How long ago was it? I got to an intersection, driving to work, and had the sensation of not recognizing where I was, not knowing which way to turn. I thought I’d remember, now I don’t remember, how old I was then, maybe forty-eight, I feel sure it was before the marriage dissolved etc., etc.—I thought, This is how it begins, right here at this stop sign, the morning I forgot where I was.
1. The Case of the Shrinking Sheets
When the amnesiacs and time travelers and protagonists of otherwise derealized plots wake up into situations they don’t recognize, their first move is to force a realignment of circumstance and expectation. Something is wrong, they say to anyone who will deign to listen. Why don’t you understand? Sometimes the quick-witted and temperamentally crafty will discern the inherent dangers of finding oneself in an alternate reality and keep quiet till the parameters of their new surroundings can be ascertained. Because sometimes the insistence on a version of events that makes no sense to anyone else will be grounds for accusations, for diagnosis, incarceration or committal. Did not Einstein tell us that insanity is defined by “doing the same thing over and over” and hoping for different results? But that would make all of us crazy some of the time, in fact every time we think an errant loved one will this time satisfy our hopes or we do maddening battle with an Ikea étagère whose prong nuts will not work even though we keep inserting them in exactly the same way. I’m certainly guilty of both.
~
Let’s say it starts with the sheets. I want you to believe with me that this thing happened, that I was putting a pair of pale-yellow sheets on my king-size bed one evening, sheets I’d used a hundred times before, and yet could not make them fit. I want you to follow my train of thought as I decided I must be pulling the horizontal side of the sheet along the vertical edge of the bed and so flipped it, and then feel the bafflement when I tell you that this too did not work. I want to convey to you the weird sinking certitude that the bottom sheet I was in a tussle with, which I felt indubitably sure I’d had on my king-size bed before, was not a king-size sheet.
Quick survey of beds chez moi: the king whose denuded blankness I was right then trying to clothe, a skin-cell-encrusted/sagging-like-a-soft-taco-shell king mattress in the basement waiting to be collected by my ex, and an old queen I’ve had for decades, long since the guest bed, and never, not once, dressed in yellow.
Obviously the sheet must have shrunk. It was the collision of color and size, do you see? But then: sheets don’t shrink. That’s the whole point of sheets. They exist in a unique quadrant of physical law whereby they are impervious to the threat of laundered chaos.
So I thought: This does not make sense.
The salesman at Mattress Firm sold me a set of king sheets to go with my new mattress, and a week later, I bought another set of king-size sheets from BB&B, where I have bought all my bed linens for nearly twenty years (long before the CEO of said doomed corporation hurled himself out of a window). Two pairs of nearly identical unsalted-butter-yellow sheets to match the walls and the sunny disposition my bedroom was meant to be fostering in me. One on the bed, one in the closet; a neat rotation of sheets that required nothing of me in terms of decision-making, which (post-divorce/trauma-fog, mid-pandemic-upheaval, edging toward sixty) I increasingly experience as beyond my ken.
I stood over the bed feeling hot, a buzz going at the back of my neck and micro-worms of panic shooting into the tips of my fingers. The feeling was … crazy. I use that term carefully. But how else to explain what I find on the label of these daffodil sheets that I bought with my new king mattress from Mattress Firm, the laundry-faded label, rolled up like a joint? queen, obviously. The word rose up at me through the smoke of my incomprehension.
~
A twin bed is not big enough for twins. Two twins shoved together is not a double but a king and a double is the same as a full. A California king is so-called because celebrities in mansions demanded more bed and the French have both a valet and a kingdom size. In some countries that don’t use monarchical names, the biggest mattress is known as a “matrimonial,” for obvious reasons, as if single people don’t require the room to position their limbs in a giant X and keep books, laptops, pets, and the day’s discarded clothing on top of the blankets and duvets on the other side of the bed.
