopter from Harrisburg if you aren't in grave danger.

They don't whisk you from your home one at a time, under armed guard, reconvening the family at a remote command center, if you aren't in harm's way.

They don't make the decision to barricade roads and bar people from their homes and make the local elementary school cancel recess and afternoon bus routes on a whim.

The media doesn't swarm to your remote farm, or slap photographs and maps of it on their front pages with headlines like the above, if they don't think there's a story that impacts the community.

Our reality: The day of the standoff, Ron had ample opportunity to hurt the boys and me. Yet because he chose to kill only himself, I have to believe that he was trying to release us from his private hell and his disastrous choices. That isn’t exactly the way it turned out—the repercussions of his act extended much further into the community and further through time than I suspect he imagined—but he obviously wasn't thinking so well.

Is this an odd post for the holiday season? I don't think so.

I'm alive. My kids are alive.

There's nothing like tragedy to tip you into a posture of gratitude. At this time of year, wedged as we are between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’m thankful for the simple yet extraordinary gift of life. We take birth for granted—who doesn't? What do we know of its circumstances, at the time? But my sons and I were spared—passed over, you might say—at a time when we were aware that it could have gone down another way.

What an opportunity my sons and I were given. And I am driven, every day, to make the most of it.

If you did something special with your gift of life today, please share it!

Where is Ron?

2010-12-14T17:43:00.006-05:00

If you've been following this blog you may recall that last week I introduced a fundamentalist Christian friend who had a few firm opinions about my plans to remarry. That wasn't the first time she'd shocked me with her outspokenness.

Soon after Ron’s death, when I was expressing fear for his soul, she told me there was no question at all as to where a suicide victim would end up. He’d gone to hell.

My first thought: It’s amazing how sweet and compassionate people can be when you are grieving. But I quickly moved beyond that.

Why? Because at least she was talking to me about it. Suicide is a difficult topic to broach. People don't want you to cry. They don't like feeling helpless. This friend, on the other hand, walked beside me—literally. We became walking partners, sharing our beliefs and philosophies and good books while traversing the hills of Berks County, beginning at 7 a.m. most mornings.

She was never less than honest. Even I had a question as to the whereabouts of my husband’s soul. Isn’t extinguishing your life a big "f@¢k you" to the Creator who bestowed it?

After much thought I have chosen to believe that God suffered along with Ron, recognized his addiction as illness, and when Ron was too weak to take one more step on this earth, met him at his collapse with arms strong enough to carry him home.

This obviously was not my fundamentalist friend's opinion.

Yet.

She changed her mind when not a year later her twenty-year-old son died of a heroin overdose (my son Marty referred to the incident in his lyrics for "Know What I Know" at a previous post). Her son's death certificate stopped short of saying “suicide,” but like me, she realized that in terms of deadly weapons potential the difference between the words “needle” and “gun” might be semantics.

She "knew" the truth espoused by her church. But try as she might, she could not envision a God who would condemn her son to hell for his actions. She knew her son was with God, in heaven, and that his pain had been relieved. She felt this in such a way that she knew it, body and soul.

She left her inflexible church for one that believes in the message of forgiveness through Jesus Christ. That message is simple: God loves us all.

Is there life beyond our physical existence? We can’t know, for sure. My friend and I have covered a lot of ground on that one, literally and figuratively. Who ever would have thought we'd have so much in common.

This is what I do know. Heaven and hell exist right here in the physical realm, and that barring certain mental ailments, choosing one or the other is within our power. Ron and I lived on the same farm, one we both loved, yet I lived in increasing peace as he lived in increasing torment.

What about you--do you give much thought to the notions of heaven and hell?

The Wedding Guest

2010-12-09T08:17:00.009-05:00

As common as it is in our society, remarriage inspires controversy, and I appreciate the comments people have left about it after my last post. On the day of our wedding, Dave and I didn’t pretend for a moment that we stood at that altar free of the baggage that metaphorically surrounded us. It was important to us to be in that moment with as much honesty as we could muster, and that included honoring all of the life experience that brought us there.

So we wrote this poem together. Our friend Trish MacCubbin read it at our wedding in her inimitable breathy, soothing voice:

The Wedding Guest
by Kathryn Williams and Dave Craft
8/3/2000

Divorced man
and widowed woman
look back on life’s
unplanned challenges
unwelcome forces
unpredictable events
unstoppable changes
and reflect in gratitude
that God,
whose plan was greater
than their limited vision,
has brought them here today.

This powerful, silent witness
left ample room for soul struggle
cradled them in their fear
patiently received their surrender
and bestowed courage when
quaking hearts
recognized a new life
in each other.

They stand here today
imperfect humans
full of joy
humbly inviting God
to their wedding.

May God live at the heart of this marriage
and create a sacred connection.
May He carry this new family in His hands
and nourish it from the bottomless well of His perfect love.
May this couple never forget that God has
called them here today to fulfill His vision for their lives,
and may they always find peace in His presence.

After the vows we had our children get involved. We placed two bouquets of loose flowers on the front pews on either side of the aisle. As my sons' music teacher sang Steven Curtis Chapman's "Love Will Be Our Home," each of Dave's four children took a turn getting up from their seat, selecting a flower to represent him or her from the bouquet on the groom's side, and placed it in a new vase on the altar; likewise, my sons each took a flower from the bride's side to add.

By the end of the song their combined flowers had created a new arrangement. It stood on the altar, like a gift. It was moving and meaningful and few eyes were dry.

One of my sisters, however, got up and walked out.

She came to the reception later but did not come through the line to greet us. She never lifted her eyes to meet mine nor offered a word of congratulation.

An explanation for this would have to wait until Dave and I got home from the honeymoon, but since I've never been one to tolerate the "elephant in the room" for very long, I asked her about this when I returned the choker and earrings I'd borrowed from her for the wedding. Her perception: that I was trying to erase Ron from the family's memory with the flower ritual.

Metaphor is tricky that way, because everyone brings something different to it.

To her "it had only been three years" since Ron's death. To me it had been "three long, hard years" of therapy, reading, journaling, contemplation about the suicide, and continuing to address its ramifications. I grieved intensely because our survival as a family depended upon it. The life we lived every day was the one Ron no longer inhabited.

My sister's life, which never included Ron on a daily basis, gave her plenty else to think about. She was less motivated to pick up a topic as ugly as the suicide of a family member to study it deeply. So her grieving hadn't progressed at the same pace. I may have been ready to move on, but she was not ready for me to do so.

The ritual worked for the Craft-Williams clan, though. No family life is free of problems, but our new family unit—further symbolized in Dave's and my wedding rings of interwoven yellow, white, and rose gold—has never doubted our loving commitment to one another. We have prospered from it.

"Till Death Do Us Part"

2010-12-06T11:05:00.005-05:00

I’ve thought about the above words a lot since Ron lifted them from our wedding vows and scrawled them, at a dramatic pitch, at the end of his suicide note. That act alone is an attention-getter, but in addition, his suicide note comprised the largest outpouring of feeling I’d ever received from him.

Then he disappeared from this world with a single shotgun blast, spattering the words with drops of his blood.

I still have the note. I do not have him to discuss this with. So I chase his spirit in my writing—Turn around! Talk to me! Hear me!—hoping to milk what meaning I can from his choices and actions.

