Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  Sara had very calmly watched her girls go, and I could see that these days, her daughters were the wall with the donkey on it. We stood outside for a while longer, talking about this last flare-up, how frightened Sara had felt, how tired. And I didn’t know what to say at first. Except that we, their friends, all know that the rains and the wind will come, and they will be cold—oh God, will they be cold. But then we will come, too, I said; we will have been building this barn all along, and so there will always be shelter.

  Falling Better

  Last year, a few days after Easter, I was invited to Park City, Utah, to give some lectures, and had scammed a free ski week out of the deal. Sam had invited his friend Tony along, and I invited my friend Sue Schuler. She was a great companion, younger than I, but already wise, cheeky, gentle, blonde, jaundiced, emaciated, full of life, and dying of cancer.

  She said yes. She had always loved to ski and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I started skiing only six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering issues. I fall fairly often, and can’t get up, but I enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations, and abject despair—sort of like real life.

  No one in her family, including Sue, was sure whether she would able to ski, or if she would even make the trip at all. Except for me. No one could have known that she would die one month after my invitation. At any rate, I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she’d at least want to try. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again—she had cancer of the everything by then—and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. I felt that that would make up for a lot. Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

  Sue said yes, she’d meet me in Park City.

  I’d only met her over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a kind of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. And call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. However, I felt God’s hand in this, or at any rate, God’s fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch funny left-wing Christian friend for Sue.

  It was March of 2001. The wildflowers weren’t in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn’t opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that her liver and lungs had developed tumors. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but the reason she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me was that various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the sort of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.

  Also, some of her evangelical friends had insisted sorrowfully that her nieces wouldn’t get into heaven, since they were Jewish, as was one of her sisters. So I said what I believe to be true—that there was not one chance in a million that the nieces wouldn’t go to heaven, and if I was wrong, who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, we’d refuse to go. We’d organize.

  “What kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?” she asked over the phone.

  That was the beginning of our friendship, which unfolded over a year and some change, a rich, condensed broth of affection and loyalty, because there was no time to lose. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was when we met: I hadn’t expected that earthy, dark irreverence to belong to such a beauty. She started coming to my church soon after, and we talked on the phone every week. I had one skill to offer, which is that I would just listen. I did not try to convince her that she could mount one more offensive against the metastases. I could hear her, hear the fear, and also her spirit.

  Sue called on New Year’s Day of 2002 in tears, to say she knew she was dying.

  I just listened for a long time; she went from crushed to defiant. “I have what everyone wants,” she said. “But no one would be willing to pay.”

  “What do you have?”

  “The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I’m not afraid of dying anymore.”

  She got sicker and sicker. It was so unfair—I wanted to file a report with the Commission on Fairness, and I still want to ask God about this when we finally meet. That someone so lovely and smart and fabulous was going to die, and that horrible people I will not name were going to live forever—it broke your heart. At the same time, she had so much joy. She loved her family, her friends, and eating. She ate like a horse. I have never known a woman who could put it away like Sue. Her body was stick thin, and on top of it all, the skin on one leg was reptilian with the twenty-two skin grafts from her knee up past her hip—which she’d needed after contracting a flesh-eating disease at a hospital after one of her countless cancer surgeries.

  I ask you.

  This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing—another thing I’d like to bring up with God. Bodies are so messy and disappointing. Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.

  Sue and I met one last time, on the Thursday after Easter of 2002, in Park City, to celebrate the Easter holiday privately, a week late. We shared a king-size bed in the condominium. Sam and his friend Tony took the other room, reducing it to Pompeii within an hour. Then, their work completed, they shook us down for sushi money and headed out for the wild street life of Park City.

  The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the death. He came back with a body, not like Casper or Topper. He didn’t come back as the vague idea of spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, He had died, and then you could touch Him, and He could eat, and these four things are as bodily as life gets.

  The first thing Sue and I did was locate a beautiful Easter Week service online, and we followed it to the book. Well—sort of to the book, in the reform sense of “followed” and “book.” The first night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, commemorating when Jesus had Passover with his disciples before his arrest and gave them all communion. We used Coca-Colas for wine and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for the bread broken in remembrance of Him.

