Mindfall
Cynthia Rich
Excerpts from “Mindfall 1996-2000” (originally published in Ensemble Anthology: Art and Hybrid Writing from International Women, 2011)
May 26, 2000
Five days ago, we drove through the Angeles mountains and stopped for lunch in Palmdale. I turned from Barbara for an instant to check where the entrance was, and when I turned back she was lying on asphalt. At first, she was without pain, only badly shaken, but the pain grew over the next day until she could not move, had to be carried on a board to an ambulance and the ER.
Now, after two days in the hospital, she’s been moved to a rehab center next door; I’m sharply aware it’s not just a rehab center but a long term care facility, too. It’s been exhausting and anxious, with so many decisions to make that all seem crucial--is she overmedicated or did the fall affect her mind, for she lost all alertness and affect, staring so dully that I miss her spirit acutely? Are the nurses’ aides moving her in a way that will make her compression fracture worse? Should I come out as her domestic partner in the Center, where I fear she is much more vulnerable than in the hospital?
The answers emerge: the doctor changes the medication and she enlivens, though still soberingly weak; the physical therapist promises to explain to the aides how to move her; I decide the staff of this home will not treat her badly if we are real to them.
Sitting at last on a chair at the foot of her bed in the Center, a cheerful light and airy place, with my worst fears at rest, I find myself asking: Without our routines, how do I know who we are? It comes so clearly now to me that for years we’ve been our companionable shared activities--our drives by the ocean, our meals out, our trips to the desert, occasional movies, even our showers and medications to take and toileting and dressing and toenails to clip. Who are we when others are feeding or washing Barbara, when we are just two people in a room?
July 1, 2000
On Tuesday I brought Barbara’s ashes home from the cremation service. Janice came with me. She’d done this before and expected it might be truly hard. It wasn’t, really. Maybe I walled off feeling because it was so unreal: taking the elevator in a high-rise to an antiseptic little office space with one window and a large woman behind a desk who was politely “sorry for my loss.”
What I wasn’t prepared for was the box. Not the box itself, which was nicely simple and black, but the weight of it. I thought I remembered hearing that ashes were terribly light, and that’s what I was braced for, like cleaning the fireplace in the desert. When she handed me the box I was shocked by its heaviness, like stone. It seems crazy now, but I was sure they had weighted the box to give it substance, and I was furious. “It’s so heavy,” I said, and she just looked at me with large, steady eyes and said, “It’s the ashes.”
I didn’t believe her and left with the box, horrified. “It’s like lipstick,” I said to the elevator, meaning it was as if she’d been embalmed with make-up and permed hair.
In the car I railed to Janice, who looked puzzled and said, “You know, ashes are really very heavy.”
So instead of grief, what rolled over me was a huge relief, calming me. It wasn’t fakery--it really was Barbara; she had that much substance, that much reality. I felt restored, on center again.
Back home, I put the box of her ashes behind a cupboard door. I don’t think about them, or plan to or need to, until the fall when I will go with Janice and Mannie to the desert to scatter them. But then I suddenly remembered that twenty-five years ago, in “Do You Remember Me?” Barbara anticipated her death:
The strangeness of that idea comes to me at the most unexpected moments and always with surprise and shock; sometimes, I am immobilized by it. Standing before the mirror in the morning, I feel that my scalp is tight. I see that the skin hangs from my hips, and below my stomach a new horizontal crease is forming over which the skin will hang like the hem of a skirt turned under. A hem not to be “let down,” as once my skirts were, because I was “shooting up,” but a widening hem to “take up” on an old garment that has been stretched. Then I see that my body is being drawn into the earth--muscle, tendon, tissue, and skin is being drawn down by the earth’s pull back to the loam. She is pulling me back to herself; she is taking back what is hers.
Cynthia loves bulbs. She digs around in the earth every fall, looking for the rich loamy mold of decayed leaves and vegetation, and sometimes as she takes a sack of bone meal and works it into the damp earth, I think, “Why not mine? Why not?”
I wrote a formal letter to Joe and Jay to ask them if, in October, I might plant three iris bulbs in the back yard and use some of her ashes for bone meal. I told them I very much wanted to respond to her wish, to complete that circle from our first home together in Cambridge to our last home. But not unless they felt fully comfortable. Today, each stopped by to say, with caring and courtesy, yes, of course.
In October, I’ll know what I feel about Barbara’s ashes. Until then, those feelings are on the shelf, with the simple black box.
