Entropy: Visiting a Ruin on Gillespie Avenue

We were headed out to plot out some local walks for my new First Year Experience class, called "Finding Your Way," about the literature and practice of walking, but we got sidetracked as usual.  We were in the car, driving north along the Flint River up Industrial past Leith to Stewart, and we turned left and crossed the bridge which once was the best view of the Buick Plant.  Today it is a brownfield that is reverting to nature.  We drove through the historic black and ethnic neighborhoods near the plant.  There is really nothing much there now … you have to use your imagination.  And that to me has always been the really wonderful thing about living and walking in Flint.  If you live in a fully operational city, you are inside some kind of big human artifact—a machine or an assembly line.  Everyone is slotted into a neighborhood, an occupation, a route that they take more or less every day.  Even their leisure is scripted according to institutions and systems in which they have little to no say in their scheduling.  The factory workers in Flint were among the highest paid blue-collar workers, but can you put a price tag on liberty?  No wonder they fantasized about three acres in Burton or a cottage up north.  Things are altogether different if you live in a has-been city, a burnt-out city, a postindustrial rust-belt city like Flint.  The centers of such cities around what used to be factories are now ground zeros.  Pits of devastation.  “You know, this area was white as late as the late sixties,” says Paul, as we intersect with North Saginaw.  “What happened?  What caused this?  I don’t think we can blame it all on the factories closing.”  We are near the Burston Field House, and that gym is where the Clarissa Shields trained for and won the Olympic medal in boxing.  Paul remembers a story he was told by the son of an old dulcimer player.  There was a street—Gillespie Ave.—where Germans from Russian lived.  They immigrated to pick sugar beets in the Michigan Thumb, but the work probably got too hard and the factories were too tempting.  They can from the towns to what was, in the early 20^th century, a booming metropolis.  “Let see if there’s a church.”  We drive to the top of a hill.  The grasses get longer and are golden and wavy in the evening light.  A trumpet vine with its orange flowers is climbing all over the remains of a house, and I imagine invisible spirits or animal musicians blowing away on those floral horns.  At the top of the hill, there is a church--old and somewhat gothic.

The door is open.  Inside, devastation reigns.  There is a mesmerizing word set on fire scrawled in spray paint across the sanctuary:  Entropy.  It’s frighteningly accurate.  Entropy is a science word, from physics, I think, about the degree of randomness or disorder in a system.  When I look it up later, the word explains Flint:  “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”  I hear a car door slam, and I get a little scared.  I quickly duck out of the ruined church without taking a photo of the only remaining and unexceptional window of colored glass.  Outside, Paul has noticed the signboard.  It was last used as a Masjid—a mosque.  That’s interesting.

Our curiosity has been piqued, and Paul suggests that we check out the City Directories in the Flint Public Library.  These books contain lists of businesses and residents by street—every street in the City of Flint, published nearly every year since 1870.  Starting with 1942, we look up Gillespie Avenue.  "What was the cross street?" asks Paul.  "Buick."  Sure enough, there was “First Reformed Church” which is clearly a Protestant Church, German, and the Pastor is listed as Rev. Albert Weinbrauk, which is a German name.  Oddly, we don't find many obviously German family names listed as residents on the street.  In order to figure out when the church was built, hence when the "community" was established, we have to go back in time, and check earlier books.  It was there in 1923.  It was there in 1921.  But it wasn’t there in 1916.  Eventually, we figure out that it was built around 1920.  Then we move forward in time to see if we can find out when the church became a mosque.  The 1972 Directory lists the building as “Muhammad’s Mosque of Islam #53.”  So after it ended life as a church, the building became a  Nation of Islam mosque, referred to as a "temple."  

The Nation of Islam (NOI) was a black Muslim movement that grew out of Black Nationalism.  The movement was founded in 1934 in Detroit by Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole in 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia).  Poole, who moved his family, parents and siblings, north to Michigan, was among the hundreds of thousands of black families forming the First Great Migration leaving the economically troubled and oppressive South in search of safety and employment.  Poole claimed that before the age of twenty, he'd seen three black men lynched by whites.  He settled the family in Hamtramck and struggled throughout the 1920s and 1930s to find and keep work.  Inspired by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who claimed to the the Mahdi (Muslim messiah) and who preached black independence from white culture, Elijah Muhammad took over leadership of the fledgling Islamic movement when Fard mysteriously disappeared, clinching for his followers his identity as Allah.  Group infighting eventually led Elijah Muhammad to leave Mosque #1 in Detroit for Chicago, and he moved around the northern midwest, growing the movement.  Much of its appeal was to black men, who tended to stay away from church because it didn't address their needs.  The NOI had its own program for economic development: Elijah Muhammad purchased land and businesses to provide housing and employment for young, black males in NOI-owned bakeries, barber shops, coffee shops, grocery stores, laundromats, night-clubs, retail stores, or as drivers in its fleet of tractor-trailers.  By 1959 there were 50 temples in 22 states.  The temple on Gillespie Ave. is listed as #53, so it may have been one of the last ones established before Elijah Muhammad died in 1975.  By the year 2000, however, the building is listed in the Directory as “Flint Masjid."  The NOI was disbanded in 1976.  Some readers may recollect the famous clash between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who made the haj (one of the five pillars of Islam), became a mainstream Muslim, broke with the NOI (which was blamed, by some, for his assassination).  Over time, the movement decayed from within, and an orthodox Islamic organization was formed, that came to be known as the American Society of Muslims.  

