Stitches Read online

  ALSO BY ANNE LAMOTT

  Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

  Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

  Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son

  (with Sam Lamott)

  Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

  FICTION

  Hard Laughter

  Rosie

  Joe Jones

  All New People

  Crooked Little Heart

  Blue Shoe

  Imperfect Birds

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2013 by Anne Lamott

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote the following:

  Jane Kenyon, excerpt from “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks,” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

  Denise Levertov, “In the Japanese tongue . . . ,” from Poems 1960-1967. Copyright © 1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ISBN 978-0-698-14785-0

  This is dedicated to Neshama Franklin.

  Contents

  Also by Anne Lamott

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One | BEGINNING

  Two | THE OVERLY SENSITIVE CHILD

  Three | STITCHES

  Four | MOUNT VISION

  Five | REMNANTS

  Six | FORWARD

  Acknowledgments

  I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

  —DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD, Markings

  One

  BEGINNING

  It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way.

  It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness—having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God as parts of life—it’s easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your parental amazement, are all the meaning you need to sustain you, or when you have landed the job and salary for which you’ve always longed, or the mate. And then the phone rings, the mail comes, or you turn on the TV.

  Where do we even begin in the presence of evil or catastrophe—dead or deeply lost children, a young wife’s melanoma, polar bears floating out to sea on scraps of ice? What is the point of it all when we experience the vortex of interminable depression or, conversely, when we recognize that time is tearing past us like giddy greyhounds? It’s frightening and disorienting that time skates by so fast, and while it’s not as bad as being embedded in the quicksand of loss, we’re filled with dread each time we notice life hotfoot it out of town.

  One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

  That would be fine, when where we find ourselves turns out to be bearable. What about when it isn’t—after 9/11, for instance, or a suicide in the family?

  I really don’t have a clue.

  I do know it somehow has to do with sticking together as we try to make sense of chaos, and that seems a way to begin. We could start with something relatively easy: C. S. Lewis famously said about forgiveness, “If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”

  Maybe, counterintuitively, it makes sense to start right off with hard, rather than easy: Where is life’s meaning after Katrina, or an unwanted divorce?

  If we’re pressed for an answer, most of us would say that most of the time we find plenty of significance in life as it unfurls in front of us like a carpet runner—at least when it goes as expected, day by day, with our families and a few close friends. We have our jobs and those we work or play or worship or recover with as we try to feel a deeper sense of immediacy or spirit or playfulness. Most people in the world are striving simply to feed their kids and hang on. We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets.

  People like to say that it—significance, import—is all about the family. But lots of people do not have rich networks of hilarious uncles and adorable cousins, who all live nearby, to help them. Many people have truly awful families: insane, abusive, repressive. So we work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes.

  Is solace meaning? I don’t know. But it’s pretty close.

  The kids say, “It is what it is.” They can say this with a straight face since they have not had kids yet. I remember my youth, and having that same great confidence in bumper stickers and my own thinking. Say it’s true: It is what it is. We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.

  And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.

  It’s pretty easy to think you know the meaning of life when your children are small, if they come with all their parts and you get to live in that amazing cocoon of oneness and baby smells. But what if your perfect child becomes sick, obese, an addict or a homeless adult? What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?

  You’re thinking about this for the first time when maybe it’s a little late. Your life is two-thirds over, or you’re still relatively young, but your girl went from being two years old to being eleven in what felt like eighteen months, and then in what felt like eight weeks to fifteen, where she has been now, sharply dressed as a bitter young stripper, for as long as you can fricking remember.

  Oh, honey, buckle up. It gets worse.

  Where is meaning in the meteoric passage of time, the speed in which our lives are spent? Where is meaning in
the pits? In the suffering? I think these questions are worth asking.

  Christians would say the answer is simple. Life’s meaning is to seek union with God and be Jesus’ hands and eyes for the people who need help and companionship. AA might also say it is simple: to stay sober one day at a time and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. For Buddhists, the answer is mindfulness, kindness and trying to remember to breathe every so often. Environmentalists want to save the planet for all species—or at least a number of them—and so forth.

  Ram Dass, who described himself as a Hin-Jew, said that ultimately we’re all just walking each other home. I love that. I try to live by it.

  These are true and rich philosophies, but often only on good days.

  What follows here is intended to be useful on the bad days.

  Like life, this book is a patchwork of moments, memories, connections and stories that I’ve found help steer me in the direction of answers that will hold, for now and even over time. They are observations that in troubled times help me find my way once again to what T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”

  For instance, maybe we can all agree that meaning is always going to have to do with love, and furthermore, that children should not get cancer, or be shot, and that our old must be cared for. Is there really any disagreement on these points? What about when your whole world goes crazy, your body or mind is on the fritz, or your family or government betrays you? What, then, can we agree on? Is anything always true? And if so, why did some of us not get the memo?

