in the hall of mirrors

In the lists

The past couple of weeks, through the holidays but around/after Sandy's death, have been different than they usually are for me – no travel, not much activity, no real holidays; only a bit of peripheral participation in other people's holidays (Bennett & Merrie dropping by, Chris Wood's concert, dinner at blahfeme's – and tonight New Year celebrations at a colleague's house, if I go). As a result, although it hasn't been depressing, the quietness has emphasized the character of this time of year, the character that the holidays are intended to alter – the dark of the year, the depth of winter, the time when the sun is furthest and we huddle around the stove, waiting for its return. (Thank God for central heating of course.)

As I'm about to begin about eight months (or, if I'm very lucky, a full year) of time off to write, with just a couple of scheduled research activities and perhaps a trip or two, this has meant a sort of retreat to take stock, especially over the past three or four days – as is appropriate for year-end; to think about time and planning and the near future.

So: messing about with calendars, with lists and plans, even with new organization software (I've fallen for several products by the fashionable Omni Group), I try to keep my future in line: to measure out in segments of time a space of focused writing and reading, free of the needs of most other people, and hopefully of the more useless distractions. We'll see if I can actually do it.

***

I was also thinking about another kind of list, the 100 Things To Do Before you Die kind of thing that's all over the internet. My younger sister pointed out that Sandy and her husband went to Hawaii last year, and that that trip was undoubtedly on her 'list' – a 'bucket list' if you keep up with current movies – and was not trivial, as she already knew about her prognosis; which made me think about what my own list might entail.

The problem is that, of course, most of the existing lists are cluttered with passive inanities (going to a Super Bowl?) or extreme sports (only interesting for the young and physically oriented). If I throw all that stuff out, a lot of the remainder has to do with travel, seeing places, learning languages – I've actually done more of that than most people (as I typically boast to my students, I've lived and worked on four continents now), although I'm definitely willing to do more. And of course all of the learn-an-instrument, give-a-public-speech, or performance things are already checked off, repeatedly; and we won't mention the sex and partying activities, which though long in the past are mostly, well, checked off. Then there are items that seem to be related to self-awareness and experience – I think I've actually done plenty of that too, although again one can always handle more.

I might mess around a bit and try to put together a list for myself; but I suspect that, if I died tomorrow, I wouldn't feel I hadn't lived an interesting life. I would still complain, irritably and fairly pathetically, that the last few years of my life have been too isolated and boring – but let's face it, I have a lot of rather lively memories that most people would envy, even if some of them are tied to situations that would scare the heck out of many. But that's the price you pay, I guess.

So that's my New Year's Eve, I guess: looking backward, with a certain tempered satisfaction....

Concerns

A disturbing dream of my sister in pain, suffering with the chemo, sleeping, getting worse – at some strangely chaotic, crowded conference; emphasizing the insensitivity of not knowing what she's going through, of not helping.

***

The family seemed calm and even cheerful at yesterday's Christmas phone call; probably the ones to worry about are her husband, after everyone goes home (what shape will his life be now, with her gone? – and him only in his mid-fifties); and my mother, who received so much extra care through my eldest sister, and of course now my younger sister and brother are finding out how much work that can entail.

Well, I guess they have their work cut out. I wonder what I can do to help – or what I could have done to help before....

As you can see from my last couple of posts, I'm actually feeling very heart-whole, calm, myself (except for that dream, of course). Midwinter, after the holidays, and after a death: but with nothing really broken.

This endris night

The candles are burning, and some old carols are playing; dinner is cooking – rice with saffron, cranberries and almonds, topped with a breast of chicken rubbed with paprika and nutmeg. Tomorrow I will go to blahfeme's for Christmas dinner, but tonight is quiet and at home.

***

I love Christmas stories, poems, plays, vignettes.

All right, not all of them: when Project Gutenberg re-publishes newspaper schlock from the 1870s, I am frankly not amused. But the brilliant ones, the well-written ones – starting, of course, with

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

– those are worth their weight in tinsel. Although there is actually no other Dickens I really like, that particular one is endlessly rereadable, and brilliant – I don't know if it's because I was trained to like it or what, but there are so many wonderful sentences, images, and moments.

