John, I'm only dancing

I don't know if you've ever thought of someone from your past and googled their name to find that they are no longer with us.

This happened yesterday.

I googled my friend Debbie, neighbor of Alyssa who had chicken for dinner, to find that she died in 2007.

Her parents are still alive. And so many years ago, they had to say goodbye to their daughter, who would never turn 40.

Her mom had been an actress in Poland before they came to the US. She had a strong accent. This was the era when we learned about ibuprofen as a pain reliever, and she called it "eeboopreen" and so that's what my mom thought it was called for the longest time. 

"Do you need an eeboopreen?" Now I find it cute, but back then it drove me crazy.

The truth is, I hadn't seen Debbie in decades. Something would remind me of her every once in a while, because for about three years, we had a very intense friendship.

I guess all my friendships have always been intense.

At some point her dad came into money, and bought a huge house in a fancier neighborhood, which was in a different school district, and they moved out of our modest neighborhood.

And she hated it. She hated the new school.

One night, she ran away. She walked miles over to the parkland behind our house. She was going to live down by the creek. 

Since this was the early 80s, the "It's 10:00. Do you know where your children are?" era, we'd spent entire days down by the creek, exploring the parkland. We played kick the can with neighborhood kids in the dark.

Our parents weren't actually looking for us until it was clear we weren't home for dinner or bedtime.

Basically, she was going to live down there and I was going to supply her with food.

The plan was not sophisticated. She just wanted out of the painful situation into which she'd been thrust.

We'd read books like My Side of the Mountain and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Running away for a time and living in nature or the Metropolitan Museum of Art seemed like an actual option.

In books like that, where the kids are very self-sufficient, you don't have the view of the parents freaking the fuck out wondering if their child has been kidnapped or killed.

In any case, I think it was my brother who spotted her down by the creek and told my parents.

I mean, the police were out looking for her. It was a crisis.

And in retrospect, I see us as kids, tweens, living in traumatic situations and not having the words. Not having been told that we could ask for help. Not trusting that someone would help us, except our friends.

We couldn't trust our parents to fix the situations when our parents were the cause of them.

Anyway, then her parents got divorced and her mom and the kids moved back to our neighborhood and her dad became a Zionist.

And then my family moved to India, and all we had was letter communication. Which I only succeeded at in starts and fits.

I'd see her in the summer, and they had cable, which meant we'd spent hours in her living room watching MTV. 

She was funny and smart and artistic. She was a year ahead of me, and at some point she was studying ancient Egyptians, and for a project she decided to make jewelry, like in a museum exhibit. So we rolled out clay into snake necklaces and such.

It was a really cool project. I was jealous.

At her house, we had Kraft macaroni and cheese, which we never had at my house. It was magical.

One summer after we moved to India, we came home and stayed with the neighbor next door to our house, which we rented out to another Foreign Service family. I met the son, who had coincidentally been in high school in Kenya with one of my New Delhi besties.

And he was so cute. We met, and then in the way of the teenager, all we wanted to do was make out to Tears for Fears.

We did a lot of that in a very short span of time. His mom wanted him to get a summer job and we wanted to sneak off and make out.

In a horrible coincidence, he was also the boy Debbie had had a crush on the entire previous year of high school. He had no idea.

I never told him, of course, because she'd have killed me. And I never told her about the making out. Why hurt her feelings? I'd be gone in a week.

Debbie is the one who introduced me to David Bowie. She bought the albums and made me tapes. 

We loved David Bowie. We loved him so much. We even loved his weird songs like "The Laughing Gnome," and "Come and Buy My Toys"—which, I learned as a mom reading Mother Goose, is a nursery rhyme. "Please Mr. Gravedigger," on the other hand, is probably not.

At one point, she gave me a special edition album of Diamond Dogs, and I wish I'd kept it, but it got let go somewhere in one of our many moves.

In any case, I hadn't seen her since the late 1980s.  

And I know that when we grieve, the pain we feel is for ourselves. 