  This is not a book on Christian meaning, but some of Christianity’s language and symbols can be useful: doves of comfort and peace, the prodigal son, lepers, Samaritans, loaves of bread. We all know hopelessness; we know Christ crucified when we see it—in the slums of India and Oakland; passed out on city sidewalks; in someone’s early, painful death. We know from resurrection. If I use the word “God,” I sure don’t mean an old man in the sky who loves the occasional goat sacrifice. I mean “God” as Jane Kenyon described God: “I am food on the prisoner’s plate . . . / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden . . . / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge.” I mean “God” as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

  So when hardships and terror appear in our lives, we first ask “Why?” I usually add, “Would it have been so much skin off Your teeth to cut us some slack here?” But then I remember that “Why?” is rarely a useful question. After that, we ask, in a cry from our hearts: What on earth are we supposed to do? It’s perfectly rational to expect or hope for an answer from God—I’ve never thought Job was being unreasonable. I personally would like a lot more stuff around here to make sense. But when something ghastly happens, it is not helpful to many people if you say that it’s all part of God’s perfect plan, or that it’s for the highest good of every person in the drama, or that more will be revealed, even if that is all true. Because at least for me, if someone’s cute position minimizes the crucifixion, it’s bullshit. Which I say with love.

  To use just one Christian example: Christ really did suffer, as the innocent of the earth really do suffer. It’s the ongoing tragedy of humans. Our lives and humanity are untidy: disorganized and careworn. Life on earth is often a raunchy and voilent experience. It can be agony just to get through the day.

  And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, “This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.”

  I asked a wise friend, “Is there meaning in what happened in the slaughter at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown?” He said, “Not yet.”

  Part of this is that we witness such terrible suffering here. Children suffer so; Christ suffers. Then there is the hope of resurrection. Death is not necessarily the enemy, or the end of the story. I assume that the murdered children in Connecticut were welcomed home at the moment of their deaths. I know in my heart that somehow their families have come through and begun to live again. Yet we have to admit the nightmare and not pretend that it wasn’t heinous and agonizing. It wasn’t a metaphor; it was the end of the world. Certain spiritual traditions could say about Hiroshima, Oh, it’s the whole world passing away. Same with the tsunami in Indonesia.

  Well, I don’t know.

  My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.

  It would be great if we could shop, sleep or date our way out of this. Sometimes we think we can, but it feels that way only for a while. To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another’s suffering where that person can see us. To be honest, that sucks. It’s the worst, even if you are the mother of God.

  Mary didn’t say, “Oh, he’ll be back in a couple of days.” She didn’t know this. She stood with her son in the deep unknowing as he died.

  Yet no matter what happens to us—to our children, to our town, to our world—we feel it is still a gift to be human and to have a human life, as long as we ignore the commercials and advertisements and the static that the world beams at us, and understand that we and our children are going to get knocked around, sometimes so cruelly that it will take our breath away. Life can be wild, hard and sweet, but it can also be wild, hard and cruel.

  The bad news is that after the suffering, we wait at the empty tomb for a while, the body of our beloved gone, grieving an unsurvivable loss.

  It’s a terrible system.

  But the good news is that then there is new life.

  Wildflowers bloom again.

  That’s it? you ask. That’s all you’ve got?

  No. I’ve also got bulbs. Well. They’re both such surprises. Wildflowers stop you in your hiking tracks. You want to savor the colors and scents, let them breathe you in, let yourself be amazed. And bulbs that grow in the cold rocky dirt remind us that no one is lost.

  Is that really even true? Wasn’t the Newtown shooter lost?

  Who knows? There’s some disagreement here. I can’t believe that a God of love could throw this kid away. It was not his fault that he was so sick.

  Whether we like it or not, we are somehow interconnected with the shooter, because we are connected to all of life. Thomas Merton wrote, “The one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems [is] that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.”

  Obviously we are worlds away from the shooter. But somehow he was part of the human family. We breathed the same air he did. Some of us choose to believe we are somehow all from God, huddled on this planet, surrounded by a hundred billion other galaxies, and yet will somehow all return to God. Walt Whitman wrote, “Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form—no object of the world. / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing”—although I have to add that evil, sickness, death and there being a hundred billion other galaxies sure complicate the picture. So I could be wrong.

  Whether I’m wrong or not, though, most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is:
life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people’s laundry, if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries.

  We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

  In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, “What on earth are you doing?” The sparrow replies, “I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.” The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, “Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?”

  And the sparrow says, “One does what one can.”

  So what can I do? Not much. Mother Teresa said that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. This reminder has saved me many times. So I showed up to teach Sunday school two days after the Newtown shootings. I didn’t overthink what I would say, because I always end up telling the kids the same things: that they are loved and chosen, that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it; and to keep trusting God, no matter what things looks like and no matter how long an upswing takes. If something awful has occurred, I ask the kids at Sunday school if they want to talk about what has happened, or if they would rather make art.