I Remember That Night

To Daddy on The Eve of What Would Be Your 75th Birthday

2018-10-02T09:36:00.005-07:00

Dear Daddy,

Happy Birthday! You'd be 75 tomorrow. Yesterday, on the phone, Mommy reminded me that you're like another, Jack - Jack Kennedy. You are forever 44 - youthful, handsome, and full of promise. We never saw what became of your life. Then again, you never saw what became of ours. I've never written to you before, even though it's been suggested that I do. At first, my reluctance had to do with a fear that you wouldn't hear me. Now it's clear to me that I didn't write because I'll never get an answer. For me, the hardest part of growing up without you has been wondering what you would think of me and if I made you proud. People have been kind enough to say that you would be, but really, what do they know about your hopes and dreams for me? I wish you were here to see my children and let us throw you a birthday party. I'm really good at that - birthdays. Everyone in my house gets breakfast cake - because birthdays are special and they should start out special from the very beginning of the day (before something terrible happens threatening to ruin the whole day). At least we had cake. At least...

Your birthday party is in the Tap Room at the New York Athletic Club. Through the lobby, up the stairs on the left, and behind the swinging leather doors. I rented the whole place for the evening. They're all here for you. Now that I am not the 7-year-old girl you knew, I am allowed in there. And women, we're full members now and we drink at the bar just like the men. It's fall in New York - that season that smells like leaves, freshly sharpened pencils and stale wool that's been hiding in a closet for months. It's much more intimate than the over 400 people who showed up at your funeral but these are the people who are closer.

I went with plain white tablecloths; the centerpieces are mums. I agonized over this decision because I think they aren't the nicest flowers, but you liked them and they remind me of a day we spent in Cold Spring Harbor. What were your favorite flowers? One more thing I just don't know about you. The menu - that was easy - NY Sirloin with potatoes and root vegetables. Three sauces will be served on the side (Bernaise because even though everyone is on cholesterol medication now, it's delicious and Mommy insisted, Bordelaise because I remember your ordering it once at Ottomanelli's, and Peter Luger's because the best is always the best). Cesar salads sans anchovies will be plated before people sit down. For some reason, I think your cake should be dark chocolate with white lettering. Instead of table numbers, I have pictures of you at different times in your life. Mommy is terribly nervous and giving the event planner a hard time. She'll settle down once everyone is eating. I've already warned the service staff to remove the empty glasses from the table before she notices they are empty. She never re-married. "Why would I?" she always asks.

I hired an Irish band to play and you will sing along. Since it's my imagination and money is no object, I managed to invite Willie Nelson, too. Alas, TSA gave him a hard time and he's probably not going to make it in time. He's still alive. When I lived in New Orleans, near the train tracks and the River, I thought of you and his songs every single day. Willie played a rally for a Senate candidate in Austin over the weekend (I live in Texas now). I didn't go because I went to a dinner party instead. While I try not to judge myself - I do. So I sent the candidate more money and crossed my fingers that he wins. Please don't hold that against me. Nobody's perfect. Not even you - even though my memory of you is one of perfection.

I'd love to talk to you about my imperfections - maybe you could help me gain some perspective on them. If I could just hear you say, "You did the right thing..." Just once. This is when I feel my faith failing me. When people told me you were looking down from Heaven and smiling - I'd smile politely but want to punch them. They didn't know any better than I did where or what you are. I am only sure of the love I felt when we were together. That is real. It is real because, I miss it so much, at times I can't even bring myself to breathe. I hold the hurt in my lungs until I imagine them bursting. My eyes open and I gasp as if I've been under water. Grief is not water, instead of drowning once, you drown again and again.

We've filled the room with people from different stages of your life - Uncle Brian and Aunt Jane are with their respective families at one table. Grandma and Uncle Tom have died but Tom's family will all join us. I used pictures of you as children that your siblings were kind enough to send me after Grandma died. While I try my best to keep in touch, I get angry that they never call me first. Death makes things awkward. I think Theresa and I were hard for Grandma.

