Normal Gets You Nowhere (14 page)

Here’s another thing I learned from my father’s death—one I want you to learn too. You have to be very clear about whether you want medications at the end and what kind of treatments you’re willing to undergo to keep you (or your loved ones) alive. My father had a “Do Not Resuscitate,” which meant he didn’t want to be resuscitated by machines if his heart stopped beating. But he was still on oxygen, which was keeping him alive—artificially! I also noticed his nurses were giving him Haldol, an antipsychotic medicine most often given to schizophrenics and patients with Alzheimer’s. When I asked why, they said, “He seems anxious and confused.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “He’s not anxious and confused. He’s dying!”

Ten days after we arrived, my father was no longer speaking (but he was breathing, compliments of the oxygen). Ava and I left for New York City. She had to get back to school, and I was scheduled to fly to L.A. to produce a
Nylon
magazine event—of all things—with Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens.

“Just watch,” I said to the kids in my New York office. “
Now
my father’s going to die.”

In fact, I was in my closet with my assistant packing my bags when my sister called, crying. I could feel my assistant looking at me, thinking,
Oh dear God, please, please tell me that’s not your sister. Don’t tell me he’s dead. I do not want to be the one in the room with you. I have done
everything
for you. Don’t make me do this. Please do not freak out. Please, please, please.
He looked like he was bracing to be hit by a tidal wave.

“My father is dead,” I told him calmly. “But I am not going to lose my shit. Everything will be all right.”

I immediately called my teacher in India for advice. He told me to take the flight to L.A. I got a car to the airport and called my nanny, Nana, to tell her to get Ava out of school and on a plane to L.A. as fast as possible.

When I arrived at the airport, I was informed by the woman at the Delta counter that there was no way I’d make my flight, since I was eight minutes late for check-in. For the first time since my father had taken a turn for the worse, I started crying. I cried and cried, and I was definitely
not
outside. Out of nowhere, two more Delta employees appeared, both very large African American women.

“
Girl,
is that
Kell on Earth
?” one asked. “Didn’t she write that book about crying outside, and now she’s crying inside!”

They asked me what was wrong, and I explained that my father was dead, but that I was flying across the country in the wrong direction to put on an event with Zac Efron, and now I’d missed my flight check-in by eight minutes.

“Her daddy just died, and you’re not letting her on the plane?” exclaimed one of the women accusingly to the ticket agent. “You are
heartless
. She’s famous.”

Who was I to argue? I put on my black sunglasses, and the two women ushered me through the airport, accompanying me through security to my gate and making sure I had the best seat. Sitting on the plane, relieved and drained, I felt like a layer of my existence had been peeled off. I was about to fly to L.A. and attend a party, while the rest of my tribe was retreating to grieve. Was I really going to work?

But I also knew that, as a yogi, I needed to put my belief systems into action and suck it up. If I really believed the physical body was not the soul, and that my father’s soul was levitating with my jet as we lifted above the runway, then why would I allow myself to be paralyzed with grief? Why wouldn’t I continue the work that had made my father proud and that was supporting my daughter, his lineage? At the moment of takeoff, I imagined him moving physically and psychically in the same direction as the plane, from the earth to the sky.

My daughter arrived that evening to meet me at the event. The good news was she got to meet Zac Efron. But later in our room I told her that her grandfather, “Da”—who had always called her his “downtown girl” and taken it upon himself to be the premiere loving male figure in her life—was dead. Ava howled like a cross between a baby whale and a wolf.

We flew to Virginia
again
the next day. By now I’ve seen a lot of people die, and I can tell you that having children or money or fame is no guarantee that anyone will be at your death. At the scene of my father’s death, we found my two siblings, their children, and my mother, who had morphed from a conservative 1950s housewife to something else entirely.

“Now let me tell
you
something,” she said to us. “My husband is dead, and this is my house, and we are going to do what
I
want.”

All of us—my sister, Allison, my brother, Lee, our kids, me—felt our jaws drop.

“We are not going to church,” she continued. “We’re going to have a celebration of life ceremony. We will put your father’s ashes on the table, we’ll have Father Jim come to the house, and we’ll all stand around talking about what we liked about your father.”

The message was clear. Allison, no more hysterics. Lee, no more bullying, and Kelly, no spewing liberal dogma. We would celebrate my father, and the sparks that created all of us and our children too. There we were, all of his sparks, shining to the rhythm of his love, teachings, and memory.

