An improvised life

Saturday marked nine years since John died. Rosie and I were in California. It was a beautiful and busy day – we woke in the home of devoted cousins on John’s side, and went to sleep in the home of generous cousins on my side. In between, we visited Santa Clara University, where I communed with my late cousin Paula Kirkeby, who died three years ago of metastatic breast cancer. I found Paula’s bench next to the museum where she donated some of her art collection. Paula was an art dealer, a renegade, large in body and spirit, who made me feel beloved and special despite the generation and continent that separated us.  Paula told stories with a particular breathiness, moving from hushed conspiratorial tones to riotous head-thrown-back laughter along with eyerolls, head shakes, hand gesticulations, mock outrage or maybe real outrage. It was always theatrical, always exciting to be in Paula’s orb. Her husband, a tall Dane named Philip who died before Paula did, would greet me with en

Last week during my twice-yearly boob check, my breast oncologist said, “Everything happens for a reason.” I can’t remember what precipitated it. I might have been saying my pericarditis still has me running scared. [1] I might have been saying I’m a little down. I was taken aback.  Are you shitting me? Did she really just say that? It felt dismissive and disrespectful. I don’t find it comforting, and I don’t believe it’s true. Does child sexual abuse have some silver lining? Does murder happen for some pre-ordained reason? It feels like whitewash, denial of another person’s reality, and bullshit. Among other things.  As these thoughts and feelings gathered like a duststorm inside, all I could say was, “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t think my husband died for a reason.”  “It depends on your faith,” Dr. S allowed. She said something like in time I will see the positives that grew from these things that seem hard.  I felt my teeth grind. She doesn’t know me and

I went to my 25 th college reunion last weekend – I reluctantly signed up for one event, leery of the pompous middle-aged people my Harvard classmates had undoubtedly become and convinced I remembered no one and nothing of my undergraduate experience.  But I stayed past midnight Thursday, and stopped in Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Twenty-five years out, life has bruised us all in some way, and we are more secure in who we are. It makes for better conversations than the exchange of resumes I recall from the only other reunion I attended, 5 or 10 years out. I talked to a friend of a friend who is a psychiatrist and whose own partner developed debilitating mental illness six years into their relationship. I talked to a classmate who said his work as a rabbi calls him to help people in the best and worst moments of their lives, and most of the time he can do little but be present and open. I learned another friend had grown up in a magic-show cult.   I learned that 22 of our cla