Je voudrais un croissant, s'il vous plait.

I was going to call my minister just now. I haven’t spoken to her in years, nor have I set foot in her church, but I know she’d speak with me as though no time had passed. That’s what ministers like her do.

But I realized, I’m not having a crisis in faith. I’m having a crisis in people.

Having my mom and my aunt pass away has been difficult enough. Writing a semi-autobiographical book and facing my life – including my dad, the only one left, who was a pathetic father and who I am now in charge of because he sits paralyzed in a nursing home – makes everything worse.

Why do people think writing about things is cathartic? Is it cathartic to open a vein and bleed out? That’s what this process feels like. I do get satisfaction from writing well, but not from the act of getting it “all out.” Frankly, I feel like I may puke. But I write on. It’s my mission. This much I know, because every time I’ve tried to veer off my path the universe has plopped me right back on it, sometimes kicking and screaming. I don’t fight it anymore. I just write.

The behavior of some people has been utterly appalling¸ and unfortunately it continues to be. There’s a pain in my heart and it’s been put there by humanity (which is not an appropriate name for many of the inhuman occupants of this planet.) Near the end of her diary, Anne Frank wrote that she still believed people were good at heart. Then they put her to death in a concentration camp. What is that?

Still, I write. It’s my job.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself right now, other than write. My plan is to move to Europe eventually, where at least if someone is unkind I probably won’t understand them. It’s the benefit of being a hermit without actually being one. The country will probably be France, because I studied French for about eight years, so I can successfully order a croissant. And yet, I can never get what they are saying in conversations because they speak so fast. Perfect.

Until then, what will I do? Where will I go? I don’t know. I have a house I can’t deal with, plus my mother’s house which I really can’t deal with. The few people I can count on for support have problems (and lives) of their own. The people I ought to be able to count on, I can’t.

Maybe this turmoil is part of grief. Or maybe I just see things more clearly now.

Or maybe this isn’t turmoil at all – just a turning point.

By the way, lest you think I’m despairing of life – I’m not. I feel grateful to be alive, to have my children and the people I can truly call “friends.” It’s the “others” I can’t reconcile. Like an innocent, I still don’t understand why people hurt each other, and why they throw good love away.

Silly me.

Grief: It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

             I've always been awkward with death.

            Not that anyone copes well –though maybe they do. Like Grandma Mazur in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. A wake is a social event for Gramdma – not to be missed. Of course that’s fiction, but I wonder, does anyone handle death with ease? (Morticians do, of course. How do they feel when someone close dies? And how to they manage to confront man’s mortality every day, and "pretty up" what remains? They are either the most well-adjusted people in the world, or the most f---ed up.)

            Faced with the passing of friends’ loved ones through the years, I’d been unable to deal with wakes (are they called wakes because they’re in the wake of lives?) and Shiva calls. I just couldn’t bear the sorrow – theirs, and mine.

            I’ve always felt a universal empathy, which either helps me be a writer or is the reason I’m a writer – or both. But when it comes to living, it’s a problem, because I feel everyone’s pain. I absolutely avoid the news for this reason.

            And death has been the worst. I do believe the end of a life is not the end of a soul, but it’s the pain of those left behind I can’t take.

            My neighbor Harriet died a few years ago. They sat Shiva right across the street from me. I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t. About a year later I summoned up to write a note to her husband and leave it on his door. I apologized for not paying a call. I explained that I didn’t handle death well. I told him I loved Harriet – and I did. I closed it with this: “Harriet tried her hardest to be a good person and help people, and you can’t ask for more than that.” It was the truth.

            My friend’s husband died suddenly at work, leaving her with two young children and another on the way. She was, understandably, consumed with grief. I told her, “You have to remember the love you shared, and you have to believe that he’s in a better place.”

            She stopped weeping for a moment, looked at me and said, “I don’t care about all that. I just want my husband back.”

            And I got that. And I didn’t know what to say.

            I still don’t.

            There is nothing to say when someone dies. I mean, there are lots of things to say, but none of them will do a thing to console those left behind. It's our friendship and love that comforts them, I realize now. It's what we don’t say. That’s another reason why it’s so hard for me to deal with death. I’m a writer. I rely on words. If words can’t be counted on, what then?

            But the grief has been the heart of my problem. The grief that surged up like a tidal wave, threatening to drown me.

            The grief is what held me at bay, unable to effectively be present during those times of loss.

            It’s a relief to know that I’m better at my own grieving than at comforting others. Perhaps because I write about my life, I’ve given great thought to the day I’d lose my mother.

            Still, it was a shock. Isn’t death always the last thing expected? Even if she was eighty-one, clearly suffering from the early stages of dementia (which I knew too well from my Aunt Olga.) Despite these factors, I never thought the police would have to break down my mother’s door to find her in bed (not expecting to die anytime soon, she hadn’t given me a key, and I’d never thought to ask for one.)

