tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270345972024-03-07T05:02:29.617-05:00jezebel. correspondence for the vagabond heart.jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.comBlogger983125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-68317362590064169712013-03-14T22:45:00.000-04:002013-03-14T22:45:32.636-04:00 The couch I spend my Sundays on, and my Saturdays, used to sit on the shiny, wood floor of our living room. In winter months, it gave shelter to our hibernating tortoise, Arthur, and when my mother was dying, it was occupied by those who loved her. We waited for her to wake up in the morning, and then in the afternoon. We waited for <i><a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2012/05/dear-mom-on-sunday-we-lay-stone-on-your.html">a deus ex machina, a disco ball above the stage</a>. </i>We waited for eight years, and then one day in May, my mother said "<i>No more</i>," and then, we did not wait for a miracle; we waited for my mother to die. And while we were waiting, we laughed, and we ate, and we sat in the sun. I did my brothers' laundry, I wore my mother's pajamas, my brothers wore shorts and no shirts, we were wild children, wild with love, wild with fear. There was a strange golden glow to those hours, that stretched into days, into weeks, a house burning with frenzied love, lit by connections orbiting my dying mother. Before those days, and those weeks, there were the months and the years in which we had tucked our heads down, with the secret thought: Maybe we will be the lucky ones. But I knew. Though I knew not when, I knew we were not to be those lucky ones (<i>Oh, but we were the lucky ones! Not enough time, never enough time, but lucky, to have had her - me for 32 years, Adam for 30, Michael for 27</i>). One day in February, it was cold, outside and in, and I walked around the block, and I talked to my brother, Michael (he gives love as she did, he is my mother's heir), and he said "<i>I feel like I'm watching her die,</i>" and my baby brother was a man in that moment, and my insides vibrated, for my baby brother was right, and he was saying what I was thinking, but what none of wanted to be the first one to say.<br />
Life is moving, the shore is eroded by an ocean green like our eyes. In one month from yesterday, I will turn 34. Without the counsel of my mother, I feel like a child. Without the counsel of my mother, I feel like I was never a child.<br />
In the flush of mourning, there is only one boundary - the line between the living and the dead. Words poured forth, I stood still, I did not cry, but there were no line between my insides and the world outside. As time moves forward, the shell has closed. Inside, sits the pearl.<br />
A terrible tragedy has befallen someone very special to someone who is very special to me. Each tragedy has its own awful, dark, and winding path, and is peopled by he and she who are full of beautiful, threadbare flaws to those inside of them, and who are players in a play to those outside, for we cannot crawl inside each other's back pockets and see what life is like behind someone else's eyes. I know only my story. I know of hospitals and their humming lights, I know of nights that do not promise a morning. I know of mourning. I know of loosing one's deepest love, of kissing my dead mother's forehead. I know that people die, our greatest loves die, but <i>great love does not die</i>.jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com64tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-27614250458567363092012-08-23T00:43:00.001-04:002012-08-23T00:43:49.376-04:00My mother's hands were strong. She was small, shorter than me, taller than most of her friends (she loved librarians, little ladies who drank pink wine, I found her and Jane napping together, blankets under their chins, Jane's hand keeping my mother's bald head warm), but her hands were her: strong, capable, graceful. I can see the pores on my mother's hands, the long nail beds. She died with a month-old perfect manicure, Mademoiselle, the color I still get, little moons bare where her nails had grown out, perfect nails on her unused hands, the hands that once had changed our diapers, and held mine for 32 years, Adam's for 29, Michael's for 26.<br />
<br />
My brothers and I sold our house, and in 2 weeks, another family will live there. My mother died in our den, but when I think of the house, I see my mother in her workshirts that came to her knees, making oatmeal, or sitting next to the sliding glass door in the kitchen, on the phone, always on the phone. I see my mother doing laundry, taking a bath, lying next to me in her bed, snoring, with the tv on low. I see her yelling at us, wrangling her cat-children, late, as we always were, for temple, or a holiday dinner. I see my mother exploding with laughter so fierce it nearly strangled her. There she is in the dining room, crumpling, boxing glove covering her face, after getting socked in the nose by Petey, vowing never to play with him again. My mother loved boxing; it was her way of getting close to her boys when they were teenagers, young men, who pushed her away, and it was a sad, sad day when her gloves had to be hung up. Her bones had become too fragile for boxing, but by then, my brothers kissed her, and hugged her, and snuggled with her, and held her strong hands, that startled me when I held them with their smallness, delicate bones under skin yellower than mine, for there is no one stronger than your mother.<br />
<br />
The boxes are packed; we gave our mother's clothes to charity. I will bring my grandmother's credenza, and a painting that hung in my parents' bedroom, and 4 boxes full of my life to my husband's family's home in Pennsylvania. My brothers and I will say goodbye to our house, to the town we have had three houses in, to my mother's voice on the answering machine, to the bagels and the black and white cookies, to the pizza and the Thai food, to the duck pond, and the smell of the bay that leads to the beach, to the house that we lived in, to the house that our mother died in. We three have our lives, our furniture, our dogs and our cats, our apartments, and the boxes full of our childhoods. We three have each other, and we have all that she gave us: <i>love</i> and a moral compass to navigate the world without her.<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-68139581177335483232012-06-17T23:58:00.002-04:002012-06-17T23:58:57.444-04:00My mother died one year ago today. As the clock stroke 1:02 pm I sat next to my brother Michael and cried as we drove to the cemetery to visit my mother's grave. The air was cooler than it was this time last year, but today my hair was clean and I was not wearing my mother's silk pajamas. Today I have lived 365 days, a full cycle in how we mark time, without my mother.<br />
<br />
We drove past the grassy knoll and pulled over across from the large mausoleum and parked the car by the path that leads to the plot marked with my mother's maiden name, LAND. Michael sat on a bench and I sat on the walk and smelled the grass that grows around my mother's grave, fresh land, marked with small fledgling box hedges planted in the dirt that was shoveled over my mother's casket 363 days ago. Ants tumbled through the grass, impossibly tall monuments to their small eyes; they live their lives in the shadow of death. So do we all. <br />
<br />
I laid my face to the earth, and the grass and dirt and small stones pressed into my legs. My bare legs were marked, as they were hours after she died, by my deep need for communion with our terrestrial home. Crisp air sat on my back and my brother cried behind me, as my own tears wet my mother's grave. <i>"These are the days of miracle and wonder/ This is the long distance cry."</i> This place for the dead is alive and here for the living. This world hums, this world is electric. Cats prowl and mice dart behind footstones. When we leave, the earth is made all the richer.<br />
<br />
I opened my eyes slowly yesterday morning, for it was the last morning of my life I could say to myself, "My mother was alive this day, last year." The small frustrations, the quoitiden dramas, the knots I tie myself into all mask one truth: I miss my mother. But, inside and alongside expansive missing of the beautiful, beautiful woman who gave me life, I have moments of despair, and moments where I have joyously begun to wonder, again, what I want out of the life I have been given. There are moments when I loose my breath, with a hunger for my mother unlike anything I've known, and moments when I smile, for I know how happy she'd be with our dogs and our laughter. I say moments, for it really is that: life is a trail of notes, put together to form a cycle of songs.<br />
