Family – Page 6 – Grace Mattern

October 23, 2015

A High Bar

I wear my sister’s socks and shoes, her jeans and a heathered purple Ibex hooded wool sweatshirt, a perfect layer for these cooler days. Other women around my sister have taken scarves, sweaters, jackets, hats, gloves, shoes, socks, shirts and boots and they’re wearing Chris’s clothes too. Pieces of her scattered across the eastern U.S. It’s a comfort.

I’m not sad and surprised at my not-sadness and then I’m sad. Today. The bright trees, saturated orange and scarlet, russet leaching into the oaks, swatches of yellow that make tunnels of light in the woods, pull at me whenever I’m outside so I go outside a lot.

The farmer across the street has moved the hay feeder to the corner of pasture across the small dirt road from the house so I watch cows most of the day, right out my window or off the porch. In the evening when the cows hear the tractor leave the barn with a new roll of hay they start to scamper and then gallop towards the feeder, two of the smaller ones butting heads.

“It’s weird, isn’t it,” my friend said to me last night at a poetry reading. We were talking about readjusting our lives after loss — her mother died not long before Chris. “We have more time now because someone is dead.”

True. She doesn’t have her mother to visit everyday, trip after trip to rehab then the nursing home then hospice. I don’t go to Stow for several days every week. Being with Chris was the organizing principle of my life for months and I surrendered to it. Helping the body of someone you love get to the end is so immediate and profound nothing else matters.

So what matters now? I’m reevaluating what I used to think counted in light of certain death. Because it is certain for each of us. I’ve been right up next to it again and it’s a high bar. What do I want to haul over?

October 20, 2015

Resurrecting Poems

It seems like a long time ago that I was a young woman shepharding another young woman into the world, a mother to a daughter. Watching the changes that puberty brought — the rising and falling tide of hormones, the blossoming of fertility, the chance that another generation was going to unfold (which it so delightfully has), was profound. I wrote about it. No surprise, I write about much of what I experience.

Sunday David and I visited friends who live far north in New England, and it was winter there. It’s creeping closer to winter here, the thermometer reading a chilly 20 degrees yesterday morning. But driving through Franconia Notch two days ago it was snowing and snow squalls followed us all the way to our friends’ farm where the grass had a white crust and a trailing vine on the porch was laced with icicles. Ice, snow, a hard wind and a fire in the stove.

Put these together, and I think of another poem I wrote long ago, as I did last week. The resurrection of poems continues.

Valentine’s Eve

I hear ice in the trees.
Our footprints from before dinner
up the walk to the house,
have crusted.

The sky, thin as newspaper,
shredded white,
hides black ice underfoot.
Oblivious to ice’s season,

another seed falls through me,
and through my daughter now too.
My hand on her arm,
she stops to stand with me —

we listen to ice clack above us,
raise our eyes from the ground,
hearts beating hard
as startled birds abandoning cover.

October 12, 2015

Parents Always

One of the first things David and I agreed on when we met was “the kids come first.” Falling in love in your 50s and 60s is complicated for many reasons, and how a new relationship will play out for your children can be one of the trickiest. Luckily for us, it has worked out well — our kids get along with each other and with each of us.

Good thing, because no matter how old your children, you’re still their parent. Maybe even more so when one parent has died. That fact and the glorious foliage this morning got me thinking about this poem I wrote at least 20 years ago.

PLAYING CATCH

The boy at the bus stop
tries to break his record of ten
leaves caught falling
from the maple,

leaves yellow as butter
cupping foggy morning light.

Not only leaves stir in the fog;
crows rattle branches, muzzle loaders
pock the morning with shots,
bus doors yawn open and shut,

children leave, come home,
leave again.

October 5, 2015

Instructions From Chris

The memorial service for Chris was Saturday. Over two years ago when she was planning her service, she asked me to read a poem as part of it. I did.

Instructions From Chris

“You could use this poem,” my sister says
when she asks me to read at her memorial.

She’s reread my book, found more darkness
than she wants, she knows people will cry

but even so, she’d prefer a celebration, more
ideas than despair. “This one towards the end,”

when grief first starts to curve away
and my sisters appear, musical, muscular hawks,

long, strong wings, a slice of sun.
I understand. She wants her own poem.

She is second of four, the smarter, prettier one
I could never catch, a life in preview.

But I do no better than what’s she’s written
herself; the space created when a book is lifted

from the table, an opening that fills with shadow
and chance, quickening, quiet. I delete, start over,

come back to her smile as she carries her hope
and illness before her, a globe in her hands.

I toast bread, open a jar of her strawberry jam, ruby
sugar, red as magic slippers, no place, home.

September 21, 2015

Memorials

Chris died on Thursday evening as the family gathered around her, including David and I, took turns reading aloud from the Tao Te Ching. We got home Friday afternoon, just before the long-planned arrival of Carol, my friend who lost her beloved life companion to cancer last winter. As she came in to the kitchen Carol asked, “Are sure you’re ready for company?” and I said, “I’m ready for you,” because I knew we could both dive right in to talking about death and dying and grief and how do we move on in the face of sorrow and the absence of someone we love dearly.

