I woke that day with the thought that my son and his bride-to-be would close on their very first house that afternoon. The course of their home buying, like Shakespeare’s love, never did run true. There were fits and starts, the one that got away, the uncertainty, the waiting. But now, they had found the one that was to be theirs. And it was perfect.

We went to see it and he proudly took us from to room, beaming and full of plans. As I stood in a spare bedroom, it occurred to me that I might be standing in a future nursery, and I smiled.

And remembered our very first house, bought when I was great with child, this son’s older brother. We had kept it a surprise and took my parents to see it.

“Guess whose house this?”

“Whose?”

“Ours!”

And the joy that followed that night, and the joy that followed us into that house, where one, two babies were brought home from the hospital. First steps, first Christmases, first birthdays, first everything, first love.

It’s gray now, but it was yellow then. It had a porch swing where I soothed fretful babies, and Chinese Tallow Tree in the front yard. In the fall its leaves turned every shade between gold and crimson.

It had a fenced in backyard where there was a swing set, and a sandbox, and once a tent was pitched where my husband and two small boys “went camping” for a night. And a kitchen with ivy carefully stenciled around the ceiling. It had hardwood floors that were hard wood for new walkers to fall on, and tiny bedrooms and only one bathroom, and was too small for a family of four, much less the five we eventually became, but it was perfect, it was home, and oh, how I loved it!

The day came when we bought a bigger house, me great with child again, this son’s younger brother this time. And it has been a good house too, and more joy and more firsts have followed, first drivers, first dates, first to fly out of the nest, and then second, and then last. And then there were none. And I love it too, and will be sad when we leave it, but perhaps not in the same way. The way you only love once, your first love, when everything is all out before you.

The night before we moved, I cried the whole time as I packed, and when I walked out for the last time, I didn’t know it would be the last time. I thought I would become coming back one last time, but as it happens, I didn’t need to, and I was glad. In a strange way, I am still a little homesick for that house and my eyes turn that way every time I drive by the turn. And I smile.

Later in the day, I tell my mother all this, and she tells me the story of her first house in the town where I was born. We moved to where we live now, when I was three. She says my Father took me and came ahead, leaving her there a day to tie up loose ends. She said she walked out for the last time, locked the door, drove away, and cried for the three hours it took her to get here.

In that moment of the telling, i felt I traveled back across time to look out of my 25 year old Mother’s eyes and understood her perfectly.

I became she, and she became me, and we will both become he the day he locks the door of his first house for the last time, and turns his back on all the joy that was lived there. Three lives connected across time and bound together by the gossamer thread of universal experience, and love.

There were two cardboard boxes in my closet, full of the history of me, in journal form. Forty years of journals. Written on the boxes instructions that upon my death they go to a friend and be destroyed. And so they have sat through the years, in the floor of my closet, peering up at me balefully, like a toad, unfinished business. A great holding on to the past, in case it is needed to explain me some day. But explain me to whom? Do I think scholars will one day be doing dissertations on what I was thinking about on a Tuesday in May, 1995?

And so one day last week I realized it was time. I opened the first box and began to shred them, pieces of me, pieces of the past. They came to hand in no particular order, despairing Mother of teenagers in one, young college student in another, newlywed, new Mother, teenager, the room becoming crowded with former selves.

A strange thing, reading the past, knowing how it all came out. Knowing that the heartbroken twenty something was within months going to meet the love of her life, the one she’s been married to for 30 odd years. That the Nursing Student agonizing over taking her Boards was going to pass them and have a long, wonderful career in nursing. That the young woman desperate to have a baby would have a house full of children and the joy they bring, and the empty nest that follows and the joy that brings. That the people she was worried about would be alright, or sometimes they wouldn’t, but that it’s all over now.

And so I threw the past away, one chapter at a time, turning my back firmly as pieces of my younger selves fluttered into the trash. And I felt lighter every moment. The past is done and nothing can change it. No need to hang onto it and figure it out, or wait for justice, or forgiveness. Accept that I did the best I could with what I knew at the time…and so did everyone else. And mostly, it came out okay, and when it didn’t, I tried to learn from it.

So I move on and strive to live this day and be here now, where my feet are. And not to squander any more time being mad, or worried, or hard on myself or hard on others. We are all doing the best we can, and hopefully, when we know better, we do better.

I saved a few pages, pages my children might want to have, about how they were when they were little, how funny they were, how loved they were, and also this. A note I wrote to myself in the midst of late teens drama, that seemed earth shaking at the time, a time when very little earth shaking had actually yet occurred.

“Dear Mary,

You are alright. All this is going to be okay. Just put one foot in front of the other and have faith. Everything happens for a reason and one day you’ll understand. Keep on keeping on and this too shall pass. Let God run your life.

