Breathing

I have been watching my son’s breaths since he was born, 22 years ago in a cabin in the woods, welcomed by his sister and brother and father, welcomed to a circle of light and peace by his midwives.

Nights watching your child breathe can be long sometimes. The terrors of pneumonia, the times I sat up holding him against my body, willing his breath to continue, in, out, in, moment by moment while the moon crossed the sky and the dawn slowly unfolded, with birdsong & exhaustion—those were times at the edge.

I almost fell. It was an April morning the last time I seriously considered an early exit from this beautiful and painful world, an exit in which I felt I had to take my fragile child. I am a good mother.

I sought and received help. But I have faced inner and outer bleakness, and these nights as I set up machines to help my boy relax and breathe and sleep, as I adjust the mask and hoses, as I time my heartbeats by the pulse of oxygen, and do not sleep, I consider this fragile world.

There’s a rush of image and information. There’s my throat closing with grief.

My son stopped speaking during the bombing of Gaza two years ago, first telling me he loved all his family but, as he said, “thinking hurts too much”. Be-fore that he had begged me to save the children, to stop the walls from falling, to deal with the wolves that came out of the air and frightened him.

Last night I read of two NATO bombings in Libya and I gasped with pain. Yes, one was the strike—such an innocuous word, like the lighting of a birthday candle—that murdered Khadafi’s 29 year old youngest son, and three grand-children under 12.

I felt the walls falling, as I do each time I see those dry reports across a geography of pain—a wedding party, a young soldier, a marketplace, a dance, a school, a hospital.

The other report from Libya was of the bombing of a school for children who, like my son, have Down Syndrome.

I remember a photo from Iraq, maybe 5 years ago, from such a school. Smiling children who looked a bit like Gabe danced in a careful circle, wearing bright paper hats, as the sky shattered with bombs.

Sometimes my son’s efforts to get oxygen to his heart and fingertips and brain only get him to a bit above 60% of the 100% oxygen the human body craves.

I think we are all gasping for air now. Gasping for hope, compassion, sense.

I watched the Royal Wedding as I timed Gabe’s breaths and monitored the machines. Such lovely lace, such luxurious satin. How sweet the little brides-maids, with their lily of the valley crowns, and how pretty the row of trees. Hornbeam trees, beautiful trees of the ancient British forests, brought into the abbey to make a pretty, artificial forest to delight our eyes. Oh, I love romance and happily ever after. Yes, I once was sure I was a lost princess, when I was four.

It passed the time, this wedding. For a while I didn’t think of children dying or truth tellers imprisoned, of babies without their mothers, of lost elders, of hungry people right on my own mainstreet, of despair. I just thought, gratefully, how pretty, my mind a wash of white satin and bridal bouquets.

And then I kept trying to breathe myself, adjusting the machines, the darkness there. My son was sleeping well. Dawn came again, with birdsong and a wash of pink light.

And I don’t know, really, what to do with this precious world but to love it. And I don’t know what to do with all the wrongs I see but name them.

And keep breathing.

The leaves drift

Yes, the rains have set in. Before the first rain, nearly a month ago, with the wind from the south and the falling leaves scattered over my porch, I met a young guy on a bicycle and we talked philosophy and politics and community and literature in the warm bookstore.

The next day, early, he was back. "I don't know if this is the right place to say this..." he started, and I said "go on". The first raids on the homeless encampments had begun, he said. He was sleeping on what is called the Island--a triangle of land between road and freeway, up above the cliff that goes down to the river. And the police came. They were cordial enough. They gave him 15 minutes to get his gear, his bike, his food, and leave.

And they told him the other gear, the tents, the sleeping bags, the clothing--all would be taken to the landfill.

Because it was trash. Because the people who slept there were...well no, they didn't call them trash. Desperate. Homeless. "undesirables".

My new friend had met some of the people camping there, and knew they weren't around, and worried. I told him he had of course come to the right place, and my partner and our beat up pickup went out to the Island and loaded up the survival gear and the real trash.

I spent the next day getting word to the street, washing clothes and blankets, bagging things, trying to preserve these little bits of people's lives.

I also sent out a message to everyone I could think of in my local circle of contacts, explaining the situation and asking for warm clothes, sleeping bags, survival gear.

Because--bottom line--please, no one die this winter. No one die because you were rousted and hounded and suffering on the street and in the woods. Oh please, not on my watch. Let me keep you safe.

A week later the next camp was hit. No notice. Earnest, intelligent, sweet officers of the law, just following orders, a little sad about it, but what to do? This time an ally of mine picked up the raid on her police scanner and hightailed it in and snatched up gear from the truck headed to the dump. The driver said "it's just trash". Deb showed me the "trash"--tents, papers, blankets.

And we were sorting through the gear on the porch, trying to figure out where the people were, and what belonged to whom. As we stood there, a young man came up to me and said "oh, sleeping bags? Oh, all my stuff was taken, could I have one?"

Not those, I said, but I did have one for him. And I invited him inside. And he told me his story.

"So, I tried to jump off the bridge," he said, fairly calmly. "Cause, I wanted to die" he said, with equal calm.

I nodded. Been there, I said, it can get pretty dark at that place.

So the police took him to the mental institution in the north, about an hour by car. And held him the allotted 72 hours. And then he was released.

"So, I walked south" said he. "And after a while I got pretty tired, and it was dark and cold and so I went to sleep beside the road. I covered myself in cardboard boxes to try to stay warmer"

I nodded. He had walked, in the night, about 20 miles.