I slept on a futon until I moved in with a man and we slept on a queen until I moved in with a different man and I guess you could say that his bed was matrimonial because I married him, and then when I kicked him out of the house there was no way that I or aforementioned accoutrements of, extensions of, me, were leaving the bed, which meant I kept his king. But at some point the thought of all the accumulated detritus of embodiment became … unsettling, and I spent a summer mattress shopping, which—if you’ve done it you’ll know—entails a bizarre ritual of lying upon a bare mattress in a largely empty store, fully clothed, pretending to sleep.
Most of the time I was engaged in this enterprise, my mother and stepdad were with me (visiting from Los Angeles, where they sleep on a California king, no surprise, even though neither is taller than 5’6″ and they live in a three-bedroom ranch), shuffling shyly at the foot of various mattresses, waiting for me to decide, watching me toss and turn.
~
For a long time I refused to make any bed in the morning because it seemed a chore designed only to prove something to myself or a cohabitor about our relative degree of social compliance. (To put this less archly, why does anyone bother? We just get back in it again.) Studies claim that making the bed improves quality of sleep, but even now that I do, I still sleep badly (I’ve written elsewhere about that problem; goodness, the mishegas of the bed, and everything that does or doesn’t happen there); nor do I believe that a made-bed makes me happier, tidier, or generally more productive. I’ll go only so far as to agree to the calm of first coming into the room with its made bed, that momentary sense of repose.
And I’ll allow as how freshly washed sheets can make life feel temporarily less panic-inducing, and not just because of the virtuousness that derives from having done one’s chores.
But … that hopeful act of changing the sheets that became a nightmare of alternate-reality proportions. You demand explanation, right? You’re hoping I tell you that I finally remembered about buying those yellow queen sheets. You’re thinking maybe the ex-husband snuck upstairs to the linen closet one day when fetching/returning the dog and executed a neat Grinch-style substitution—I mean, it’s happened before that I came home from travel abroad to discover various emptinesses about the house (“The grill is gone, baby, he done me wrong,” ha ha: I wrote about that, too)—so why not sheets? King and Queen exchange: something chess-like and calculated in that.
You’re thinking that maybe I never did switch out those sheets, but instead was always washing and reinstalling the same pair, while the queens lurked in the closet as a vestige of some other lifetime/relationship/color palette.
You want me to reveal that “sheets” have been a metaphor all along. “The sheets don’t fit” as code for the myriad unhappinesses of love and sex. Or that I made the whole thing up as a commentary on the nature of realism.
You want me to clean up the whence and wherefore of rogue queen sheets that make no sense, and I want to accommodate you, I do.
I put the yellow queen sheets back in the closet and shut the door like it was the lid of an open casket whose contents I did not want to face the fact of. I mean I shoved them to the back, I buried them. You know what happens to a prematurely buried thing? They were pulsing in there, those wretched manifestations of my brain as billions of axons and dendrites susceptible to misfire. They radiated shame. And so, I retrieved them and I tossed them. I mean I threw them away, in the garbage; I mean I did not donate/recycle/deliver to hospice or animal shelter. And I feel bad about that.
But, do you see?
Those sheets were an intersection.
2. Se/dementia—
—the naturally occurring process by which, in the dreary, universal, downward trajectory of erosion, we become our own dregs. Imagine yourself as the leftover particulate matter that drifts to the bottom of a bottle of wine, erythrocytes pooled in a syringe. The airdropped remnants of rock. The wave-pounded sands of fluvial time. Silt-bed.
We are not just dispersing but layering. Let’s say the agony of aging is this tension of retrieval against burial. I guess the question is whether memories are there, but irrecoverable, or lost forever (do you know how to make a bed? or will the sheets not comply?). Or: let’s say the trouble with our aging brains is one of insufficient cohesion and exaggerated density simultaneously, as if we are liquid and sediment at once. Mercury, perhaps. Yes, that captures the quicksilver frustration of things-coming-apart, the maddening sensation of being repelled the instant you come too close to your own substance, to the person you once were.
I worry that memorizing how to count down by seven from 100 would constitute cheating on the memory test, and then think, um, no. Whatever is happening—if something is happening—doesn’t feel like forgetting. It feels like mishearing a word spoken in the adjoining room. It feels like the slow creep of soap scum into the folds of a plastic shower curtain. Or maybe, it feels like I’m at 78 rpm, at which speed it’s difficult to catch one’s own mistakes. A sense of living behind the scrim of undoing. A kind of unrecognizable landscape.
