Books of 2023

(Mostly) alphabetical by author. The fact of my having read something should not be perceived as a recommendation that you or anyone else do so. 

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust
Switchboard Soldiers - Jennifer Chiaverini
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Victory - Joseph Conrad
Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Keepers of the House - Shirley Ann Grau
An Armenian Sketchbook - Vasily Grossman
Arena - Karen Hancock
Mr. Splitfoot - Samantha Hart
The Forest Unseen - David George Haskell

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I - Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm - Diana Wynne Jones
Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones 

Tomorrowmind - Gabriella Kellerman and Martin Seligman

The Magician’s Nephew - C.S. Lewis

The Lion, The Witch, & the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

The Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis

Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis

The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis

The Final Battle - C.S. Lewis

The Monk - Matthew Lewis

You Are Here - Karin Lin-Greenberg

The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett

Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett

Eric - Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett

Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett

Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett

Mort - Terry Pratchett

Pyramids - Terry Pratchett

Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett 

Sourcery - Terry Pratchett

Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett

Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

Tender at the Bone - Ruth Reichl
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling

Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind - Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
With the Old Breed - E.B. Sledge
The Daughter of Time - Jacqueline Tey
War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator
Summer - Edith Wharton
Lament for a Son - Nicholas Wolterstorff
The Great Divorce - Ilyon Woo
Swiss Family Robinson - Johann David Wyss
The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Love Episode - Emile Zola

Tidal Pool

 Life after loss is a unique experience. No- perhaps not entirely unique. But each fresh grief has its own inscape, as Wolterstorff observed in “Lament for a Son.” My mother’s death felt like a raw and tender wound, easy to chafe and renew with words poorly chosen. Those who were merely acquainted with her might puzzle over what there was to grieve. She could be vicious and vile toward those she blindly accused, or on a less personal level, she could baffle strangers by showing up miles from home without pants on. She did not have many casual acquaintances at her funeral. Those who knew her a little could sympathize with our feelings at least, but only a few such folks felt her loss - or if they did, were more focused on excusing themselves from any lingering sense of guilt over what they ought to have done or been for her than on fully accepting her absence. And those who knew her well were divided among themselves, some retreating to peace that the seeming chaos of her life had somehow found meaning in heavenly peace, others describing her life as “tormented,” and a few of us (I would include myself here as the pronoun suggests) trying to hold her legacy gently, in all its complexity: even if there were no heaven to soothe and smooth the weariness of a tragic, strange, and sharp existence, she still had her moments of unusual joy, equally fierce, and places where she touched the world with her own inimitable mark. 

Dad was different, and not just because they went so close together, almost as if he’d lost her again while they were out running errands, and she’d found someone who’d lend their phone or perhaps a police officer spoke to her, and she called him to come get her. Only this time they didn’t come home. That was Dad to a tee though. On the edges of things, out of the way in his shed or under a car or out in the garden. You always knew he was there because he’d be rumbling audibly to himself in his own world, but he blended into the background until something happened, and then he’d be the one to hook up the tow dolly and drive wherever to pick up a stranded daughter or show up daily at the nursing home with a vanilla latte for Mom. I forgot until the week before he died about the many Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings we’d spent together, just he and I or maybe both Maria and I when we were younger, going to church together while Mom found her own places to go because the vibes weren’t right. About breakfasts at Country Table with syrupy sweet hot chocolate and Belgian waffles under towers of whipped cream. About sitting in the passenger’s seat up front in the motor home playing viciously competitive alphabet games where we’d wait for miles for a tractor trailer to pass us with its reliable Q from the “air ride equipped.” He wasn’t someone who could have a deep conversation about most topics, but he was consistent and steady. And unlike Mom, who went out with pain and refusal and was the sort who’d wrestle an angel til it lamed her hip, Dad gave us permission to let him go and tried to be unobtrusive in his leave-taking too, telling us we shouldn’t fuss too much about his remains, just do whatever required the least work, he wasn’t worried about where his body ended up and in what form. He had spent his last bit of energy taking Mom’s ashes back to Lancaster. Perhaps we all asked too much of him without realizing it. Then again, we counseled him to wait in case he wanted something to keep her close, and perhaps he wanted to put all his affairs in order, being a conscientious man. He saw everyone, said his own private farewells, and then went to the hospital and only came out of it to die.