And some of the other familiar ones –

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

But she hugged them to her, and at length she was able to smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim... Oh! You haven't seen your beautiful present! Isn't it a dandy, Jim? A platinum watch chain, I hunted all over town to find it. Give me your watch, I want to see how it looks on it."

A letter saying so merely confirms the news that some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose, like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across the campus on this December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, almost like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

It came a floweret bright / amid the cold of winter, / when half-spent was the night.

And some of my own favorites that you probably don't know: sentimental, funny, sad, or even sinister –

Here were the popcorn strings my mother strung when I was the youngest child, and the paper bells Larry and I made when he was so small it seems unbelievable now, and the jigsaw Santa my husband cut out the same year, and the painted candy canes, and the red ribbons, and the green paper wreaths. "Oh, my," I said, looking at all of it. "Oh, Mom, just sit down," Jannie said. "You just don't remember, that's all. You sit down and I'll do it."

Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say, she made the most of it: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!" And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid – of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

Why should I have my premises made a scapegoat for administrative incompetence and I don't care who hears me! And it's not just the inconvenience – it's the downright inhumanity that makes me so upset. Like this poor girl from up north – all that long way in such terrible weather, and the baby due any minute.... Well, what do you expect me to do? I haven't a room in the house. I don't know whether I'm on me head or me heels – just look at the place, a madhouse and I'm run off me feet! You'll have to find somewhere else, I just simply can't – oh my, she can't really travel any more, can she? Oh dear, oh dear – Look, would it be all right if I was to put you in the stable?...

"We sent them something on the twenty-second, so they had to think of us. There was no getting around it." "Well, what did we send them?" "I forget – good heavens – I think it was a calendar."

"Only there ought to be a star at the top," the woody's uncle said. "Do you think so?" the woody replied, looking thoughtfully at Moominmamma's red silk rose. "What difference does it make once the idea's right?" "The rose should have been a star," Moominmamma whispered to the others. "But how on earth?..."

The sun is shining, the grass is green, / The orange and palm trees sway. / There’s never been such a day / In Beverly Hills, L. A. / But it’s December the twenty-fourth / And I am longing to be up north...

"It's an ominous present," Suzy said. "Aren't you going to open it?"

And, of course, one of the best lines ever written:

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Wassail

After a sleepy day, recovering from yesterday's late visit from Bennett and Merrie, I put myself together to walk down through the northeastern suburbs, between the universities, down through the center of a practically deserted Sunday-night town, and over the river to the Sage Gateshead (our dazzling new-ish local concert hall) for a work by Chris Wood, a brilliant 'traditional' musician. We have a lot of folk/traditional people in the music department here – this is in fact a national center for it – and they tend to be very lively, familial, and not incidentally highly skilled players; but Chris, who occasionally works with our people, is exceptional, as a player and as a composer.

A few years ago, he'd sent me a short version of his radio piece Listening to the River (a 25-minute version, later finished as an hour-long broadcast work commissioned by the BBC). It was like Steve Reich's Different Trains, but frankly a vastly better piece – in the same way, Wood taped a number of people's voices (in this case, people living in the Thames Valley, which is where he grew up, talking about the river itself) and used them as material, composing tunes and textures based on the rhythms and pitches of the spoken voice. Although I've never heard the whole piece, the short version was one of the best things I'd ever heard – naturally, easily gorgeous music, delicate and intelligent and marvellous and amazingly touching – I've played it for many people over the past couple of years.

Tonight's performance was Christmas Champions, and it had stories, traditional tunes, and several newly written songs in it; the actual material would seem pretty slight if you described it, but what he and storyteller Hugh Lupton did with it was really wonderful. This is about the deepest skill – the ability to make most subtle and sophisticated of work seem completely casual and natural; Wood's own assertive, occasionally hilarious charm in live performance made it even better. I was sitting there stunned at one point, while he held his own fiddle negligently in the air, one-handedly doing pizzicati as an accompaniment to his own voice, as natural as breathing and with as little apparent attention – but with small shifts and details that made it subtly finer than most performances that exhibit more sheer hard work.

