I don’t believe in astrology, but I like reading my horoscope
in the Willamette Week. Rob Breszny, who writes Free Will Astrology, is a fount
of interesting quotes and references and I often glean something relevant or
useful. A couple of weeks ago, he advised those of us born in April to stop
being such impatient control freaks. Good advice for the week, though I feel
like it could be my horoscope the other 51 weeks of the year as well. I should
probably get it tattooed on my arm as a prompt: impatient control freak with a
big red slash through it, like a road sign.
I have always been a planner. I make checklists, I make
one-year plans and five-year plans. I’ve always wanted to map the future. More
than wanted; I believed that my chosen destination would be only slightly
harder to reach than Bend or Corvallis. The future was like Breitenbush Hot
Springs, maybe: on a small, unpaved road that was still easily plottable on
Mapquest.
When Balthazar died, without warning I found myself at the
end of the known world. At the place where my life ended. Where the future no
longer existed. A place without maps.
Of course I knew that I wouldn’t die. That my life would go
on. But I was acutely aware, from the first moment, that I would be someone
else. Who, I had no idea. Everything except the fact of being Jasper’s mother
was up for negotiation. Writer, wife, Portlander, financial underachiever,
introvert, yogi, redhead; I could change it all. It wasn’t time, though, not
yet. My body was battered; my heart was broken. I read and I cried and I wrote
thank you notes. I waited to see what would happen.
And now it’s two years later. What, exactly, has happened?
I rode a horse in Kauai. Ran a mile in 7:32. Got a cat. Started
proofreading again. Wrote a blog that became a memoir. Went to Italy. Got
cranky in the Colosseum. Made new friends. Bought a car. Started volunteering
at Write Around Portland. Did a deadhang pull up. Read a lot of books. Separated
from my husband of fourteen years. Read to five-year-olds. Spent more time with
my brother. Ate a lot of French fries.
In the last two years I’ve done a lot of things I never
dreamed that I’d do. But there are also other ways to measure change.
In the last month I have reconnected with three of the
fairly sizable collection of people I haven’t seen in two years. One reunion was
deliberate: I emailed my friend and we went out for drinks. One was completely
serendipitous: as a couple of friends and I pulled up to the Starvation Creek
trailhead one Saturday, we couldn’t help oohing and aahing over a gorgeous
blue-eyed toddler in a pink hat. Then I looked at the woman attached to the
toddler. “Let me out!” I cried. “I know her!” The third I happened to run into at
Write Around Portland, where he now works and where I recently started
volunteering.
I felt a surprisingly uncomplicated happiness at seeing
these people again, which is a milestone of some sort. People get a wary look
when they see me after a long time. They’re waiting for me to set the tone. So
I hugged all three of them. I’ve never been a hugger, but what the hell. Maybe
I am one now. Who knows?
*
I recently told a friend at the gym who is in a place of
transition in her life that the crossroads is where the possibility is.
“Are you writing self-help now?” she asked dryly.
I’m really not. One of my favorite books of the past year
was Bright-Sided, Barbara
Ehrenreich’s critique of the self-help industry. And I don’t believe in the
life-expanding opportunity created by wrenching change every single day. But
when I said it to her, I believed it. Some days, I believe it.
For awhile I was writing ‘Alive to the possibility of
happiness’ on the inside of my left wrist. I took the phrase from a book review
in which the reviewer used it to describe a character’s transformation. I
couldn’t tell you what the title of the book was, or what it was about, or
whether the reviewer liked it or not. But the phrase stuck with me. Each day it
washed off and each day I wrote it back on. Happiness, if not a reality, is now
a possibility.
‘Surrender to chaos’ might be another good reminder for a
control freak to tattoo somewhere on her body.
*
I don’t have a list anymore. Obviously there are things I
want to do: refinance my house, get a roommate, get a full time staff writing
position, fall in love. Do a chest to bar pull up. Get my heart broken. Fall in
love again anyway. Rock climb. Go to a music festival. Dance and sing and take
Jasper to Mammoth Cave. I’ve got plans, but I don’t have A Plan. Am I done with
Plans forever? Maybe.
“There
was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one,” Kazuo
Ishiguro wrote, which might make me sound literary until I tell you that I
picked it up from Free Will Astrology, too.
It’s true
for everyone, but it’s something I feel acutely. Would I be here, doing this? I ask myself
sometimes. Would I have met him? Would I have become friends with her? The
answer is always ‘probably not.’ But I’m going to stop asking if I would rather
have this than that, because that question is moot. I am here. This is where I
am. It couldn’t be stopped, it can’t be changed. And so.
If Balthazar’s short, almost life was a beginning that was
also an end, the end of my life has afforded the possibility of rebirth. Birth
is never easy. There is pain, and rupture. But the only way through is to push
on, and at the end is something miraculous that wasn’t there before. Isaiah
43:19 was always one of my favorite Bible verses: “Behold, I will do a new
thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way
in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
To me, that’s not the voice of God, it’s the voice of life
itself.
This is the season of my birth, and Balthazar’s also. Two
years ago today I watched Kentucky beat Kansas in the NCAA men’s basketball
championship game, and, although I did and didn’t know it, Balthazar was dead.
One year ago today I canceled my birthday and proofread a preschool curriculum
all day. Today is different than both of those days.
I used to think that my birthday would forever be a day of
horror. Now I wonder if the opposite will come to be true. Not that there won’t
be sadness or tears; that would be impossible. But maybe I will be able to feel
the rhythm of Easter and the vernal equinox, the cycle of birth and death and
rebirth, instead of getting stuck on Good Friday. Instead of hanging back in
the bleak midwinter.
Sons die. They don’t come back. And yet…