Paul and I close the books, knowing that we've only begun to dig into the rich history suggested by these few but important facts.  We locate Gillespie Street on the huge street map of Flint that hangs over the library tables.  As we leave the library, we chat about the way such major movements of people, religion, economics, and community can be glimpsed through tracking the simple history of a single building.  “And remember," I say, "the current ‘Muslim House’ is just down the street on Saginaw."  “Right,” says Paul, “There’s a whole institutional history in this.”  

Piecing together that history from the remains, from stories heard, from bits of facts culled from books is work, and it is creative.  It teaches us to dig in, understand, be inspired by past times, and let those times inform what we make.  There may be no more first, second, or third shift, but there is plenty of work for those of us who stay in Flint.  The city may be dead and the smart people fled to suburbs, but those who stay inhabit a ruin.  And there is something sacred about ruins … you are walking through layers of time, the deep psyche of the city, and the collective unconscious of the people who came here, worked, played dulcimers, prayed to God or Allah, and either died here or moved on.  It’s our job to wake up and discover the lives here, and use the wisdom that is laying all around us in the artifacts and echos to make new communities at spots where the river is fordable or the view is nice or where the decay has allowed a whole field of prairie grass to grow.  There is something mesmerizing about entropy, but we mustn’t just photograph the ruins or the graffiti.  It is the human task to work against entropy and to make order where there is only fire, ash, rotting wood, and soggy mattresses decaying in the street. 

Let It Rain!

Maybe I am a lousy sister

“You have used confidences to curry favor with Mom for years.”  “If you want me to count the ways you’ve broken trust, I will.”  “You didn’t save my wedding dress out of spite.”  “How could you not see that picture of me on top of the trash.  You did it on purpose!”  Every text felt like a stone hitting my body.  I know I haven’t been perfect, but am I that bad?  Down, down I fell.  Even worse, they attacked my blog as “lies, lies, stories not your own, partial truths, "gaslighting," you cut us out of Mom’s death, we mattered, too.”  Yes, I know, I know.  But blogs are personal.  I was there when Mom died.  She opened her eyes, took a breath, and exhaled for the last time, looking into my face.  In that moment, that haunting moment, nothing mattered but the relationship I’d struggled to have with her.  It was personal.  Just because I didn’t include you when I wrote about that experience doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge your value.  I know you are part of me and I you, my brother and sisters.  We nurtured one another, giving and receiving.  I remember leaning on Katie, my rock, when I struggled with emotional problems.  I remember talking to Jennifer about books and ideas and praising her poetry.  We all, following Mom, looked to brother James as the man of the family.  At least, that's how I remember it.  We played the roles mysteriously assigned us within our family culture and have, since becoming adults, struggled to separate, to be ourselves.  Me, too.  I have a right to BE, too.  The lost wedding dress and coveted collectibles seem to me to be merely objective correlatives for the emotional gaps and misfires of human love.  It was a terrible storm.  But I want to take my siblings' criticisms seriously.  Did I "use confidences" to win Mom's love?  I guess it's possible.  The thing is:  Mom used me as a sounding board, as a confidante.  She shared her worries and feelings, and I reciprocated.  Of course, she was a worrier and, of course, she worried about her children--all of them, but I never felt this kind of talk was "trash-talk" or a betrayal except maybe once when I was entrusted with a very personal and sensitive story.  I'm sorry that I shared it.  Even worry is no excuse.  Going through decades of family photos, I see that Mom had much more adult relationships with my sisters.  She went on trips to see them, they did things in the world together.  I don't think I ever separated from Mom but was stuck by her side, which meant being stuck at the kitchen table listening or on the other end of the telephone line listening.  Mom's sister, Ruthellen, called Mom "shithead," and I was "little shithead."  I, too, could be envious of the relationships the others had with Mom; but I am not.  I know that each one is unique and important.  Each one is a story that should be told.  Now, every time I write a blog post, I risk alienating my family members further, since I don't seem to have the right words.  But I write of my Mother and my brother and sisters because I want to understand how the cracks got so big that the earthenware bowl of family must be tossed in the dumpster.  It's old.  It's beautiful.  In the bottom there is a delicate design of three sisters in bonnets fishing from a log with a bull frog looking on.  It came from great-grandmother.  It was passed down.  We can fix it.  Please save it.  I texted this to my brother just this morning.  Proof that the things themselves signify so much more.