~
I have been monitoring myself for early signs of Alzheimer’s for a long time because the women on my mother’s side incur neurological deficits as they age. My grandmother: beset by mini-strokes as early as her forties, asked to stop teaching; later affected by Parkinson’s—I suspect a form like Lewy body dementia, with a gradual slowing of movement. My two aunts, Mother’s younger sisters: one dead at fifty-eight from sepsis incurred in the hospital when she became so dehydrated that her body went into shock (neglect, but nobody sued)—did it start with Mad Cow? no one seems to know; and the other institutionalized at seventy-six with an unnamed form of senility.
When my mother’s middle sister first showed signs of dementia, she was treated for anxiety, then depression, next menopause, and then someone came out of an exam room to explain that my aunt could no longer pretend to hold a knife and fork and instead turned her forefinger into the knife.
I remember the way the light seemed suddenly dim in the hallway where we clustered. The way that failure of performance—like a shocking dramaturgical mistake—passed silently between us and the gerontologist, the way she said it: portentous, and yet in its particulars so ridiculous. How could that single action foretell the doom to come? My mother’s body went quiet when we welcomed my aunt again. My aunt had trouble negotiating the threshold, her feet tapping cautiously across the doorframe. She smiled, shyly, like she was wondering if she’d done a good job at these mysterious tasks (“Julia, can you pantomime cutting a steak?”), set before her by the kind lady with the glasses and brown bobbed hair.
She was younger than I am now. She knew, I’m sure of it. And I knew.
Women being more prone than men to forms of senility, and because women endure menopause, and menopause resembles anxious depression, which women also have in statistically greater numbers, the aging female brain is not well-studied. Some years ago, plagued by headaches, I was sent for an MRI, and diagnosed with idiopathic white matter disease—a “wastebasket” diagnosis, my doctor called it, because any junk symptom you have might be tossed into it. They found no organic cause for the weeks of headaches—no blood clot, no tumor—and white matter disease is not a proven precursor for dementia. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a “previvor.”
For nearly fifty years I’ve carried the memory of a dream in which my scalp is connected to a bag filled with a viscous, amber fluid—the color of butterscotch candy—which a doctor, a man, is manipulating while my mother looks on. A certain feeling of sharpness in my head would forever be associated with loneliness and the terror of something wrong. I will not forget finding out that my aunt had used her kitchen as a bathroom just before she was hospitalized. I’d always thought we were so alike.
~
The history of my anxiety begins with a morning at the kitchen table when I was twelve. My parents were in L.A., house-hunting, and my sister and I back in Philly were being watched by the elder daughter of our next-door neighbors. My sister was herself on the brink of sixteen, soon to be waging a battle with the father who chose to uproot his family, in the middle of a school year, to decamp cross-country for a job, or a new kind of manhood—or something—that he craved. For years I have pondered this choice (whose needs and preferences in a family rightly prevail?) and even now I wonder if my sister, for the brief time the parents were away, resented the neighbor’s daughter, older than she by just a few years. I wonder now if my mother was already plotting her course out of the marriage, if Los Angeles beckoned to her with its cusp-of-the-land open-endedness.
I woke one of those mornings lit up with panic. I was just a kid, and the world was tilting. I put on my favorite seafoam-green Levi’s corduroy jeans and a matching striped turtleneck, and sat down at the white Formica kitchen table and tried to hold my body in place. To keep from blowing into bits. The outfit was flimsy, but armature all the same.
