Category: Moving On

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Yahrzeit

The first year after Eric died I noted the anniversary of his death three times — on the actual day (first Sunday in May), the Roman calendar date, and the Jewish calendar date — the yahrzeit (Hebrew for ”
time of year”).   It was grueling, three days to think about him having been gone a year.  “No more triple anniversaries,” I told myself, or “deathaversaries” as Adrienne calls them.

But here I am, burning a yahrzeit candle today, on the Jewish calendar anniversary.  And I’m very aware that this year Sunday is May 6 and I’ll think about that being the day of the week Eric died.  And then the next day is May 7, the actual common calendar date of his death.

All this awareness is only heightened by the fact that I’m doing readings from The Truth About Death.  Several people at the book launch last week at Gibson’s in Concord (smashing success, with 83 people there and many many books sold, check out the photos) told me how nice it was for them to remember Eric and feel like he was there in the room.  He’s here, as everyone we’ve ever loved is with us in our hearts, but he’s also really really not here.

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The Trail to the Cairns

If you walk out Canterbury Road from my house it turns into an old woods road, eventually petering out.  It used to be the way to Canterbury, and at a party at a neighbor’s house decades ago, a man from Canterbury told me he used to ride his horse from his house to my neighbor’s house on that road.  Many many years ago.

Eric and I walked the road often.  It rises slightly from my house, passes an old cemetery bordered by dairy pastures, goes back down hill, back up through grand old maples, down and up and down again many times as it passes houses and then heads into the woods, passes a junction with two other old roads, then about two miles from the house loses its definition.  There’s a large glacial erratic that sits along the road side just about where the road becomes indistinguishable from the ramble of woods around it, and that’s where Eric and I would stop.  Sometimes we’d hang out for a while, just happy to be in the woods.  It was our turning back point.

After Eric died, I started building cairns on the big rocks, a monument to Eric.  I walked out there often in the first two years after he died, adding to the cairns each time I went.  Then in July 2008 a tornado ripped through Northwood and laid a wide swath of downed trees and bramble and jumbled branches across the road, about a quarter mile short of the cairn rock.  I tried walking around it once shortly after the tornado, but the road was perpendicular to the tornado’s path, so the mess of downed trees went on for as far as I tried to walk around it.  I got lost.

After the hurricane, my neighbor who owns the land told me he planned to clear the tornado damage and open the road again.  I’ve been walking or snowshoeing or skiing out to the point of the tornado path for almost four years, hoping to find the road reopened.  When David and I walked out the road on Tuesday morning, our neighbor was working on moving and cutting the trees.  “It should be done in the next couple of days,” he said.  Today we walked out there again, and there were two young men, still clearing the last of the thick white pines that were the main trees to come down in the face of the tornado.  “We should be done by the end of today,” one of them told us.

But there was enough cleared for us to get through this morning.  I was so happy to get back to that rock, to those cairns, happy to pick up the few rocks that had fallen and put them back on top of one of the three piles.  Joy can be so simple.  A blocked path in the woods, open again.  Cairns at a turn around point, on random rock, rock I can reach.

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Legacy

One of the other poets in my Yogurt Poets group brought a poem to our workshop recently, in which a woman rises from her coffin at her wake to ask for a recipe.  Jennifer said, when we talked about the poem, that she’s come to think the only real way we live on after we die is through the perennials we divide and distribute and the recipes we share.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people live on, have actually thought a lot about it since Eric died, but it’s been closer to the front in the last six months, as I helped to dismantle David’s family’s home.  A few things from David’s parents’ house ended up here, but mostly their possessions went to auction and Goodwill and the dump.

When I first started cleaning out the house in Lancaster this summer, I noticed a small bulletin board made of wine corks in the kitchen.  “Ah,” I thought.  “Alison would like that.” She’s been collecting wine bottle corks for years, maybe even decades.  She plans to someday make a table with a top of wine corks, or some sort of cork-sided object.

This winter when David and I were doing the final clean out of the house, while the auctioneers were there carting away room after room of furniture and decorations, the cork board was still hanging in the kitchen.  I took it down, took the old papers and tacks off it, and put it at the top of a box I was filling.  When Alison came to my house a week later to help me move some rugs into our house, we opened a box looking for scissors and there was the board. “A cork board!” Alison said and I lifted it out and handed it to her.  “It’s yours.  I brought it back for you.”

When I was at Alison’s this past weekend, there was the board, hanging in her kitchen by the table.  So now there is a bit of Betty and Baird in a corner of Alison’s house, a sweet and simple legacy.

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Silver Stone

We woke to snow this morning, pulled up the shades and got back in bed, letting the silver light fill the room.  In spite of predictions of a change to sleet and rain, the snow kept up.  We went for a walk, the cold wind numbing our faces the way the last week of new loss has left us feeling numb and dumb and clumsy.  I don’t even know what I did yesterday, but I do know I managed to grocery shop and cook and work on a poem and go to Yogurt Poets last night.  Is that enough for one day?