  Then we washed each other’s feet. Jesus had washed His disciples’ feet, to show that peace was not about power; it was about love and gentleness, about being of service. Washing Sue’s feet was incredibly scary. I did not feel like Jesus at first. I felt very nervous. I don’t actually like to wash my own feet. But we put some soap in a Tupperware dish tub, and she sat on the couch, and I lifted her feet into the warm water and then washed them gently with a soapy washcloth. And then she washed mine.

  I watched her sleep beside me in bed off and on all night. Sometimes she was so still that I was sure she was dead. She looked like a beautiful corpse, slightly yellow, slightly smelly, ethereal. And then she’d snore softly or open her eyes and look at me. “Hi, Annie,” she’d say in a small voice.

  In the morning after breakfast, the four of us took the ski lift to the summit. The boys disappeared. Sue was wearing a lavender ski jacket, and she weighed 110 pounds, on a five-foot-nine-inch frame, and she was wobbly and trembling. People turned to stare at her, because she was yellow and emaciated. She smiled; people smiled back. She had great teeth. “Oh yeah, and I used to be built,�
�� she said, as we got our bearings in the snow. “I used to have a rack on me.” We stood together at the summit, staring at the mountain range and an endless blue sky, and then I suddenly fell over. She helped me up, and we laughed and then headed down the mountain.

  Sue hadn’t been on the slopes for years, and she moved gingerly at first; the air was thin and she had cancer in her lungs. Then she pushed down hard on her poles, and took off farther down the mountain. At some point she turned around and waited for me, and as soon as I saw her, I stopped and fell over. There I was, sprawled in the snow, with my skis at an angle over my head, like Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis.” She waited for me to get up and ski to where she stood, and then she taught me one of the most important things I’ll ever learn—how to fall better. She pointed out that when I fell, I usually didn’t fall that hard. “You’re so afraid of falling that it’s keeping you from skiing as well as you could. It’s keeping you from having fun.” So each time I fell, I lay there a minute, convinced I had broken my hip, and then she would show me how to get back up. Each time, I’d dust the snow off my butt, look over at her, and head down the mountain. Finally, after she saw that I could fall safely, she tore off down the slope.

  We celebrated Good Friday that night. It’s such a sad day, all loss and cruelty, and you have to go on faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it. I hate that you can’t prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I’d have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check to see if you’re on the right track as you go along. But nooooooo. Darkness is our context, and Easter’s context: without it, you couldn’t see the light. Hope is not about proving anything. It’s choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim bleak shit anyone can throw at us.

  After the Good Friday service, Sue wanted to show me her legs, the effects of all the skin grafting. The skin was sort of shocking, wounded and alien as snakeskin.

  “Wow,” I said. She let me study her skin awhile. “I have trouble with my cellulite,” I said, guiltily.

  “Yeah,” she answered, “but this is what me being alive looks like now.”

  She had fought so militantly for her body over time, but she was also tender and maternal with it. She took long, hot baths at night, and then smoothed on lotions.

  We slept well. The next morning we celebrated Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, when Jesus is dead and hidden away in the tomb, and nothing makes sense, and no one knows that He’s going to be alive again. His disciples had left Golgotha even before He died—only a few women remained at the cross. So the disciples skulked off like dogs to the Upper Room, to wait, depressed and drunk—or at least, this is what I imagine. I certainly would have been, and I would have been thinking, “We are so fucked.” Father Tom adds that there was a lot of cigarette smoke that night, and Monday-morning quarterbacking.

  One thing Sue wanted to do before she died was to get a massage, to be touched sensuously again, so we decided to get massages on Holy Saturday.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, as we walked to the salon. “You don’t see a lot of bodies like Sue Schuler’s here in Park City, Utah.”

  She got a gorgeous male Indian masseur. He looked like Siddhartha. I got a tense white German woman. Sue and the Indian man walked off together, and she looked over her shoulder with such pleasure that they might have been going to their bridal suite.

  My masseuse looked like she was impatient to start slapping me.

  When I saw Sue again, an hour later, she smelled of aromatic lemon oil. I asked, “Did you feel shy at all?”

  “Nah!” she said. “Not after I gave him a tour of the Bod.”

