Family – Page 4 – Grace Mattern

September 18, 2016

A Cairn for Chris

My sister Chris died one year ago yesterday. A year seems like an impossibly long time for her to have been gone, and also impossibly short. That’s the thing about death and the physical absence of the person — it can feel unreal, and so time gets distorted. Chris had been part of my entire life. She was two years older than me, so she was here when I was born and somewhere in my sense of the world she is always here.

Except now she’s not. Of course her absence feels much more acute for her husband and her boys — a life partner and a mother are gone, and I know how completely disorienting the loss of a spouse is. The built-in companion on evenings at home, the warmth next to you in bed, the other parent to sort out worries about the kids — all gone. How to even make that work?

It was a great struggle for me and there are enough people in my life now who are living the same struggle that I know my experience wasn’t uncommon. Others at the time who reached out to me, who’d lost a partner, confirmed it then. “It’s like an out-of-body experience, isn’t it,” a colleague said to me at work one day. His wife had died the year before.

It’s been ten years since Eric died and I’ve long since come back into my body. But I remember being out of it, I remember being manic and obsessed with writing The Truth About Death, I remember drinking a lot and eating hardly at all, working out whenever I could and talking, talking, talking, as I tried to make sense of what my life was going to be. Losing a sister has been much less brutal — sad and disorienting in its own way, but not cry-myself-to-sleep-alone-in-bed sad.

There was a family trip to Chris’s memorial bench in Scituate, MA yesterday that I couldn’t be at, but I’m building a cairn for her in the woods, on the rock where I’ve built cairns for Eric.

My younger sister Meg texted me first thing yesterday and suggested we talk on the phone and read each other our letters — Chris wrote letters to her husband, to each of her boys, to each of us sisters and to our parents. A common theme in her letters, and which she talked about at the end of her life, is her belief that she’ll always be with us.

“Know that I am not gone, only my physical presence is missing. In the space I left is my love, energy, memories and shared history. Things I would not trade for anything. Enrich that space with new people, events and shared history. I will be close by your side,” I read to Meg and she read similar words to me. We cried. We miss Chris, but she was right. Yesterday she was with us in her words and in the memories of her that Meg and I shared. She was with us as we talked about our commitment to being in the moment as much as we can, a lesson Chris worked hard to keep at the center of her own journey.

I just put another rock on her cairn, topped with a heart stone from the beach in Humarock, a favorite place for Chris.

September 2, 2016

Lists

Lists help. There’s evidence from brain research that writing down a list accumulating in your mind helps free up space for other thinking. How else would we ever get anything done, or how would I, if I didn’t keep track somewhere other than my head? It’s too busy in there, even though it’s slowed down a good bit from when I was younger, or maybe I’ve just learned to manage everything that comes up, partly with strategies like lists, so there’s room to keep moving along the circuitous path of one thought to the next.

Lists are also satisfying. You get to cross things off, you get to keep track, if that’s your thing, which it is mine. And apparently Emilio’s too. I was on Long Island this week spending the days with Emilio and Ava to fill a summer-week gap between camp and school. Monday and Wednesday I spent with Emilio and at this point in our lives together we have so many games we could play, so many things we could do together, choice and desire and time all competing, we decided to make a list first thing Wednesday morning so we could organize our day and make sure we did as many of the fun things we had in mind as possible.

The list included a lot of games and of course, keeping track of who won what was important. By 6:30 a.m. we were playing Uno. I lost twice in a row, the first time because of the “switch hands” card I had played on me, a card Emilio had made up himself as another tricky switch in the game. Okay, 2-0 so far, Emilio to Mimi.

Out to the yard for a full nine innings of whiffle ball, during which we managed to keep track in our heads of the score, the inning and who had left runners on base — we switched field and batting teams after any number of runs, calculated on a complicated and constantly negotiated set of assumptions about what constituted a successful run to base, how far runners would advance, whether hitting the ball into the thickest of the backyard bushes constituted a foul because there was no way to find the ball in time to stop a home run, etc. etc. I tied it up in the bottom of the ninth, but lost 26 to 25 in the tenth, a satisfyingly high scoring game. (Love those runs!)

