Shantih

To Barbara Goldenhersh: May you know peace which surpasses all understanding. Go with love.

To her family: I weep with you tonight.

Set In Stone

It took me quite a while to finalize plans for Alex’s monument. A huge part of that was the indecision of what it would look like. He wanted a bench. He wanted a place where someone could sit and read or just take in the sounds of the birds on a beautiful day. After that, it was up to me.

I had suffered quite a bit of guilt about not getting it done sooner, but after seeing it, I’m so glad I waited until I could put my brains back together and get it right. Because I think I did get it right. This was our last collaboration and I think it’s a shining example of how well we always worked together.

I would like, at some point this spring when it is warmer, to have a little dedication and a brunch. I know so many of you wanted to come to the funeral, but couldn’t make the trip on such short notice.

 

The White Elephant In The Room

New Year’s Eve, though not quite as difficult as I thought it might be, was not without it’s hitches: Mainly, my SNAFU with the white elephant gift exchange.  Each party is supposed to bring one gift per adult. Somehow I, in my entire process of choosing, purchasing, wrapping, transporting and finally, adding into the mix of packages, didn’t realize that I had my math wrong. I brought two presents. I only realized this fact after they were counted and someone said, “Wait…do we have an extra?” Yes…I set the proverbial place at the table for the dead guy.

I was able to laugh it off at the time, but when the morning sun hit my face 4 hours after I went to bed, I woke up sobbing. And though I wasn’t beating myself up about the horribly uncomfortable moment, I was perplexed at how it could have slipped past me. Was it just that habit was stronger than my acceptance of reality? Whatever it was, it slammed home the realization that though we all still feel him, he is gone.

On this, the first anniversary of his death, I wanted to write some profound post about all the insights I’ve gained through a year of mourning. And it’s not that I don’t have any…I just haven’t been able to process things enough to really write about them yet. I feel as though there is a veritable BOOK in there, somewhere…I just can’t tap it yet.

I no longer feel like he could walk in the door at any moment and I have fewer moments when habit, instead of reality, reigns. But I still miss my dearest friend and what I miss most is the laughter. So I want to remember him tonight by sharing a story and couple of things that were always guaranteed to send him off into cackling fits.

I have a memory of laying in bed with Alex while enormously pregnant with Anya. We had been discussing baby names that evening. I was almost asleep, but then my eyes popped open again. “What about ‘Corinne’? That’s pretty, isn’t it?” I asked. He slowly turned his head to look at me quizzically, raised an eyebrow and said, “Corinne…KARAN?”

I hadn’t put the two names together yet. We spent the next five minutes giggling uncontrollably and I remember thinking at the time (and still believe) that THIS…moments like these, are what makes a marriage last.

There were so many things that could send him into hysterics, his voice rising an octave and a half, gasping for breath. A poorly translated owners manual for some Asian-manufactured product was always a favorite. We used to read sections of Richard Lederer’s Anguished English to each other until neither of us could see the page through our tears or speak coherently enough to keep reading.

Then there was the literal video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart.” (Of course, if you can’t find something funny in this, you need to check yourself into a clinic for the hopelessly humorless.)

Enjoy. And as you watch, see if you can remember the exact pitch his voice would hit when he’d really crack up.

And oh, yeah….

As Kenny would say: I’m alright. Nobody worry ’bout me.

Margin Notes

It’s been quite awhile since I read poetry in the bath. (And for those of you beginning to paint a mental picture….I coyly draw the shower curtain closed in front of your mind’s eye.) But I cracked open a small book a friend lent to me and began to read. The fifth poem inspired this post:

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

—Billy Collins

I had forgotten the margin notes.

It used to drive me insane when I would open a book for the first time and discover that Alex had beaten me to reading it and had scribbled copious notes and doodles in the margins. He said it helped him process what he was reading. I just saw that he was marking up my pristine books. Some of our earliest arguments were about that. And about the apple core he left on my cedar chest (which I inherited from my late mother) for hours (days??).  Apple juice + wood furniture = AAARRRRGHHHHH!!!

Now those margin notes are cherished treasure.

While I was searching through his early work for just the right poem to inscribe on his grave marker, I stumbled across the copy of his U. of Chicago thesis project in which he had, (what else?), written notes to me in the margins. There were explanations of what each poem meant in the context of us…a lengthy ballad of my effect on his psyche and grand credit for shaking him out of emotional stasis. For saving him.

I guess we should all be so lucky to be those notes in someone’s margins. And to have them written into the book of who we are. We should be so lucky as to be the story they pick up and refuse to relinquish and eventually write upon a page of it: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Milestones

As much as my rational mind would like to ignore the fact that there are certain meaningful dates and events tumbling past at rapid speed this year, the rest of my brain will not let me forget. It started with our 9th wedding anniversary, UVa 10-year law school reunion, Micah making partner at Kirkland & Ellis, Parkway North 20-year high school reunion, his 39th birthday, Anya’s 3rd birthday, Charlie’s 7th…They just keep coming. Some of them have been marked with a passing sadness and some have hit me like a 6-ton truck (dropped from 120 meters. I’ll let you calculate the acceleration on your own time) .

