My girl came home

A few of her friends who happened to be in town for spring break came over last night to sing happy birthday to her and share in cake and revelry. These were her longtime friends from MCS days, fifteen years and counting, plus a newer friend from college, a girl named Henri whom I immediately adored when I met her last Thanksgiving.

My women friends came too, the mothers of these children. We have forged our own independent connection over the years, so that when we get together for a meal, sometimes we don't even talk about our children.

We kept everything simple. Cake and pizza and seltzer. My daughter and her friends provided their own entertainment, laughing and chatting non stop, while we women talked softly in the kitchen and in the living room my husband and son, and one of his friends, a former housemate from college, watched March Madness basketball on TV. It wasn't as segregated as it sounds. Everyone weaved in and out of the groups, and my children sat with their heads close for a while, catching up with one another, talking about I know not what.

I am so happy to see my daughter. I depend too much on her sometimes. She has a mysterious ability to lift the mood in a room, just with her laugh, which bursts from her like light, her eyes dancing, the sound like music filling my parched soul. I am grateful beyond words that she is here. We three buffeted souls needed her. I know this is hardly fair, maybe it is too much to burden her with, to find such comfort in her young, carefree spirit, but there you are. I hugged her close and felt a healing begin. I am crying again.

So I wrote the obit. I don't know if anything I write could possibly do my aunt justice, but I've done my best. I need a reader, which would normally have been my mother, but she can't be the one anymore. It will only make her weep. My cousin in Virginia will read for me, and tell me if there are any wrong notes, glaring omissions, self-indulgent paragraphs. It is too long, but my other cousin in Boston, a graphic designer who is doing the program, told me she will make it work. I am remembering a minister who used to be close to our family once saying that the biblical phrase. "In my father's house there are many mansions," should in our case be changed to "In my mother's house are many cousins."

My heart is shredded from the storms of this week, some created by my own internal chemistry, some unbloggable, but in the midst of it all, I am finding so much to be grateful for. But it is strange: I recognize my vast blessings intellectually, but am having trouble actually feeling them.

Tomorrow, we travel.

While Waiting

I need to write Aunt Winnie's obit for the program. I keep waiting for inspiration to strike, for joy at the memory of her to fill me, booting out the sadness, the free floating feeling of anxiety and angst, which might be grief or something else, but whatever it is, I don't want to write about Aunt Winnie and how wonderful she was to me, to all of us, while marinating in anxiety, while trying to get free of the unruly thoughts that assail me, the fist that has closed like a vise around my heart, my throat which feels brimmed with tears. I push them down, because who can cry all the time. I think I have never felt so alone. I am sorting through photos sent to me by family members. I am gathering them for the picture spread of the program. Here are a few.

The sisters and brothers (and one friend), circa 1934
My great grandfather had an impressive mustache, no?

Me and my mom and two cousins. The cousin on my mom's
left did the whole eldercare dance with me. Faithfully.

I love this pic of my aunt. You can see the 70s feminist
and civil rights rabble rouser with her curly fro.

Happy 20th birthday my love

I am so happy and privileged to be your mother.

It all feels so hard. I am made of tears.

After

We're deep in the planning of Aunt Winnie's memorial service and the details are endless. Hardest for me is cleaning up and clearing out Aunt Winnie's apartment so that family members who are coming for her service on April 5 will be able to stay there. Her home had literally become a hospital wing; that bed she used, the one that pumped air under her body continuously to keep her papery skin from breaking down, was a huge and complex piece of electrical machinery. I didn't grasp quite how complex it was until I watched the men dismantling it and packing it up today.

Her room is empty now, the carpet stained and old, the walls bleak and tired, the furniture scuffed from decades of use. The house looks sad, and Aunt Grace, who will be staying there with her two daughters and three of my other cousins, was on the phone last night, crying, saying she didn't think she could walk into that apartment again knowing that her sister was gone from there forever. So much hard life occurred in that place, as Winifred slipped from us by inches, skin and bone at the end, her body curled tight, her cheekbones sharp, her eyes sunk deep, hair thin and white and feathery. I see her there, even as I collect and compile photographs from her earlier years, and try to bring back the way she used to be, her eyes alight with some mischief, a woman onto herself, striding ahead of the pack, the rest of us following like eager ducklings in her wake.

Going through her things this afternoon, I found a folder that held a literary magazine I had contributed a short story to in college, and issues of the college newspaper that contained stories I had written, the newsprint yellow and brittle with age. My own mother had not kept these things. I had forgotten I'd even written these stories. But there they were, faithfully preserved by Aunt Winnie, who pretended not to be sentimental, but kept my student writings in a red folder tucked among a pile of photo albums next to her chair.

