It’s been a long time since I wrote for this space. When my mom first passed, writing helped. I kept my words measured, each phrase carefully chosen for coherence. I kept a tight hold on sanity and reason by creating a world of carefully controlled sentences and thought. But all the while, behind the keyboard, I was screaming into the void, howling into a black sky where no moon ever rose, whirling lost in the chaos of hurt and raw anguish. Writing to try and find my mother in an emptiness I could not pierce.  Eventually, writing my grief exhausted me. 

It’s been six years since she passed. Grief has ebbed and flowed through those years. I have learned (sort of) to live without her, but it’s life with an emotional limp, a curvature in the spine of my splintered heart.

This week I was at my parent’s house, the family home. I woke up on Thursday morning with a song running through my head: Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection. I have not heard that song in years, even when in the early months of the pandemic Kermit came out of retirement to gift the world a video of him reprising his biggest hit. I watched it Thursday morning and cried.

The weather has been unseasonably warm in California, and the soil around my parents’ house is already baking and cracking, dry and dusty instead of the usual February muck. “No use to plant a garden, “ my father insists. “They’re going to shut us down for water this year if we don’t get rain.”

In truth, he hasn’t gardened since the day my mother passed. What was once a blowsy, flowerful yard, a garden that stopped people in their tracks to admire and exclaim, is now bare soil with only a few deep-rooted shrubs that linger despite neglect. We have finally, my Dad and I, in the last year, begun to talk a bit about her death, and we’ve both agreed that all our heart for gardening left when she left. I know it shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

In the back yard, where she grew lettuce tomatoes, beans, cucumber, kohlrabi, strawberries, plums, and enough zucchini to frighten the neighbors, only two productive trees remain: a Santa Rosa Plum and a Meyer lemon.

The Meyer lemon produces prodigiously. Branches bow like prayers under clusters of lemons in various states of maturity. Old grandmother lemons, thick wrinkled rinds darkened by sooty mold hang in the interior of the tree, while a bit further out along the thorny branches grow middle-age lemons, ruddy orange and full of sugars. At the ends of the branches young lemons an innocent yellow tinged with green nod under blossoms that scent the branch tips.

I spent some time picking lemons, smelling the fresh scent, the light lemony essence that mingled with the perfume of a Bay Area spring. Star jasmine, Daphne, early roses, narcissus. In that barren back yard I felt the presence of my mother’s past gardens, the ghosts of bean rows and squash leaves. The wraiths of past tomato plants haunted by the buzzing of long-gone bees.

Can involuntary memory—startled into existence by a scent, a taste, a sound, just a few notes in a pentatonic scale—eclipse time, fold time as if the years are accordion pleats, gussets that close onto themselves and play two time-tunes so close that past and present nearly touch? Do we carry time in our noggins, the hours, days, and years resting along our corrugated brains? When those folds are squeezed like a bellows by scent, sound, taste, even sight, does the reality of the past leap like electrons across space and open in our presence like flowers scenting the air?

The mélange of smell followed me into the house, where it wound its way through the scents of laundry detergent, last night’s dinner, and the faint but still present smell of my mother. My dad watched a Western on the tv. In the distance the commuter train blew its horn, and a dog barked. Time slipped. For the first time in six years, I felt my mom’s presence at the house, as if she had entered with me, peeling off her gardening gloves and saying, “well, we had better get your father fed.”

I heard in my head Kermit singing, “All of us under its spell. We know that it’s probably magic…”

On that warm spring day I imagined the bellows of time closing for a brief moment as memory ran through time’s wet-tuned reeds. Past and preset merged. In the tree at the door a chickadee sang through the leaves, “hey sweetie, hey sweetie, hey sweetie,” and I got my dad some dinner.

Tuesday night I walked among mermaids, lions, demons, and witches who flooded the  neighborhood. The streets were closed to traffic and a volunteer police force guarded us in the smoky suburban streets. Kids clumped together clutching bags of candy, then scattered as they ran and spun into the falling dusk, imp-giggles trailing like pine smoke in the butter-warm Indian summer night.

I set up an ofrenda, an altar, to my mom. On a bookshelf in the kitchen I spread a bright table cloth she gave me long ago, then set a photo of her taken on her birthday, a  2013 image of her smiling and pretty in a coral-colored suit jacket. Next to her photo I set a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream and a yellow Opal apple.

