Do you believe in magic? Or are you a Realist? My mom and I were great fans of Alice Hoffman who wrote Practical Magic. I am still a great fan. Sometimes, when I have nothing new to read I go to my bookshelves and I peruse all the great titles I have read before. It doesn’t matter which one I choose, if I have it in print, then it was obviously good and deserves to be read again. Alice Hoffman, John Grisham, Maeve Binchy, Amy Tan, Dick and Felix Francis, the list goes on and on. Mark Sullivan, Barbara Kingsolver, Olivia Hawker… we simply loved to read. That was a connection I will always treasure.
These days all I want to do is read. Be comfortable, be relaxed and cozy, maybe drinking some wine. And read. I want to lose myself in the stories, I want to drown myself in someone else’s reality, imagined or true. I want to think about other things, other than real life. Other than what is actually happening these days. The economy, the politics, the weather, the physical and emotional pain, the endless stream of thoughts that won’t leave me alone. I want to deny it all, deny that anything important is happening, deny that my life is moving along towards what I can only assume will be a future with dementia in it. Deny that my child will have to take over, take care of me, agonize over me, miss me.
My husband likes to say that my thoughts are like a bowl full of spaghetti, with no beginning and no end, while his are like a trail of bread crumbs. I have trouble sleeping, I have hot flashes and nightmares, all the things that a menopausal woman struggles with. I wouldn’t say I have regret. I have done all the things I really ever wanted to do, besides a bit more travel, a bit more of seeing the world. I know I am lucky, blessed. But I think. Too much. All night, all the time. And I torture myself.
What happens when we are all gone? A thousand years from now we won’t be missed. We will simply be a page in history. Can you imagine living a thousand years ago? I can’t. A hundred years even. When life as we know it now was just beginning. I read novels that took place in the 1700’s, in the 1800’s and I am astounded. That it was normal to live that way. No electricity, no transportation, homes out on the prairie with nobody for miles around. I read The Children’s Blizzard, (which you should absolutely read) about the great blizzard that hit the Dakotas in the early 1800’s when there was no reliable weather prediction (and no way to inform people of it anyway) and I was so grateful, SO GRATEFUL, to live in this time period. I simply can’t imagine. I have read countless books about the Holocaust. I can’t fathom it. I can’t wrap my head around the strength of the people who survived, the way people were brainwashed into believing that murdering another human… many humans… was in fact OK and acceptable, even commendable, and for many, how easy it was to do it. The atrocities of WWII are inconceivable. I agonize over people who have lost loved ones in plane crashes, car wrecks, murders, suicides. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about their pain. I think about the souls that were born into living in a war zone, an ACTUAL war zone, like in the Ukraine, or the Sudan… and I feel ashamed. I live in relative comfort, I have food and a home and I can go where I want and when. I have no restraints on my life at all. And most likely neither do you.
We don’t know how strong we are until we have no choice but to live through something we thought would kill us. And most of us never have to.
I can’t stand to think I am selfish but I know that I am in a lot of ways. Today’s mantra is “you do you.” People are more about living for themselves, making themselves happy, and less about worrying about other people, other lives. At least in the close connections to people they interact with daily, monthly, yearly. It’s easy to feel empathy for people you’ve never met. It’s harder to show that empathy towards people in your everyday life. I often wonder why that is. Or maybe that’s just me. And I wonder what will the world be in twenty years, thirty or a hundred? When we who are living now are not even a memory. I am not worried about where I am going, but what I am leaving behind.
What can I do to make the world a better place? It troubles me. The crime, the pollution, the natural resources being depleted, the animals going extinct (the polar bears make me cry), the negative impact we are having on our earth. And the trash, oh my God, the trash. I’ve been to Dominican Republic. I’ve seen trash piled up high on the sides of the roads, with nowhere to go because it is an island and the only option is to burn it or throw it in the ocean which creates more problems, more pollution either way. It is enough to make you feel completely overwhelmed and ineffective. I fight against it in such small ways. I am an avid recycler. I hate waste, I hate the thought of things going into the ground that will never break down, things that are terrible for the environment, that let off chemicals and gasses. Even caskets seem like a waste to me, why are we burying boxes in the ground that are taking up space? I want to be buried in a mushroom casket.
You might not see the connection here between how this post started and where it has led. The truth is, I don’t believe in magic. I would like to. I love the way Alice Hoffman writes. She has a gift that few authors possess, an ability to draw you into a world where anything is possible, even magic. But I am jaded by life, I find it difficult to believe that cardinal outside my window is in fact the soul of one of my parents coming to visit me. I want to believe it. I wanted to believe that when they passed that I would feel something, some way of knowing that they were passing into the next world. That they were at peace. But that didn’t happen at all. One minute their hearts were beating and the next they weren’t. That’s it. No magic to it at all. I was disappointed.
I do dream of them. A few times I swear I heard my Mom say my name out loud. When I dream of them I don’t think they are talking to me directly from another realm. It is just my heart wishing. It doesn’t offer me much comfort to be honest. It’s nice to dream of them, but when I wake up they are still… far away. So far away. I want to know where they are. Not in the sense of whether they are in Heaven or not, that is not what I mean. But where are they? Are they close, are they watching over us? Or have they truly moved on in a way that I can’t begin to understand?
Alice Hoffman wrote in the book Faithful, whose main character Shelby has just lost her mom to cancer, “Shelby loves Maravelle (her best friend); she wishes she could spend the night in Valley Stream, but being with Maravelle and her mother would only make her sadder. She doesn’t have a mother anymore. There’s no one to whom she’s the most important person in the world.” And I felt recognized when I read that. I realize the character in the novel doesn’t have a husband, doesn’t have a daughter to whom she IS the most important person in the world. But it isn’t the same. Who I was to my mother is something that can’t be replicated.
Baby Girl will feel it too. When I am gone. And there is nothing I can do to change that. There is, in fact, very little I can do to change the world she’s going to live in. I’m sure when you lose a parent, or both parents, or any loved one, you start to have these kind of thoughts. Because what you thought was permanent is all of a sudden NOT. The reality of our time on Earth being short slaps you in the face. Of all the billions of souls who have departed this earth, how many of them made a positive difference here? How many tried? So I read. To escape the constant wheel of thoughts and worries that torment me. It’s a worthy and consuming pastime, and it works. But I can’t escape the thought that I have a purpose here, that my time here is also worthy and that I need to make the most of it, even while simultaneously feeling helpless about it all. I don’t want to get dementia of any kind, and lose precious, earthly time.
When my Grandma was in her death bed I thought I was doing the right thing by telling her it was ok to let go, that she should feel peace and comfort at that stage. Her eyes got wide and she shook her head at me, No, she said clearly without words, no. She wanted to stay. She didn’t want a magical life, she wanted more time.
Now I understand.
Me too.