I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.

  I so resent this.

  The American way is to not need help, but to help. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I was going to need a lot of help, and for a long time. (Even this morning.) What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don’t find a lot of answers to life’s tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that’s even better. They help you see who you truly are, which is not always the loveliest possible version of yourself, but then comes the greatest miracle of all—they still love you. They keep you company as perhaps you become less of a whiny baby, if you accept their help.

  And that is so much easier said than done.

  I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose—paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

  I never used to take my turn. I always gave my turn away. I helped others have a great turn. I must have had a clipboard by the time I was six, because by then I had a whole caseload of people to keep track of. After they had all gotten a turn, then maybe I could go, if there was time and it didn’t bother anyone.

  Now I take my turn, as a radical act.

  Let me tell you a story. (I told this story in a novel years ago, but I want to tell it now as it really happened.) I bought a small, lovely house when my son was ten. The previous owner had kept three huge scary dogs in the family room on the bottom floor. And the dogs had had tiny hygiene issues. So when we moved in, there was the lingering smell of pee downstairs. I felt as much shame about it as if I’d peed on the floor myself.

  First I did what all Americans do: I tried to disguise it. I masked it, sprayed it with copious amounts of Nature’s Miracle enzymes. But my miracle didn’t come: the family room still smelled. I had the rug professionally shampooed. I got a machine that showed you with blue light where the dog urine was, and I bought products that promised to eradicate it. Fixing unhappy situations is my strong suit, so I was game to try.

  It didn’t work this time.

  I hired a handyman to take up the carpet, but the room still stank, plus it now looked like hell, too, because you could see the floor where it was stained with dog pee—as if I didn’t have enough self-esteem issues as it was.

  So the handyman pulled up the floorboards. But when the flooring came up, things still smelled, and the blue-light pee-pee machine revealed that the joists had urine soaked into them.

  Let me repeat that: The joists of the house I had just moved into had urine soaked into them.

  We had to strip the bottom floor down to the foundation.

  You know what radical, crazy belief drove me to do that? It was the belief I’d been given by people over the years that I was worthy of a house that was beautiful, and that didn’t smell; that my son and I deserved a fresh start, a fresh house that was not a cover-up, built on top of secrets and dog pee.

  That was fourteen years ago, and I’ve never been the same. Deeper and deeper exploration over time and revelation down to the foundation have helped me heal my inside home, too. It goes without saying that difficult problems still arise within, but nowadays as I inch toward sixty, I have collected some hard-won skills, a few banged-up tools, needles and enough thread to make meaningful repairs.

  Three

  STITCHES

  While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody. Then people can get on with their lives.

  Sometimes after a disaster or great loss, when we are hanging on for dear life, we struggle to understand how we will ever be able to experience cohesion and safety again. The aspects of life that we treasure and have gathered over time, because they are lovely and go together, are gone. We may feel as if we’ve been handed ugly patches for our quilt that clash with one another—brown Hawaiian print, say, along with orange Rob Roy tartan and three squares of vomitous sea-foam upholstery.

  At this point, a reasonable person can’t help thinking how grotesque life is. It can so suck, to use the theological term. It can be healthy to hate what life has given you, and to insist on being a big mess for a while. This takes great courage. But then, at some point, the better of two choices is to get back up on your feet and live again.

  There is the tried-and-true method of “Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.” Or you can become a fundamentalist, perhaps Opus Dei, or Anabaptist. Or you can start to sew around the quilt squares with the same color embroidery thread. This unifies your incompatible patterns, textures and colors. It’s grace as an unexpected bond, grace as surprise.

  Stitching with the same color thread might mean regular contact with a few trusted friends, the three people you can currently bear who don’t make your skin crawl. Daily rituals, especially walks, even forced marches around the neighborhood, and schedules, whether work or meals with non-awful people, can be the knots you hold on to when you’ve run out of rope. What if you bordered each square with mossy green thread? Maybe the Hawaiian floral will look peaceful next to the sea foam, palm trees growing near the water. And nothing complements orange like dark green, showcasing a crazy plaid burst of sun.

  The unifying colors can decrease the sense of shock, mismatch and jostle that you feel. They may give you respite from the worst of the pain so that some time might tiptoe past. They may give you the momentary illusion that you are getting over this devastating loss, which is not a bad thing.

  But what if the great secret insider-trading truth is that you don’t ever get over the biggest losses in your life? Is that good news, bad news, or both?

  The good news is that if you don’t seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever.