July 15, 2000
When I was going to the Center to be with Barbara, and guessed she was dying, I bought a one-time camera to take her picture. Partly I felt ghoulish--what right had I to invade her privacy when she couldn’t say no--and partly I still do, as I write this. And still I did it because I was not sure it was an invasion, and I was sure how powerfully I wanted to. In those weeks her spirit was so present, without word or expression, a sort of luminous essence that filled the room. It wasn’t only me.
Barb Potts just told me that Nancy told her the same thing after she came to visit. I wanted to catch and hold that mystery because I thought later I might belittle it to myself. I took three pictures then put the camera away. I knew she was in there and when I went to Kathy’s birthday party, I finished the roll with pictures of laughing guests.
Sitting in the RiteAid parking lot in Hillcrest with the package of photos in my hand, I’m caught between eagerness and dread. Will she really be there? What will it mean if she is? I tear open the flap, let the happy faces spill onto my lap, and grab the three I’m waiting for.
She’s there. They are bad pictures, grainy, pale. But she’s there--the spirit of that room, that time, that last time lingering on the edge. The spirit I’ve been drinking in these past days without any Nos.
And I lose it. It’s so large I can’t contain it. At first its huge power is centered in the pictures. In my grief so vast it’s close to horror, I realize that this is what I might have felt about Barbara’s ashes.
I had watched Barbara’s spirit leave her body with the kind of finality you can’t argue with, and so I knew in a deep way it wasn’t there among her ashes.
But the pictures! They are filled with her, her spirit floods out from them, and it is immense.
So immense that I can see no way to live with them. I can guess that this is how I might have felt about her ashes--How can I keep them in the house, this huge presence? But how can I let them stay anywhere else?
The dilemma seems to me unbearable, insoluble.
I come home, bearing the charged envelope. I don’t see how I can stay here with the pictures, and I have nowhere to go. It’s Saturday evening and everybody is living their life, except maybe Barb or Nants and they are--each--grieving their breakup and don’t need to receive this mammoth grief. Besides, during Barbara’s illness, after the death, I never felt this urgency to be with someone, and I’m afraid that urgency would go into my voice, leaving whichever friend I called on no choice. Even the day of Barbara’s death, when I called Janice, I didn’t have that edge, I was at peace, and I could have been alone. This golden evening, my need is immense, I’m drowning. I struggle against it, promise myself it will go away, that if I meet it alone, I’ll be stronger for it, but I don’t believe it. I give in.
Janice’s voice is ready and unalarmed by my need, though I keep my own smooth and open all kinds of escape hatches for her.
I drive wildly sobbing to Pacific Beach with the packet of pictures on the dashboard. She’s waiting at the window and when she gets in the car, I pour my grief onto her lap.
We drive a few blocks down to the beach where we sit, and I wail and don’t care which of the young men and women in their shorts and halters may hear me. I tell Janice what I realized on the way to her house--what I am grieving for today.
I know I have always appreciated Barbara, seen and valued who she was, and as I’ve joked, even after twenty-six years of living packed together in a trailer or one-room apartments, still am a wide-eyed groupie. I told her so, in every kind of way, so I’ve no regrets for that.
Still, these last days of surveying her work of twenty-five years, watching and hearing her speak on the videos, have been the time for taking in at another level her whole life, her whole stance--a wider and deeper view than I’d ever been able to take.
At the same moment, I can see it’s not Barbara only. I realize that this must be true of everyone, that nobody can take in the fullness of another human being while she is still living. They are unfinished, in process, they may still disappoint or surprise--it would be senseless or crazy-making to try to sum up anyone every month or year or decade. And we are in process, too, unfinished in relation to them. So it doesn’t matter how deeply we’ve valued, admired, appreciated. We can’t fully appreciate until after death shuts the door on the new, the changeful. It’s only then we can fully take measure.
My grieving, as I spill it out to Janice, is: I can now see Barbara whole--whole as someone who has been present for less than a third of her lifespan can see. I take her in as if for the first time because with deeper knowledge. So while I know it’s false, my feeling is, I never appreciated her.
And with that new appreciation, another grief: I can’t let her know how much I value her now.
The platitude goes: “We must tell people how much we love and value them while they’re still here to hear us.” Well, sure, of course, but in the larger sense it’s a crock. We can’t know it, much less tell them, while they’re still here to hear us.
Excerpts from “Mindfall 1996-2000” (originally published in Ensemble Anthology: Art and Hybrid Writing from International Women, 2011)
May 26, 2000
Five days ago, we drove through the Angeles mountains and stopped for lunch in Palmdale. I turned from Barbara for an instant to check where the entrance was, and when I turned back she was lying on asphalt. At first, she was without pain, only badly shaken, but the pain grew over the next day until she could not move, had to be carried on a board to an ambulance and the ER.