With his postscript Ron was referring to the fact that despite vowing to love him until death, I had, some eight weeks earlier, begun divorce proceedings. Alcoholism had obliterated what sense of fiscal responsibility he’d had, and since he wouldn’t seek help for he drinking or our marriage or the spending, I needed to protect our children and me from any further harm in this regard.

He chose to pre-empt the divorce on his own terms—he’d wanted to live on the farm together as a family until he died. He did so.

Three years later, I was ready to make that same vow again.

A fundamentalist Christian friend voiced a strong opinion about this: Dave and I were not free to marry. You gotta love a woman who speaks her mind, you know?

According to her beliefs, I was free to marry Dave because my husband had died. Dave was not free to marry me, however, because he had divorced.

I couldn’t play that game. I knew in my heart my marriage to Ron was over and could see, in retrospect, that the difference between divorce or death in my case was only a matter of timing.

It never ceases to amaze me, since we all worship the same Creator, how differently we believers choose to draw boundaries between right and wrong. Luckily, not all Christians are as rigid as my friend. Dave and I found a pastor who believes, as we did, that God will forgive choices that result in no-win situations because God loves us, expects us to grow, and challenges us to bring good things into the world.

So I imagine Ron might be as surprised as my conservative friend to hear that I believe, as Ron did, that what God joined together, I did not have the power to put asunder. I see that as a separate issue from enacting my legal right to extricate myself, to the extent possible, from the consequences of his choices. But I remember the soul connection with the man that I loved, and even beyond his death, Ron will be with me for the rest of my life.

So I was never “free” to marry Dave. Yet I chose him.

And I guess he wanted me, ghosts and all.

More on that, in Dave's and my words, in the next post. What do you think—are we ever truly freed from our choices?

Memoir bigamy

2010-11-29T11:16:00.007-05:00

I am married to two men. One is alive...

...and one is dead.

I married Dave three years after my first husband Ron’s death. He was pretty brave to do so. At the time I met him, a cursory look at my relationship qualifications might have gone something like this: “Over the course of 15 years she drove her husband to drink, and then when she told him she planned to leave him, he killed himself. Bonus: two disillusioned sons entering adolescence.”

That’s not an ad most men would answer.

But Dave's a special kind of guy. Early on, he told me: “I know Ron’s suicide is something you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life.” Considering that’s the exact same term Dave expects to spend with me, I guess he knew what he was signing up for.

Or did he?

It’s no secret: lately I’ve been spending a lot more time with my first husband than I had ever planned to. The memoir requires that I remember what I loved about Ron, and why I wanted to start a family with him. I’m re-immersing myself in some of the most precious times of my life, none of which included Dave.

On any given morning I might have spent hours writing a scene about my life with Ron on the farm, hearing the horses whinny, smelling the manure—only to hear Dave call up to tell me it's an hour past lunch time, do I want soup? Sometimes I fall asleep beside Dave but spend the night with Ron, who visits me in dreams that I share with Dave when I wake up.

A friend of mine, in a comment after a recent post, described my memoir writing as "periodically pulling back the curtain" to share my reflections. I thought that was beautifully put. At times, though, the curtain between my two worlds is as thin as gauze, and the suddenness of such time travel can be discombobulating.

I asked Dave if the time I spend with Ron bothers him. He said that he knows I still have questions, so does he, and he encourages me to keep searching. Dave does love a good mystery. But he also admitted: “I have been jealous a few times. Especially about the dreams. I guess I wish you might dream about me every once in awhile.”

First let me just say how cute I thought that was.

But when he said that, it made me think: I believe Dave is in my life because I did dream of him. Despite all I went through with Ron, the loss of that relationship left me with a vision of marriage that I still hoped to bring into my life. And when Dave arrived, it didn’t take long for me to recognize him.

Truth is, I don’t need to dream about Dave. For the past ten years he has been my rock-solid reality. And when I need to talk with him about something, he’s always there, ready to listen and share his own feelings.

Beyond the first few years of our relationship, I’m not so sure Ron ever listened to me, although he liked to hear me talk. And he rarely shared his feelings with me.

And so, thirteen years beyond his death, I continue to chase him.

Was I even “free” to marry Dave? There are those who think not—including myself. More about that in my next post.

The List, reframed

2010-11-23T09:33:00.011-05:00

On the 10th anniversary of his suicide I found a list Ron wrote before he died. He had tucked it inside one of my journals. For three years since I've held the mystery of that list in my consciousness. He wrote:

1. Withdraw from family life.
2. Don’t pull my own weight with Kathy and kids.
3. Ran up large CC bills, didn’t share with her.
4. Didn’t communicate with her. Didn’t listen to her, she has been worried and concerned for years.
5. Do fun things not just work.
6. Alcohol—When at home have 2–5 drinks in evening. Don’t seem to drink when not home.

Why did it take me ten years to find this list? Because I have never been the type of person who reads her own journal pages.

Now, while writing my memoir, I must. I read not only to steep myself in the facts of my life at an earlier time, but to fully appreciate the ways my journal pages functioned in my life. Now I can see:

the way I partnered with these pages as Ron slowly withdrew from our lives.
the way I steeled myself to take on his duties as well as mine in all aspects of our farm and family life.
the way I’d work through my fears about our financial jeopardy as the clues slowly emerged.
the way I'd air my feelings because for years the pages were the only place I would be heard.
the way I’d fantasize about travel or doing something fun outside the demanding routine of our everyday lives.
the way my fears about Ron’s decline slowly added up to a conscious concern about alcoholism.

Hmm. Look at those two lists. Remarkably similar, aren’t they.

It occurs to me now that just three weeks before the suicide, when I returned from a weekend away, Ron admitted to having read all my journals. This shocked me. Not because I feared his awareness of their content; I'd been trying to share these thoughts and feelings with him for years. No, it shocked me because in our fifteen years together I only remember him reading one slim volume, while on vacation in North Carolina—Master Electrician—and my journaling at the time had spilled into more than a dozen spiral-bound notebooks.

Unfortunately, his newfound curiosity about me arrived too late.

I remember asking him what he found in those notebooks. He answered: “Hope.”

You may recall from my last post that ten years later, I too found hope in reading Ron’s list, for in awareness lies the seeds of wisdom. I thought the list was a gift from Ron showing that he was aware of the problems in our marriage. Tucked as it was inside the pocket of one of my personal journals, that list felt like an apology. That he wrote it at all made it seem like an action plan.

I'm sharing this story here because it reveals so much about memoir writing. The digging for clues. The surprises.

And the huge potential for erroneous conclusions based on point of view.

My recent re-examination of the facts leads me to a new conclusion, one you may already have come to: Ron wasn't devising an apology he hoped might reach me across time any more than he was he drafting an action plan. He was taking notes. He cribbed that list from my journal entries. Parroting, not understanding.

And within this new awareness lies an important clue as to why I have thrived in a way Ron could not.

It is my nature, not his, to analyze until I identify problems. It is my nature, not his, to seek answers. It is I, not Ron, who believes that the seeds of wisdom take root in awareness. I misunderstood that list for so many years because it is my nature to not only look for gifts from the universe, but to expect them.

I see myself as a small character in a grand, epic story, yet I don’t use that as an excuse to accept my insignificance; on the contrary, I see this as an opportunity to create a ripple effect. I have embraced the opportunity to co-author, with the help of God, the development of my own character.

I am a believer.

I think Ron was, too, but in a much different way, and it was the source of his undoing.