Here's a picture I found. It was taken at my daughter's baptism. She is the baby and four of the sisters are clucking over her, each of them knowing what's best and no doubt arguing happily about it. That's Aunt Grace, Aunt Maisy, Aunt Winnie and my mom, Gloria. I love the way they are all holding my child. My daughter would grow familiar with the tornado of woman energy that whipped up whenever the sisters were together, but by the look on her face in this photo, she wasn't quite used to it yet.

My girl will be 20 years old in two days. Next week, we are going to St. Lucia for her spring break as planned, and will return for Aunt Winnie's service at the end of the week. By the time we get back, family members will have arrived from everywhere. I'm a little stressed right now, but I know we will manage to send Aunt Winnie off in grand style. She deserves no less.

The Cool Hip Aunt from America (repost)

Aunt Winnie died last night. She was 95 and at 4:55 p.m. she simply stopped breathing. As I told a friend this morning, she went very peacefully. She was trying to tell her home attendant something, but couldn't get it out, and then she let out a breath and just departed, eyes steady and glass-green, the light slowly going out. She had just finished a meal of pumpkin soup and apple pie, and her home attendant had just given her a sponge-bath. I think she was trying to say "Thank you."

*

Repost from May 14, 2009:

That's my Aunt Winnie, in a portrait made around the time she got married in 1949. She will be 91 this September. I'm sitting here remembering her as she was, the funny, opinionated, energetic woman who used to visit us from New York in the summers, with her curly gray afro and piercing green eyes. We loved her madly. She was the cool, hip aunt from America who understood us better than our parents.

And she was a feisty. Once, when my son was three and came home from preschool with a scratch on his face, she bent all the way down and put her nose to his and said, "Did you hit him back hard?" My son, parroting his parents' instructions, told her, "I don't hit!" She straightened up, looked at him with a frown and said, "So how do you plan to defend yourself?" Her sisters say she was always like that. Figuratively, a brawler.

She was the oldest girl of nine children, a gifted pianist who left Jamaica because she got tired of having to give all her little brothers and sisters piano lessons. "They never practiced," she complained to me once. "My mother cared for them to learn music, but they didn't."

She was the fourth in our family to migrate to America. The hoards came after her. She eventually sponsored all eight of her brothers and sisters, and the multitudes of their children. We have a joke in our family: If the U.S. government had known how many of us would follow Aunt Winnie to America, they would never had let her immigrate back in 1947.

She was officially the first Black employee of Barnard College (she says she was the second, that there was one woman there before her, but she was passing for White). My aunt rose through the ranks and eventually ran the college's Department of Office Services. She was the only director who did not have a college degree.

On her annual visits to Jamaica, she lectured her nieces on the importance of getting good grades in high school, and on the value of attending a women's college, and one by one, as we came of age, she had us apply to Barnard. She stressed that our grades would have to get us in, but if we made the cut, she would help to get us decent financial aid. Eventually six of her nieces migrated to New York and enrolled. 

She employed us all. After classes, we xeroxed hundreds upon hundreds of pages of professors' lesson plans, sorted mail, made deliveries of printing plates downtown, and ran the addressograph machine. My years at the college overlapped with three other cousins', and my aunt made sure our work hours seldom coincided, because she didn't want us chatting and socializing on the job.

One cousin and I did manage to work together in my aunt's office one summer. We'd hang out till late at night with our friends on campus, then head off to work each morning. We were living with my aunt. One morning, after a night of particularly spirited carousing, we didn't wake up on time. My Uncle Charlie, watching my aunt gather her things for work, said, "Aren't you going to wake the girls?" My aunt responded, "Let them sleep. While they're asleep, they still have a job. When they wake up, they'll find out they've been fired." We laugh about that now. But she didn't fire us. She just lectured us and made us work that day for no pay as punishment. Work was serious business.

Ironically, my aunt is the reason we are all here in America and able to take care of her. Two of the six nieces she helped get to Barnard now act as her power of attorney and health care proxy. And when it became clear that her daughter's troubles were putting her 6-year-old grandson in jeopardy, a third niece took him to live with her family in Virginia. The truth is we would all do anything for my aunt, because when she could, she did everything in her power for us. She was so generous to a fault, loyal and true. Every one of us is who we are today because of who she is and what she taught us and how she has lived her life. She is our big sister, mother, aunt, advisor, champion, friend. She is our beloved matriarch.

Goodnight Sweet Aunt Winnie, I imagine you now striding across the sky, finally free

September 7, 2018—March 22, 2014 

at 4:55 p.m.

Carpe Diem

Let's look on the bright side.

When I am between projects, I can wake up slow and make myself a one-egg omelet of cheddar and onions and sip my coffee slowly while catching up on the scandalous Scandal or maybe Downton Abbey.

I can work on my own lovely endeavors for a spell or cross the courtyard and sit with my 95-year-old Aunt Winnie and chat with her home attendant in her sunlit room.

I can meet an out-of-town friend for a late lunch to celebrate her new book, and we can raise a glass if we choose, because the day is ours.

