pull up a chair

i’ll be honest (as if i’m ever not): this was an unbearably hard week. and i am exhausted to the bone. the horrors of the world––images and stories i could barely take in––shred us, and scare us; make me wonder if we’re teetering on another apocalyptic precipice. and within the world’s horrors, there is a much-closer-to-home struggle that’s absorbed my every ounce of attention and strength: the not-insurmountable, steep incline of moving my mother into the next much-dreaded chapter of her life. a chapter she had adamantly refused to consider until the bones in her body were broken and the home she has loved for six decades can no longer be a place of safety and refuge.

the days have been long, have been wearing. but time and again through the week, my eyes fell on words that all but saved me. i gathered them up each time, hungrily. voraciously. as if the ones who spoke the words, or wrote the words, or somehow laid the words all in a life-saving line had reached out through the darkness to give me their hand. each time i held on tight. here are the words that steadied me this week. maybe they’ll steady you too.

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i turn first to the irish, because where better to turn in the face of a broken world, and a battered heart: this comes from pádraig Ó tuama, who wrote: “there’s an irish phrase, ‘Is olc liom do bhris,’ which we say during a time of grief. a literal translation is ‘your brokenness brings me horror.'”

i couldn’t pronounce the irish if you paid me, but i love that the irish soul immediately understands that sometimes we’re not simply saddened but out-and-out broken under the weight of our sorrows.

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but then, at the very moment i needed it, anne sexton came along: as i sat there watching my mother, now bent over a walker, sometimes crying out in pain, i watched my somewhat shy mother shuffle into a dining room filled with strangers. i watched her gently lay her hand on the shoulder of someone she was shuffling by, and i heard her say, “hello, i’m barbara, i’m new here.” and i felt my belly gurgling like jelly, as in the days when i pressed my ear against the kindergarten door, praying my firstborn would make it through the morning, my tender brave boy in a sea of new faces and voices. i watched my mother show me courage in the face of everything she’d prayed would never come to her. and then anne sexton’s words slipped under my nose. and i thought for a minute the heavens must have been listening, or maybe instructing.

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
 

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
 

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
 

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

 ~ Anne Sexton ~ 

(The Awful Rowing Toward God)

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and then, the news of the death of louise glück, the nobel prize-winning poet from cambridge, mass. a poet i once sat inches away from in a bookstore in harvard square, so close to me that i could feel the whoosh of her hand as she swept it through the air, punctuating one of her lines, pushing back her lioness locks of silver-streaked hair. louise died of cancer, and her beautiful words held a deep resonance in this week when i found myself talking to the kindest physician i’ve met in a long summer of looking for answers. in between worrying about my mother, i remembered i too am still looking for light in my own shrouded tunnel. a doctor from mass general, just down the road from cambridge, gave me that light. and she was more than kind in doling it out. but here’s louise:

CROSSROADS
by Louise Glück

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

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and those are the words i clung to this week, the words that carried me across an awful abyss.

what words carried you?

p.s. there’s one other poem that saved me this week, because it always saves me: naomi shihab nye’s kindness. here tis:

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye