Writing Through Cancer

I miss you every day–the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.

(From:  “Father” in Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser)

It is an old photo, retrieved from the dozens of pictures taken in the summer of 1972, one that makes me smile even now.  In it, my first husband and his brother are clowning for the picture, a seventies version of a “selfie,” achieved with the shutter lag of his camera.  But it’s the faces of my daughters—ones that once ignited a young mother’s anxiety — that make us all laugh, remembering the oftentimes “wild and crazy guy” their father was.  My youngest, nine months old, is sliding toward the floor from her father’s arms, alarm on her face, while the oldest, by just a year and a half, is crying loudly as her grinning uncle grips her arm tightly.  It was intended as a “happy” group photo, but the younger members in the picture were not smiling, even as their father and uncle laughed and counted the seconds to the flash and shutter click.

The picture appeared  last night, posted on my daughter’s Facebook page  with the words, “My hero; I still miss you, Daddy.”  And she does, even though he’s been gone for 35 years, his life abruptly ended in a drowning accident when my daughters were just nine and ten.  Yet their memories of “Daddy” are still alive, as are mine.  I see his smile, hear his voice in one daughter’s face and the other’s penchant for political discourse.  We all carry vivid memories of him, stories that have been told and re-told.  “Death,” Jim Harrison wrote, “steals everything but our stories.”

For several years after his death, I was mother and father to my daughters, weathering our shared grief and loss and navigating the sturm and drang of adolescence as a single parent.  “Daddy” became larger than life in the girls’ minds, and, not surprisingly, they grew close to their father’s parents in the subsequent years, helping one another keep his memory alive.  It was during their teens that I met and later married my husband, John.  Although he’d been married before, he never had children.  I worried, as our  relationship began, that my two strong-willed adolescents might frighten him away, but John weathered their ups and downs with more patience than I thought possible.

He never tried to assume the moniker of “Dad,” honoring their undying love for the father they’d lost and always encouraging of their stories of him.  Gradually, the bonds between John and my daughters grew.  He became “Bubbie,” responding to them with patience, affection and the ability to dance that conflicted tango of step-fatherhood:  “I love you”—“don’t even think that I love you.”

He taught them to drive, visited my eldest daughter on her first work-study program in rural Thailand while on a World Bank project in Laos, and drove cross-country from California to New York with my younger daughter when my career took me to New York City.  Little by little, and without any fanfare, their relationship deepened and their bond with each other was cemented.  “This is my father,” my eldest daughter said as she introduced him to a former high school teacher three years later.  My heart skipped a beat, but John simply extended his hand and said “hello,” although I saw his tears glistening in his eyes.  He’s been in their lives now for 29 years and has firmly rooted himself as stepfather to my daughters and “Grandpa” to their children.

Even though there were video calls and Father’s Day gifts for John this morning, I know both daughters always remember their dead father on this day–and many other days of the year.  They miss him even now, as I do my own, but they are generous in the love and affection they have with John.  I am deeply grateful for how John he loves my daughters wholeheartedly and how he has so willingly embraced them in his life, demonstrating as much concern and commitment to their growth and well-being as any birth father.

He wasn’t hard on us kids,
never struck us…

He used to sing in the car
bought us root beers along the road.
He loved us with his deeds.

(From: “A Father’s Pain,” in A River Remains by Larry Smith)

Writing Suggestion: 

The memories we hold of our fathers or the father figures in our lives are full of feelings and of stories.  For example, take a look at the range of poems about fathers featured on the Poetry Foundation site.  What stories do you carry about your father or a father figure?  Why not write one that is especially important, humorous or poignant?

I salute you all, the fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, all the men who have played a loving role in a fatherless child’s life.  Whether you helped to birth a son or daughter, or were “like” fathers to any child, teenager or adult, Happy Father’s Day.

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Happy Birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy Birthday dear Gramma.

Happy Birthday to you.

I awakened to that familiar song early this morning.  An enthusiastic duet by telephone from two of my grandchildren.  Today is my birthday, like it or not, and the mirror has already confirmed what my brain refuses to accept.  I’m  getting older, despite that in my head, my mid-forties are where I prefer to hang my age for the rest of my life.  But that’s a grand self-deception, because my body announces itself a little more definitely each year, confirming my forties are long gone.  Drat!  Yet I will tell you that I wouldn’t trade a birthday cake with 45 candles on it for this morning’s long distance serenade and followed by a lecture on Florida marine life from my seven-year old grandson!  What greater gift could I possibly receive?