I know that with each loss of someone dear from my past, it's a reminder that I don't have my mom to tell. Because I would definitely tell her about Debbie. 

But probably she already knows.

She wasn't mine to lose, and I think, who am I to be sad, when I hadn't tried to contact her for over 25 years?

But I also think, gosh, now I never can.

The quicksand but not a metaphor

On Monday, I returned from dropping my progeny off at camp. This entailed driving almost 1,200 miles to Maine and back. 

I did not go to the beach.

Wendy pointed out that mileage-wise, I drove almost halfway across our country.

So then I started thinking about it and if my geography were better, I might know how many European countries that would equal.

But what I really want to talk about is quicksand.

If you are a person from the 1900s, and particularly if you're from the slice of the 1900s that includes a youth in the 1970s, then we may have shared common fears.

We didn't have a TV when I was a kid, but in any case, this was before the age of cable, and the bulk of programming in India and Bangladesh would've been local.

When we lived in Dhaka, each week we would go to the house of our dear friends who had a small black and white TV to watch Flipper the Dolphin and Little House on the Prairie.

Little House was a huge part of my childhood. My mom and I read the books together. And Mrs. Medley, my delightful second grade teacher, was reading them to us as well.

One day we had a substitute teacher, and she pronounced Almanzo's name wrong, and I was outraged.

Also, when we'd go spend time with my grandmother in North Dakota, we got to watch a whole lot of TV and always watched Little House. We were in Minot, which was the big city, but after all, not so far from the prairie.

Like, when my mom was a kid, they'd walk on the prairie and find arrowheads.

On a side bar, we also watched a nature show sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, though I've forgotten the name of it. And of course we watched Lawrence Whelk.

We ate dinner, which we called supper, at 5:00 pm, and sometimes we got to use TV trays and watch television while we ate.

It was all very decadent. Unimaginable in real life. And really, probably only possible because my dad was not with us.

We were so fascinated by television that we watched any and everything we could. I watched soap operas—their stories, my grandma and aunt called them—in the afternoon. 

Each summer, I would become, over the span of two weeks, deeply invested in The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live.

In any case, I desperately wanted a bonnet, and in retrospect, I find it surprising that my mom didn't make one for me, since she sewed so well and made us so many cute things.

But what I'm saying is, we got our American pop culture in bursts.

And we got enough that I genuinely believed that quicksand was an ever-present danger. 

In case you aren't from this particular era and don't know how to save yourself: If you try to walk or run out of it, you're a goner. You have to spread your body weight and use a swimming motion to safely get to solid ground.

Also, back then the Bermuda Triangle could swallow you at any moment, never to be seen again. It didn't matter that Bermuda was on the other side of the world from us, and we'd never flown, as far as I knew, even remotely close to it. 

The Triangle was there, and waiting.

As if those weren't enough, you could always be knocked on the head and suffer from amnesia. That wasn't terrifying, the way quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle were, but it was still a regular possibility. 

So throughout the 1970s, you had to be emotionally prepared to die of quicksand, disappear from the air, or suddenly have no idea who you were.

Were there other fear list items? Surely there were, but those were my big ones.

So imagine my tremendous joy when a couple weeks ago I learned that a woman fell into quicksand on a beach in Maine!

Her husband immediately pulled her out. So she's fine. I wouldn't be rejoicing her demise or anything.

But quicksand!

It felt like when I know I'm right, and my husband insists on doing something his way, and then it goes badly and at some point it becomes clear that if he'd just done it my way in the first place, things would've been so much easier.

That kind of satisfaction.

I told my friend Pam, who I was staying with in Portland, and she was all delighted as well.

Quicksand! Ha!

I will admit that I kind of wanted to go to the beach and see if we could find any, but it was 62 degrees and raining and I didn't want to investigate my childhood terrors that bad.

On our trip up to Maine, we spent two nights in Boston with friends. The drive to Boston should've taken eight hours, but because Waze told us to go through Connecticut, it took 10 hours and approximately five years off my life.

I was like, what the fuck with Connecticut, which I've always considered an inconveniently-located state in the first place.