I can go to a movie in the middle of the afternoon at the theater with the red leather power reclining seats if I want, and I can fall asleep if the movie doesn't hold my interest and it will feel like a delicious escape.

I can watch March Madness basketball with my husband, who is home sick today.

I can color my hair in a risky shade.

I can meditate on what's good and practice not worrying.

I can plan a birthday party. My girl turns 20 this week.

This Life

May I vent?

Just a bit.

I was up for a project filling in for someone going on maternity leave but I just learned they offered it to someone else. A four-month paycheck would have been nice but no dice. I didn't even bother to tell my family.

My friend just called to tell me about some other jobs I might apply for and I heard myself telling her, "Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe I'm going to have to hurt a little bit more to get really motivated." But my severance runs out next week. Hurt is waiting in the wings.

Could be, too, that I'm hiding out from the disappointment. I was really kind of crushed when I got the email today that they'd offered the position to someone else. If I'm being honest, I imagined that someone else to be younger, slimmer, white. I imagined he or she was deemed to "fit in" better than the editor who interviewed me thought I might. They say people hire who the ones they want to go out and have cocktails with. I'm sure this is true.

I have a payday coming for the job I just completed, but after that, who knows? I'm trying to trust that I will be okay. The story I have long told myself is that this particular life—in this particular body, in this particular place, adjacent to these particular people—is not about the pain of having no money. I've been able to indulge myself with this story because even during those periods when there was very little coming in, there was enough. Enough to meet my most basic needs, if not my simple wants. Enough to help provide for our family. Enough.

It seemed to me therefore that this life of mine was about other lessons. The clues always have to do with pain. What aspects of my life have caused me the greatest measure of distress? Those were the signposts—things like body comfort, the physical body, learning to treat myself with compassion, learning to risk mind-bending, heart-exploding love for others knowing you have no control over what might come and how that might undo you.

These are lessons I am learning still. But now, money is starting to cause its own measure of concern. And that worries me because I have been known to declare to my husband, "If I don't worry about money, I won't have to," a superstition that always makes him shake his head dubiously as if to say, "Do you."

I feel like the girl at the dance who didn't get chosen, who stands in the corner making up the reasons why.

Okay, I guess that's enough of feeling sorry for myself.

Thanks for letting me share.

*

Here's what else happened today.

My husband called from work this morning. My son and I were home, as my son doesn't go to his coaching job till 2 pm. My husband asked if our son could come and get him at work; he was feeling dizzy and unwell. My son and I jumped in the car and went to collect him. His coworker walked him out to the car, because he was feeling very lightheaded.

On the way back home, my son asked him lots of questions about what he had eaten and what activities he had done and then told his dad that even though he had sworn off sugar for Lent, he should drink a glass of mango juice when we got home.

When we got home, our son took out his stethoscope and blood pressure cuff to check his dad's numbers. He said, "Okay, Pops, sit here. You didn't educate me for nothing." He wondered if maybe his dad's recent healthier eating and newly regular gym schedule might be having a positive effect on his usually high blood pressure, so that his blood pressure medication might now be too much. He instructed him to go and see his doctor so see if his meds need adjusting.

My husband drank the glass of juice our son handed him and did begin to feel steadier. He ate a protein lunch and now he is dozing in the chair right next to where I am sitting. Before he drifted off, he said, "You know, I called my son and when I put down the phone I wanted to say to my coworker, 'EMT is on his way,' but I didn't." There was pride in his voice. You could tell he felt taken care of by his son.

When I think about it this way, on balance, this is a good day.

A good forgettery

By Sunday morning all was well again, and that is how it is I suppose: All is well some days, not so much other days, but if we manage to hang on and not do anything too destructive to ourselves or the other person, we just might get through to the other side. I remember reading in a women's magazine a story about the secrets of lasting marriages. In it, they had asked long-married couples for their prescription for success. There were a lot of nuggets of wisdom, but the only one I remember was from a woman in her eighties, married 48 years. She said, "You have to have a short memory. You have to be very good at forgetting because you're not going to work everything through, you're not going to solve everything, and sometimes you just have to forget about it and move on." Words to that effect. It rang so true to me. My mother and aunts call this having "a good forgettery," something they all practiced to get past sibling squabbles their entire lives. I don't really know what was up on Friday and Saturday, and I've decided it no longer matters.

My husband took me to the annual orchid show at the New York Botanical Gardens yesterday, because he knows I love orchids, and he also finds them to be the most sensual flower ever. We took lots and lots of pictures as we walked the labyrinthine paths and that was when I exhaled and relaxed into our okayness once more. It was a good, simple day with my love, whose light had fully returned, no doubt in partial response to the dissipation of my own gloom and doom. We are so at the mercy of random electrical storms on these plains.

Here are some of the sights and the people we found wandering through that hothouse of extravagant natural and manicured beauty that was the orchid show.