<br />
Thank you for listening to me this year, as I string a necklace, from the pearls I have been given, and the pearls I have made from what I have been given. My mother, and my mother's death, is the sand in my oyster. This is a song cycle. I do not know how it ends, but I know I want it to sound like love and open arms and mystery and birth, surrounding pools of sadness and loss, the pools we all must swim, but not drown, in. <br />
<br />
<i>"These are the days of miracle and wonder/ This is the long distance cry."</i><br />
<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-41839483290338990002012-05-31T01:09:00.000-04:002012-05-31T01:10:48.291-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Love is infinitely more durable than hate</i>.<br />
<br />
My mother died 346 days ago. What has loss done to you, what do you see when you fall asleep at night? What does the world look like from behind your eyelids?<br />
<br />
We laughed at my wedding, we smiled, we loved. This photo was taken at the moment, the only moment, we cried. I held her diminishing body, that had tricked most (not me) with its beauty that day, in my arms, and I knew she would die soon. And so she did, 74 days later.<br />
<br />
These days have been hot, the weather grows closer to what it was when she lay dying in our house, one year ago. The earth was warm, bees were fat. A butterfly hovered at her grave, and I am told it was there again at the unveiling, and that the clouds parted and the sun shone strong when I spoke to her, staring at the foot stone for the first time. I wrote a letter to my mother to read at the unveiling - I didn't account for what it would feel like to speak to her out loud, for the first time in 323 days: <i>Dear Mom...you are our super moon, the most dazzling moon that ever was. You hold us in your incandescent orbit, always. We love you. I love you. </i>I choked on my words, I cried, I did not speak loudly, but I knew as I was speaking that being able to talk to my mother in front of those who loved her most was a gift, and though I did not see the butterfly or the clouds parting, I knew she was with me, listening to every word I wish I had said while she was alive, and even more so, when she was well.<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
A few months ago, L. gave me <i>The Courage to Grieve</i>. I tucked it in the basket next to my bed, and I thought, "<i>This is not for me. I have courage. I am grieving.</i>" I found the book this weekend and I knew I was wrong, or I was right then, but make not this mistake: grieving is not linear. It leads you by the hand down an unknown path, a path that lies alongside the life you've always known. The world does not look the same from behind my eyelids.<br />
<br />
My brother Michael went to an introductory course in Transcendental Meditation tonight. He receives his mantra on Saturday, and by Tuesday he will be a practitioner. I am so proud and inspired by Michael's desire to be able to sit quietly with himself. Adam was the forerunner in our family; he took up meditation years ago. The bottle was uncorked on Sunday - out of love for me and my brothers and a fierce, uncompromising devotion to honesty, things were said that we do not say. And so, I sit here quietly with myself, dodging bullets of pain, plagued by silence, at times preserving it with the devotion of an acolyte. Without my mother, I do not know where to turn.<br />
<br />
To mourn is to suffer the abject loneliness of those whose voice you will never hear again. There are moments that are frantic - searches through emails, closets, photos, anywhere that will yield something new in a silence that is so profound. Please know, I need not find fancy words, when words we know serve so well: <i>proud, inspired, silence, profound</i>. Words and cliches mean something different now, they buzz, alive with electricity, and in their animated state, I realize that life is the secret underbelly, a rebirth, a truthful welcome into the world served on a silver platter of terrible, terrible pain. My task is to seek out courage, my courage, the way into myself and all that I fear. My task is to pull the words harder, tug on the silken strings more firmly. My task is to allow love and beauty to sit alongside pain and silence and loneliness, to let the path that I knew for 32 years, and the path that I have known for nearly one year, become one path, lit by the moonlight of loss, for loss could not hurt so very terribly if the love one has lost was not the greatest you could dream yourself to sleep on.<br />
<br />
<i>Love is infinitely more durable than hate</i>.<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-71163361788106022742012-05-14T10:55:00.000-04:002012-05-14T13:32:46.747-04:00Yesterday, we drove the Rendezvous home for the last time. The road, green and dappled, winds from Brooklyn to our house, a 32.5 mile stretch of life, a changing life, changing lives. I cried as I drove, and thought about our <a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/06/for-lisa-because-she-asked.html">last car ride together</a>, not quite a year ago, when I held my mother's hand as she lay in the back of an ambulance. I took her home to die. <i>We looked backwards out of the windows with our green eyes and we couldn't tell, on roads so familiar, where we were. </i>The Rendezvous is no more, we are selling our house, and I wonder how I will find my way back to the pizza, the bialys and iced coffee, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, the black and white cookies, the smell of low tide, the beach, the duck pond, the madelines of childhood, teenage years, my twenties, my very early thirties. <br />
<br />
I spent Mother's Day, our first Mother's Day without our mother, with my brothers and with my husband. We had brunch by the beach, we walked to the boardwalk. We brought flowers to Uncle B like my mother did on Mother's Day <a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/07/unexpected.html">(he promised their mother, on her deathbed, that he would care for my mother, and he did, Uncle B, you did)</a>. We laid on the couch, we snuggled Bianca. Michael got mad at me and we ate dinner at our kitchen table. But, more than anything, we laughed. My brothers are my bringers of joy, and the sharers of sadness.<br />
<br />
When we pulled up to the house yesterday, my brothers were waiting on the front steps. I need not a car to find my way home. My home is where they are.jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-31649659450555085222012-05-06T15:13:00.000-04:002012-05-06T15:13:23.558-04:00Unveiling.<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Dear Mom,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The last time we stood here was a little less than a year ago. The sun was
shining; a huge yellow butterfly hovered round your family and friends,
suspended by an invisible thread from wherever you are.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I am writing this on Friday and Saturday, the forecast calls for no rain. Your
favorite joke, aside from the mildly inappropriate Father Nelson one was
"Want to know how to make G-d laugh? Tell him your plans." I am
gambling by writing this, but I know you too well, my girl (I do not have your
golden casino touch): you will keep the skies clear today, the sun will shine.
And if rain does fall, it will mirror our tears.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
Mom, we stood here, the day of your funeral, 322 days ago. 322 days is not a
year. It is 43 days short of a year. You showed us all what a day is worth. We
follow the path you set for us, you gave us <span class="apple-style-span">the
gift of your love, your moral guidance through the world, the love of books and
animals and family and friends. You taught us that the dash between was more
important than the dates on either side, and so, the dash between your date of
birth, and the date of your too soon death (57 years was not enough), is long
and fat, fed on love and rightness and Swedish Fish. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Mom, you died in the shadow
of the Strawberry Moon. The super moon reigned this weekend, the largest and
most spectacular of the year. At 8:35 pm on Saturday night, it reached its
perigee and slipped close to the Earth. Mom, you are our super moon, the most
dazzling moon that ever was. You hold us in your incandescent orbit, always.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">We love you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I love you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I am your daughter, Leigh