  This is also the bad news, not because your heart will continue to hurt forever, but because grief is so frowned upon, so hard for even intimate bystanders to witness, that you will think you must be crazy for not getting over it. You think it’s best to keep this a secret, even if it cuts you off from certain aspects of life, like, say, the truth of your heart, and all that is real.

  The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.

  Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.

  When I die, the people to whom I am closest should grieve forever. They should never quite get over me. Otherwise I will seem dead to them, no matter how close I may secretly be.

  My friend Pammy died at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind an eighteen-month-old daughter. Plus she got shingles two months before her death, the height of misery.

  No comment.

  Well, okay—shingles, two months before she died. God Almighty! You have got to be kidding me.

  I refuse to pretend that I ever got over her death. I’m still mad that she was ripped off of a rich life at such a young age, that her daughter didn’t get to have a mother, and that I can’t talk to her on the phone. But after more than a decade had passed, I knew I had reached a sort of achy détente when I tore up her favorite shirt, which had been in my closet since she died.

  Pammy often wore a white linen top from Talbots, a blouse of elegance and simplicity, with a scoop neck, perfect long sleeves that stopped short of her wrists, pearl buttons, and tucks below the shoulders so that it draped just right. Two weeks before she died, when the shingles were over, she asked me to try it on. She wanted to see me in it. The shirt was as flattering on me as it had always been on her, and we both wore it during the last days of her life. We shared it, and then one day she said it was mine. She moved into pajamas.

  I thought of the shirt as our slutty surplice, because you could undo the top buttons and let cleavage or a camisole show. The tucks softened the clavicle area, the curving-in place beneath our shoulders that is so vulnerable, where I would duck my head when I was young and shy.

  It almost looked like a holy garment, and it was one to me. Every time I put it on I felt beautiful, and I felt the softness and lightness of my friend. It made me feel sad, but also braver, because Pammy had been so brave when she got sick. She had always been much braver than I am: for example, I never traveled, partly because I had no money, but also because I was scared to death of flying, hijackers and snakes. (I am only occasionally afraid of snakes on planes, in the overhead bins, although in my defense, I wasn’t ever, at all, until the movie Snakes on a Plane came out.) Pammy was a great traveler and had visited many distant cities, both alone and with her husband. In fact, they had gone to Morocco to take advantage of the last chance for travel they would have for a while before they adopted their daughter. Come to think of it, they were in Marrakech when Pammy discovered the lump in her breast.

  “See?” I said, on the way to the first, bad biopsy. “I told you so. Stay home. With me.” But metastatic cancer didn’t stop Pammy’s plans for adoption or travel. She, Jim and their daughter, Rebecca, flew to Maui two months before she died. They were on Kaua‘i when the merciless Category 4 hurricane Iniki landed, in 1992. When she got home, emaciated and depleted, I said to her, “I rest my case.” She just smiled.

  For years after Pammy died, I wore her blouse, with black pants and a silk scarf, when I had to dress up for a meal or a lecture. It lay lightly but held me in just the right places.

  Well after the acute pain of losing her had faded, along with the glory of the shirt, I still could not throw it away. The cloth was getting to be almost as thin as tissue. I was nice to myself about this: Of course we do not want to say good-bye. We do not want to sever the few cords that help us feel there is meaning and safety on this earth.

  Then tiny tears appeared in the cotton fabric of the shirt. I mended them. Every so often, I put it away in the back of the closet because I didn’t know what else to do with it. Then, months later, I would reach in and pull it out again.

  I believe in eternal life, and richer realities than the one we can see. I believe in a reality that stretches and connects us to other realms that are not of this world, but I guess I didn’t entirely trust the dreamy ectoplasmic reach. The shirt was the only guaranteed way to stay in touch with Pammy.

  Years after her death, I started thinking mean things about myself, and that holding on to her shirt was pure neurotic clinging. That it was ridiculous. Part of me understood that my hold on it had to do with the excruciating mess and weirdness of my family: how only a handful of people in your lifetime help redeem this mess, so that when one of them dies, hope dies. You never fully recover. You can’t.

  Yet my contact with Pammy remained deep and important. She had helped me raise my son, and before that, she’d helped raise me from the depths of a crazy life, and before that, she had been my bosom buddy since high school, sharing all those joints, beers, rock concerts, the salvation and new beginning in passing back and forth to each other the first issues of Ms.

  The shirt had been on her body, and her body was gone. But I could wear it on mine. Something about this worked for me.

  I thought that if I got rid of it, and she were floating free, she might just float away and I’d forget even more about her.

  We forget so much. All those memories of great meals, travel, landscapes, conversations, insights, theater, and scenes in distant cities, moments you swore you’d remember forever, so many washed away like Etch A Sketch drawings.