On Halloween I baked all day, making challah in the morning, and an apple pie in the evening. When I finally went to bed at midnight, my energy straddling the hour between Halloween and All-Saints day, the house smelled like her house—baking wheat, caramelized sugars, heat-softened fruit. Perhaps it would entice her to the ofrenda where she might drink the Baileys and taste the Opal apple. Perhaps she could reach through that veil and touch me.

Wednesday dawned warm and clear, fitting for All-Saints day, a day of remembrance for our loved ones who have gone to heaven. The time of year that the veil thins. A liminal time, a threshold, when one thing changes into another thing. In Mexico it’s the season of Dia de los Muertos, the time when the dead can come back to visit the living.

People tell tales of their loved ones visiting them. One friend told me she saw her mother standing in her bedroom, at the foot of the bed, the night after her mother died. Another saw her father in a cloud of cigarette smoke moving across her living room. Others see their loved ones in dreams, or hear their voices.

Today is November 2. I wept this morning because, despite the ofrenda (built, I admit, as bait to lure her into my home) I never felt my mom’s presence, save in the smells and tastes of the baking I began on Halloween. Perhaps that is all that’s left of her: The memories I can beg by dressing my life in activity; feelings I summon by making pie, bread, soups; remembrances of taste.

I don’t want a nebulous feeling, a drifting odor, a dream. I want to know that it’s her. I want a visitation.

And yet, I fear such a thing. Will she be angry that I didn’t do enough to save her? That we caused her pain as she died? That our efforts to keep her out of pain deprived her of consciousness?

That’s silly. My mother was not an angry woman. American culture’s fascination with horror has given ghosts a bad rap. Why would my mother be something in death that she did not embrace in life?

But she always kept her word. Long ago, she promised that if she could, she would come back to say goodbye. Which is more important to me now because death interrupted; we could not properly bid our adieus.

It’s November 2nd. The ofrenda remains in my kitchen. The day is gray and chilled, and my loved ones hear me crying (my fiddler can hear me crying no matter how quietly I try to sob) and hug me. Perhaps today, or some time during this liminal season, my mother will reach across that thin threshold into the graying winter light, and give me some sort of sign. Then perhaps this grief can change into something else.

 

 

So, I haven’t been painting

There’s a story about painter Chuck Close that goes: When he was in the hospital, recovering from a paralyzing stroke, his wife said, for God’s sake, give him a paintbrush. If he doesn’t paint, he’ll die. In rehab, they strapped a paintbrush onto his hand and he invented a whole new way of painting that drew from his previous works, but did not —he could not—copy them.

He’s famous for the quote, “Art saved my life.”

I always thought I’d be like Close, creating art through any setback, drawing strength, sanity, and a sense of direction from the work.

Then my mother died, and I stopped painting.

I admit, painting had already scootched to the back seat last fall. As my mother grew weaker, I began spending as much time with her as I could, which meant I was away from my studio most weeks. I kept a sketch book, of course. I never went anywhere without a sketchbook.

This is the last sketch I made in my sketchbook.

I drew as she slept in the hospital bed. She woke up and remarked on the drawing, then asked for a drink of water. 15 days later she died.

Since then, I haven’t touched paint and brush enough to really even remark on it. In February struggled through a month of classes with my favorite teacher, Felicia Forte, but painting felt like swimming through pudding, without the chocolate, and I didn’t—I couldn’t—continue.

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to work. It’s just that I can’t seem to get started, somehow. That’s not like me; I always worked, in the mood or not. I believed—I believe—that chance favors the prepared.  If you’re not inspired, just draw something. Practice; inspiration will eventually come whistling through the door.

And here’s the thing: All my life, artwork energized me. My fiddler says it makes me glow. But since my mother passed, painting and drawing exhausts me. Even when drawing the figure, an exercise I purely love, my arm feels like lead, my charcoal feels like a gritty lump of dirt, the paper wrinkles and cockles, and every mark I make is awkward, as clumsy as if I’d never before drawn in my life.

The conversation

A few weeks ago I told a friend of mine, painter Chuck Waldman, that I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I hadn’t been painting. “I just didn’t have the ganas to paint,” I whined.

“It’s the grief,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You’re having a conversation with grief instead of with the paint. You have to have that conversation. When you’re done, you’ll paint again.”

