Grief, Part One

This week was the solstice and in the morning light seeps in, even through the closed blinds and the pulled curtains. I want to keep sleeping, but the light and the birds wake me before seven and once I remember all our simple but complicated plans - Mia's first day of summer "enrichment" with its four part schedule she will need to navigate without her mother, Nora's first day of camp swim lessons which means a return to swim diapers and rubber pants necessitated by the daily dose of Miralax - there will be no returning to darkness and oblivion.

Which is a way of saying that life makes you go on.

My uncle Phil died the first day of June. I had gone to see him in Kansas City two weeks before. For two days I was able to drive Ruth to the nursing home and help her sign the hospice forms and sit with her next to his bed as he slept. For this I will always be grateful. The new room Ruth had requested sat at the end of the hall and Phil had a window that looked on the leaves of an adolescent tree. We sat silently in the dim room, next to his bed, and it felt like a few holy moments of time. I did not want to leave him. I wanted more of him, even if he was only able to answer questions with few words and once, after Ruth complimented his freshly combed hair, make a sweetly funny face that showed a flash of the self-mocking humor we knew as well as we knew the man himself.

He died at the age of eighty-five, long past our expectations, so the news was not a surprise, just painful as a motherfucker.

At the memorial service, however, other surprises fell like a soothing rain - that I was able to plow through the tribute I'd written despite my squealy voice and running nose, that so many dear dear friends and relatives and neighbors came to show their support, including Mike Love from Colorado, that the flowers were so beautiful, that I had no resistance to the minister's traditionally comforting words of future reunions and perfect love, that the chestnut "In the Garden" (Is there a more romantic waltz in the hymnal?) could work wonders on my heart, that my dear old high school friend Tonya would show up and we'd reconcile so easily, that my cousin Jan would delight my girls with gifts of stuffed animals at the post-service lunch, that my brother Ron would decide not to fly back to Denver but instead remain in Kansas City to live closer to family again.

That I could feel these tiny surprises, almost approaching a kind of joy, on such a hard day is, of course, another sign of life breaking through the dulling and numbing binds of grief.

The best moment came back at the house after our girls had a little break at the hotel and the guests had gone. Ron and Randy and Ruth and me and Jeanne and Jan sat in the kitchen and talked and laughed and ate some of the dishes neighbors had kindly brought. The girls had already gobbled their chicken nuggets and asked to go play. The four of us who grew up in this house and the woman who raised us and my husband who helped me make a new family sitting together in one room - it felt like home. Yet as whole as that feeling was, we knew someone was missing from the table and this time he wasn't napping on the couch downstairs or flipping channels in his office. The reminders of his absence were everywhere to seize you up in the chest and gut and bring back some of the dark inside that it will take many mornings to fully let go.

Blackhawks Win the Stanley Cup!

"Chelsea Dagger"

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal

The Little Prince Song

Gone writin'. Here's a song for your patience.

Ballhawks

Ballhawks, the riveting new feature length documentary shot and directed by Mike Diedrich and edited by my dear husband, Randy Palmer, has its North American premiere at the Athens Film Festival this week.

The Chicago premiere will take place Memorial Day weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center downtown. Mike and Randy and several of the Ballhawks will be at the 8:00 Friday night screening. Tickets are available on Ticketmaster or at the Siskel Center box office. You can become a fan of Ballhawks on Facebook, where you'll find more info and some pretty funny outtakes. The trailer is here. (A tip: turn the HD off if the video is slow.)

