the cassandra pages

Yes, Joy

In the comments on yesterday's post, EasyDiverChris wrote:

The peace and joy you wrote about in this post is a far cry from how I've previously viewed death.  It helps me see my mother's end in a new way and that has helped me cope.

Pat said:

As much as grief hurts, there is also so much sweetness. Did I somehow miss this for 50 years?

and Jean wrote:

One of the things I value most that friends have shared in their blogs is these glimpses of the way emotionally healthy people carry on living, eating, drinking, talking, loving, sharing, in the face of illness and death and grief - that grief doesn't have to be an entirely cold and lonely place. This is not the scenario I grew up with and I guess I never really knew it was possible.

Even our hosts last evening had written, out of consideration, wondering if we wanted to come for dinner or to cancel. But actually, we were delighted to be together with mutual friends.

The longer I live, and the more deaths I experience, the more I see they're all different. It's easier to feel joy at the end of 99 years of a well-lived life than when we all feel robbed and someone is snatched from us too early, or violently and suddenly. In fact it would feel, well, greedy to ask for more in this case. But in most deaths of people who've lived, say 50 or more years and had a chance to love and be loved and do some of the things they wanted, I think it's important to celebrate and be joyful for their time among us. Of course we always want more life - so did my father-in-law, even at 99! But death is less of a tragedy to me than it used to be.

What's tragic is never living one's life: failing to be present to the moments as they pass, failing to see, failing to participate.

I haven't always known this, and even now I know and live it imperfectly. I'm learning to live in the face of illness and troubles and aging and uncertainty, which means un-learning being depressed and self-absorbed about my own troubles, and realizing that life goes on in every moment, it is we who step off the track and feel like it's going on without us, or convince ourselves that "life" belongs to other people, or a previous time never to be recaptured.

Death also reminds me to live as if tomorrow might be my own last day -- not foolishly or rashly or graspingly, but with gratitude and intention, trying to understand what I'd regret if indeed I were contemplating the last few minutes or hours of my life, and acting to change my way of living, so that I have fewer regrets.

The things that were important to my father-in-law during these last four or five months were highly personal things he had not done in his 99 years. He took the long bed-ridden hours as an opportunity to reflect, to see most of the people he really wanted to, and to tell them what he needed to tell them. He said things to his children, and others, that he had never before said. Yes, he was also angry and frustrated at times at the loss of control and privacy and dignity he had always cherished. But on balance these months were a gift, and the people who shared them closely with him are all grateful that he used them well and that we were able to be witnesses to some of his thoughts and to his growth. He didn't resolve everything about his own life, or about religion, in his own mind, but he made big steps toward other people. That's part of why I feel joy now. And the other part is that he's not struggling any longer to overcome, by sheer force of will, a physical body that was tired out. Finally, it took over and let him go.

Thank You

I can't even begin to tell you how much we've appreciated the comments and emails you've left here. In the coming weeks, I will try to write back to all of you personally, but please know, in the interim, that what you've said means a huge amount to me and to J.

We're doing OK. Because there is so much to be done, blogging may be lighter than normal for a while. (If anyone here is interested in attending the memorial service, to be held in central Vermont on August 17, please send me an email and I'll send you the particulars.)

I'd also like to tell you this: I am nowhere near done writing about my father-in-law. He often talked about immortality as being like the fragrance of a rose that lingers in the room after the petals have fallen. There's something to that, and I hope he would be happy to know that his fragrance is likely to be perceptible for a long time.

Last night we were invited to dinner by an old friend of his and her husband. With the other guest, a woman we were delighted to meet whose own father had died last year in his mid-90s, we rode in their truck up a steep hill pasture to watch the sun go down on the mountains and hear J. read his father-in-law's obituary aloud. And then we returned to the old farmhouse porch for a summer dinner by the light of candles, the sound of the pond and bullfrogs below, the twinkling of fireflies in the trees. As we ate, we talked about my father-in-law: what he had meant to us all, and what his life had really been about. Those reflections served as a springboard for a wide-ranging discussion he would have appreciated about society, culture, politics, and spirit that carried us through dinner and dessert and then out under a sky where the Milky Way and a million stars and planets blazed as brightly as I've ever seen them. Our hosts turned off the interior lights of the house, and we all stood for a little while in the damp grass, finally silenced by the beauty and mystery of the black, punctured sky.