He spoke about grief in the most natural way, as if we were discussing the weather, or gardening. He didn’t try to drown me in platitudes, he didn’t try to make me feel “better.” He didn’t try to fix my grief. He acknowledged it.

That acknowledgement came as such a relief. I didn’t have to defend my grief, or feel guilty about it; he didn’t make me feel like a Debbie Downer, he didn’t make me talk about it, or try to shut me up about it. Grief rose and fell in our conversation like trout in still water. And I appreciate that so much.

Chuck’s words lifted something heavy from my heart. It was as if he lifted a stone that had collapsed onto my soul. Still trapped, but I can see some daylight.

Soon after, I started attending life drawing sessions again. I’ve made a few small paintings, mostly of my friend’s kittens (they are cute, non-threatening, happy). I’ve been working on a series of illustrations based on fantasy sketches I made in the wee hours last year, when I could not sleep.

Most days are still too painful for painting. On those days, I need activities that occupy my whole brain. Being busy is good. I throw myself into my job, focus extra sharply on the task at hand. I immerse myself in words, writing reams that will mostly never see the light of day. And I admit, I’ve sunk into the quagmire of social media, that soporific of outrage and cute-overload.

I now know that I won’t die if I don’t paint. It’s okay to rest a bit. To have that conversation with grief. And gradually, I hope, I’ll start to work more regularly, and once again my brain will fire like sparks from a Roman candle. I have to trust that will happen, because there are days when the brush looks like a weapon rather than a tool.

Meanwhile, I try to strap the brush to my wrist, and invite grief to a three-way conversation with art. Will that conferencing change my work? I don’t yet know.

Grief and art? If they’re talking, it’s behind my back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kowana Valley is shaped on the map like a butterfly, two wings of golden-brown floating in a sea of GIS-forest green. It’s one of my favorite places on earth, home to friends who are central to my music family. For the last two days, I’ve been glued to the internet, watching red and yellow circles on the Current Wildfires Map creeping towards that little butterfly-shaped spot. To the south and east of it a massive wildfire approaches. At the time I’ve posted this, roughly 50 homes have burned.

Set in the oaks and pines of the Sierra Foothills, Kowana Valley is a heavenly piece of land, a wide valley set between mountain, split by a creek that sports two swimming holes, Native American grinding rocks, wildflowers, blackberries and willows. Any time I’ve spent there has been idyllic. I’ve slept outside on the lawn under stars and been woken by bees buzzing in clover; I’ve plunged into the cold waters of the creek; I’ve walked the perimeter and nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. Once a year for the last 20 years, it has been the site of a three-day camping party for folkmusic lovers; we play, dance, sing, swim, laugh, and eat. Many of us have played tunes together for decades; the party reunites those of us who have moved away from our original roots. Families come in all shapes, colors, and tones.

Since the fire started, I’ve been thinking about loss.

Two years ago my county burned in the Butte Fire. The fiddler and I were lucky, spared from losing our home, our town, our little housing development. But friends of mine were not so lucky. They lost everything but what was in their cars when they sped away from the crackling flames in abrupt evacuations.

In the mountains we take precautions to save our homes from wildfire. We rake away pine needles, trim away tall grass, cut back brush. But we live in a forest. A forest that traditionally burned often before Europeans arrived. Fire, like shit, happens.

No matter how hard we try to build safe places, it’s sometimes not enough. One friend who lost her home said, “We thought we were safe. We had a rammed earth house, a metal roof. We didn’t think it would burn. Yeah, people in stick houses, they had nothing left. But us? We had rubble!”

I’ve talked to people who still forget, turn up their old road to what was once home. It’s a shock to them once again, to find nothing there. Some people are rebuilding, replacing what they lost; others moved away; many have found rentals and stayed in the county, unsure of their next steps.

It’s been seven months since my mom abruptly ceased to be. I am still not used to her absence. If my mind is not occupied with work, writing, podcasts, conversation, it drifts to my mom. These days I’m beginning to think of happy times we shared, but more often if drifts to that last month of her life. One minute she was talking to me, complaining about politics, laughing at the funny papers, making plans to come to my house, and then the next minute her blood pressure tanked and she drifted into incoherence, then a coma.

