I seem interested only in speaking with people I believe can talk about loss in a particular way.  Artist Holly Swan wrote: “When you experience a loss, time seems to stop.  You are left with a hole.  But what if that hole is a sacred space you hold in your heart?”  To me, there is no “what if?”  Of course that hole is a sacred space.

I am interested in talking about that hole and how it is we carry it as we move through life.  One moment, we experience it as an ache; in another, it is an abyss; in another, a weight and a darkness.  Then there are moments when its presence is momentarily outside of our awareness.

Being with someone who is dying is a meditation.  Or maybe better put, it is an invitation to meditate (which Jon Kabat-Zinn defines as “attention in the moment without judgment”).  Simone was in the hospital at two separate times over the course of two-and-a-half weeks: once for six days when she was first diagnosed, and the next for three full days and nights when it was clear that chemo wouldn’t buy her any more time.  That first stint, I was in the hospital room with Simone and Lauren two nights and three days, and the second time I stayed three nights and three days.

I saw my main job as being another maternal presence for Simone’s nights while Lauren slept a couple feet away on the hospital cot.  My hope was that Lauren would be able to ease into sleep knowing someone equally watchful was awake, attending to her gravely ill child while she slept.  There were moments, awake at night, when my mind ran ahead.  Perhaps I’d think to the up-coming meeting with the oncologist, or perhaps I’d anticipate the next moment when Simone would awaken, and I’d worry that she would need something I couldn’t offer.  (After all, what could I offer?  I wasn’t her mom and I wasn’t a miracle-worker.)

Thinking ahead like this, I felt a rising panic every time.  In the future, another glass waited to shatter, to send its sharp, hard pieces through the air, to pierce us on the fragile platform we’d made after the last bit of shattering news. How could I prepare in any way for the next wound?  How could I hope to see which direction it was coming from to protect us from it?

Thinking like this for any length of time would clearly render me useless before long.  At some point, thankfully, I’d remember to tell myself, “Just get through this moment.  How is it right now?  You can’t know about the next one; stay in this one.”

Writing about being with someone who is dying – about being with her, her mother and her grandparents, with her boyfriend, uncles and her cousins – is somewhat fraught.  I need to reassure my reader (that is, I need to reassure you for myself, not necessarily for you) that I know the heroes of this story are Simone and her mom, Lauren.  I do not mean or intend to appropriate that.  I need to say explicitly that while I want to write about what I saw and thought and experienced, I in no way mean to suggest – ever – that the role I played was super-hard.  My job in this story was a cakewalk compared to my sister-in-law, Lauren’s.  All I had to do was support the two of them as they made some very hard decisions.  I didn’t have to make any of those decisions myself, and so I was free of second-guessing them later.

That’s the “I” who is writing this.  She is the “I” who had the luxury of being one removed.

This morning , I walked to work early, so the frost – our second day of it – was on the ground still.  I was reminded of a day 37 years ago at just this time of year when I lived in the Willamette Valley.

That morning was, in fact, the first day of November 1976. I noted this fact to myself before I headed across our rural road with my brother to wait for the bus to take us to the high school.  It had been an awful year so far – for my brother and me, and for my parents especially.  (My sisters seemed to fare this year a little better, though they should correct me if I’m wrong.)  The sky was gun-metal gray and low.  But something in the quality of the cold reminded me of New England, where we’d lived until recently, and I was uplifted.

(Actually, it’s the me sitting here writing this – as opposed to the me back then –  who believes the association with New England is perhaps what lightened my mood that day.  I’d lived in that region almost all of the previous nine years and been mostly happy there.  Autumn days on the cusp of winter had been my favorite.)

On school mornings, my brother and I waited beside our mailbox, and on this morning, strung between the mailbox and its post, a spider had made a web.  It was encrusted with frost.

It’s November 1, I thought.  And now here is this jewel-like creation at my bus stop.  Everything is going to be okay.