Our friend Deb arrived the next day and we kept talking and cooking and crying and eating and coloring in my Crazy Paisley coloring book. Yesterday morning we went for a walk out to the rock where I’ve been building cairns as a memorial for Eric since he died. I told Carol and Deb the story, which I’ve told here on this blog, about the cairns accidentally being knocked over while the woods around the rock were being logged last summer, and how badly my neighbor who owns the land felt about that. He erected a stone cross as a way to continue my ritual of using the rock as a memorial site, and also because he’d begun to use the rock as a place to remember and honor his father.

As we walked Carol told me she was looking for large, flat rocks to use in the memorial garden she’s creating for Steve in her yard in Delaware. She’d shown us pictures earlier of the mosaic sculpture that sits among plantings of perennials and shrubs. I started looking down as we walked, hoping to find stones she could use.

When we reached the rock with the cross and the beginnings of cairns being rebuilt by me, I stepped up on the top to put a couple more layers on the cairns. From that vantage I could see that many of the rocks from the previous cairns had fallen in to a cleft in the middle of the rock, piled in a jumble waiting to be reassembled into towers. There were a half-dozen that were large and flat, some speckled with tiny flakes of mica.

I asked Carol if she wanted any of the flat rocks for her memorial garden and she loved them all. So Deb, David, Carol and I walked back out of the woods carrying rocks, heavy but manageable.

Now Carol has taken rocks from Eric’s memorial cairns back to Delaware to become part of Steve’s memorial garden, and I’m carrying memories of Chris as I help make the arrangements for her memorial service.

It was a sad and glorious weekend, with striking blue skies and sharp air, gusty wind and sunshine glinting on the leaves of the trees, beginning to rattle with autumn dryness. We looked at photos of Steve and Carol and me and my sisters and talked, talked, talked.

Getting ready to build again. I’m going to start a cairn on the rock for Chris.

September 10, 2015

Today

This is the day my grandson started kindergarten

This is the day the latest heat wave ended.

This is the day I tried to pick enough apples off my Golden Delicious tree so the branch that’s draped all the way to the ground can lift again. A large branch has already broken off the tree, too much apple weight. I didn’t succeed.

This is the day I discovered the garden spider is gone, an egg sack left dangling from a bar of the wrought iron trellis the nasturiums climb.

This is the third day my sister hasn’t eaten or taken liquids.

This is the day my grandson started kindergarten.

September 5, 2015

We Don’t Have Time To See the People We Love

rio_307954c — Photo from http://www.thetimes.co.uk/

Crossing the lobby of the grocery store I heard someone call, “Chris? Chris Mattern?” At the Mattern I turned around.

There was my cousin Sally, who lives in NH but who I haven’t seen for at least ten years, though we trade holiday cards and I recently sent her a condolence card when her mother, my father’s older sister, died.

“I’m Grace,” I said and she said, “Of course.” Sally is wide and beautiful and smiled as she pulled me in to her large bosom. I told her how sick Chris is and she said she’d called her three months ago, to tell Chris about her own recent diagnosis of lung cancer caused by a genetic mutation, did she think there could be a connection between their cancers? No, no connection and Sally is doing well. She just finished chemo and radiation and is going into a clinical trail with a drug targeted to her mutation, a promising development in cancer treatment.

That’s the seventh new diagnosis of cancer among people I know this summer, two of them in their 20s. And now Oliver Sacks has died of ocular melanoma, same as Eric. Oliver was in the 2% of people expected to have his cancer metastasize. Eric was in the 10%. Spectacularly unlucky, in that regard. Chris was in the 10% of people expected to survive her cancer for five years, 24 years ago.

Here was the one in who-knows-how-many chance that I’d run in to my cousin at Hannaford’s. We had a lot to say to each other and at first didn’t notice people trying to manuever around us to get shopping carts. We moved out of the way and kept talking. It was nice to talk to someone who had the same grandmother as me.

When we said good-bye we told each other, and ourselves but I don’t believe we believed it, that we’ll get together this fall, our other cousin from my father’s brother has a vacation house close to Sally, we’ll have a little reunion.

That evening I told David about running in to Sally, and how it would be nice to see her again, to connect with cousins because I see a cousin about once every five years. He laughed. “We don’t have time to see the people we love.”

He’s right, and it’s not that I don’t love my cousins, but it’s in a cousin way that turns in to long stretches between connections. Sally and I were in a hope warp, thinking new time would open up in our lives and we’d be able to make real plans to visit. But don’t we do that all the time, imagine that our lives will expand into another dimension with infinite opportunities to love all the people we love in person and even add in more?

August 30, 2015

We Made An Ocean

“I want to make an ocean,” Emilio said over a month ago, when I was talking to him on Facetime about his upcoming trip to New Hampshire for our family vacation. I’d asked him what he wanted to do during his visit and expected the answer to be “swim, play baseball, play basketball,” — all activities he’s always eager to do. I was surprised he had a project in mind.

“How will we make an ocean? Will we need paper and colored pens, scissors, glue?” I envisioned some sort of construction paper creation.

