make it beautiful

Sometimes the realizing-one's-youngest-child-is-growing-up sadness hits me. Hard. I have to reckon with the fact that there will be no more babies, that I am much older now, that we are well into another time in life marked by soccer games, math homework, pleas for phones, shifting boundaries. 

But I breathe a sigh of relief when I think that Beatrice's recent confrontation with the terrible inevitability of death marks the last time I will walk closely with a three year old through that singular developmental milestone's anguish. (Also, thank heavens there will be no more potty training, or worry over weaning a toddler). But back to death. I went through it with Frances and Gabriel at this age, and it broke my heart into a million pieces then too. Not that the process is over - not that it's ever really over. But the initial realization has hit.

I can't in good conscience tell you about the conversation that came about and then escalated at the dinner table in such a way that all of our hearts broke together. With Mike and especially my older children involved, I can't really tell the story of something so intimate - I think it is theirs to tell. I have to make space to allow my growing dear ones to articulate these sacred, saturated moments for themselves. 

In the On Being interview with Marie Howe that I referenced recently, she said that art is a kind of safe container for the brute, painful knowledge we all live with, which is that all our earthly relationships will end. Death will take us away from our children, from the ones we most adore. It's the separation, I think, that evokes the anticipatory grief and terror. But art can hold those feelings for us, rendering them tolerable, even beautiful, even transcendent. 

Children especially love to tap-dance around death. They are drawn to the ghoulish: Halloween, ghosts, skeletons, mummies. I'm going to kill you! they holler at one another in the heat of play (and argument). They love games with names like Murder. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die! All these songs and games are ways to get close to the finality of death while keeping it wrapped safely in melody and story.

And then I think of Beatrice's anguish last night, sitting in my lap, asking over and over again: will I die? do people die? without the aid of art, nor any armor at all - with her bare defenseless soul exposed. She experienced a kind of agony that merited the rending of garments, the tearing of hair. For real. 

When it became unbearable, and also late, I told her it was time to read some stories. Frances and Gabriel sat with us, all exhausted by sadness, all gathered around picture books. They were a balm. And then Beatrice requested four songs, instead of our usual two, at bedtime: The Dock (which I figured out a few days ago means the Doxology) and Amazing Grace, please, then Red River Valley and Wild Mountain Thyme. As I sang I felt how these beloved songs are about the same things: God's grace and love, the pain of endings and goodbyes, the inevitable changes life brings, the joy of connection. They make beautiful, hold-able, the truths that define our lives together.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

After all the tearful children were put to bed, I stretched out on the couch and read and read until it was very late and I had finished Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. I could not put it down; I barely breathed. I hesitated before picking it up, because I knew it would not offer distraction to my weary heart (unlike Narcos, my first choice, but Mike wouldn't watch it with me - it was already too late). Rather it would take me down further into its brokenness.

Which was true. But it rendered the pain of loss just-bearable, and exquisitely beautiful too. Reading that book was like being in someone else's dream, mixing memory and fear, the immersive sensations of childhood, the words we say and don't say, into a narrative that flowed with a logic all its own.

August, the narrator, is grappling with overwhelming loss. Of her intimate friendship with three other girls she says we opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

The phrase stayed with me. I started a new job this week, one in which I will have the honor of listening to the burning stories of others, and the ashen stories too, that live dry and bitter deep in the gut. I think it is the work I am meant to do. But without art, it would be impossible.