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| Round and round and round... |
| 12.30.04 (9:09 am) [edit] |
|
For most of my adult life I was petrified to fly. I’ve gotten over it, but, for many years it paralyzed me. It wasn’t necessarily the dying that worried me, but rather, the time between descent and hitting the ground…knowing what was about to happen and being powerless to stop it. Yesterday, my world crashed head on into a mountain. The descent has begun and I’m not quite sure how I will crawl from the fuselage in one piece. I had known it in my heart for over a week. But, as it was just a feeling, I left the door open for hope. It has been a revolving door leading to a roller coaster of emotions, but, none more painful than this. The cancer has spread to the bone marrow. There is nothing that we can do to change the course of this disease. And, with those words, the last door of hope on this long and arduous journey, cruelly and abruptly closed. I will write more about this when I am able. But for now I will tell you that whatever lessons I learn along this scenic route through purgatory, none will equal what I have learned about courage, grace, and strength from my beautiful 17-year-old daughter. I always believed that it would be the other way around but sometimes life doesn’t work that way. For now the revolving door just keeps spinning. Round and round and round we go, where we stop nobody knows. |
| 6 Comments |
| In the light of the silvery moon... |
| 12.14.04 (11:29 am) [edit] |
|
Early this fall they began to cut down the huge old maple trees along Third Street. The trees, which graced this street for many years before it was a street, made the light dance in summer and their immense branches formed a tunnel of leaves towering over the street below. In the autumn they provided a spectacle of color that would take your breath away. But, they are gone now. Victims of a sewer project. It appears as if a nuclear bomb went off and for a while every time I looked down the street I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Last night, however, I happened to look out my bedroom window and saw an unfamiliar glow resting on the snow. Three houses in a row, were adorned in various styles of Christmas lights and for whatever reason, it made me smile. And, as silly as it sounds, it gave me a sense of hope. In the house directly across from me, lives a widow named Marge and her dog Lil’ Bit. Marge can barely walk and has a long list of critical ailments, including diabetes and heart disease. She lost her husband three years ago, which is when Lil’ Bit came to live. In the summer Marge can be found day after day, reading on her front porch. For several weeks, though, I hadn’t seen any activity and I worried that perhaps something had happened. But now, as I looked out my window, I saw hundreds of tiny lights wrapped around Marge’s porch and railing. Not only did I know that she was alright, but I knew that every time she looked out the window she would feel the same sense of warmth, celebration and hope that I did. For some reason, there is hope in light. The houses to the left of Marge were also decorated. Before the trees were cut down I could barely even see these houses and I never saw any signs of life coming from inside of them… rarely even a light. Now, however, the glow of holiday lights radiated out and over the snow. "Barns burnt down, now I can see the moon". That is what I thought about when I looked at the lights shining from the houses across the street. It is a quote I have hanging on my refrigerator by a Japanese poet named Masahide. If I have learned nothing else in three years, I have learned that it is much easier to focus on the loss of the barn than to celebrate the glow of the moon. In life, it takes less effort to get swept away by the hurt, disappointment, and seeming unfairness than it is to start stripping away the sadness and begin to search for the ray of light that most certainly exists. Somewhere. Behind the barn, behind the trees, behind the pain there is a bigger picture… in a smaller package. Ultimately, by focusing in on the things that shine through after everything else is gone, we are able to discover what is truly important. For many of us though, by the time we discover it… it is often too late. When we lived in our big house with the 14 ft. Christmas tree and a pile of presents that extended for yards… there was always a degree of hollowness to Christmas morning. A few years later, when I had no money and could barely scrape up enough to buy the girls even a few small presents… for the first time, I saw them truly grateful. After Christmases overshadowed by loss, illness and pain, what shined through was the fact that we were together. We all have people that we love, but rarely do we understand the degree of preciousness in those relationships… or the precious nature of time. That Christmas, the presents were an afterthought… the gift was in discovering the gift in each other. It’s not that the big house, the big tree, or the big presents are bad things… they were just the barn blocking the view of the moon. I guess that’s why I love Christmas. It is the story of the bigger picture found in a smaller package. It is about a group of very lucky people who in the middle of their every day lives, laid everything aside and followed a bright and pervasive light that cut through the darkness. In the middle of chaos, behind the barn, behind the trees, and behind the pain, they followed a star that took them to a cold, damp cave where a little baby lay in a feed trough. For 2,000 years that has been the light that shines through after everything else is gone. The baby’s message was simple. Love each other. Look past the barn. There is a reason that we find hope in the light... whether it is the guiding light of a star, the beams of a moon once hidden from view, or the soft glow of Christmas lights resting on the snow. |
| 6 Comments |
| Christmas at my brother's house. |
| 12.07.04 (8:01 am) [edit] |