“In normal life,” Louis Menand wrote in a review of Scott Stossel’s impressively researched, excruciating-to-read 2014 tome The Age of Anxiety, “anxiety has content.” I find myself parsing every one of those words, starting with “content” and working my way, grouchily, back to “normal.” Menand implies that anxiety is unalarming so long as it has a referent, if we’re anxious about something, in a contained and time-limited way. In this sense, the world-swallowing terror I felt in my matching seafoam ensemble was normal because the ground beneath me was shifting and I was lonely in the hollowness of an impending cross-country move. But that makes a free-floating sense of peril abnormal: and of course it has been pathologized, enshrined in the DSM-5 as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. When I read the criteria for GAD, though, it doesn’t sound like dread as I know it, because GAD does have “content,” its obsessive worry trained on health, finances, a job, performances, family. Occasionally a concrete thought sets off that nauseating flip (like I forgot to buy toothpaste or I should be practicing the guitar) but mostly it’s just the central plinth of my body thrumming with obscure alarm, a tightness beneath the ribs like I’ve eaten too much. Tiny waves of agitation we call “butterflies”—but that’s an absurdly delicate metaphor for the breathtaking, relentless crashing on the internal shore of my guts. From eyes to abdomen, buzzing and exhausted and taut. Or levitating—as if I have come unmoored.
Stossel calls us “sensitive minds in sensitive bodies” prone to latching onto a whiff of anxious feeling, like a stray scent of gas that makes you sure your house is about to blow up.
~
My mother has outlived both of her younger sisters. She’s eighty-four, still working as a therapist. I worried about her during the COVID lockdown year—not so much catching the virus (they transitioned so fully to virtual life that it’s possible she didn’t see another human off-screen apart from my stepfather until they got the vaccine), but the deleterious effects of isolation, all that shrinking of scope. But meanwhile she grew a year, two, then another older. I don’t know how to untwine the causes, the ambiguous effects, for either of us, when mood, disease, age, and circumstance keep ribboning around each other and I’m skipping beneath this raucous maypole, an off-key tune in my brain, just trying not to trip.
3. Crockery
We mock (or mourn) as cliché that moment of looking in the mirror to find we’ve become our parents. Since I’ve always reminded myself of one or the other of mine, the truer shock has been not recognizing myself at all—the altered shape of me, the wrinkles and drapes as if Barbie-size hands have been pulling downward on my skin for the past twenty years. One afternoon many years ago, walking into a CVS slightly behind me on his single visit to the town where I live, my father looked up into a large round mirror angled above the entrance (surveilling whom?) and said, “There’s an old man behind you,” and it took a split second for me to turn and realize he was referring to himself. He was sixty-five and it made me laugh, the way he said it with actual surprise, but also that sly irony of knowing there’s no escaping this, being two steps behind your offspring as she ages and you age and you look up and don’t recognize any bit of it. Not one part of it making sense.
But misrecognition isn’t just about the way we look. There’s another truism that people grow fully into themselves later on—a kind of hard-won consolidation—after the careers and the parenting and the agonies of youth fall away and we’re left with self-acceptance, purposeful and distilled. But what if you arrive at that mythic moment rocked and upended, some solid faith in your me-ness exposed as dandelion flimsiness, backlit in a shimmering too-hot noon?
It’s in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up” that F. Scott Fitzgerald famously tells us, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.” In that wee-hour disorientation, he realizes he’s exhausted himself, literally: he’s emptied out. The essay is about hitting bottom, which means coming undone—not so much in terms of mood, but as a person, the collection of performances that had coalesced in the form of a chimerical “entire man” revealing themselves as naked dress forms. Happiness had been easy for Fitzgerald as a bright young writer, but now, wasted in more than one way, he admits he’s been defining himself entirely through the gratifications of “toil,” become overly “identified” with his attachments, rather than his “values,” and so he’s lost hold of what he stands for. Now he’s no more than a “cracked plate.” “There was not an ‘I’ any more,” he says, weariness breaking through a overridingly dispassionate tone. “No self.”
Fitzgerald was holed up in the North Carolina mountains, eating “potted meat,” as he submitted himself to this scathing psychic inventory of inadequacy. He was crushed by debt: his wife, Zelda, hospitalized back in Baltimore, was increasingly erratic; Fitzgerald needed the money to support her care, but his stories had been selling for a fraction of the highest prices of his heyday. Various romantic dalliances did little to distract him, soothe his desperation, or compel him to get any work done. He suffered a resurgence of tuberculosis. He broke his shoulder, then developed arthritis. And he was drinking—heavily (by some accounts twenty, thirty-seven, or forty-five beers a night, to say nothing of the gin)—the very epitome of self-destructive creative genius, ruined by drink. Even the essay now admired for its forthright, penetrating, believable account of depressive collapse was beheld by some in its moment as unseemly: a confession of weakness rather than a testament to a mind hard at work on itself. Later that same year Ernest Hemingway would write “poor Scott” into “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a man “wrecked” by the failure of his romantic delusions.
