The Darkness and the Light

Yesterday we were driving from Pennsylvania to Boston, after a visit with Sam’s parents, for a quick visit with my family, before heading home to Vermont after our long vacation road trip. We took Route 84. I hadn’t looked at the map, and was just following Sam’s directions and the signs. I was caught off guard, in the middle of that beautiful day, to see a sign that read: Newtown/Sandy Hook 1 Mile. Immediately I started wondering about the families, and thinking about the children. I tend to react viscerally to tragedy, even when the tragedy is not my own, and I sensed myself starting to get pulled toward the kind of sadness that is hard for me to get out of easily. 

My eleventh grade American Literature teacher once explained that he was an “energist"; he believed that all living things are made up of energy and when a given life ends, the energy would not be extinguished, but rather transferred to some other aspect of the universe. The idea didn’t originate with him, but he had made it his religion, and his explanation was my first exposure to such an idea. For some reason it made real sense to me, in a way that my family's Catholicism never did. And, the morning after my mother died, I felt I had proof. I walked out the front door of our house and found the two rose bushes on either side of the steps fully loaded with brilliant orange blooms. There hadn’t been any flowers the day before, but there were the morning after the men came, in the middle of the night, to carry her body from our house. My mother loved her roses and tended them with great care, and when I stepped out into that first day of my new life, I knew she existed in those gorgeous orange blooms. 

Some years later, when I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in graduate school, I found more validation for the idea in the final verse of “Song of Myself."

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

In the nearly twenty years since my mother's death, I have only been to her grave once since she was buried, and only then because my aunt was buried in the same cemetery. While I have never had the kind of comfort a belief in heaven would provide, I have never doubted that my mother's energy departed her body as air.

And yesterday, as that mile of highway rolled by outside my window, and we got closer and closer to the Newtown exit, where twenty beautiful kids lost their lives, something else happened that struck me as one of those impossible to deny, presence-of-some-spiritual-energy moments.

Just as I was thinking about the lost children, my own child’s voice grabbed me from the back seat. It started with this: “Mom! Come back and sit with me. I miss you!” 

I thought of the mothers of Newtown who would give anything to climb back and hold their babies, and I knew I couldn’t deny my own. As Sam drove down the highway, I climbed over the center console and into the backseat, and sat down next to Quinn. And when I did, it was like I entered into some sort of crazy emotional vortex. Quinn just started blurting out thoughts as fast as she could speak them: “Mom! I love you! You make me happy! And I make you happy! And I missed you! And I miss Dad! And I love him! And I make him happy! And he makes me happy! And you make him happy! And you love him! And you love me too! And you missed me! And! And! And!” 

And then, just as soon as the whirlwind began, it stopped. And Quinn sat smiling and out of breath. And I looked out the rear window at the Newtown exit behind me, and had an overwhelming sense that something mystical had just happened...just exactly as we were driving by.

That was only halfway through our drive. Further on, when we made it to Route 95 in Massachusetts, and saw a sign saying that it was Marathon Monday, I thought back to the couple of years I worked at Copley Place and went out to join the crowds at the finish line in hopes of catching a glimpse of someone’s victory. (I feel those viscerally too and always get teary when I watch athletes standing on podiums in the Olympics). As we drove, I thought how fun it would have been to be at the marathon with Quinn. 

At about three o'clock, when we were just outside of Boston, approaching a point roughly parallel to the Back Bay, I happened to turn on the radio and I heard the rapid controlled panic in the voices of the announcers. We struggled to make out what was happening. Some time later I realized that at that time, only ten, twenty, then thirty minutes after the two bombs exploded, they were still struggling to make out what was happening too. Police cars started whizzing past us in the left lane. An overhead sign told us the Copley ramp was closed. We heard that some of the victims were “gravely” injured. 

It’s ironic that just last week I was wondering about that aspect of my present life which has me always on guard, scanning the horizon for some unidentified threat that might harm Quinn. Sometimes when I catch myself going into Mother Lion mode, I try to tell myself to calm down, to not be ridiculous. I don’t want to live in a bubble. Even more, I don’t want to want to live in a bubble--I don’t want to lose that part of myself which has allowed me to have so many great experiences. I don’t want to always be afraid that something bad is going to happen. “We’ve only got this one life,” a friend reminded me the other day, and I don’t want to waste it living in fear. And yet, there is no denying that there are things to fear. 