We made name badges for Adrienne and Matt (circles of thick paper with their name, place of birth and a “license plate” around all the writing) for their anniversary. Eight years married and going strong. We played more games, we went to the park to play mini-golf and then got lunch, we did laundry, we picked up Ava at daycare.

We crossed items off the list and added activities as they came up. As we went upstairs after dinner for baths Emilio said, “Mimi! We didn’t write down ‘bath.'” So I wrote it on the list and checked it as done. Seeing Emilio and me at the paper Ava had to be part of it, “color? color?” as she took a pen and scribbled all over the page, squealing when I tried to give her a blank paper. She wanted in on the list too.

It was a very busy day, including giving both kids dinner, a bath and getting them to bed by myself so Adrienne and Matt could go out to celebrate their anniversary. At 21 months and 5 years, little people need a lot of help navigating the routines of daily life and it takes a lot of grown up energy to keep everything on track.

Yesterday I was with Ava for the morning before coming back to New Hampshire. By 11:00 a.m. I was ready to collapse and managed to keep myself up long enough to give Ava lunch and then lie down with her for a nap. Two hours later we both woke up.

I don’t think I’ve taken a two hour nap since I was two myself. And at the end of the day with Emilio? Out of ten games played, Mimi 3, Emilio 7. He’d want me to let you know that.

August 14, 2016

Unplugged

“This is the most unplugged I’ve been for a long time,” David said last night as we drove back to our house from our camp rental on Jenness Pond. After three weeks of living on the water, mostly sleeping in a corner of the screened porch so that lying in bed at night I could look out on the overhanging maple and oak trees to the night sky beyond, and spending much of every day in the water or looking at the water, I knew just what he meant.

For the last three weeks it’s often been almost unbearably hot out in the world which continued to report the usual bad and distressing news. On the water it’s been comfortably cool and when it got too hot, I got in the water. When my periodic checks of the NYTimes website to stay updated on Trump missteps was too distressing I clicked off my phone, put it on the hutch on the porch and went outside.

There were stretches every day when I didn’t know where my phone was and didn’t care. There were days I didn’t open my computer. There were many meals with many friends and lots of family eaten on the long porch table, watching the sun set over the pond. There was an unending supply of zucchini brought to the camp by visitors. Emilio learned what a “dip” in the pond before bed is (a skinny one) and learned to jump off the swim raft, plunging deep and popping back up above the water with his eyes wide and blinking every time, as if he was just being born. That was the big news of the week.

Now I’m on my porch at home, listening to geese chatter as they circle the farm ponds across the street. There’s a breeze and late light on the horizon, the geese silhouetted as they circle the fields. Tomorrow instead of waking up to water off the porch it will be the cows in the pasture. But I may keep trying to lose track of my phone periodically. Unplugging can be blissful.

July 19, 2016

Dresses

Is it frivolous to have spent many many moments in the past few months discussing dresses to wear to weddings with my younger sister Meg? Her daughter Amelia is getting married this weekend and her son Alex is getting married in October, and Dave, the middle son of our late sister Chris is getting married in two weeks. There was also the wedding of my son-in-law’s brother this past weekend. I’m officiating at two of the upcoming weddings, so there are mother-of-the-bride dresses to consider, officiant dresses, rehearsal dinner dresses, and wedding guest dresses.

Add to this the fact that Meg, Amelia and I have traded dresses at the last two family weddings, taking turns with each one. Sort of like musical dresses, except no one is ever left without a dress. At the last wedding we got a bridesmaid and mother-of-the-bride in on the swapping too.

That’s a lot of dresses. So every time Meg and I are together we try on dresses from our closets (luckily we’re close enough in size that most everything fits), we buy dresses and compare, we look at dresses online. Yesterday I got a text about the dress plan for this weekend just as I was headed in to Marshall’s to look for another dress. Which I found.

To answer my opening question, no. I don’t think spending mental energy and attention focusing on what dress to wear to which wedding is frivolous. It’s a relief. The world is a tough place to take in these days — a hate-mongering sociopath as a major candidate for President, constant reports of mass shootings and massacres and fatal shootings by police and against police, an attempted coup in Turkey, another too-young death of a friend, escalating climate change that may be a contributor to a dry enough summer that the farmer across the street is already putting out hay for the cows in the pasture where the grass has stopped growing.