But Fitzgerald seems preveniently aware of such critiques even as he anatomizes the mind’s capacity for sleight-of-hand balancing acts whereby we function because we’ve pitched “the futility of effort” and “inevitability of failure” against an equivalent (and maybe equally absurd) “determination to succeed.” The wry, self-effacing tone, the slight detachment—this observer stands back from himself, alert to his own propensity for self-congratulatory deception. But he also knows we don’t crack up just from private insufficiency. “All life is a process of breaking down,” he declares in the opening line, and if there’s a “sort of blow that comes from within,” there’s also “big sudden blows that come … from outside.” Fitzgerald is not a writer I care about, I have to admit; I take no particular solace from his glittering fragility. But I learn something from him about how a mind organizes itself back to managing. I remember being startled by “The Crack-Up” the first time I read it as a much younger woman, before I knew you could disclose such things without getting sucked under the effort or exaggerating the effect. That’s the quality of the essay that stays with me, with its weird reassurance that if we’re a mess, it’s a right proper mess out there, the world does knock us about.
Some would call this bad luck, I guess, or worse, an abdication of responsibility for ourselves. But I don’t hear Fitzgerald taking refuge in that quintessential brand of American blame, born of our individualism; the essay balances the puzzle of cause more delicately than that. Temperament is weighted against the vagaries of occurrence, against social expectation, against all the infinitesimal decisions whose consequences we can’t possibly guarantee. In fact it’s the confusion of “The Crack-Up” that appeals to me the most: less the stock-taking of a broken self that vows commitment to bettering than the sickening undertow of how it happens, “the disintegration of one’s own personality,” in artistic, political, emotional bewilderment.
There’s a theory that chronic anxiety, like chronic pain, is a misfiring that can permanently damage our nerves. Unable to shut down, the brain keeps pumping out stress hormones, which then alter its basic chemistry. This makes searching for the trigger potentially irrelevant, if we owe our sensations of worry to some awful physiological feedback loop. I imagine Fitzgerald in a grubby room, rubbing the 40 cents he supposedly had in his pocket (not even $9 today) between fingers stained by tobacco, ruing his choices, cursing fickle editors, missing Zelda, scribbling in the leather-bound ledger that was a lifelong accounting of himself about his “two-cylinder inferiority complex,” and “holding [himself] very carefully like cracked crockery.”
4. Bottomless well/ness
We still speak on my campus of the turbulent years we’ve emerged from (are maybe in 2025 plunged once again into), the never-quite-finished effects of pandemic in a world upheaved by climate disaster, international war, gun violence, brutal race inequity, a political assault on reproductive bodies … a surround that wreaks its havoc on us in both private and collective ways, with which our individual circumstances interact in a swirl of learned helplessness and fear. An embarrassed ineffectuality—“an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness,” as Fitzgerald says—against the daily headlines of stupidity and disaster and hate. Superstorms, epic floods, fire tornados, heat. A planet of armed indignation. When I think about students maturing into this moment already traumatized by their teen years of isolation, uncertainty, and Zoom, I can’t fathom how they find the wherewithal to move forward with confidence, except that that is what we are propelled to do, the momentum of life on a rotating earth.
