Later Life & Caregiving Archives - Page 8 of 13

The Garden I Finally Have Time For

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been saying for fifteen years that I wanted a garden.

Not the theoretical garden, not the intention of a garden, not the seed catalogues I looked at in February with the particular February longing of a person who is snow-bound and dreaming of something that requires patience and actual dirt and the willingness to be wrong about things and try again in the spring. The actual garden. The one that requires time I did not have, attention I could not afford to give, the kind of daily and seasonal presence that a garden demands from you and that I was giving to other things, always other things, always the more urgent and visible things.

This spring I made the beds.

I made them badly. I will admit that plainly. I did not prepare the soil correctly and I planted some things too close and I lost three tomato seedlings to a late frost because I was overconfident about the last-frost date, which is a beginner’s error I should not have made if I had been paying attention to the garden books I have owned since 2008. I made mistakes and the garden did not mind. The garden is democratic about beginners. The garden offers you another try next year without requiring you to justify why it took you until now to show up.

I go out there every morning now.

Before the coffee sometimes, which is unusual for me, who normally requires coffee before anything can be said to begin. But the garden is different. The garden asks for you before the day has organized itself, in the early light when the temperature is still cool and the slugs are finishing their night shift and the birds are in full argument about territorial matters I do not fully understand. I go out and I walk the beds and I look at what happened overnight, what opened, what is struggling, what has surprised me by surviving something I was sure it would not survive.

I have become a person who is surprised by plants.

This seems like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is the discovery of a category of attention I had not given myself permission to have, an attention that is slow and patient and proceeds at the pace of growing things rather than the pace of institutions. An attention that asks nothing back. That does not need to be useful. That is just the morning and the garden and a woman learning to love something that will never go on a resume and does not need to.

The Graduation I Almost Didn’t Cry At

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had prepared not to cry.

I had told myself the morning of, with the deliberateness of a woman who has been managing her responses in public for decades, that I was not going to cry at the graduation. Not because crying is wrong, not because it would embarrass anyone, not for any reason that holds up under examination. Just the habit of composure. Just the default position of a woman who learned that the feelings were fine in private and complicated in public and that the difference was worth maintaining.

I almost made it.

I held it through the processional and the speeches and the long careful reading of names and I held it when her section stood and I held it watching her walk across the stage with the particular walk she has, the one that has been hers since she was small, the one that is entirely her own and recognizable to me from any distance in any crowd. I held it through the handshake and the photograph and the turn to face the audience.

And then she looked for me.

That was the thing I could not hold. That small scanning motion, her eyes moving across the rows looking for my face, the thing she has been doing since she was a child on every stage in every room, looking for me first, and me being there, always there, in the third row or the back corner or the folding chair in the gymnasium, the reliable fixed point she could find and that was enough, that was the whole of what was needed in those moments, just the finding.

She found me.

And I cried. Not quietly. The kind of crying that is also a kind of laughing, that is too large for one emotion and so it comes out as both at once, the overflow of a feeling that is too much for the container of a single woman in a folding chair in an auditorium on a Saturday afternoon.

I had prepared not to cry and I cried and it was the right thing. The composure would have been the wrong thing. Some moments are not for composure. Some moments are exactly the size of the feeling they contain and you either let yourself be that size or you make yourself smaller than the moment and I have spent enough years making myself smaller than the moment.

I let myself be the size of it.

The Distance Between Us Is Also Love

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Three time zones.

That is the practical version of the distance. Three time zones and a flight I have taken four times now and will take again, that has become its own kind of rhythm, the particular routine of a mother who travels to her child rather than the other way around because the child is building a life and the life is rooted where it is rooted and the mother can go to the life because the mother has the flexibility now, has the retired Tuesday and the open calendar and the willingness to be in a middle seat for four hours because at the other end of the middle seat is her daughter.

I thought the distance would feel like absence.

It does, sometimes. In the particular way that distance feels like absence when you are used to proximity, when the relationship was built in the same house and the same kitchen and the same car driving to and from things, when the knowing of each other was inseparable from the daily physical presence. The absence of that is real. I do not minimize it.