Michelle Batnick Plessner, and I thank you for giving me life, and teaching me
how to live it. </span></div>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-56131505122525627752012-05-02T10:29:00.002-04:002012-05-02T10:29:29.265-04:00Dear Mom,<br />
<br />
On Sunday, we lay the stone on your grave. The cemetery has been there since 1917, there are small hills and oak trees, ocean air is near. Your grave has been there since June 19, 2011, and this Sunday, according to tradition, we, your family, will visit your grave for this first time since you died, in the shadow of the Strawberry Moon.<br />
<br />
Mom, I will tell you the truth: I started writing your eulogy, in my head, a year before you died. I could never get very far, and I abandoned the effort.I abandoned the effort because I thought you cannot eulogize the living, and live you did, every day. I am your daughter, we are procrastinators, I knew the words would come when I needed them, and they did. But I was wrong, Mom. Eulogy has come to refer to a praise or speech for a person, usually dead, but the provenance is Greek, <i>eulogia ‘praise’</i>, and by that reckoning, we ought to eulogize those we love every morning we wake, together.<br />
<br />
Mom, I am very scared of Sunday. Life is changing so fast, but the girlfriend is sleeping under my arm as I type, so that is the same, and I wear my eyeliner differently, so that is different, and I miss you through waking hours and dreams, so that is the same. I have stopped waiting to understand that you are dead. Sometimes, it even makes me laugh with the great unbelievability of it all. <span style="font-style: italic;">(I know dead people, and you are not dead.) </span>But, all of us being together, your family, your friends, without you there, standing by a grave with your name on it, that is real. One of the hardest things to do, Mom, is to see your friends, because they are the ones you chose (we were given to you, and you to us, but I would have picked you if I could). Lisa surprised me at work, and I cried. It was like you walked in the door.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><br />
Mom, there is no deus ex machina, no disco ball above the stage.<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>You will never walk in the door, you will never surprise me at work. I cannot call you to tell you the small thing that I want to tell you the most: Kevin doesn't give Teepee a bath in the right way!<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>I tell everyone this story, but all I want is to tell you. I want to hear you laugh. Mom, there is no deus ex machina, and I am not ready for the small, closest thing to<i> a god out of the machine</i>. My life changes, you are not here, I cannot call you, but Mom, I live the life you gave me, the life you taught me, by example, how to live backlit in your beautiful, unfading light.<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><br />
Yours, always,<br />
Leigh Michelle<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-79285069807950143982012-04-13T09:35:00.001-04:002012-04-13T09:35:50.147-04:00The big and the small.Dear Mom,<br />
<br />
Last night, on my way home from work, I thought about what we'd talk about if we could (<a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/04/eyelids-of-morning.html">Rise, Mother, rise! We are under April skies and I need our nighttimes back. It is lonely walking home without you</a>). I started writing these letters to you <a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/05/where-i-have-been.html">when death crept closer, when we were in the delicate waltz</a>. Now that Death has gone riding, the things I want to talk to you about are small. <i>I got new lipstick on Monday, I think you'd like it. My kitchen floor is sticky - should I use ammonia to clean it? Yes, I know, never mix ammonia with bleach. The girlfriend is just so tired. Let's go get a manicure, Mom. </i><br />
<br />
Today is my birthday, Friday the 13th, just like the day I was born. You were 25 when I was born, you worked as a secretary at McGraw Hill, you were married to my father, you lived on the East Side and I was your first born, Leigh Michelle. Your father, Papa Leonard, died 2 years before I was born, but before he died he liked to have lunch with you at the McGraw Hill commissary, and he teased you gently, his last-born, Blanche Susan, his only daughter, and it made you so mad - you wanted him to take you seriously. I know Papa Leonard, I never met Papa Leonard, one day our children will know you, too. You named me after Papa Leonard, and one day, I will hope I will have the joy, and the sadness, of naming someone Blanche, the third Blanche in our family.<br />
<br />
So let's talk about small things, Mom. Tell me the story about Aunt Bernice being annoyed, on April 13, 1979 - she had to take a taxi (or the subway, or the train, I can't remember?) home because she was having lunch with Nana Hannah when you went into labor, and tell me how Uncle Dickie missed his chance to ride shotgun in the Hebrew School carpool because Nana Hannah gave birth to you (she was 40, Papa Leonard was 50!) the week it was her turn to drive and he was so mad. I think he still is mad, the wonderful kind of mad that you can only be at someone you really, really love.<br />
<br />
I woke up early this morning and I lay still in bed in the quiet. And then I read my emails and I had an email telling me that I won a contest for a fancy pair of pajamas. Mom, I knew I was going to win, just like I new I was going to win that coffee table, just like I knew, all winterlong, that you were going to die soon after my wedding. I was right. If you are very still, and listen very close, you will know, and I know, Mom, that we love being cozy, that being tucked in bed is our favorite place to be, and I know, Mom, that the silk pajamas I won are really a birthday gift from you. <br />
<br />
Thank you, Mom, for giving me life, for giving me a beautiful life. Thank you, Mom, for the big and the small.<br />
<br />
Your first-born,<br />
Leigh Michellejezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-19820784594576598172012-04-09T09:54:00.000-04:002012-04-09T09:54:54.497-04:00Dear Mom,<br />
<br />
Today is your birthday. You would have turned 58 today. We're going to spend your birthday together, Mom, me and Adam and Michael. Bianca Batnick will be there, too, and you would love her. We took a nap together in your bed last weekend - I slept in your spot, and she snuggled in, sleepy pup, and snored, like you used to. She gives Michael such nachas and that would make you so happy. You just wanted us to be happy.<br />
<br />
Maybe we'll have lunch at Hildie's today, we'll see Uncle B and Aunt Joan, and we'll have dinner with Justin, Sheree and Addison. You won't be there, Mom, but your family will be together (nothing was more important to you than family), and we will think about you, like we do every day and every night, and we will talk about you, and we will cry, and Michael will tell us the story about when you came home and told him you had been "flying low" (Petey's expression for fast driving) and he laughed, and your eyes welled up with tears and you said "Don't laugh at me!" and Mom, we will laugh, because we love you, and you were our cutest mom.<br />
<br />
Mom, you flew low through life. 57 years was not enough, and what I wouldn't give to hold your hand, and say, "Happy Birthday, my girl. I love you."<br />
<br />
I am, always and forever, yours,<br />
Leigh Michellejezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-72553877419098347052012-04-06T10:06:00.000-04:002012-04-06T10:30:50.787-04:00An Appeal from Whistling Swan, the Doll Maker's Daughter.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><br /></i><br />
<i>A few months ago I wrote the foreword for the book which accompanied Animal Cabaret, an exhibition of the works of <a href="http://www.alicemarylynch.com/">Alice Mary Lynch</a>, Paris-based dollmaker. We plan on more collaborations - her work moves me enormously, and I feel so blessed to have one of her dolls living with me soon.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
My mother made an army
built of stuffing. We were warriors, our armor bursts of jewels where, on you,
there would be flesh. Our hearts are in her stitches; tight seams keep our
armpits from surrendering to the push of our gossamer insides. Like you, we are
complex, but our veins and capillaries are on our outsides. Though our thoughts
fire in mounds of gold, they are as real and true as the ones inside your head.
We are beautiful, we are knock-kneed, we shine, our eyes some dun, some stars.