I too am grown up in this radical precarity, but to be old in these times is to balance on a teetering contradiction of edging closer and closer to finalities very hard to imagine and the positive aging movement, whose experts try to recuperate later life from stereotypes of frailty, loneliness, and irrelevance by exhorting us to defy our years by behaving as youthfully as possible. This is meant to be a balm, to say, shuck those weary tropes of the elderly as doddering, incipiently senile hypochondriacs who offer nothing to worlds moving too fast, with too much creative zest, for their stale ideas to matter!—which, in an unintended but inevitable way, reinforces that very cliché. If we define good aging as the absence of the things that tend to characterize our advancing years (the diminishments, the medications, the blunting and blurring and days spent ailing), then we’ve perpetuated youth-culture’s arrogance about what sort of life counts in this world. We cannot escape our decrepitude, can’t quit time, no matter how we fill our retired hours with sanctioned busyness, crafting and aerobicizing our older, altered, creaky selves back into youth. I grew up in a culture that taught me incoherently to loathe and overprize a female body. Shouldn’t “success” mean I get to age my way out of hating myself, especially when so much else feels devolved into chaos and the perpetual imminence of shame?
Thus I take my solace in the defenders of “later-life floundering.” In his 2022 book, Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, Scott Herring celebrates our “mistake-prone and mistake-laden” bodyminds precisely because they “keep getting it wrong.” Herring wants us to indulge our goofing and our stumbling and quit disciplining ourselves into submission to youth culture on the one hand or wise old docility on the other. There is strength, he insists, in cultivating our errors as an “art form,” even the alarming death-in-life disintegration of dementia, because therein lies our “geroresilience,” as he calls it, a bold “carry[ing] on error-ridden until [we] cannot.” What a relief our aged bumbling might therefore be from the pressure to wrestle ourselves with all the vigor of adolescence toward a dignified senescence!
My days seem full of firsts. Take today, when I felt the car accelerate slightly as I neared the stop sign and realized I had my foot on the gas. (You’re wondering—you should be—if you’re reading the record of a mind in decline.) That had never happened to me before.
~
Holly, Personal Banker, regards me from across her shiny desk, where I’m shuffling four months of statements like I’m setting up for a game of monte. She wears an expression I cannot precisely interpret, looking genuinely sorry she can’t figure out why I’m having trouble balancing my checkbook. But maybe it’s pity. We have reached that point in the proceedings where the faces of people whose job it is to help you develop a sort of sheen, because your insistence that something is wrong is pushing the limits of their patience and wherewithal, and now they’re bored, and wish for you to leave. It is the expression that glazes the face of many a physician in the company of hypochondriacs.
It’s taken me a few days to get here, to this desk, to the risks of embarrassment (surely the mistake is mine, though I can’t find it), of not being believed, and the panic of crazy.
“We’re going to figure this out, Susannah,” Holly says with consummate surety about fifteen minutes before she summons the branch manager. In a whispery, apologetic voice, I ask if there is a way, any way, that someone from inside the bank could be siphoning my money.
When I get home from the bank, feeling frantic and obsessed, I open one of the blank registers they gave me (because “starting over” is how we contain chaos) and begin ciphering and cross-referencing the last two months’ statements for the sixth time. It takes but a moment for me to realize that twice in a row I transposed two numbers in my own paycheck, thus granting myself an extra $380 or so—exactly the amount I went to Holly to recover. Now another sheet of paper is covered with numerals that add up to me leaving a message for my personal banker, apologizing for wasting her time, and to an exultation of relief, and to shame.
Some weeks later it’s Sue, Dental Technician, who is not happy with me. She says I am “in her chair” to get a filling fixed and I say no, that’s in May, I’m here for a cleaning. Sue flips her side-ponytail impatiently as she pulls up a digital appointment calendar and it dawns on me that the reason it’s felt too soon to get my teeth cleaned is that it is (four months). I never did the math; two dates on a reminder card halfway under a magnet on the side of my refrigerator, I just assumed. I can never remember what they’ve done/need to do to my teeth, anyway; it’s like a selective amnesia. “I can’t have a mouth full of Novocain today,” I screech at Sue. “I’m giving a lecture to a room full of Honors inductees at five o’clock!” Deep sigh. Like Sue would know what I’m talking about. In fact she is not impressed with any of this, and flounces off to interrogate someone.