A friend who does the drive regularly then offered me a better route that avoids Connecticut completely. But on the return trip I was visiting my beloved college roommate Lesley in Hartford, so there was no way around it.

I feel like this is kind of turning into a chicken for dinner kind of diary entry.

And I am not kidding you, my childhood friend Debbie peeked at her neighbor Alyssa's diary one time, and the entirety of one entry was "we had chicken for dinner".

It drives me crazy that I can't list more than maybe 10 US presidents, I retain almost no historical facts, and my geography is appalling, but I know what Alyssa—who I barely knew and found kind of irritating—wrote in her diary in like 1982.

One might wonder if I had amnesia, but I think it's just the quicksand.

We are stardust, we are golden

One year ago today, I went with Fiona and four other new friends to Pura Tirta Empul in Ubud, Bali, to visit the temple and do a water purification ritual.

And I just realized when I was typing that water purification sounds like filtering through a Brita jug, rather than using the water for self-purification.

According to Hindu tradition, the water at this temple is holy. You say a prayer and put your head under each of the water spouts, washing the water over you.

A couple years ago, my mom and I went to the memorial service of a dear friend. She was surprised when I got up to take communion (not Catholic, so we were all invited), and I said I needed all the help I could get.

This is how I felt about the water purification ritual at the temple. As long as we were invited to take part, I wanted to embrace the blessing.

Fiona and I had arrived late the night before, by the temple trip a full 12 hours later we were besties.

Our lovely driver, who Fiona had organized with via WhatsApp, suggested going to the Tirta Empul temple the next day, because it was a full moon, a particularly auspicious time to go.

He had six seats in his car, so Fiona offered the trip to our new friends at breakfast, four of whom wanted to join us.

It was magical.

It's easy to ascribe meaning to events in hindsight, but so I will just say that thankfully, in the wake of losing my mom, the world lined up for me to go to that particular training in Ubud.

While my mom was alive, there was no way I'd consider Bali, even though all but one training for the company I'd chosen took place there. It would've been unthinkable to be 25 hours of travel away from my mom, in case anything happened.

And then, when the worst possible thing happened, the arms of the world opened up wide, and I threw myself into them without hesitation.

It occurred to me, and I asked Nick, and I texted the company to ask if it was possible, and I bought a ticket. All of this happened I think on the same day. And then I drove the kids to Maine and then I left.

I was scared to go so far away alone, though I did so with no hesitation in my 20s. I was extremely anxious about an intense yoga teacher training. 

All I knew was that I had to go. I couldn't stay in an empty house where everything reminded me of my mama.

In retrospect, I couldn't have chosen anything more healing.

Though Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, Bali is Hindu. The temples and gods and rituals, though not mine, were so familiar. The vegetation was that of my childhood. The smell of incense was everywhere.

Because I didn't grow up with home as a fixed address, it was familiar enough that it felt, in some ways, like home.

Now I can say that I arrived an absolutely crazy person, hollowed out by grief. I didn't, at that point, have things that I was affirmatively seeking.

I was just desperately escaping.

But because I'd lived through losing my dad, I didn't feel guilty when, deep in my sorrow, I laughed.

I knew their energetic vibration is so similar, and that experiencing joy wasn't denying my grief. It didn't diminish how much I loved and missed my mom.

And so I threw myself wholeheartedly in.

The teachers told one of my friends that the group before us had been entirely composed of very young women. And they got very competitive about their outfits.

I don't even know what I'd have done if I'd wound up in that group.

So on the one hand, I don't believe that things happen as they're meant to. I don't believe my mom was meant to miss that final step and fall on our landing and break her hip. And then go to the hospital and never come home.

I just don't.

But sometimes life lines up in a way that makes me feel so lucky, and then I do in fact wonder about stars aligning and the universe and such.

And I do firmly believe that we are all connected. And since we have the laws of thermodynamics proving that energy doesn't go away, who is to say that we're not all together somewhere in the same time and space.

Which is all to say, I have no idea. I'm one of those people who picks the pieces of things that I like out of the whole.

