(Making Me Understand is an occasional blog feature where I analyze, in brief or at length, what a particular work of art or an artist means to me right now.)

The bar mitzvah weekend passed in the blink of an eye. All of our preparation paid off and absolutely nothing that mattered was amiss. The tidal wave of joy broke over us and we stood in the surf, blinking and sputtering and smiling from ear to ear.

However, the world continued doing what it does, which is turn. Turn bad, mostly. An old friend, F., lost her beloved sister H. to cancer on Friday, just as we were beginning our celebration. I was simply shattered to receive messages from her, congratulating us, even as she was preparing for the hardest funeral ever.

The collision of good and bad shook loose in my brain a poem that I hadn’t read in a long time. I am fairly certain I was introduced to it in my freshman poetry workshop at University of Maryland, taught by Kim Roberts.

Patricia Goedicke (1931-2006) was born and raised in New England but spent the rest of her life moving westward (to Ohio, then Mexico, and then Montana). In her youth she studied with Robert Frost at Middlebury College, which thrills me because I took part in the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury many years ago, and visited Frost’s cabin there. She also studied with W.H. Auden at what is known today as the 92nd Street Y in New York. I took many wonderful poetry workshops there, when I first moved to NYC.

There are any number of drafts of this poem. I don’t own the collection that it was a prelude to (The Wind of Our Going) so I tried my best to find the version that I read in college. I strongly recommend that you read this poem aloud:

For All the Sad Rain

 

O my friends why are we so weak

In winter sunlight why do our knees knock,

Why do we walk with small steps, ugly

And spindly as baby birds

 

Whose world do we think this is?

O my friends take it,

O my friends don’t look at each other

Or anyone else before you speak.

 

I have had enough of scared field mice

With trembling pink ears,

I have had enough of damp

Diffident handshakes,

 

Do you think I haven’t been stepped on by giants?

Do you think my teachers didn’t stand me in a corner

For breathing, do you think my own father didn’t burn me

With the wrath of a blast furnace for wanting to sit on his knee?

 

Indeed I have been pressed between steamrollers,

I have had both my feet cut off, and the pancreas

And the liver and lungs of the one I love

Have been sucked out of my life and the air around me

 

Has turned to cereal, how will I stand up,

What opinions can I offer but I will not be silent,

There are dogs who keep their skinny tails

Permanently between their legs

 

But also there are sleek horses, as easily as there are curs

There are squash blossoms that flower around fountains

Like white butterflies, there is courage everywhere,

For every reluctant nail-biter

 

There are a hundred raised fists, for every broken broomstick

There are millions of bent grasses snapping

Back and forth at the sky, beating the blue carpet

As hard as they can, with the frail tassels of their hair

 

For every pair of eyes squeezed tight

Under colorless lids there are thousands of others

Wide-open, on the proud columns of their necks turning,

Observing everything like King Radar,

 

O my friends for all the sad rain in heaven

Filling our dinner plates you have ten fingers of honey

Which are your own, stretch them, stick them up

And then, wave to me, put your arms around each other’s shoulders

 

When we meet in a field with no fences

The horizon is yours, and the books and all the opinions

And the water which is wine and the best bed

You can possibly think of to lie in.

 

What a journey this poem is. I adore its audaciously varied line lengths, and the changes in the speaker’s register, which range from the oracular and religious to the informal and everyday. I’m intrigued by “King Radar,” the air that has turned to cereal (not the  kind that waves in the breeze, I imagine, but the soggy kind in your breakfast bowl), and the single stanza that presents a chain of images from horses to curs to squash blossoms to… nail-biters. There truly is something for everyone here. The “field with no fences” connected me immediately to the landscape of the US-Mexico border, and the abject misery of incarcerated migrant children. And yet, the voice here, while obviously traumatized, is clear and strong. It exhorts us not to collapse into ourselves in sadness.

