The Still Point Of The Turning World (16 page)

19

And there we were, in a kind of harmony; and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell whether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we could stay that way forever.

—
Margaret Atwood,
Alias Grace

A
t the crossroads between spring and summer, my friend Carrie brought a burst of hope and calm into our house for two days, a much-needed shot of harmony. We went for a hike in the strangely cold and overcast weather, and I found myself feeling hopeful and frightened at the end of it, with Ronan sacked out in the front pack and his hands pressed to my stomach. Sometimes the soft bulk of him, his solid weight and cellulite thighs, made me jump ahead to the time when my arms would be empty. And then I felt guilty, and then I felt guilty for wasting time feeling guilty when I need to be enjoying my son or else I’d feel guilty about it later.

Carrie’s presence was the antidote to this constant circling: being with someone who knows and loves you, someone who can see you from the outside in (and still like you!), is maybe the greatest gift any grieving parent—or person—can expect. Carrie and I used to take long walks in Provincetown, where we met at the Fine Arts Work Center, a working colony for visual artists (Carrie) and writers (me). On those long walks along Herring Cove or Race Point Beach, we talked and talked and lost track of time; when we got back to town, the sun would be setting, the stores closing, and we’d be famished and freezing and desperate for hot chocolate and a hot meal. Six years later, I wished we could hike up a million mountains together, always moving, never tired.

Cultivating an ability to rest in what was an impossible, thorny place—Ronan was dying and he was irreplaceable—was proving very difficult for me as his condition progressed. Without a goal or a solution or something to strive for, something to fight for, I felt lost. There was only today and then tomorrow and then the next day. But waiting was not playing to my skill set, which was about pushing, achieving, driving ahead, meeting this or that goal.

In the words of Grace, a convicted killer with a tortured past and the heroine of Margaret Atwood’s stunning and smart novel
Alias Grace:
“It’s the middle of the night, but time keeps going on, and it also goes round and around, like the sun and the moon on the tall clock in the parlour. Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can’t stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it’s the day itself . . . The breaking day.” Time, time, time: our enemy, and the only friend we have. We need it, long for it, fear it, loathe it, dream about it, try to extend it and shrink it.

Coming to peace with “nonaction,” I realized, felt impossible. I was used to doing and moving. Now I was waiting and thinking. Writing. Crawling up over the edge of each breaking day, broken but ready for action. Aching with fear and also brimming with a bright, swollen fearlessness. Fueled by a new ambition: to be still, to consider, to examine. It was against my nature, but my nature was changing. I was living an oddly liturgical life: examining grief with thought, word and, occasionally, a hell of a lot of movement.

At the end of May my friends Amy and Jennifer hosted a fund-raiser for Ronan, a spin class followed by yoga (called the Ronan-a-thon) and I was given the opportunity to sweat and stretch and move and cry in honor of my son, and I didn’t do it alone. I’ve gotten a lot of guff about my penchant for exercise, which, yes, is an obsession, yes, is an addiction, and, yes, can be a crutch. But it is also recommended on a daily basis by various celebrity doctors, health councils, and the American Academy of Doctors of This That or the Other Organ.

I took spin and yoga classes with the same group of women fives times a week for four years in Santa Monica. We obsessively claimed our bikes next to one another in the spinning room; there were songs we loved and others we rolled our eyes about; we lent one another socks and offered swigs from water bottles; we were tirelessly coached by the indefatigable Amy to the sounds of Metallica and Journey and Bon Jovi and AC/DC; and then we relaxed and stretched by the poetic instruction of Jen and her magical lavender oils and head massages. We didn’t discuss the gritty particulars of our lives, and in that sense we were like stereotypical “guy friends” who like to do things together rather than talk about feelings/relationships/life/other complications. Adult playdates, but without the cocktails or conversation. We groaned about being asked to do yet another set of sit-ups. We chanted om and then flopped onto our yoga mats. Like all self-respecting gym rats, we then crawled to the showers, feeling spent and stinky, before going on with our individual lives. Until that weekend in May I knew very little about the present realities of these women, let alone their old stories, their old wounds.