Now, after two days in the hospital, she’s been moved to a rehab center next door; I’m sharply aware it’s not just a rehab center but a long term care facility, too. It’s been exhausting and anxious, with so many decisions to make that all seem crucial--is she overmedicated or did the fall affect her mind, for she lost all alertness and affect, staring so dully that I miss her spirit acutely? Are the nurses’ aides moving her in a way that will make her compression fracture worse? Should I come out as her domestic partner in the Center, where I fear she is much more vulnerable than in the hospital?
The answers emerge: the doctor changes the medication and she enlivens, though still soberingly weak; the physical therapist promises to explain to the aides how to move her; I decide the staff of this home will not treat her badly if we are real to them.
Sitting at last on a chair at the foot of her bed in the Center, a cheerful light and airy place, with my worst fears at rest, I find myself asking: Without our routines, how do I know who we are? It comes so clearly now to me that for years we’ve been our companionable shared activities--our drives by the ocean, our meals out, our trips to the desert, occasional movies, even our showers and medications to take and toileting and dressing and toenails to clip. Who are we when others are feeding or washing Barbara, when we are just two people in a room?
July 1, 2000
On Tuesday I brought Barbara’s ashes home from the cremation service. Janice came with me. She’d done this before and expected it might be truly hard. It wasn’t, really. Maybe I walled off feeling because it was so unreal: taking the elevator in a high-rise to an antiseptic little office space with one window and a large woman behind a desk who was politely “sorry for my loss.”
What I wasn’t prepared for was the box. Not the box itself, which was nicely simple and black, but the weight of it. I thought I remembered hearing that ashes were terribly light, and that’s what I was braced for, like cleaning the fireplace in the desert. When she handed me the box I was shocked by its heaviness, like stone. It seems crazy now, but I was sure they had weighted the box to give it substance, and I was furious. “It’s so heavy,” I said, and she just looked at me with large, steady eyes and said, “It’s the ashes.”
I didn’t believe her and left with the box, horrified. “It’s like lipstick,” I said to the elevator, meaning it was as if she’d been embalmed with make-up and permed hair.
In the car I railed to Janice, who looked puzzled and said, “You know, ashes are really very heavy.”
So instead of grief, what rolled over me was a huge relief, calming me. It wasn’t fakery--it really was Barbara; she had that much substance, that much reality. I felt restored, on center again.
Back home, I put the box of her ashes behind a cupboard door. I don’t think about them, or plan to or need to, until the fall when I will go with Janice and Mannie to the desert to scatter them. But then I suddenly remembered that twenty-five years ago, in “Do You Remember Me?” Barbara anticipated her death:
The strangeness of that idea comes to me at the most unexpected moments and always with surprise and shock; sometimes, I am immobilized by it. Standing before the mirror in the morning, I feel that my scalp is tight. I see that the skin hangs from my hips, and below my stomach a new horizontal crease is forming over which the skin will hang like the hem of a skirt turned under. A hem not to be “let down,” as once my skirts were, because I was “shooting up,” but a widening hem to “take up” on an old garment that has been stretched. Then I see that my body is being drawn into the earth--muscle, tendon, tissue, and skin is being drawn down by the earth’s pull back to the loam. She is pulling me back to herself; she is taking back what is hers.
Cynthia loves bulbs. She digs around in the earth every fall, looking for the rich loamy mold of decayed leaves and vegetation, and sometimes as she takes a sack of bone meal and works it into the damp earth, I think, “Why not mine? Why not?”
I wrote a formal letter to Joe and Jay to ask them if, in October, I might plant three iris bulbs in the back yard and use some of her ashes for bone meal. I told them I very much wanted to respond to her wish, to complete that circle from our first home together in Cambridge to our last home. But not unless they felt fully comfortable. Today, each stopped by to say, with caring and courtesy, yes, of course.
In October, I’ll know what I feel about Barbara’s ashes. Until then, those feelings are on the shelf, with the simple black box.
July 15, 2000
When I was going to the Center to be with Barbara, and guessed she was dying, I bought a one-time camera to take her picture. Partly I felt ghoulish--what right had I to invade her privacy when she couldn’t say no--and partly I still do, as I write this. And still I did it because I was not sure it was an invasion, and I was sure how powerfully I wanted to. In those weeks her spirit was so present, without word or expression, a sort of luminous essence that filled the room. It wasn’t only me.
