Tag Archives: grief

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Songs to raise girls: Down by the Salley Gardens

In 2009 my sister came to visit for spring break and our birthdays. We were born in March, five days and three years apart. I said that her birthday present was arranged: a recording session with me, her and my father, to record some of the family songs that we had been singing since birth.

My family had music parties in the 1960s on the east coast and when they were in college at the University of Tennessee. My mother had quit Cornell and my father had quit Princeton and they got married and went to the U of TN and I was born 9 months later. They were very poor. My mother said that she wanted to buy me a three dollar teddy bear but that they just couldn’t afford it.

They did not have a television. They were beatniks and admired On the Road. My father’s family all played instruments and sang. My mother had a much less trained voice but she had a prodigious memory and knew the fourth, fifth, sixth and all the verses of the folk songs. My father also sang classical music and had already sung at Carnegie Hall in his prep school chorus, Williston Prep School. He hated prep school. He had a full scholarship there and to Princeton because he scored perfectly on the early SAT test.

My parents refused to get a television until I was nine and my sister was six. So we sang.

My sister’s response to the birthday present: “Best Birthday Gift Ever.”

She had cancer and my father had emphysema. My mother had died in 2000. I was trying to capture their voices.

We recorded for two two hour sessions in a local in home studio. We made a list of songs and lost it on the way there. So we just took turns naming songs. Both my sister and my father play guitar. I brought kazoos, which we used on a round. We recorded each song once and in two days we recorded 36 songs.

I bought two more recording sessions at silent auctions, but we did not get to record again. And now they are both gone.

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My mother and father would sing “Down by the Salley Gardens” as a duet. He was a baritone and low bass. She was an alto. My sister and I sang her part in the recording.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears

by William Butler Yeats in 1889

Listening to it, I miss my mother, my father, my sister. I miss singing with them. It was a love duet for my parents, and full of longing.

The photo is my parents, in about 1960.

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Full lunar eclipse

Long long ago, when the universe was forming, the Moon fell in love with the Sun.

The Moon was afraid that the Sun wouldn’t see her, because the Sun was so bright. Slowly she pulled herself together. After careful thought, she chose to orbit the Earth.

Now it is another full lunar eclipse. Her face reflects the Sun’s glory back to him. She slides behind the Earth in a three hour version of her usual cycle, from full to only her own light back to full.

“Where are you, Moon?” bellows the Sun. He hates these quick disappearances. He yells and bellows and tantrums. But the Moon knows that he will forget quickly and that he has not bothered to learn and predict her cycles. He doesn’t like to be reminded of loss and endings and death.

The Sun likes it best when he has her full glory, face reflected back to him. He doesn’t see her light. Each month she moves from reflecting his light towards her quiet time when it is only her light that is visible from Earth. She needs this time to remember that she has her own light, even if it is a shadow compared with the sun.

“You should orbit me!” says the Sun, but the Moon knows that if she orbited him she would be burned and barren and dead, no rest and no light of her own. One night a month the Moon remembers who she is and is alone. She lets her quiet darkness shine. The Earth whispers, “Why do you love the Sun so? Don’t cry, Sister.” The Earth’s salt water tides move like tears.

Sometimes the Moon longs for ending, but she remembers: all love, returned or not, is longing and praise for the Beloved. Maybe she will not be loved or seen as she longs to be in this life, but she too will return to the Beloved and be One. And after her time in the dark she slowly returns to reflecting the Sun.

And the Sun loves her in his way. He loves to watch his reflection grow on her face each month, preens in it, until she is full. He is more irritable in the second half, as she turns her face away again. She wishes that he would look past his own light and see her.

Now the little eclipse is ending and she is rapidly becoming full again. The Sun is cheering up.

“It’s silly of you to hide your face.” says the Sun, fondly.

The moon does not smile. The Sun sees his own smile reflected in her face.

 

I took the photo in 2009 at Joshua Tree.

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Grieve

For Ronovan’s Weekly Haiku Challenge #66, 2 of the 3 numbers of the beast. The words are pine and grief.

pine, supine, repine
grief, thief, disbelief is chief
rewind, rest mind, find

I suppose the image could be a pine. But this is a picture I took from the Synchronized Swimming Nationals in 2012. Water can be tears, right? Sometimes we are immersed before we can be lifted out…..

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Cat Collapse Disorder

Boa cat is 11. We got her and Princess Mittens when my daughter was 7.

Last summer Princess Mittens was killed by a car in front of our house. We were looking for her the day after she went missing. A neighbor said, “There is a cat dead across the street. I’m sorry.” Yes, it was Princess, all stiff. We put her in a box and brought her in the living room. Boa came in, and went stiff legged, arched and fur on end and backed out of the room. She had been crying and looking for Princess and she stopped then.

The next morning we dug a hole and buried Princess in the back yard. Boa joined us and watched. She avoided the living room for 24 hours and then was ok.

Without her companion, she is more social. Princess was the one who would come into the middle of a party and lie down as equidistant from all the people as possible. Boa would rarely venture out in company but now she is social.

In January she started dropping weight. She didn’t look right. By March I worried. I changed her food first, to an all protein, no corn, no GMO one. In May she went to the vet. She is an indoor outdoor cat. I let her out for a while when I am up writing in the hour of stupid early and the hour of insomnia and the hour of convalescence. Both cats would return when I clapped, because that meant I was locking the door and might not open it again until I returned from work. No cat door. We have a family of raccoons and they can get a bit exciting in the house.

The vet said fleas and parasites and maybe we should do a whole bunch of things including antibiotics. I negotiated by phone from Portland. My daughter promised to pat Boa while I was gone. She’s a bit cat allergic, so usually she doesn’t. She said, “Can I wear your clothes if I am going to pat Boa?” Well, good idea. She wore a cat-patting outfit and then promptly changed.