Not long after my grandfather died in 1986, my mom called me to say she was worried we might need to move my grandmother to Virginia to be closer to her. The problem? She wouldn’t stop talking to Billy, her dead husband, in the dining room every day. “She thinks he’s really there,” my mom whispered. I told her I agreed that we should move her, on one condition—that my mother could prove that my grandmother
wasn’t
speaking to my grandfather. Well, this story later proved yet another reason we should not point our fingers at our tribal elders.

When my mom walked down the plank of life herself and became a seventy-one-year-old widow, she also missed her lover, and she too started speaking to him every day in their home. In fact, if you ask my mother, he’s still living on the second floor. So I’m very aware of the fact that my daughter is watching to know how I behave toward my mother, and I’m encouraging my mother to continue her relationship with my father. To be honest, this is where my yogic training has given me an edge over my siblings—in being able to embrace my mother as a
woman,
and not just as my mother. She’s just another beautiful young woman who fell in love with a really great guy who rocked her world, brought out the best and worst in her, and fathered her kids who eventually grew up and left the house, leaving the two of them alone together yet again. At death, we see this kind of panoramic view of life—I saw my mother not just as an old woman, but as a little girl. I saw her as the teenager, as the lover, as the mother, and as the grandmother, all simultaneously, in a gorgeous kaleidoscope view of the feminine. And I knew I was just another kaleidoscope looking at her.

When I was in Ireland recently, I found her a Victorian necklace. She can unscrew its small capsule and fill it with my father’s ashes, so she can keep him close to her heart. This way, she and her lover can leave the house together.

Epilogue

T
he truth is, I actually do practice all the things I preach. I really do believe that normal gets you nowhere. After all, from the time I was seventeen my life has been anything
but
normal, from starting a company in my early twenties, to selling everything to become a tarot card reader and living on a yoga mat in Los Angeles, to getting randomly signed to Atlantic Records in my late twenties on a total fluke (despite not being able to read music). Throw in a couple weddings and divorces and ultimately having a child by myself at thirty-five, and, well,
none
of these things is normal.

In fact, it got to the point a few years ago that normalcy started to seem like a really exotic fruit that I really, truly wanted to eat. I had no idea what it would be like to drive my daughter to a ballet lesson or soccer game on a weekday or even to live with the father of my child as a family, to walk down the street hand in hand together. I’d never had the experience of someone coming home at seven and saying, “Hi, honey. Do you want to go out to dinner?” It’d been years since I’d lived with anyone at all! I mean, I think maybe the last movie I saw in an actual theater was the first
Harry Potter,
when I was pregnant and in Montreal on business with Ava’s dad. And what can I say, I guess it started to irk me when I’d meet cute, seemingly happy families at my daughter’s friends’ birthday parties and imagine them wearing matching Snuggies and watching TV on Saturday mornings on the couch. Or when I’d walk by bistros in my neighborhood and see couples having what seemed to be romantic dinners at seven thirty on a weeknight. Let’s face it, seven thirty was basically lunchtime for me, and there was nothing romantic about it.

I admit I’d let my schedule get a little out of hand at the time: On a typical day, I’d wake up at seven, meditate, see my daughter off to school by eight fifteen, work, work, work, drink coffee all day, grab a salad at two, work, work, greet Ava when she came home from school, see her at six for her dinner, put her to sleep at nine, get my own dinner at nine fifteen, usually with someone I worked with, and then work until one or two in the morning. I even slept with my BlackBerry under my pillow in case someone called wanting to work in the middle of the night (now, with the recent research on cell phones and cancer, I keep it off but still within reach). I know I’ve said my work is my yoga, but there was nothing yogic about this schedule. It was more like boot camp for really crazy monks.

And so it was that around age forty even
I
started to envy the so-called normals out there. In fact, I became a little obsessed with normalcy. I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep at night in a home where there was a man to keep me safe. Or to have more time off to walk around the city with Ava or to go for bike rides. I wanted to find out if the relatively easier lives that the people around me seemed to have were as pleasant as they looked. So I started to try to emulate them. I insisted on going out to dinner with nonwork friends. I tried to be open to dating. I went to Home Depot and Michael’s craft store. I considered scrapbooking (I eventually decided against it because it seemed like it would take $800 to get my scrapbook going and, frankly, that’s a Margiela shirt). Believe it or not, I even strung my whole loft in bright Martha Stewart and Lily Pulitzer tissue paper flowers I put together with Ava; this was the décor for our Easter dinner!