  Sue got up early on Sunday, the day we were leaving. The sun was pouring through the windows, the sky bright blue. She no longer looked jaundiced. She was light brown, and rosy. She made us her special apricot scones for breakfast. I tried to discourage her at first, because I didn’t want her feelings to be hurt if the boys turned up their noses. “The boys won’t eat apricot scones,” I insisted. “They eat cereal, Pop-Tarts . . . traiiff!”

  “Oh, the boys’ll eat my scones,” she said slyly. And they did. They ate all but four, which she packed up for us to take on the plane. Two actually made the drive to the airport in Salt Lake City. They were small, pale yellow, flecked with orange apricots, gone by the time we arrived home.

  Ground

  Voices

  The good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets.

  A great friend who became a grandmother this week is already being tortured by the baby’s parents and the grandbaby mama’s family, and the baby is five days old. My friend wrote to say she was trying for compassion and focus on the big picture. I wrote back that these go only so far. What really helps is radical self-care, and revenge.

  Okay, I was just kidding about the revenge. Sort of.

  I will say that in the face of this, maybe patience is not an awful thing to practice. The alternative is to jack oneself up with passionate convictions, self-righteousness, wounded silence, and blackmail, like dear old Mom and Dad used to do. Hey, how did that go? Pretty well? Helping pump Dad out of his bizarreness, so there’d be Reaganomics trickle-down, and thus Mom would be semi-okay, and then maybe the kids?

  The last time I had a chance to choose between the old ways and the new was a month ago, when various family members, me included, had fallen, each in separate areas, into hardships that simply couldn’t all be happening at once but were—legal, mental, custody, spousal. And health. So we gathered around the dinner table at my house, to which we had brought roast chicken and heirloom tomatoes, cheese, brown rice, and buttery Brussels sprouts with lemon and soy, along with what everyone had secretly brought to the feast, the indigestible sorrows of life.

  Over dinner, we threw everything old-school at our problems—intelligence and wit and compassionate listening, and also the unconscious effort to power up, by taking inventory of all the offending parties. We had a bright conversation, and lots of attack humor, everyone zinging like electrified molecules. And there I sat, cute wise Annie, being the butt of most of the comical attack humor, fending it all off while feeling more and more vulnerable and wishing they would leave.

  That night, after everyone left, I cleaned up the kitchen, which is always my favorite part of any dinner party, even at my own house. Then, as I was walking toward my bedroom, past the riverbanks of my grandson’s and niece’s toys and art supplies, I heard a high-pitched, warped voice. It said, clear as a bell, “Annie.” I stopped and looked around. Obviously I had imagined it. I did not hear it again and attributed it to a brain glitch. But when I got to my bedroom door, it called to me again, “Annie,” like a sick, witchy, ancient woman. I went back to investigate. It was deeply weird, with no possible explanation, unless the
dogs were punking me. Or, more likely, the cat. When I didn’t see anything that could possibly explain it, I went to bed.

  A few nights later, there it was again, without warning, and I wondered if I was losing my mind. Not, I might add, for the first time in my life.

  It gave me the chill. It made me feel desperately alone. Like everyone, I’ve had a huge lifelong package of fear and self-doubt that was always waiting to claim me, which I’ve tried rather successfully to keep contained, but now there seemed to be a leak in the vessel. A friend once called this sense of being too alone “the desperate plain,” the looming desolate stretch of ground, no trees to shelter you, no water, no way to escape, nowhere to hide or find comfort, strewn with rocks and a few random snake holes. You are stripped down existentially, you are naked, you are nuts.

  The third time I heard the voice, I thought, “It’s come for me.” The “it” was the spooky internal voice made external, the black-dog voice of insomnia and hangovers. All the specters I’ve imagined and suppressed for fifty years were finally coming for me. I could hear this voice out loud, in my living room, wheedling: “Annie.”

  It was filled with supplication and despair, and taunting, like an earworm, the piece of music you get in your ear and try to shake, like a dog with a foxtail, but it won’t let you go—it could be a jingle for a plumber or Metamucil. Only this one was the brainworm that has been there since I was a child, beneath all the activity, distractions, success and obsession and brilliant conversations and busyness and horns honking.

  It is the voice containing the knowledge that my parents’ lives were insane, and that caused me to be insane, too, and that will cause the little ones to be insane, too, someday.