How do you watch the children of your child grow up when your own child is dead? She gave me a pair of gold earrings from Tiffany's when I graduated from Holy Cross. Did I mention that I went to Holy Cross, like you? Beaven Hall is made up of classrooms now - I think I took logic in a room where you might have slept. I received a tremendous education there but went for the wrong reasons. I never found you there. For me, it's a place filled with ghosts and I struggled socially. You were right that I was a weird kid. Now, I've grown up and I am eccentric - which is much better than being weird. So I've got that going for me.

At the Holy Cross table, some of your friends managed to come down from the Cape and in from Long Island with their wives. The photo of your doomed-from-the start rugby team sits in a small frame. They'll drink beer and consider the state of the world today. Speaking of which, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. Remember his TV commercials from the 1980's? "You're the King, You're the King of the Castle. Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, Baby, Baby do we know..." Well, he's the President now. I hope you don't have to watch the dumpster-fire that is American politics these days. People voted for the Atlantic City casino guy. A whole lot of people voted for the Atlantic City Casino guy!

After that happened, I was a captain for a group of Junior League women in the Women's March. Women all over the world took to the streets. We were peaceful - very few arrests, no violence. I wore the pearls Grandma gave me. Lately, I am furious at the power struggle with men and wonder if we women should have burned our cities to the ground. Then again, we have our children and their futures to consider - we won't destroy the world. We keep it safe because we play a long game, a different game. This long game is the one where we protect the Earth from polluters, save a little money so the kids don't drown in debt, and give health care to everyone. It's the Earth where not only do we believe that education can fix things but also we believe in it enough to pay to fix education. The politicians on either side care for none of this. Instead, they spend time arguing about people who have the temerity to exercise their right to free speech (Both sides are not doing well on the free speech front - but that's another letter entirely. I never went to law school so my views are probably not as nuanced as they should be).

My children are at your party but will leave early with a sitter. Like you, I don't think that children after 8 p.m. are the same adorable creatures who wake smiling at 6 a.m. Ellie is 9. She has dark blond hair, blue eyes, a great smile and intelligence that scares me ( I haven't told her that she's smarter than me - I'm not ready to give her the upper hand). She is asynchronicity at its best - she wants to be a physicist and has me looking up the Higgs Boson particle and the Hadron collider one minute and she can't figure out why a friend found her constant interruptions during conversation annoying the next minute. I worry that she will be lonely, or more lonely than most people. I was lonely. I am lonely. What's different now is that I suspect everyone is lonely, even if they don't admit it. Our own minds are a complex universe that we can only share with others in small amounts. Only you know your thoughts at 3 a.m. Would you be appalled, if you could hear mine?

My little son, Jack, is 2. He is playing with his diggers under a table. I popped the collar on his blue blazer and he has charmed the socks off of all the grandmothers. How do I bring up my son not to be part of the problems I see in the world, not to take advantage of the advantages conferred upon him by birth as a white male? How do I tell him that while patriarchy is the problem, he is good and kind and doesn't have to be part of the problem? I guess I'll tell him about how you stood up for your daughters to a church that says we can't be leaders simply because we are women. It's not enough, but I'll take whatever help I can get. Remember how you told me, in our country, we prefer 100 guilty men to go free vs. 1 innocent man wrongly going to prison? Also, remember that you told me picking on someone who's weaker than you is so much worse than picking on someone in general? Turns out - these things really hard for people to grasp. I wish I could ask you about what's happening in the Courts. I hope to believe that you have the same opinions of how a Supreme Court Justice should conduct himself, but I wish I could be sure. Then again, I am sure. Having spent so much of my life unsure of things, I am now here, almost forty, and quite sure of several things.