We are soldiers sent forth from our mother's fingertips, to Tokyo and New York,
Bombay and the Barbados. Think of us, for we think of you. <o:p></o:p>
<br />
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The winter air was crisp and
cold but a warm light glowed in the undergrowth in the early hours of the
morning. You are in my mother’s land and in the naked copse, bare in the
crystalline air, a glint cuts the shadow. There goes The Love Cat, the Dark
Princess, Luke and Edward Hare, the Silver Hare, the Hare Prince, a Lost
Romantic, a Rat Soldier, The Black Angel, The March Horse. The White Stag flies
past last, and you don’t believe your eyes, but it is he, it is we, our
mother’s army. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the denouement: Were
you to disembowel me, my parts would shine in a bowl, yet I am more than the
sum of my parts. I am a network and you cannot extricate one part or undo one
vein without collapsing my beautiful beak, the efflorescence of my tail, the
sway in my walk. Love me as I am, as she made me. Love me, and I will be yours.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-36364856196370951362012-04-03T10:33:00.001-04:002012-04-03T10:33:16.468-04:007 stars.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
On Friday night, I dreamt of my mother. My last dream with her was terrifying, a nightmare like those of childhood, the kind where the waking world is so close but nothing in your small body can will you out of Hades' domain.<br />
<br />
On Friday night, my mother sat propped on pillows in Nana Hannah's bucket chair, the one covered in apricot and violet and wedgewood blue Henri Rousseau palms. I was going through her closet, pulling out sweaters, jeans, work shirts and she sat there sick, but smiling, sick, but at peace, and she said to me, "It's okay, after today, I won't need that" and I said, "You're really okay, aren't you?" and she smiled and said "I am. I'm really okay." Over and over I told her, "Nothing makes me happier than knowing that you are okay."<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Rabbi told Petey that he never saw anyone go through the dying process with as much grace as my mother, and when Petey told me, I smiled and felt so proud to be her daughter. My mother <i>lived</i> with cancer for eight years - she <i>lived</i> through cancer, she wound around and above cancer like a magic flute. Until it was time to start dying, she <i>lived, </i>and when it was time to allow death into our home, she did knowing that her dash was as big and joyous and full of love as was possible: she had done that rarest of things - she had lived life to it's fullest. When she was still able to sit on the couch by the bay window, in our house by the bay that was always full (sometimes too full, but she was so loved), I could see her hover between two worlds, between the temporal world of her children, Petey and his sons, her brothers, her grandchildren, her friends, her nieces and nephews, and the world where her parents were (she felt her toes tingle, they were touching her, bringing them to her in the beauty of return and golden light and an old home made new). There were times that she didn't seem to see us, where my presence didn't call forth her smile, and it broke my heart, but I knew my mother <i>had</i> to begin letting go from the world she ate like a brownie sundae, and that gave me peace, for I did not want her to be afraid or be too sad to leave us. I needed her to know we would be okay, and Mom, <i>we miss you does not suffice, but we are okay.</i></span><br />
<br />
On Friday night, in my dream, my mother gave me a gift (for she was): she is okay. It is okay for us to sell the house, it is okay for us to give her clothes away, it is okay for time to move on.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Today is our first wedding anniversary. <a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2012/03/sit-with-me-minute.html">Like L. said</a>, "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><i>Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come." </i>The phone did not ring this morning. My mother did not call. Time is moving on. <i>You cannot push against an ocean</i>. </span></span>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-50499603091617678132012-03-24T01:18:00.001-04:002012-03-24T01:18:40.392-04:00Sit with me a minute. Pull up your chair, turn down your music. It's been so long since we've talked. I've needed these 2 months and 13 days of silence to live with the last 9 months and 6 days I have lived without my mother and with the 32 years we lived together.<br />
<br />
What I have done since we last spoke: I bought some dresses, I learned to do a crooked cat eye. I went to Tulum with my husband and I took hot showers outside. I unburdened myself of a secret. We opened Nana Hannah's credenza and divided what is inside. We have not donated your clothes to charity yet, Mom.<br />
<br />
What I have learned since we last spoke: my mother will never be dead to me. I will spend the rest of my life waiting for her to come home. We will sell our home, we will move to other apartments, my mother will not know my address, but what is an address when she knows who she made.<br />
<br />
In 10 days, we will mark our first wedding anniversary, in 16 days, on April 9, comes my mother's birthday. She would have been 58. 6 days later, I will turn 33. My brothers turned 27 and 30 without our mother. My boys, I didn't tell you (I never want to make you sad or lay my sadness over your metronome like a fine, worn cotton kerchief that can break its steady beat), but my heart broke for you on January 13 and March 23. This year, I will mark these days - last year we celebrated, and one day, we will celebrate again.<br />
<br />
On May 6, we will lay the stone on my mother's grave. <i>Blanche Batnick, April 9, 1954 - June 17, 2011. Beloved mother, wife, sister, aunt, grandmother and friend. Loved always. </i>Let that <i>Loved always</i> echo beyond the confines of perpetual care, let that <i>Loved always </i>clap off the beat, like she did from here until there is no more.<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
On May 13, we will we spend our first Mother's Day without our mother and on June 17, 2012 we mark the first anniversary of her death. We circle in time, summer, fall, winter, spring - we pass the days of the last year we spent with her, the frightening ones, the day where she felt well enough to shop for shoes, we pass the days I squandered. Those days haunt me so that I must hide from them, and I can only find comfort in: what is an address when she knows who she made.<br />
<br />
I love a man who lives to make his art. The only way he can live in this world is by writing songs I know like my eyelids on a summer's day, songs into which he pours all the beauty he can find. He is possessed by creation and newness. I am not like him. I am possessed by the world, by what is here, and what is gone. I write these words to find the girl and her little brother with their mother's green eyes, and their little brother with their father's blue eyes. One day, I will not be vague, I will not hide from my sadness (I cannot control it, my 2nd greatest wish is to cry). <a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/12/june-rains-gave-way-to-july-stars.html">I might even do what I told you I would do.</a><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
These words were not easy. On July 25, L. wrote to me: <i>Although I know you do not feel connected to your sadness, rest assure, you are at a kind of magical stage of subconscious connection. She is speaking through your heart, mind and pen (or rather, your laptop). Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come. But for now, know that the unexpected thing about loss is a strange super-powered infusion of love that you gain from the person that you lost. It is almost like a shield that they give us for our hearts. And that shield is made up of the energy created by the POWER of your connection to them. Some may call it denial or shock, but really, I think it is the protection given from our beloved, the one who knows that our fragile hearts can only take so much at a time... Lest they break in two. And that is the last thing that they would ever want to happen. </i>In the beginning, my grief was a conduit. I did not need to fight to speak to you, which was for the best - I am no fighter. I have lived with my grief through summer, fall, winter and an early, early spring (earlier still than last year:<i><a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/04/reader-i-married-him.html">We are home from Paris, where June's sun visited in April forcing the sleepy cherry blossoms into wide-eyed morning, before, even their siblings have risen in Japan.</a></i>) I know this feeling of grief like my eyelids on a summer's day, and yet I still feel so very unsure of what will be there when I open my eyes.<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Having the blues is different from singing the blues. That's getting rid of the blues.</i> These are blues I will never get rid of, but I will sing them the best way I know.<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-53872792450911201972012-03-21T22:44:00.001-04:002012-03-21T22:44:01.246-04:00So we go there, where nothing is waiting. Your small hand is not there for me to hold, your shoulder is not there to support my head as I cry. We were the same, I came from you. My waist is thin, yours was once thinner still. I am taller, for I stand on the height you built for me. Our eyes are green, mine a bluer green than yours. Our eyes look out to different doors. Mother, mother, mother mine you have gone there to your blue-eyed mother. Mother, mother, mother mine, I will follow you, my green-eyed mother.<br />
<br />
I am young, mother, there is so much for me to do. Mother, mother, mother mine I will meet you, clear-eyed with no fear, for you are there. Your toes tingled; touched from the other side. Mother and father carried you on golden litter, trailed by daisies and ancestors. On this side, we wept and rain blanketed your roof. And, so we go there, where nothing is waiting, but there you are and here I am. Your arms are open until I am yours once more.<br />