Obscurity and Struggle

"I don't know what to tell you," says the doctor. "This is the way it is when someone is dying. It isn't the heart, the kidneys, any one thing anymore. They pass in and out of lucidity. And it's very hard to tell you what to expect." He's a good guy, this doctor, and we don't have unreasonable expectations, of him or of this process. We're all waiting, wishing it could be easier.

There seems to have been a change starting on the weekend. My father-in-law is very weak but still insisting on getting up even though his legs won’t hold him; they're giving him morphine now as well as a sedative, to try to keep his blood pressure down, help his groaning, and keep him a little more manageable because he's been really angry, disoriented, and unable to communicate what he wants. He's refusing his other medications, and today, even water, though he ate last night, and apparently it's been a real struggle to give him the morphine and lorazepam. It seems like we're getting down toward the end but that it's going to be a struggle right up to the final moment; J. and I will be heading down there again tomorrow.

Why the refusal to give up, to go gently? Because peace flowing out of a simple conclusion never suited this contradictory man, whose mind has wrestled with the big questions as long as it could - and perhaps still is, as he grapples with confusion, growing darkness, and the fear he might have been wrong. Life -- the material body and the rational mind -- are what he knows and what he can hold onto as true. The rest: unknowable, and, except in poetic speculation, that was never the territory he wanted to travel.

Fa-sin-eh-ting!

How to do (and not do) an American accent: lessons for Brits from a famous acting/speech coach. Living in Montreal, where many English-speakers are either truly British or have a British accent, I'm more aware than ever of my American way of speech but hard put to identify exactly what I do that gives it away: here's the start of an explanation, amusingly delivered. Repeat after me: fleece, creep, speak...

Of Crêpes, Cats, and Calmness

Café Olimpico wasn't crowded when we arrived yesterday mid-morning, but half an hour later the line for coffee stretched all the way across the room. This little girl waited patiently for her mother; when we left she was eating a croissant and a small container of yogurt, and talking happily between every bite.

While V. and I ordered lattes, the guys went down the street to buy buckwheat crepes, which arrived folded in half and then in thirds to form a point at the bottom, and wrapped in a paper cone. The crepes -- dark, crusty on the edges, and dotted with fine holes -- had been buttered and dusted with plain sugar, and they were just about the best I've ever eaten, accompanied by the strong milky coffee. Our friends, who love food and cooking, had been at the Jean-Talon market, and told us they'd left V.'s mother sitting at the dining room table shelling not one, not two, but four huge bags of fava beans. The mother, who is from eastern Europe and lived for years under Communist rule during which a number of family members were imprisoned or exiled for their anti-Communist activities, jokingly calls these sorts of tasks - common in their fresh-food-intensive household - "labor camp."

After our brunch the friends took off for a visit to R.'s family in the Eastern Townships, and we got back on our bikes and rode over to Avenue du Parc, where J. took pictures of the old Theatre Rialto, and I visited a fruiterie where I bought a small box of Quebec raspberries and two "black velvet" apricots, which looked (and tasted) like dark furry plums. I also visited an excellent poissonnerie where the fish and shellfish were displayed like jewels peeking from a crystalline covering of ice chips: wild salmon; olive green sea urchins; ruffly skate; huge langoustines; snow crabs from the Isles des Madeleines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; a box of fresh smelt shimmering like coins in a treasure chest; buff-colored pasta clams the size of a man's thumbnail; shining black mussels. We didn't buy anything, finally -- it wasn't cheap -- but will go back some day when we're entertaining. Then a quick ride back through Mile End to Fairmont, where we stopped at the Japanese paper store and I bought three sheets of printed paper for a project, and then rode home through the blocks of brick duplexes and triplexes with their wrought iron staircases, windowboxes and front gardens overflowing with flowers.

Today has been nice too: though the air was very still, and the cathedral was hot and humid, we heard a Lassus mass setting and the sermon (taking off from the Gospel reading of the parable of the good and bad seeds to talk about the un-calm "garden" that is the Anglican Church these days) mentioned the Japanese Garden post from these pages a few days ago. (You never know what will happen when you write these things!) The postlude was very fine -- it was a piece I didn't know: the Bach Allegro from the Concerto in d after Vivaldi.