I fear his belief system was so small that when he began to sink it couldn’t possibly continue to hold him up. The commandments he internalized could not save his soul. Written on a yellow slip of paper, they were gleaned from a much more personal bible, and they fed perfectly into the cycle of self-condemnation caused by his alcoholic depression.

By the time his life imploded I fear Ron only believed in one thing.

Me.

Heaven help his tortured soul.

[Later that day, after writing this post, I heard a nun say on Oprah, "If we don't believe in anything larger than ourselves, we'll never do anything larger than ourselves." Coincidence?]

The List

2010-11-22T07:06:00.003-05:00

October 20, 2007: The 10th anniversary of Ron’s suicide, and because the boys are both off to college, the first anniversary I won’t see either of them. Yet the date seems significant, so I decide to drive up to the cemetery and spend some time alone with Ron.

I take my folding chair from the car, the one I’ve taken to countless soccer games over the years. I'm more thankful than ever to be setting it up, once again, on the sidelines. I try to remember if I bought this chair before or after his death. This is how I divide the timeline of my life now—before, and after—but the division is getting as frayed as the edges of this chair.

I sit down and flip through my 1997 journal, the one I was writing in at the time of his death. I am finally considering writing a memoir, but first I want to steep myself in the details of my life at the time. Some entries make me laugh, some bring instant tears.

I pull out papers stuck into the notebook’s front pocket and leaf through them. Among them are copies of letters the boys wrote to Ron. Tears again, they are so touching—I decide to ask them if I could use them in the memoir. We’d read the originals aloud nine years ago, and burned them right here on his grave.

I find a few printouts: an e-mail I’d sent to my friend Ellen on Valentine’s Day—the date stamp says it was eight months before Ron’s death—in which I admitted the sad truth that I could no longer connect to any romantic feelings for my husband. A “Virtual Flower Bouquet” Ellen sent to cheer me, just five days before Ron’s suicide, that says, “Don’t ever doubt that it’s right to believe in love, in yourself, and in the possibilities.” Another e-mail from Ellen written five days after his suicide, that begins, “I’m sitting here trying to imagine how it will feel for you—returning to your office, where although everything remains the same, somehow everything will undoubtedly feel different."

Everything gains new meaning through the lens of hindsight.

Then I find something that proves that even from beyond the grave Ron has the power to shock me: tucked into that same pocket, among the other papers, is a list. I haven’t seen that handwriting for ten years but I immediately know it to be Ron’s. Not the quick scrawl I’d find on a note left on the counter—“Animals all fed,” I’d eventually decipher—but the quirky mix of cursive and printing he’d use when attempting legibility.

I do not recognize this list. I don’t know how it ended up in my journal. But it feels like a gift.

It reads:

1. Withdraw from family life.
2. Don’t pull my own weight with Kathy and kids.
3. Ran up large CC bills, didn’t share with her.
4. Didn’t communicate with her. Didn’t listen to her, she has been worried and concerned for years.
5. Do fun things not just work.
6. Alcohol—When at home have 2–5 drinks in evening. Don’t seem to drink when not home.

By the end of his life I did not believe Ron self-aware enough to make this kind of list. Yet of one thing I was sure: the last person to touch this piece of paper had been my husband. And as I sit here at his grave I feel he is reaching out to me across the years to tell me he was more aware than I thought.

The list leaves me madly resorting facts and suppositions. Had I found this list before his death I would have seen in it a glimmer of hope: If you can identify problems, you can search for solutions.

I guess this isn’t true of everyone.

More about this mysterious list in my next post.

The Boys, Harry Potter & Me

2010-11-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

In honor of tomorrow's release of the film that represents the first half of the last book in the Harry Potter series, I thought I'd post this essay, formerly online at Central PA Magazine. It marked the first time I'd written publicly about Ron's suicide. My sister Nancy read it and said, "That sounds like the beginning of a memoir." Thanks, Nance.

It was the summer of 1998, and we'd heard the buzz: Harry Potter was coming. It had been only months since my first husband's suicide, and my boys and I were slogging our way through grief work so thick it choked our vision of the future. Looking out across the next ten years overwhelmed me: Jackson was 10, Marty only 8. But pick up Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone and read it to them? That was something I could do.

In a house now much emptier, reading aloud provided an excuse to sit with my sons pressed against me, one on each side, for the hours it would take to work our way through the book. As a bonus, we'd immerse ourselves in a world of witches and wizards whose conflicts were so different than ours.

We soon found out, of course, that they weren't. After Harry discovers that his awkward differences were really the source of an unrealized power, he studies wizardry so he might vanquish the evil that caused the early loss of his parents. The boys and I desperately needed to know that, with the help of his friends, Harry could overcome this loss and triumph in the end.

With one son looking at the book over each of my elbows—and then eventually, each of my shoulders—my boys grew up alongside Harry and his friends, whose Hogwarts hijinks provided a timeline for our own memories. In the beginning, my mind absorbed by weightier concerns, we strained to finish one chapter at a sitting. By book three, the more intricately plotted Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, we could no longer limit ourselves to our daily ration. One school night we undertook a sixty-page sprint to the finish line. Approaching midnight, huddled together beneath the covers in my queen-sized bed, my boys and I prayed for the snow day the weatherman had anticipated. The next morning we awoke bleary-eyed, relieved that our prayer had been answered.

There was the year the boys couldn't switch sides periodically, as was their custom to avoid cricks in their necks, because Marty had broken his arm and had to prop it up on pillows with an ice pack [picture]. There was the year we read while vacationing in northern New York, where thanks to the heat and humidity I kept falling asleep while reading. We ended up taking three chairs down to the beach and setting them in the spring-fed lake. The cool water on my feet helped keep me awake—and when I would start to yawn, I'd simply dip down into the water to splash my face.

By the time we read Order of the Phoenix, I had married again. Dave, an early riser, would end our late night reads by kicking us off the bed so he could sleep. There was the year reading Half-Blood Prince when, due to my own study of fiction writing craft, I couldn't get through the sing-song rhythm of Rowling's adverb-studded dialogue attribution and kept giggling. Marty would elbow me in the ribs and tell me to cut it out, I was ruining the story. We loved the introduction of Dobby, the house elf, who I loved all the more for Jackson's falsetto rendition of his dialogue.

Is it like that with everyone who has read the Harry Potter series as a family? Sometimes I can believe Rowling wrote the series just for us. As with each of the books, the last in the series began its tale just before Harry's July 31 birthday, which Marty (and J.K. Rowling) shares. In the last book, released this summer, Harry had quit school to undertake his ultimate quest; Marty had just finished high school and would soon head off to college. Everything felt right: this summer we would see Harry through to his final chapter, together.

Due to conflicting work schedules, however, the boys and I had limited access to one another. We read a chapter whenever we could steal an hour, reassured we would have a stretch of time together at the lake to finish up before Jackson returned to college. As August reeled past I felt a growing sense of urgency: just as I have always sensed the possibility that stepping on cracks might break my mother's back, I felt a karmic relationship between my boys' fates and that of Harry Potter. Like Mrs. Weasley, I had adopted Harry as one of my own. I needed to see him through his trying adolescence, and I needed my sons to see it, too. And we needed to do so before September first: that symbol of summer's end, the date the Hogwarts Express whisks away its new charge of students, just as mine would be whisked from me. September first was also, by the way, Jackson's twentieth birthday.