The hard edges of life can’t be all we keep in focus. People still fall in love and get married. People still have fun dressing up and usually look great when they do. Having reasons to celebrate is a reason to celebrate itself.

Thinking and talking about and texting pictures of dresses back and forth with Meg is a happy thing to do and harmless. Or maybe not completely harmless. Maybe the dresses we’ve ordered and bought were made by women and children working in terrible conditions with inadequate compensation. Do I have to think about that too?

Well, yes, but I can still enjoy myself, even if all those dresses keep stalking me on every page of the internet I open.

Celebration of life-affirming events puts good energy into the world, and right now the world can use all the good energy it can get.

July 5, 2016

Youth

As we moved in to summer I started crying, the light letting the sad memories in — how sick Chris was on the 4th of July last year, being in Humarock without Chris and thinking about what it’s like for her widower and sons to have that hole in their traditional family beach time, what it’s like for my parents. But our family time in Humarock was also sweet, lots of family still gathered in a beautiful spot.

I don’t mind the crying. It’s been balanced with the joy of having youth around me. Yesterday I sent Adrienne a chat and asked her to snap the kids for me through the day, happy enough just to see Emilio and Ava but knowing there was the bonus of two more children there over the weekend, adorable child video riches. And I got to share those videos with the youngsters here, Melia and Mackenzie and a crew of their friends, of course not as young as the grandkids but still much younger than me, in lives that are still expanding and reaching out and full of energy and hope.

Not that I don’t reach out still, but more and more I’m content with what I know I love best. Home, family, close friends, garden, time at my desk to write. It’s not only me. This is a researched phenomenon. As people age, they more and more value time with a closer circle of people and experiences. We’ve learned what we like and know there’s limited time left to enjoy it. We get more careful about how to spend our time when there’s less of it to spend.

Being with our kids and grandkids is top of the list, always. I realized this weekend David and I never mediate when we’re with our kids in spite of being regular mediators otherwise. We don’t need it.

So my sad weekend was also a great weekend. I love a full house, the crowd in the kitchen, the meals with multiple palates contributing to the taste, the conversations and laughing at stories, coffee and toast on the deck in morning sun, cocktails and beer on the porch in the evening. Now I have a line full of laundry, flags of the pleasure being with loved ones brings, soaking up the energy of youth

How lucky we are.

June 20, 2016

Summer Time

Once again, more than a week has slipped by without time to write a blog post. What have I been doing? Playing Chutes and Ladders and Match game, and spending a bright, windy day on Governor’s Island, a former army base and now a 173 acre island park just off the southern tip of Manhattan where I watched Emilio scamper over climbing structures and spent only a moment on the long stretch of criss-crossed logs myself and ended up with a splinter in my thumb that throbbed and seeped and shot pain under my nail for a week.

I spent a day with Ava who spent an hour going through my purse, taking out everything and putting it back, mimicking putting on chapstick (“open, open”) and holding up an appointment card and pen (“color, color”) and scribbling and who helped me walk the dog at the end of the day but not until she’d gotten properly set for the walk (baggie, baggie”) which meant hoisting an empty handbag almost as big as her over her shoulder and dragging it along the sidewalk, taking the longest two block walk in the history of dog walking, averaging a step every 30 seconds or so because there was the bag to drop and readjust and neighbors front steps to try and a driveway to run up and flowers in the grass that needed to be touched.

I went on a carousel and roller coaster and spinning cars and bumper cars at Adventureland with Emilio, and we make a good amusement park pair because neither of us like scary or twirling rides. The ferris wheel was my favorite. By the time we left I was with batman.

I got to watch Emilio figure out how to cross a line of monkey bars and then experience a 6 1/2 hour car ride from Long Island to New Hampshire with a five year old and one year old in the car (very long).

This weekend we had a full house — family, friends, peonies, strawberries, teaching Emilio how to make whipped cream, swimming, visiting the cows across the street and counting motorcycles everywhere we went because it was motorcycle weekend in NH and we saw 70 in a 5 mile trip to the store and back.

Finally, last night, I stopped being a baby and let Melia take out the splinter that was plaguing my thumb. Good thing — that 1/2 inch of wood wasn’t going to pop out on its own.