I often got through the difficult times of my adolescence and young adulthood finding “signs” that it was okay to hope; that if things were hard now, things would get better soon.  I knew this because a heron flew by, or because I smelled wild grapes after a rainfall, or because of a spiderweb that put me in mind of the miniature flocked evergreen tree in our Christmas decorations.

Now, I don’t have such an easy relationship with hope.  I don’t mean to imply that I am hopeless.  But I know that the presence of natural beauty is simply that; it promises nothing other than itself.  Things in life will be as they will be whether a heron flies by or not.

Yet, beauty promising “nothing other than itself” is actually promising a lot.  I like to think that part of me was simply appreciating the image before me and recognizing what a privilege it was to be able to look upon beauty and to know it when I saw it.  It wasn’t hope that got me through, but rather it was beauty that carried me.

As some of you know, three weeks ago, on October 5, my niece Simone died at the age of 18.  She had been diagnosed less than three weeks before that with cancer.  Cancer took her swiftly – too swiftly for us to grasp, really.  That will perhaps take most of the rest of our lives.

Writing can’t help but be part of my journey about this tragedy – just as my daughter’s journey after losing her sister-cousin involves lots and lots of drawing and painting.  It has felt unclear to me how to proceed with that writing though.  The topic of death and its aftermath is not the usual stuff of this blog, and I don’t care to shift my focus here quite so thoroughly.  I have never wanted a reader – accustomed to my shorter form and (usually) light touch – to feel hijacked by a blog post.  At the same time, it feels wrong somehow to proceed with only those topics I deem consistent with the blog’s previous life without acknowledging somewhere that I stand on new ground.

Simone’s death is now part of everything I might do, so in that regard, it will be present in anything I write for this blog.  Likely you will glimpse her – if only sometimes between the lines.  How could it be otherwise?

The other day, I was texting someone, and of course I took shortcuts in my spelling to make it easier to compose the message.  I found myself typing “tho’t” for “thought” – and it took me back to the numerous letters I received over the course of my adult life from my Grandma Gould.  She was a steady letter writer for whom the act was a chance to say “I’m thinking of you.”

Mostly she wrote me when I had responded to one of her letters, though I did occasionally get letters just because she thought it might be nice for me to get one – say, at my new teaching job on the Oregon coast, or when I moved from Austin to Pasadena.  Her letters were full of words like “tho’t” (I suspect the correct text spelling is, in fact, “thot”), and I am sorry to say that – at least in my early adulthood – these writing shortcuts of hers irritated me.

How’s that for self-centered adolescent-like nerve: “You are taking the time to write me a letter but I intend to quibble silently about how you spell your words”!  I cringe to acknowledge the ways that I was a simply a normal teenager (and post-teenager).  I never aspired to be normal, and in this I was largely successful.  I also knew it was ridiculous to be embarrassed by things the adults in my life did, or wore – but that didn’t stop me from being embarrassed.

So even though my grandma hopefully didn’t know she was in a position to be vindicated, I still feel she somehow is by the fact that now her favorite writing shortcuts are all the rage.  Adding a little humility to my stack doesn’t hurt either.

White lettering on a black t-shirt: “Dead Women Are Easy.”  The guy wearing it puffed on his cigarette and walked back and forth in front of the cafe where I sat.  He walked a dog that would make a gerbil look robust.  Yes, of course I was offended, of course I was angered. But I was also bemused.  Why would someone want to put that out into the world?  Why would he want anyone to think, upon seeing him, “Now there goes a guy who is so driven by sexual impulses he’d rather practice necrophilia than be with a real, live, thinking woman,” or “There goes a guy so repellent the only woman he could hope to have sex with is a dead one?”

I’m not writing this to take pot shots at him.  I am writing to pose that question in a larger way:  Why do we put messages out into the world that are thoughtless, aggressive and offensive?  Or maybe a better question is, Why do we not think more about what we put out into the world?  I don’t mean for these questions to be  rhetorical.