We had a lot of reading ahead of us. By the time we left for the lake the book was still much thicker in my right hand than in my left. Then, the blow: Marty, still in the throes of post-graduation hoopla, decided not to come to the lake for the whole week. He would drive separately and join us in a couple of days.

Our time potential withered.

It was silly, my need to do this. Impossible, really; we would have only two days with more than 380 pages to go. But I am no stranger to undertaking projects that become much larger than I first anticipate—say, the decision to read aloud what would end up being, over the series of seven books, 4,100 pages. Or writing sixteen drafts of two novels. Or raising two sons after their father killed himself. Just tell me I can't do it.

With only two days, we mounted our broomsticks and flew across the magical countryside of Rowling's imagination, reaching for closure, that elusive snitch that brings peace. We laughed, we cried, and we headed into final battle with He Who Must Not be Named. We took breaks only when the bodies now pressed beside mine—when had they become men?—caused hot flashes that required my stepping away for a spell.

But that second day, we finished the book in time to cook dinner, take the boat out of the water, and winterize its motor by daylight.

Harry had J.K. Rowling to guide him through a plot line rife with conflict; the boys have had me. After their father's death, I watched Jackson and Marty run the gauntlet of adolescence, a ten-year race that is at once marathon and sprint, and no easier to understand than the game of Quidditch. They are now young adults, and ready to author their own lives.

Of course the name J.K. Rowling will go down in publishing history, but her story of a young boy persevering against all odds has contributed in a quieter way to the salvation of my family. It brought us through a tough time by dangling a promise that is as true for me as it is for my sons: Growing up is hard, but you aren't alone in your fear of it. Make of your life a good story, and share it with those you love. It will be a story full of pain and conflict, yes, but the sharing of it will hold all the magic you could wish for.

Random act of... culture

2010-11-14T09:05:00.011-05:00

The theme of this blog is healing through writing, but for my sons and me, a whole lot of healing has gone on through other arts as well.

Ron didn’t have that.

He wasn't able to communicate with me about the kind of pain he was in. If he could, I think my family's story would have gone a different way. The right words could have created a bridge so he wouldn't have felt so profoundly alone. Perhaps addiction ate away at Ron’s bridges. Perhaps his bridges were never properly constructed in the first place.

Those of us left behind will never know, really. We can only look back and hunt for clues. This is what I do know: the arts have an amazing way of creating community, and community helps us understand our innate connection. We are all part of something greater than ourselves.

Let me set the stage, and then I’ll show you how that can work.

October 30, 2010: The grand court at Macy’s in downtown Philadelphia, during one of the daily 45-minute organ recitals. The music is routine but exceptional: this isn’t just any organ.

Set up on the second floor balcony and open to the court, the Wanamaker Organ is the largest operational organ in the world, with 6 manuals (keyboards), some 370 stops, and over 30,000 sounding pipes. Below it, people mull around, shopping. Among them are hundreds of “plants,” many of whom are from the Opera Company of Philadelphia. The rest are vocalists from clubs, colleges, high schools, churches, and professional choirs.

One of them is my son Jackson, who lost his father to suicide at the age of ten but who, in a school essay six years later, would write, “I want the world to be different when I’m gone, better somehow.”

And that’s but one small backstory from among 650 performers (what are their stories?) who will connect with a throng of shoppers—and already more than one million You Tube visitors—through one of the most glorious songs of praise ever composed.

Think of that as you watch this video. You are about to witness a random act of culture!

Haven’t gotten enough? Me neither. In honor of my love for dance, musical theater, and joyous public spectacle, I’ll include this one too. It was filmed last year in Antwerp, Belgium, but the language is timeless and universal.

Thanks for reading, for watching, and for being part of my community.

Note: To protect your privacy, enhanced settings will prevent You Tube from storing personally-identifiable cookie information from the playback of these videos.

Finding Meaning in Tragedy

2010-11-11T09:51:00.006-05:00

Ron would not live to see our first-born son, Jackson, reach 9th grade. That's when Jackson came home from school to tell me the news that would change the course of his life.

Weeks earlier Jackson’s junior high choir director had urged him to try out for county choir. Hundreds and hundreds of students from Berks County had auditioned; only one hundred would be chosen. The results were in.

Jackson leaned against the kitchen counter with his hands in his pockets, a posture I’d come to recognize as his casual way of breaking big news.

“Did you make it?” I said.

“Well, keep in mind that this was my first time auditioning. I think I did okay, you know, considering.”

“Well?”

“I’m first chair in Bass II.”

With those words, everything shifted. Jackson's other interests dropped away as music usurped his every waking moment. We signed him up for private voice lessons with Tammy Black. The rest of his high school career was studded with accomplishments including multiple appearances with county through state choirs, performances with every vocal group and orchestra at school, a European tour of six countries with Sound Of America Honor Band and Chorus, and parts in school and regional theater musicals.

Instead of high school gym, which would have interfered with his full load of advance placement and music electives, Jackson got a waiver to sub in aquatic exercise at the YMCA, for which he got up at 6 a.m. three days per week. Instead of a high school graduation party, Ron's little slacker opted to learn a challenging hour of music in several languages so he could perform a solo voice recital for his family and friends, followed by a reception.

In classical vocal performance Jackson found his calling. He is now a 23-year-old graduate of Westminster Choir College and a member of the chorus of the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

One could say he was driven to make the most of every opportunity that came his way.

In earlier posts I shared the way my younger son Marty has expressed feelings about his father’s suicide through his life choices and songwriting. Now, it’s Jackson’s turn.

His words are from a 10th grade English essay. Jane Stahl, Jackson’s teacher at Boyertown Area High School, put together an annual spiral-bound compilation, After the Rain, Rainbows: Surviving to Live, Thriving to Grow, that she would distribute to disadvantaged and abused children as a ray of hope. In her note to the reader she wrote that her students “are better people because they’ve suffered, and they know it.” What an amazing sentiment, and a very meaningful project.

The contributors wrote of displacement, health obstacles, sports challenges, tragic accidents, the death of loved ones, alcoholism. The essays are riveting: in directly addressing that which was difficult and life changing, these students accessed impressive inner wisdom.

Jackson wrote about his father’s self-destruction in the following essay, "Finding Meaning Through Tragedy":

“Son,” she said, “It’s about as bad as it can get. Your daddy’s dead.” Needless to say, I was not prepared for this news. At the time I was only ten years old. My father, an alcoholic, had locked himself in his woodworking shop all day threatening suicide. My brother and I stayed at our neighbor’s house while this was taking place. The police had taken my mom to the fire station for protection. I didn’t seriously consider that he might kill himself; I just thought that tonight it would all be over and tomorrow would be just a normal day. I was wrong.

Over the next few days, I lived at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t go back to school yet. I didn’t feel ready. After that the days turned to months, which turned to years. These years felt almost normal compared to my life before.

Looking back on those times, I realized that I never really showed much emotion, I cried when I found out, but that was all. This lack of feeling made me feel like a horrible person, like I was forgetting about what happened, but that is not the case. He was never really there for me. He worked almost all day long, and nobody ever got to see him. Even when he was home, he was always working on something. He was always very distant. After his death, things were almost the same.

This realization struck me. I don’t want to be remembered that way. I don’t want to be someone who was never there. I want the world to be different when I’m gone, better somehow. I want to be someone people could go to with problems, someone who could help. That’s how I want to live my life. That’s what I want.

