Category: Life Changes

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Indispensable

I have 25 days of work left.  “I can’t imagine the Coalition without you.” “I don’t want to talk about it.”  “What are we going to do without you?”  “I’m just really worried about what’s going to happen when you’re gone.”

I’ve been hearing comments like these since I announced a year ago that I’d be leaving in June.  And, to be fair to the talented, dedicated and amazing people who make up the Coalition, the staff, board members and member program directors, almost all of these comments are coming from people outside of the organization.  Now as the date gets close, really close, the comments are escalating.  And the fact that there’s no one identified yet to take on the job has shifted some of the questions to the vein of, “Are you really going to leave?  You’re really going to do this?”

“Yes,” I answer.  “And everything will be fine.  Voids don’t get filled until they’re created, but they do get filled.”  I’ve watched this phenomenon my entire adult life, and believe it whole heartedly.

Last night, after reading our Chinese cookie fortunes looking for clues about what’s next in our lives (there was an interesting and possibly relevant message — “don’t pass up a once in a lifetime opportunity” — but that’s another post), we got the real wisdom on our way out of the restaurant.  We ran into a woman David and I both know, and met her friend, Gary.  Talking about leaving our jobs, and the importance of leaving, the rightness of the path of moving on and recognizing that no matter what we’re doing at our jobs, it can still happen without us, Gary lifted his hands.

He held one hand as if gripping a glass of water, and dipped a finger from the other hand into the imaginary glass.  “Put your finger in a glass of water, and then pull it out.  The day the hole in the water created by your finger doesn’t fill back up as soon as you pull your finger out, then you know you’re indispensable.”

I don’t need a glass of water to know I’m not.

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Coffee Shop

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I’m in a coffee shop in Madison with cappuccino, wi-fi and time.  This is a place I often imagine myself and hardly ever really experience.  In my imagined life I have boundless time to sit in a cafe and be creative, or read, or just watch the life of whatever city I’m visiting move through.

Coming to Madison this weekend for a visit with David’s family, I thought maybe I could make it happen, I could actually get to a coffee shop with some open time and sit and read and write and just be.  And here I am.

But the path here is not what I expected, though this particular cafe is playing the role well. It’s an independent coffee shop (Starbucks just doesn’t work for this particularly fantasy) with interesting cards, a bucket of slogan buttons by the cash register, coffee accessories, and a fairly spectacular railing for the upstairs seating area — circles of metals and looping silver chains, the kind of repeating and swirling patterns I draw myself when I doodle.

Sam called yesterday with unexpected news.  Marianna has been offered a job in Tennessee, so their planned move to Boston for Sam to go to BC graduate school may be taking a 180 degree reverse turn.  We talked twice yesterday, as they’re trying to sort out what their best move is, how real is this offer, what does this do to Sam’s plans, just simply, what should they do?

Early this morning I heard my phone buzzing.  I got up to check to see who had called. Natalie, Eric’s mother, was in the hospital last week and is now in a rehab facility, and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t someone from Connecticut calling.  It was Sam and Marianna.  I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t.  David was still sleeping, so I left the room to call them back.

“Guess what?” Sam said.  “I won a 37 foot, two bedroom camper trailer in a raffle!”  He and Marianna are camping with her father at a music festival, and Sam bought two tickets for a charity raffle.  And then won.

“Do you and David want it?”  David and I do talk a lot about our plans to take off and travel the country, teardrop trailer in tow.  Sam wanted to be sure we didn’t want to amend our vision of what will be following our VW Passat wagon.  “I really don’t know what to do with it.”

And isn’t that just what life is?  Right turn swerves, then left turn swerves, tumbling chances and changes.  We’re in Madison because we’d planned to come to a family wedding here and then that fell apart, but a good number of the wedding guests came anyway and there was a wonderful gathering of lively and interesting people last night.  Sam and Marianna were moving to NH in two weeks, to spend the summer with David and me before moving to Boston.  Now they may be staying in Tennessee.  I was planning to spend the rest of my life with Eric and then he died.  Now I’m in the big, interesting life of another man and in places I never expected to be.

Like Madison.  Except for a long time I’ve expected to be in this coffee shop.

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And I Shall Have Some Peace There

“Who are you going to fight with after you leave your job?” a colleague asked me at a board meeting earlier this week.  I had been talking about preparations to testify to the NH House Finance Committee, opposing the total loss of state general funds for domestic violence services.  This cut is only one of many too many the Committee is considering that would destroy critical service programs that the state’s most vulnerable citizens rely on for basic survival.  Tough times these days, which I assume had me talking tough, thus the question.

“I’m going to stay on this board and fight with you,” I answered, but with a laugh, because this colleague is a man I mostly agree with, but who can engage in a good discussion.

“You strike me as an organizer,” he went on.  “What will you organize?”