Which is part of why I sucked at math. Because I'd pick and chose the parts of the problems I understood to solve, and then I'd combine them.

This doesn't lead to the correct answer, but it does really confuse your teachers.

But I do feel like it was such a blessing that I wound up in that time and place. And I feel lucky that Fiona had had to change her ticket so we wound up on the same flight, and I feel beyond lucky that we connected immediately and intensely.

This morning I realized it was Maude's birthday, which meant it was the second of July, which also meant it was the one-year anniversary of my life-changing adventure in Bali.

I think back to the people who cared about me almost immediately. The kindness and generosity of almost complete strangers.

It's striking to me that our training group included a very young woman who'd lost her mother the year prior. She knew exactly where I was.

When I was in tears because, when we were supposed to be coming up with our own sequences for the final, and I couldn't remember Sun Salutation A, which is foundational, she said it was because I had grief brain.

Nothing stayed. I couldn't remember anything. Anything. I couldn't remember anything, but I felt everything acutely.

Having someone explain it so simply as grief brain was a blessing.

Making a new friend with whom I resonated so deeply at a time when I felt frail and vulnerable felt like the biggest gift. 

When I need to visualize a place of peace and happiness, I conjure up the image of the rice paddy next to our yoga shala. I envision laughing with Fiona leaving the field, or while walking to meals, or squeezed into the same cash vestibule trying to figure out how many zeros to add to make $100 in Indonesian Rupiah.

I'm a terrible visualizer—which always surprises and frankly kind of offends me, because I have such a good imagination—but all of these images are so accessible.

I think now, a year later, I want to tell some of these stories. They bubble up from time to time. I had every intention of telling them after the training but then all this other stuff happened and I finally feel like maybe I'm coming back to me.

Truly I know that I come from a place of immense privilege to escape across the globe at the worst time in my life. I used money my mom had left me, and the freedom of children at camp, and I spent the cash and the opportunity.

Those three weeks of healing, and the yoga teacher certification were Betty's gift to me.

Last week, in Boston on the way to camp, I took a class taught by one of my yoga teacher training friends. She and I had been paired for a meditation exercise. We were supposed to stare into each others eyes and transmit love and compassion.

And we couldn't stop laughing. But tears were also pouring down my face. We were doing the exercise, and I think discharging an excess of profound emotion through laughter.

It's one of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had.

Also, her class was fantastic. She invited us to set an intention, and if we didn't have one, she offered the suggestion of gratitude. And I will always feel grateful for the friendships and deep connections that began a year ago.

I have long known that time actually helps. Even deep in the midst of my grief, and then my fear of cancer, and the pain of recovering from surgery, I knew that time was my friend. 

But time is also is the longest distance between two places.

So.

Here I am, one year later, healthy, and in such a different and more positive energetic space.

I'm truly, profoundly grateful.

Year 1: How I wish, how I wish you were here

Dear Mama,

Yesterday last year I thought you would come home from the hospital.

Today last year, very early in the morning, you were admitted to the ICU.

And it became increasingly clear that you would not.

Yesterday last year was Mother's Day, and it was terrible.

Mother's Day this year was brutal. 

Sarah posted this poem for Candy, and it resonated so deeply.

Since you left, I've felt, I don't know, less in this world. And after I read this, I realized that what I felt was untethered. 

Not homeless exactly. Not quite lost.

But kind of.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the calculations I started doing were about my kids.

I love my life, but the math was like this: if I have 10 more years, the kids will at least be in their 20s. 20 more, and that will get them to their 30s. And so forth, by 10s.

I was 53, and still, I wasn't ready to lose my mom. I needed you. I still need you.

I feel like so much of what made me me was connected to you. 

I'm not suggesting this is how it is for my kids. But I do know that people go on needing their moms, and I want to be here for them for as long as I can be.

You were gone, and suddenly, I wasn't a daughter. 

I wasn't your caretaker. Your advocate. Your protector.

I wasn't the fittest person you knew. Or the funniest person you knew. Your favorite writer.

