Author: Grace Mattern

Grace Mattern is a poet, writer, artist, mother, grandmother, partner, friend, community activist, gardener, triathlete, hiker and for 30 years was the Executive Director of the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Her chapbook Fever of Unknown Origin was published in 2001 and her full-length poetry book The Truth About Death was published in 2012.
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Details

It’s been a trying day, frosted with more bad news.  In spite of the difficulties, I noticed that the Japanese maple tree in the yard of David’s parents’ house is dripping with red seed pods, like a pink petticoat peeking out from under the maroon leaves.

Advice from David’s mother today.  “Oh, don’t get old, it’s really irritating.”

David’s mother is laughing and just brought me a photo of Rihanna from the current issue of People magazine — she has hot pink boots with lime green high heels on, matching her heavily-beaded two-piece bathing suit, and fishnet stockings.  “Just in case you were looking for something to wear this summer,” she said, still laughing.

 

 

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If I Could Move My Mind Backwards

“People are living too long,” my mother said to me when I called her this weekend, to tell her about David’s father’s stroke, and that we were heading to Lancaster to help.  My parents have lost many friends over the past decade, and watched many more slide into increasing incapacitation.

But is it that people are living too long, or are we keeping people alive too long, or is it just that life is essentially hard, and aging is a difficult process with inevitable loss at the end?

When we arrived in Lancaster yesterday, David’s mother looked up at us from her chair with red, tearful eyes.  She’s bewildered and scared, the knowledge of the fundamental change coming in her life lying like a hard weight at the bottom of the sea she swims in, bits of reality floating by that she’s able to hang on to.

“If I could move my mind backwards I’d be able to understand how I got here,” she said, revealing the magical thinking that some different turn somewhere could have made a difference, alongside the awareness that there is no going back, and we’re only here.   Now.

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Summer Flowers

It’s quiet on the back deck this morning.  I’m the first one up and enjoying the extra moments of ease and the brilliant fuchsia flowers in the big pot.  Potted summer flowers on my deck and porch are among my favorite parts of summers, and this pot is self-watering so I can leave it where it is, even when I’m away.

The real marker of what’s going on for me right now is that all the potted flowers for the front of the house and the two lobelia I keep on tables on the back deck have stayed tucked into a corner of the porch all weekend.  They make a lovely mass of pinks and purples and white, but ideally they’d be spread on tables and the steps and front entrance, welcoming people to the house.

When we got home from the shore a week and a half ago, I moved all the potted petunias and begonias and coleus and lobelia out into the sun.  I’d put them back in a corner of the porch when I went away, because otherwise they need to be watered every day.  Three days later, I was carrying them all back into the shaded corner, getting ready to go to Puerto Rico for a meeting of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center Advisory Council, one of the boards I’m staying on.

When I got home from Puerto Rico on Friday, I knew I’d be leaving again in a few days, and decided to skip the spreading of the flowers, knowing I’d just be gathering them all into the corner again, and I have enough to do as it is.  David and I are headed to Lancaster, to help pick up the pieces of the wreck from his family “falling off a cliff” as he describes it.  It’s no worse than what many friends of ours have managed with aging parents, but now that’s it’s here for us to manage, it feels like a lot.

So for now the flowers will continue to bloom, face out towards the west where the late sun angles in under the porch roof to reach them.  Not enough to dry out the pots, but enough to keep the blossoms bright.

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Man Plans, God Laughs

Among the laughable plans of man are airline schedules.  This is not the first post I’ve written on this blog while waiting for a late plane at the Philadelphia airport.  But this Yiddish proverb is reverberating much more deeply than the late plane level.

David got off our plane from San Juan here and ran to catch a train to the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, to get a train to Lancaster.  Wednesday night, after a delightful night swim in the lit pool at the hotel in San Juan, a tiny bit of playing for me in a week heavy with meetings, David got a call from a name he didn’t recognize.  “Who’s Donna?” he asked.   Who would be calling him at 9:30 at night?

“Donna is the name of the woman who helps your parents,” I answered, so he called her back, and got enough information to conclude his father was having a stroke.  He was right.  So now our plans to go to Lancaster the week after next, to help his father arrange additional care for David’s mother whose worsening health is becoming too difficult for him to manage on his own, have changed to taking each day as it comes.  Today, David getting to Lancaster and me going home was as far as we could plan.  David’s father is in the hospital and stable and there are enough family members and friends there to make sure his mother is okay, so I don’t need to be there right now.  Better for me to be home — there are house and garden chores and Adrienne and Matt and Emilio are coming.

On the plane from San Juan we started trying to figure out the next couple of weeks — thinking through the plans we have, when David’s brother will need to leave, when it would make sense for us both to be in Lancaster, for how long, what will we be doing, what’s going to happen. . . .  We gave up.  I’m going home and David is on a train.

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What Happened to “After Grace?”

Over a year ago I started my original blog, intending to document my final year in my job. Having done a lot of reading about succession planning, I thought a blog providing insight into a succession planning process in progress would fill a gap.  So, I started writing. But I followed my instinct, confirmed by other coalition director friends, not to make the blog public.  There was too much current content about people’s reactions to my plans to leave the Coalition after 30 years.