When Ronan was diagnosed, some of my friends ran from it and I guess some of them are still running. Months later some admitted that they didn’t know what to say, how to respond, and I understood this reaction as deeply as I had trouble forgiving it. My friends from the gym, however, women I hardly knew in the sense that we didn’t share many personal stories, came right at me: with e-mails, an envelope full of checks for future medical bills, concerned voice and text messages. I was surprised at first, but then I realized that I viewed these connections as if they were superficial, as many of my “why are you going to the gym when you could be thinking (that is, doing something important)?” friends casually assumed.

But consider this: I saw these women almost every day for four years. I did push-ups with them during every day of my pregnancy, up until the day I delivered Ronan. When I told people familiar with grief that in some sense Ronan died for me on the day of his diagnosis, they warned me about the grief to come when my son was physically gone. “You carried him for nine months,” my friend Chris, also a writer, reminded me, and as strange as it might seem, so did the women in that gym. No, we weren’t having some deep intellectual experience, but we were having an experience. The difference? It was embodied. It was, in a sense, mindless. What a relief.

All of our most ecstatic, profound experiences (in addition to some of the most terrifying and destructive) are lived in the body. I vividly remember the first expert run I skied in Winter Park in the early 1980s. Moguls like giant fists as high as my waist, the bottom of the hill an icy slide straight to the bottom. I was sweating even before I shot off the top of the mountain, my coach screaming at me (but in the nicest and most supportive way) that I was ready to do this and if I believed in myself I would finish without breaking my neck.
Go, Emily, go!
My heartbeat swished frantically in my ears; my heart was a rocket burning an upward path through my chest, and my leg and arms went to jelly and then to steel and then back again over each hump. On and on, until the end of the run, and when I looked up and saw where I had come from, I didn’t think,
Look what I can do,
which has a built-in superiority (itself an inferiority complex in disguise) and seems to be the guiding principle of disabled sports (and of all competitive sports, actually), but I observed what my body could feel and experience in that moment. The feeling was freedom—of the most profound kind. You know what else? During that entire twenty minutes I didn’t have a single thought, and I’ve probably never been happier. Exercise as an experience, as the joy of embodiment.

Why are we so afraid of the body? Is it because it’s a mess, unpredictable, mortal, unreliable? We take pains to perfect it, to keep it healthy, but we probably wouldn’t go to such extremes if we weren’t scared to death to lose it. A paradox: we pretend we don’t need it, that it’s our minds that matter, and yet the body is the thing we can’t ignore and that knocks our thinking minds flat to the floor.

During my four-year writer’s block in Los Angeles, I thought I needed to leave the body in order to figure out what the hell was going on with my writing life. I needed to chuck the monkey mind, the constant cycling, the endless
thoughts.
So during a three-month sabbatical from teaching, I took a meditation course in Santa Monica. The teacher annoyed me, in part because rather than letting us practice meditation, he seemed intent on talking about the electromagnetic forces at work in the universe (something about comets?) and the new world order, of which we’d all be taking part whether we liked it or not. Frankly, I thought he was full of shit, especially when I was trying to sit quietly for twenty minutes while imagining a lit candle floating in front of my third eye, which I still wasn’t certain I’d successfully located. “We are moving from the age of energy into the age of matter,” he postulated. “It’s these living bodies that will save us.” Okay, maybe salvation is a stretch, but several years later I considered that he might have had a point.