Too many people in the world today are content to see life pass them by. They are afraid to make a difference in other people’s lives. I don’t want to be that kind of person. If everyone would just try to help other people instead of satisfying their own selfish interests, then the world will be a much better place.

In my next post: a most amazing performance.

Moments before the standoff

2010-11-08T09:19:00.004-05:00

October 20, 1997, 8 a.m. Ron drove up the driveway and when he got out of the car he was obviously drunk. Eight-year-old Marty ran out to the car; I followed. Marty was a linear thinker: if his father drove drunk he might kill himself, therefore he had to get those keys away.

Jackson stood on the porch, frozen in indecision. A more conceptual thinker, he took in the picture before him: Just as it was time to head down to catch the morning school bus, his family life had devolved into a brawl with a drunken father. Two years older than Marty, and already a martial artist trained to avoid the fight at all costs, he wasn’t so sure that adding into the fracas was the best choice.

Ron, Marty and I stood beside the car’s open door with our hands balled around the keys, locked in a war of wills, when Jackson called to me.

“Mom, what should I do?”

“Call 9-1-1,” I said. Inside the car I could see an ice chest, large bottles of whiskey and sweet vermouth, strewn cigarette packs—and leaning against the front seat, a shotgun. I knew what it was for; Ron had already threatened suicide once. “Tell them you need help and that your father is trying to drive drunk. He has a gun.”

Jackson disappeared into the house.

My point here isn't to tell the story of the standoff, what led up to it, or how the boys and I forged ahead once Ron was dead. That's the purpose of my memoir. Here I simply want to set up Jackson's role: it was a ten-year-old boy who turned a domestic dispute into a full-day standoff at our farm. Because Jackson carried out his task perfectly, the help we needed arrived in full, mightily armed force.

The police safely removed us from the property, avoiding what might have been a more grievous disaster—once a man has lost belief in the sanctity of his life, the police would later tell us, he is capable of killing anyone.

Suicide will challenge anyone’s innate optimism. In the early months after the suicide I worried if the boys would ever recover from this. Then, as we slowly regained our equilibrium, I wondered if somehow, with time, Jackson and Marty might make a positive contribution to the world because of this experience. They were both bright kids. Maybe one day one of them might discover a cure for depression, or alcoholism.

Okay, I was projecting—the interest in medicine is my thing. They would each find their own paths.

By the time of the suicide Jackson already showed signs of becoming a performing artist. By the age of four he had memorized all the songs on his Raffi tapes and would sing them while strumming a pink-and-cream plastic guitar—when I threw Ron a surprise party one year Jackson wouldn’t go to bed until he’d performed for Ron’s friends: “Baby Beluga,” “Down By the Bay,” “The More We Get Together.”

While Marty earned his father’s admiration for dutifully contributing to family projects like our 20-hour autumn leaf-raking extravaganza (sound fun, right?), Jackson’s attention would skitter away like a dry leaf and he’d soon head back inside to write an illustrated book about geology or a Star Trek script.

Ron feared Jackson was a slacker, which pained me. Jackson was just a different kind of worker—a self-directed creative—and as such worked harder than most kids his age. We'd signed him up for Tae Kwon Do because by first grade he'd taught himself how to do a cartwheel by watching the Power Rangers on television; by the age of ten he was already a deputy black belt. He began violin in third grade, and constantly drew pictures and read books in his spare time.

Ron would not live to see the day in ninth grade when Jackson came home from school and told me the news that would change the course of his life.

More about that, and some writing from Jackson, in the next post.

Healing Through Songwriting

2010-11-03T09:07:00.008-04:00

I am not the only one in our family who has found healing through writing after Ron’s suicide. In my last post I wrote about how my son Marty got involved in a Straight Edge hardcore band, for which he has been writing lyrics.

In an online interview at the "Where it Ends" blog, Marty, 21, explains why he wrote this song:

“We had just played [a show], and it was in a Polish Club with a downstairs bar. [This girl] was clearly pretty drunk and was talking to a friend of mine. He said something about us being an edge band and she laughed about [that] and said it was dumb. So I wrote a song about why it isn't dumb to me. I've seen drugs and alcohol do a lot of fucked up shit and I don't want that happening to me.”

Know What I Know
by Marty Williams

You think that straight edge is a joke
That’s what you said last we spoke
I hope you heed the words I said
If you don’t, soon you could be dead

If you only knew the things that I knew
If you could only see the things that I’ve seen
You’d know how drug abuse is wrong
And how my edge has become so strong

The boy down the street with everything in the world
Never would have guessed how his life has unfurled
Found by his family dead in his room,
Heroin introducing him to his tomb

A disgruntled neighbor didn’t like what his life had become
Tried to drown it away in a bottle of rum
That didn’t work, he wrote a suicide note
Then put a bullet in his fucking throat

If you only knew the things that I knew you’d be straight edge too,
And you’d understand why I’ll always stay true

Marty didn’t reference his father in this song. He refers to other events in our neighborhood: seven months after Ron’s death his friend's twenty-year-old brother was found dead from a heroin overdose. The sad irony is that his fundamentalist Christian parents had home-schooled him to keep him away from such influences; later, from his journal, the parents learned the boy had first used cocaine in the basement of a friend’s home while his family was playing a wholesome game of volleyball at a picnic outside. Marty also mentions our neighbor, who in a freakish juxtaposition with the anniversary of Ron's death two years and two days later, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the house next door.

So Marty saw messages all around: Pay attention here. Death was no longer a distant concept; it was an imminent danger. He covered the topic of his own father’s self-destruction in an earlier song, whose title bears Ron’s initials.

RJW
by Marty Williams

At 8 years old my eyes were opened up wide.
My father said he loved me and I knew that he lied.

The only love he had was for the bottle.
Got home from work and drank alone

Passed out, slept till three
An alcoholic was all he'd ever be

Cut off from the world sinking into depression.
Blew out his brains to escape this world's oppression.

Suicide's not a way out. It's a way to show you're not a man.

I'll never be you
That's why I have this X on my hand

Take a stand—if you DARE

2010-10-31T10:20:00.003-04:00

In response to his father’s drinking, my son Marty embraced a Straight Edge lifestyle. Straight Edge is a subculture of hardcore punk music that embraces the philosophy of staying clean and sober, and often extends to eschewing sexual promiscuity. It is often represented by the symbol “XXX,” which signifies no drinking, no drug use, and no smoking. Throughout high school and college Marty has been a bass guitar player in several Edge bands and is now the vocalist for the band Agitator. (One uses the word “vocalist” because hardcore is more screamed than sung.)

In between school and work obligations, Marty and his bandmates have a blast touring the country in a cheap van, sleeping either on the floors of their concert sponsors or in the van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, to perform for small but passionate crowds in basements and churches and record stores. Their upcoming December tour will cover so many miles that Marty pointed out that in the middle of it they’ll need to get an oil change for the van.

By touring Agitator has gotten quite a following, and even when they perform in towns in distant states they find people in the audience who know the lyrics. Just click on this link if you want to understand what a feat that is, because Glee this is not. You can see in the video the way Marty displays the black X on the back of each hand, and further announces his lifestyle choice with his tee-shirt.

What else you will see in this video, if you dare to open it: raw rage and confrontation. I have posted it on Halloween for a reason. It’s scary. Yet even in this I find hope.