“I just organized a new writing group,” I said, and I have.  “I have a lot of identities.  Being the Executive Director of the Coalition is not all of who I am.”  Very true.  Look at my bio here on the blog — you don’t get to my career identification until the end of the list.  But this week I’ve been exploring another woman’s life-altering shift in identities, and beginning to understand that as much as I’m embracing the coming change, it’s going to be BIG!

Margaret Roach is a gardener and writer, and until 3 years ago, was a top executive in the Martha Stewart empire.  Margaret’s gardening blog, A Way to Garden, is a treasure, and her new book and I shall have some peace there is also a treat.  I went to hear her read and speak last Tuesday night, and at one point, in describing her previous, jam-packed and wildly hectic work life, she held up her hands as if warding off demons when she talked about her need for time and space and solitude in order to figure out who she really is and how she wants to be in the world.  She left her high level Manhattan career and life to live full-time at her weekend home in the country, to garden and create and write.  While I am walking away from a much different kind of career, the pace sounds similar, and so I’m reading with anticipatory curiosity.

In her first months of her new life, slowing down is not easy.  Margaret describes still being on the spin cycle in fast and furious language that rings so true.  I’m getting a helpful glimpse of what my new life might feel like, when suddenly there isn’t somewhere I have to be and something that has to be done, right now!

The book’s title is from the Yeats poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  It’s worth keeping the full line close in the coming months: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”

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Saturday Morning

It’s been a sad week — on top of the suicide of a young man in our community, and the sadness in David’s family of the failed relationship, a mentally ill man was shot to death by the police in Concord.  It’s not clear what happened, but with the changes happening in the public mental health system because of state budget cuts, there very well may be more events like this.  I can’t get used to how little people with no voice count, how easily they’re pushed aside in debates about funding and revenue and the trashing of budgets to take away the social safety net.  “It’s not a safety net,” a member of NH’s House Finance Committee said to our Commissioner of Health and Human Services at a recent meeting.  “It’s a hammock.  These people are swinging in hammocks and they need to get up and get to work.”  Sad.

Then David got the cold I had this week and was too sick and infectious to come with me to visit Adrienne and Matt and Emilio.  So I spent a bit of time being pouty and upset that here is yet another weekend David and I spend apart.  And then I got real.  We are both alive, we are healthy (except for our colds), we have smart, strong, healthy and highly functional children, and in three months we are going to have oceans of time spreading out around us in all directions (knock wood).  We’ll go kayaking.

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Barrell Mill Pond Dam

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In the 1700’s, in York, Maine, a dam was built where a tidal creek flows into the York River.  This created Barrell Mill Pond, which was managed to run a saw and flour mill. New England is full of these old mills, often just crumbling walls in the woods where a brook falls down a few feet.  Barrell Mill Pond Dam is still a strong rock wall, 50 feet out across the opening of the creek to a 10 foot water spill under a small suspension bridge.  The bridge leads to an island which is now a preserve.  I walked there yesterday morning.

I watched the force of the tide running in under the bridge, through the spillway.  When you narrow the space for energy to flow, it gets concentrated and stronger.  As it is now in my life.  I have about 70 days left in my job, and I can feel energy accelerating around me. The water is lifting up into ridged ripples and small waves, I’m in the middle of the spillway and being carried along.  But I can swim, and I can keep my head above water, and once I’m in the pond, the water will quiet and I can float again.

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Stepping Out

Two weeks ago I stepped out of my daily life and everything has changed.   Two weeks ago Sam and Marianna and I left New Hampshire, headed back to New York to be with Adrienne and Matt for the last weekend of the Sam and Marianna’s visit from Tennessee.  We were all hoping Adrienne would have her baby over the weekend, but if not, we’d have a fine time anyway.

And then came Emilio, perfect, scrunchable, adorable, sweet, robust, enormous and tiny Emilio.  The grandchild Eric never met, Adrienne and Matt’s first child.  Sam’s nephew.  My grandson, making me Mimi.  The rest of the world continued on its daily path, as it did, to my astonishment, after Eric died.  Life is birth and death, which we all know, but we don’t all get to live it as close up and real as I have over the past four and a half years, and this side of the birth/death equation has been astounding and profound.  Amazing that everyone isn’t stopping what they’re doing and marveling at this wondrous new being Emilio.

David has come and gone twice in these two weeks, and we talk every day, do our daily downloads the best we can long distance.  I’ve talked with most of my close friends, at least once, since Emilio’s been born, and am emailing many of them.  But mostly I’m keeping up with the larger sphere of my personal life via Facebook, which means simply posting photos of Emilio. 