So, this is a very long introduction to a substantive blog post I did write, for the Prevention Innovations Research Center blog. Given the Orlando massacre and the previous attention to a too-lenient sentence in the Stanford rape case the topic of this blog — child sex offenders ending up on lifetime registries — may seem mild. But it’s another example of how we need to make sure our intentions line up with our actions.

Onward into summer.

May 25, 2016

My Sister’s Chi

Today Chris would have celebrated her 65th birthday. Instead, those of us who love her are remembering her and honoring her, as sad as we are.

But she’s also still here. Chris was a committed practitioner of Qigong — postures, movement and breathing to bring life force in to your being for health and vitality. The name comes from two Chinese words: qi (or ch’i or chi) means the life force or energy that flows through all of us and everything, and gong means skill cultivated through practice.

Chris thought a lot about chi, about the life force, about how we’re all connected. When she died, her chi didn’t disappear because her energy wasn’t bound by her body. It flowed in to the life force that’s everywhere. I used some of that chi today.

Sam did a 20k trail run two weekends ago — that’s over 18 miles, up and down mountains, on scrambly trails, not an easy run. When he called, excited by how well he’d done, he told me how he uses chi when he runs — his own version of chi running. When he’s in the flow and feeling good, he stores chi to use later if some part of him starts to hurt or if he’s lagging. If someone passes him, moving smooth and fast and clearly in a good zone, Sam thinks, “Well that person has some chi to spare. I’ll take a bit of that.” Then he uses stored chi or borrowed chi to send to an aching knee or tired legs.

I loved the idea and thought of it today, just under 8 miles in to what I hoped would be at least a 10 mile run. My knee hasn’t completely healed from whatever made it so cranky during the NYC half-marathon in March, and though I have another half-marathon to run in a little over a week, I haven’t been running much, wanting to give my knee time to rest.

The rest has been working. Last week I was able to run over 7 miles without knee pain, the first time I’ve run more than 3 or 4 miles in many weeks. I wanted to add 3 miles to that today, thinking that would mean only adding another 3 next weekend to do the half-marathon.

Heading into that 8th mile my legs were tired and my knee was cranking up. And then I thought about it being Chris’s birthday and the energy she left behind, so much life force still to be used, and I concentrated on pulling her chi into me. I felt a tingling rush of warmth through my body and Chris was right there, hovering over me as I ran another 2 miles — 10.2 miles, exactly what I’d hoped to do.

I’ve been texting with my sisters Meg and Jeanne today, touching base on this sad and happy day (the 6th birthday of one of Jeanne’s grandsons), and when I told them about my run my sister Meg reminded me it’s everyone’s chi. Universal energy. “We are all one,” as it says on Chris’s memorial bench.

March 31, 2016

Journals

FullSizeRender (16) — Journal Cover Collage by Chris

A not uncommon conversation for me over the years: What are you going to do with your journals when you die, or before you die? What instructions will you leave for whether or not they can be read, by whom, when, what can be shared? Or will you destroy them all at some point?

A poet friend records current events and notable weather in her journals, because she plans to leave them to be read and she figures that’s what people will want to know about — what was happening in the world, not in her head.

Which is what my journals are full of. There’s some recounting of events, but much of it is I’m anxious, I’m worried, I’m upset. . . blah, blah, blah. Another poet friend admits the same. “My journals are blah, blah, blah over and over.” Not that the blah isn’t important, it is to us, that’s why we’re writing it. But it probably would be boring to most other people, and would paint a false picture, anyway.

When my mood is mostly even and good I don’t journal much, I do it when I’m confused, when something is upsetting me and I need to figure it out. I write in my journal when I’m anxious because the act of getting worrisome thoughts on paper loosens their uncomfortable grip a bit. I’m honest in my journals about all the ways I’m quirky and irritable and over think the shit out of way too much.

So do I want anyone to read all of that? Would anyone want to? I’m talking serious numbers of journals — 82, including my blue plastic bound Ponytail Dear Diary with a brass lock (key long gone) from grade school.

Jon brought me three of Chris’s journals last week. He wondered if I wanted to read them. He doesn’t want to right now, though he wants to keep the journals. Do I want to read them? Should I? I’ve peeked in to them and so far haven’t read anything that I didn’t hear Chris talk about or haven’t read in her essays. Chris didn’t hide her feelings and worries and struggles. I loved that about her, her honesty about all of life, the joy and the hard road of living with metastatic cancer.