Have you eaten? I asked. Yes, he said. The nice man who picked him up in the town he'd slept in treated him to breakfast, and brought him here to my shop, because, he said, this was a good place.

He was going to call his mother, who lives in Austin, Texas. He didn't want to call from my phone. We talked a while longer, and in the notebook he carries, under his mother's contact information, I wrote my name, address, and phone number. And told him, as I've told so many of the young wanderers, that I answer the phone and that I accept collect calls. So if ever it would be of help...call me, I said.

He had just turned 17. He had beautiful dark eyes and a sweet smile. We talked a bit longer, but he was ready to be on his way, clutching my list of resources and his new sleeping gear. He said they call him DJ on the street.

Stay on the planet a little bit longer, won't you? I asked. You have things to do here, you are needed. Think about it.

Yes, he left. And I think of him every day, through the new raids--every encampment within a 10 mile radius has been "cleared" now. This doesn't mean that my friends are gone, just that they are having to scramble more as the icy rains fall and frost makes the hillsides glitter.

The local county supervisor dropped by to talk with me yesterday. My Maine coon cat sat on his knee and Champ gazed at him hopefully, though the guy says he's not a dog person. He'd come bringing some warm jackets and little soaps and such. I thanked him. He was enroute to talk with the police; I told him to give them my best regards, but that I had major problems with the illegal raids being conducted. He told me he had only a minute or two, but nicely pinned by my helpful animals he stayed an hour. And he'll be back.

What I told him was...well, no dead kids or dead elders or dead anyone from hypothermia on my watch. And...what I've been telling everyone these days...that I'm ruthless. I'm going to use every bit of light or energy or compassion I can find in anyone. I'm going to seek it out. I'm going to find it in the officers of the law and in the people on the street and in myself. And somehow, somehow, we are going to make a circle of compassion in which no one, no one is going to have to wander the roads and sleep covered in cardboard and look at bridges as means of ending it all.

The beautiful leaves are drifting down with the rain. Beautiful souls are drifting by on the streets. Somewhere, somehow, they must be held and cherished.

April, that complicated month

I wonder what it is about April that breaks my heart? It is certainly the month of poets; heavens, it is even National Poetry Month. It is the month of songs and poems, the cruellest month, the brightest month.

It's the month of the births of two of my children, the month in which my father was born, the month in which each day has the name of a friend on it, and most of those friends dead now.

It's the month in which I actually was in Paris, decades ago, dazzled by the pure light, amazed that even little children spoke French with flawless accents, enchanted by the hotel concierge's huge marmalade cat.

And yes, there were chestnuts in blossom, great candelabras of chestnut flowers. And little captured foxes in wire cages by the Seine, and doubtful gentlemen trying to pick up a much too innocent little blonde.

They thought I was Swedish. For some unknown reason--my professors in college also remarked on this--when I speak French I speak it as my Swedish speaking ancestors would have. Wasn't a bad thing, back in the day, though it dashed the expectations of my gentlemen.

My lovely daughter is now a few years older than I was. Though in some alternate universe that thin young blonde poet is still staring at the Seine, mulling over a line or two, waiting for her April born, dashing young love.

He would have been busy poring over dusty files in a library while I was off weeping over the little foxes.

April is the month of my last time at the edge of suicide as well. I was thinking of this the other day--not suicide, but that phantom anniversary, that little fork in a winding road I didn't know I was on. As I get older I am astonished at how quickly the time flows by. It was surely yesterday I wept and lay down in the long soft April grass and plotted my death so carefully, with such pure exhaustion.

And..I think 16 years have passed now, since I faced such a dark door, and then came through into the purest light. Think of that. 16 years. Entire trees have grown up that I planted by seed then. I have planted such gardens, and watched over dogs, and cats, and my growing children. My dear Gabe, though still fragile, has had a pretty good time these years. I have seen my quirky little girl flower into a spectacular womanhood, and my eldest son become a wonderful force in our community.

What on earth was I thinking? I can only tell you that the logic of suicide is strange and seductive. I wept the other day when I heard the news that Nicolas Hughes, the son Sylvia Plath wrote such moving poems about, had stepped out of this life. But I know the territory.

It was April. The friend I called to, out of my despair, was most fortunately for me a doctor and someone I trusted. And indeed loved. We walked through the river valley where the new flowers were blooming and the April rains were falling. We talked. For me I think it was my one last bid for life, and I didn't really think it would work, but I felt I owed it to my friend and to anyone else who might care to reach out once more.

But my soul was exhausted, my body was aching, I had gone through a winter in which my youngest was near death over and over and over again. When I lay on the long grass I was longing for my heart's mother to just swoop in and take me away. Let me rest. For God's sake, let me rest.

I intended, of course to take my youngest along. I was a good mother.

Of course I tremble when I think how close we were, my boy and I. And life had a lot more to give us and ask us, both of us.

My friend the doctor gave me a remedy. I had no belief it could work, but I took it.

And the sun came out in my heart.

It was April, the season of rains and flowers, and birthday celebrations. I sort of count one of my own birthdays from April onwards, not from my actual date of birth. Sort of "welcome back to life". It's a private celebration--but I'm glad to mark it.
(photo was taken in a long ago April. I'm showing my daughter how elegant it might be to wear four o'clock blossoms on one's nose)