Flying into Los Angeles for Ronan’s fund-raiser, I saw that massive grid, the straight lines of boxy houses with their swimming pools like blinking blue eyes. When I touched down, I had just read this line from the novel
Year of Wonders,
by Geraldine Brooks, a novel about the Great Plague of 1665, and also about what happens to people—how they twist and bloom—during catastrophe. “These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.” I felt the joy of familiarity at the sight of palm trees and pesky traffic snarls. I got in my rental car, sped onto the 405 freeway—which was already a parking lot at three o’clock in the afternoon—and cranked up the cheesiest, bubble-gum hip-hop pulsating rhythm I could find. I drove with all the windows rolled down and needlessly used my horn at least three times on the short drive south to Long Beach. The shimmering concrete, the fancy cars, the sun sun sun, the skyline muddled by pollution, the deceptive sea-salt smell of air ranked as some of the unhealthiest in the nation. I didn’t care. I inhaled that smell of burning asphalt and overcrowded, overindulged West Coast city. I’ve been nomadic all my life, rootless, and I always savor these brief glimpses of what it feels like to be grounded. I was on my way to the house of my friends David and Lisa; I was headed to mojitos and tapas in a sun-drenched bar, to conversation and late-night kebabs and expensive brandy. I was approaching one of my homes.

There is power in a gathering, big or small. It’s why houses of worship exist. It’s why we have parties to celebrate, to mourn, to just be. At the beginning of the Ronan-a-thon, Amy asked us to imagine a collective heartbeat. For more than an hour, a roomful of sweating bodies, pounding blood, and a united embodied intelligence focused on my son. (And oh so many Springsteen songs and power ballads. “Don’t Stop Believin’!” Never!) We were not riding for a cure because there wasn’t one; we were riding for Ronan’s life. A celebration, a tribute. Time stopped—painfully, beautifully. A crystalline moment walloped right down in the middle of a pile of tumult.

During the yoga class, when my friend Jen asked us to open our hearts out wide for a baby that some of the people practicing that night had never met, I thought:
This might be what it’s like to be Ronan.
Every moment a wonder, every moment distilled. Stopped. Each moment out of time, with no memory attached, and with only the body as the guide, the gauge of experience. I learned that you don’t need to know much about another person’s grief in order to share it and help him or her bear it. People can be amazing and resilient and giving when they don’t have to be. Hearts can pound right out of bodies; they can
move.
It’s not gross or alien or weird at all; it’s human.

More than anything else, I felt accompanied. Me with all my words, so many words, so many I couldn’t keep up with them, and here were people, in the sweat and silence and effort, who could just stay there. They could cry for Ronan when I could not. There was a fullness in that emptiness, a literal, visceral feeling of life in death; finally, when so many days felt like the reverse. We went out for cocktails and steaks and we laughed and I learned about these women I had sweated with for four years—things I didn’t expect, both the funny and the painful. We could be sad but also celebratory. It was an important lesson for me.

As I left Los Angeles, the waves were like chalk marks drawn on the surface of the water. Flying over New Mexico, the plane hung in the air and the wing shuddered still for a moment despite the notorious winds sheering off the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A maze of empty roads twisting into land and sky. We descended into the home-for-now and back into the situation of my life, which, for the next few years, would no doubt feel a bit like living on a foreign planet. The planet of grief, where love and loss exist and occur in equal measure. Like Anna, the heroine of Brooks’s novel who loses both her sons to the plague: “I knew that it was true that fear of losing him had marched beside that love, every moment of the short time I had him with me.”

Grief isn’t just an alternative universe, it’s the nastiest, cattiest, meaner-than-a-slighted-and-jealous-mean-girl snake. It’s not a cute garden snake that slithers under rocks and looks, in its own snakish way, cuddly. Grief is a cobra. It is fierce, it hides, lurks, strikes, and it can be brutal or even fatal. And it is lived in the body; it can be seen and felt and touched. It is not an intellectual experience but a bodily one. As Basho- says:

Come, see

Real flowers

Of this painful world.

Grief can be seen, felt, touched and tasted. Plucked. Chewed. My mind was trying to keep my heart together, to steel it, but I realized that a broken heart might be more useful because it’s fluid, cracked, full of room, messy, without defined contours or corners. It lacks certainty, and therefore judgment. Jen gave me a clear white rock that is solid but also transparent in places. Maybe the ability to break is what can heal it. Maybe Yeats got it wrong; the center
can
hold, especially when it doesn’t have a choice.