The flip side of this question is a rant my kids are familiar with: take care what you allow into your mind.  If you watch a show where a zombie eats off the face of someone else, that now resides in your brain somewhere.  We don’t always have control over what we take in (witness the above t-shirt), so when we do have control, use it wisely.  But of course these ideas are connected.  If I am not in the habit of protecting my own mind from things that might harm me, I am also unlikely to attend to the idea that what I do might affect another.  (I want to add here – because I am channeling my stepson, Chris, at the moment – that I also recognize we are all different.  Something that might be deeply troubling to one person could be no big deal to someone else.)

By way of denouement, I offer this quote from Stephen Jenkinson: “Creation longs to be seen, through the singing and response, or the gesture that you make, or your willingness to dress in your finest so that there’s no such thing as work clothes anymore.”  Here’s to humanity singing, and gesturing, and clothing itself more intentionally; here’s to humanity figuratively wearing its finest more, so that what we see when we look in the mirror – and what others see when they pass us on the street – is our intention to make the world a finer place.

Hi, all.  My friend, Karen, wrote a great comment in response to my post a couple weeks back (entitled “You aren’t anybody if you’re not on Facebook”).  I have her permission to share it with all of you.  I want to, in part, because I felt uneasy with something about that post ever since I hit the Publish button.  Her comment gives me a chance to revise my stance and revisit her always-insightful thoughts.

“I have no such feelings about Facebook or Instagram, though I use them both. However, what you’ve described is one of the main reasons I stopped blogging, actually. I would feel this small surge of relief when I was doing or experiencing something blog-worthy. I’d start mentally phrasing out how I would present this or that event while I was experiencing it, and like you said, it took me away from the experience and into the framing of it. Sort of like when everyone used to videotape the kid birthday parties rather than participating in them.

“On a related note, I also felt something like this way back when I was in therapy. After the first couple of months, when all the veins of my childhood were unmined, when I was suffering through a terrible divorce, I just went in there and let loose. Then came the times when a little something would happen and I would think, ‘Oh, good, I can talk about this in therapy this week.’ Soon after that, I graduated with my therapist’s good wishes.”

Oh, yeah, that’s right: we’re all different.  So, it’s not that Facebook or blogging or whatever takes us out of the moment.  It’s that we humans take ourselves out of our present moments sometimes, and when we are determined to do so, we each have our favorite ways of doing that.  At least, that’s where I go after considering Karen’s response to my post.  My aforementioned uneasiness, I think, originated because my post had a hint of judgmental-ness to it: I don’t do Facebook, and see how these people who do get pulled out of being in the moments they’re in.  As if, as a non-Facebook user, I was immune to this effect.

But wait, it gets better: I plan to start using Facebook for work purposes soon.  How’s that for irony?

Yesterday, I was doing some touch-up painting in our bathroom while Kami and Luken took turns choosing music to play.  At one point, the Beatles’ “Help” came on, and I immediately thought of our dear, longtime neighbors, Will and Katie – who after eight (nine?!!!!) years are moving from across the street to another Portland neighborhood.

It’s not the song “Help” per se that brings this Will-and-Katie association with it – it’s any Beatles song.  A couple of years into Will and Katie’s time as neighbors, they learned that our kids had not yet been exposed to the music of the Beatles.  (The why of that is another story.)  Will in particular took it upon himself to rectify this situation.  Whenever we spent time at their house, the Beatles played in the background, Beatles trivia was shared, and in all ways the kids were converted into avid Beatles fans.  I don’t think Kami became a drummer because of Ringo, but she certainly has a fondness for him that probably contributed to that decision.  Luken went through periods of time where he listened repeatedly to Beatles albums.  We have all been brought back from the Dark Side and over to the Beatles Side.

