Robert, James, Mary, Alice, June...My mother's voice soared across the brook that separated our yard from the forest. Her singsong refrain traveled over the pines and into whatever thicket we were exploring that day. It was time to go home.
How old was I? Three, four. Maybe five. Not more. But when I recall her voice now I am in the moment again.
We didn't resist her summons. She was always waiting, usually on the porch. With her at home was another brother. He never came with us to the forest, because he was an invalid, bound by a twist of fortune to a crib.
Home. My universe, in its proper order. Mother and her six children.
Somewhere in time, my mother's voice still echoes through the trees and she still waits on the porch. But many of those trees have been cut down, and the six of us...we are now three. My mother long ago departed.
For everything there is a season.
How do I make sense of the season I'm in? How do I live in it?
I remember reading about the cicada. Some cicadas live underground, as nymphs, for seventeen years. They spend their days in nymph form, eating, growing, preparing to fulfill their purpose on earth. In culmination of this effort they emerge as adults, climb a tree, mate, and die. Seventeen years of preparation for six weeks of life--their final season.
When my eldest brother died, three weeks ago, I felt sad, profoundly sad. I allowed myself that, briefly. Then I insisted on getting back to the business of living.
Is that all there is? Peggy Lee sang these words wistfully in the 1960s. If that is all, her song suggested, then we should take out the booze and start dancing.
I loved the song, and love it to this day. Peggy Lee's rendition is haunting, but the shallow, almost nihilist vision of the lyrics will not carry me through my final season. They were not even enough to take me through the hardest days of my youth, when I found validation not in distraction, but in doing.
William James, the American Pragmatist, is said to have written the following to Helen Keller: Act as if what you are doing makes a difference. It does.
Once, when I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, I met a young woman who seemed incapacitated by the surgery she had just endured. She was my roommate. I was a veteran of surgery and had learned the basic rule for recovery was to get up and move, as much as possible. And so I did, to the astonishment of the nursing staff and roommate. Dragging an IV pole behind me, I fetched my own supplies and even made my own bed.
My roommate was on the brink of tears. One of the things that bothered her most was her dirty hair. So I helped her wash it.
I have no grand plan for my days ahead. I'm not going to discover the cure for a disease and I'm not going to write a great novel. But in this, my final season, I can still do.
Is there sadness? Yes. Lingering in the past, though, takes me nowhere. I, personally, cannot be both sad and productive.
Turning to William James once again--he wrote: The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. I can hear my mother's voice, and I am stirred by memory of that time, and of my siblings. But then I let the memory go and I look to the future. Like the cicada, I try to find purpose in this, the final season of my life.
I think this picture was taken in the summer of '49 or '50. I was born in '47. I'm the girl on the lower right, holding her chin. I was always a serious child ;) One brother is missing from this picture, my brother who was an invalid. He had suffered traumatic brain injury at birth. He was twin to the smaller of the two boys in the picture. The brain injury was a matter of bad luck. The first twin, the boy in the picture, had an easy birth. The second twin did not.
The names used in the story are not truly our names. I used substitutes that sounded right to my ear.
- **The cicada reference:
One of our best bloggers on Hive, @abneagro, recently wrote an amazing piece on the cicada. That's why this insect's life cycle was in my thoughts.
- **Title
From Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, New Standard Version Bible
- **William James
Founder of Pragmatism, which some characterize as the philosophy of doing. He taught at Harvard and wrote books on psychology, philosophy and religion.
- **Helen Keller
Deaf and blind because of an illness in infancy, Helen Keller became a pioneer in establishing services for the blind. She wrote books and demonstrated that the deaf and blind are 'able'
- **The Photo
This is, obviously, my own