Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (38 page)

ANOTHER DIALECT OF THE SOUL

B
e in the world but not of the world
. How many times had those words traveled from her mouth to my ear? How many times had she implored me to pray for guidance, to give thanks, to claim the promise that
God did not give me a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and a sound mind
? All our life together, even before her diagnosis, she had been preparing us—not just my siblings and me, I now realize, but our father, too—to survive her. And not just to survive but to manifest the courage and the might her belief had always insisted we possess.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me
. She made me say it over and over again whenever I doubted. She made me say it to myself until it said itself, and once it did that, I didn’t need to hear it anymore because I knew. Maybe that is the sum, the end-all of belief. Not a zealous adamancy but a quiet certainty.

My mother’s language was always the language of the soul. But it grew clearer, more telegraphic, once the cancer began to accelerate her sense that she was on her way elsewhere. So much of the time, living with such knowledge, her mind must have been tuned to the idea of what awaited her:
I go to prepare a place for you. If it were not so, I would have told you
. In some strange way, the return to the soul state might simply be the answer to the prayer that sits behind every prayer:
Deliver me
. Is there another dialect of the soul, a way it speaks in those who don’t possess the vocabulary of
belief? A way it stirs and surges as if to say
Here I am
, something we don’t hear but that we feel and, feeling, know.

I liked to sit in the leather armchairs facing the tall windows in Lamont Library. The windows looked out onto Mass Ave. at the intersection of Quincy Street, and when I’d glance up from my page, I’d see people I knew and people I didn’t know moving back and forth along the axes of their lives. The reading room silence would obliterate all the outside traffic noises, and the daylight would baptize the pedestrians, it seemed to me, in a kind of transparent splendor, as if for the few moments they appeared in frame, they were resplendent in the inviolable promise we were all of us born into. It didn’t matter if they were in a rush or a daze, if they coughed into their fists or if smoke streamed from their mouths. Each wore, for an instant if not more, a mantle of eminent belonging, as if the moment that held them was not a mistake, as if they were not lost or alone or under a heap of insurmountable dread.
Here I am
, something in them seemed to be saying to the pavement, the fallen leaves, to no one in particular.

I was taking a poetry workshop, my third so far at Harvard. In it, I had discovered that sitting down with an idea and letting it unfold in words and sounds offered me not just pleasure but an indescribable comfort. I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by—the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
Back out of all this now too much for us
, said Robert Frost, and when I heard his words in my ears, they gave weight and purpose to my footsteps, to the breath going in and out of my lungs; they gave me terms with which to consider bits and pieces of the things I otherwise didn’t know how to acknowledge. Frost’s voice telling me to retreat (at least that’s part
of what I heard in that line, hovering in space on its own, apart from the rest of the poem or even the rest of its sentence) emboldened me to admit that, yes, I was overwhelmed. My mother’s cancer overwhelmed me. Her death, waiting out there in the distance, overwhelmed me. So did the loneliness I still sometimes felt, even amid the chatter and bustle of friends and classes.

Perhaps without realizing it, I, like my mother long before she belonged to me, had been seeking something.
I was searching
. Not for any one thing in particular, and not as a result of a single glaring lack, but seeking—searching—nonetheless.

Poetry met my particular sense of need. Writing a poem, I sometimes felt like I was building a house from scratch, raising the walls, hanging the doors, laying out the rooms. It felt at times like backbreaking work. Other times, it seemed that what I was trying to evoke or encounter in a poem was already alive somewhere and that my job was merely to listen. The language of each of the poetry workshops I’d taken was built upon the assumption that there really was something else at play. My teachers talked about our poems as if they were sentient beings with plans and wishes of their own, wishes it was up to us to carry into language. “Your poem seems to be leading you in one direction, but you insist upon going in another.” Or, “Try and cut out all this noise so you can hear what the poem is trying to tell you.” It sounded quite nearly mystical, like we were playing at divination, but it also rang true. Wasn’t it strange that a poem, written in my vocabulary and as a result of my own thoughts or observations, could, when it was finished, manage to show me something I hadn’t already known? Sometimes, when I tried very hard to listen to what the poem I was writing was trying to tell me, I felt the way I imagined godly people felt when they were trying to discern God’s will. “Write
this,” the poem would sometimes consent to say, and I’d revel in a joy to rival the saints’ that Poetry—this mysterious presence I talked about and professed belief in—might truly be real.

Often, that spring, I found myself sitting in a reading room window with a book I ought to have been reading for class, but I also always had a black sketchbook into which I’d begun writing lines of my own. Sometimes, I wrote the same stanza over and over until something was unlocked and I could move forward. Once or twice, I’d stopped mid-poem, altogether stumped, and started a letter to myself in which I’d describe whatever it was I was having trouble getting into language:
What does it mean to slog through the weight of the everyday, to wake to anxiety, to spend the day straining to hear what they must be saying now that you’re out of earshot, to have to put on the boots, though you’re tired, always tired, and just keep going?
Sometimes all of the watching and listening and waiting finally gave way to a poem:

THE ORDINARY LIFE

To rise early, reconsider, rise again later

to papers and the news. To smoke a few if time

permits and, second-guessing the weather
,

dress. Another day of what we bring to it
—

matters unfinished from days before
,

regret over matters we’ve finished poorly
.