Barb Potts just told me that Nancy told her the same thing after she came to visit. I wanted to catch and hold that mystery because I thought later I might belittle it to myself. I took three pictures then put the camera away. I knew she was in there and when I went to Kathy’s birthday party, I finished the roll with pictures of laughing guests.
Sitting in the RiteAid parking lot in Hillcrest with the package of photos in my hand, I’m caught between eagerness and dread. Will she really be there? What will it mean if she is? I tear open the flap, let the happy faces spill onto my lap, and grab the three I’m waiting for.
She’s there. They are bad pictures, grainy, pale. But she’s there--the spirit of that room, that time, that last time lingering on the edge. The spirit I’ve been drinking in these past days without any Nos.
And I lose it. It’s so large I can’t contain it. At first its huge power is centered in the pictures. In my grief so vast it’s close to horror, I realize that this is what I might have felt about Barbara’s ashes.
I had watched Barbara’s spirit leave her body with the kind of finality you can’t argue with, and so I knew in a deep way it wasn’t there among her ashes.
But the pictures! They are filled with her, her spirit floods out from them, and it is immense.
So immense that I can see no way to live with them. I can guess that this is how I might have felt about her ashes--How can I keep them in the house, this huge presence? But how can I let them stay anywhere else?
The dilemma seems to me unbearable, insoluble.
I come home, bearing the charged envelope. I don’t see how I can stay here with the pictures, and I have nowhere to go. It’s Saturday evening and everybody is living their life, except maybe Barb or Nants and they are--each--grieving their breakup and don’t need to receive this mammoth grief. Besides, during Barbara’s illness, after the death, I never felt this urgency to be with someone, and I’m afraid that urgency would go into my voice, leaving whichever friend I called on no choice. Even the day of Barbara’s death, when I called Janice, I didn’t have that edge, I was at peace, and I could have been alone. This golden evening, my need is immense, I’m drowning. I struggle against it, promise myself it will go away, that if I meet it alone, I’ll be stronger for it, but I don’t believe it. I give in.
Janice’s voice is ready and unalarmed by my need, though I keep my own smooth and open all kinds of escape hatches for her.
I drive wildly sobbing to Pacific Beach with the packet of pictures on the dashboard. She’s waiting at the window and when she gets in the car, I pour my grief onto her lap.
We drive a few blocks down to the beach where we sit, and I wail and don’t care which of the young men and women in their shorts and halters may hear me. I tell Janice what I realized on the way to her house--what I am grieving for today.
I know I have always appreciated Barbara, seen and valued who she was, and as I’ve joked, even after twenty-six years of living packed together in a trailer or one-room apartments, still am a wide-eyed groupie. I told her so, in every kind of way, so I’ve no regrets for that.
Still, these last days of surveying her work of twenty-five years, watching and hearing her speak on the videos, have been the time for taking in at another level her whole life, her whole stance--a wider and deeper view than I’d ever been able to take.
At the same moment, I can see it’s not Barbara only. I realize that this must be true of everyone, that nobody can take in the fullness of another human being while she is still living. They are unfinished, in process, they may still disappoint or surprise--it would be senseless or crazy-making to try to sum up anyone every month or year or decade. And we are in process, too, unfinished in relation to them. So it doesn’t matter how deeply we’ve valued, admired, appreciated. We can’t fully appreciate until after death shuts the door on the new, the changeful. It’s only then we can fully take measure.
My grieving, as I spill it out to Janice, is: I can now see Barbara whole--whole as someone who has been present for less than a third of her lifespan can see. I take her in as if for the first time because with deeper knowledge. So while I know it’s false, my feeling is, I never appreciated her.
And with that new appreciation, another grief: I can’t let her know how much I value her now.
The platitude goes: “We must tell people how much we love and value them while they’re still here to hear us.” Well, sure, of course, but in the larger sense it’s a crock. We can’t know it, much less tell them, while they’re still here to hear us.
Working notes
In 1995, Barbara Macdonald and I visited Tokyo to publicize the Japanese edition of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism. She gave talks and interviews and helped me negotiate the Tokyo subway. Less than a year later Barbara began to show signs of Alzheimer’s. The excerpts above are from Mindfall, the journal I kept during the five years before her death. These entries follow the fall that was to signal the end. Mindfall can be read in its entirety in Ensemble Anthology, no. 1.
About the author
Cynthia Rich is a spiritual care counselor at UCSD Medical Center in San Diego. She is co-author, with Barbara Macdonald, of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism (Spinsters Ink, 1983/2001), and author of Desert Years: Undreaming the American Dream (Aunt Lute, 1989) and dharma gleanings: company for a meditation practice (www.dharmagleanings.org.).
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.