Is there any way of putting into words exactly where his skill lies? – maybe there isn't, but I keep trying. Something about the delicate precision of small sounds, lightly done, in unexpected relations with each other – no, that's too conceptual, it's more immediate than that... the close musical lines, the dense tangles of notes, the slight difference from the traditional expectation, but not different in a conceptual way – almost: different in a way that seems even more rooted in the innate, in the deeply, archaically natural....

And yes, a couple of references to short life, death, loss (typical of folk music) were good for me, given the past week; I did admittedly cry two or three times in the evening.

Anyway: I'm glad I bought the CDs they had on hand. A great antidote to the appalling Christmas music that keeps popping up in restaurants and stores all this week.

Family pictures

By which, this time at least, I don't mean: pictures of my family. We have hundreds – thousands – of those, from the decades of my father's passionate taking of photographs; I have several made into plates – including one of all of us some time around 1968 or 1969, where Sandy notably has a beautiful haircut à la Jackie Kennedy (my other sister Lauren has something a bit trendier and more defiant, sort of girl-group-plus-bangs over one eye; my brother looks distinctly Italianate, and I look like the bowl-cut Spock I resembled throughout my teens).

But let's talk about pictures made by my family. Dad, Sandy, and Lauren are the picture makers – my brother is more interested in real objects (especially cars and airplanes), I can't draw, and my mother only ventured into some cautious crafts work fairly late in life. Although Lauren is the professional, Dad and Sandy both had very fine eyes for the 'classic', as shown in Sandy's book (which I'll describe some day).

Just two pictures, then: one, a large Cibachrome photograph by my father from 1976, around the era that he discovered what was then the new dazzling-quality color film. It is a forest of deep-green trees, but seen only in a rippling pond – which gives a strange sense of the mystery and beauty of these trees, as though the forest itself is under water. I told him it was my favorite picture of his, and he made me a print later that year; it has come through thirty-one years – well, not unscathed, as on my last move the frame broke and the glass tore one corner of the print. A local photographer, a very shy but kind man, agreed to try to remount and repair the print; that was two years ago – ridiculously, he and I kept getting busy and forgetting to call each other.

Finally, two weeks ago, he called on a Friday night and said he was in my neighborhood making another delivery, and could bring the photograph – he charged me less than usual because of the delay (and because the delay was at least as much my fault I paid him more than he asked), and stood around, sweet and gentle but nervous as always. (My gaydar says: yes – and he likes me, too – but of course he would never get up the courage to say anything.)

The tear is invisible, the mounting perfect, the light beech frame beautiful: I just hung it in my bedroom (you'll pardon the flash in my photograph, the ones without flash are too blurry; I know that the skills exist to angle the camera so that the glass doesn't reflect, but I'd have to ask Dad...).

The trees in Dad's photograph always suggested my most elemental experience of my parents' house – the room I shared with my brother was on the second floor, and looked straight out into the green leaves of the crowd of very tall trees in our back yard (forty-two trees in the back yard I think, I believe I counted once while mowing the lawn). Most of those trees had about fifteen feet of fairly bare bark before the leaves started, but the height of our windows meant that in spring and summer you looked straight into them – like living in a tree itself.

The second picture is much smaller – and there is a similar one in my office. When Sandy sent me forwarded mail, she would often tack a small post-it on the inside – casually, quickly, evidently while doing several errands at once. These pictures are smiley faces; both of my sisters draw smiley faces, but they don't look like the classic commercial yellow face – Lauren's tend to have the eyes closer together and show a variety of expressions, always comic; but Sandy's inevitably tended towards the wistful, with crinkly mouths and a wry, oh-well-what-ja-gonna-do feeling. Although both kinds of smileys consist of only a line and dots inside a circle, it's amazing how much expression each sister gets into them. And it is notable that Sandy's always looked peculiarly as though their little, round faces didn't merely have an expression – they actually had feelings that they were quietly putting aside, expressions behind the expression....