Your anything.

I was just me. Without you.

My calendar was suddenly wide open, because I would no longer drive you to Sibley every other week, swearing at other drivers and making you laugh.

You were my first home. And because we moved so much, our family, rather than a specific location, was my home.

You were my first home, and our house was your last home. 

When I feel very sad, like today, I try to remind myself that you had a comfortable and loving home with us. And you were so, so loved.

One year ago on this date, while you were firmly physically affixed to your hospital bed, I saw you recede as the day wore on. You were just less and less there.

The only thing I feel good about is that you made the choice. When we asked you if you wanted further intervention, and you said no, and we asked you if you knew what your decision meant—and you so clearly did—you didn't hesitate.

The fact that it's the same day Dad left us, now 15 years ago, underlines for me that it was your choice.

Not a coincidence.

At some point too many of your systems were failing, and rather than fight the inevitable, you decided you were done with your tiny, frail earthly body. You were done with the pain. You were already more there than here, wherever there is.

You know, the doctors told us that it could be hours, or it could be days. They said once they stop intervention, you don't actually know what people are going to do, how long they will live.

But you'd made your decision, and you left.

By this time tonight, last year, you'd left us, and, after our allotted two hours, we left you. By this time Nick and I had come home, and India had met us at the back door, asking, why, WHY did we have Nana's things?

And then she knew. 

Recently she said she didn't know when she hugged you in the hospital, it was going to be for the last time. When she said goodbye to you, it was going to be the last one.

It's true that you know first times, but last times can sneak up on you. 

Leaving that hospital room was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Even though you weren't there anymore. I was holding your hand, and one moment you were there, and the next, you were gone.

Where'd you go?

This morning, I got my annual text from my friend Vik, saying *hugs*. May 15 has been a hard date for me for the last 15 years.

Losing Dad was devastating. For a long time, I think it was impossible to separate the loss of him from the trauma of the circumstances.

He'd disappeared so many times, but this time, it was somehow forever. How was that possible?

But of course I'd thought about a world without Dad in it, because I'd been confronted with the possibility. The likelihood.

Losing Dad was horrendously painful. But my world without you in it was unimaginable.

I loved you and Dad equally, but differently. You, you were always my safe harbor. The side of the bed I'd run to when I had a bad dream. The person I'd call heartbroken and sobbing, well into my 30s.

The person who loved me most in the whole entire world. 

I remember you saying you loved going home to Grandma Lillian's, because you were never judged. And it's everything to be loved unconditionally. 

How many people love us this way?

When you decided, it didn't feel like you were scared at all. You were relieved. You were tired, and you were ready.

Our friend Alexa, who was checking in on you energetically throughout the day, texted me to say your hospital room was full of loved ones. She didn't know you were leaving then, but she knew who was there waiting for you.

And then you were gone.

And I coudln't believe it. I mean, I was there. I saw it. But how did I suddenly not have my mom anymore?

I know this is all about me, because you're fine; it's the people left behind who hurt and hurt.

It's a terrible club to be in, this one. My motherless friends know. It's different, and it's awful.

I've survived a year that I couldn't actually imagine surviving.

I have to admit that I don't remember large chunks of last year. Kind of like how I don't remember much of college. I know facts, I made friends, but there are big blank spaces. I'm not searching for them.

Anyway, here we are. It's been a year.

I love you and I miss you and I miss you and I miss you.

Love,

Lisa

Do not go gentle into that Teams meeting

Every Christmas of my childhood and beyond, we listened to a record of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales." 

It's a short and charming tale, if you're not familiar with it, and the way he reads it is marvelous.

But some Christmas Days, probably at the surly teenage ages and up, we just wanted to read our new books or play with our new toys or just retreat to our corners and not all sit in the living room together next to the record player hearing each other breathe.

Did we eventually have it on tape? CD? We must have. I just found it on YouTube.

Christmases were hard for my dad, and he was always melancholy, but because we weren't allowed to talk about it I don't know if it was family trauma, or abuse by Catholic priests when he was an altar boy, or Vietnam, or seasonal depression or regular depression or possibly bipolar disorder. 