She died, not because of irresponsible actions by anyone, but because she was sick. She had fought a long battle against her disease. She outlived the prognosis for most people diagnosed with it. She was a good patient, following doctors’ orders tightly, giving up things she loved—wine, salt, bananas, leafy vegetables, dairy, broccoli—until in the end the list of things she could eat was very short. Her deprivations no doubt helped save her life. But at last, the wall of safety, the medicines, the diet, the antibiotics—none of it could save her life. Her poor body was ravaged by the disease, and death, like fire, is an element of this planet.

My mom built a family that was home, and she was the heart of it, the house of it, the metal roof and packed soil that protected it. Her death hit us like a fire. We are left with rubble. I’m not sure what kind of family we’ll rebuild; I’m not sure what it will look like. The loss of her is so great that perhaps we’ll simply stay fallow, leave the emotional rubble to eventually be swallowed by the overgrowth of time. That remains to be seen.

Yesterday I choked my way through dense smoke to the grocery store and bought the foods that I love but don’t usually eat because I’m always watching my weight. You know, trying to be healthy. Macadamia nuts, ice cream, kettle corn. And I ate them last night—yes, a binge— while watching fire circles on the map roll towards Kowana Valley. I sifted through memories of the valley, of my friends who not only own the land but are stewards of the land.

The butterfly shape of the valley is slightly bedraggled looking, but on the map the image is flying directly, bravely, hopelessly into the future towards the fire. Because that’s all it can do.

Disclaimer: I do not receive anything but love from the folks who own Kowana Valley. You can read more about Kowana Valley at their website: http://kowanavalley.com and you can stay at their lodge (after the fire, of course, and please keep your fingers crossed, pray to whatever God hears your supplications, or just keep cool, wet thoughts coming towards the Central Sierra.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this three months ago. It was too soon for me to even proof read it. Now, after 6 months of the numbness of grief, I am able to read this, correct the spelling and the grammar, and put it out there for the world to read. I have been sorting clothes, and trying to figure out what to do with them.

My father asked me to clear my mother’s clothes from the closets and drawers in the house. Seeing her things hurts him. The loss is too fresh. Three months ago she passed; it’s the longest my parents have been apart in nearly 60 years. Her clothes are reminders of her absence, tangible pieces of the person who has ceased to exist.

I can’t stand to see my father in pain, so I taped together boxes with multi-colored duct tape I found in the garage and I started to empty the closets. My dad studiously made a salad for dinner. He’d prepared a full meal of all my favorites: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, Momma’s home canned green beans. It was the first full meal he made for the fiddler and me since my mother left us. He didn’t turn around as I taped up boxes.

“Your father, he’s a clothes horse,” Momma used to tease, but her own closets were packed with clothes hanging neatly from wooden hangars. Pants and shirts crisply ironed, seams straight, collars arranged properly, cuffs square, buttons done up, everything ready to be worn. As I emptied the closets, hangars clicked and fabric whispered. I fumbled with the origami of sleeves and shirt tails—I never did learn to fold clothing properly—and I apologized to my mother as I pressed each shirt and trouser into a dry smelling cardboard box.

Joan Didion in A Year of Magical Thinking says that, after her husband’s death, she kept his shoes. Surely he’d need them when he came back, when he returned from the temporary journey he’d taken the night he died. Because surely, she thought, he was coming back.

I felt the same way. Despite all logic to the contrary, I was awash in guilt as I packed away her clothing. How could I take away her clothes, the things she was so proud of, the shirts and pants in which she looked so cute and so pretty? What would she wear when she finally returned home? When she was over this death thing and came back to us?

In my anguish, I imagined her, unseen, gesturing to me, waving her hands and saying stop that! Or worse, I imagined her weeping for the loss of her elegant slacks and sweaters, her comfy jersey shirts and her capris with the stretchy waists. My mother had grown up during the depression, so poor that my grandmother made her clothing from patterned flour sacks. Momma loved clothes. They made her feel safe.

I wondered, what will I do with these clothes, to honor her? Where can I take them, how can I make it bearable to part with the only solid, touchable things I have left of her?

I imagine I’ll keep some of the clothes. They fit, I am short on clothes-buying cash, and we wore the same size. They are quite beautiful. I don’t feel ghoulish about this at all. Pre-modern times it was quite common to leave clothes to survivors. Clothing was hard to come by and in short supply.

What I don’t keep will ultimately go to a second hand store, and that saddens me beyond measure, to imagine her freshly-laundered, sweet-smelling slacks and shirts and skirts and robes and pajamas jammed into the racks of the sour, mildew-reeking aisles of the local thrift shop. Or worse, just thrown away or ripped into rags because nobody wants them.