I cannot say enough how much I like it that something as accessible and ubiquitous as Beatles songs brings Will, Katie and their family to my mind.  They have been an integral part of making this place feel like a neighborhood, and though I’ll still see them, I will miss their presence here.  When they first moved here, Garth and I referred to them between ourselves as the Golden Couple.  It wasn’t just their tow-headed children, or long-legged Katie’s flowing hair, or Will’s bright blue eyes and ready smile.  It was also their intelligence, creativity, enthusiasm and humor.  Could they be more perfect, we wondered affectionately.

Thank god they’re NOT perfect.  But I still think they’re pretty golden, and I will miss the warmth of the light they cast on Taylor St.  Luckily, there will 214 opportunities for me to turn on the radio or the computer or the CD player and – thanks to John, Paul, George and Ringo – bring some of that feeling up again.

Okay, I took liberties with that quote,  which originally comes from the Gus van Sant movie To Die For and actually reads, “You aren’t really anybody in America if you’re not on TV.”  It comes to mind because two clients this week have shared stories about something they did last weekend (going kayaking and installing a window air conditioner) that included comments like, “And then we decided to post pictures on Facebook.”

When my family and I were in Hawaii in April, I noticed a creeping self-consciousness after awhile because, simultaneous to taking pictures of some place or event, I would think to myself, If this is a good picture, I’ll put it on our Hawaii blog and this is what I’ll say about it.  In other words, I became aware of my slide into leaving the present moment by planning my blog post.  My clients, too, were less present for air conditioner installing and kayaking because they allowed themselves to be preoccupied by planning the Facebook posts.  I imagine a process something like, While being photographed  balancing the air conditioner in the window, the person thinks of the caption that will accompany it: This is me balancing the air conditioner in the window.

I do not mean for this to turn into a rant about Facebook.  I believe every generation has its pitfalls, its siren call away from what we are doing right now.  But I also believe every generation requires its skeptics, those who say, “I’m not sure it’s a good thing to be so hooked into Facebook (or blog posts) that the planning of the next post occupies one part of our mind while the rest of our mind is shooting the rapids.”  That could prove dangerous.

And more than that, if we have had a devastating first relationship and now have a fledgling new relationship, and this new person notices that in the current heat wave, our apartment is brutally hot and goes out to buy a window unit and comes to install it for us because we don’t know how – it seems to me we’d want as much of our brain to be on-board as possible, to notice this moment, this moment where we find evidence that maybe, this time, we’ve found someone who cares about us.

Every Monday evening on the way home from work, I pass the community policing center (otherwise known as the police station) on NE 47th and Burnside.   There, as I wait for the light to change, I hear bagpipes.  It has been this way for years.  Some bagpiper has convinced the police station that s/he could use its rooftop parking lot after hours to march around and practice.  It makes sense that a bagpiper would find it difficult to locate a place to practice.  Anyway, no matter how I’m feeling, it does my heart good to hear music played loudly, well, and outdoors.

And of course, I love the bagpipes.  I still remember the first time I heard bagpipes playing Amazing Grace.  I lived, fittingly, in Scotland at the time.  I was eleven years old, and my mother was having a great time finding music and bringing it home.  She put this recording on, and not only did I get chills when all the bagpipes joined the first, but I started to weep.  I think my crying comes from the same place as my tears during the climax of Witness when the Amish villagers come over the rise to rescue Harrison Ford from the corrupt, murderous police; or in V is for Vendetta when the masses march on parliament all dressed like Guy Fawkes.  It has something to do with people joined in a common purpose, people saying somehow, “We, joined, are more powerful than the evil that has set itself against us.”

I will not pretend to be any sort of expert on the struggles going on around the world right now in Syria or Turkey or in other climes.  But I think art exists in part to point toward the heroic even when it emerges amidst chaos and violence.  There certainly is an amazing grace to doing what one feels is right even in the face of possible extermination.