The smiley is a message. The photograph: wholeness, a gift – a blessing.

Solstice

The winter solstice at 6 am today, on the 22nd; a full moon coming (early afternoon on the 24th); a light snow.

Though it will be a quiet Christmas, it won't be I think I bleak one. The house is clean and warm, with plenty of food, even a small panettone; and although my Christmas present to myself – a handful of amusing books, chosen over three or four hours on the second long sleepless night after Sandy's death for their short stories and pleasant distractions – didn't arrive at the university before it shut for the holiday (typical), there are of course massive numbers of books and movies neatly lined up on the shelves.

At this latitude, the day is seven hours, forty minutes long....

Message

A calm day, after several nights of erratic sleep (insomnia is strange for me – usually even under stress I sleep more): went in for a meeting and office holiday luncheon, got a haircut, did errands. The house is quiet and clean, and smells good: candles in the living room, panettone in the kitchen.

***

Sandy's message to me on my birthday, seven days before she died:

"hippo birdies to you!"

[A Sandra Boynton quote.]

"I hope you found something fun to do and good people with whom to have that fun. Send a pic or two! L. & I thought about calling last night, but since we couldn't figure out what time it was for you, I hope you'll realize it was a public service that we didn't call at 3 am or whatever time it really was for you. Anyway, happy birthday, and many more. I hope this will be the year that, if you still want to go back to CA, you'll make progress getting there, and that you'll write that book. love, s"

At the time, I thought: hmm, odd that she would say all that. Of course, if she was thinking the way we now believe she was thinking, it was basically a last message... somewhat like when Reid, on his deathbed in 1983, told me: stop screwing around in San Francisco, and go away somewhere to graduate school.

Last instructions....

Reflection

It's obscurely troubling, though understandable, that Sandy evidently knew how low her chances were – and we didn't. Or, perhaps more accurately (it's hard to tell exactly), that she knew that her chances might be very low, while we assumed that there was an outside chance that she would be in some trouble.

A slightly disturbing episode of House – where Chase's father comes to tell Chase he has cancer; hostilities between them don't cease; he doesn't tell Chase, but assumes that House does – while Chase, at the end, comes to see him off from an obscure sense of affection, but still not knowing; so that they play a final scene with different assumptions. The scene bothered me when I saw it before; now, thinking that Sandy and I might have played that scene this summer to some extent, it bothers me even more. It is not pleasant to be caught in an interesting theatrical scene.

Her choices in terms of information and discussion are understandable; I know that I was oddly proud of her talking to me about illness and death at points this year, although I thought they were rather distant fears, not of course near-certainties. And of course the truth is that her brothers and sisters weren't quite in the inner circle: she made a choice some years ago when she married, to turn away from certain things for the sake of happiness – I always felt that a close connection to me was one of those things, and resented it for some years; although I know she certainly still cared, if in a more distant, attenuated form. I've also always assumed that part of the distance was due to my being gay – though I am not sure of this, although I know she was conceptually perfectly fine with it, I think she didn't like the, shall we say, material reality of it. (Like the Mormon mother in Angels in America, when she says: the thought of two men together, it's so "ungainly".)

But here I'm battling with old uncertainties, faint resentments, ghostly attempts at mind-reading: my eldest sister's slightly sphinxlike approach to topics of delicacy always tended to make me (and my other sister) anxious, probably pointlessly anxious, that she was concealing more unpleasant thoughts than she probably was.

But that our more recent meetings, especially this summer, were partly based on me Not Getting It: that still bothers me. When you read backwards in time, and try to figure out what was going on... a difficult task of course. And one where none of the questions can ever really be answered.

•••

Later that night – a partial self-rebuttal: of course at some points in the years of panic and suffering, at points when I was pretty sick, I didn't tell my family a great deal about it. Probably when you can tell someone else over the phone that you are in serious health difficulties, they have advanced to a point where – well, to a point where you don't have much hope that they will simply go away. Like a cold that you don't tell your mother about, because next week it will be gone....