Just once you’d like to start out early
,

free from memory and lighter for it
.

Like Adam, on that first day: alone

but cheerful, no fear of the maker
,

anything his for the naming; nothing

to shrink from, nothing to shirk
,

no lot to carry that wasn’t by choice
.

And at night, no voice to keep him awake
,

no hurry to rise, no hurry not to
.

Sitting in the window thinking about language, threading my questions, worries, doubts, and fears into sentences, made me happy. As did the deep visceral longing that the voices of other poets awakened in me, a longing for the kind of momentary belonging that came from getting hold of an idea that had been waiting all along just for me. When I felt the presence of that other thing—the voice that seemed to be speaking to my hand as it moved across the page—I became clearheaded and steady, richer with something I hadn’t known I possessed. Was that what my mother felt when she prayed? Was it what she quieted herself to hear so often during the days and nights, calling it
Lord
? Perhaps it was and is external, adrift, moving among the living like weather. Perhaps what it teaches, to each of us, no matter who we are, is our own necessary language, one that is both wholly new and yet familiar from a time that predates every other thing we recognize, even ourselves.

SOMETHING POWERFUL AT HER SIDE

I
n April, just around the time that spring was deciding it futile to put off arriving any longer, I found myself once again struggling with heartache. My boyfriend in Providence had been seeing someone else, and the betrayal pressed down upon me constantly, from the time I drew the curtains and took my first glimpse of the day—the wintry New England sky so often overcast, a blank expansive white made up of flat, cold light—to the moment I lay back down in the dark of my room at night. I carried it with me on my walks to and from campus. It crept into the books I read, tampering with characters’ motivation, changing their faces and voices to mine or his or hers. I squinted into the distance, mistaking any number of innocent men for the one who had been careless with my affection. I was angry, dogged by humiliation: why had I been so stupid, so trusting? And, perhaps most vexingly, why was I still lonely for the cad who had put me in such a mixed-up, wretched state?

I should have been heartbroken about my mother, I reminded myself one night. I should have been thinking only of her, preparing to go home to her in two months’ time. Instead, I was breaking myself apart over someone who wasn’t worth my time. I was up late trying to finish a paper, late enough that I felt alone, like the sole person awake on our block, on our block and in the world. It was a rare clear night, and the sky, for once cloudless, was glinting with distant stars.
If our lives make sense
, I’d thought,
it must be a sense visible only from that great a distance
. No matter that much of what watched from there had long since vanished, the light that was only just reaching me seemed alive with comprehension, compassion.
What would it tell us if it could speak?

How many thoughts, how much longing and bargaining with who knows what had I wasted on someone who would eventually,
I
was sure of it, dwindle to just the faintest smudge of a memory? Where might I be if I had given that energy to something, anything else? And without having decided to, I was talking to the gathering of stars:

Please help me to let go of this story. Please help me to give my heart over to my mother
.

If it was a prayer, it seemed to travel out into all that the night sky kept hidden.

I graduated. My mother made it to campus but slept in her hotel during the commencement ceremony. At one of the celebratory gatherings, Conrad’s father-in-law leaned over to whisper to me that she did not look at all well. His words chipped through the stubborn veneer of my denial and nicked at my flesh.

I spent one last summer in Cambridge, saying goodbye to the site of my first real brush with independence. I spent a few nights in bed with a boy from my summer job, thinking I’d go back to being good, being chaste, in a few months’ time.

In September, I moved back home to Fairfield. Despite my complete understanding of my mother’s prognosis, I was still confounded by statements that suggested she wouldn’t recover. It must be the very nature of denial not to assent until knowledge, which is abstract, has given way to incontrovertible fact.

At home, Jean was the one who knew how to minister to our mother’s needs quickly and quietly, how to make sure she felt the dignity that her illness by that point seemed intent upon whittling
away. Jean was the one who bathed our mother, who got her in and out of the bathroom, who emptied and cleaned the basin of the hospice toilet (like a lawn chair with a bucket lowered into its seat), who did all the other things I never even learned to do. And because it was Jean who knew how to lower her voice and speak quietly with my mother about the things that would make her most comfortable, it appeared to me, throughout the day and night, that the two of them were conspiring. I knew they weren’t, but sometimes the sight of their heads close together, and the soft rumblings of their conversation, unsettled me: I was too far away, an outsider unable to anticipate what would be needed next, not wanting to be fully aware of how the things we were every day willing ourselves to accept would eventually play themselves out. I envied them that closeness, but I didn’t begrudge it. For my part, I was most relieved by the companionable silence, punctuated by laughter, in which my mother and I sometimes sat watching old black-and-white movies on TV. That particular wordlessness always brought me back to my childhood, the time when she was everything to me. Laughing with her at something Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell had just said or done, I could just about convince myself that I’d come full circle—that I’d gone off on my own and lived a life and then come back to her as if nothing else in the world could possibly matter.