Give it a listen.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0syjecXN_no

A conversation occasionally emerges here in Portland about whether political correctness is a virtue or a vice. One camp maintains that it’s important to always use inclusive, non-demeaning language when speaking to and about others. The other camp believes this approach only enables sneaky and inauthentic people’s true colors to remain unexposed. Proponents of this latter approach have been known to say, “If someone holds an ignorant, insulting opinion about me, I’d rather know it than have them hide behind their PC language.”

This debate got me thinking about Sarah Kendall.

Sarah Kendall was the daughter of the wealthy Kendall family who lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Sarah was a year younger than I, and rather than attending public school with the rest of us, she went to boarding school during the school year. I first met her at her family’s annual Christmas party when I was 10 years old. They traditionally invited neighbors each Christmastime for a festive gathering. That year, we lived on Moosehill at the top of a rising slope outside of Sharon proper. Moosehill was home to Sharon’s Audobon Sanctuary and whaling museum, and to numerous homestead-type houses owned by the Kendall family, as well as one mansion-like house they themselves occupied. The Christmas party was held in this latter house.

The entire crowd of party-goers – probably 50 or more of us – fitted easily in what I thought of as their living room. Now I’d call it a ballroom with couches and a fireplace. I’d been told the Kendalls had a girl my age named Sarah. I don’t know what I expected, but I was convinced someone who was rich would appear rich in some way. Yet Sarah was as normal-looking a nine-year-old as I’d ever met, with straight, shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes and an open face. She and I both played the flute – a fact we discovered because party-goers had been asked to bring an instrument to play. I’d brought my flute without thinking through the consequences, and once I realized that at some point sheet music would be passed out and said instruments played, I anxiety-stricken for much of the party. Sarah Kendall and I shared the music for We Three Kings of Orient Are and I played quietly, hoping everyone would think the flute they heard was both of us.

Several grownups, Sarah’s mother included, suggested that, since we were so close in age, perhaps Sarah and I should get together some time. I was not against this idea. I may even have called her once so my mother could feel I’d been polite and followed through on the suggestion. I didn’t not want to get to know Sarah. But I was perplexed about how to go about it. She’d looked like a normal kid, but she wasn’t. She was rich, and I didn’t know how to behave toward a rich person. It seemed to me that trying to befriend a rich person opened up more opportunities for faux pas than my usual brand of friendship contained. A friendship error equivalent to using the wrong fork at a fancy table seemed probable when one was friends with a rich person. I wasn’t sure how to navigate this social minefield, and so I didn’t pursue it.

Fast forward three years. I was 13 now and had moved away from Sharon at the beginning of that school year but was back visiting my dear friend, Tina, for a few days. Tina and I were hanging out in her room. Tina’s mom, Donna, was a professional flautist and the flute teacher in Sharon if you wanted the best. She’d been my teacher when I’d lived in Sharon. Donna told us, “Sarah Kendall is coming for her lesson in a few minutes so I’d like you two to decide where you’re going to be and then stay there during her lesson so you don’t interrupt us.”

“We’re good here,” Tina said. She turned to me and said, “Sarah Kendall.” I told her about the Christmas party.

“Let’s see if we can see her come in,” Tina suggested. We went to their den where you could look out into the street. A large car pulled up. A chauffeur sat at the wheel, complete with chauffeur cap and uniform. We watched the car. We talked about the situation, sneaking small glances at each other then back to the chauffeur-driven car. “Man, what’s it like to have so much money you have a chauffeur?” “How can a parent be so busy they have to have a chauffeur drive their kid to their music lesson?” “Do you suppose she ever even sees her parents?” “Does he have to take her wherever she wants to go, or do her parents decide?”

We waited, and waited, and Sarah didn’t emerge from the car. Now that we were in the den, the upstairs seemed a boring place to be during the music lesson. In fact, not only was it boring, it did not have a refrigerator. Tina said, “Let’s go down to the kitchen before she comes in so we can make a snack.”