The older I get, the fewer moments of stillness I have. It’s too easy to get distracted, even without a phone close at hand. There are too many things, and they indeed, as the philosopher Smashmouth once said, start coming and they don’t stop coming. Sewing gives me a little quiet amid the noise, but it’s not a reflective silence, simply a cessation of higher order thought. Here though, it’s hard to avoid, or the avoidance of it will just sap your strength til you have to stop and look and wait until the looking becomes seeing, even if through a blur of tears. 

I think of all the things I will forget, given time. The feel of Dad’s callouses. The sound of Mom’s voice, which is what I remember now more than her words. This is a last opportunity to re-experience those things while they’re fresh, and perhaps, giving them the weight of my attention, to impress them a little more deeply and hold them just a little while longer. It may be painful - it so often is when we fix in memory places and times that we cannot ever return to - but at least it will be one place where we can meet again, long after they’ve gone.

Life and Letting Go

 When my dad was admitted to in-home hospice, he initially thought he was being discharged. This led to some confusion, as he sought to re-establish himself and get stronger, but Katrina sat down and told him that he’d been brought home not to recover but, eventually, to die. Dad has been prophesying his own demise for years, as he felt his exhausted body betraying him, so perhaps it was not a surprise that he should be accepting and philosophical in his response, telling her that “we can only be so possessive and let God do what he wants to do.”

Perhaps we should all hold the threads of our lives with such a slack grasp. It would lessen the griefs that I was mulling over today while driving away from my grandparents’ nursing home. The fields are mostly laid bare for the winter, and Lancaster’s summer green hills and blazing blue sky had been traded for a murky grey over barren browns. I passed a patch of milkweed and was struck by the thought of all the things that my parents and probably my grandparents will never see again. And most of them so unremarkable that you could hardly think back and say, ah that was the last cardinal.

I love how attention anchors me in present experience and helps me to recall and relive those moments again at a later time. It also makes it more painful: to remember the precise weight of Bear’s body in my arms and the smell of the fur at the nape of her neck also sharpened the edge of grief.

We are most present to those with whom we are most intimate. Wherever our minds may be, we are brought home to our bodies by touch, which demands that we come out of ourselves and take heed. Grandma is confined to a wheelchair after a month in the hospital, and her only complaint was that she could not move close enough to Grandpa, who has fairly limited mobility, to give him a kiss. Maybe it was easier for Dad to be philosophical about his own passing because he had already lost the one who could hold him in time.

Anniversary

She sits two feet away

And regrets that she cannot kiss him.

One day - perhaps you’ll recognize it,

Or just as likely not -

There will be a final darkened milkweed pod,

Burst and letting its seeds take the wind.

Death is an indoor matter

(Almost always)

Happening in beds that are not close enough to windows

Nor to the ones we love most.

The last slips in the door before it’s bidden.

Dirge Without Music

 By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

In Time

The first day of autumn here was sometime in early September. It had been a mild week, but the breezes still carried summer’s lazy humidity tinged with heat, right up until one Thursday morning when the 65 of the beautiful evening before had been transformed into a chillier 65 that threatened to bite. Ordinarily that might be cause for celebration: October is usually jam packed with fun events, the warming spices and knitting come out again, Christmastime is on the horizon, and I begin my annual determined few weeks of seeing all of my good friends one-on-one for coffee or drinks, which is how I’ve taken to celebrating my own birthday as a boring ass adult. But as the sun rose on that morning, it felt like one more death than I had left in me to handle. 

Jo March is the Gryffindor of Little Women: everyone thinks that’s who they’d be, at least initially. But I always identified more with Beth. Not the melodramatic dying bit - thankfully I’m in excellent health - but the grief on Claire Danes’s face when she asks, “Why does everyone want to go away?” On grayer days, that’s the frame for my world: there was a moment that I didn’t know was perfect until slowly its components slipped away one by one. First, my sisters moving to Seattle one after the other, and somewhere in there, my parents selling the childhood home and moving several states away too. Then losing a beloved roommate to work in yet another state. My boyfriend moving around the region, following post-doctoral work 2-5 hours away. The severings of COVID, which were more ambiguous but felt the more intensely for introducing physical isolation. Bear limping to me as I opened my front door coming back from a long weekend, and six weeks later she was dead. Moving, at long last, because everyone else close to me had except Gwen, and more partings. Mom fighting cancer but not understanding the terms of the engagement and losing. Without her Dad not knowing how to want his own future, and he too has come close to slipping out of our hands.