Today’s post  is borrowed, in part, from previously published posts over the last several years.  It’s inspired by little more than the relentless march of age, the retrospective look at life that  birthdays often trigger.  I love birthdays, but lately, it’s  my grandchildren’s birthdays I celebrate with the enthusiasm of a wildly in-love, grandmother, remembering when I felt as much excitement over a birthday as they do now.  I remember the little girl I was so long ago, the one in an old, faded photograph, blonde hair curled for the occasion and topped with a giant hair ribbon.  The picnic table nearby is piled with gaily wrapped gifts and a chocolate cake sits in the center, six candles aflame.  I sport an ear-to-ear grin on my face.  Those were the long ago years I eagerly counted the days until my next birthday, becoming a “big” girl with each year promising many more possibilities than the one before.  I was ready then, even impatient, to claim older age.
Are we ever ready for the changes life presents to us?  It’s never either/or.  Each stage of life has challenges, but there are rewards too.  I’m quite content to embrace the title, “Gramma,” but on the other hand, I am less enthusiastic about some of my physical changes—the relentless pull of gravity, loss of muscle tone, and the silvering of my hair.  I balk at regular visits to my cardiologist, reminding me of a condition I thought belonged only others, elder others like my grandparents.  Ready or not, you can’t escape aging.
“Ready,” the title of a poem by Irene MacKinney, begins with a memory:

I remember a Sunday with the smell of food drifting
out the door of the cavernous kitchen and my serious
teenage sister and her girlfriends Jean and Marybelle
standing on the bank above the dirt road in their
white sandals ready to walk to the country church
a mile away, and ready to return to the fried
chicken, green beans and ham, and fresh bread
spread on the table…

Every birthday reminds me of ones past.  Memories come alive:  the scent of chocolate as my mother baked my birthday cake, the candle flames dancing as everyone sang to me, eyes shut, wishing as hard as I could for something I wanted to happen.  That “Happy Birthday “sung enthusiastically over the telephone by my grandchildren sent my mind racing back to not just those joyful celebrations of a grade school girl, but some that were less celebratory, marred by difficult events in my life at the time.  Birthdays are full of story…ones that are, as mine have been, triggered by that simple song, “Happy Birthday to you…”

I’ve used an exercise in my writing groups borrowed from Roger Rosenblatt’s wise little book, Unless It Moves the Human Heart (Harper Collins, 2011).  Rosenblatt would ask if anyone in his class had recently celebrated—or was about to–a birthday.  Then he surprised the class:

I…then burst into song:  “Happy Birthday to You.”  They [his students] give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years.  I sing it again.  “Happy Birthday to You.  Anyone had a birthday recently?  Anyone about to have one?” …just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives” (pp.39-40).

When I tried the exercise, my students looked at me with curiosity as I began singing before laughing a little and joining in.  “Now let’s write,” I said as our singing ended.  “What memories does “Happy Birthday to you” inspire?”  I wrote too, memories of the highlights of birthdays past: a blue bicycle waiting for me the morning of my seventh birthday, a surprise party my husband and daughters managed to pull off few years ago, the long-ago headline in my small town newspaper’s society page:  “Sharon Ann Bray turns six today,” (my aunt Verna was the society editor), one memory spilling out after another.

Everyone in the group had the same reaction, so many memories and stories were shared that morning.  As inspirational as his exercise was, Rosenblatt isn’t the only writer who used birthdays as inspiration.  Go to www.poets.org and you’ll discover William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and many others inspired by a birthday as a time for retrospection.  I’m especially fond of Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday,” a short poem that captures how a birthday triggers retrospection.

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Poems about birthdays reflect the passage of time, aging, even the opportunity for change, for example, Joyce Sutphen’s “Crossroads:”

The second half of my life will be black
to the white rind of the old and fading moon.
The second half of my life will be water
over the cracked floor of these desert years.

