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.