I’m trying, somewhat in vain, to stay on top of my job by working remotely.  But being the Mimi is what I want to be doing, and doing work phone calls, staying up on email, frantically reading whatever needs to be read for the call I have coming up in the next hour, has been draining.  I’m all baby brain and that’s where I want to be.  Every email I return has photos of Emilio attached.

Saturday I’m leaving to go back to New Hampshire, to my home, to my job, to my life as I formerly knew it.  But it’s fundamentally altered now, and that’s only wonderful.  My arms will be aching to hold Emilio and I’ll probably want to video-chat with Emilio like a crack addict, but that’s what babies do to me, to many women I know.  We’re hard-wired to fall in love this way and I’m in love.

Ah, Emilio.

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Baby Sleeping Chest Pose

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Too bad the baby sleeping chest pose isn’t a yoga pose.  If it was, I’d finally be making good on my constant remark that I’m going to “start doing some yoga .”  I need to devote some energy to loosening up my muscles and joints that are starting to protest more and more about my constant fitness activities that only wind me tighter and tighter.  Yoga would be good for me, but I rarely get to it.

Even if it isn’t yoga, the baby chest sleeping pose does loosen me up.  It’s one of the sweetest experiences in the world.  Emilio has spent a lot of time sleeping on my chest the last week, and that’s where he’s curled up right now.  His little body is wormed pretzel-like across my belly and up to my shoulder.  He squeaks and hiccups now and then, and takes quick little breaths, interspersed with deeper breaths and moaning sighs.  His body is warm and loose with an unstrung floppiness only infants seem able to pull off.  When I look down I see both my children as babies, I see Eric, I see Emilio’s father Matt, and I see Emilio, sweet, scrunchy-faced babiness in total abandon against my chest. 

It’s quiet here today.   Emilio is 8 days old and those days have been full of escaping from the hospital (yes, it felt like an escape) and a constant stream of visitors.  Today’s visitors have already come and gone, David has headed back to NH, Matt is asleep upstairs, and Adrienne and I are making up for baby-loaded time with some free time at our computers.  Baby sleeping time is my yoga time.

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Funerals

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Two summers ago when Aunt Freda died, David and I stopped in Worcester, where Sam was living, to pick him up on the way to the funeral in Connecticut.

“I told someone I was going to a funeral,” Sam said as we drove south.  “And he said he’d never been to a funeral.  ‘What?’ I said.  ‘You’re a senior in college and you’ve never been to a funeral?  I’ve been a pall bearer like six times.'”

Eric came from a close family, with small generations.  His mother had four siblings, and of the five in that generation, only two had children, five total, and of those five, again only two had children, again totaling five.  Three generations of five meant that my children, two of the third set of five, had numerous great aunts and uncles who were like grandparents.  Every trip to Connecticut to visit Eric’s parents included all these aunts and uncles who’d never had children of their own.  Adrienne and Sam were like grandchildren to them, and family gatherings and festivals and parties were rich with an older generation, full of love and delight in watching our children grow up. 

But the other side of that richness is the loss.  Over the past 30 years, we’ve lost ten close relatives, and only Natalie, Eric’s mother, is left.  Last Wednesday morning, Natalie’s brother Ben didn’t show up at schul as usual, didn’t make his usual morning calls, and his phone was continually busy.  Burton, Eric’s cousin, went over to his house and saw through the window that Ben was sitting slumped in his reading chair.  The newspaper was scattered on the floor and the phone was off the hook.

The funeral was Friday, early, because the burial couldn’t be done on Thanksgiving, the funeral home said they wouldn’t do it.  To obey religious law, the burial needed to be completed before mid-day, which the Rabbi determined meant 11:35.  So at 6:00 a.m. I was scraping ice off my car to make driving peep holes, and got on the road. 

When I pulled into the funeral home, the men in dark coats were waiting.  “Are you going to the cemetery?”  When I said yes they had me pull my car into line, gave me an orange tag for my rear view mirror, and put a suction cup flag on my car.  “Funeral,” it announced, black letters on orange.  After the service, we made the familiar drive, headlights on high beams, emergency flashers blinking, through New Haven, across the harbor, to the cemetery in East Haven.

As we drove down the narrow lane with the fenced cemetery on either side, I watched the head stones flashing behind the iron fence rails.  The clouds that had produced ice up north and rain in New Haven were lifting.  Cars were turning in the muddy circle at the end of the lane and coming back towards me, pulling over to park heading back out to the main road.  Cars in, cars out, fence rails slipping by black and straight, dark faced stones carved with name, Hebrew and Stars of David, people getting out of cars and walking through the gate to the small tent next to the new grave.  I took Natalie’s hand and helped her to a seat.

After Aunt Fagel’s funeral, the year before Eric died, I said to him, “You introduced me to all these old people in your family who I love and now they’re all dying.  It’s hard to lose so many people.”

“Ah,” he said.  “But they weren’t old when I brought them into your life.”