Here is the description of the film from the Siskel Center site: "You've got to be crazy to be a Cubs fan, and a little bit crazier to be a Ballhawk--one of the glove-wearing true believers who faithfully patrol the streets just beyond Wrigley Field's hallowed ivy-covered walls in the hope of catching an out-of-the-park clout, preferably on the fly. Mike Diedrich's documentary takes an affectionate, amusing, and at times poignant look at this only-in-Chicago obsession and the singular personalities who pursue it: undisputed king Moe Mullins (with over 4,000 lifetime catches), exuberant "rookie" George Field, controversial maverick Super Dave Davison, and many more. The film's specialized subject-matter provides a unique, oblique angle that illuminates sports fandom, the special agonies and ecstasies of Cub fandom, and larger issues that verge on the (gulp) downright philosophical. As one of the Ballhawks says, 'It's all about time...holding onto time.'"

Which hints at the humor, heart and depth of this film. "What will you do with the rest of your life?" asks narrator and Cubs uberfan Bill Murray in the film's opening moments. It's a question worth asking and Ballhawks, like the similarly great documentary, Gates of Heaven, makes us reconsider and, almost to our surprise, understand one of the most unusual of answers.

Ballhawks, 74 minutes, directed by Mike Diedrich, narrated by Bill Murray. Randy Palmer, editor.

Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State Street, Chicago. (312) 846-2800.

Screenings Friday, May 28, 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, May 29, 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, May 30, 5:30 p.m.

Redbud

Five days before my Uncle Phil returned home from the nursing home where he'd spent a couple of months post-hip replacement, the skies opened and burst out a special wind just for the block in suburban Kansas City where Phil and his wife Ruth have lived for five decades. My cousin Jeanne watched the tempest from the kitchen window while my cousin Jan yelled for Ruth to go to the basement and wailed for the fate of the dog still tied to its house in the backyard.

The wind howled through. One of the Redlin's old maples fell on a car but it was Ruth and Phil and Jeanne and Jan's yard that bore the brunt of the blast. The two pin oaks that were already enormous when I was a child cracked and toppled. One fell on the roof of the house; the other crushed a mature magnolia and destroyed the redbud tree Phil used to call mine.

Nancy and me under the west pin oak.

I planted "Cindy's tree" when I was in elementary school. My sister Nancy and I were given tiny saplings to take home one Arbor Day, wet sticks with the roots wrapped in damp paper towels. I put mine in a shady spot next to the magnolia on the east side of the back yard. Nancy planted hers in the side yard, outside our bedroom window. Perhaps it was Phil's casual lawnmower, but her young tree soon disappeared.

The only pic I can find of the redbud alive. In the background, to the left of Jeanne's gorgeously enormous hat.

My redbud tree grew fifteen feet high. It crowded the magnolia and the low branches of the nearby oak. It bloomed tiny clusters of blossoms, beautifully magenta, in the spring before its heart-shaped leaves opened. It lived. The idea, let alone the sight, of an actual tree appearing out of that thin little stick seemed miraculous. I visited the tree with pride nearly every time I returned to the house where I grew up. I looked at the thickening trunk with wonder.

Side yard with destroyed magnolia, treehouse, redbud, pin oak.

There's a sweet temptation to accord metaphorical power to such objects in our lives. How neatly the disappearance of Nancy's little tree glides into place as a floral place marker for her own early vanishing. And the whirlwind that left a quarter acre of wreckage in its wake begs to mimic the emotional upheaval recently begun as Ruth and Jeanne and Jan start to care for the difficult old man on their own, to clean him, feed him, change his sheets, change the bandages that his thin skin requires, to mollify him and attempt the impossible, making him comfortable and content again in his eighty-fourth year.

Granting such significance to that material of the world that becomes snagged by our attention can easily slump into a nearly religious feeling: I could interpret the storm as a kind of punishment, a warning or a sign of greater emotional unrest on the way. Jeanne sent out the note, "I want to run away," a day after Phil's return.

And yet turning my back on the messages I may find in the world could be no less an error of hubris. "It's just weather, Miss Fey," said one of my students once, when I was trying to draw the class's attention to spring and its chemical catalyst for young love. I had to smile at him.

"There's no shade in the back yard anymore," says Ruth. "It's just so open and empty." Sometimes a tree is just a tree and sometimes it never is just a tree.