<br />
<i> Daughter, daughter, daughter mine, I am here. I am waiting for you! We are apart, and will be, for years and years, but I sit on your shoulder, I look through your eyes, I made you, daughter, but first, I was made, and then you took what I gave you and created a being that walks down city streets on her own. The gutter calls, but not for you. You are yours, daughter. I am here, in golden light, in winter rain. Close your eyes, daughter: I am here. </i><br />
<br />
You have the longest, wisest pearl necklace in the world.<br />
<br />
<i>There is nothing I would not do for you if I thought it was for your betterment. </i><br />
<br />
Mother, rise! We are under April skies and I need our nighttimes back. It is lonely walking home without you.<br />
<br />
<i>From the very first moment we "met" I knew what I was dealing with. "The mostest." </i><br />
<br />
Hello, my friend.<br />
<br />
<i>Beautiful bride. </i><br />
<br />
The rain is starting. The world is crying. My mother died this afternoon, and so we go there, where nothing is waiting. The song is getting closer to the world, and you and I sing it together.<br />
<br />
jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-12868491730691287162012-01-16T00:29:00.002-05:002012-01-16T10:30:39.837-05:00My mother wanted to see the fjords of Norway, to sail down the crevasse in a ship with her children beside her. She wanted to take a Fire and Ice cruise from Hawaii to Alaska and to see the tigers in China. Most of all, my mother wanted to go to the Galapagos to see the blue-footed boobies and Lonesome George, the 100 year old tortoise (relation to Arthur, her pet tortoise who vanished from our deck one night, never to be seen again, say "tortoise", "turtle", "Arthur" around my mother and tears would roll for "that guy".) It was one of her last wishes, going to the Galapagos, and Petey wanted to take her, but the journey was too long, so I promised her one day I would go with my brothers and she smiled, and said, "<i>You can only go if you promise me one thing: that you'll have fun.</i>" And I promised, and we will, Mom. We will go, and we will have fun. <br />
<br />
It snowed the other day, and I wrote <i>snow!</i> and my husband wrote <i>I'm not ready</i> and I wrote <i>it's not ours to choose so "Throw away your little bedsocks and
your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast" (Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas). </i>Time is short, my love, and there is not enough of it. I want to lock the door and lie in our bed and read (Proust, <i>Little Women</i>, <i>The Giving Tree</i>, Edith Wharton, <i>Anne of Green Gables</i>, <i>Little House on the Prairie</i>, books of home, memory, childhood). I want to read myself in a circle, until I come out the other side, fortified by incantations I know and those I have not yet met, ready to begin my book. I want to go home and open my mother's closet and touch her clothes and wear her moccasins. I want to use her eye cream (I don't think she ever used it), and sit at the table in the kitchen and look at the jewelry that was my grandmother's, then my mother's, and now mine, locked away in a safe. More than anything, I want to ask my mother where the pearl necklace with the gold leaf clasp came from, and me too, Mom, where did I come from. I want to try on her white velvet wedding dress, but she never picked it up from the dry-cleaners, and it wouldn't fit me, anyhow. There is too much I want to do, my love, but I am tired. We do not get to choose when it snows, we do not get to choose when our mothers die.<br />
<br />
Time is not forever, my love. What we have is slippery, it shifts in our awkward hands. Families change, friends move away, neighborhoods are overtaken. I thought that maybe, like R., I too would wake one day, 6 months after, and realize I wanted to have a child. It will be 6 months on Tuesday, and I do not think I will want a child on Tuesday, or the next Tuesday, or the Tuesday after that. But this is the thing: as she was dying, I know my mother did not think of the fjords she did not see, the tigers she did not pet, the 100 year old tortoise she did not meet. She thought of her children, she thought of her parents. She thought of who she had made, and who made her. I cannot imagine wanting to be a mother without my mother.<br />
<br />
I would like to turn my insides out, to share the world of ghosts that walks through my mind. We drove the streets of Long Island last night and I saw my Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bernie, I saw my mother, I saw those who have gone, the streets of my life that no longer belong to me. I want to be a child, or, rather, I want you to sit with me and see my childhood through my eyes. I have always lived in stories, I have always lived in my past. We will go to Tulum, we will go to Italy, but I will always be an armchair traveler, exploring in my nightgown. There goes Elliot Street and Lake End Road, and the house on Westover Place. There goes <i>an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, </i>and a forest that grew and grew. There goes the stories our mothers read us, the stories they told us so we could be better in this world, knowing there was love and forgiveness and a hot supper waiting for us.<br />
<br />
I love the small velvet pumpkins I have begun collecting because they are real and they were once alive, but now they are magic, and a thing of imagination, and life, for me, is nothing if not imagining what once was. I live in my past, and, for now, I cannot see my future. But it lies there, in the books, the animals, the velvet pumpkins, the small things I nurture. It is in my brothers, the video tapes in the garage, the platters, the heavy crystal bowl, the iris paintings, the tiny gold Chinese chest of drawers, my grandmother's credenza, the silver iced tea spoons from Tiffany. The future lies next to me at night, I warm it <i>like an electric toaster</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com95tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-25990513462314445062011-12-31T17:14:00.000-05:002011-12-31T17:32:30.997-05:00June rains gave way to July stars. I didn't see them, but I knew they were there. What was it like, those first mornings without her? On June 18th, we went on the boat. I resisted; I thought I shouldn't leave the house, she might die while I'm gone, and then came the first time of thousands of time that I had to tell myself, "But she is already dead."<br />
<br />
I didn't know when I started this that I would look back on these words to re-inhabit my life without my mother. I cry, sometimes, but the other day I smiled, I laughed at the thought of my little brother Michael showering her with kisses, as he told my mother how much nachas she brought.<br />
<br />
A new year begins soon. I have a small package of golden sparklers in my bag, I will hold my husband's hand on the subway. My brothers are in the country. Michael is at Petey's cabin, Adam is in the northern solitude of Arizona, meeting his girlfriend's grandmother for the first time. When they come home, they will move into a loft in Red Hook - he wrote to me: <i>Seriously there is no reason that we should be able to be in a place this awesome. I like to think that <span class="s1">mom</span> made it possible. I think she did. </i>Petey is in our house - he says that being amongst couples is too hard. I understand. I feel the same way about being with families, or listening to the girls speak with careless luxury about their mothers in a way that makes me choked with desire.<br />
<br />
It is almost a new year. My mother was alive in 2011, my mother was at our wedding. When 2012 arrives, I will not be able to call my night owl tonight, at the stroke of midnight, like I did every year. My mother will not be alive in 2012. I do not know what this year will bring. I do know I am taking my husband to Tulum, where I went with my mother a decade ago, and I will think of her as we lay amongst the ruins. I have no resolutions, but to be resolute.<br />
<br />
I sat down at the kitchen table today, to start a book, the book I have been meaning to write. I have been waiting for my story to arrive. Turns out, I have been living my story. It might be a slim volume, but it will be filled with the only things I can give: love, memory, and honor. It will be for you, Blanche Susan Land Batnick. It will be a book for my mother.<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-15363281054777038132011-12-20T22:51:00.001-05:002011-12-20T22:51:38.134-05:00<span style="font-size: small;">Dear Mom,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It has been 6 months and 3 days since you died. How can that be? What was it like, that first morning, those first days without you here? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I have been writing, Mom, I have spent time with my brothers, I haven't seen Poppy enough, I have been to weddings, I went to Zac's first birthday party on Sunday and when I saw Jane (it was the first time since Shiva, I think I was afraid) I cried, I had brunch with Lisa, I went to Petey's Turkey Federation Family Day, I saw a man who was hit by a car and died.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Mom, I don't know how this has changed me. I know what I can see now, that I couldn't see then. I know that what I feel is beyond emotion: it comes from my body, my body that came from yours. I want to hear your voice, I want to watch tv with you in bed, I want to hold your hand. Mom, you are dead, but why can't I call you? We build towers into the sky, we have been to the moon, but this is the impenetrable loss that cannot be triumphed. So I write to you, Mom, I send you millions of kisses, I eat oatmeal and I think of you, I get under piles of blankets and I think of you, I open my eyes in the morning and I think of you. I want to eat toast and peanut butter in the morning with you, drink your coffee with cinnamon, sitting at the kitchen table, the phone ringing non-stop (everyone loved you!).