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"Let it Rain!" (post from last week that I was reluctant to share)

I'm back in Flint.  It's Sunday, sun shining.  I need to be at Mass, but I have to drive Paul to Bishop airport to return his rental car.  We finish the errand too late for me to make 10:00 mass at St. Mary’s on Franklin Street.  So I drive to St. John Vianney, but the pews are packed and the people dressed up and the priest’s voice flat.  About to be boxed in by a handsome middle- aged woman and her well-groomed husband, I give them my seat and flee to the vestibule.  From a bench in the back, I hear the liturgy of the Word.  Moses speaks to the Israelites about the location of the ultimate commandment which is not far away in the Heavens but in the secret closet of each heart.  When the gospel rolls around, I hear Jesus answer the question put to him by a young lawyer, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life,” with a parable of a traveler fallen among thieves, stripped, robbed, and left for dead on the roadside.  The officially religious people—a Priest and a Levite—looked on this man and walked on.  Only a Samaritan (the good Samaritan) stopped and tried to help.  He bound up his wounds, poured in oil and wine, put him on his beast and led him to in Inn, making provision for him.  The take-away is plain:  we must do the deeds of mercy.  The gospel somehow gave me permission to leave the liturgy before the eucharist.  It felt stale and I was restless, dying to cry out to someone … the clouds?  The sky?  My mother?  My God, my God?

I drive from Chevrolet Avenue over to the old Flint Farmer’s Market.  I park and head off down the river.  I have no route or destination.  I hear a voice from the soundtrack that kept me company on the 12-hour drive back to Michigan yesterday: “Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again.  It’s so far and out of sight.  I really need someone to talk to, and nobody else knows how to comfort me tonight.”  That’s Carole King’s voice.  Where is mine?  And, for that matter, where is home for me?  I don’t know.  And I don’t know whether the issue is making it home or escaping the gravitational pull of Mom’s home where all the antiques and collectibles newly liberated from their fixed positions orbit like little moons or the balls of a juggling clown.  Careful, careful.  They auction people weren’t careful.  “They really trashed the house,” texts my sister.  I think I hear an undertone of reprimand.  Hopefully, I imagine it.

From above the Flint River, swifts dip down to sip the water mid-flight.  No lead in their flight or mine.  I walk fast.  The sun is hot; thank heaven for the cool breeze.  Out from under the overpass of I-475 I’m on Lewis Street (one of the poorest streets on the east side).  I cross to the shady side of the road, and suddenly I hear this music.  The building is whitewashed.  No name of a church or a denomination.  Just a sign that reads “Jesus Christ is Lord.”  

I try the door but don’t force it.  I put my ear to the door, trying to make out the lyrics of the rousing gospel sounds, “All men who love God praise the rain, praise the rain, oh let it come down.”  I hear something like this.  The voice booming and the choir echoing in wave after wave of music falling down on me.  I feel like I’m resting against the big voice on the other side of the door.  The big voice that I cannot see.  The big voice that is calling my own voice out of me.  I don’t care what people passing by might think.  Drug addict.  Prostitute.  Someone who is hurting.  Tears run down my face.  Rain rhymes with Pain—the rain of troubles.  But the rain of tears washes away pain.  I notice the purple stains of mulberries on the sidewalk and the sign for Art’s Pub and Grub across the street.  It’s been closed for years.  “Let it rain ai ain!”  Later, when I’m back in my car, I use my SmartPhone to google the lyrics that I think I heard, and all the sounds fall into place.  

“Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let it rain.  Open the floodgates of Heaven.  Let it rain.  Let the rain come down.”  The church must have been playing a YouTube video the same one I was watching of Bishop Paul S. Morton, Pastor of Changing a Generation Full Gospel Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.  On the YouTube clip, he sets up the song by asking the congregation to put themselves in the presence of God—to find themselves in the Holy of Holies.  I recognize the Old Testament imagery of the tabernacle in the desert, and I remember that words in the Hebrew Bible are often compared to dew and drops of rain.  “I believe that somebody here tonight just wants Him to open up the windows of Heaven for you.”  Mm hmm.  I’m feeling all of this from sound alone, sound so strong it carries me into the presence of both God and Mom, and she is with Him.  And I am just crying on the other side of a door.  Open the window, Lord!  Mama, can you hear me?  Pray for me?  I love you, Mom.  They see me and know my love as I know theirs. 

When I get back home an hour late, Paul is still at the table going through old family photos.  Where’ve you’ve been?  He asks, and I tell him that I had a very interesting experience. I don’t tell him that a preacher I never saw and an invisible but audible congregation, moving within the space of that white storefront church on Lewis Street, gave me my voice back. 

Thinking back over the past week when I was home, working with the auctioneer to clean out Mom’s house, I realize that I was as stolid as one of her earthenware crocks.  Her house looked devastated without her organizing presence, and I when I was there, I wanted to cry but didn’t.  The couch she slept on for twenty years in the wood stove room was gone when I arrived.  Who took Mom’s bed?  The white bone china of great grandmother’s was all mixed up with Staffordshire face mugs and other knick-knacks, strewn carelessly over the blue carpet that still smells like cat pee even though the last cat was buried out back years ago.  Mom’s beloved things washed up in a wreck.  “Oh Mary Jo, I’ve made a mess of our lives,” were her first words to me after breaking her hip.  No, Mom, it’s just the way life goes.