Writing Suggestion:

This week, let birthdays be the trigger that gets you writing.  Hum the birthday tune, or if you’re feeling brave, sing it:  “Happy Birthday to you…”  Or begin with a sentence such as “On the day I turned ___, and keep writing.  Take of the memories, good or bad, a birthday ditty evokes.  Whether you’ll soon have a birthday, recently celebrated one, or joined in the birthday celebrations of family and friends, explore your memories of past birthday, remembering that within each memory lurks a story or a poem…   Write one.

(As for me, my husband promises a carrot cake (and candles) will be part of my day and shared with a few neighborhood friends.  I don’t mind candlelight—it will soften the physical evidence of growing older.  I might wait a little longer before I try to blow them all out!)

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Memorial Day:  celebrated on the final Monday of May, it honors all U.S. troops who have died in war.  Originally a holiday intended to honor the soldiers who lost their lives in the Civil War, the date was chosen by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, apparently because there would be many flowers in bloom—flowers to place upon the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers’ graves in Arlington Cemetery.

I admit that I didn’t understand the full meaning of Memorial Day when I was a child, believing it was simply a date meant to honor the dead—no matter how they died.  It was a belief formed by an annual tradition of the extended Bray family, numbering between forty or fifty aunts, uncles and cousins, who gathered each Memorial Day, for a potluck supper, followed by a visit to the family graveside in Northern California, just miles from the Oregon border.  Although my father and his brother were veterans of World War II, the day seemed to have nothing to do with remembering those soldiers whose lives were lost in war; rather it was focused on their deceased parents and siblings.  The aunts placed flowers on their gravesites, while we restless children turned the cemetery into an adventure, romping over the different headstones dotting the grounds, challenging one another to find the marker with the oldest dates engraved on it.  We knew nothing about the lives or the stories of the people whose remains lay beneath the earth.

But I understood a little about the tragedy of war, poring over the pictorial volumes documenting World War II that belonged to my father for countless hours, mesmerized and revolted by the images of dead soldiers and civilians pictured on so many pages.  I grew up with a singular belief, perhaps influenced by those photographs, that war was wrong and in the sixties, joined in the youth movement protesting the Vietnam War.  I knew or understood little about the young men and women who, by choice or by the call of the draft, were sent into that war.  And, unlike the war my father and uncle knew, the Vietnam War polarized a nation at home and did not welcome the returning Vets as those of the Second World War.

I remain a pacifist, against war, and deeply troubled by the fact of the continuing war and bloodshed—whether on battlefields in far-away countries, or the more covert and fearful brand of terrorism that continues to spread throughout the world.  Violence, destruction, death—the cost of war exerts a terrible toll on the human spirit, on anyone who has fought in or had their lives torn apart by war.  I am touched by the bravery of those individuals, whether soldiers or refugees of war, and I am deeply humbled by their stories.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” calling upon all Americans to pause at 3 p.m., local time, on Memorial Day and remember those who died fighting for this country.  In the midst of whatever celebration you may enjoy this Memorial Day, I hope you, too, will take a moment to pause, remember and respect the bravery of all those who have died—much too soon and too young—in war.

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

(From “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” by Dylan Thomas, 1933)

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I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(From: “What I Learned from My Mother, by Julia Kasdorf, in:  Sleeping Preacher,  1992)

There’s much that I learned from my mother, just as you may have, much of it more useful as I grew into adulthood, but not the lessons she might have intended for me.  I learned less about the domestic tasks Kasdorf describes and more about my mother’s struggle with the prescribed roles of wife, mother and homemaker.

My mother had two faces and a frying pot   

where she cooked up her daughters 

into girls 

before she fixed our dinner…

(From: “From the House of Yemanjá” by Audre Lorde, in:  The Selected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997)

My mother was not like the mothers  my friends had.  She was different, even difficult.  She wasn’t the most versatile of cooks, nor did she  inherit her mother’s talent in the kitchen.  In truth, she took little pleasure in producing the daily meals for her family.  She preferred physical labor, daily scrubbing and housecleaning, yard work and gardening, and in turn, she believed those tasks were necessary to build good, solid character in her children.