Then I went for a ski, my first ski of the season, so I said a Shehechiyanu blessing (for more on that see this previous post) and thought of Eric’s mother.  Eric always said a Shehechiyanu when he did something for the first time each year — like the first chance to cross-country ski or the first kayak of spring.  It wasn’t until after he died that I found out Eric learned that from his mother, Natalie.  We were at a Passover Seder together three years ago and she talked about how often she says the Shehechiyanu blessing and all the opportunities there are in a year to bless the return to a favored place or activity.

Now Natalie is in a hospital, recovering from a bad bout of shingles.  More worry.  But back to skiing, to being in the woods, my tracks leading back into the trees, snow draping the branches and quieting the inner chatter.  Blessed.

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Right Now, A Year Ago

For those of you who haven’t read every word of this blog, including the page The Premise Is Grace, here’s a recap.  My original idea was to write a blog about the succession planning process, right from the middle of it.  So in the spring of 2010, just before I announced my planned departure from my job in June of 2011, I started writing posts for a blog, planning to begin making them public after my retirement as Executive Director of the Coalition was announced.

I wrote, but I didn’t post.  I discussed what I was doing with some Coalition Director friends, and they agreed with my hesitation — though I was writing mostly from my own experiences, what I was writing revealed too much about other people’s reactions.  My friends thought publishing the blog posts a year after they’d been written, with an update on what I was experiencing in my year post-Coalition, would be interesting (to them, especially, to know what it was like to not be working so damn hard) and respectful enough of the people I was writing about.

So I kept writing, though less and less frequently, and then finally just stopped.  Making most of what I was writing public wasn’t going to work no matter when I posted it.  But there are posts on that still-private blog that are worth looking back at, as a counter to what I’m experiencing now.  The short story of what I’m experiencing now is a great sense of relief and freedom.  I stepped off an edge, and there is plenty of ground under my feet.

From October 6, 2010:  I’m at a meeting of the Coalition’s member programs and Peggy is providing an update on the search process.  The amount of energy that’s going into finding my replacement makes me feel guilty.  We have so much other work to do!  Now there’s this whole transition process on everybody’s plate.  Is this the best way to be doing this?  Sue J. asked me last week, when we saw each other in Chicago, did a year’s notice feel too short or too long?  I think the board, staff and member program directors would say, “Not enough time!.”  It’s feeling too long to me.  I’m sitting in the middle of a process that involves me letting go of a huge part of my life, convincing everyone else it’s okay to let go of me, and all of us stepping together off the edge, trusting there will be someplace to put our feet.  I’m feeling so ready to take that step.  And yet, right now, here I am, in it.

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Yom Kippur, Again

I just reread my Yom Kippur post from last year, which told a story from two years past on Yom Kippur.   And I recently reread Adrienne’s blog post from last Yom Kippur.  Looking back is in the spirit of this solemn day, when we think about our transgressions, contemplate atonement and forgiveness, and resolve to be as good as we can be, while loving ourselves even in our imperfection, in the year to come.

Today at services, I could feel Eric sitting beside me.  He is so present to me still, and no more so than on days that are rich with all he brought into my life — a spiritual practice that has stayed deeply meaningful for me, with rituals and traditions that keep me connected to friends and family and him.

In a couple of hours, David and I will go over to Mark and Andi’s to continue a tradition we’ve started since Eric died.  In the years before Eric’s death, we had started going back into Concord to attend the Memorial and Concluding Services for Yom Kippur.  In the midst of the thoughtful swoon that a day of fasting and reflection brings on, getting dressed again for services and driving back into Concord was a lot, but we’d come to count on the tradition.

The year after Eric died Adrienne and Sam and I planned to go back into Concord, after the break from the morning service, for the Memorial and Concluding Services.  Being part of the Memorial Service was particularly important to me.  But we didn’t make it.  I don’t remember exactly why but it was probably a combination of grief and exhaustion. We went to Mark and Andi’s and broke fast with them.  We didn’t make it back into Concord the following year either, and by the third Yom Kippur after Eric died, David was in my life and Laura had just died.

“I really want to go to Memorial Services, ” I said to Sam, who was home that year.  “But I really don’t want to go back into Concord to the Temple.”

“Do your own service,” Sam said, and we did.  I have a copy of the High Holy Days prayer book at home, because when I went to see the Rabbi after Eric died, and asked for his suggestions for helpful readings on the Jewish response to death and grief, he said he thought the Yom Kippur Memorial Service in the prayer book was as good as anything, and I took a copy home.  So three years ago I picked out readings and we created our own Memorial and Concluding Service with Mark and Andi.  And did it again last year.  And will do it again today.