Love,

Mary

I was right about that.

March 2023

It is my last day in London. With a couple of hours to kill on my own, I decide to visit the Florence Nightengale Museum, to pay homage to one of the founders of my field. It is adjacent to St. Thomas Hospital, which she helped found, and where she practiced, on the banks of the Thames overlooking the Elizabeth Tower (“Big Ben” is the clock itself) and the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey.

After a very interesting hour that made me proud to be a part of my profession, I wandered out to a lovely memorial rose garden at the Hospital, and then down to the River path. As I turned the corner I saw the sign:

A walk to honor the roughly 250,000 dead of the Covid Pandemic in the UK. Each heart containing a name, a few words, an attempt to summarize life and what the loss of it meant. The wall full of hearts stretches as far as my eye can see. I walk and read the heart wrenching messages:

“Ian, you left such a legacy”

“Mum, forever loved and forever missed.”

“To all the healthcare workers that were lost.”

“My best friend, gone too soon.”

“To the love of my life. I miss you every day.”

As I walk and read, that dreadful time, the one we all rushed to turn our eyes from as soon as it subsided, begins to come back to me. The fear, the not knowing how you get it, or why, how to prevent it, or treat it, or when it would be over. I think of all the babies born into silent rooms because no one could be there, of all the people that had heart attacks or strokes or surgery alone, or struggled to breathe with rising panic in hospital rooms alone, and worst of all, those who died alone, because no one could be with them. If they were lucky, maybe some nurse, whose eyes were kind above a mask, held their hand or sang a hymn or prayed.

It was a time where you couldn’t stop to think, and you were too tired and traumatized to anyway. You had to keep going for the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that. A long ride on a Carousel in Hell.

And as I walk, unbidden, tears begin to fall, for the horror, the sadness, the waste of it all. For the fact that we learned nothing from it, and we never do. A cry three years in the making. I sit down on a bench overlooking the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and give to the English wind my surplus of unshed tears, while Londoners walk by briskly, pretended not to see.

And then, like all storms, it is over. There is nothing left. I heave a great sigh, blow my nose, straighten my coat and adjust my scarf, and head out into the rest of the day, face toward the sun.

Overheard at Vietnam War Memorial circa 1991:

Little boy: “This is for a war? Who won?”

Father: “No one did.”

Originally published June 5, 2018

Memorial (n.)-created or done to honor a person who has died.

I have a friend whose Father was killed in Vietnam when she was a little girl. Forty eight years later she can still tell you everything about that day, about that moment, when the soldier came to the door with the envelope in his hand.

She can tell you what the weather was like, what she was wearing, the way her baby brother’s foot looked hanging from her Mother’s hip, about the strangled sound her Mother made and then the wailing.

She wonders what she was doing at the exact moment her big, strong Daddy laid down his life in a rice Paddy far away.

She tells me all of it, with tears in her eyes, frozen at her eyelids as that moment is frozen in time. Her shoulders are drawn in as though to ward off blows on a place still tender. After all these years.

Today, maybe even at this moment, somewhere in the world, someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s friend, someone’s someone will die for our country. It will probably be in a desert rather than a jungle, but still, alone, afraid, miles away from anything that feels like home. We will be eating BBQ when this happens, or lounging by the pool, or binging Netflix.

May we all stop for a moment and remember that somewhere in this country, a soldier is coming to the door with an envelope in his hand and drawing a line of demarcation down the middle of a life, across which all events will now be placed in time as either “before” or “after”.

And in a moment, I will send my friend a text, as I always do on Memorial Day, to let her know that I am thinking of her…and that I remember.

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Birmingham Airport, 5:00 a.m.

Waiting to board an impossibly early flight. Running low on caffeine and humanity.

Also in the waiting room, a family of 5, grandparents, adult daughter and 2 little girls I would place at ages 6 and 4, give or take. Much is being made of the fact that it is the girls first flight. They are unimpressed and are busying themselves unpacking their entire carry-on bags seconds before boarding. They have been instructed not to do this, but it has provided a nice break from pushing each other and shrieking. They are crabby and ungrateful, uncooperative and difficult, in other words, expressing outwardly my exact internal emotional state.

We board the plane at a glacial pace in which entire kingdoms could rise and fall, and when I take my seat, my heart sinks. The crabby twins are directly in front of me. It will be a very long short flight to Atlanta. I content myself with the thought that at least we are not flying to Australia.

Immediately a scuffle breaks out between them over who gets the window seat, the younger prevails. Howls ensue from the elder over the unfairness of it all. A flight attendant is accidentally summoned because one of them pushed the button they were expressly instructed to not push. They refuse to smile for Grandma’s “first flight” shot for Instagram, despite several attempts. This degenerates into low level sniveling as we taxi down the runway.