|
This year we will be having Christmas at my brother’s house. I guess that I need to spend some more time there… to see traces of him in his surroundings. To me, it is still Ellie and Fritz’s house. It is the house where the davenport was covered in plastic. It always looked the same, smelled the same, and felt the same… warm and cozy… a shelter in the storm of every day life. Grandma Ellie would not argue that I "got away with murder" at her house. When I played restaurant, I used real dishes and served real food...can't remember who cleaned up. I'm doubting that it was me. I played in her dresses, wore her jewelry, perfume, hats, and shoes and put on red 'rouge' and lipstick. We made pizza and homemade malts and she always kept maple leaf cookies in a Tupperware container by the basement door. For a mean-spirited, evil Republican… Ellie definitely had a bleeding heart when it came to me. Following my infamous carrot experience (see my first blog), I was excused from the table without the benefit of dinner. Knowing that I would soon be hungry, I took the three block trek to Grandma Ellie’s where I knew I could share the details about my horribly nasty parents and I would get a sympathetic ear, as well as, something to eat that wasn’t apt to make me vomit. She greeted me at the door with a hug and a smile. Ellie always smelled like Lillies of the Valley. She started filling me with food even before I had begun divulging the details of the cooked carrot atrocity. Every once in a while she would take a break from her preparations and run her hand over my hair… shaking her head in sympathy. "Fritz", she would yell, "Lori’s here… come give her a hug… she had a fight with Jim". Grandpa Fritz had a heavy German accent and a thick head of black wavy hair. He was the most agreeable man that I have ever known and I’m fairly sure that he died without ever having a single enemy. Ironically, he lost his arm to cancer in the 70s… the same year that their beloved cottage was lost in a flood. When he retired as a machinist from Chrysler, the line for his retirement party went on for three hours. Every Sunday, Fritz would take me to Sacred Heart Church for mass and then bowling. Three games…four if I pouted. Grandpa had bowled at least two 300 games in his life. When he lost his arm he had to learn all over again. He never complained. Patiently he would show me where to stand and dutifully he would cheer me on. Occasionally he would slap his hand against his forehead and shake his head… "you turned your wrist again" he would say with his accent, "you aren’t ever gonna get a strike it you keep throwing that back-up ball!". I never knew what a back up ball was but I knew that it always made him slap his forehead. In the summers we would go to their cottage on Lake Erie. It was small and smelled faintly of ivory soap and mildew. The walls were covered in pine paneling and the curtains were a beautiful 50s floral pattern. Ellie and I would water the lawn in the evenings and when it was dark we tiptoed with a flashlight and a coffee can digging up nightcrawlers for fishing the next day. I would sit for hours on a giant rock and fish… all by myself. I never tired of it. Looking out at this seemingly endless mass of water and daydreaming. At night I would lay in bed with the screen door open and listen to the fog horn and the waves… turning on my light every once in a while to check for spiders. There were always parties at the cottage, not fancy parties, but they were filled with raucous laughter and a level of hospitality that Martha Stewart never dreamed of. They had one of those giant brick barbecues and it always smelled heavenly. On July 20, 1969, I was just one of many faces crowded onto the tiny screened-in porch, watching intently as two men walked on the moon for the first time. First there was a sense of quiet awe and then a great deal of cheering and clinking of beer mugs. Drifting through the heavy German accents came the sound of American pride. The American dream… not without cost, struggle or pain…but even at the age of eight I was drawn to a light in their eyes that I rarely see any more. One day I went back to the cottage after the flood. My bedroom was perched just past the rocks where I used to fish. We lost so much more than a cottage that day. They are both gone now. Grandpa died several years before grandma. She found ways to fill her time but she never got over it. One year, I gave her a computer and she cursed it and feigned a little anger with me. She insisted that she was much to old to learn something new… but every day she was on that computer emailing her Congressman, pulling up the Drudge report or ranting to me about democrats. One night she, my mom, my sisters and myself all started a private chatroom and she was blown away by the possibility of it all… a childlike fascination, like watching men walk on the moon right before your very eyes. After grandma died, I took two things from her house… a little cuckoo clock that I would wind each time I visited and the Tupperware container where she kept the cookies. Christmas at Ellie and Fritz’s. The tree will be different and so will the smell. We will still serve the pink fluffy stuff, the baked beans and the German potato salad. It is still a shelter in the storm of every day life but, I won’t be snooping through the drawers anymore looking for clothes to dress up in, covering myself with her Muguet cologne or chowing down on maple leaf cookies. It is my brother’s house. It is my brother’s house. Yet, somewhere in between the stories and the card games, we will think about Ellie and Fritz. We will almost be able hear their voices…arguing over the placement of the video camera until someone waved their hand in the air with a loud "Ach!" and walked away. I imagine that it doesn’t matter what we call the house. We will be together at Christmas. Ellie and Fritz would have like that, I think. |
| 6 Comments |
Grace, beauty, humor, strength.
Alison Haley Cloud
Nov. 16, 1987-March 1, 2005