I feel the weight of these less and less as I heal, but so often I have questions I'd like to ask...and there's nobody to ask.

My Uncle Jack passed away a few weeks ago. He was the last of that generation on both sides of the family, for me. 

I didn't know him growing up, but I'd gotten to know him a little as an adult. Donna, his partner after his wife passed away, was a dear childhood friend of my dad's, and they and my parents would get together.

A year or two before my dad died, he and Donna decided to go skydiving. Something he'd always wanted to do. He was delighted to have a partner with equal enthusiasm.

My mom and Uncle Jack stayed on the ground, while Dad and Donna soared.

But losing Jack felt like losing my mom all over again. She was the only person in my family who would keenly feel this loss.

Grief is endlessly surprising.

Anyway, from teen years to medicated years, for ol' Dylan Thomas, I was fully in the throes of seasonal affective disorder—except when we had Christmases south of the equator in heat and sunshine, which in my opinion is the way to go.

So surely I was rage raging against the dying of the light and it had nothing to do with my family or Thomas—who I adore as a poet and storyteller and as such, feel a little guilty for bastardizing his beautiful lines.

But clearly not guilty enough!

I don't know much of anything about the Welsh, except that Wales looks so beautiful and Fiona studied there and the Welsh were very fierce though unsuccessful in their uprisings. 

And also, after watching Doc Martin, I really want to go to Cornwall.

If you like the British murder villages but get tired of death, I highly recommend Doc Martin. 

I do realize they're not interchangeable. But apparently the Cornish were problematically fierce for the English as well.

Anyway, the main point of this story is that I had to be on a Teams meeting with Jordan's school.

Microsoft Teams hates me. The feeling is mutual.

If I try to attend on my phone, it says I have to download the app. But I deleted the app, because I never had the correct login information. So I thought I could get around it by getting rid of it.

No.

It knows that you're on a phone, and you can just go to the app store. So it's like, bitch, get the app and then come talk to me.

So now I make sure I'm on a laptop. But it has to be my mom's laptop, because the sound on mine is broken.

So I logged in 45 minutes ahead, just so that I knew I could. Like getting to your gate at the airport to make sure it's there, and then you can get a snack and use the bathroom.

Teams meetings derail my entire day up to the point where I successfully (or not) connect.

When we had meetings with India's teachers, I did everything right—right time, right laptop, right link—except it was a link for a teacher whose class she no longer has.

So then Nick called and I said, "I went to the fucking link they sent us but it's a link to the Chinese teacher and why do we fucking have to use fucking Teams I hate Teams so fucking much..."

And he said, "Dear, we've started the conference and I've got you on speaker, and two of India's teachers are on the line."

I apologized profusely for the profanity. They both laughed (I think) and said no children were present.

Apparently a couple minutes before they'd asked if they should wait for me to start the conference and Nick said the odds were I was struggling with Teams, and I'd be along shortly swearing about the platform. 

Which just confirms what I've long believed: people don't change as they age. 

They just become more so.

This was, you understand, prior to my Tabarnac Era. Also, my friend Brian recently reminded me of my interest in "What the Dickens?"

But Teams gets the full extent of my profane wrath.

Which is to say that on the whole I'm fine, and in this photo, I was in Puerto Rico with my children for spring break.

The day we got there, I was inhaling humid tropical air, and reveling in the foliage of my childhood. Bougainvillea always makes me happy.

Sometimes I think things but am not sure if I said them out loud, and so I ask if I said something out loud and people will tell me I did or didn't.

But in this case, I said, "When you guys are gone, I'm moving to the tropics." And my kids were all, WHAT? 

And I was all, oh did I say that out loud?

I said it out loud.

And so then I was like, OK, not really, haha I just love tropical weather. 

And now it's 90 in DC, thank goodness, because I was pretty sure it was going to be cold here for the rest of my born days.

All good. Carry on.

Just don't make me attend a Teams meeting.