It is no mistake that this poem resurfaced in my consciousness at a time of worldwide and local upheaval. My son became a bar mitzvah at a time when Jews are being attacked and murdered, in our country and around the world. My friend F. lost her sister to cancer in a world where new treatments offer some hope, but not yet anything globally reliable. We are enjoying yet another New Year’s Eve day with temperatures in the 50s and I wonder on a small scale when on earth to get the bulbs in the ground when the alliums I planted last year have already decided the party is starting. I wonder on a large scale what kind of scorched, post-apocalyptic landscape of famine awaits my children in their adult years. We continue never to watch television news with them, or bring any newspaper headlines to the dinner table. I hate keeping them in the dark. But then, the news keeps all of us in a dark, dark place.

I think a lot of us need this poem now more than ever. I know I do. I had a brain MRI yesterday, and because of the holiday, I have not yet gotten a report back from it. (Usually I hear in a matter of hours.) So I’m trying to proceed with my day, but the giant sword that perpetually dangles over my head keeps troubling my peripheral vision. I just need independent confirmation that I am as OK as I feel. But of course nothing is OK, and it is possible nothing has ever been OK. Patricia Goedicke gets that exactly right.

Happy New Year. Let’s all put our sticky honey fingers around each other’s shoulders in solidarity, and wade back out into the mess of the world and try to do some good in it.

 

Dear Young J,

It is the morning of your bar mitzvah. We’ve all spent months getting ready in our own ways — you, by learning to read from the Torah and preparing a short talk discussing the text, but also by being asked to contribute in a larger way to the world. Because today’s Torah reading is so long, others were drafted to help, and now the roster of readers today includes me, J, Savta (my mother), Uncle G, and a friend of ours. You have some kind of power, to make such a thing happen.

In looking for a mitzvah project, you chose to tackle hunger. You serve meals at a soup kitchen once a month. I had the great privilege to work alongside you, the first time you went. Your absolute focus on doing the job right, which includes a smile for every person coming through the line, was all I needed to see to know what kind of adult you will be. You’re one of the good ones.

This weekend is a whirlwind of activity. Family and friends joined us from all around, and the glowing energy produced by all of the love is something incredible to witness. I have been saying for days that it feels like a massive tidal wave of joy is about to hit us. I don’t think that’s just the prednisone talking. I’ve been able to push through all of the planning and long lists of minutiae with a minimum of grumbling, because the cause is such a good and deserving one.

Last night three of your friends from New York joined us at dinner, kids you’ve known for a few years who are a bit older than you. I was stunned to see how tall they’d gotten, one nearly my height now. It occurred to me that these thirteen years were just the blink of an eye. I now understand, but can’t quite understand. We lived this span of time minute by minute, hours waiting for you to nap and then hours waiting for you to wake up, measuring time in baby spoons of mashed peas. Now the units of measure increase.

Young J, it wasn’t a given that I’d be here to see this day. I’ve always soft-pedaled the malignant part of the disease I’ve been marked with for the past six years. Even though I have come so far, and science has come so far, there will always be a question mark at the end of the sentence. I have been off any cancer meds now for at least a month while my eyes heal from the havoc the meds caused.

I never ask you what it is like to be the child of a person with cancer. My disease has worked its way into the fabric of our family, and not only through my endlessly berating you and Young A about protecting yourselves from UV rays. I’ve developed a way to mention as casually as possible whenever I have a scan, and I ask you to wish me luck, and you do. I don’t think anyone involved in that conversational transaction ever considers that one day the outcome might be anything but good. I don’t look forward to that day… even though there is a small part of me that considers the possibility with a perverse kind of excitement — as though I were looking for a new challenge, and nothing but a mortal threat could ever measure up. I scheduled a routine MRI for the Monday after your bar mitzvah and find I am looking forward to it, much as others might anticipate a spa day.

Let’s just proceed as though I get to be your mom forever, or at least for a really long time, OK? Keep making me proud, and I will try to keep doing things that make you proud of me.

Love,

Mama

I was born on this day, on the other side of the equator, three days before I was due, because of a soccer game that was going to snarl traffic on my due date. (I think I was once able to independently verify this, since Pelé was one of the players on one of the teams.) Family folklore also claims my parents were made to pay an extra fee so that I would have an “inny” bellybutton, much coveted in my native country of Brazil.