She’s gone.  Never will she answer the door.  Never will she smoke a cigarette at the table.  Never will I smell the Kools and listen to her fret.  Never will I hear my name pronounced Mare ee Jo.  Never.  I want to scream at someone.  I want to cry for her.  At the cemetery, I moved toward her still unmarked grave and would have thrown myself down on the brown sod if my daughter hadn’t been with me.  Instead, I held myself together.  I did the job of executrix.  I took the fraternal beatings.  Swallowed the tears.  Swallowed the pain.  Stood up and got the job done.  But I felt and still sometimes feel like a frightened child with a world of whirling objects spinning around my head.  I am dizzy as I remember how the corner cupboards spilled out her Christmas Santas and blue and white German Meisen.  Kitchen cabinets gave up her favorite dishes—Poppytrail with the homely farm scenes.  Blanket boxes dropped their linens and embroidered handkerchiefs.  A silver-plated tea service was rejected as were the dozens of brass candlesticks standing mute in the corner of the dining room.  “They don’t sell.”  No one in this generation wants such things.  The cherry drop-leaf table that I worked at for years bid goodbye to the house, to the yard with the pressure of my pencil making words and sentences in its finish.  The furniture, now better called by its old English equivalent, “moveables,” left at the speed of light.  Is this what surviving a cyclone feels like?  “I want to go home, I want to go home.  There’s no place like home.”  That’s Dorothy’s voice.  Where is mine?  At the House of Frankenstein wax museum in Lake George (my daughter’s favorite tourist trap), the scariest exhibit for me is not the ax murderess or the witch burning or even the electric chair.  It’s the black hole.  A tunnel you walk through, trying to keep your balance while a vortex of stars whirls around and around.  “Kat I can’t do it,” I say in a panicked voice.  “Close your eyes, Mom, keep walking, and hold my hand.”  I made it through holding onto my daughter’s words.  God, I hope that Mom held fast to my words as I imagined talking her through the dark and whirling passage of her final hour?

Kat and I stayed up north in a rented cottage on Indian Lake, continuing the family tradition.  Our cottage is just down the road from where my father died and where my mother stayed for years.  Mom kept us returning to the same lake where we’d been traumatized by finding Pop’s dead body.  Calling and crying.  Pairs of loons winter separately and find each other every summer at the same northern body of water.  Mom probably didn’t imagine her kids as loons, but I think she did hope that hurts would be healed if we just kept coming back.  She tried valiantly to keep us connected to our lost father through immersion in the spirit of the lake.  It did and didn’t work.  Ritual cannot substitute for sharing feelings, and words are all we humans have.

 After one hectic day down at Mom’s house in Queensbury (50 miles south of the cottage), when we return Home to our cottage at dusk, I grab a paddle at the “office” and run down the hill to the lake.  I’m going for a “ride” in a kayak as Mom loved to do.  I revert to present tense because I need to relive the experience.  I paddle to the middle of the lake and let go.  I drift.  I can see the house on the hill (Camp Mary) where Pop died.  I see the mountains growing black in the fading light.  The sun is bright in my eyes.  I drift, and details of my parents’ bodies and lives come back to me.  My father’s printed boxer shorts, the way he’d meticulously fold toilet paper on his thigh before wiping, the smell of his aftershave.  My mother rubbing Vaseline on the infected wound on her leg, her arthritic hands, her love of weeding and going out to the wood pile, the orange fires she made in her wood stove from late autumn through cold springs.  Random details.  The rocking of the boat is lulling.  I lay back and feel I am leaning on their recovered lives the way I’d lean into Mom’s chest when I’d ride on her lap as a child home from Indian Lake, watching the lights on the dashboard, watching my father’s head drop and hearing Mom’s voice wake him, “Joe!”  When Mom kayaked, she stayed close to shore, afraid of deep water.  I’m not afraid.  I go out deep.  When I was a little girl at the Jersey shore, I’d beg my father to “carry me out deep” where I’d get to jump off his shoulders into green surging waves of ocean, sure that he would catch me.  I see now what a gift that was.  Carry me out deep!  Open the floodgates of Heaven!  Let it rain!  Let it rain!  Such details like Mom’s collectibles liberated for some new combinations in the lives of their children fly around and around in my mind.

I paddle back.  My daughter is waiting to fish.  We fish and catch two large and feisty small-mouth bass, which we admire and release.  Up the hill and into the cabin, I settle into the flannel nightgown, compliments of Mom’s stockpile.  I grabbed the last down comforter, and I AM comforted that somehow she is still provisioning the vacation that meant so much to her.  I boil water and pour it over a tea bag, stirring sugar into the teacup with a delicate sterling silver teaspoon—Lancaster Rose.  She collected a set for each daughter to give us for our weddings.  I know for sure that I will not let Mom’s things sit on shelves or be mere decorative flourishes in my life.  They are free now to be used, to inspire, to sing in their own way about her grace, her love, her benisons.   