After

As it happens, there will be no memorial for some time – so I won't go home this weekend, or I think anywhere over the holidays. Which means, as even Patrick has gone home to Wales for the next three weeks, plenty of time to myself – and/or too much time to myself, however you prefer to view it.

Hubris

The arrogance of assuming, after twenty-five years of dealing with people with AIDS, that this would be easy to deal with: that arrogance has taken a blow – because of course the relative importance of a person changes everything. The sheer sense that the universe has broken in half, or cracked at some deep level: that I can't imagine much caring about doing things if Sandy won't get to read them – that a main reason for functioning, for having successes, has vanished.

On the other hand the bizarre quality of distance, isolation, unreality: since I wasn't there when Sandy was ill, or when she died; as I haven't seen her very often for many years; as I'm thousands of miles from everyone who is dealing with this, connecting with and consoling each other – there is a disturbing elusiveness about the whole situation: as though it is entirely made of ideas, of concepts, of images and words – and the whole starts to feel like a novel that one will close and forget.

My sister hadn't "wanted us to remember her in the hospital"; unfortunately I disagree with that kind of thinking – it makes everything so, well, virtual....

Aging & AIDS

Of course, after fifty, one gets accustomed to losing friends and family with increasing frequency. Which points up what was so bizarre about AIDS – that we experienced the same thing, even more drastically, from the age of thirty (or for some from the age of twenty). There are however differences: AIDS was always more predictably a shared experience, with familiar problems and mutual advice about how to handle them; where most of my straight relatives and friends plan on being ill or dying with only a few immediately family members around, and everyone else 'outside the circle' (as all the family has been except Sandy's husband and daughter).

Which means some isolation from their friends – and no, or very little, discussing things or telling anyone much about them; which also means everything is always an unprepared shock, and also that everything becomes somewhat virtual/unreal.

I suppose this is especially frustrating for me – since I always want to talk about everything....

Mom

The great, background difficulty: how will we take care of Mom? Should I try to move there to help care for her? (Improbable, as finding an academic job in the area would take some time – a year or three at least; and besides my mother, even in her more forgetful and fragmented condition, is not very comfortable being cared for in more intimate problems by anyone male, even her youngest son. Of course the nursing home staff, who are really pretty good although with lapses into ineptitude, will handle most of the day-to-day problems; but my younger sister will have the brunt of visits with the occasional need to handle incontinence, etc.)

Incidentally – I shouldn't call her "my younger sister": she is – or was – really the younger of my older sisters, if you can follow that. Sandy was eldest, then my brother, then my other sister, then me – and that matters because birth order really does function very strongly among the four of us, determining much of our personalities, habits and mutual relationships. Or – will we all shift a bit, in the absence of Sandy, the linchpin of the whole system?...

Anyway: should we assume that Mom is dealt with as much as she can be, by the nursing home staff? Because Sandy spent so much time checking in on her, and watching every detail of what the staff did and didn't do – in fact we apparently became known as somewhat troublesome clients, though it was all clearly justified (it's not a bad nursing home – lots of good intentions – but there's also a startling amount of ineptitude). And now my younger sister (see above for explanation) has been coming down from New York every weekend, almost the length of the Northeastern corridor – she obviously expects to keep doing that; but think of the expense, the stress, possible health issues –

well: not an unusual family problem, I guess. But I wish there were some useful contribution I could make to a solution.

Funeral Music

Monday and Tuesday, before I understood that the memorial wouldn't be for some weeks – now lengthened to months (they've decided to do a Spring memorial in March/April, putting her ashes with my father's in Arlington Cemetary – quite an honor really; I hadn't realized that the families of military men were eligible to be there), I'd been told that Sandy wanted me to choose music for the memorial.

(She thought of everything – or more accurately of everyone: carefully planning for people to have tasks so that they felt involved, which would of course help us get past being on the outside in relation to her illness or death. And, she made a point of taking care of a variety of people – yesterday her husband had the task of taking back her chemo medicines to the oncology clinic, together with holiday chocolates for the nurses. Quite impressive... I doubt I'd think of any of that.)