I feel a little bit like I’m dying too. Again, not in that Beth way, but in one of the transformations we undergo at moments in our lives when the many adaptations we’ve made to survive begin to produce deeper changes. How do I perceive myself? What are my goals? What doors are being locked and unlocked at this moment? Being fully in one place for the first time in so long - no weekend trips to see Pierce, no weekly commutes to New York City for work, old ties weakening, new ties being formed - I don’t feel as good as I expected. It was exhausting to maintain at times, but cloistered here entirely I feel stifled and forgotten. Like stars being birthed in a cloudy nebula there are pinpricks of light: a spontaneous adventure, a new friend, a novel that soothes and then scalds, the pungent kicks of garlic and cumin and miso and chili oil.

It will be months til the darkness is turned back at the solstice. Little wonder that we’ve arranged several holidays to fall in that period when we most need the comfort and consolation of other people’s company. And perhaps I shall draw the shadows around me like a blanket, and use the months of gathering gloom to conceive, like my father, of what a future without the past self I inhabited so fully might look like.

Hospice

I am not doing any of these things perfectly. I may not even be doing them well. But dwelling on my shortcomings feels too selfish of a preoccupation in this moment, and an intolerable preoccupation at that. There is no more time to prepare: what could even be done to remedy it? 

And so things are as they are, and the resources I have are what I have to work with. When everything I encounter takes the form of an unrelenting, unbearable headwind, how do I stand in it and not be knocked over?

The word "gracious" comes to mind. The wind rises, the slender reeds shiver and flex and rise again with its falling. To not be perfect amid difficulty but to choose grace, from moment to moment. 

And this is not a moment to react with defensiveness or anger or frustration or disappointment, though they're close to the surface as the pressure is applied. There is no time for these things, because in one universe, time is ending. A life that one person still desires with a fierce desire, that she is not resigned to giving up: but she does not desire pain. Moment to moment, seek grace.

Anchor

By the window, where the light pours in, we have joy. The myriad comforts of everyday life or even the extraordinary pleasures that come to us rarely and are delightful for their unusual unfamiliarity. I cherish the sensation of washed linen against my skin. I laugh at a cheeky text from my boyfriend. I celebrate the prospect of new friendships or the success of a new venture. I enjoy the satisfaction of re-experiencing what I have been able to accomplish with my hands and simple materials as I wrap myself in a beautiful shawl. I savor new tastes and textures at a pleasant dinner with friends. Both the present and the future feel bright.

On the opposite side of the room where the shadows find space to gather, we have sorrow. Rooted in what has happened, what is happening, what we know or fear will soon come. As parents grow older and their medical diagnoses multiply and become scarier, as other loved ones confront unexpected health challenges, as I grieve the loss of a beloved pet, as personal ambitions meet frustration at every turn and fears of financial insecurity loom like a dark cloud on the horizon, as isolation creeps up slowly and darkens the already dark nights. Were we to number them, they might overwhelm us. To repeat their litany, fingering each bead as it passes along the string and being confronted by its hard reality, would be a slow descent into anxiety and melancholy.

At every moment, these are with us. Some retreat into the background, while others take their place. Time lessens the sting of old wounds, time inflicts new ones. How do we choose for ourselves the path that we will walk in mind and in heart? To focus on only joy would be naive and even selfish in its ignorance. To focus only on grief would be a kind of claustrophobic shutting out of the light and reducing space to its smallest dimensions, a different kind of naivete - nihilism - that shuts its eyes to all that's good and beautiful. If I see my joy through my pain, if I see my pain through my joy, what will I find in this strange and wonderful life? I hope the strength to endure and the tenderness to love despite it all, and the wisdom to meet each day as it comes with patience rather than fear.