Aspens and Spruce and Fir

This week has been aspen leaves and spruce and fir and my brother and his young kids. Despite geography and years of distance because of the pandemic, it is so easy to be together. So much like home. And watching our kids together gives me such joy, knowing that they will have one another and that there is a soft place for them to land out there in the universe if ever it is needed.

Breckenridge was one of our favorite places before we had children, when we went out and slept in late, drank and ate too much, and had the time to grow bored of one another. We met here for a romantic hot air balloon ride, skied the resort until our legs burned, and stopped in Frisco for romantic dinners in an Italian restaurant which has since closed. I still remember that you loved their calamari, that it's the main reason we stopped. I ate it on our first few dates despite despising seafood because I didn't have the heart to dissuade you from ordering the dish you salivated over all day.

Now we are a marriage and three children and two moves in and it is all one big, grand adventure that has offered us no promises or guarantees. The only constant has been change and adaptation and resilience. Even as parents, our children wake up from one day to the next as completely different people and the parenting they require feels new and challenging in a matter of minutes.

It is nice to find peace and connection in the small moments, in the puzzles, in the dance parties in the kitchen, and the giggles over ridiculous stories at the kitchen table. We are so infinitely lucky to be together and to have one another.

Today is silence and gratitude and peace. It is home and affection and deep appreciation for the ties we carry despite the obstacles of distance and the weight of a burdened world.

Marcel

We saw Marcel the Shell today and it reminded me of a person I used to be and the way the world used to feel. When Marcel first emerged, the internet was still young and the idea of a talking shell with shoes felt utterly bursting with marvel and delight. It seems that Marcel's life has also transformed into something a little darker over the last two decades, though there are hints of his previous whimsy.

His short films were big when social media was in its infancy, when the world still felt smaller and the news cycle wasn't as immediate and overbearing. You couldn't join Facebook unless you were a college student and you couldn't friend anyone who you didn't actually know in the flesh.

We were all terribly aggrieved by the re-election of George W Bush (I recall looking out the window of our dorm to a burning American flag on election night). If only we could have looked ahead to the election of 2016 and the divisiveness sewn in the country over the next four years, the vitriol and toxicity of the camps to which we swore allegiance.

The variants of the original coronavirus caused a cold, but didn't shut down the world. Millions of people hadn't died and family ties hadn't been irrevocably fractured by the forced distance, vaccine misinformation, and mental health toll of prolonged loneliness and isolation.

No one in my peer groups had contracted terrible or rare diseases and I hadn't attended any funerals. Cancer was something abstract and obscure, not something anyone I actually know battled.

I had absolutely no money, but I also had absolutely no debt that was due in any kind of immediate way (the college loans would roll in shortly after graduation, but they were never an ACTUAL thing in my mind). I had no mortgage or job or retirement, but that allowed me the freedom to go anywhere, do anything, and have faith that I would be no worse off than when I made the leap. Having nothing, it turns out, is a kind of liberation.

We hadn't begun the cycle of marriages and divorces. Children, miscarriages, and infertility were not yet a consideration. 

My relationship with alcohol in no way resembled dependency like it did at the height of the pandemic. I remember having a beer with friends, it opening doors to intimacy and closeness without that sense that something was very much lacking if the evening didn't end with enough drinks that the terrible edge of the world was at least a little blunted, if I couldn't slide seamlessly into sleep immediately when my head hit the pillow (only to wake in a spiral of anxiety several hours later when the buzz dissipated).

The themes in Marcel were life giving, if not laced with some of the worldly melancholy we have all been feeling. He is worried that things will change and his grandmother reassures him they will. He is frightened of the things to come, but those closest to him push him toward that inevitable future. Death is present, but life goes on, and the reverberation/connectedness of everyone is a final rumination as Marcel sits in front of a window, thinking of Nana.

And before her death, she recites a poem I have never read, and it seems like perhaps the most perfect poem for Marcel and, perhaps, for all of us in this very particular and exact moment.

The Broken People

I like the broken people best.

I like the ones who watch the world in terror, hear news of climate change or a mass shooting, and watch with a tremble in their lip and tears in their eyes.

I like the ones who cry at movies about animal friends who leave too soon and are enraptured by stories of sacrifice, devotion, and humanity.

I like the ones who look strangers in the eye and see a reflection of themselves. I like those who understand cruelty as a reflection of the perpetrator's pain and look at destruction and rage with pity because they understand the beauty that can be wrought from jubilation and faith.

Broken people understand that forgiveness and kindness are a path to freedom and love is a gift given without expectation of reciprocation.

Fractured people notice the buds of flowers as they erupt from the soil and hear the bird song at dawn. They handle one another with an infinitely delicate touch because they understand that things break and sometimes they can't be repaired; they live in desperate fear of fracturing others because they can taste their own proximity to that edge, feel the unforgiving wind on their cheeks as they peer into that dark abyss.

