Son's Offering

My husband's mom's birthday was on Friday, October 14. As he does each year to celebrate her, my husband rose early on Saturday morning and went down to the flower district to choose blooms for the Sunday service altar arrangements he had committed to making. He arrived back home just as the house began to stir, all our out-of-town guests slowly surfacing from the depths of comforters and dreams as he wrapped the stems and carefully placed each flower. I could imagine his mom looking down from her heavenly perch and seeing these lovely red and pink anthuriums, picked and arranged by her firstborn's hands with so much filial adoration. Happy birthday, dear Nana. We love and miss you always.

Faerie Dance

Left Behind

Thank you who commented here for feeling this photo. I took it in the spare bedroom at my mom's home in St. Lucia. The state of the wallpaper told me more starkly than any words could that she would soon be living elsewhere, because she could no longer manage this house on her own. If you knew my mom, you'd know what this peeling wallpaper meant. It was a hard moment, one that surfaced again for me in the sad events of this week. And yet I was happy my mom was here with us in New York when we got the news of my cousin's death. The spirit that she has, her proactive faith, made the planning of his service seem somehow loving and familial instead dark and tragic. And the conversations she had with my cousin in the weeks before he died left us all feeling that he had arrived at a good place in his own life and conscience, that he left this earth with a heart at peace.

Pretty

This is the set-up my cousin in created for the party to celebrate her older daughter's passing her bar exam. My cousin's taste is exquisite as usual. I wish she were here to help us plan the events of this week.


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The Fire This Time

"The things that tormented me most were the 

very things that connected me with all the people

who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

— From The Fire Next Time 

by James Baldwin

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Portal

My cousin died on Thursday. Aunt Winnie's son. It was very sudden. No one expected. My mother called me at work, her voice shaking, sobbing, bewildered. I left work and went to her. Together, we went upstairs to my aunt's house, with my cousin's daughter and son in law, and his ex wife, who was the one who found him. He had been home recovering from a hip replacement surgery, and when he wouldn't answer the phone, she went to his house. He was lying on his bedroom floor. A pulmonary embolism.

We decided to wait for my aunt's minister to get there before we told her. We knew his prayers would be a comfort to her. But she already knew. When I stood at her bedside she grasped my hand and said her son's name, her face contorted into a mask of mother's grief. Of course she knew her son had stopped breathing. She said, "I can't even go." I didn't understand anything else. Only that at ninety-three she is ready to go to where her son is. But her pacemaker keeps ticking as the tears roll down.

Now all the family members are flying in again. The elder sisters. The cousins of my generation. Flying in from Jamaica and Florida and Canada, driving up from Virginia and Maryland and New Jersey, coming to pay their last respects to a man who often drove us to distraction, but who we loved. We loved him. He was ours. And now he is gone, waiting perhaps to welcome his mother to the place where he has gone, where he understands everything, even the weight of my self-righteousness at some of his earthly actions, and the weight of my guilt at never having acknowledged that he had, toward the end, begun to change. At Aunt Winnie's birthday party a month ago, I watched his grandsons, ages 5 and 3, climb his limbs as if he were a tree, and him indulging them with a wonder and joy he had never been in touch with when his own children were small. They brought something out in him. Something tender and good. I saw it, but I failed to say.

He was also reconciling with his ex wife at the end. They had begun to pray together, she said. They had started to make plans. She sobbed and sobbed after she found him on Friday morning. Sudden death. But he was in a good place when he died. His daughter says he looked peaceful. He had talked for a long time with my mother on the Sunday before. He told her that he was not so bitter anymore. He had even forgiven his sister, the one who is still out there in the streets, lost in a cocktail of substances. The rancor he felt toward her was gone, he told my mother. Now he just felt sad for her. And wanted her to get well. He was in a good place. As tender and good a place as I had ever seen him. The Buddhists say we are to treat each person as we would if we knew it was their last day on earth. I wish I had said. But I didn't, so I am saying it now.


Painting "Blood and Wings" by Michael Kessler

Dreaming Life

"Everything can be killed except 

nostalgia for the kingdom, 

we carry it in the color of our eyes, 

in every love affair, in everything 

that torments and unties and tricks."

—Julio Cortazar 

Would I like to be somewhere else today? Intensely. Another place. Another costume. I am dreaming of being in another life today, inhabiting another body, experiencing another time, but only if I can still be with my husband and children, with all the people in this life I so love. And if I can't do that, then I will stay right here and do my job. I know my purpose. It is a gift. These exquisite photographs are by the artist and illustrator Carin Ingalsbe. Her portfolio is here. 

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This is the boy, who is now a man

Twenty years ago, on October 4, 1991 at 7:01 pm, my son came into the world screaming bloody hell, and nothing has ever been the same.

This is the boy who made me a mother, filling my heart with loving him beyond what I ever thought I could hold.

This is the soul who made my husband a father, and the three of us a family, waiting for our fourth to join us, his adoring sister.

This is the boy who led the way, who looked after his baby sister by making sure nothing she could swallow was within her reach, who led us to the schools his sister later embraced and attended, always charting a course.

This was the "I-do-it" child, the one who wanted to try his hand, to twist his mind around the problem and find his own reasons how and why.

He never stopped moving, this boy, never stopped questioning, he never ever quit.

I remember the day when he turned one he realized there was a word for everything, and he ran around the gardens touching things, chanting, "What's this?' "And what's this?" committing it all to his steel-trap memory.

This is the boy who did decently on tests when he wanted to be spectacular, but who made the information part of his DNA, so that long after his fellow students had forgotten what was learned, he knew the material deeper, more surely than before.

This is the boy who noticed everything in passing, took it all in, and could give it back if you asked, and you often did, because you knew he would have noticed that the toothpicks were on the shelf above the bottled water in his grand aunt's pantry.

As a teenager, his energy was spiky, so he ran. He ran on soccer fields, and around Armory tracks, and he set himself the task of outdoing himself, his fiercest competitor, himself.

Now he is no longer a teenager. He is well and truly a man. He has such fine examples of manhood, his father and his grandfathers, and he is walking that same path, I can see it. He too is growing into a very fine and good man.

Of course he has that silly streak in solidarity with his dad.

But they have such heart, these men. They are steady and true in how they love.

Happy birthday, our sweet precious boy who is no longer a boy, but a man. We love you with all our hearts and then more. Feel the love everywhere around you. It flows to you from all of us, always. Forever and ever. Amen.

A Big Day

My daughter will be 18 in six months, and thus eligible to vote in the next presidential election. Strolling down Broadway at a street fair Sunday afternoon, we stopped at a campaign table, and she decided to register to vote! She was the first person to be registered by the just-up-and-running campaign office, and when she was done, they asked her to hold a sign so they could take pictures of her. Of course, I took pictures of her too. This is a major right of passage; we were all kinds of excited. Hard to imagine she will be a college freshman when she votes for the first time next year.

Saturday Night

Can I go to Molly's tonight?

No, hon, why don't you stay in tonight.

But why?!

I don't know. It's raining? It's already late?

Silence.

Tapping furiously at her cell phone qwerties.

Then her lips at my ear, whispering.

I really wanted to stay in tonight anyway, Mom.

Laughter. Arms encircling.

Scene.