  It wasn’t even that she didn’t come visit. People drop by when they can. I had a visitation from her the other morning, which was as real as my sitting here at my desk. She was laughing with some of our friends. You may say it was just that I was half asleep, and I would say, Thank you for sharing.

  I took the shirt on a vacation with my Jesuit friend Tom Weston, to Mexico, where I planned to bury it on the beach, beneath the palm trees. One morning I carried it out to the sand, stood watching the surf, then changed my mind. I carried it back inside and put it in my suitcase for the trip home.

  The shirt was loaded with memory and with my baby self, whom Pammy had so mothered, and with my broken heart, and with the joy that she was to me, the lightness, the shared history, her sweet intelligence, how she made me laugh. I’d given talks for years about how when it comes to grieving, the culture lies—you really do not get over the biggest losses, you don’t pass through grief in any organized way, and it takes years and infinitely more tears than people want to allot you. Yet the gift of grief is incalculable, in giving you back to yourself. And so, putting my money where my mouth was, I listened to that, and on that beach in Mexico I could tell that I was not ready. I decided to wait.

  Then too much time passed, and I looked unhinged. I mean, let go already, right? But if something encapsulated all the qualities of someone you loved, someone who helped keep you afloat, and those parts of life that made any enduring sense, how could you let it go?

  Unfortunately, all the stitches couldn’t hold together what had dissolved. It was finally about trying to fix the unfixable. The shirt was made of fine things that were meant to dissolve. Maybe we are, too. The fabric had a life, like Pammy had a life, and life dissolves even as you cry out, “Don’t leave!”

  And because all lives are hard and difficult to understand, you acknowledge the slipperiness of those who died—they got out. You hold on to them because it can be so appalling here, until you can’t hold on anymore, because you’re not holding on to anything after a while. Either they had a Get out of Jail Free card or they became part of the bigger natural order of things. You can’t tether them to earth anymore, because the thread has grown too fine. All you can do is say, “I get it: You are somewhere else now. But little flecks of you remain, like mica in rock, which glint and say: It was all true.”

  Her shirt said: It was true.

  A few years after Tom and I went to Mexico, he took me to Southeast Asia. It was mind-blowing: bright, neon, loud. Some of it seemed brilliant and perennially primitive, some of it was racing to catch up to the modern world in flashes of steel and plastic. It was pagodas, temples and ancient tuk-tuk drivers peddling tourists around in carts to Internet cafés.

  In Laos, we walked along the muddy brown Mekong River, such a grievous place when I was a teenager, existentially sickening to remember even now. More bombs were dropped on Laos by Americans during the Vietnam War than on all of Europe during World War II, yet dense green bamboo and jungle have grown over most of the scars. The city of Luang Prabang, between two rivers and below mountains, is hazy, hot, eerie, soft, golden. Everywhere we walked, there were scraggly tattered dogs and cats, and banyan trees and tamarinds, houses built on pilings, frangipanis exuding their perfume to attract the moths, French manor houses from colonial times, ornate temples with their gold-leafed Buddhas, mosaic snakes and dragons, hill tribe people alongside ordinary Laotians and monks and hippies. It was antiquity and Apocalypse Now all rolled together. Finally we came to the Nam Khan, a soft green ethereal river surrounded by jungle shrubs and palms and tropical flowers, a place out of time.

  And on its banks we found a Swedish hotel, a European hotel run by a Swede. I kid you not. Tom’s people are Swedes. I thought it might be a mirage, and we checked in so quickly that I got whiplash.

  When I was finally able to leave the hotel’s air-conditioning, we reveled in the sleepiness of the village, gorged on noodly food and wandered through the night market.

  The following morning, after breakfast, we took a trip on a longboat with skimpy oilcloth awnings to keep the driving downpour off us as we glided past limestone cliffs. The boat leaked, and I imagined drowning while dreaded river snakes attacked. I took a deep breath, though, and realized I was happy in this great beauty. I was brave woman warrior, or at least brave woman traveler.

  The next day was my twenty-second sober birthday. Tom, who had been sober for thirty-four years, said, “It’s a start.” He’s so supportive. The hotel owner stopped by our table on the porch at breakfast, and it turned out he was from the same village in Sweden as Tom’s mother. Life is much trippier than first imagined.

  Late that afternoon, we hung out at an Internet café. Then Tom mentioned that a friend used to work here until a krait, a venomous snake without any redeeming qualities, slithered past his boot. I made Tom leave with me. It started to rain again. The rain on the Mekong was exquisite, dusky, foggy. The Lao think the foggy mists are ghosts, and I do, too.

 

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