Marty was daddy’s little helper, just eight years old on the day of the standoff that ended in Ron’s suicide. At that young age, with only a few sessions of D.A.R.E. (Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education) under his belt, Marty was already made of such moral fiber that when he realized his father was drunk he raced from the house to help me physically battle Ron for his car keys. He already knew that drinkers shouldn’t be drivers, and bore the pinch marks and scratches of that rectitude for several weeks after Ron’s death.

Children look to their parents for the unconditional love and support that allows them a safe place to form their own definition of self. Marty’s father cut out on him that day, physically and emotionally and completely, and I can’t imagine the rage that might cause a young man who is already hormonally predisposed to fight.

And I don’t have to. Thanks to his songwriting and hardcore performances, I can see and hear it. Marty doesn't keep that darkness bottled up inside, where it could gain control of his actions, hurting others and destroying self. In hardcore Marty has a way to express himself that allows those dark feelings full expression, and in a way that other young people can relate to. Funneling rage into one’s art isn’t necessarily healing in and of itself, but at least it’s an honest first step.

I know from my own experience that anger is a necessary part of the healing process, because it is only in identifying what boundaries were violated that we can truly forgive. We need to forgive for the health of our own souls and I hope that both of my sons are heading in that direction.

In my next post, Marty will share his decision to embrace Straight Edge in his own words: he’s allowed me to post the lyrics to one of his songs.

Happy Halloween, everybody. If he had lived, today Ron would have turned 68, and seen the amazing young men his sons have become.

Zero Tolerance

2010-10-28T07:45:00.004-04:00

“More than a decade later, the sound waves from that one shotgun blast continue to ripple through time.”

~from my memoir, Standoff at Ronnie’s Place

It stands to reason that Ron’s suicide continues to have ramifications in our lives. Perhaps one of the most obvious and immediate influences it had was on my policy concerning teen alcohol use.

I said to my sons: “If either of you comes home smelling of alcohol before you graduate from high school, you are not taking what happened to your father seriously enough. If I smell booze on you once you are going into 30-day inpatient rehab, no questions asked.”

Sound extreme? Good. I was feeling extreme. Was it even fair? Probably not—I went to beer parties when I was in high school. At one, the driver of the car I arrived in got so drunk that her wild dancing sent one of her wooden clogs flying from her foot through the side of a big expensive fish tank. Kegger over. The house emptied as quickly as the tank. Fish flowed helplessly from from it to flop around on the soaked family room carpet. This same girl drove us home, pulling over to the side of the road once so she could throw up.

Problem was, we suffered no adverse consequences besides the basic confusion that we called this “fun” when it made us feel ashamed and sick. We got home without a car accident. We got away with sneaking into our houses past our curfews. We lived to drink underage again. As a member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the past twenty years, I cringe at that thought of what might have happened. But it didn’t.

Now that I was a mother I had to act on the best possible information. That included a slew of drinking and driving statistics from MADD and other sources. And thanks to the events of the final eight weeks of his life we now had the information that Ron had an incredible tolerance for alcohol. He could drink as many as a dozen shots of whiskey in an evening—enough to put most of us into life-threatening alcohol poisoning—before becoming visibly drunk. At the time my kids were teens, research suggested this to be an inheritable trait. And until science reversed itself on this issue, or until my sons were mature enough to make a responsible and legal decision, I didn’t want them messing with liquid fire. They would not become addicts on my watch.

My sons got through high school without me having to invoke my zero tolerance policy. My first-born may have stories to tell me about that some day, who knows.

But not Marty. He was developing a zero tolerance policy of his own.

More on that in my next post, set for Ron’s birthday: Halloween. Some will find its content frightening.

Memoira Interruptus

2010-10-21T14:53:00.006-04:00

As reflected in my spotty writing at this blog, I interrupted work on my memoir this past year and opted to funnel my writing in other directions.

These are the reasons I wish I could give you for turning my back on the examination of my own life:

I finally got life all figured out.
Because I moved from the farm I never thought about Ron, or what happened there, again.
Life in Doylestown has been a non-stop string of welcome parades, tea parties with the rich and famous, and HGTV interviews.
Against all economic odds, my editing business took off at such a rate I'm still adjusting to the G forces.
Oprah called me and said that despite the fact my novels haven't yet been published, she read my mind, loved my ideas, and booked me for her show...and the rest is history.

Okay, okay, by number 5 I know you realized the entire list is fantasy. I'm still clueless; while at the lake this year I truly missed Ron for the first time; my life in Doylestown has felt like a constant string of attendance at book signings—for my friends' books; my editing business was as affected by the economy as the next person's, leaving plenty of time for writing; and I've continued to market my novel because I know darned well you can't possibly get published if you leave your book in the closet.

So what did cause me to abandon the memoir project, especially after going so far as type all the notes into a computer document and play with several different versions of its structure?

Surface reasons: I didn't want to expose others while sharing my truth. I didn't know the best way to structure the story. Agents told me the story would be easier to sell if I novelized it, because I could make it better. This last split into further problems: a) Life is life, and since I'm not God I can't really figure out how to improve on it and still suss out its truth; and b) I haven't found a novel all that easy to sell so I don't know what the hell they're talking about.

A deeper reason: That constant voice in my head, saying, Why do you think anyone wants to read about you? What can I say? Maybe I used up all my courage in the aftermath of the suicide: the voice won out.

The activities I engaged in instead may have been diversions, but they still required risk and perseverance: I continued fine-tuning and marketing my novel and renamed it yet again. I got situated in my new community and started a new writing group. After a particularly vivid dream suggested a viable story arc I began a young adult novel. I supported the goals of my fellow writers by chairing one writers conference, for which I maintained a biweekly blog, and contributed time to the smooth running of another. I consider all of that meaningful work. My point is I made different choices—choices that didn't seem relevant to the theme of this blog.

Writing about it now, I wonder if there might have been one more factor putting off the memoir. Did you see that little clause up in the third paragraph: "while at the lake this year I truly missed Ron for the first time"? It sure caught my attention. To avoid miring my memoir with angry rant, I required the distance of time and perspective. Maybe I just wasn't ready yet.

Now, ready or not, here I come. When I showed up to restart this blog in my last post I asked if the universe was listening. It was an answer more than a question: the universe asked the question of me first. In my next post, I'll share the incident that ended my waffling and returned me to the task of writing my memoir in earnest.

Instant clarity

2010-10-21T13:19:00.007-04:00

In my last post I promised to share the reason why I returned to my memoir project.

On August 30 I was up at our lake house, typing away on a young adult novel about a sixteen-year-old boy who seems to be the only one who sees something in his grandfather's odd behavior beyond a neon sign flashing "Alzheimer's", and is willing to bust him out of a locked memory ward to find the answers.

*Ding*: I had mail.

The note was from Deirdre, Ron's first wife. Deirdre and I became pen pals for one extraordinary reason: in the early months after Ron's suicide, she reached out to the widow and young children left behind by the husband she had quit so long ago. In one amazing handwritten letter after another, Deirdre offered me the one thing I couldn't possibly conjure for myself: context. To all appearances, Ron's suicide was in direct answer to my intention to divorce him, and to that notion Deirdre's precious gift of backstory created an emergency roadblock: as I moved forward, any access to the path of guilt would be denied.