The most recent event that completely trucked me up was his birthday. I had a plan. I was going to ignore it. I’m pretty good at forgetting exactly what the date is most of the time, anyway. The big hitch in my plan? How the hell do you ignore SEPTEMBER FREAKING 11TH?

Uh…do we have a Plan B?

(Yep. But you’re not gonna like it…)

On the evening of September 10th, we had a lovely Rosh Hashanah/Shabbat dinner with Rabbi Chalom and family. (There will be more regarding this connection in another post.) It was getting late and time to round up the girls when I noticed I was feeling a bit “off.” I chalked it up to the fact that the house had gotten warm and I had worn too heavy a sweater. I put the girls in the car and drove the 30 minutes home, continuing to feel increasingly unwell. Obviously, I was overheated, ate too much brisket, was coming down with something…?

I got the girls to bed, made myself a cup of herbal tea, sat down…and immediately burst into tears.

Oh. So that’s how we’re doing this. Plan B was a full-blown anxiety sneak attack. One cup of herbal tea, half a box of tissues and 1mg of Ativan later, I went to bed. Oy.

I had a somewhat less intense reaction to the news that Alex’s dear friend Micah had been made partner at Kirkland. They had done some very nice work together over the years, including a (still unresolved) case before the 7th circuit. Micah ended up arguing it in front of the court because at that point, Alex was already too sick, but he summoned the energy to make the arduous trip downtown to watch. He was so proud of his friend and the lawyer he had become, so it was really difficult to imagine the celebration he wouldn’t be a part of. The black-tie partner dinner would go on without him. His gin and tonic (half of which was enough to make him giddy) would go undrunk. And he would never see the ruling on that case.

I still have a bottle of Cristal engraved with “Kirkland & Ellis 2006.” It sits in the cabinet between the fine china and the extra-virgin olive oil. We were saving it for some big special occasion.  Stupid, that, in hind site.

I’m not really prepared to think about NYE yet. That was always our big holiday with his family and if I remember correctly, it was the last time his oldest and dearest friends saw him. I find that I can look down his Facebook wall at all the posts written since he’s been gone and it’s when I get to his old friends that I lose it. I get to Jon first. And Kyle and Rod…all his college friends and everyone from St. Louis. I start thinking about the fact that it’s not just me and it’s not just the girls that feel his absence. There is a whole universe of friends out there who have lost a brother, their devil’s advocate, their confidant….the first person they wanted to bounce an idea off. We ALL lost him. And my sadness for them is sometimes more intense than my sadness for myself.

It sometimes takes me awhile to recover from these milestones blowing past this year. I find they can take the wind out of my sails for days. But dark nights break and grow into well lit mornings.

Hello, sunshine.

Thank you, Facebook.

It seems that the most offending aspects of FB’s “relationship status” category have been resolved to my satisfaction. I held my breath, chose “widowed” from the menu, closed my eyes and hit “save.” And the sky stayed put. Not only did the sky stay put, the status stayed put. It didn’t automatically revert to “single.” Best of all, Alex’s status on his memorialized page remained “married.”

One of my biggest fears regarding all this was that his status would change, leaving that little cyber piece of him abandoned and unattached. That thought was nearly unbearable.

So now the status is an authentic representation of reality. All I have to tackle now is the issues I have with the connotative meanings embedded in the labels I’m stuck with: Widow and Single Mother. *Cringe*

Really, Facebook?!!

I am no longer married. I have fully accepted this fact. It took me awhile to feel, well, “unmarried,” but I’m there now. I’ve taken off the outward symbols and the idea of (one day) forming a new romantic attachment is something I can now tentatively entertain. So WHY, when I go to change my relationship status on Facebook from “married” to something else, do I come to a screeching, grinding halt in my tracks every time?!

Under the “relationship” pull-down menu, “widowed” is an option.  Ok, great. Um…except that it actually changes the status to “single.” Ok…bit of a bullshit bait and switch, but I can handle that. It’s the truth, right? Except….

“Your relationship with Alex Karan will be canceled upon saving.” Wait. What the FUCK?!

Canceled? You can’t cancel my relationship with Alex Karan! We were together for 16 years. We got married. We bought property. We combined our genes into two brilliant, amazing, gorgeous she-children! Nobody left voluntarily! CANCELED?!! Cancel you, MF!

AND WHY THE HELL DOES THIS BOTHER ME SO MUCH?! It’s just a pre-set message some programmer typed in because they had to write something and never dreamed that it could have such a paralyzing effect on little ol’ me.

(Breathe in…breathe out.)

I’ve come to the conclusion that this statement bothers me profoundly for this reason: I am a writer. I’m a musician, a reader of literature, a teacher, a marketing professional. In all aspects of my life, words (even in limited quantity) have a great deal of meaning. I’ve spent most of my life squeezing as much meaning as possible into just a few sentences. Words have the ability to alter opinions and even moods…to effect great change or inflict pain. (Forget that “sticks and stones” crap. If hurled at the right angle, by the right person, at the right time, it hurts.)

So I’ve come back to this threshold several times now and haven’t been able to make the leap. Some day, soon, I’ll just have to close my eyes and hit the “save” button. It’s starting to feel like an important step in living authentically in the “now.” Until then, however, my gut reaction will reign over my rational mind and I have to let it stand a little longer.

I’ll keep you posted.