But the distance is also something else.

It is proof that she went. That the going happened and the going worked and she is somewhere building the life that was hers to build and the building is going well because I can hear it in her voice, the particular quality of a person who is in the right place, who has found the room that was shaped like her, who is not performing her life but living it. That is in her voice now. I can hear it from three time zones away, across the middle seat and the four hours and the particular miracle of a phone that lets me hear her breathing before she speaks.

The distance is also love.

The love that was large enough to let her go. The love that did not ask her to stay closer for my comfort. The love that packed her up in August and drove her to the airport and put her on a plane to the life that was hers and came home to the quiet house and called it good because it was good, because she is good, because the three time zones between us are filled with the life she is living and the life I am living and the love that connects them, which does not require proximity to be real, which is in fact the test of whether the love was ever about the person or about the comfort of having them near.

It was always about her. The distance proves it. I am glad to be proved right.

The First Vacation That Was Actually a Vacation

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I used to take work with me.

Not always visibly. Sometimes the work was in the laptop I packed and opened at the hotel desk on the second evening because I had told myself I would just check in on a few things, because the inbox did not understand that I was away, because there was always a student, a committee, a deadline that had the particular quality of being slightly more urgent than my presence at the beach. I brought the work to every vacation I took for twenty years and the vacation contained the work the way a jar contains water, everywhere, filling every available space.

I did not bring work on this trip.

I want to say that plainly because it sounds small and it was not small. I packed a bag and there was no laptop in it. There was no folder of things I was going to get to. There was nothing in the bag that was for anyone else. There were clothes and a book and the phone that I agreed with myself to use only for photographs and the occasional message to let people know I was alive and well, which they were capable of inferring but I have not yet reached the point of not telling people I am alive and well because the habit of being available is deeply embedded and I am working on it.

On the third day something shifted.

I was sitting at the edge of the water in the late afternoon and I noticed that I was not thinking about anything in particular. Not planning. Not reviewing. Not composing the email I would send when I got back or rehearsing the conversation I needed to have or calculating what the next three weeks required of me. I was just sitting at the edge of the water watching the light move and the pelicans doing whatever pelicans do with their enormous unhurried bodies and I was, for a stretch of time I could not have measured, entirely present.

I did not know I had forgotten what that felt like until I felt it.

Twenty years of vacations that were not quite vacations, of rest that was not quite rest, of presence qualified by the background hum of everything still waiting. And then this. This afternoon. These pelicans. This particular quality of light that I was, for once, actually there to see.

I am going back next year. I am not bringing the laptop next year either.

The First Winter Without the Commute

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I used to drive in the dark both ways.

That is what I remember most specifically about the winter commute. Not the distance, which was manageable, not the traffic, which was what traffic is. The dark. Leaving in the dark and coming home in the dark and the light being a thing that happened somewhere outside the parentheses of the workday, that existed during the hours I was indoors under fluorescent tubes that rendered everyone the same shade of slightly wrong. The sun was doing its work in my absence. I was doing my work in the sun’s absence. We were colleagues who never overlapped.

This January I watched the light change every day.

Not dramatically. January light does not change dramatically. It changes the way things change when you are paying attention to them closely, which is incrementally, almost imperceptibly, a minute more at the far edge of the afternoon, the evening arriving slightly later than yesterday, the kind of change that requires attention to detect and rewards attention with the particular satisfaction of noticing something real. I noticed it every day. I was there for it. The light and I were finally on the same schedule.

I did not know I had been missing the light.

I knew I was often sad in winter but I attributed it to winter, which is a legitimate thing to be sad in, and I did not think to ask how much of the winter sadness was the light deprivation of a woman who was inside under fluorescent tubes for the hours when the light was present, who saw the sun on weekends and called that enough because it was what was available and what was available was what enough meant.

This winter I went outside every day.

Not heroically. Just out. The walk in the grey morning, which is still light, even grey is still light, even the flat January sky is still the sky and being under it is different from being under ceiling tiles and I needed the difference more than I knew, had been needing it for twenty-five winters and calling the need something else, something more manageable, something that could wait until the weekend.