The reason for Deirdre's August 30th e-mail: after a full year of symptoms, she had been diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

The one and only time I met Deirdre face-to-face, several years ago (an event memorialized in the photo, above—Deirdre is on the right), it seemed that I was the one with the big life challenges. She had a happy late-life marriage and a touch of sciatica. Then BAM. It doesn't get a whole lot more challenging than ALS. Like any story with an epic cast, life is a continual compounding of scenes in which our roles are always changing.

Because of my experience with Ron I wasted only a few minutes dispensing the coulda-shoulda-wouldas. Instead I focused on the parameters of our relationship: she lived in South Carolina, I lived in Pennsylvania, and our time was limited. How could I best use that time to honor what she'd meant to me?

And I thought, what if it were me? What if I had drawn the ALS card, and only had a limited amount of time to keep writing? Would I keep working on this YA novel I enjoyed, that would have some emotional resonance and that I might even be able to sell, or would I write the memoir that will surely help me construct context and meaning from the chaotic events of my life?

I returned to the memoir the next day and have not allowed that voice that insists on second-guessing me to again gain purchase.

Here's why: whether other readers will be interested in my life or not is no longer my concern. Deirdre is my audience. My audience of one. In my return e-mail, I told her as much.

She wrote back:

You are such a funny bunny. You want "desperately to do something meaningful" while you are here on this earth and you have, my dear, you have. Think of those lovely boys/men you raised in the midst of a murky, twisted marriage with an emotionally stunted person. I could never have done that, never!

If Deirdre only knew how much she had to do with that. Her letters freed up energy I might have spent beating myself up so that I might best help my sons get through the ordeal of the suicide's aftermath.

I mean to tell her. As a way of honoring the huge gift she gave me 13 years ago, with that series of letters she has given me permission to reproduce, I am writing that memoir.

And since she's on a deadline, so am I.

One more thing. While Deirdre and I are both big readers, I learned from her bookshelves that time we met that our tastes are are quite different: I am an omnivorous reader, Deirdre is not.

She likes the truth, hard up and artfully expressed.

The only genre she reads is memoir.

Revivification

2010-10-21T11:27:00.014-04:00

Hello blank page, I'm back. (Is the universe listening?)

Nothing like reviving one's blog with one of those words that's so long you must pull it apart syllable by syllable to figure out it's meaning, right? Re-vi-vi-fi-ca-tion. Welcome to my world, for that's what a writer does to breathe new life into her work: pulls apart words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes, constantly questioning their components for meaningful expression and relevant inclusion.

As my temporarily abandoned readers already know, I have used this blog to explore the way writing helps us address issues of healing. Life questions that got me journaling instigated that journey for me some eighteen years ago; my first husband's suicide spurred it on.

The 13th anniversary of Ron's suicide was yesterday. Because Dave and I moved to Doylestown last December, this is the first anniversary of Ron's death I did not spend on the farm where he killed himself after a day-long police standoff. I thought I'd commemorate the anniversary by powering up this blog again.

Truth be told, I've missed writing about my life. A memoirist uses perspective like a sieve: you drop in the events of your life, shake them around, and allow the drab to fall through so that you might more closely examine the bits that glitter with meaning. I'll show you what I mean by applying that same process to my blog.

Sifting back through my last several posts, I saw some sparkle of meaning beyond that which I purposefully applied to the page.

Sunday, March 22: Blessed detachment

Monday, March 30: Scene and Sequel

These two posts exemplify the yin and yang of my writer's life. Networking/holing up, crafting/learning, reflecting/living, dreaming/enacting, producing/marketing, responsibility to others/responsibility to self: these sets of dueling needs are a fertile source of conflict in the life of the writer who's in it for the whole wild ride. Just when I've figured out how to tame my schedule to encourage that elusive notion of consistency, one of these duels heats up to wreak havoc. Turns out we are all characters in an unpredictable story. Hallelujah!

Saturday, June 6: While I was underground

Writer or not, if you plan to live fully, you must play the game in a ready stance—you know, like in tennis: knees bent, weight over the balls of the feet, racket at the ready, eyes scanning the horizon for opportunity and peril, weight shifting back and forth to propel you in the direction of the next shot. You gotta try. But watch: it's often when you're fully committed to your forehand that you'll feel the ball zing past your backhand side. This feels unfair—I was ready!—but such reversals are a necessary part of a great story.

Saturday, September 19: What he left behind

Our legacies will define us for future generations. Ron left a legacy of shock and horror. If I choose to write it, my memoir can leave a legacy of perspective and hope. The written word trumps the echo of trauma, paper over rock. For me this post also exemplifies the energy required to boost myself beyond the forces that could have kept me in orbit around a traumatic event. In terms of personal growth, that is rocket science.

Monday, September 28: The illusion of control

Healing is not "getting a grip": it's the opposite. Healing, for me, has been reassembling that flexible ready stance I mentioned above, body part by body part, and regaining the heart to face whatever comes at me next.

Thursday, October 8: The stories behind the stories, Part 1

Tragedy need not define my life. My role as dance critic defined my relationship with a larger community even as the foundation of Ron's life crumbled beneath him—on the very day of the suicide standoff, for example, my editor at The Morning Call was awaiting a story I was writing on choreographer David Parsons in conjunction with his upcoming performance at Lehigh University.

Saturday, July 10: My lemon crosses America

The blog posts and essays and book-length material that comprise my memoir work, with its theme of how to carry on in the face of tragedy, is as serious as it gets—yet to become whole again one must honor one's whimsical side. Her move across the country was very stressful for my sister, but documenting the lemon's journey was a running gag that afforded much in the way of healing laughter. I can even find meaning in the choice of a lemon to exemplify my sister's journey: its sour taste doesn't mean it isn't good for you.

Forehand or backhand, ready or not, meaning whizzes past us every day. Writing about my life allows me to capture it on the page so I can mine the little stories for the big over-arching story. Finding the structure in that bigger story is in itself healing; what once seemed random is now architecture.

Please check back often, as I hope to update this blog three times per week. In my next post I'll explore why I temporarily stopped writing about my life.

My Lemon Crosses America

2010-07-10T21:24:00.003-04:00

I recently flew out to Sacramento, CA to help my sister move her possessions cross-country in a Budget rental truck. The night before we left My sister's friend Mickey made us dinner. I noticed a tree in her backyard with these huge yellow globes hanging from it—lemons. I asked if I could have one, and the rest is recorded in this photo journal. Enjoy!

The stories behind the stories, Part I

2009-10-08T10:30:00.008-04:00

Now that we have a signed agreement of sale on our Berks County property the process of letting go begins. It's been a long haul: 27 years I've lived on this farm, 12 of them without the man who chose it.

This has me feeling nostalgic.

Perhaps to avoid larger issues for the moment, I thought I might share some of my favorite memories of writing for The Morning Call from 1984-2002. The stories behind the stories, that never see print. My tenure spanned an important portion of my life in that I began writing as Kathryn Williams and ended writing as Kathryn Craft. In no particular order:

• My first Nutcracker review. While previous reviews of the Ballet Guild of the Lehigh Valley's production were of the "look how cute, how hard they worked" ilk, I criticized artistic director Alexi Ramov for his production's overly made up dancers, lackluster Waltz of the Flowers costumes, and the use of bumbling children as soldiers in the ballet's climactic fight scene. In a scathing 3-page letter addressed to me and my editor--and which a Ballet Guild insider told me he read aloud to his school-aged company--Ramov refuted all my points, and took me to task for criticizing children.