I know my mother was—is—not her clothes. But as I searched through her things, seeking some sign of her—a diary, a journal, a day book—some words in which I could hear her voice, it became clear that one of the few impressions I had of her were her clothes. They still smelled of her, the clean of laundry soap and the faint scent of who she was. They still held the shape of her body, the stretch across the shoulders, the push of her bosom, the set of her hips and the angle of her legs. If I put laid them out on the bed, could her ghost fill them and sit up and go make dinner or come out for a walk with me?

Shedding the clothes of one who died is a tough row to hoe. As I went through the closets, I kept finding clothes of my grandmother (dead these 20 years) still hanging, ready for her to wear. They appeared like anachronisms in an archeological dig as I sifted through the clothes: a fur cape; a ruffled rayon shirt; a plaid wool jacket. My mother used to ask me, “what should we do with Granna’s things? We can’t just throw them away.” I never had a good answer, except, “I’ll take them, Mom.”

At my house I have my grandmother’s cedar chest, full of her treasures. For the last three years my mother planned to visit me, and together we planned go through the chest, unpacking, sorting, identifying the provenance of each item. Momma never made that visit; she was never well enough. Now I have to go through my grandmother’s cedar chest and my mother’s cedar chest. Alone.I have no children or female siblings. My mother’s grand daughters live far away, and are busy with their lives. I screwed up. I should have had a daughter to help me sort through the clothes of my mother and grandmother, to bear witness to their lives, to cry with me as I remember their lives, my own life. There is no one to care about these clothes with me, to listen to stories they tell. Someone who would treasure at least a few items—Momma’s wedding dress (used three times by her, my aunt, and me) maybe? Or the fur coat my grandmother made for her. The handmade square dance dresses she twirled in back in her prime.

Instead I cry alone until the fiddler hears and comes to hold me. And he makes plans to cart all these clothes to our house so I can go through them as I can bear it and decide what to keep and what to discard.

 

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It’s been four months since my mother left us. I get along most days with few and brief teary episodes. But a friend emailed today to tell me her mother had entered into hospice care. What a shitty thing to happen in spring, when life is shouting and exhulting and bursting into blooms and babies and renewal.

But winter is a shitty time to lose your mother too. All seasons blow when it comes to losing the important people in your life. My friend’s news brought back that white-knuckle feeling I had when we made the decision to let my mother go, that terror of skidding out-of-control over a cliff into a chasm deep and cold, where you know your heart will be dashed and shattered on hard reality below. A sharp edge of panic sliced through my composure and threatened to cut my day short with sorrow.

Instead, I tried to collect myself, kept myself busy. I worked extra hours and extra hard to ignore her absence, to forget that I haven’t spoken with my mother since December.

Four months. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone in my life without talking to my mom. Even when I lived abroad, or was traveling in a camper van for months on end, I called her as often as possible. And when I couldn’t call, I wrote.

I learned from her. She and my grandmother were great letter writers. When I was a little girl, we got a letter from my grandmother every couple of weeks, and my mother read it to the whole family at the dinner table.  I know my mother wrote back to her often as well. They had to write; long distance telephone calls were expensive and dollars were in short supply. Stamps were cheap.

Their letters weren’t particularly poetic or erudite or filled with abstract thought; the folded writing paper, so thin it was almost transparent, was filled with stories about the neighbors, or the garden, or what was for dinner. I wish we had some of those letters now, but I have so far not been able to find any. I long for anything bearing my mother’s or my grandmother’s voice, even if it’s just a laundry list of chores, or that they heard a particular bird singing in the trees.

These days it’s hard to believe in a time when you couldn’t simply poke at a screen and connect with your loved one. But in those days, what we now take for granted—skype, face time, Messenger—seemed impossible. Science fiction.

Now I talk to my dad every night. I wish I had talked to my mother every night. We had the capability; it’s the age of miracles and wonder after all. But I let work, tiredness, stupid Facebook, and sheer laziness stop me from calling her. And the calls I did make, we didn’t record. Who ever thinks to?

I wonder. Will we ever conquer the distance that death puts between us? Will someday some tech company make gazillions of dollars patenting a device that will let you talk to your dead mother, and let her answer?

If so, I’ll mortgage everything to buy it.

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