Traveling with Pomegranates (24 page)

On our second day in Paris, after half a day in the Louvre, Mom and I walk to Notre Dame. Along the riverbank, we pass vendors selling books, art prints, and vintage postcards. We linger at patisserie windows displaying raspberry tarts,
pain au chocolat,
petits fours, and madeleines. When we cross the Pont Neuf, I can still see the desserts in my head.

At the cathedral square, I pull my Fodor’s guidebook from my backpack and scan the pages devoted to the cathedral:
Construction began in 1163 . . . completed in 1345 . . . walls are lined with chapels . . . don’t miss the three rose windows
.

“This says there are three portals that lead into the church,” I say to Mom. “One represents the Virgin Mary, one, the Last Judgment, and one, St. Anne.”

“A St. Anne portal?” Mom asks.

“Yeah.”

She walks through that one while I go through the Virgin Mary entrance. Looking up, I see a depiction of the Coronation of the Virgin and remember the fresco on the wall in the monastery in Greece, where I first discovered Mary, Queen of Heaven. Up until yesterday, I would’ve guessed Mom would choose the Mary portal, too, but then she spent all that time in St. Anne’s chapel at St.-Germain-des-Prés, and today she seemed transfixed by Leonardo’s painting of St. Anne in the Louvre. I know that she sees herself in Anne all of a sudden and that it has to do with “the Old Woman,” as Mom fondly calls her. I’ve always thought of my mother as ageless. It’s hard to think of her growing older, to watch
her
thinking about it.
I won’t have her forever,
I think, and the sight of her walking off toward the Anne portal nearly levels me.

This morning, I woke to the buzzing of Mom’s blood pressure machine as the cuff tightened around her arm. Even before we left home, she was having a problem with her blood pressure. “What’s the reading today?” I asked, and she said, “Oh, it’s up a little, but I’m okay.” But I wonder silently—how okay can it be if she’s
traveling with the machine
?

I meet up with her at the ambulatory, and we walk past the first of thirty-seven chapels that line the interior of the cathedral, looking up at the vaulted ceiling and lit chandeliers. I smell candle wax and stone. Some chapels glow with more votive candles than others. You can easily tell the popular saints from the unpopular ones. All the visitors to Notre Dame seem to be on the same path, circling the church like bobbing toys caught in a swirl of bathwater. Now and then I see strips of pastel-colored light from the stained glass float above their heads.

I stop at the chapel of Joan of Arc. She’s one of the popular saints. Her chapel is ablaze. I hadn’t expected her to be here, though I don’t know why not. Of course she would be here. Her statue stands on a tall stone pedestal. She wears a long skirt, armor across her shoulders, and a helmet opened to reveal the face of a nineteen-year-old girl. My eyes are drawn to her hands, folded around a spear, the tip of which is sculpted into a fleur-de-lis. The helmet and spear remind me of the
Mourning Athena
relief at the Acropolis Museum that I had not gotten to see. I try to imagine this warrior-girl charging through Paris on horseback, commanding an army. I love her youth, her boldness, her clear vision, her whole wild story. She is like Athena, but a real girl.

Sensing I want to stay here awhile, Mom says she’ll meet me at the Madonna statue near the choir screen. I drop a few francs into the offering box, light a votive candle, and set it in the stand in front of the statue. I look at Joan’s face and entreat her silently:
Help me listen to my own voice. Help me find what I’m born to do. Help me find the courage to do it.

The yellow flame of my candle burns in a steady flicker. My prayer is reflexive. I do not pause to wonder if I deserve an answer, but I do ask, which is progress, I suppose. I don’t know what will come from something as simple as asking. Prayer and faith are enigmas—but I feel alive, like the girl on the horse. Maybe this is hope.

Outside the cathedral, our eyes adjust to the daylight. On our trek back to the hotel, we stop in a patisserie and I buy a chocolate éclair. I walk, and eat, and think. I hear that poem in my head. My St. Michael “voice.”