The photo above is from the first Yom Kippur after Eric died, just about 5 months after.  The photo makes me think about all that’s changed in the five years, and six High Holy Day seasons since he’s been gone.  Mark and Andi and I visited his grave after this morning’s service, and told stories about our lives then and now that made us laugh.  Eric loves that — all of us laughing and loving and carrying on our rituals in whatever way keeps us connected to Judaism and to him.

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What I Did Today

I cleaned up my old “ericgrace”email account.  I’ve hung on to the account Eric and I created more than a decade ago because of my attachment to the ericgrace tag, and when I switched to gmail, wanted that for my address, but of course it wasn’t available.  So today when I needed to open the account to get a friend’s address to email her about my manuscript, I finally admitted to myself that I don’t have an “ericgrace” life anymore, and that old account is so spammed out it’s mostly just annoying.  So, I made sure I had all the addresses I wanted from the old account, forwarded emails I’ve saved to my gmail account that tell stories I may want to get back to telling and the emails will be good reminders, if not good sources of some already-written work, scanned the 1,000 + emails that have come into that account since I last opened it (in early July) to find online accounts I needed to switch to my gmail account, and then did that.  This was not a glamorous creative-life task, though it was working on getting my manuscript ready for the publisher that led me to it.  This was cleaning up life details that have been ignored for too long.  But now that big box in my head that said “clean up and close your old email account” has a check next to it.  Good-bye “ericgrace.”  I still love you.

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High Pressure

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Scattered rain showers moved through last night as we ate take-out Mexican food in Adrienne’s back yard on Long Island.  Those dark clouds must have been riding the edge of a high pressure system, because today was clear and dry, with hot sun and cool wind.

That high pressure wasn’t inside me, though.  I’ve been thinking I have nothing to say yet about what it’s like post-job, post-Coalition ED, post-high pressure busyness.  But I do.

We came to Long Island yesterday to take a baby break on our way back to New Hampshire — we needed some time on the early life side of the life=death equation.  This morning we went to Sagamore Hill, the estate of Theodore Roosevelt on Cold Spring Harbor on the north shore of Long Island.  We walked through a small forest with enormous oaks and tulip poplar trees out to a boardwalk over Eel Creek to the small beach along the harbor shore.  Back on the estate grounds, we walked through the fields up to the house.  By the front door was a grand old copper beech tree, planted by the Roosevelts in the late 1800’s, with a trunk like a leathery animal and a towering crown.

Once we got back to Adrienne’s house, we got to be on Emilio duty.  I gave him pear and zucchini pieces to gnaw on, fed him a bottle, let him play in his crib and on the floor, and did some dinner preparation.  The afternoon hummed along as if on a smooth track.  At one point late in the day, Emilio was on my hip, sleepy and a bit dazed, while David lifted his hand out towards him opening and closing his fist, to see if Emilio would mimic him.  Emilio lifted his arm slightly and opened his hand.

At that moment I realized I didn’t feel any pressure or any need to be anywhere else, doing any other thing.  I’d gone for a beautiful morning walk on a crystal summer day and spent the afternoon taking care of a baby.  “Ah yes,” I thought, “this is different.”

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June 15, 2011

It’s a sunny morning, the first one for a week.  We’re on the back deck drinking our cappuccino, the sun working its way up through the trees along the brook, leaf filtered rays of light shining on the grass.

I find the period after every word that I see used in writing overly bloggish (see it a lot in blogs) and lazy.  Why not find grammatically correct and accurate language to express what it is that needs to be described? But this morning I can’t resist.

One.  More.  Day.

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The Last Tuesday

“Good morning, sweetheart,” David said as he got up to make our cappuccino.  “Last Tuesday.”  He walked out of the room.  He’s been saying that since last week — our last Thursday, last Friday, last Monday, now our last Tuesday at our jobs.

Tomorrow is June 15, the countdown date, the day that’s been drawing near just about here, the last day of our jobs for both of us.  For David, it’s been a little over 10 years, for me, it will be exactly 30.  I started at the Coalition on June 16, 1981.

When I decided a little over a year ago to announce my departure from my job, I’d thought of leaving in March.  “Are you kidding?” Adrienne said.  “Three months short of 30 years?  Just do the 30 years.”

So I decided I’d leave in June, but couldn’t decide the date.  “Look in the records at the Coalition,” a friend suggested.  “Find out what date you started and make it 30 years exactly.”  So that’s what I did, except I looked in my journals to find my start date, not in Coalition records.  As I’ve said many times, maybe even here in this blog, I have a well documented life.  Two shelves of the book cases in my study are lined with journals and diaries, in chronological order mostly, dating back to 3rd grade.

It was easy to find the day I started at the Coalition.  Adrienne was six months old and I was heading back to work after being home as a new mother.  Now Adrienne is the new mother and I’m a grandmother.  After today, my life as the Executive Director of the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence will be one day from being over.  Stay tuned.