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Category: grieving

A Birthday

A Birthday

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Through the years, birthdays become attached to the people who hold them. Today will always be Nancy’s day, even though Nancy is gone. 

It was on this day, long ago, that I landed in Europe for the first time. The date wasn’t accidental. It was Nancy’s 20th birthday, and I was meeting her in Luxembourg. We had planned to be chamber maids in a Swiss hotel, but our employment fell through at the last minute. Instead, we traveled through Europe for two months on what I will politely call a lean budget. 

We trudged through London in rain so heavy I thought my shoes would never dry out. We explored what seemed like every Viennese hovel in which Beethoven had ever lived (and there were a lot of them). We toured Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome and Pisa. We scrambled to find places to sleep, and sometimes they were train compartments. 

The trip cemented our friendship, brought it through the decades. I think of our travels now with great wonder and gladness. They bring Nancy closer, which is where I want her to be. 

(Nancy and I spent many hours in train stations, though not this one, which is in Edinburgh.) 

Immortality

Immortality

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Today, my dear friend Nancy will be laid to rest in the Indiana earth, less than 150 miles from where we first met. But where is she now, really? 

My faith tells me that she is sleeping and will rise in glory on the Last Day. My skeptical self says, “Hmmm…” 

One thing I know for sure: Nancy lives on in the hearts of those who love her. It’s an immortality in which we all can believe — and to which we all can aspire. 

(The Bernini columns in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, one of many wonders I saw for the first time with Nancy. Photo: Wikipedia)

Green Bank Shining

Green Bank Shining

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A walk yesterday to clear the head and boost the spirit. The day was made for it, a gift of a day if ever there was one. I walked fast and long, as if I could outpace grief. 

That wouldn’t happen, but there were delights along the way: Lake Audubon, resplendent on a May morning, the scampering of squirrels and chipmunks, a green bank shining in the sun. 

We who are still living pick up the banner and march on. It is our duty … and our privilege. 

For Nancy

For Nancy

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I met Nancy on our first day at Hanover College when we were homesick 18-year-olds. We missed our families, we loved to travel, we lived across the hall from each other. So we neglected our bio lab reports and stayed up late to hatch crazy schemes. Maybe we’d take a tramp steamer across the Atlantic or be chambermaids in a Swiss hotel. We didn’t quite pull off those adventures, but we did travel through Europe for two months on $5 ($3?) a day, surviving on baguettes and water. We’d gotten so skinny that Nancy’s own grandmother didn’t recognize her when she picked us up at the airport. 

Nancy and I stayed close through college and early adulthood. When Tom (another Hanoverian) and I moved to northern Virginia, Nancy, who’d lived here since grad school, quickly became an honorary aunt to our three daughters. 

Through the years, Nancy was at most every birthday party, graduation and other special event. She’s part of Suzanne’s first memory because it was Aunt Nancy who took care of her when Claire was born. Nancy even loved our sweet rascal of a dog, Copper. 

Nancy was a lawyer, historian and indexer extraordinaire. A proud member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she traced her lineage back to Revolutionary War stock. One of her first and most notable jobs was at Mount Vernon, Washington’s home. 

Nancy continued to travel the country and the world, skiing in Colorado, bicycling in the Netherlands, visiting Israel, Jordan, Greece and Eastern Europe. For the last eight years or so, her travel has been up and down I-95 as she spent much time in Massachusetts caring for her parents. A devoted daughter, a loving sister, an exemplary friend. 

Three weeks ago, we learned that Nancy, always caring for others, was seriously ill herself. Friends and family flocked to her side. Her older sister dropped everything and virtually lived at the hospital. We saw Nancy as much as we could, but not nearly enough. It’s never enough when you can’t imagine the world without the person you’re visiting. 

Nancy slipped away over the weekend. I still can’t believe it. I wonder if I ever will. 

(Nancy, right, with our pal Peggy, another dear college friend)

Closing the Gate

Closing the Gate

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For years it was the first commandment of outside living in my family. Close the backyard gate! Our frisky Copper dog was, as I’ve mentioned before, quite the escape artist, and he missed no opportunity to leave the only loving home he had ever known.

As a younger dog, he rushed the doors, both front and garage. Guests entering the house had to slide in quickly before he barreled past them. 

But at least a couple of times he found his way out of the fenced backyard into the great beyond.  One time he moseyed under the deck and squeezed through an opening we never thought could accommodate him. I found him calmly sniffing the hedges near the front stoop. 

His most likely point of departure, though, was through the backyard gate, which is tricky to latch and was prone to being left open by the meter-reading man and other folks. We lived in fear that we’d forget to check, let him out the backdoor and that would be the end of it. Copper, of course, had no fear of cars.

This week I’ve walked through the backyard gate dozens of times. And every time, not just out of habit but out of reverence, I’ve made sure it’s closed behind me. 