On a ferry in the Gulf of Morbihan, along the coast of Brittany, I begin to think morbidly about my blood pressure. I took it last night and again this morning with the battery-operated machine I brought from home, and it was alarmingly high, stirring up the familiar panic I’ve felt lately about my hypertension. It started out mildly a few years ago—as something to
watch
. In the months leading up to the trip, however, it erupted into uncontrolled episodes like this one, so many that my doctor looked uneasily at me, ordered an electrocardiogram, and upped the dosage of my medication. One minute I had a little pile of leaves burning in a corner of my backyard, and the next, a wildfire was whipping across the grass. I did not see it coming.

I have responded with yoga, aerobics, diet, acupuncture—a sort of holistic bucket brigade—but so far without effect. I’m probably working too hard at them, turning them into hypertense activities, but I don’t know how to relax about something referred to as a “silent killer.” The words are emblazoned across a big poster about hypertension in my doctor’s exam room. During my last visit, while waiting for the nurse to take my blood pressure, I refused to look at it, but my body reacted anyway and I was soused with adrenaline by the time she got there. My blood pressure soared off into the stratosphere like the starship
Enterprise
, going where no reading of mine had ever gone before.

I don’t like to talk about my hypertension. As if it has a stigma attached to it. As if it reveals too much about me, some glimpse into myself I cannot allow, cannot bear. It feels ridiculously like a failure, a revelation of my inability to rest, a reflection on the paucity of my stillness, serenity, and centeredness—all those contemplative graces I value. The whole matter leaves me embarrassed, helpless, afraid, and amplifies my already touchy thoughts about my mortality.

By the time we board the small, white ferry, the panic I felt earlier this morning about the readings has blunted into a dull percussion along my breastbone, enough to send me outside to the rail, wanting to be alone. It doesn’t help that we are on our way to the tiny island of Gavrinis to see a five-thousand-year-old burial chamber, known as a “tumulus.”

Not discovered until 1865, it is thought by many to be the finest tumulus in the world. In the tourist pamphlet, it’s described as “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory,” though it’s hard to imagine what could lead to such hyperbole. A tumulus is a piece of stone-age architecture, after all, earth and stones and that’s about it. What intrigues me most is that archaeological evidence suggests the tumulus was not just a grave site, but that it had a ceremonial purpose. What that purpose may have been, however, has turned into one of those Stonehenge-like mysteries.

When we decided to visit Gavrinis, I wondered if my time at the tumulus could become a private ceremony for me as well, a way to have an overdue conversation with myself about the fact that for the first time in my life I think about death. It always comes unbidden, suddenly there in front of me like someone unsavory stepping out from an alley into my path, startling me and taking my breath, and then a tiny burst of anguish occurs in my chest—
yes, it will end, it will all end
. For several moments, the feeling will ricochet inside, then it’s gone.

The intimations have come more and more frequently and at times bring on a slightly frantic litany—
I am fifty-one, so young. Dying is far in the future. Cross that bridge when you come to it. Focus on today. Don’t be morose
.

I first read Eavan Boland’s poem “Ceres Looks at the Morning” after I returned home from Greece. Sometimes, like now, entire lines of it come back:

The words offer some kind of latitude-longitude reading of my soul, positioning me in interior time and place—
at the edge of a larger darkness.
At the strange, uncompromising border with my finitude. Deep down, those bearings seem right to me. The growing recognition of my mortality seems part of the threshold I’m crossing, and I know my soul is asking me to come to terms with it, to develop the ability to look at death, to find my way into its secrecy and wisdom, its stunning ordinariness.

Over the preceding summer, Sandy and I vacationed in Bermuda at a place called Ariel Sands, so named for the water sprite Ariel in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
. The hotel desk clerk handed me a copy of the play when we checked in. Having never read it before, I opened it one afternoon sitting beside the waves and found a story about a man, Prospero, making a rite of passage into his older years, though I’m sure I was reading it through the lens of my own life. At the end of the play, Prospero announces that every third thought he has from then on will be of his death.
Oh, great.
I closed the book with a sinking feeling.