And I didn’t stop there. I took a chunk of the money I’d earned on MTV and announced to my employees that we should all start exercising. Then I bought each and every person at People’s Revolution a $500 bicycle and christened us the Grand Street Sports Club. We had baskets and bells; we were even featured in the
New York Times
for our riding prowess! I also denounced grocery stores; instead, you could find me throughout the week with the rest of New York City’s domestic mavens at the farmer’s market, buying good organic produce.

My country house at the time shared a beach on a lake with several other families. I’d always avoided going there during prime sunbathing hours, because I hate group sports. In fact, the words “moms” and “bathing suits” used in the same sentence had always been enough to send me on a rocket to another planet. Instead, I’d go to the lake around eight for an evening sidestroke or early in the morning before anyone else woke up. It had always seemed like my worst nightmare to cart my coolers and beach reads and sunblock down the wooded path at ten on the dot and spend the whole day drinking Sprites and eating cheese balls with everyone else. But in the spirit of normalcy, I even gave
this
a whirl. And you know what? It was painful. I had nothing in common with these people and nothing to discuss with them. I’d never seen
Mad Men
or
The Office;
I’d never been to Atlantis or Cancun. In fact, I felt like I was visiting from another planet.

Although a lot of the other things I tried in the name of normalcy were fun and worthwhile, I ultimately just couldn’t get in the groove. This sane and normal life—the same one being lived, give or take a few details, by hundreds of thousands of professional women and mothers in New York—seemed kind of repetitive and animalistic. Get up, exercise, work, eat organic salad greens, drink wine, maybe have sex, go to sleep, and get up and do it all over again. My formerly abnormal life had had its share of repetition too, but at least the grueling work I did was pushing me forward, not keeping me moored in vaguely contented stasis. I couldn’t say the same about dodging crazy cab drivers on my morning bicycle ride. Not that there’s anything wrong with riding a bike per se or even sunning yourself on the beach—it’s just that I was doing these things for everyone else’s reasons, not my own. These weren’t
my
preferred activities. And they quickly started to seem like a huge waste of time. I didn’t feel replenished or exhilarated; I felt exhausted, emotionally and financially. Where was this all
going
?

In hindsight, my awkward quest for normalcy was one of the most humorous explorations I’ve taken in my life as well as one of the least rewarding. The truth is, not only does normal get you nowhere; normal doesn’t do anything for you, or at least it didn’t for me. I’d already known the feeling of winning through self-esteem and hard work, and it was much more invigorating than winning the race to conform to everyone else’s life plan or the feeling of having held hands, drunk wine, and watched a movie. Don’t get me wrong. That kind of thing can be nourishing at certain moments, but it’s hard to be effective at changing the world or yourself when you’re eating heavy meals at seven thirty every night—I mean, this is probably why France, a magical country, hasn’t managed to catapult itself back to being a real world power!

A lot of people say they want to be special, but they don’t want to do the work or to occasionally eat crow in order to grow. This was obviously what had set me questing after normalcy in the first place. I hadn’t done any drugs or even really drunk in sixteen years; I’d become a champion worker and an accomplished meditator. I was clearly trying my best to go all the way on this karmayogic path I’d chosen. And at times it seemed overrated, or at least like it was making me miss out on things. And it was, The Mother herself warned people off the path of spirituality—she said it was not for the meek. Few people ever manage to commit totally to the Divine, becoming a swami or a prophet, and few commit to darkness either, becoming a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Charles Manson. Most of us dance between the two, with one foot on either side, for our entire lives. These forces are both incredibly powerful and, on the surface, attractive; as one side starts to consume us, we grab the other as a way to balance ourselves. This is what’s normal.

Ultimately, I would like “normal” to become equated with “boring.” Let’s throw “successful” in there too. Instead, let’s use words like “conscious,” “collaborative,” and “creative” (and of course “charming,” “charismatic,” and “compassionate”). In my early forties, having strived for years to accomplish many of the things I wanted in my life, from creating a business to raising a daughter, I found myself wondering what was left to do, and
be
. The answer, I now know, is to be of service to others. Compassion and true Universal Motherhood start with consciousness—with awakening to what’s going on all around us in this world and summoning our courage and creativity to change it.

If normal gets you nowhere, consciousness will get you fucking everywhere, from Bali to Paris to your very own bloque. I hope to see you there.