            And it was a sucker punch, this loss. Coming on the heels of losing my aunt.

            But I’m okay. Handling it much better than the previous deaths I’d been exposed to. I guess death has become more familiar. Maybe that’s the morticians’ secret. Familiarity.

            I have my mom’s cat. The poor thing looks to be about twenty years old, bowlegged and all spine. She yowls incessantly and follows me everywhere. She’s hideously mean to my other felines, who take up a Halloween "black cat" defensive stance which I'd never seen in person before. 

            I have my mom’s things. Her favorite scarf. The pictures she carried of my sons. The meticulous notes she took while watching Dr. Oz. The tutu I wore when I was six, which was hanging in her bedroom. Her many, many papers I’m sorting through.

            I have to deal with the things she left behind. Everything.

            I hear her voice, asking the questions she always posed. She had so many questions. I only hope she’s got some clarity now.

            I was raised without religion, but I know this is not the end.  It’s hard not knowing just what this is, and what we are in relation to our dead. I guess that’s where the faith comes in.

            The faith that was never instilled in me.

            Death is, among other things, a lesson in faith. Death and faith are both so vague;  both so muddied by our frenzied, fruitless attempts to explain and complicate them. Untampered with, they are simple.

            They are calm.

            I’m trying to follow their lead.

Tightrope Tuesday: Walking the Holiday High Wire, While Parenting

            I never learned how to ride a bicycle.

            My mom bought me one, but never taught me how to ride it. I mentioned this to her once, when I was grown. She looked at me with contempt and told me, “You should’ve taught yourself.”

            If there is a child who taught him or herself how to ride a bike, I applaud them. I did not have to gumption to try such a thing. I was alone all the time and it was sad enough. I didn’t want to be alone on the ground with a scraped knee, or worse, crying with no one to hug me.

            My ex-husband tried to teach me once, but I couldn’t get past the terror of letting go of my gravity.

            My son Casey tried also, when he was about nine. I had to beg him to give up. It was like I was the child.

            Some things are meant to happen in childhood. When you’re an adult, they’re so much harder.

            Faith is like that for me. I wasn’t exposed to much in the way of it when I was little. Certainly not organized religion. We did celebrate Christmas, but to me it was a time when Santa brought gifts. I thought everyone had a Christmas tree – until I moved to the Five Towns. There, in second grade, I was questioned unmercifully by the other kids. They wanted to know if I was Catholic or Jewish. I had never heard of either of these things, but I desperately wanted to belong. I asked my mom about it that night. She said, “Tell them you’re agnostic.” She didn’t bother explaining, but even if she did it wouldn’t have mattered. Agnostic was not a choice!

            I went back and said I was half-Jewish and half-Catholic. I wanted to be liked be everyone. Instead, no one embraced me.

            There is probably more to this that I’ve blocked out. Our minds try to shield us from the little horrors of our youth. Suffice to say that faith was hard to come by, because I wasn’t quite sure what it even was.

            My aunt was a late-blooming Buddhist. She tried to teach me. I loved my aunt very much, but her zealous, in-your-face method of meditation instruction was not kid-friendly. I really wanted to like it, but I didn't. I couldn't even understand it. All I knew was that you were supposed to say, “Mu.”

            That I have been brought to any faith at all shows us that miracles happen. I do believe in God, but not in the traditional sense. I know there is a power watching over me, guiding me, taking care of me – if I let it. I call it "God" because everyone else does. I could just as easily call it "Harry."

            All of this makes the holiday season a challenge. So many people have their religious rituals and traditions. Then there’s me – with a deep spirituality, but not belonging to any of the groups that bind people together. I tried being a Uniterian. I still call myself one. But after a few months of services I couldn’t handle it anyone. It felt confining. And redundant. The initial comfort I felt in the church was gone.

            My children have no religion. They seem okay with it, perhaps because I explained the concept of religion to them and why they don't have one. I just couldn’t impose something on them that I couldn’t embrace myself. Casey went to the Uniterian Sunday School for a while. But he grew weary of it around the same time that I decided to stop attending services. It was good timing.

            This is not meant to be a condemnation of organized religion. I’m simply saying that it’s not for me.

            So what is Christmas without Christ? Well, it’s a time to show the people you love just how much you appreciate them. It’s a time for gratitude.

            Even though I've come to this conclusion, I get very sad around the holidays. It’s like I'm walking a highwire above all my ghosts of Christmases past, and they're poised to engulf me - smother me - if I fall. And yet, I have to be a parent. Someone who provides guidance, without having known any - and solace, without having experienced any. I have no idea what I'm doing. 

            But the hardest thing is the very thing that redeems me.

            Parenting is my saving grace. My children love me unconditionally, as I love them.

            How can I be a good mother during the holidays? By doing what I do best: Loving my kids.

            And taking that leap of faith: That everything else will follow.