Then we went off to Verdun and a wonderful lunch at a friend's house, during which we got to meet her beautiful new cat: a different but equally inspiring vision of repose and tranquility. Back home -- a nap -- some email -- a chicken, mango, and avocado salad for dinner, and now an evening stretching before me with no plans but some reading and listening to music.

In other words, a restorative and happy weekend. I needed it and I'm grateful.

Waiting

We arrived at his apartment in the evening, the day after he had called and said he was dying and wanted to tell J. he loved him. The next day he had severe angina – the first really intense episode since the angina attack and hospital stay that had precipitated this entire decline - and was given nitroglycerine tablets, then a nitro patch, then some morphine. When we got there he was resting comfortably in his bed, on sunny yellow sheets, wearing a dark blue nightshirt covered with white moons and stars. We didn’t stay long, and told him we’d come back the next day, which we did, arriving there around dinnertime. He refused food, though, having already eaten two big meals earlier in the day.

He moves painfully from the bathroom to his chair in the living room, stopping at the kitchen counter to collapse onto the seat of his walker and be pushed the rest of the way, eyes shut, loud moans accompanying each breath.“Let’s have some action!” he says, his eyes roaming anxiously around the room. “What are we waiting for?”

We sit in our own chairs, waiting, suspended with him in this interminable purgatory. After a cursory “hello” upon noticing us, he sits in his chair, moaning, unseeing, for a long time. Now his eyes open; I move the little rush-seated stool closer to him. “Let’s do something!” he insists, seeming agitated as he searches my face. “I think the three of us should take some action! Where are my shoes?”

“In the back room.”

“They’re hanging on a hook,” he elaborates, and then clutches at the neck of his bathrobe. “Where are my clothes?”

“Also in the back room.”

“What good are they, lying there? Let’s do something! The day is starting.”

It’s six in the evening, but no matter. “What do you want to do?”

No response.

“Shall we pretend it’s morning and we’re going to chapel?” He raises his eyebrows. “If you were going to speak to the students in chapel today, what would you tell them?”

“That I want to DIE!” The words emerge in a growl from between clenched teeth.

“Oh. I’m not sure they’re going to want to hear that.” He gives a slight, very slight, smile.

“When did we get to London?” he asks, suddenly.

“We’re not actually in London."

“Really?”

“No, unfortunately. If we were there we could go to the museum. Like we used to do after breakfast." He gives me another wan smile. I’m thinking fast. What to say next? “We had a lot of good times in London, didn’t we? Do you remember John W.? And Lady W.?”

“She’s dead!”

“Yes.”

“Is he dead now too?”

“No, he’s very much alive and always asks about you.”

“So we’re not in London?  Where are we?”

“In your apartment in X.”

He looks at me, astounded. “Really? Amazing!”

“See, all your books are here. Simone de Beauvoir.” He looked surprised again. “Up there on the shelf. Your daughter arranged all your books for you.”

“Alphabetically?”

“No, they’re more by subject area. That’s a little French section up there: Simone de Beauvoir, Stendhal, Andre Gide... you have a wonderful library.”

“Keep it!”

“I think we probably will. All your children have good libraries.”

He nods, and then sits, silent. At length he rouses himself and makes an announcement to the room: “I know what we’re waiting for.”

“What is that?”

“We’re all waiting for me to die.”

A little stunned, neither of us have any idea what to say, so we are silent as well.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he goes on. “Putting someone in their bed for months and just waiting for them to die.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s Christian.”

I think hard, trying to choose between various ways of responding. Finally I take the riskiest one. “So, would you prefer the hemlock?” I ask him, speaking gently.

“No,” he says solemnly and sadly. “I wouldn’t drink it.”

“Neither would I, probably. So I guess we just have to wait.”

“I suppose so,” he says, and shuts his eyes.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Japanese Garden, Take 2

The Japanese Garden

To listen to me reading this piece, you can download the audio file.

The weeping plum trees bow to the approaching visitor, before the entrance gate, before the tea house behind its screen of bamboo. A grassy lawn, curving paths, rocks, a stand of purple iris next to a yellow-flowered bush alive with bees. We hear the waterfalls before we see them, short broad cascades into wide pools, like stair landings, leading down into the greenish, still pond.