The light and I are on speaking terms now. We see each other daily. I had forgotten how much I needed that. I will not forget again.

The Friend I Lost Track Of

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We used to talk on the phone for two hours.

Not about anything that needed to be resolved. Not because there was a problem requiring our combined attention. Just because we were the kind of friends who could talk for two hours without noticing it was two hours, who could move from the serious to the ridiculous and back again with the ease of people who have known each other long enough that the conversational ground is entirely familiar, who do not have to manage the impression they are making because the impression was made twenty years ago and it stuck.

I do not know when I stopped having two hours.

Somewhere in the middle years the two-hour calls became thirty-minute calls became twenty-minute calls became a text exchange that started with sorry I know it has been forever, and the sorry was genuine, the sorry was real, but the sorry did not make the time and the time was what was missing. The time was what I had given to the institution and the children and the parents and the household and the other obligations that accumulated over years the way obligations accumulate, without your permission, without your noticing, until one day the day is full before you have chosen what to put in it.

I called her last month.

I did not send a text first to schedule it. I just called the way you used to call, in the era before calling required advance permission, and she picked up and said your name in the voice that people use when they are genuinely pleased, not politely pleased, not meeting-you-halfway pleased, genuinely, and we talked for two hours and eleven minutes because I checked afterward because the two hours and eleven minutes felt like a gift I wanted to account for properly.

I had forgotten that I was funny. She reminded me.

I had forgotten that the part of me that is funny exists independently of whether I am performing competence. She has always known both parts and is not confused by the coexistence and I needed that more than I knew I needed it until I had it.

I am calling her again next week. I am not waiting for a reason.

The First Year Without the Routine

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not realize how much of me the routine was holding.

Not in a bad way, not only. The routine was also a kind of container. The five forty-three and the prep and the commute and the particular sequence of a teaching day, which I did not always love but which organized the hours into a shape I knew, which gave me the satisfaction of a known shape even when the shape was exhausting, because a known exhaustion is easier to manage than an open morning with no scaffolding and no one expecting you to be anywhere by any particular time.

The first year without it I was slightly lost.

I want to say that without shame, though there is residual shame in it, the shame of a woman who spent a career being competent and organized and should therefore be capable of organizing her own freedom, who has read enough about this transition to know that it is normal and still felt abnormal in it. Lost is the word. Not unhappy, not regretting, just without the shape I had been using to know where I was in the day, like navigating a room where someone has rearranged the furniture in the dark.

I built a different shape.

Slowly, trying things and discarding them, the way you build anything without a blueprint, by trial and by the patient accumulation of what works. The water in the morning. The writing before anything else. The walks that have become their own kind of appointment, not to an institution but to the day itself, to the light and the temperature and the condition of the world at eight in the morning, which changes and which I am there to notice changing. The reading in the afternoon. The cooking that is leisure rather than logistics.

The new routine is quieter than the old one.

It is mine in a way the old one was not. It was built around what I need rather than what the institution needed from me, which sounds obvious and simple and is neither. Building a life around what you need, after decades of building it around what was required, is its own kind of work. The most personal work I have ever done. I am still doing it. I expect I will be doing it for the rest of my life, and that feels, finally, like the right kind of work to be doing.

The Day I Stopped Explaining the Poetry

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Someone asked me what my poems were about.

Not unkindly. Genuinely curious, the way people are genuinely curious when they encounter something that does not fit into their existing categories and want help placing it. What are they about. And I heard myself start to explain, start to frame it in the language that makes things legible to people who are not inside them, start to say: well, they are about labour and grief and the body and rest and the cost of caring for the people we love while also caring for ourselves, they are about being a woman at a certain age in a certain kind of life trying to understand what the life has meant and what it is still becoming.

And halfway through I stopped.

Not because the explanation was wrong. It was accurate as far as it went. But the explaining was already doing something to the poems, was already reducing them to their paraphrasable content, was treating them as though the content was the poem rather than understanding that the poem is how the content is held, that the specific weight of a line is not the same as the subject of the line, that a poem about grief is not the same as a description of grief and the difference is the whole of why poetry exists.