Back in Flint, when I think of the vacation and try to picture my cabin, I instinctively go to hers.  Her big tree, her deck, her gas stove, her table.  It takes a real effort to remember the interior configuration of my own cottage, hard to focus on just my view.  And tonight, that feels okay.  It tells me that I remain in her orbit, that she continues to organize and animate the beings she created.  We had one stormy night at the lake this year when it rained, really rained.  And the floodgates of Heaven opened.  (Perhaps Mom opened a window.)  And in the morning, the mountains exhaled their visible breath.  My mother’s last word, the barely audible sound of breath leaving her lungs, is now part of the world-breath that hovers over the trees, hovers over the surface of the waters, and I know that one day, at an hour I cannot predict, my last exhale will merge with it, too.  Until then, the small voice in my own heart, responding to her last “word,” says:  let us love the things of this world and one another, let us dizzy ourselves with the fullness of it all.  I felt my own soul rise up at the sound of birds and Mom running water to fill the coffee percolator.  Wrapped in her mantle, I go outside to breathe through every pore a new day after rain.

Relic

The destination of my pilgrimage had shifted from Lindisfarne to the family home, a blue cape cod on Sylvan Avenue—the first street in what became a massive suburban development in Queensbury that laid waste to woods in its wake.  “She had a hard life,” said a woman I met once on a plane.  I must have told her about Mom’s hip break and gone on to review her life from the time she was widowed at age 50.  She never remarried.  Never even dated.  “How could I?” was always her comeback.  She took care of her parents as they aged and died.  Her children left physically and some left emotionally, too.  Her response:  fill the house, every inch, pack it tight (Mom was a genius at packing), finding little spaces for everything she couldn’t let go of, things precious and potentially necessary to someone someday.  In her house, nothing was lost; and while she lived, no one was permitted to order the chaos.  “I know where everything is,” she’d say, even when she really didn’t.  For years we’d been moving piles of newspapers and magazines off the kitchen chairs so there would be room for guests on feast days.  “Just put it down by the washer.”  “If not there, then, there’s room in the bathtub upstairs.”  We even used a junk car, the 77 Olds for storage, as well as our greenhouse that was rotting in the back yard by the fence.  We, her children, always obeyed.  For years we carried piles of stuff round and round, looking for places to put it.  We had been immobilized artifacts and ephemera--history--and spoke of the furniture and collectibles as if they were sacred.  Perhaps that is why neither of my siblings who lived near Mom had made any effort to clean the house in the eighteen months between her fall and her eventual death.  “It” was too “overwhelming.”  Yes.  They have jobs and lives.  Yes.  But there was more to it:  the stuff Mom collected was imbued with sacredness.  How could she have trusted me with the job of handling the “tangibles,” disbursing them, unsettling all that was sacred in what was to some eyes is an antique store and to others is a hoarder house?  When I arrived and began the work, sure enough, every piece had a talisman-like power to lead my mind back through the years to gone worlds and once dear places:  the northern mountains, the southern pine barrens and across the Atlantic.  There was garnet from the North Creek mines, hunks of slag that looked like meteorites from Batsto, jars of shells and grains of beach sand, a paper mache coal mine with a balsam wood elevator, grade school stories corrected by her, machines to bunch asparagus, railroad lanterns, pictures of the Yorkshire Dales and ruined abbeys, and even her high school scrap book.  Nothing lost but me.

On the drive from Michigan, I was reading about the cult of relics in medieval Europe, and, like any pilgrim, I felt I was going to Mom’s house (her shrine) to be in the presence of an invisible person.  Relics that turned up were thought to do so by the grace of God and were understood to be messages to the pilgrim from the beyond.

First day of the cellar clean-out, the dump truck arrived and up came the boxes full of children’s clothes.  I recognized each outfit, and it was hard to let them go.  But the dump truck was there to be filled.  College books.  Luggage smelling of mildew.  College books.  Buddhism.  The Turko-Grecian War.  Hurry, hurry, time is money.  “Throw it,” “You can’t keep that,” “They are mildewed.”  “No baby clothes.”  Pressure to look fast and discard.  A box came up with another box on top.  It was black with swirls of color.  Thin enough to have held stockings, lingerie, sets of pocket hankies.  Too pretty not to open.  I stopped long enough to read the fine print:  “Barton’s.”  It was a chocolate box, and when I opened it, I was stunned.  

There was a faded old photograph that captured, even with a quick look, joy beneath gray layers of time.  The reflection of the flash was a bright spot still shining in the window behind the kitchen table.  A family group sat around a table sharing a watermelon.  The women held up their pieces.  The table was covered with an oilcloth.  I flipped it over, and, miracle of miracles, the people were named!  There was Uncle Frank (my mother’s favorite).  He is visibly happy.  I can see the ring on his left finger and his striped trousers or maybe that’s the long dress worn by Cornelia Grawe (who must be cousin Mildred’s mother).  Frank wears a suit and tie, and the women are wearing the high collared blouses of the late nineteenth century.  Their dark hair is swept back and pinned up.  My great grandmother, Kate Wescoat, is sixth from the left.  She is young—no babies yet.  I know she married Philip Wescoat in 1900, and so the photo must have been taken around the turn of the century.  The photo speaks to me of the joy of living in an extended family.  The pleasure of sitting down together for a simple meal—just a watermelon.  Even when I was a kid, my Jersey relatives had such meals.  If we visited Grandmother Walker (born a Wescoat) in the early summer, we’d have meals of strawberry shortcake.  In their world, strawberry shortcake was not dessert.  Ruth Wescoat made big casseroles of fluffy biscuit, and the red red juices of strawberries layered with whipped cream filled us up.  Whatever fruit was in season was always the main dish. 