Mom, it was hard for me, in those last months, to share you. I wanted to shout that you were mine, ours, my mother! I know that I am so lucky to have had a mother who was so loved, but I wanted you to myself. There was so much that I didn't get to ask you. What did you use ammonia for? What was your recipe for stuffed mushrooms? How did it feel to know you were dying? That was the hardest question, Mom, and the question you didn't want us to ask, the question you didn't want to share with your children, but when we asked, you told us, for you were always honest. One night, you said to me, "<i>The girls were so sad today.</i>" I asked, "<i>What about you?</i>" and you said, "<i>Me? I'm not too sad.</i>" It was so hard to watch old friends cry when they came to say goodbye to you. I couldn't do it. But it gave me peace to know you weren't too sad. It gave me peace to know that you were at peace. I know you felt you would be with your parents again, with your mother, that a few months before you died, you told Adam that you felt them tugging at your toes. Mom, I will be with you again one day, and that gives me peace. </span><br />
<br />
Mommy, I love you and I miss you from so deep inside. All I want is what I will never have. I want you, I want you back. I would trade all these words, I would give anything. I think these words worry some - that I am not okay, I am not moving on. I am not okay, I am not moving on, but, <i>I am okay, I am moving on</i>. I owe you my best life. Mom, I know you would understand this: what would it mean if I did not feel this way? How could I not be decimated by losing my mother? How did you raise 3 small children in the wake of your mother's death, your mother who you loved like I love you? This is the gamble of love: those you love might leave, those you love <i>will</i> die. I take that gamble. I choose love, like you chose love.<br />
<br />
Mom, I would give anything to hear your voice again. Every day, this mourning, this grieving changes, but I cannot imagine a day when I will not miss you. That's the great rub of it all - I will move forward, I will grow, and I will change, and with every movement, you will not be here. You will never be here again. We will never be together again, Mom. Except, you told me and you are my mother, and I believe you, you said it! <i>I will be with you always, except for the private moments. </i>Be with me always, Mom. I need you. We need you.<br />
<br />
I love you.<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.918); color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-76548606303019244912011-12-12T22:56:00.001-05:002011-12-12T22:56:50.287-05:00Most nights when I set out to do this, I know what I want to say to you. It is always at night. I am, like Blanche Susan, a sleepy night owl.<br />
<br />
The thumb on my left hand is dry and withered. I do not seek to remedy it. I stroke it, I nurture it, for I know where it comes from, and I do not want to hear any other explanation. It is my childhood, re<i>presenting</i> itself. If I were to tell my mother about my left thumb, she would know it was the thumb that I sucked until I was too old to suck my thumb, my unconscious habit, in bed, lights dim, under the covers, with a book tucked in front of me and a pile of books beside me.<br />
<br />
The other night, I was out with my husband and J., the troubadour, who both claim to not remember what it feels like to be a child. <i>Not remember what it feels like to be a child! </i>It seems impossible to me. I think my entire life is a winding pursuit to the secret garden I dreamed of when I was small. I search for the path that leads to a palace blanketed in snow crunching beneath my feet, a gown made by my mother clutched between my mittened hands. I look for the doll makers, the suffragettes, the pioneers, the mute geniuses, <i>an old house in Paris that was covered with vines</i>. I look for the life I found in the books she spoiled me with. She, the non-reader, indulged her daughter at the library, at the bookstore.<br />
<br />
The sadness of mourning, you learn to live with. The anger of grief, you learn to live with. The anxiety, the fear, the depression, all of it becomes a new, familiar friend. What I will never learn to live with is missing my mother. My mother is my phantom self, the part of me that is no more. I do not want to close my books, my dreams, myself as my mother's child. I pick at my left thumb, I treasure that old wound, for in it is the late nights, hot under blankets in the cold house, the girl who didn't quite belong, but was loved, and oh, how I was loved. In my scaly left thumb, is my mother, guiding me along. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-88535073175969254412011-12-01T22:20:00.001-05:002011-12-01T22:51:59.352-05:00Where are we going? Tomorrow night, I am going to my mother's childhood temple to be with my uncles as a plaque is raised, bearing her name and the date of her death. One night, a few nights ago, I dreamed of my mother, dying, over and over again I heard her last breath, and in my dream I fought with those I felt took away our time together, instead of fighting with myself for the time I didn't spend with her. When we brought her home from the hospital the last time, I made plans to take her to lunch. We never went. I am imperfect. My mistakes keep me awake at night. There are so many mistakes, and no one knows them better and more intimately than I do. I long to undo them, but I cannot. <br />
<br />
This morning I bathed, I drank coffee, I put on my newly tailored black lace pants, I fed the cat. I got in the car, and stopped still a
block from our house: in front of my car, in the intersection, a man was lying face down. He had been hit, the driver left the scene, traffic was stopped,
two men kneeled next to him. He was dead, I think. There was no blood,
he was old. Where was he going? Police officers arrived on foot, someone crossed the street,
picked up his hat and his shoe (they had taken flight, the man was dispossessed of his hat, his shoe, his life) and returned them to their dead owner. I
pulled my car over, turned it off, and sat. And then I walked to work. <br />
<br />
I think of the man who drove away after he killed someone this morning.
He drove away from his mistake, he drove towards his mistake, and it
will ruin his life. <br />
<br />
M. told me today that she read the toast she gave at her sister's wedding last weekend. She toasted her sister and talked about their brother, dead 13 years. She was nervous to speak about her brother. She has lived half of her life without him, and with fine-tuned antennae, grown since girlhood, she has learned what I stubbornly have not: <i>people do not know what to say</i>. She reminded me that if they did, it might be because they understand, and no one should understand. I say gently, though: l<i>ive life, love, and the understanding is inevitable</i>. Hurt, heartbreak, mourning is in direct proportion to the depths of one's mortal love. She was nervous, but she did not cry and she whispered in the ear of her sister the bride, "He is with us."<br />
<br />
M. told me that when I arrived at work this morning I was white as a sheet. "White as a ghost," I thought, but I know no ghosts. <i><a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2011/07/your-mailbox-is-full.html">I know dead people, and you are not dead. </a></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-22628298291705883482011-11-22T23:07:00.001-05:002011-12-04T22:50:08.236-05:00I seek to know who I am without my mother in this world. I seek to know where my words go, the words that used to go to her. I seek to know what becomes of a daughter of a dead mother, who feels hopeless, alone, unmoored, unloved, uncared for. I do for her, but that is not always enough. What of me, who am I, where is my family, who do I belong to?<br />
<br />
The streets are empty, the children have gone home. I have no home. There is my apartment, there is our house that she died in, but where is my home in this world? When she was in the hospital, for the second to last time, on a night my brother and I saw her go into septic shock and shouted for nurses, doctors, anyone, she was dying and she was not ready and it was terrifying and I held her hand and she asked me why I was crying, my stepfather said, "My home is where she is."<br />
<br />
Oh, Mom, the things I didn't know. Where is my home without you, Mom? Who am I without you, Mom? Where has my childhood gone? Where are the memories of 32 years? Who will tell my children what I was like as a child? Remember when Marc and I set out to catch butterflies with a bucket of water and a net? "Did we mean to drown them?" you wanted to know. I don't know the answer, but without you, there is no one to ask the question. Mom, my children will not know the sound of your voice and it's ups and downs, the punctuations, the funny inflections (Coral became Caarrrl, please, oh please, don't let your voice slip from my ears). On our camera, there is one video of you telling a story, 2 weeks before you died about Michael being bad when he was small. I press it against my ear, like a seashell. I want to hear the sea. I want the sound of your voice. I want you. Oh, Mom, Mom, Mom, my girl. I am drowning, quietly, alone, in the small 5'1" space where you used to be.<br />
<br />
Mom, I was afraid, that night when you came to me, but last week, I was drying my hair and a breeze passed over my shoulder and I was dizzy and the apartment spun and the light caught the butterfly in the frame that we bought in Paris and the pale pink wings shone blue. The apartment was still. I was not alone. Magic was with me and the air shook. Do it again, Mom. I don't want to be alone. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-45717212380004519952011-11-17T22:29:00.001-05:002011-11-17T23:13:04.179-05:00If the trees stayed green all winterlong the hope that the bare branches would bloom again would be gone. We need that hope, I know we need that hope, but I cannot find that hope. We have chosen our mother's headstone. I must sign the paperwork and approve. <i>I do not approve</i>. We wait a year to mark the grave. I need a year. The loneliness is worse than ever and I miss her more than any metaphor can amplify.<br />