I’ve spent five years here on the blog navel-gazing, as it were. I introduced my seven year plan here, and I just completed my reflections on year three of it. As a plan it doesn’t stand up to any rigorous external testing. I think I just decided that year four of it will be entirely conceptual and unspoken.

I’ve been meaning to post here for at least a week, because I’ve been back on prednisone for a week now. The ocular toxicities caused by Tafinlar and Mekinist (my former meds) and/or Braftovi+Mektovi (my current meds that I am on hold from taking) have extended to optic neuritis (swelling of the optic nerve), which could lead to permanent vision damage if not dealt with. So once again, I am off the cancer meds, on steroids, and hoping that the cobbled-together approach of retina specialist Dr H (who finally got off his ass last week and reached out to his network and realized a former colleague of his co-authored a paper about the toxicities of these types of targeted therapy), and oncologist Dr L (who is kind of on my shit list at the moment for giving me the impression that it would be fine to start tapering off steroids as soon as I started them — which turned out to be contrary to Dr H’s feelings on the matter).

How is prednisone this time around? As sneaky as always. A week in, my face is beginning to show signs of the moon-like contours it takes on, and my sleep patterns are predictably trashed. It is starting to feel normal to wake before it’s light. The kids are surprised to see me up and about before 7:30.

I have some of the steroid rage, but it seems to be largely channeled towards one particular task that lends itself to obsessive repetition: learning to chant a significant amount of Torah in preparation for Young J’s upcoming bar mitzvah. I haven’t read Torah in a number of years, and certainly not thirty verses of it! So I’ve been practicing for hours, in a kind of fever dream, establishing connections between the text and the melody that only exist within my brain and possibly would not survive going off prednisone. If a God exists and is listening (take all the time you need to ponder that, I’ll be here when you come back), then that God must be very surprised to hear me so completely immersed in this one small section of the Torah.

So now, I am secretly hoping I will still be on steroids through the end of the month. The weight gain, so far, isn’t happening, because I’ve been vigilant about eating for the past couple months, and am trying to keep it that way.

In scans news, I had a good result to a CT scan last week, and have a brain MRI awaiting me at the very end of the year.  I am continuing to be, in my own parlance, a “long-term remitter.”

So, I look ahead to the bar mitzvah that is coming soon. I look back towards the entirety of 2019, the very first full calendar year that elapsed without my father in the world. And I realize that to get through such a momentous rite of passage for my son and my family without looking like a bedraggled, snotty mess, I need some tactics, some techniques for keeping the tears at bay. I turn to one of my two “secret internets” for advice. Some parties say, “Why fight the tears? After all, you didn’t think you’d be here.” (Cue TEARS WHILE PARTICIPATING IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT HOW TO STOP TEARS). But then someone quietly discloses that they have a way. A way that sounds counterintuitive, but which I am finding is actually working. You must smile. Hard. With your whole face but especially with your eyes. And I’ve been practicing, because life basically presents opportunities for me to dissolve into tears on a daily basis. Turns out it can work. It does something to your tear ducts. It is hard work but perhaps worth it not to have smeared mascara and a desperate need for tissues that I never seem to have.

Of course, my practice sessions have often been around the kids, who find my suddenly-smiling face unfamiliar, horrible, and amusing, and now take to chanting “creepy clown face!” just as I am trying not to cry. Sometimes it makes me laugh. This morning, before Young A left for school, he brought me the dog-eared Beatles book with the fallen apart binding which my brother G gave me for my seventh birthday, and summoned me to the piano to sing “Let It Be” while he played it for me. It’s hard to sing when you’re forcing a smile and your kid’s face is beaming up at you as he bangs the chords loudly over your voice. I eventually erupted in a sobbing guffaw, release and relief oozing from every pore, because damnit, it’s my birthday, and I’ll cry while I laugh and sing if I want to.

“I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.”

https://youtu.be/ii6kJaGiRaI