Chris took journaling classes in her last years, and in one she made a cover for the journal she was using. It’s beautiful. Right now it’s at the top of the journal stack on the side of my desk. I love looking at it. I don’t know if I’ll read it.

January 25, 2016

The Last Time You Cried and Why

Image courtesy of The Reluctant Grandmother

I send writing prompts to three friends every Monday. It started as a way to help a friend who wants to be writing more in order to remember things about her husband who died last year. Then a writer friend talked about not writing right now and wanting to, so I offered to include her in the prompts. When another friend saw the result of a prompt I’d sent the second friend, she wanted in too. So, I’m up to three.

But today has been an off one for me. A nagging dread has kept me from falling into mindful/mindless absorption in making a collage, or reorganizing my study or fiddling with poems. Is it that I’m working on my memoir, writing about a particularly difficult patch in the months after Eric died, a part of the story I haven’t told yet, which means reading those journals again and living with some of that pain present? Not that it isn’t present on some level anyway.

I was having trouble coming up with a prompt for my friends until I got in the shower late this afternoon and started scrubbing at the nasty scrape I got on my knee when I tripped running last week. It hurt, I started to cry, and I thought, ah, the prompt. Write about the last time you cried and why.

I remembered the side of Chris’s face swollen with scrapes last spring and I cried more. I’d talked to Chris the day before and she’d told me, “I’m not having a very good day.” She’d fallen that weekend out walking with her family and was sore and discouraged. The next day she and Jon came to visit unexpectedly, arriving while I was at an appointment. When I got home and went out on the back deck to greet them I had to suck in my shock. Chris looked so banged up and battered, with red scratches covering one side of her face. Battered by cancer.

In the shower I thought about how much physical limitation Chris had to live with, and then she still died. I cried. I cried because I’m close to a lot of people who have a serious illness, love someone with a serious illness, or have lost someone to illness. I cried because the list of people I include in my healing meditation every day mostly die rather than get better and then I include on the list those left grieving. I cried because my knee hurts and is taking a long time to heal and interferes with much of what I want to do.

Then I turned off the shower, dried off, dressed my knee and sat down to write. To myself and to my friends.

January 23, 2016

Artifacts

Announcing a New Son
SCHAIN — a son, Eric Hiram, to Mr. and Mrs. Raphael Schain (Natalie Cohen, formerly of this city) of 911 Cooke Street, Waterbury, on January 2.

On the back of the thickly laminated clipping, “Thank you for giving a cerebral palsy child the chance
to walk –
to talk –
to play.
Clipped from New Haven Conn Register”

I found it in an old hutch that I moved out of my study to make way for the new desk. The cupboard was full of VHS tapes — Adrienne’s dance recitals, Eisner Camp summers, professional trainings. The top drawer was stuffed with napkins (Eric often ate while he watched TV in this room), paperwork and power cords from long forgotten small electronics, two ancient, fancy calculators the kids needed for high school math, one gutted to its plastic shell.

The birth announcement was in the drawer, along with a child’s tooth wrapped in a note with handwriting I’m almost positive is mine.

Dear Tooth Fairy,
Mat would like a gemstone rather than money for his tooth. Thank you.

Was my nephew Matt staying with me when he lost a tooth? I don’t remember that but it’s certainly possible. But why didn’t I know how to spell his name? Do I know a Mat? I put the tooth, wrapped back in the note paper, in the box on my bureau with my kids’ teeth. What else could I do with it?

Cleaning up clutter can be an archeological experience. Mother’s Day cards back to the 90’s, diaries and journals that go back to 1964. I must have taken my 1967 diary from my sister Jeanne. Her name is written in the front and there’s a bunch of torn out pages between March 20 and April 20. I take over on April 24th.

April 26: Wed. Dear Diary, Boy, am I depressed. Paul never pays any attention to me anymore. I was president today. I think David likes me. I’m sure Morse hates me. Today at play rehearsal a kid commented on my weight. I wish I weren’t so ugly. Oh well, I’m miserable. Luv, Gracie

I was president? Hot shit. But of what?

I still had a crush on Paul in my 1968 diary.