<br />
The air smells like cold and fires are burning. When we sell our house with the fireplace next to the couches (my grandmother Hannah Daisy's tweed couches - lilac, violet, periwinkle, her colors, her sister Muriel Iris was a turquoise) we laid on for those last months, my last fireplace is gone. Card games are gone (I didn't play them with her, but with my grandmothers, also gone) - Gin Rummy, War, Go Fish. I could still play solitaire, only I can't remember how. This is the time of the magic of hearths and home. When the crackle is gone, along with your mother who really did roast chestnuts, you are all you have left.<br />
<br />
I don't want to find some beautiful pearl, a shining rope to cling to. I am all that I've got, and all that I've got is so very angry. I do not want to be told it will get better, I will get better. Do not tell me that. I will mourn my mother for the rest of my days, whether you see it or not. So, off I go, on my own. I am not afraid. Wherever I go, my mother is waiting for me.<br />
<br />
<i>I</i><i> never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is the
leaving you all. I’m not afraid, but it seems as if I should be
homesick for you even in heaven. -Little Women</i>jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-31069276276492709042011-10-29T23:09:00.001-04:002011-12-04T22:50:42.450-05:00How can it be snowing? It was barely summer when she died. Today is an aberration, but my life is guided by aberration; the life expectancy of an American woman is 80.4 years, so by that figure, my mother, and those who love her, were robbed of 23 years (remember the provenance of bereaved: <span class="foreign" style="font-style: italic;">bereafian</span> "to deprive of, take away, seize, rob"). 23 years more years would not ready me to lose my mother, but 23 years more is what we should have had. There would have been weddings, our children, joys that she would have delighted in, sadness that she would have led us through. My mother didn't do for rightness, but for the believing in the rightness, the knowing of what rightness is. There are storms in the world, hurricanes and earthquakes and devastation, yet we are short on the perfect storm of rightness, a wind that always blows north. I follow my mother's wind, I sniff the air in search of her path to follow.<br />
<br />
My mother would have been the best old woman. I want (<i>insufficient and bears no weight under my needs, that small word: want</i>) to know that old woman. I will always be her daughter but I was only just becoming her adult daughter. When there is nothing more to come, no more from who you have lost, the mind becomes a hothouse of new and old. Though my mother lives no longer, our relationship lives to me, and as long as I am here, she will guide me. I will go forward, I will change, I will grow, but mothers can look into that prism of their children and see their future, though my mother is dead. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_979686242">Remember:</a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_979686242"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></a><br />
<i>Besides, </i><br />
<i>in my opinion you aren't dead. </i><br />
<i>(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)</i><br />
<br />
The girls lament the loss of summer. I did not know summer was ever here. It was warm while my mother was dying, and the sun was shining, and then rain poured from the sky when she died and R. sent me photos of a rainbow flashed from it's terminus on a dingy block, seemingly shot into the sky from the tumbled down, magic warehouse we were married in.<br />
<br />
Now, there are no seasons. There is a circle from today back to April 3rd, the day I was married and I had the luxury of yelling at my mother to shut the door (I was nervous for 15 minutes before the ceremony). Up on the chair she went, during the hora we danced for her, with pure glee on her face, our small speed demon. And then, I mark the days that follow. The day she almost died in the hospital, the day chemotherapy was no longer an option, the last car ride together (in the back of an ambulance, just me and my mother, on her way home to die), the last kiss, the last hug, the last words I can't remember (watching your mother die is so very not like the movies), the last breath. There are no seasons, the cheap thrill of pumpkins or the first snow or blossoms to mark time. There is today, and there is yesterday.<br />
<br />
I will make it okay, because she taught me how. But I want more than okay. I want the algorithm that teaches me how to live in the shadows of her beating heart. I want my mother.<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-23835596467376966182011-10-11T00:25:00.001-04:002011-10-11T00:25:33.386-04:00Childhood is my temple.Last night, I was with my mother for the first time since she died. My friends have told me that she visited them, in a pink terry cloth robe (she had one, covered in ducks) to admonish one for being too hard on himself, or to another she came, with a bowl of strawberries so red, so fresh, they were near psychedelic (she had forced strawberries upon her best friend, "Eat them, eat them!" and commanded us to set out fruit for our guests towards the end, when food barely passed her lips). For the first time since she died, I was not remembering her, it was not what she would have said, what she used to say. <i>She was with me</i>. For a breath, she was with me. In my black and white bathroom, I said aloud, "Mom, where are you?" and from behind my left shoulder she answered. "I'm right here, my girl."<br />
<br />
A few days before she died, I sat on our deck (outside, I could not do this in the house she slowly breathed in) and made arrangements for her body to be prayed over and laid in a simple pine box, for that is what Jews do, and my mother was so proud to be a Jew. We did not have her buried in a shroud. Instead, she wears the dress she wore to my wedding, her moose fleece, and on her left pinkie is the same gold ring that is on mine. It says "LAMB", for us, her and my brothers (and you, too, Uncle B.).<br />
<br />
The moths of mourning are eating holes in my shroud. The stillness, the rigidness keeps me upright, but the pole is loosing ground, the tide is having its way. Saturday was Yom Kippur, and tears poured down our faces (me and Michael - we were not crying, the physicality of it passed the emotion of crying) as we listened to the Rabbi's sermon - he lost his mother a few months before we, ours, and we felt he was speaking to us, about her, when he spoke of those who have gone too soon. My mother was only just 57 years old.<br />
<br />
I sit, I write, the stillness is back - it was gone when I took up my pen, the tears poured, but in an instant, they disappear. Next to me is the Book of Remembrance, printed every year for Yizkor, filled with names of those remembered to G-d on the holiest day of the year. It looks the same, but it is not. The year is 5772 (which means Petey is 72) and my mother's name is listed inside, three times. Blanche Batnick. Blanche Batnick. Blanche Batnick. We too look the same. Leigh Michelle. Adam Ross. Michael Henry. We look the same, but we are not the same. We are wounded. We must learn to live wounded.<br />
<br />
<i>May G-d remember the soul of my mother, my teacher, Bloomie, who has gone to her supernal world,
because I will - without obligating myself with a vow - donate charity
for her sake. In this merit, may her soul be bound up in the bond of
life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel
and Leah, and with the other righteous men and women who are in Gan
Eden; and let us say, Amen.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-84420862219654532212011-10-01T18:05:00.001-04:002011-10-01T23:17:23.776-04:00JourneymanMy grandfather turns 90 in a few weeks. The world has changed since 1921, and my world has changed in the ninety some odd days it has been since my mother has died. I hold his hand and listen to him talk about my grandmother, gone 6 years, the love of his life, and he is the door in the cupboard. He longs for her, he misses her, his cough rattles deeper through his bull-like body, and he prepares to meet her again. On Rosh Hashanah, we sat alone and I listened to him again tell the story of coming home, one early afternoon, from getting whitefish salad for my grandmother. He sat down next to her, she lifted her hand to his face. Her hand dropped, her throat rattled (it is true, the death rattle happens, I didn't know if it would but it did, it began the night before my mother died and <i>it terrified me</i>) and she was gone, but she is never gone. Before he sleeps he sings her the anniversary song, "I remember the night, when we danced, la la la..." and as he sang it to me, soundless tears poured down my face. He cut the challah at my wedding, and I can feel him getting ready to go to her. He is here, but he is going there, and I want to say, "Poppy, send me a postcard. Let me know that they are all right. Slip this letter in your pocket for my mother. Kiss her for me. Millions of kisses, please, Poppy."<br />
<br />