Aging as protracted ridiculousness. The flip side of this stereotype is another cultural trope of aging: wisdom, born of experience, emotional quiescence, uncomplaining detachment as the opening act on death—aging as self-control. Old people in this model are Platonic philosophers “in the best possible position” to sum it all up, says Helen Small, Oxford lit professor and author of The Long Life. Not everyone agrees with our cultural affection for these calm, wise elders who in the real world have no cultural value, and I’m hitching myself to their rallying cry: to honor in myself as I age all the unruliness I ever felt in youth—the angst, anger, and uncertainty, the playfulness and arousal, the curiosity, even the horror and fear. It is a way of giving over to the turbulence, within me and without.
5.
Where is the line between interesting anecdotes about a wayward brain and something you need to see a neurologist for? When I was younger, in my twenties, I had a T-shirt that said, “Of all the things I’ve lost in life, it’s my mind I miss the most,” which I thought was so funny, like, hilarious. Blue shirt, white lettering.
My therapist tells me to hold gently in moments of vulnerability.
I’d been describing a strongly worded reply to a student’s senior project proposal in which I chastised said student for daring to do a thing he had not, in fact, proposed to do, and telling my therapist how, when I realized it, I hyperventilated on the treadmill in my mouse-infested basement.
“Make the appointment,” the therapist says. “Everyone’s so backed up right now, it’ll be six months before you get in. By then you’ll know.”
Know what, though?
~
I think of writing as akin to the metacognition we achieve through meditation, a slightly altered state in which insight arrives almost without our noticing, through the body, through the back door of consciousness when the chatter quiets down. Writing my way into turbulence is not to rehearse the wherefores of this historical moment, which will inevitably change, which will mean what they mean to you as they mean something else to me, but to hold these fears in my cupped hands, in the midst of coming undone. I’d thought of writing to claim something—purpose, clarity, calm, the very small joys that arrive like magic, like hummingbirds at your back window or white blossoms tucked beneath the russet-colored leaves of a Rex begonia. To pull myself, myriad threads, together. But then I read a line in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights about a plane falling from the sky, and I wondered if I could write as a form of surrender to disintegration. If it might be good to lose my way altogether and to falter, spectacularly, in the middle of flight.
For example: “My brain feels like it’s swathed in gauze.”
I didn’t write that. (Michele Morano did.) But I feel it.
In one week in January, three men in their nineties I knew, or knew of, all died. Husbands and fathers who’d led full and rich lives, who are celebrated and grieved. The wife of one babysat my sister in infancy, which means her late husband knew me, too, almost my whole life.
I know it was three but now I can only remember who two of them were.
“In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.” I didn’t write that either—it’s a line from Camus—but I’ve been reciting it as a mantra for the past several months. It’s important in times of stress to come upon such shards of ourselves in unexpected locales.
“I am alive and you are so afraid / of dying.” This is Joy Harjo, calling to fear in her poem “I Give You Back.” “I release you, my beautiful and terrible / fear.” I hear those words as if they are singing; they are full of defiance and grief.
~
I discover a poem called “In Praise of Old Women,” by the Croatian-Canadian poet Marya Fiamengo, that declares holy wisdom to be “old and a woman.” “I will stubbornly praise old women,” says the speaker, “and I will liberate all women / to be old.” There’s a reason the poem refers more than once to America, where “they never grow old,” as if to absolve Canada of its southern neighbor’s distasteful obsession with youth. “I will wrinkle adamantly,” the speaker goes on. “I will have no second debut.”
One afternoon I got caught in a sudden downpour while clearing weeds from a corner of my yard and putting down mulch around the iris and coral bells. The rain was cold on my back, soaked quickly through the knees of my pants; it dripped from the end of my nose like warts on a hag’s proboscis. I worried for the consequence to shoulders, hips, knees; worried about the chill and the damp, because so much these days seems to hurt in ways I forget to anticipate. But I didn’t stop. I wanted to thrust my hands into the spice of pine, watch my hands in their purple gardening gloves smooth an idea I had into shape. To take one ragged triangle into neatness, into stillness.
Old women “bend over graves / with flowers,” writes Fiamengo, though as I leaned into dirt with my rear in the air I felt more childish than wise.
Old women “endure,” says Fiamengo. I could warm up after, anyhow, take a bath. I could lie down and rest. There is always somewhere between the sheets, in the sediment, to lie.