I knew instantly that this photo would be my best find, my relic, and I found it on the first day of a week-long clean-out.  I felt sure it was a message from my mother (historian and saint).  Who else could have nudged me or turned my attention to that chocolate box that contained a photo about the real sweets available in this world?  I posted it to Facebook with the wish that my Mama had rejoined her family group at such a table in the world we mortals cannot see. 

But the real message is for the living.  Four of us, four children, grew up in Mom’s crowded house, and, despite the fact that she bought things in triplicate, there is a sick feeling of competition, as if there is not enough to go around.  It’s possible that Mom was too much the historian, too much the teacher, leaving each child with needs for attention and affirmation that went unsatisfied.  Four rooms.  Two girls (13 months apart) had to share a room for there to be enough space; and one now resents that, resents that she wasn’t treated as a separate individual.  As we matured, each adult child wanted Mom for themselves, claimed her, sought to be her favorite.  Even though I shared the watermelon photo, Jennifer had to see the original and clearly wants to possess it for herself.  Where does this capitalism of the heart come from?  What experiences feed into a belief that the essences of life can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on love, stage a hostile takeover of history or happiness?  It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.

Antique Salt Water Taffy Box / Inside was Mom's hair

It's as if she just stepped off the beach or climbed down from a tractor after plowing a field

Medieval saints were often exhumed and some found to be incorrupt.  Their books, shoes, jewelry, and even their bodies were taken as relics.  Days after the clean-out I dreamed of objects unearthed, objects appearing.  Shirley Temple in her original box.  Her white dress is stiff with age and dust, and her eyes rolled back are yellowed.  Open an ancient looking Fralinger salt water taffy box to find my mother’s honey-colored pigtails still soft and bright.  Open the box.  Open the box.  What would my mother look like now?  In my dream, I opened a box to find her body changed:  skin like brown-black leather and fingers like sticks.  And even in the dream, my siblings and I quarreled over her mummified remains.

But the relic photo has an urgent message from the rural extended family to the suburban children of a diasporic farm girl.  Family should not be taken for granted.  Place and position mean nothing.  Family exists in its extensions.  “This is my body.”  “It is good. It is sweet.  Take and eat.”  My sister, Jennifer, rightly noted that the people in the photo arrange themselves in a Last Supper kind of pose.  But I prefer to see the ritual carving of a watermelon world as Mom’s wish for us to share and enjoy and come together.  If we grab and hoard, then the spirit of Nesco, will be truly lost as this photo almost was.  There is something for everyone in Mom’s house—a house that represents her mind and spirit if not her body exactly.  “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Holding On to the Dead

                My father’s and mother’s deaths couldn’t have been more different.  Pop was 53 and died in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  His children found him the next morning on the pull-out couch in the rental cottage at Indian Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state.  No time to say goodbye.  While I answered the coroner’s questions, his body was taken somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I never saw him again.  Closed casket.  Mom, on the other hand, was 88 and in a slow decline after a hip break.  Pneumonia after pneumonia had weakened her, and her body gave out.  Even though we had time to let go, time to say goodbye; and even though I was with her when she died and had hours afterward to sit with her expired body and talk to her and talk about her with others, it was still over too soon.  I wanted to keep her.  I wanted to help prepare her, so I pulled off her socks and helped to wash her body.  I wanted to witness all the people that cared about her speaking in loving ways.  I wanted the song the tattooed aide, Jean, played on her cell phone, “What does it Look Like in Heaven,” to go on forever.  But I participated even in the parts of the ritual I didn't want:  I walked behind the gurney, I rode the “cargo” elevator down to the back entrance, and I let them slide Mom’s body, zipped in a bag, into the transport vehicle.  I let them take my prized possession, my world, my mother.  Our close and complicated relationship was over too soon even though she was 88.  

Tending to a long dead relative, the Torjans are comfortable touching and interacting with the expired human body.

                The nursing home staff graciously gave us time to be with our mother.  This was a pleasant surprise because I’d heard Mom complain that the staff at these facilities covered up death.  “They don’t even tell us.”  Because they don’t want to upset people whose own deaths are imminent.  But Lois, my mother’s roommate, was kind.  “Is she still with us?” asked Lois, pulling back the divider curtain on the morning Mom died.  Lois was kind and compassionate throughout Mom’s dying.  She’d been married to a man who ran a funeral home in Argyle and had told me once before that she enjoyed helping people through their grief.  A dozen or so old people in wheelchairs and on foot came into the room to pay their respects to my mother, lying gaunt in her bed with her stuffed newfie on her sunken chest.  Being loved even in death is reassuring to everyone, no matter their age.  Hiding death is terrifying.  Ironically, it was the Catholic priest who rushed us at the grave—“I have to cut this short … I have a very important meeting to attend to discuss how to cope with the shortage of priests.”  I wondered silently how this grieving family would cope with his shortage of compassion.  We stood there beside the casket at a loss.  Someone laid a bough from Mom’s crabapple tree on the wooden box.  Someone else balanced a Kool cigarette on the center molding, carefully so it wouldn’t fall into the hole.  Mom hated to waste a good cigarette or even part of one.  We took turns kneeling and touching the wood as if it was her like the way we kiss the wooden feet of the wooden cross on Good Friday.  She was our Jesus now.  Goodbye priest; we don’t need you.  “O.k.  now we must let the cemetery people do their work,” interrupted Sarah, the waxy-faced director from the funeral home.  We were not allowed to watch them lower my mother into the dark.  We were not allowed to see dirt.  The gravediggers were not even called gravediggers but “cemetery people.”  The social tarp was pulled over the Act 5 ending of our family’s life together.  We left feeling dissatisfied.  We left angry.  None of us were ready for life—the common life we shared through Mom—to be over.