We circle counterclockwise, sit for a moment on a wooden bench in an open building where a group of German tourists consult their guidebooks, and another woman in a hat sleeps in the sun against the white wall, her head bent slightly to the side. The lesson here is texture and contrast: I run my hand along the undulating close-trimmed hedge of yellow-green juniper bordered by low reddish grass with softly swaying foxtail heads. In the curved knees of the juniper rest wide-leaved peonies, dark and glossy, now done with flowering and neatly dead-headed: what a sight they must have been a month ago. Above: old hemlocks and firs; the soft needles of tamaracks; white birches; a gingko; a pear.

Water, too, is ordered: running here in a wide canal, here over rounded pebbles, here in a narrow stone channel; rushing over waterfalls, dripping from a mouth of bamboo, standing mirror-like in pools that reflect the sky. And from the murky green rise the koi, the size of human infants, fluttering their fins like wings: orange, canary yellow, alarming white. I stand on the wooden walkway and they rise to the surface, gasping, like guilty thoughts and forgotten promises, black-spotted, eyes rolling with reproach. Legless ones, captives in this watery limbo.

I return their stare and then leave the platform, moving back onto the path, up into the shadows of taller trees where a thin squirrel digs furiously for the nut he’s hidden. On the edge of the black woods is a stand of maidenhair fern, lush and astonishing; beneath a fir, pale yellow pendant blooms hang above broad leaves where turquoise dragonflies are laying eggs with a delicately curving touch of their tails. The path circles back toward the pond; I stop in dappled shade to consider a close-trimmed boxwood  and rock, joined together in a lifelong pas de deux.

And here, glimpsed through the low branches of the spruces, a female duck stands, in one of the cascade pools, regal and calm, her long neck and back striped brown as if with a carefully-dripped glaze. On the bank, her half-grown brood sleeps in the sun, a beak tucked behind a wing, bodies comfortably and confusingly entangled into a unity of warm feathers and forgetfulness. The mother watches, on one foot,  timeless and motionless as bronze, except for the blinking of an eye.

Small Stones

Underwater stones, Lake Champlain, Vermont

Today it's my pleasure to welcome Fiona Robyn, who is traveling the internet in July on a virtual blog tour for her new book, Small Stones: A Year of Moments. I've come to know Fiona and enjoy her writing both through her daily blog and at qarrtsiluni, where she has been a frequently-published contributor and a guest editor (of the Jan/Feb 2007 issue "Come Outside.")

I'm delighted to have this chance to share our recent conversation with you, and perhaps introduce some new readers to Fiona's precious, often surprising "small stones."

---

Fiona, I've really enjoyed your book. Your practice of attentiveness and writing about at least one particular, memorable thing in your day has, of course, a lot of resonance here at The Cassandra Pages! To begin, I wondered if you could say a few words about your dedication to Shunryu Suzuki, because his teaching was also very important to me.

Thank you. A friend recommended 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind' a few years ago when I told them I was getting interested in Zen thought, and I don't know about you, Beth, but I didn't understand much of it on my first read through!  Something about the spirit of the writing stuck with me, though, and several years later I read it again and went on to read his autobiography, 'Crooked Cucumber', which somehow moved me profoundly. I love the simplicity of Suzuki's message - 'just sit', 'nothing extra', 'when the bell rings, get up', but most of all I felt like I'd 'spent time with him' by the end of the book, and that it had been a great honour and learning opportunity.  What do you get from his writing?

My experience was almost the same - on the first reading I just didn't connect with the book, but about ten years later, it was a totally different experience, and each time I've  picked it up since, I've gotten more out of it. "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." I think what appealed to me especially was the gentleness of his teaching and writing. He's firm but kind, and the sort of perseverance and attention he speaks about made sense to me and have helped and changed me over time. But his prose also touched me deeply and particular passages, like the one about why we should polish the tile, or clever students having the most trouble, or Nirvana and the waterfall, made a huge difference to me. I'm profoundly grateful to him.

One thing I noticed and liked in particular about your "small stones" is that they're not all pleasant or beautiful. Could you say something about that, in light of what we've been talking about here?