Last night I read that at the beginning of yesterday’s marathon, there was a 26 second moment of silence to honor the 26 people killed in Newtown, and the 26th mile of the marathon was dedicated to them too. A number of Newtown residents had traveled to Boston to witness the tribute; many were sitting at the finish line. Yesterday was a beautiful spring day, perfect for putting the darkness, if only briefly, out of their minds...out of everyone's minds.

Maybe it was coincidence that Quinn was a love tornado at the exact moment when we drove by Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. And maybe it was coincidence that not long after Quinn's Newtown explosion of love and joy, our drive paralleled the disaster of the marathon--an event which was in part, by design, a remembrance of Newtown.

Maybe those were coincidences, and maybe not. It is hard for me right now to separate them in my mind.

Sometimes, in the face of rational people who think only practical thoughts and believe in simple explanations, I am tempted to feel silly for worrying about unseen threats, and absurd for believing, even now and then, in the presence of something mystical. But after yesterday, I am resolved: whenever I feel bad for these things, I'll look at Quinn’s face and let the self-consciousness relax its grip and melt away. I can look at her face, that is made of my own flesh, and I can accept the fears that are real and that coexist with the magic that is sometimes waiting where we are passing through.

All At Once

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

-John Green, The Fault In Our Stars

I often tell people that I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to have a kid until Quinn was three months old, and when I tell people that, I’m not actually kidding. I made the conscious choice, but I really had no idea what that choice meant. And even though I stayed awake through Quinn’s first night holding her and staring at her and thanking her for being okay--on that first night at the end of the day on which she was born, while Sam slept in the other bed in our hospital room--even then I didn’t love her in a way that I could fully identify. And in the first three months after that, as I tried to figure out what she was all about and what happened to life as I had once known it, even though I was focused solely on her existence for 24 complete hours of every day, even then I couldn’t quite put my finger on what she meant to me. After three months I started to find her more lovable each day. By six months I was really enjoying hanging out with her. By eight months, when we were on vacation on the Outer Banks, and she was sitting up on her own in our borrowed beach house, smiling a lot and happily playing with toys, I started to find her really irresistible. But then, sometime after that, I fell off the cliff.

What I experience now is love so big it makes me delirious--profoundly, unabashedly happy and sad all at the same time. 

In the happy moments, it is Thoreauvian, in the woodchuck-eating sense: “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour [her] raw.”  I get ridiculous. I kiss her incessantly and it drives her mad, but then she later asks me, “Mom? Wanna hug? Big fat kiss?” And so the cycle continues. It is delicious, savage delight. 

The sad moments aren’t so much sad as they are an awareness of the potential loss of happiness. The threat of losing her somehow, when I acknowledge that threat, overwhelms my fragile composure. It is a painful jolt that I knowingly inflict on myself, like a finger in a socket; I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is to keep myself on guard, always scanning the horizon for a car, rogue wave, killer bumble bee...who knows. Perhaps it is to keep myself on guard to notice, enjoy, appreciate each moment, knowing there are not an infinite number of moments to be had.  

Two years after Quinn first started sitting up on her own and smiling happily at her toys, we are back on Cape Hatteras, thanks to the continued generosity of friends*, staying in the same sweet beach house. Only now Quinn is pushing her own babies down the road, with her own stroller, and she is digging holes in the sand at the beach, and collecting shells and following plovers as they try to escape her. She seems taller, and more grown up than I thought two year olds were supposed to be. She is happening so fast, I can’t comprehend it. 

There is much I can’t comprehend:

Quinn: I don’t wanna wear that shirt, Mom. My eyes are too cold. 
Me: What? 
Quinn: Mom! (squint. squint.) My eyes are too cold!

In my clearer moments I acknowledge the tenuous comfort of this unfortunate truth: “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” -from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

At some point, when the Earth started spinning on its axis at an entirely unprecedented speed from what we'd formerly experienced, with whole days and nights whizzing by outside the bounds of predictable patterns, Quinn came to be and I fell in love all at once. And the faster we spin through our revolutions, the less able I feel to pause and comment on what is going on. I want to document each new phase and phrase, each new accomplishment, each sweet moment before it dissolves, but the moments are starting to happen so fast.  It is “an elegant universe in ceaseless motion,"** and I'm just trying to hold on.

*Thank you Betsey & Bill, for sharing your special place and for the gift of these memories. 

**Thank you John Green for your wonderful book The Fault In Our Stars.