For Ratsy

For Ratsy

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Her name was Janice but we knew her as Ratsy, a childhood nickname that stuck. The childhood is not mine but Mom’s. She and Ratsy met as little girls at a convent boarding school in Kentucky and had the sort of adventures you read about in books. They made up games, imagined ghost nuns in the hallway, and almost hopped a freight to California until a law-abiding friend learned of the plot and tattled on them. 

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. Mom and Ratsy missed their parents and homes. But they found much comfort in each other, and they remained close friends — more like sisters, really — to the end of their lives. The end came only two weeks ago for Ratsy, just a month shy of age 96. 

How to describe Ratsy? Pure elegance, sophistication and cool. She and her husband, Monty, worked in Hollywood and knew movie stars like Bing Crosby. Ratsy sent us lovely gifts, a dress and pinafore set I still remember. She made Mom laugh. And she hosted seven of us (four kids, two parents and an aunt) when we drove across the country to California in an old “woodie” station wagon. 

The Ratsy I came to know as an adult was even more impressive. I realized then what she had overcome, living most of her life with the use of only one arm. It was a disability you never noticed — until she was driving you down an LA freeway, with a cigarette in one hand (a habit she later kicked) and wait, how was she steering? Never mind, we survived. 

Ratsy outlived her husband, sister, nephews and many others, but she leaves behind dear friends and family who grieve her passing. With her death, the world lost a true original … and my family lost a little more of the world that Mom knew and loved.

Mourning Copper

Mourning Copper

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When a human being dies there are rituals and ceremonies, ways to process the passing. When a pet dies, not so much. But I’ve been touched beyond measure by the calls and messages from family and friends that have comforted us these last several days. 

The outpouring heartens me — and tells me how important animals are to us. It reminds me that we homo sapiens are not alone in this world, that we share it with many creatures, and that we could do worse than  look to them for a model of how to live. 

Copper did not complain in his final days. He suffered silently and took life as it came. Yes, he could be silly and rambunctious. Yes, he tested our patience at times. But you always knew where you stood with him. He was always completely and utterly himself. 

So just as we grieve people by recalling their uniqueness, what they brought to the world and how we might emulate it, so do I mourn Copper. 

For Mayfield

For Mayfield

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I heard about Kentucky when good friends wrote to ask if my brother was OK. I checked the news then and learned of the horrible tornadoes that ripped through the country’s midsection. So this post is a lament: it’s a cry of solidarity for the residents of Mayfield, Kentucky, a town I’m embarrassed to say I had never heard of until Saturday, native Kentuckian that I am. 

At first, I thought it was Maysville that had been hit, a river town near where some of Dad’s kin were born. But no, it was, as I often say about Kentucky towns whose names I don’t recognize, “in the western part of the state.” And it truly is there, close to both Tennessee and Missouri, more midwestern than southern. Dawson Springs is there, too—another town hit by the deadly twisters. 

I keep thinking about the folks in the candle factory, perhaps some of them working an extra shift since it’s Christmas time and they could use the money. I think about the malls where those candles might be sold. Do we need those candles? Not really, but yes, because the residents of Mayfield need those jobs. 

It could have been any kind of factory, though. And it could have been any place. But it was in Kentucky, so my heart is even heavier. 

(Dark clouds outside of Nicholasville, from my August trip to Kentucky)

Remembering Mom

Remembering Mom

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I’m remembering Mom today on the fourth anniversary of her passing. So much has happened since she died, so many changes in my own life and the life of our country.  I often wonder what she would make of them.

She would be surprised by my “new” job, not so new anymore. It’s strange to think she knew nothing of this chapter of my life, a chapter I didn’t anticipate, with its travel to faraway places and writing about some of the world’s neediest people. She would approve … to a point. But she would also be encouraging me to write another book.

As for the life of the country, Mom (a lifelong Democrat who grew more conservative with age) saw enough of the 2016 campaign-to-come to offer this pithy observation of the Trump phenomenon: “It’s the right message but the wrong messenger.”

I’m thankful that both she and Dad were spared having to live through the rancor and divisiveness of these times. In that sense, their exits were perfectly timed.

But of course, I wish they were both still here. And today I especially miss my strong, beautiful, intelligent, inspirational, one-of-a-kind mother.

(Mom at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C. )

Remembering Notre Dame

Remembering Notre Dame

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You tell yourself it’s just a building, not a person; that it was not an act of terrorism; that it’s silly to feel this way. But there is still something so sad about the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral.

Maybe because we already have so much destruction in this world, so much war and cruelty. Maybe because it is so beautiful and had survived so much.  Maybe because it has been with us so long and connects us with so many.

I find myself saying what we say in times of loss: How grateful I am to have seen the cathedral; to have climbed its towers and glimpsed its gargoyles; to have taken my children there; to have strolled through it as a young woman and a middle-aged one.

Once, long ago, I was ambling along the Seine on an April evening. The light was slanting low in the sky and throwing the old stones and the spire into high relief. It was a scene of incomparable beauty. I had no camera at the time, so I told myself, remember this, remember it always.  

I did — and I’m remembering it now.