Grief, Part Two

Oh, I can't even write this. I can hardly say it - the words are so wrong. Katy Maguire died. Her heart broke and now the hearts of those who loved her are cracked open. I'm moving through a fog of magical thinking that still insists I will see her again, hear her big laugh and feel her light and warmth, like a beautiful sun here on earth.

A magic more benevolent than my stricken denials followed our friend Katy everywhere. A few summers back, my brother Ron and I ran into her and her beloved daughter Erin on Sheridan Road. We were all riding bikes, Katy and Erin having survived the rock and water balloon missiles from west side kids as they crossed the neighborhoods on their way to the lakefront from Oak Park. Katy laughed as she us told the story of their journey, laughed big as she always did and you had to laugh with her. Meeting her and Erin on the street may have been just another coincidence in a city full of chance meetings, but like everything Katy touched, it had the air of a magical gift.

At one of her memorials, someone described Katy as a modern day pirate who discovered treasure everywhere and shared it with everyone. Perfect, but you also have to picture her as her brother Mike described her, "always coming in the door dressed like a Himalayan Sherpa with a Chihuahua falling out of her purse." I met Katy through work - you can see an example of her film editing here. A short film she made about her son Patrick won awards when Katy was getting her degree at Columbia College; filmmaker D.P. Carlson featured her in his documentary Chicago Filmmakers on the Chicago River.

The memories fly thick as a flock of birds - dancing on the table at one of Katy's raucous parties after the bride-to-be modeled her new lingerie; serene moments in Katy's garden, an Eden of fern grove, goldfish pool, shady arbor for chess games, great swaths of iris, phlox, rose. Katy imitating her daughter Erin's review of the movie Dragonheart: "Dwagons ah ah fwiends!"

And there was a glorious July day with Katy and Erin and my eight-month old Mia on the beach at Lakeside, Michigan. After sunning and swimming in the sparkle water, Katy grilled veggie dogs while Mia and I rinsed off the sand in their clawfoot tub. Was that the day Erin told me her mom was her best friend? I held my sad little baby girl, who couldn't get comfortable and who would cry the entire hellish Skyway ride home in July third fireworks traffic, and I thought I want that kind of relationship with my daughter.

I had made Katy a pie that day, probably blueberry or raspberry peach, brought it up to the little lakehouse under the trees, but my karmic debt to her remains insurmountably high. She gave and gave and gave. Brought our new little family dinner when Mia was four days old. "I love the way babies cry 'la-la-la,'" she told us, holding Mia in her arms. Two years before that, the summer Randy and I got married, when I was too busy constructing hundreds of flipbook invitations to think about my garden, Katie had showed up at my door with armfuls of orphaned marigolds. With the touch of a loving mother, she planted the seedlings, fed and watered them and promised they would grow. They did, exploded actually, into a gorgeous backdrop for our wedding portraits. And she always modeled for me a kind of mothering I wanted to imitate - one that combined fierce protection with tender and gentle love.

Katy raised Erin and Erin's big brother Patrick with the quiet heroics required of a single mom. Patrick was born with health complications when Katy was twenty-one; Erin is the age now that her mother had her. Patrick now studies environmental sciences and social policy; Erin is studying film, like her mother.

Katy's large and loving family held a memorial for her in Gilson Park on one of the beautiful Saturdays this summer has given us. I rode my bike down to the park, wept at the photos, hugged Patrick and Erin wet from the waves of Lake Michigan, sang the songs, wept more at the heartfelt tributes. At the invitation of Katy's sister, we all raised our hands and called out a thank you to Katy for everything she gave us. It was a beautiful day. When the grief in my chest swelled too heavy to bear, I could look overhead to leaves blowing wild in the wind, look away to the iris blue sky you could see over the harbor and think how much Katy would have reveled in this beauty.

Here is a tribute from one of Katy's yoga friends: http://brookshall.blogspot.com/2010/06/honoring-dead-for-things-we-hold.html

Randy Sent Me This From France

Who needs lingerie or a scarf? My sweet husband has been cutting short movies of the antics of David (the chanteur on the right) as he bumbles around Cannes during the advertising world's version of the film fest. David operates on the whims of the tweeting world - you can send him a request of your own at www.twitter.com/davidondemand - then shoots it all for the world to see. See Randy's work at www.davidondemand.com.

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.