I miss the fresh feeling, the daze and haze of the world without my mother. Three months later, I do not understand her absence more than I did then, but I sit easily next to this feeling, or the place where my feelings ought to be. The passing of time signifies to the world healing and understanding, but for me time robs me of the cloak of sympathy. How can I heal what I do not understand? On Thursday, for the first time since her funeral, I went to temple. I saw the plaque with her name and date of death. I did not think of her funeral: I thought of the velour that used to cover the chairs stratching my small legs, under the short plaid dress my Nana Hannah bought for me at Bib and Tucker with it's thick-planked, creaky, gleaming wood floor. I thought of braiding my father's tallis when I was very young and my parents were still married. Most of all I thought of fingering my mom's jewelry during services, the pearls and diamonds and cut jade bracelet that is now mine. One day, Adam will give a girl my grandmother's engagement ring (it was in a box in the vault, my mother wrote on the box "for Adam, love Nanny" and Michael will give a girl my mother's engagement ring. They won't be able to call her, like I did, and whisper "Mom, I'm getting married." My boys, I am so sorry you will not have that joy. But, there will be joy, the joy of watching what magnificent husbands and fathers you will one day be. For now, my boys, you are magnificent sons and brothers, and I am so proud of you. Mom is, too. You give her such nachas. jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-2172203435162803612011-09-11T20:57:00.009-04:002011-09-12T11:49:29.224-04:00<a href="http://jezebelstationery.blogspot.com/2006/05/swan-lake.html">The other night I sent my father a photo of me, just two and in saddle shoes, feeding swans with my mother at the duckpond</a>. 26 hours later, his response came, and with it went my breath:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I remember it like it was yesterday</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">G-d rest her soul</span><br /><br />I thought of what it means to my father that the girl he married when she was 19, he 20, the mother of three of his four children, has died. He was the second person I called when she died, and he came to our house, and cried as he kissed her goodbye. For the first time, I saw my father as the unseen, the third person in the photo, the one behind the camera. Now, my mother is the unseen, but she is as real and as present as my father is in that photograph taken 30 years ago.<br /><br />And, I thought what it means, "<span style="font-style: italic;">G-d rest her soul</span>," and how common words reveal themselves as beaming vessels when the soul in question is the one that made yours. If ever a soul is resting, it is my mother's, who, like our Rabbi said (the same Rabbi that married us, 75 days before she died, and oh, what a day can mean when there are only 75 left) climbed the mountain with us to know that on the other side, she would walk on and leave her children in a valley.<br /><br />Today, 10 years later, I think of my mother's dear friend, Josephine, and how Josephine knew instantly, this morning, 10 years ago, that the love of her life would never return home. He was a firefighter, on disability, but for the reasons she loved him, she lost him: into the towers he went, out he never came. I think of our dear friend, Gabe, who toasted us so beautifully at our wedding, and how he stood on the sidewalk, 10 minutes late to his job, and watched a plane explode into the place he was not. <a href="http://sciencefactionnyc.blogspot.com/2011/09/now.html">The gift, and weight, of survival was handed to him in a loaded quiver that will be slung across his back for the rest of his life.</a><br /><br />I think about my father's words, "<span style="font-style: italic;">G-d rest her soul", </span>and I am grateful for the 8 years we had with our mother as she lived over her illness, and let it be the white noise that played in the background, when most would have let it be the dissonant symphony that clapped a deafening refrain. On Mother's Day, we sat in the living room together and read her <span style="font-style: italic;">Winnie-the-Pooh </span>(we laughed, it is our favorite)<span style="font-style: italic;">,</span> and went for a drive by the beach. My brothers learned how to lift her gently, so as not to rattle the cancer that filled her body, they dressed her, cooked for her, fed her, and I knew that inside, deeper than where the cancer dwell, my mom was beaming, for her boys were driven by love, not constrained by fear. I have never thought "<span style="font-style: italic;">G-d rest her soul</span>" because it is so clear to me that never has a soul left as proudly and peacefully (though not joyously, do not think that) as my mother. I think today about those nearly 3,000 souls who did not have the gift of forewarning, who had no time to dance the hora (though <span style="font-style: italic;">there is never enough time</span>). 57 years is not enough, but on this day, I am grateful (again, common words, beaming vessels) for the warning that Death came closer, before Death came to our house.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing.</span> -<span style="font-style: italic;"> Winnie-the-Pooh</span>, A.A. Milnejezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27034597.post-8804518669100410242011-08-17T22:37:00.005-04:002011-08-17T23:18:57.514-04:00Dear Mom,
<br />
<br />It has been 2 months since we lost you. Liz got married on Saturday night, and we were there (you rsvp'd yes, and ordered the sirloin), me and Kevin and Petey and Davey. Petey wore his hat, which you wouldn't have been happy with, but it was his fancy hat, which makes it better. When we got home from the wedding, to our house, to our house that you lived in and died in, I had this email waiting for me:
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Are you THE Leigh Batnick...</span>
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">…who was a sweet & lovely 5th grader at Lakeside Elementary in Merrick in 1989-90? I suspect it must be you, as your writing is as deep & graceful & magical now as it was then. I came upon your blog just now, and am so very sorry for your loss. </span>
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Of all things, I remember your mom’s signature on your report cards & absence notes. She had happy handwriting! </span>
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My deepest condolences to you & your family; my heart goes out to you.</span>
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">With love,</span>
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Christine aka "Ms. Wicks"</span>
<br />
<br />Mom, you remember Ms. Wicks! She was my favorite teacher, her, and Dr. Isaacs (he understood me before I did). The thing is, I haven't exchanged a word with her in <span style="font-style: italic;">21 years</span> and she emailed me precisely at the moment that I was toasting Liz and <span style="font-style: italic;">Liz and I met in her classroom</span>. In my toast, I quoted from the letter Liz wrote you on June 5th, and in that letter she spoke about Ms. Wicks.
<br />
<br />Mom, I know you already know this. I haven't written back to Ms. Wicks yet, because I'm waiting to understand; I spend my days waiting to understand. Liz, who knows deep loss from the its eddy, wrote to me:
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">...Although I know you do not feel connected to your sadness, rest assure, you are at a kind of magical stage of subconscious connection. She is speaking through your heart, mind and pen (or rather, your laptop). Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come. But</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> for now, know that the unexpected thing about loss is a strange super-powered infusion of love that you gain from the person that you lost. It is almost like a shield that they give us for our hearts. And that shield is made up of the energy created by the POWER of your connection to them. Some may call it denial or shock, but really, I think it is the protection given from our beloved, the one who knows that our fragile hearts can only take so much at a time... Lest they break in two. And that is the last thing that they would ever want to happen...</span>
<br />
<br />I spoke to Ray-Ray tonight, and she told me that Jane asked you before you died, as best friends can, "<span style="font-style: italic;">How will I know you are with us?</span>" and you answered "<span style="font-style: italic;">You will know. There will be no doubt about it.</span>" When Jane opened the library the first morning she went back after you died (you loved little ladies and librarians who loved pink wine), 3 computers were on but the main computer, the host, was off. No one was there, the computers are turned off every night, religiously, and she knew. It was you. The mother-ship was dark, but still, she lit her 3 children.
<br />
<br />Mom, you light your 3 children. I think about what I did not ask you; I did not know you were afraid of heights. Petey told me when you went on the ski gondolas out West, you hovered over desert and prairie, canyons and brush, and your hands tightly gripped the sides. I am afraid of heights, too, or of precipices, more specifically, and I couldn't breathe as we ascended the Eiffel Tower, so down quickly we went. I never knew you were afraid of anything, except what could hurt your children. You are fearless to me. You feared not death, you feared not life.
<br />
<br />Mom, your heart has stopped, I heard your last breath, but your heart made mine, and now Liz tells me, that you cradle my broken heart. Please, come to me. Be with me in dreams. Michael dreamed of you, dead, but re-animated, and I am so jealous. In his dream, you told the three of us that Petey took good care of you, and when he told me about his dream I said, "<span style="font-style: italic;">You're right, he did</span>" and Michael gasped, for I had said exactly the same thing in his dream. My girl, be with me in a dream. Tell me what I know (but the knowing is hard, and it's not the same as your voice telling me, kissing me, nuzzling your head into my neck - you are short!) you would say if you were here. Tell me that you love me, tell me that I am the daughter, the person, you hoped I would be.
<br />
<br />Mom, I fear not the night or a great height. You are with me, you are in me, you are all around me. I love you, my girl, and I love my brothers and we talk to our uncles and I will be better about calling your friends (my friends) and seeing Poppy. You have taught me how to live, and I want to be my mother's daughter. There was no one better than you, my mother.
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<br />Tuck me in, and slowly tell each part of my body to rest, to exhale from my tiniest toe, to the tip of my head, like you did when I was small.
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<br />I love you, I love you, I love you and this is not good night, for maybe I will see you tonight.
<br />Lulu Belle
<br />jezebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05509325518752000772noreply@blogger.com3