Broken people peer into that endless night and they choose courage. They face the onslaught of rain, peering hopefully toward the west, holding one another tightly in search of the first rays of dawn and the promise of rebirth.

Infinite Delight

Skin drying in sunshine, the brush of warmth chasing rivulets of cold water as I close my eyes and lie outstretched on warm sand.

The laughter of those I love huddled in claustrophobic space. 

Truths told hidden by the intimacy of the fire, the baring of the soul absent self consciousness.

A day filled with trees and arduous exertion followed by home and big pillows and mattresses in which the body sinks, sinks, and finally floats.

Coffee. 

Music which becomes love and passion and grief and tells the story of being.

Stories told with animation, lives which inspire my own, and daring deeds in uncertain times that impart courage, grit, resilience, and selflessness.

The embrace of your love and the careful wisdom you impart to my daily barrage of questions.

Snuggling.

The escape of the best stories, the relief in the expression and subsequent consumption of our shared humanity.

My disappearance near the ocean or in the midst of the forest as I remember that I, too, am just water and dust and the falling leaf in fall.

Finding myself here, next to you, eternally lost but ever comforted by the solace of your words, the closeness of your body, and the infinite minuscule moments which craft the very marrow of this life.

Life Support

The woman on the table is gray and bloated. Though she is a year younger than I am, it is impossible to estimate her age as time spent alive on machines has changed her appearance, her skin is puffy and stretched and her abdomen is unnaturally distended. 

Since January, her lungs are kept functional by the ventilator and her blood circulating with the help of another machine operating to relieve and rest her heart. She had heart disease before her pregnancy and, one day after delivery, developed heart failure which was complicated shortly thereafter by respiratory failure which was complicated by clotting and an amputation of her limbs. She has had better days and worse days, but most of the recent ones have been frightening and all of her tests demonstrate her body is failing. She is dying.

Her room is silent, filled only by the whisper of the nurses who plea urgently to one another that the care team should be more assertive with the family; their beloved daughter and wife will not recover and she is nearing her final minutes here. This will be her last ever spring and she will not feel the heat of another summer. She will not hear the crisp leaves beneath her feet in fall or look in awe as the early tulips challenge late snowflakes.

I assess her abdomen organ-by-organ and think quietly of the six-month-old baby for whom she has died. I think of the ecstasy and trials of parenthood and of all the milestones she will miss. I think of the pain of her family and the desperation with which they have clung to care. We always hope for recovery and for the miracles of modern science because love demands we must, but hers is an impossible case for which there is no hope and the only final mercy will be release from a body which is no more than a vessel, kept alive by the rhythmic hums and exhales of modern technology.

She died the Wednesday before Roe versus Wade was struck down by the supreme court.

Pregnancy is the ultimate stressor on the body, the ultimate litmus test of underlying predispositions for a young woman and the decision to terminate a pregnancy in order to preserve the life of the mother is rarely as black and white as any of us would like it to be. Life, death, and the risks inherent in pregnancy do not have a manual or any guarantee of success. 

There will be so many more women like her who will have sacrificed so many years of joy and laughter and life because their case was not abhorrent enough to justify an abortion, not emergent enough for a physician to put his license on the line. But where, exactly, is the cut off in any case? This woman was healthy enough to carry her pregnancy to term but her heart could not endure the influx of a large volume of blood from her uterus after delivery. Her pregnancy damaged her already-damaged heart to the point of failure.

I have so many other thoughts, mostly about how jarring and difficult pregnancy has been, how motherhood should never be forced, how much my body was destroyed by carrying my three very wanted children, and how I don't want any woman to have to do the things I do if she does not desire it with her entire heart. I feel terror at the thought of the gray corpse on the bed and all the others to come as the result of a decision made in zealotry instead of careful consideration; the easiest and simplest narrative winning out over the stunning nuance and delicacy of life, death, and appreciation for the intricacies of even the most basic medical care.

I feel hopeless and sad that more women and physicians who have made this their life's work were not included in the decision. But I also have hope that we are capable of change, that through passionate and devoted action, we can live in a more just society where female autonomy is prized above political gesturing and evangelical christianity holds less sway over those in power. It is so very, very hard to take a step backward.

Perhaps you are also feeling desperate and hopeless and set adrift in a sea of peril, mournful of the past and despondent for the future? Perhaps, then, this is the starting place, the place where we, like those who have come before, find ways to be more kind, caring, and compassionate to one another. There are so many mountains ahead of us and so many hearts that need convincing. I suspect that when you are in the starting place, things always feel insurmountable. But I have hope because you are out there and I am with you. I feel hopeful because hard things are easier together and because there are thousands of women and daughters who depend on our grit, resilience, and never ending pursuit of that more perfect union.