“No, just water and food coloring. We’ll put blue and green color in the water and then put in animals and it will be the ocean.”

“What will we make it in? A bucket? A glass?”

Emilio shrugged. “Anything.”

We didn’t make an ocean when he was in Northwood in July. We were busy doing what I’d expected — playing in the water at Jenness Pond, hitting the wiffle ball over the roof of the camp we rented, lying belly down on the dock and looking for fish, playing Sorry! on the screened porch. The ocean project seemed to be forgotten.

Friday I went with Adrienne to pick up Emilio from his school. On the way home I asked, “What do you want to do this weekend, Emilio?” Again, I expected a list of games and sports. Instead?

“I have a project in mind.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“We’ll make an ocean. We’ll put blue and green food coloring in water and put in animals and it will be the ocean.”

So today we did. We started with the bucket a set of ocean animals came in, but once we’d filled it with water and mixed in the food coloring, watching the dye swirl into clouds of blue and green, then piled in all the animals, the bucket was so full there was no room for the whales and sharks and octopus and turtle to swim. So Adrienne got out a long plastic tub and we poured the first ocean in then made more. Water, blue, green, swirl, animals and rocks and coral and seaweed.

Kitchen Floor Ocean. It’s a great place to spend a summer afternoon.

August 23, 2015

Zinnias & Sisters

Bold and bright, sturdy and upright, zinnias have long been a favorite in my garden. They’re simple to grow, add splashes of magnificent color and vary in their design — from a single row of petals surrounding a protruding center of yellow stigma florets, to a dome of overlapping petals making a smooth surface of blossom. These very different shaped flowers often come from the same plant, which is puzzling but delightful.

Zinnias are so not fussy and so satisfying. White, chartreuse, orange, scarlet, peach, pink, fuchsia and lilac and too many shades in between to name. Every year at least half my flower bed is devoted to them. The summer Adrienne and Matt got married I grew extra. The table decorations at the reception were glass globe vases of zinnias, and there was at least one zinnia from my garden in each bouquet, a sweet touch. My sisters and I put the bouquets together the morning of the wedding, pulling stems from the florist’s buckets, and then one or two from my supply. Jeanne, Chris, Meg and me, working together to decorate a happy day.

It was time for our family to have a happy day. Eric had died two years before and Adrienne, quite wisely, had resisted my pleas those two years before to get married right away, have a baby, make something good happen. As it turned out, everything happened exactly when it seemed it should, following the natural cycle of sorrow and recovery and beginning to understand how life flows on in its unrelenting dailiness, marked again at some point with bright days of joy, splashes of zinnias in a garden.

Yesterday I was home again from several days with Chris and her husband Jon. Jon has been sorting through decades of photographs and gave me a picture of my sisters and me from a happy day several years ago, the four of us in a clear frame with the word “sisters” in varied fonts inscribed in silver around the photo. I propped the photo in my study so I can see it from my desk, and went out to pick bouquets for the house. Zinnias first.

Why? Zinnias pull me into appreciation. This summer has been tough for my family, and a whole lot more than tough for Chris’s sons and their partners and Jon and my parents. I’m there to help as often as possible and home soaking up the colors of flowers when I can, remembering the bouquets I made with my sisters. A room full of zinnias, a garden of bright blossoms, tables with joy in the center.

August 17, 2015

Tidy

I was being tidy yesterday. Actually, I was looking up, once again, the varieties of my apple trees. I wrote it down in my gardening log years ago, and have looked it up several times in the last few years, as the run of laden trees continues. Wanting to compare the taste of the types, I needed to look up what’s what yet again.

David’s blood pressure machine has been sitting on the bottom shelf of a small table in the kitchen for the last year, the cord to the cuff looping over the folder with my gardening log sheets. As I reached for the folder, holding up the loop and balancing the device so it wouldn’t fall off the back of the shelf, I decided to make room for it in the drawer at the top of the table. One problem — that drawer hasn’t been cleaned out for decades.

There were old maps and menus in the drawer, five dreidels, small plastic bags of metal and rubber parts to long ago gadgets, screws and nuts and a four inch antique nail, a hand forged wedge of steel too beautiful to throw away with the rest of the mess.

And a plastic bag with an unusual assortment. Two banister supports, some screws and a few washers, a bit of old bead twine and three green clay beads. I remember the beads were made by Eric’s first wife, Rene, at least 45 years ago. I don’t know why they were in the bag.

But most surprising was the human tooth, a broken molar. Who put a tooth in this random bag? Whose tooth is it? Eric’s? On the assumption it is, I’m going to put it with the baby teeth of Adrienne and Sam that I still have in a box on my bureau. Is that weird?

I found the log sheet with the varieties of apples. The trees were planted in 1992, thin sticks now over fifteen feet tall and so full they shade the north side of the yard and one of my garden beds. This year the trees have enough fruit to feed us all winter if we had the ambition to store it. Working west to east, Northern Spy, Cortland, Macoun, Golden Delicious, Baldwin. Nourishing Courtship Makes Good Babies.

Ah, babies. . . .

11811284_10155942955950014_7002740704902994795_n — Baby Emilio and Baby Ava