                Moving on after death.  How is it possible?  When Pop died, I felt nothing but anger at the gatherings of well-meaning relatives and neighbors who would tell funny stories, who smiled and laughed.  I wasn’t ready for any of that.  I hated the fact that we were expected to just go on with life, forgetting about his death, ignoring the obvious and utter change.  Years later when I was writing a dissertation on complaint, I read books on elegy and despised the Freudian theory that to complete the work of mourning, the bereaved had to find a compensatory object for the lost loved one.  In the wake of Mom’s death, searching online for connection and comfort, I found an anthropologist talking about a culture in Indonesia—the people are called Torajans—who literally live with their dead relatives for long periods of time.  If grandfather dies, his body is rubbed with leaves or injected with formalin, and he is laid out in the family home and allowed to metamorphose.  His clothes and bedding are changed periodically, and he is taken out for a “walk” around the village.  Family members bring him food, drink, and cigarettes once a day.  When a guest enters and asks about grandfather, his daughter may say, “he is still sleeping,” or “he is sick.”   The anthropologist acknowledged that this may seem gruesome to western people, but that the Torajans had a “relational” perspective on death, understood it as a “social process.”  The years with decaying grandfather in the living room gave the family time to transition, to develop a new relationship to him as a revered ancestor instead of a living family member.  The process of dying wasn’t over until the family could throw a lavish funeral for their family member—a party for the village that involved the sacrifice of many buffaloes, which are the spirit animal that is thought to carry the soul to the afterlife.  The blond anthropologist was evidently taken with this culture because she married a Torajan man, who has happy memories of playing with his dead grandfather.  “If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life,” she suggests, “we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear.”  We have much to learn from peoples like the Torajans.

Corpse of Torajan woman, Tana, going out for a walk

                In the long history of western societies, there have been peoples who have kept the dead with them.  I think of the 7^th century Anglo-Saxon monks, who carried the body of Cuthbert around northern England at the time of the Viking invasions.  Before they placed Cuthbert in his final resting place, the monks opened the box and found that his body was “incorrupt.”  That means that it hadn’t decayed, was fresh and flexible, as if he were just sleeping.  This was one of the many miracles that established the cult of Saint Cuthbert.  Research suggests that holy men and women were frequently exhumed by the faithful, who still searched for confirming signs that there was a spiritual life beyond death.  The dead were seen as persons, medieval historian, Peter Brown, explains.  "Indeed the cult of the saints in sixth-century Europe is an illustration of the ancient and poignant theme--the quest for the Ideal Companion.  The saints, said Ambrose (made bishop of Milan in 374), were the only relatives that you were free to choose. Their protection had the intimacy of a surrogate kinsman.

                It seems to me that in our world, because of the dominance of scientific positivism, we need practices that recognize, mark, and honor major losses, and we need desperately new understandings of death, informed by the lifeways of peoples in other places and other times.  My own mother used to tell and re-tell the story of Grampy being laid out at home.  I never asked her how many days he lay in her Aunt Ruth’s parlor, but she said she talked to him and bumped into him when she had to run the vacuum.  

                My neighbor Lark, who works at an elder-care facility, lost her mother in 1994.  “It’s still hard,” she admits, but at least once a year, Lark says that she has a weirdly comforting dream.  “Me and my sisters go and dig Mom up and we take her out for a car ride.”  Whenever I have this dream, I am just so excited to really see her.  I guess it’s kind of weird that we have to dig her up, but it’s still wonderful to see her and talk to her.”  I’ve been praying, really praying, to have such a reassuring dream.  I want to see and feel my mother’s presence.  I want her in any form.  I want her death to be part of my life.