As we take off I eventually notice it has gone quiet. Through the gap in our seats by the window, I see the little girl is staring wide-eyed out the window. Suddenly she announces in a clear, ringing tone:

“ We are FLYING!”

There is no mistaking the wonder in her voice.

I look out the window and it comes to me that we ARE flying, and what a miracle that truly is. I forget that I’m tired and grumpy and old and crunched up in a tiny seat and remember that I have the privilege of soaring above the world.

Then she exclaims

“Clouds, clouds, CLOUDS…”

before her words trail off.

And I looked out as we came up out of the mist onto a snowy blanket of clouds, illuminated by the rising Sun, a ring of fire around the horizon, and I catch my breath at the beauty of the world.

At that moment she looked back through the gap at me and our eyes met and we smiled, and without saying a word, turned our eyes back to marvel at clouds, clouds, clouds…

“…to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning.”-Isaiah 61:3

Christmas Eve, 2024.

On a beautiful Christmas Eve morning I woke up feeling sad. No real reason. Of course I could find some, the empty places at the table, more ever year, the general overwhelming clamor that is the holidays, the vague sense of anti-climax about it all; but that would just be playing pin the tale on the emotion. So just vaguely sad.

As I sat looking out the dining room window at the birds, my mind reached back to a holiday party I had been to that week. I was my husband’s plus one for a group he is a part of, and we made the rounds being introduced and chatting. My husband moved away to talk to someone, and I introduced myself to a woman standing near by. One minute we were engaging in polite small talk, and the next, having an incredibly deep and authentic conversation about the loss of her daughter 5 years ago. A beautiful young woman killed a particularly senseless way, that ended life as it had been known for her and many others as well. It was as though everything and everyone else fell away as she described what it had been like to live with the eternal raw wound of the lost child. She told me how in her anguish, she began to paint and to write and how art began to heal her, as much as she can ever be healed, and beauty and life began to be possible again. One moment small talk, then suddenly something else altogether, the Unseen Hand took over and a real connection happened. I walked away baffled, but honored. I sensed it meant something, had happened for a reason, but for what reason I could not say.

And so, in that moment on Christmas Eve, that encounter came back to me. I thought of her, her family, several families having a much worse day than me, with a real reason for sadness. I began to pray for them. That THEY would know peace, that THEY would feel joy again, that THEY would be comforted. That I would get over myself…immediately. Amen.

In the stillness that followed, I looked out and saw a red-winged blackbird…then another, and another. They came, first five, then ten, twenty, fifty. I looked out the back door and realized that the woods were alive with them, hundreds of them, every branch full. Occasionally something would spook them and they’d all take off as one, and then settle back down, a seething, ebony carpet on my still green grass. Finally, responding to some unheard signal, as one, they took to the wing for parts unknown, lifting my heart with it, in a cacophony of midnight wings, and flashes of scarlet, against the bright, blue, winter sky.

“Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?”-Jane Austen

The phone rang at my Grandmother’s house on December 23, 1978. I answered it, and it was my Father calling to tell me that after 11 long years as an only child, I was a sister…I had a sister.

When I finally got to see her, she was tiny, just a bump over 5 pounds. And she has stayed tiny. When my boys, and later other nieces and nephews, and now her own children, outgrew her they would shout:

“We’re taller than you Aunt Maggie!”

And she would reply:

“Aim higher boys, aim higher!”

She had a head full of dark hair that promptly fell out, and stayed out for a long time, necessitating a long season of bows being taped to her head. And when it came back in, it was blond and has stayed that way.

It was as though Santa had delivered me my very own personal baby doll. I learned how to take care of babies, and how not to, by taking care of her, like student teaching for being a parent. I always suspected that what I felt for her was pretty close to what I would feel for a child, as it turned out to be.

Then she became a child that followed me around and wanted my attention and got in my stuff. One night in high school I was sitting on the couch with a boyfriend holding hands, and I looked over to see her on the other side, holding his other hand. There was a brief, tumultuous time when we shared a room, a tiny room. Many harsh words were spoken, many tears shed. We never speak of it.

Then she became a teenager, and I became sounding board, keeper of the secrets, letting her tell me things that I sometimes didn’t want to hear, so she would have an adult to talk to.

Then a college student, then a young woman, then a Bride, and now a Mother. I cried for the entire hour it took us to drive home from her wedding and I couldn’t have told you why. I have never felt so many competing emotions, until I had my own children.