I think praise as a practice is much neglected, and I much admire the work of bloggers like Clare Grant at Three Beautiful Things who help us to remember how much we have to be thankful for.  But as a writer I am interested in the whole truth, 'things as it is (sic)' as Suzuki might say!  Rather than looking away from road-kill or homeless people, I've found it more helpful to look more closely.  These things are a part of our everyday reality.  We all contain these dark places, and only we can start to acknowledge them, struggle with them, start bringing them out into the daylight.  I think Pema Chodron speaks well about these messy parts of us.  It's also an ongoing dilemma for me as a writer - will people keep reading if I describe the innards of this dead animal?  How much darkness (how much of my darkness) can people take?  I wonder if this is something that ever crosses your mind, Beth, when you are writing about your father-in-law?

Oh, definitely. And blogs are different from books, they aren't one-off; people visit a place regularly because they like what they find there. I know some readers come to the Cassandra Pages because they receive a feeling of solace and calm, and I worry sometimes about scaring them off!  But I'm totally with you, Fiona, in being more interested in truth than beauty, in its usual sense. We can learn to find the beauty in everything, even decay and death, even struggle and suffering. For a long time I thought the Buddhist idea about duality was that we couldn't see one side of the coin clearly unless we also saw the other: "for the moon there is the cloud," -- so suffering exists to make us appreciate non-suffering. But I've come to see that's not really it: the point is to face and even welcome difficulty, ugliness, pain because they have a great deal to teach us, and avoidance doesn't work: misfortune comes to all of us eventually so we're better off to learn how to deal with it. I like it that your small stones acknowledge reality. It made your book much more meaningful -- and beautiful -- to me!

On the other hand, I thought some of the most lyrical moments in the book came in your writings about the moon:

"the moon is so transparent you could slip a thumb-nail under the edge and peel it from the sky"

or

"(eclipse) the pale moon turns illm slips under a sheet of shadow"

or

"the translucent moon pinned on egg-shell blue, above the pink and billowing skirts of sky."

Like the Chinese poets, you've managed to come up with creative, original ways to speak about the most ordinary things we see everyday, things which are easy to ignore or often get written about it a hackneyed way. But they're still beautiful; they've spoken to human beings forever. It's a challenge, isn't it?

Thank you.  And yes - it is a challenge - and that reminds me of the process of editing the book.  I had three years worth of 'stones' to choose from, and a lot of them just didn't do it for me on re-reading.  It's as if I hadn't quite managed to translate the feeling of 'ooh!' or 'look at that!' into words.  Or maybe it was a combination of a failure of SEEING freshly enough with not being able to find the right fresh words.  I'm thinking of Suzuki again as I use the word 'fresh'...

"Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind."

Even thought we often see the moon, you must look at the moon each time with a fresh mind!  Or try to, at least...  I'm glad the suffering made the book more meaningful to you, Beth - it feels heartening to me - that at least you are willing to hear about the poor fox on the roadside, or the troubled boy in the coffee shop.  I suppose, going back to Zen again, we also contain the fox and the boy, and so it is also as if you are able to hear about those dark places in me.  Having said that, light and fluffy is also good sometimes!

That's so true! And I want to stress that this isn't a "dark" book at all; I get the sense that you're a lot like me in trying to see the beauty in everyday life, and that as we practice this kind of noticing, it starts to color our whole life - and become something that we want to share with other people.
Fiona, I'm so glad we had this chance to talk, and I hope some of the readers of this blog will order your book and enjoy it themselves or give it as a gift. I feel so strongly about the merits of independent publishing that I've made a personal commitment to buy most of my book-gifts this way, and to try to support the many writer-friends I've found online.

I also want to tell you that I admire the calm, determined, professional way you're promoting Small Stones -- you're an example to all of us who are exploring this new world of publishing. Congratulations, and I wish you the best of luck with it!

That's very kind, Beth - it's been so heartening to receive support from my colleagues, especially blogging colleagues.  And I agree - I've gained such a lot over the years from 'pay-more-attention' practice that I'd love to spread the word!  It's been a pleasure to have this 'conversation' with you - not quite as good as coffee and cake in a local cafe but it'll have to do for now.  I'd be very happy to hear from any of your readers who have any comments/questions, and thank you for having me.