In a season of fresh loss, I’ve been thinking about the ties that bind us through blood and beyond, especially the power of the mind—is it even the mind?—to sense a loss that is beyond our ability to logically know.
Though there is a recent loss at the center of this story, I need to start it in 1997, when I was in a therapy session, wading through twenty-two-year-old life difficulties, because I still can’t explain what happened next. Without warning or cause, mid-session, I suddenly felt weighted and sunk, like an anvil being pulled to ocean bottom, limbs pinned to the second hand couch behind me.
Our conversation didn’t seem to be the cause; this was something beyond.
“Can we end the session early?” I remember asking. “I just feel tired and like I have nothing more to say tonight.”
My therapist, a student-in-training in the low-cost clinic that was the only way I could afford therapy, did not resist and for this I was grateful; I could not have formed a coherent sentence from there if I had tried.
I lumbered up from the couch with a body twice its weight and could only think as far as driving to the grocery store to buy a few essential items I needed.
The distance between therapy and grocery seemed monumental. Was it always this far? I couldn’t even enjoy that too-healthy smell of freshly cut herbs, the faint sweet sulfur of vitamins and soap. On leaden legs I grabbed a handheld basket and loaded it with my usuals: bulk brown rice, a slab of fresh tofu, zucchini, chai teabags. Suddenly that weight seemed to extend to my arm, the tiny basket of things too heavy to keep carrying. All I wanted to do was get HOME. To my too-tiny apartment with my boyfriend. A pot of tomato soup bubbling on the stove.
Mildly embarrassed, I dropped the basket at the corner of an aisle and fled. For that’s how it felt, as though I was just outrunning a yawning chasm at my heels. The feeling didn’t leave me as I drove across town, as I wondered what might be wrong with me that I was too tired to finish therapy, too tired to carry a basket of light food items around a grocery store.
Somehow, I dragged myself up the staircase to our apartment, and I didn’t even have to open the door. Erik flung it open as he heard my steps and greeted me with a frown.
“Your mom called. Your grandmother Dorothy just died.”
Ah. There it is. My limbs restored to their normal density in that moment, reality catching up with information parts of me had been processing for the past hour.
For years I would wonder how I knew. How her very loss made gravity clutch me to the Earth as though holding me tight.
Approximately ten years later, my ailing Oma, Tamar, 92 years old, told her caregivers that she was ready to go. Almost six months pregnant, I drove up to spend the day with family sitting beside her bedside. It was a surprisingly joyous day of laughter and reminiscences for an imminent loss steeped in years of silent crafts done side by side in New York summers, her soft skin smelling of Oil of Olay, her German accented chuckle when she’d tell me to close my car window because “I’m flying away.”
My fetal son shifted silkily in my belly as her own breaths raggedly ebbed over hours, each of us pioneers at different poles of the birth-death cycle. When I went to sleep that night, in my dad’s spare room, she was still with us, each of us having whispered our version of “It’s okay to go.”
In the very wee hours of the morning, before sunrise, I sat up in bed with the feeling of someone having walked past my bed, disturbing a gentle wind.
Ahh, I thought. She’s flying away.
Sure enough, my father told me later that day, she had passed around the time I woke.
I was telling these stories recently to a friend of mine who experienced a moment of grace, able to reconnect with her estranged mother as she came to the end of her life. For her final trip back, no one called to tell her that the time was now; she simply woke up one day with that feeling: It’s time to book the ticket. I have to go now. She made it just in time to say a final goodbye.
On September 23, my father texted that his only brother, Joav or “Joe,” age 81, was entering hospice after six months of complications from an aortic aneurism. His wife Kendra had hoped for a miracle, she would later tell me by text, a chance for him to come home.
The morning of his passing, I woke up weepy, heavy, his face and quirky laugh strongly on my mind.
He’s flying away, I thought.
Several hours later, my father texted that Uncle Joe had died.
What is it that yanks us through the ether, pulls on our very cells saying notice, a transition is upon us, it is worth your attention?
Sadness rolls in around me like famous San Francisco fog over the bay, obscuring sunlight. Grief hunkers in my body once again, a cellular weight, even when my mind tells me I’m okay, I haven’t seen Uncle Joe in years. Yet for his wife Kendra he was a whole world. He is a last link for my father to a time no one else will ever know, and the second-to-last tether to my paternal grandparents, parent figures who deeply shaped me.
My father’s and others’ grief reaches out with its psychic tendrils, too, tethering us. In my mind’s eyes I see Hubble images of the cosmos looking like a neural network, a starlight highway, a map of connections.
An only child well into my teens (before my siblings came along), who bounced back and forth between my divorced family’s homes until I was 17, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve always stretched out my psychic arms to embrace far flung loved ones. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that I’m sensitive to these filaments between us, that when a cord is plucked on my family tree, it sends a song through my bones.
SONOMA COUNTY WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
Saturday October 19.
I’m teaching: SCENE STEALER. 10:10 a.m.
You’ve felt the pulse-pounding drama of a good story, caught up in a book that feels so real you might have been inside it. What makes a story come to life? Strong, powerful scenes--the building blocks of great fiction and memoir. They bring flat narrative into full-color action, allow you to breathe life into compelling characters through dynamic action, and when added up, they create powerful plots. This workshop will give you a crash course in this essential element of writing.
Join An Ongoing Community of Writers
Would you like to join a community of writers who discuss writing craft and process twice monthly? Write Lifers is an ongoing monthly group/class for writers who want to stay connected but don’t have the luxury of time for a weekly class. You can register for any month’s classes and don’t have to commit to any time frame.
*We typically meet the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month, at 5pm Pacific Time, but this varies depending on holidays, life events and so on.
You may pay monthly ($50) or annually ($550). You will NOT be auto-billed.
October’s sessions are the 2nd and the 16th. REGISTER HERE.
Each session we will:
Discuss a short writing craft lesson
Engage in writing prompts
Set goals for accountability
During the month I send out readings and other resources
You also have access to a Google drive where you may exchange work for peer critique, utilize resources and more
*Please note that sometimes these dates may change, due to holidays or other situations, but you will be apprised in advance.
Gorgeous, my friend ❤️
Jordan, I am so sorry for your recent family loss. We all share this one common thread of loved ones passing on and flying away. How special to write words expressing this loss. Peace.