I have been child care consultant, chief celebrater, commiserator, coffee dater, and somewhere along the way it became mutual, and we have arrived at friends, the best of friends. She’s the first person I tell news, good or bad, and these days she talks me down off the ledge as often as I do her. There is a way of talking, of crying, of laughing, and a shorthand to our relationship that I have with no one else. She insists that we must die at the exact same moment holding hands, as the only acceptable option. I am hoping she can arrange that.

And sometime today I will tell her, and mean from my heart, as I do every year:

“Happy Birthday to the best Christmas present I ever got.”

I read a story the other day. In it a man shared about buying some land, much overgrown from years of neglect. He was in his field clearing brush and found beneath it, the remnants of a long forgotten barbed wire fence. And there an acorn had fallen and a tiny oak sapling has risen, or tried to. It was spindly from lack of light and had become embedded and bent in the barbed wire as it grew. He carefully cut the wire away and replanted it in another place, with better soil, better light and more room, and now time will tell if it becomes a mighty oak.

What struck me upon reading was the resilience and insistence of life. The poor conditions had not been able to stop that force, but had caused it to grow into something that was not quite what it was meant to be, and yet it grew.

That is not so different from our lives, and how conditions beyond our control can alter us so that we are not quite what we are meant to be. Dry and withered from lack of water, or yellow and rotting from too much, weak and spindly from always having to stretch to reach the light, or forever marked by the barbs that have become a part of us. And yet, we grow.

I thought of all the people I see in a day, including the one in the mirror, overcoming all manner of adverse conditions that are known only to them. And it reminded me to be merciful. Because we are all doing the very best we can to do the very best we can, from the little sapling that could, to me and you. Warped, but resilient, and hopefully, still recognizable as what we were meant to be.

Cowboy Santa is the first ornament out of the box this year, the first gift ever given me by a patient, many Christmases ago. There was a different one for each of us in the clinic, Santas in various occupations. Given to me by a young patient who holds the unlucky honor of having the worst veins I ever had to contend with, and the patience of a Saint as we stuck him over and over, making him miserable as we tried in vain to make him well.

Cowboy Santa is always a reminder of him and all the patients, and the things they have given me.

A baby outfit smocked with trains for my first child.

A Christmas Cactus that in an act of yearly rebellion, blooms at Thanksgiving.

An enamel box in the shape of a Christmas Stocking. It came with a note of thanks and appreciation, one for each by name, from a man who could measure his time left on earth in days.

A recipe for Salsa from Big Dave, in his own handwriting, and another for Miss Edna’s tea cakes, in shaky cursive like they used to teach.

And food, oh the food. They press cakes and cookies and homemade candy into our hands as though love and gratitude could only be properly conveyed through butter and sugar.

A tray at Christmas from the Mother of a patient who thankfully was healed years ago, and has gone on to live a wonderful life. She turned up with one faithfully every year until she died. I eventually became a Mother that understood that impulse.

The look over the head of a woman from her husband as we admitted her for what would be the last time. His lips saying “Thank you” with his eyes saying all the things those two words could not.

The knowledge that there may be less time than you think and not to squander it.

The understanding that in the end, no matter who you are, it all goes back in the box.

That peace can come and be overwhelming when there is no reason for it. That the veil is very thin around the dying, and they are not alone when they leave us.

That in the end, all you leave and all you take away is who you loved and how you loved them, and who loved you.

That is the best gift they have given me.

Long ago I formed the habit of giving the first hour of the day to God. My Dining Room becomes a Holy Place in those moments. I read, pray, meditate, try to make contact with the Source before I go out into my day. Sometimes I feel more connected than others, but I am faithful to be present, and God is faithful to be present too.

Through the window I see green, the trees, the birds at the feeders or in the birdbath, beginning their day too. The feeder, a gift a gift from my stepfather, sturdy and impervious to squirrels, faded by time but as good as ever. The birdbath, a Mother’s day gift from my husband.

In the window, a stained glass panel given to me by my Mother, the first light peeking through it.

In the corner the Monsterra plant, a gift from my son, once an uncertain chute, now in glorious fullness.

In the Hutch, my wedding dishes, reminders of well wishes from family and friends long gone now. A soup tureen that is all that is left of my Grandmother’s China. I never use it, but I like to know that it’s there.

On the wall, the prints we splurged on when bought our first house, when we had nothing and yet everything.

And on the table where I fed my family for years, dented and scratched by many little hands, sit my Bible, my notebook, my pen, my coffee cup. An unlikely altar. A Holy place.

Here is where I start again. Here is where I decide anew how this day will be, whose this day will be. It is peaceful and quiet, my favorite hour of the day. I sit expectantly in the stillness, surrounded by gifts, surrounded by reminders that I am loved.