So, I'd been thinking about finding music: and naturally had the urge to use something really sad and powerful – Arvo Pärt's Cantus (too ruthlessly sad), Gorecki's Symphony no. 3 (unless that's too much of a cliché? – but you don't hear it as often as you did five years ago), Barber's Adagio (too familiar, and too often distorted by remixes, to hear it in the right spirit), or tracks from Cliff Martinez' score for Solaris (too tonally weird) – but I will have to tone it down to something more peaceful and acceptable to a large suburban audience.

Sandy and my remaining sister Lauren both love baroque music – perhaps some solemn Purcell or Handel would work well... the Chaconne at the end of The Fairy Queen, or a slow movement from a Boyce symphony, or that best of Handel concerti grossi where everything suddenly turns delicate, transparent, and faintly sad?...

I'd pulled some CDs out to think about them; now that I have several months I'll just make a list, I suppose. But will hopefully not delay decisions until the last moment.

And, speaking of decisions – my friend Susan H. from Los Angeles helped me buy the classy black suit for my father's funeral in 2000, a better and more appropriate choice than I ever could have done on my own. I hope I can wear that of course, but – may not be that shape any more – aargh: the difficulty of wanting to be appropriate, but not ever wearing such clothes these days....

Solaris

Of all possible movies – the remake of Solaris was on television several hours after Sandy's death. As I've said before, despite any criticisms anyone else cares to make in comparison to the Tarkovsky or Lem originals, I love this movie very much – and it is, for me, a nearly perfect poem about love, loss, death and eternity. Seeing the detailed turns and changes of the film's last hour, I think, again: when he imagines himself returning to Earth – and then we jump back, and see him decide to stay on the ship – that I would certainly, absolutely, make that same choice.

"Am I alive, or dead?"

"We don't have to think like that anymore."

The master

Sandy, especially after her apparently unpleasant year taking a master's degree in city planning at Harvard (as Susan M. always says: "Harvard ruins people" – testimony to the viciously unfair politics that reputedly mar the most famous of American universities), didn't talk a lot – in fact it seems as though the elder two (Sandy and my brother) got quieter over the years as we two younger ones became more voluble.

However, what she did say was usually right on target. It was also often clear, simple, and as scalpel-exact as advice from a Zen master – and more so than, for instance, my father's advice, which was similiarly kind and sensible, but not as startlingly exact. I have the sense, looking back – I was mostly unaware of this at the time – that some particular sentences out of her mouth were the main reason I got anything at all right.

For instance, after botching Purcell's long-phrased 'Hallelujah' at my younger sister's wedding, when I was thinking of university, performing, composing, musicology, sciences – she said, "I've always thought of you as more of a book person." Clean, precise – clarifying that no, I shouldn't be a performer, but without any unpleasant criticisms or side comments....

Holidays

The dullness of feeling: combined with the relief that I won't bother to figure out pretty much anything for this holiday – no tree (which means I don't have to replant the one from last year which is half dry), no travel (which means no answer to the apartment rental in Palermo – probably too expensive anyway), and no concern about presents (the family had already decided not to bother this year).

Dangerous, of course, at least under some circumstances: although the depression therapy of the past three months has actually made me less anxious about the holidays (the actual fear of being left in too meaningless/depressing/lonely a situation on Christmas morning is much smaller), it is still not ideal – not the best way to get older: trying to decide where to go alone on Christmas – it's not healthy, I suppose.

And, in a way, I'm disappointed that the memorial is so far away: it means that the reality of losing Sandy turns into a lengthy social process, a cloud of minor needs and duties and experiences, and that any memory of her gets lost in the shuffle....

Strange holidays.

Sandy

My eldest sister Sandy (Sandra) died this afternoon – about an hour ago – in the hospital; her husband and daughter were apparently there.

I will arrange to fly home this weekend – I assume there will be a funeral or memorial before Christmas – when my younger sister and brother and their families were already planning to be there for the holiday.