I said: read one.

Just that. I stopped explaining and I said read one, and I meant it, meant that the poem would do what I could not do by talking about it, that the poem was the explanation and any other explanation was already less than the poem. I have spent my whole academic life explaining things. I am good at the explaining. I know what explaining is for and I know what it cannot do and what it cannot do is be the poem. The poem has to be the poem. The only way into a poem is through it.

She read one.

She was quiet for a moment after. Then she said: oh. The oh that is not a response to what something is about but to what something did, to the way a thing landed, to the arrival of the thing itself rather than the description of it.

Oh. That is the whole of what any poem is trying to get to. That one syllable that means: I felt something true. I am not explaining the poems anymore. I am just handing them over. The rest is between the reader and the page.

The Diagnosis She Took Better Than I Did

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The doctor said the word and I watched her face.

She did not flinch. She nodded, the specific nod of a woman who is taking in information and placing it in the appropriate file, who has been taking in difficult information and placing it in files for eighty years and has not yet been presented with a piece of information she could not find a place for, who was not going to start now. She nodded and she asked one question, a practical question, the most practical question available, the one about what happened next, because what happened next was actionable and she was interested in actionable.

I was the one who had to breathe carefully.

Not visibly, I hope. I was the one doing the thing I do in rooms where I am receiving difficult news on behalf of someone I love, which is to locate the still center, the place from which I can be present without the being-present becoming a problem that the person I love now has to manage. She should not have to manage my response to her diagnosis. So I breathed carefully and I held the face and I nodded alongside her nod and I listened to the practical question and the practical answer and I held the whole of what I was feeling in the place I hold things in difficult rooms.

On the drive home she said: well. That’s that then.

Not despair. Not acceptance exactly, or not only acceptance. Something more like the orientation of a woman who has been told the weather and is deciding what coat to wear. The information is the information. What can be done will be done. What cannot be done will not be done. She has always been like this. She has always had this particular relationship with reality, this willingness to look at it directly without requiring it to be other than it is before she can deal with it.

I drove home and I let her be the calm one.

I let her set the tone. I followed her into the practical, into the what-happens-next, into the coat-for-the-weather. It was not the tone I would have chosen for myself. It was what she needed and it was, I found, what I needed too. The practical is its own kind of grace. She has always known that. She is still teaching me.

The Conversation I Keep Having With My Younger Self

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She shows up in my dreams sometimes.

Not as a ghost. As herself. The version of me at thirty-two or thirty-five who is in the middle of something and has not yet made it out the other side and does not know there is another side and is doing what she knows how to do, which is keep going, keep going, keep going, because stopping has never been offered to her as an option and she has never thought to offer it to herself.

I want to sit down with her.

Not to warn her. I have thought about warning her and I have decided against it, because the things she is about to go through made her into the person I am, and I am, on most days, glad to be the person I am, which means I cannot in good conscience ask for the things to be removed, can only ask for her to be held a little more gently inside them. Not to warn her. To sit down with her and say: you are going to make it through. That is all. Not the details, not the map, just the fact of the making-it-through, which is the thing she cannot see from where she is standing and which would change the quality of the going through if she knew it.

You are going to make it through.

The contract years and the burnout and the year the contract did not come and the sitting in the parking lot doing the math on the phone. The things that happened in rooms that called themselves collegial and were not. The slow accumulation of a worth that kept being measured and found lacking by metrics that were designed to find it lacking. The grief of a career that gave so much and withheld so much simultaneously, that required her to love the work in order to survive it and punished her for loving it, and she loved it anyway, she always loved it, that is the thing no one will ever be able to take from her.

She is going to sit at the edge of a sea one February and remember who she is underneath all of it.

She is going to write it down. She is going to give it to people who need it. She is going to become, slowly and imperfectly and at considerable cost, the woman I am now, who is not finished becoming but is no longer afraid of the becoming.

I would tell her that. If I could sit down with her. I would say all of that and then I would say: now go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow is still going to ask you for everything and you are going to give it and it is going to be worth it and you are going to be okay.

Go home. Get some sleep.