                “It isn’t over.  Death doesn’t mean the relationship is over.  Of course, death makes the person no longer accessible in the same way, but you hold on to them by remembering.  That is how you grieve.”  My current therapist thinks that the panic I feel at losing my mother stems from the fact that my father’s death was so sudden.  He did disappear.  I’m not satisfied with the cliché that “you have your memories.”  We lose memories, all too easily as well.  No … I want to hold my mother’s hand.  I want to light her cigarette.  I want to see her toothless smile.  I realize that none of us can know, but rather than rely on psychological or even religious truisms, I’d rather trust my feelings.  And I feel that my mother and I are on some kind of journey together.  I know this because every night since she died I sleep a restless sleep searching for her.  I don’t have vivid or colorful dreams; what happens as night feels more like “dream thoughts.” The first week after her death, my dreaming mind was full of my effort to get to where she is … to help her somehow.  Now, the third week, I sleep more deeply and have dreams with situations in which we talk things over:  the tiresome nursing home people, whether her boyfriend can live with us, whether she likes clown-suited nurses.  Weird things like that.  But at least we are talking.  My friend, Lark, tells me to end the day with a cup of tea and a talk with Mom.  I am trying to do that, too.  When I see something on my daily walks that reminds me of her, I try to remember to talk to her about them.  If I am more assertive, if I complete my sentences, if I am courageous, then maybe I can even improve my relationship with Mom.

                I still think of her eyes when they looked at me for the last time.  Close to death, they were still so blue.  The blue of longed for things that are always far away:  mountains, the ocean, a city on the horizon line.  The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.  Essayist Rebecca Solnit explains that blue is the color of light that got lost.  “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us.  It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. … This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”  My blue-eyed Mom was always a little bit distant.  Not a hugger.  Emotionally cool.  Leaving her babies asleep at the foot of the mountain to ride to the top and ski down.  When she opened those eyes and looked at me in her last moments of life, she tinged with blue my solitude, grief, and longing, setting me on the road that leads (perhaps) to the conclusion that some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. 

Offerings of cigarettes to the dead continue in Indonesia

Pastures New?

St. Anthony, St. Anthony

Please come down

Something is lost

And can’t be found.

Saint Anthony is my mother’s go-to saint.  Right now I need his help because for the past three weeks of nights, I cannot sleep but look for her obsessively.  For my husband, the dead are dead: just gone.  For religious friends, the dead go to heaven; “they are in a better place,” end of story.  The story of my life with mother and maybe every daughter’s life with her mother cannot have such a clear ending or maybe any ending.  After I read a book on “fell” shepherding in the Lake District of England, I understood better.  A fell (from Old Norse fell, fjall, "mountain") is a high and barren landscape feature, such as a mountain range or moor-covered hills.  In fell farming, the sheep spend most of the year on upland pastures that are not fenced or walled.  In theory they could wander right across the Lake District.  But they don’t because they know their place on the mountains.  They are “hefted,” taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs.  “Heft” can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and it basically describes an attachment or bond to an animal’s special spot on earth. 

As long as Mom was here, on this earth, my place was somehow secure … even when she was at the nursing home.  Now that she is gone, gone too is that invisible cable that bound me to her and to my place.  At night, I follow an irresistible urge to head home … to her, to her in a box, to do something, to get somewhere, to suckle.  No places are recognizable anymore.  Where is my place on the mountain?

The morning I sat with her before she headed off to her own place, I kept my hand on top of hers.  Her hand was like a rocky mountain, and it was warm in the way stones absorb the heat of the sun.  I remember thinking of her body, even in its shrunken state, in terms of a landscape or a world.  My mother.  My mountain.  She was it for me.  And like a good fell ewe, she taught me the places where I belong, to which I will be returning all my life:  Nesco on the edge of the Jersey Pines, Brigantine—the sea isle off Atlantic City, and Indian Lake.  But even more than these beloved places, she taught me how to find good pasture anywhere.  She led the way.  Even in hard times.  I talk to her as I walk.

“Mom, I was coming up through Kearsley Park yesterday, and the purple phlox was blooming like mad.  Suddenly, I remembered that God gets pissed off if people don’t pause to acknowledge the color purple.  So I did, and I noticed a path along the stream.  I followed it into the bushes, and I saw evidence that homeless men had used it as a washing place.  Some of their clothes remained on the branches.  Along this part of the stream, I’ve seen woodchucks and even deer—so near the road.  When I took the path to the washing place and thought of these men without houses, I thought of you going to the laundromat all those years and enjoying the adventure of it.  For most people, laundry is a chore we take care of in the privacy of our own houses.  But you filled the cellar so full you couldn’t have a repairman down to fix or replace the machines when they broke.  No worries.  You didn’t complain; just did what you had to do.  Even from this distance, I can still hear you striking up conversations at the Broad Street laundry.  I see you rubbing stain remover into the collars of your white blouses and standing outside in your jeans puffing on a Kool cigarette.  No cell phone to scroll through.  No book to read.  You looked.  You sensed the air of the day.  For you, this was pastime passing excellent, and you drove home with a sense of accomplishment.  Work is something that you relished.  It was life.  It was fun.  You showed us how to graze.  ‘Graze, my daughters on the fields of this world.  Don’t shy away.’”

There will be no other mother for me.

 

Why didn’t I stay by your side like Jennifer did?

I wanted you to come to Michigan, but you didn’t want to leave your own home turf and Jennifer packed up her life and headed north, going to the place where she’d been hefted.

What about me?  Banished.  Far away from my familiar mountains and fields.

Can we find each other and find a new place to graze together, Mama?  Will you lead me there tonight?

Dear Saint Anthony, I pray

Bring her back without delay.