My plan then was to keep writing “After Grace” (the name I gave the blog), and wait to make the posts public during this year, my year after leaving.  I’d write about what I was going through having made, or being in the midst of making, a huge transition, and then also post whatever I’d written the year before.

But by March I was hardly writing any posts for After Grace, and then I finally stopped.  There wasn’t just too much current content about other people, there was too much content about other people period.  That’s an issue I think any personal blogger has to pay attention to, the boundary between one’s own story and others’.  What are my stories to tell, and what stories do I have no right to make public?

So for now, After Grace will be a private record.  In the weeks to come, I’ll review the posts and see if there’s anything that would be appropriate and worthwhile to post.

In terms of my own story post-Coalition, I’m too busy right now to comment.

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Sweet Day

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Yesterday I met a number of cousins (first cousins, once and twice removed) — the children (and their children) of my first cousins, who are the children of my aunt, Margaret Kirkwood Ferris, one of my mother’s sisters.  We were all at Aunt Peg’s memorial service, at the stunningly serene and spacious Peacham Congregational Church.  Set in the small, June-lush hill town of Peacham, with a grand steeple and enormous windows looking out on a quintessential Vermont landscape, the church is reportedly the most photographed in the state.

There was a small knot of family gathered in the front few of the many curving pews, to remember and celebrate and honor my aunt.  David and I drove up to Vermont with my parents.  Peg was my mother’s last living sibling; now there is only my mother of the five.  Sitting in the sanctuary, singing the hymns, listening to the memories of cooking and knitting and sewing and days on the beaches of Cape Cod, I could feel a deep peacefulness unfolding.  David and I are both still churning at the work speed we’ve been maintaining for decades, and the family situations and obligations we’ve faced since leaving our jobs close to two weeks ago, has not done anything to lighten the churn.  But all that was gone yesterday afternoon.  We were just there.

After the service, we gathered downstairs for refreshments.  I went to look over the old photographs my cousin Peg had laid out.  One of my grandparents, and my mother with all her siblings and their husbands and wives, was particularly sweet, everyone young and smiling, whole lives ahead of them, just a few of the next generation yet born.  My first cousin, once removed, Lucy, has been researching family history, and she knew as well as me who everyone was in the photograph.

As we left, David showed me how to ring the church bell, pulling on the thick jute rope hanging from a hole in the ceiling of the foyer.  I had to pull down with all my weight, let the rope float back up, then pull again with the fall of the rope and then the bell sounded, deep and clear, floating out across the first blue sky in days.  The young boys, first cousins, twice removed, made a game of holding the rope as it pulled back up with the weight of the bell, letting it lift them off the floor, swinging into the chiming. Bell song rang out across the summer afternoon.

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The Spin Cycle

I wrote about the spin cycle in March, while reading Margaret Roach’s book and I shall have some peace there.  In Roach’s book, which chronicles her time after stepping out of a super-busy, mega-Manhattan career life, she talks about the spin cycle in washing machines.  Once that drum is spinning, it doesn’t matter if you turn the washing machine off.  It doesn’t matter if you unplug the machine, the momentum keeps that heavy drum spinning and spinning.

I’m 8 days into my post NHCADSV-ED life, and the drum is spinning.  It’s making me feel dizzy and sloshy and a bit unbalanced.  But I got a sweet reminder last night that I wasn’t always on this cycle.

David and I went to see Greg Brown — excellent show, including an opening set by Jason Wilbur, who deserves mention and recognition.  He was great on his own, and then playing with Greg Brown, double delight.  At the show, I saw an old friend, Tim, who I hadn’t seen for at least a decade.  Probably more like 15 years.

“I heard about Eric,” he said, and held his hands to his heart.  “How are you?  How’s your writing going?”  I told him I’d just left my job and my plan was to start writing more again.  “Did you choose to leave?  What happened?”  I realized he knew a more balanced me, the me who had being a writer as a central identity, the me who was raising children and who gardened and hung out with groups of friends and worked part-time.  He had no sense of me as the Executive Director of the Coalition, no idea of how big my job had gotten, how much of me it was taking up, how it had crowded out other identities.

“Every time I go into Gibson’s book store I look to see if there are any books by you,” he said.  I’m keeping that idea of me in mind today, watching it spinning by on the drum.

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Dock Talk

I’m back in New Hampshire, back from the family visit at the Jersey shore, back to regular internet access.  A sweet tradition with David’s family is gathering on the deck overlooking the bay after dinner to watch the sunset.  Every sunset was wonderful, even if not glorious.

One night while we were there the almost constant wind died and the water reflected every color and nuance of the sky.  We talked about the unusual array of colors and shades and then David’s father said, “When the water is this still, it makes me suspicious.  That’s what I don’t like about lakes.  They just sit there and look at you.”

Ninety-two year old wisdom to ponder.

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Sunset, No Internet

I’m sitting on the curb as I write this, between 84th and 85th Streets on 3d Avenue in Stone Harbor.  This is the annual “shore” trip for David’s family.  His parents’ house is perfectly situated for watching sunsets, but there’s no internet, and the neighbors whose internet we often rely on aren’t here.  So I’m in the one spot I’ve found where I can pick up a bit of signal from some unsecured network, and posting briefly to say, the sunsets have been glorious, and a few days of paying attention to what’s right here, right now, not what’s on the web, is probably a good idea.