Life's Not a Paragraph

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have already experienced profound loss and those who will.

I've been lucky so far in this life. My losses have been quiet goodbyes, gentle by most standards, the soft leavings of old age, cushioned by the generations between them and me. Secondhand losses. 

After my grandfather died, and my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, I asked her if she was afraid of death. "Oh, honey," she said. "At my age, death is almost a friend. It's a story I read about every day in the paper."

Death is not always a friend — sometimes it is a thief, robbing us of our dearest treasures. 

Earlier this month, I wrote about my greatest fear — a recurring nightmare I have that one of my children has died. I knew even as I wrote it that I was trampling on someone else's grief. Tragically, unbelievably, one of my fellow bloggers from the Silicon Valley Moms Group is living this nightmare right now, having lost her baby just two days after I posted my nightmares.

Madeline Alice Spohr 

(November 11, 2007 - April 7, 2009)

I've never met Maddie's family, but so much of her story is familiar — difficult conception and pregnancy, traumatic, premature birth, eating issues, growing issues — but more importantly:

joy,

fun, 

giggles, 

first teeth, 

first baths,

FIRSTS. 

Her story may not be a long one, but it is a story worth knowing.

This loss, like so many others, was not a quiet one. When a child dies, we roar with the pain, the grief, the missed opportunities of a story barely started. 

A writing friend, Cindy Fey, wrote beautifully about the sudden loss of her dear friend, a peer, a cohort, a man who was walking this life at the same time as her husband when his footsteps suddenly stopped. His premature death left a novella, not a full novel perhaps, but a story worth knowing. 

Death is not always a friend — sometimes it is the harshest of spotlights, the cruelest of mirrors, shining stark light on our own mortality, leaving us gasping and keening.

Another dear friend has experienced more deaths in her family than anyone I know, whittling her immediate family down to a precious few, leaving her clear-eyed and unsentimental. Her losses are a series of short-stories and tall tales, an epic saga — a story worth knowing.

Death is not always a friend — sometimes it's a relentless clock, ticking off the lives of those we know and love as surely as it counts off the seconds of our individual lives — a never-ending death knell.

I know I am lucky — death has brushed by so closely that the hairs on the back of my neck still rise and tremble at the memory. In grateful acknowledgement of those near misses, in tribute to Maddie and Eric and Jill's family, and in celebration of April as National Poetry Month, let's remember that no life is just a paragraph, but a full story worth telling:

since feeling is first

by ee cummings

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry

- the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

Please click here to share a thought, a poem or a comment.

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to fly and those who don't. 

Remember when flying was fun? When your luggage flew for free and security meant checking to make sure you hadn't forgotten your ticket?

When I was a kid, flying was a big deal. It was expensive (by my family's standards, at least) and people still got dressed up to travel. Flying was such a special event that I remember exactly what I wore for my first flight — to Florida when I was 12 years old. My mom had made me a brand new outfit: heather brown elephant bell pants, a melon colored halter top and a cropped, window-pane-checked jacket with short princess sleeves. Wait, don't forget the platform sandals — the literal and figurative height of '70s fashion.

We were not a family of frequent flyers. My dad was, and still is, terrified of flying. His first flight, from Detroit to New York, was so turbulent that he took a train home. When he did have to fly for work, the only way he managed was with "greenies" and martinis. In other words, he was flying before he even boarded the plane.

Fear of flying takes many forms: some hate the takeoffs, others dread the landings; some fear crashing, others are troubled by turbulence. Then there is the airplane agoraphobic — the one who fears being stuck someplace where help may not be available.

For me, flying BC (before children) meant adventure — exotic vacations or weddings or warm-weather getaways in the middle of winter. I was always excited, not scared. Even the mishaps were exciting. Once, on a trip home to Detroit from Jamaica, we tried to outrun a winter storm and ended up on a Cleveland runway for 13 hours. The plane had no food, but plenty of alcohol and everyone was loaded with liquid happiness when our pilot, Captain Bobo (I'm not making that up) told us we would be taking off again and landing in New York just in time for New Year's Eve.

After I had children, I would get a little nervous when I flew alone, wondering what would happen to them if something happened to me, but the danger seemed remote. Flying with children, on the other hand, is a whole different kind of adventure and, for our family of six, prohibitively expensive. These days, when we travel en masse, it's by car.

Last week I encountered a new kind of airborne angst: putting my child on a plane by herself. She's 16 and has flown alone before, but this trip felt different. I worked hard to find a non-stop flight (we couldn't have her stranded in, say, Atlanta if her connecting flight fell through), but even that didn't completely set my mind at ease.

She was thrilled to be heading off to a creative writing residency and didn't seem nervous at all until it was time for us to part so she could go through security. Suddenly, the idea of hanging out alone for an hour or so before boarding became overwhelming and she got a little teary. This was completely unfair. Now I had to suck it up and be the calm, reassuring grown up. I hate when that happens.

I'm happy to report that she arrived without a hitch 10 minutes ahead of schedule, and called me shortly after she deplaned, chatty and cheerful in the custody of her grandparents. I have yet to recover.

Just in case you were wondering, as I often do, here is Orville Wright's concise explanation of the phenomenon of flight: "The airplane stays up because it doesn't have time to fall." Don't you feel better?

Have any fabulous travel plans this summer — flying or driving? Click here to air your qualms or share your tips.

Photo credit: Sunset wing by maliavale via flickr.com.

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