I followed Tina down the stairs. As we skirted the flute lesson area, I was seized with nastiness. I said in my most snide tone, “Well, Sarah Kendall’s so rich she has to have a chauffeur drive her to her flute lesson.”

Tina snickered and we continued on to the kitchen to make snacks, our ears cocked, waiting to hear the doorbell that would signal Sarah’s entrance. Tina found bagels in the freezer and remembered I preferred pumpernickel. She handed one to me. Still no doorbell. She handed me a fork to pry my bagel in half and found some orange juice in the refrigerator. Still no doorbell.

Then wafting down from the flute lesson area, we heard the strains of a fourth-year flute student warming up with her scales.

Tina gaped at me. “Oh my god, she was already here.” She made a strangled sound. “She had to have heard you.”

I covered my own mouth, mortified beyond words. This was unprecedented. Usually, I was careful not to be heard when making less-than-kind comments except by those I knew wouldn’t judge me unkindly for it. This comment had been meant for Tina’s ears only. I didn’t know what to do if my comments were overheard – especially by the person they were about.

We sat at the kitchen table, staring at each other and not daring to even speak while the lesson commenced. The front door was on the other side of the kitchen wall, and I hoped that Sarah would simply leave without seeing me.

Fat chance. Instead, at the lesson’s end, flute in its case and sheet music in her hands, Sarah came into the kitchen accompanied by Donna. Sarah wore glasses now, as did I, and her hair had grown past her shoulders. “Girls, this is Sarah Kendall. Sarah says you and she have met, Katrina.”

I looked up. Sarah shifted her sheet music into her left hand, which also held her flute case, and extended her right hand to me. “Hello. We met at my family’s Christmas party a few years ago,” Sarah said. “It’s nice to see you again, Katrina.”

I took her hand and shook it. “Hi. Nice to see you, too.”

Sarah nodded to Tina, then said to Donna, “Thanks again, Mrs. Hieken. See you next week.”

When she left, Donna stood next to the kitchen table. She looked toward, but not at us, and said, “Sarah is a quality person. Truly one of the nicest people I know, and a pleasure to have as a student.”

Perhaps this painful moment is one of the reasons I fall into the pro-political correctness camp. I can think of no way it did Sarah any good to hear how I “really” felt about her. It could only have served to make her feel more isolated from her peers. And of course, I didn’t really even know Sarah. I wasn’t saying anything true about her, or even true about my feelings about her. My comment was simply a 13-year-old’s uncomfortable, ignorant snarkiness, uttered to impress Tina. And probably most of us make similarly cutting remarks into adulthood. How could it have done Sarah any good to have yet another experience to prove to her what I’m sure she already knew: that people have preconceptions about what it means for someone to be from the upper classes and some of those preconceptions aren’t very nice?

If, on the other hand, I had kept my mouth shut on the walk down to the kitchen – if I’d been PC about it – when Sarah came to say “hello” after her lesson, I could have just said “hi.” She could have made whatever she wanted out of that “hi,” and maybe she would have made something of it that would have been a comfort, that would have been a balm to her aloneness. Instead, because I was not especially thinking about political correctness, my humiliated “hi” on the heels of passing judgment on her because she rode in a chauffeur-driven car to her lesson could not have been mistaken for kindness in any universe.

My mother tells a story about something she overheard at the Christmas party. A brazen adult came up to Sarah Kendall and asked her, “How does it feel to be rich?”

Apparently Sarah said quietly, “I don’t know. It’s my parents who are rich. I myself am quite poor.”

I would have liked to know the Sarah Kendall who enjoyed playing the flute and who at age 9 already had a sense that she herself had not earned these riches. That Sarah Kendall sounds like someone worth knowing, whether she was driven by a chauffeur to her flute lessons or not. I hope to never be judged by something so small and not of my doing, and if I occasionally judge others on details so insignificant, I’d like to keep that to myself until I come to my senses. Maybe that’s what political correctness is for: putting forth a proscribed nicety until you remember that we are all so much more than the trappings we present.