We were assigned daily tasks and chores which had to be completed before school or play.  Every Saturday, we protested and complained as we were forced to scrub walls and floors while our friends waited impatiently for us outside.  Of my parents, Mother was the strict disciplinarian, and she prided herself on the role.  She was quick to remind us that any successes we had in school or life were due to the discipline she imposed.  My father, naturally playful and soft-hearted, had my heart; my mother had my obedience, but also my embarrassment and rebellion.

Many years later, as the mother of two strong-willed daughters, I began to understand some of my mother’s struggles more than I had in my earlier years.  I weathered the storms of adolescence as a single mother, experiencing their affection one day and rebelliousness the next, all while I attempted to parent, earn a living and build a career.  I developed greater empathy for much of my mother’s struggles—and much greater appreciation of what it meant to be a mother.

I see her doing something simple, paying bills,

or leafing through a magazine or book,

and wish that I could say, and she could hear,

that now I start to understand her love

for all of us, the fullness of it.

It burns there in the past, beyond my reach,

a modest lamp.

(“Mother’s Day,” by David Young, in:  Field of Light and Shadow, 2011)

A dozen years ago, my mother died peacefully in a home for Alzheimer’s patients.  Her descent into senility escalated as my father passed away from lung cancer.  The woman who was always in control of everything –or so we thought—wasn’t in control at all.  My father had quietly been covering the signs of her illness as best he could.  The irony was, of course, that as the disease progressed, my mother became docile, sweet and affectionate in ways we’d rarely experienced her.  Yet out of the darkness, a moment of clarity, the mother we remembered would reappear, if only for a few seconds.  She loved her children as ferociously as she attacked life, yet she remained critical of us even as her mind deteriorated.  She was proud of what we each had accomplished, and yet she had always expected more of us.  She left a legacy of conflicted feelings among her children, wounds that were never healed, and old jealousies bred in the competition she fostered between us.  But I realize now that my mother did the best she could do.  It wasn’t ideal or even good mothering at times, but she wanted the best for us always.

I choose, on this Mother’s Day to remember that she did the best she could and that although her kind of love was difficult sometimes, it was love just the same.  I recall one of the last times I visited her, a month or so before she died.  She had, by then, lost the ability to walk, and she wasn’t aware of much, including me.  I resorted to pushing her in her wheelchair, going round and round the garden of the Alzheimer’s home.  As I grew weary, I positioned her chair by a brilliant red Bougainvillea  and took her hand.  At a loss, I began singing, “Let me call you sweetheart…,” something she had often sung to us as children.  As I sang, she slowly raised her head and looked at me for several seconds before speaking.

“Why, it’s Sha-ron!”  She spoke my name slowly, elongating the syllables.

“Yes Mom, it’s me.  Your eldest daughter,” I said, tears filling my eyes.  I squeezed her hand.

“I’m…happy,” she said slowly, smiling a little, as she closed her eyes.  Then her head fell to her chest.  Once again, she had disappeared into her darkness.  A few weeks later, my mother passed away.

It’s taken me time to sift through all that my mother was and meant to me.  The relationships we have with our mothers can be complicated as well as close.  Mine was both.  Yet she was my mother, and I am her daughter.  There are mornings I look in the mirror and see something of her in my face or expression, just as each of her three children likely do.   If I could, I would tell her now all that’s in my heart, maybe write her that long overdue letter I always meant to write, but like Wallace Stegner, writing to his mother long after her death, it’s too little, “much too late.”

 “All you can do is try,” you used to tell me when I was scared of undertaking something.  You got me to undertake many things I would have not dared undertake without your encouragement.  You also taught me how to take defeat when it came, and it was bound to now and then.  You taught me that if it hadn’t killed me it was probably good for me…

(From: “Letter, Much Too Late, in: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs:  Living and Writing in the West, 1992)

To all mothers everywhere, Happy Mother’s Day.

Writing Suggestions:

We learn from our mothers lessons of love and life, some of them not appreciated until we’re much older.  What lessons did your mother teach you?  How have those lessons or experiences influenced your life?  If you have since become a mother, do you find yourself acting in ways as you remember your mother did?  Write about the relationship you had with your mother.  Was it close?  Conflicted?  Distant?  Explore the things that made it so.  What do you want to say to your mother this Mother’s Day?

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