An improvised life

Parenting an 18-year-old right now is like being blindfolded in a leaky lifeboat in confused seas, one rogue wave after another slamming us. What guidance can I offer on the cusp of her graduation from high school? What comfort?  She wants to help, wants to be part of mending this broken world. What can she do that doesn’t feel like an empty gesture, virtue signaling, or preaching to the choir of her “woke” friends? Her questions are mine, only more urgent. She is on the cusp of fledging (– but where? how? I am moving, dismantling the nest. Her summer job at overnight camp is gone, and with it her summer home. Her dishwashing job and babysitting gigs are gone. Graduation will be piped into our dining room through my laptop, the inadequate conduit emblematic of our evanescent plans, our fading certainties. The uncertainty is all-encompassing, too much most days to talk about.) Last night we walked down the street with Rosie’s small homemade Black Lives Matter sign and my small

On Monday I participated in New York City’s annual count of unsheltered homeless individuals. Our team of five, including two West Point students who’d been bused down to volunteer, canvassed some 16 blocks between midnight and 4 a.m., asking everyone we encountered whether they had a place to sleep that night, and if they would like help. A few people laughed – we told people we were supposed to ask everyone, but the implication that we thought they might be homeless was comical to the briefcase-toting executives heading home, and to the jovial beer-drinking group of Eastern European-sounding men who had perhaps just gotten off work.  Between moments of levity were scenes of profound despair. We passed a group of five white people scattered on the sidewalk with their dirty blankets and personal detritus, faces scabby and gaunt, with the prematurely withered air of drug addicts. They told us they were staying there for the night and no, they didn’t want to go to a shelter.  We

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

Alaska swore in a new governor today. I remember the last inauguration day, four years ago. Alder and I returned from our Thanksgiving travels that morning after overnighting in Seattle and catching an early flight to Juneau. It was Monday and I made a half-hearted attempt to tell Alder he had to go to school. He was not having it.  “If you don’t go to school, you have to come with me to the inauguration,” I said, deciding on the spot to go to Centennial Hall for the ceremony. A foot of new snow lay on the ground. “And you have to wear your boots,” I added. Alder was six. He hated boots then and hates them still.  “Fine,” he said.  We unpacked, scrounged among the fridge rot for something to eat, and walked three-quarters of a mile through glittering snow to Centennial Hall, arriving about two minutes early. I scrambled around searching for an empty seat, found one on the center aisle and dove in, pulling Alder onto my lap just as the event began. I later realized I’d j