Since this was my first Nutcracker review, and Ramov had said that its lead sounded "like the first draft of a high school journalism student," and that "you seem to employ a destructive atmosphere to cover for a lack of dance credibility," I sent the review and the letter to the professor in Ohio who had mentored me through my masters program, Lana Kay Rosenberg, so I could get her opinion. She found it sad that Ramov's need to retaliate had won out over common sense. Then she added: "I actually find your reviews rather bland with your need to find something good in everything. I think it's actually better to dismiss something entirely than to give it space in a paper."

I learned early on to try to be true to myself in my reviews, since I was not likely to please anyone else.

• The Edward Villella review. The most famous Balanchine dancer to ever visit the area was on his way to Lafayette College and I threw my back out that afternoon. I could barely breathe. But there was no substitute: if I didn't go, the event wouldn't be covered. And I hated to miss the opportunity to join a few other reporters in interviewing Villella before his talk. So I loaded up on ibuprofen and headed to the interview.

Was I glad I did. Villella brushed off the other reporters and seemed to hone in on me--for some reason it seemed vital to him that I, and I alone, receive his answers.

Then I figured out why. I had a tape recorder in my lap. He wasn't speaking to me so much as to the recorder, for posterity. The other reporters were taking notes. And later, in comparing our stories, I was the only one who had not altered his words.

• The Gregory Hines interview. Gregory Hines was by far the biggest mainstream celebrity I interviewed during my tenure at the paper. His people required a letterhead fax to set up the interview, and I would never learn a contact phone number--he would call me. Well, near the appointed time, I started to get nervous, and so when the call came through I was...indisposed. Ron answered the phone and put his hand over the receiver. "Oh Kathryn, it's Gregory Hines calling. Should I tell him where you are?"

• The barn call. I was trying to set up an interview with the artistic director of a New York City-based company and when the contact called me back I was in the barn mucking out the horse stalls. I tried to adopt my office persona as I answered the barn phone while wearing filthy jeans and squishy muck boots--you can't smell over the phone, right?--but my professionalism was ruined with one big cock-a-doodle-do. My New York City contact said, "Was that a rooster?"

• The Mark Morris interview. Baryshnikov wasn't doing interviews, so when I was to cover the White Oak Dance Project, I had to approach Morris instead. His schedule was busy; if I wanted the interview I had to do it at 2 pm on a certain day. Trouble was, Ron was buying a new horse and we had already arranged to go pick it up in Syracuse, NY that day. Determined that I could do both, I purchased a suction cup microphone I could use on the receiver of a pay phone and as it got close to the appointed time we pulled off at a Holiday Inn in Cortland, NY. As I dialed Morris's number from the lobby phone I could see the horse in the parked trailer, lifting her tail and taking a dump onto the macadam in the hotel lot.

The interview did not go well. Not only was Morris reticent to the point that I had to wonder why he agreed to the interview, some of what he said on tape was obscured by a roaring sound. Seems 2-2:30 pm corresponded with the exact, unalterable point in the cleaning lady's schedule when she needed to vacuum the lobby.

Okay, I'm having fun with this! More in next week's post.

The illusion of control

2009-09-28T09:20:00.004-04:00

Two recent situations helped me identify one of the vehicles I used to drive my life forward since Ron's death: the illusion of control.

What I was driving away from was the polar opposite of control. Suicide, like any other murder, is chaos. No matter how heavily foreshadowed: that full day standoff with a heavy police presence might have been a clue, right? No matter how many hours, waiting, waiting for word, fully realizing the only possible outcomes for Ron would be self-destruction or imprisonment. Still thinking: This. Can't. Be. Happening.

Then word came.

By then it had already occurred, that horrific moment in which all choice and all plans and all determination and all hope were ripped from my grasp. The violence was already over but its echo would live on.

The choices I made in response to Ron's actions were the control I had. Until recently I hadn't realized how reliant I'd become upon my need to make them.

But my choices were good enough, because as you may have read in the last post, we made it. Over the past twelve years, on this farm Ron and I lovingly renovated, on this farm where Ron killed himself, I raised my two sons to adulthood. I am now selling the farm and wrapping up this chapter of my life.

All that was fine and good until someone else grabbed the wheel.

Incident 1: The oil burner man

To ready the house for sale I made an early appointment to have our oil burner serviced for the heating season. When I heard the gravel popping out in the driveway I went out to meet the truck and let them know they should come in the office door. But the van had already turned around at the top of the driveway and come back to me.

"So you've been here before," I said. I didn't recognize the technician; in recent years someone else had been coming.

"Oh yeah, I've been here before," he said, looking around. Then he looked right at me. "Didn't you have a big suicide standoff here a while back? With all sorts of police cars showing up?"

His unexpected words hit me with the force of a shotgun blast. The twelve intervening years dissolved. I stammered as I searched for a response.

From the beginning I have been able to talk with some sense of detachment about the events of that day. But it was only in that moment I realized that I had initiated those conversations. Always. Luckily for me, few people, as much as they might be burning to know, actually walk up to you and say "So what's it like when your husband offs himself?"

His questions felt like an assault because the control was his, not mine. As I sputtered for response his reason for bringing it up became clearer: his brother, too, was involved with a suicide standoff around the same time. It, too, was covered in the local papers. Turns out he had serviced our heater for some 25 years; had even met Ron. He would soon retire, and we would soon leave the house. This was his last chance to connect, however clumsy the approach.

Incident 2: Marty leaves home

My younger son has not taken to campus life at Drexel. He has often returned home on weekends to see his friends here, and lives at home for the six months per year he is on co-op.

Now, with a move to Doylestown wavering on the horizon for us and a new co-op beginning for him, I don't know how much longer I can offer him a place to stay in this geographic area. I told him she should start exploring options. Then assumed he would deal with it when push came to shove.

Two weeks ago, while I was away at my writing retreat for women, Marty stayed at a friend's house while Dave handled a bunch of house showings. When I returned from the retreat, Marty was just returning home as well. He gave me a hug and I settled in for a nice catch-up chat. He began.

"Doug and Brad said I might as well just move in with them," he said. "So I guess I'll just grab some stuff and go."

And he left the room to pack. My first thought: Not yet!

I wasn't ready. Of course it was time for him to make this move. He's twenty. Plus I had told him to make it. But push hadn't yet come to shove. Meaning, of course, that I had not yet done the shoving.

As proud as I am of him for growing up to be the kind of responsible young man who would take this proactive step, I did not respond well to losing my illusion of control over the situation. After he left I curled up in a ball on the couch and cried for all of the illusions I had lost in this home.

"Surrender" is still a tough concept for me. But I'll keep working on it. Because for each unexpected twist life has been good enough to substitute something even greater than the thing I was hoping to cling to. Lost Ron, gained Dave. Marty freed me to pursue the next chapter of my life without undue worry over him. Even the oil burner man came bearing gifts: I could survive the intrusion of unbidden memory.

For Marty and the oil burner man: I wish for you the same grace as you face whatever twists occur in the next chapter of your lives.

About the photo: this is Dave's grandson Liam, born well after the mayhem in my side of the family. But that look! His innocence already fading: "I want to take the wheel, but will I get away with it?" All I can say is, it's a good thing we can't see too far down the road, or we'd never drive anywhere. Only innocence gives us the courage to begin anything. But it is surrender, ultimately, that helps us stay the course.