Anyhow, Boa is still thin but better. And so why would she have fleas and parasites and general awfulness after we’ve pretty much managed her the same way for 11 years? Grief, I think. I got terribly ill after my sister died and then after my father died. I think that grief lowered her immune mechanisms and she was just prone to everything. And why did I switch her food? I don’t think that cats normally eat corn or much vegetable filler, and so I wanted her nutrition to be as normally cat like as possible. Also, this spring she caught and ate 7 mice and two birds and she has never done that before. I think she had realized that the cat food I had for her was not ok. Since I switched foods, she has not brought in any catches. She also thinks I’m a bit dense, but you know….

I used to think those people who bought organic for their pets were nuts. But I can change my mind.

But reading about honeybee collapse disorder, it’s not one mechanism: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006481. It looks like it’s multifactorial. Do GMOs bother honeybees enough that then they are more likely to get parasites and mites and whatever? Or maybe the bees are grieving…..

The picture is from 2005. Boa is the black one and Princess Mittens is the black and white tabby.

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the kind of people

my cousin’s husband said
I wouldn’t want to be around the kind of people who play paintball
which silenced me as I suppose he meant to as I stared at him thinking that since I was telling him that I had taken my son to play paintball as a celebration of my son getting a 4.0 in sixth grade and we were framing it as a celebration rather than a reward so that low grades would not generate in turn a punishment and I was trying to tell my cousin’s husband about the third round of paintball and I was the only woman there and definitely the only mother there and by then the sharpshooters in camouflage had asked why I was there and I had explained upon which one said “you are a good mom” and so in the third round when my son said that he wanted to be on the opposite team as his mother the guys giggled and we were on opposite teams and I am good at hiding in the woods but was having a bit of trouble with trajectory so everyone on his team was shot but him and everyone on my team was shot but me and I was trying to shoot my son with a paintball in a desultory sort of way since he was peppering the tree I was crouched behind when he ran out of ammo and we walked back to the safe area me with the gun held over my head saying “moms rule” and the sharpshooters in camo said we are going to shoot you next time and they certainly did
and I didn’t say any of that to my cousin’s husband
because I am one of the kind of people who play paintball and so is my son and I realized abruptly when my cousin’s husband said that that I really want to love everyone and so I still send love to my cousin’s husband but honestly I have trouble being around people who divide the world into us and them and didn’t Jesus and buddha and Muhammed all say essentially that god is love and Rumi says that the universe is the Beloved and so everyone is Beloved and we are all part of the one and there is no division and if god is love then there can be no hell
and I don’t really visit that cousin any more
and I still wonder why people want us and them and why people talk about that kind of people and I try to work with every kind of people that comes into my clinic that’s why I became a doctor really because I wanted to understand people and understand love and forgive things that happened when I was very little and thought that really, the big people were insane and loving but not trustworthy and obviously this is a fail in the end because I truly don’t understand how anyone could ever make assumptions about anyone else and ever say that they wouldn’t want to be around
the kind of people

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let go

For Ronovan’s weekly haiku challenge, the words are hope and luck.

I saw my doctor yesterday, still on half time and it looks like it will stay that way until January or longer. Slow healing. I am finding it hard though I am healing and often people don’t or aren’t or won’t…..

I let go of hope
for love my luck is to be
alone writing love

the picture is from my garden

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Any day now

any day now

I will be going going to the lake to the rocks to the place I went to when I was five months and in the womb too

any day now

no electricity and the cell phones don’t work we filter the lake water now as the coliform count rises but still the water I taste it and memories rise like fish like turtles like lake trout from the depths my sister wants her ashes there but no worries there are bits of all our skin my uncles ashes were scattered there last time I went I burned a little of my hair my father’s hair my daughter’s hair my son’s hair so that our ashes would be there too

any day now

forwarded email as I’ve left the cousin email in protest of the emails about my father’s will circulating behind my back the propane delivery has closed down and we must go out of Blind River for propane the 100 pound tanks have to be carried upright which makes the rental car more of a challenge we used to get 60 pound tanks but they are harder to replace we are all always getting older

any day now

my cell used to work on one cabin porch when it was overcast but that was tmobile and I have another now so probably it won’t work and we are all still broken in the aftermath of my sister I will look in the cabin and donate all the shoes that none of us will every wear hers her daughter’s her husband’s that cabin is a castle a monument of dreams and I have not been there for three years and I hear the roof is going we don’t have enough money or cooperation I thought the Trust we fail at that by the way was 30 years but it is 40 and we are now half way and I am thinking about how to handle it

any day now

because I love this land this lake and I will not give it up oh Beloved help us heal

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Not yet adequately adored

I am wandering in the forests of emotion I am comfortable now mostly I don’t talk about it much though occasionally I am irritable I am thinking about love I have had my children going commando could also be going postmenopausal because there is no longer bleeding or if there is I would have to get checked for uterine cancer but it is hot and why wear underwear of course apparently things can still get wet which is a bit of a surprise since so many women complain of less libido once the hormones drop I as usual do everything ass backwards and want sex more than ever but not when I am working hard and tired and cursing the new server laptop printer program and the keyboard is spaced differently and more sensitive all this fucking equipment when what we really want is to be loved as we are I have only seriously dated two people in the last seven years and one said that what I want is to be adored he said he couldn’t and I thought why not and Rumi says the depth of the longing is our depth of longing for the Beloved and really it’s not a forest for me it’s the ocean it’s the deepest part of the ocean those rifts and I dive all the way and don’t care if I run out of air Beloved I am not yet adequately adored

I will go for coffee instead.

the photo is from 2006, one swimmer carrying the younger swimmer