The whole world must play the long game. I will do my part and play the long game. Sometimes, this will mean my family pays higher taxes - that is nothing compared to the sacrifices parents make on an individual level for their children every single day. I will watch my carbon footprint and reduce my consumption of red meat. My priority is my children. I will pretend to be an optimist until I am one.

2. Our children (ALL CHILDREN) deserve better than they are getting. They always have. The degree to which children are forced to grow up early and suffer for the convenience of adults is a collective failure. We adults need to do better. Children deserve to play and discover, to fall and get back up, and to laugh until the milk comes out their noses.

3. When I take my children to the beach, I feel closest to you. We joined the Swordfish Cub in Westhampton. I think of you and I climbing on the jetties that were almost over my head. Now, those same jetties are completely buried in the sand. Like everything else that time covers over, the core of the memory is there, underneath the sand, holding us together.

4. Wire hangers from the dry cleaners, left alone in dark closets, breed like rabbits.

5. Thinking matters - and we don't do enough of it. New technology has emerged so that no one reads the whole paper anymore - we get news in filtered soundbites and don't know how to question anything. Also TV commentators opine on the issues of the day as if they are reporting news. People don't know the difference between news and Op-ED. As such, the audience hears small details without context and live their life accordingly. People are so crazy that science is totally up for debate. Fact is allowed to be a matter of personal opinion or belief. I am glad you don't have to see this.

6. I will always miss you. Also, I miss me with you. I miss knowing that the world may be a hard place but that you would always love me, no matter what.

Back to your party - I skipped the paper invitations, even though I love printed paper because people don't really do that anymore. We have put all the money into really good red wine and cognac. I keep whisky in the house just in case your ghost shows up one night. We'll open that bottle of wine with your name on the label. Mommy saved it even though she laughs and said it was "just an exercise in vanity." We're pouring some of my favorite Sonoma wines. My husband ( I married a great man and we've been married longer than you and Mommy were married- 15 years in May) and I lived in San Francisco and fell in love with the small wineries on route 12. Napa is beautiful but you're not likely to meet the winemaker in the driveway. San Francisco changed since you lived there. It became too expensive and too crazy - so we moved to Austin, TX. I think you'd like it.

As I write this, a bell on my porch is ringing - it's from Arco Santi. We kept the bell you bought there on the porch for years until Mommy sold the house and moved into a nice condo. I read about urban planning - something that had become a passion for you before you died. It's fascinating. It's also humbling - I live behind a gate, in a big house, on the edge of a nature preserve. It's beautiful and I love it - but I don't see things. I don't see poverty like I did as a child growing up in New York City. My children don't know how to ride public buses ( working on that - I promise). Someday, I want to go to Arco Santi.

In the mean time, I spend time working part-time, volunteering at schools and in the community. It feels scattered and unfinished and I hate answering the question, "What do you do?' because my answer is not succinct and the messiness bothers me. You wanted me to accomplish so much - I want to accomplish so much too. I think I just need a little more time - a luxury never afforded to you and one that worries me everyday. That imaginary hour glass hovers over me. I hate being late and I am constantly afraid of running out of time. That is my fear - that I won't have enough time and my children will be left without me, constantly aware of my absence.

Well, it's time to blow out your candles. Everyone is singing and a waiter volunteered to take the pictures. Happy birthday - we can't celebrate three quarters of a century or even half a century. Instead, we can celebrate our capacity to love and remember. You are not forgotten. When you died and I went to say a prayer at your coffin I promised I wouldn't forget you. I kept my promise. You promised you'd always love me and never leave - sometimes I think you broke that promise. Today, I'll find some way to believe you.

Don't forget to make a wish.

All my love,
Kate

Hyde Park, November 1978 - On Becoming A Mother, Again

2016-03-12T16:00:00.002-08:00

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Home_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt_National_Historic_Site_P1160002.JPG

The back of the photo reads, “Hyde Park November 1978.” I flip it over it hoping to find some secret to my parent’s pre-child existence inside the curling and peeling white border. Mommy in tartan trousers, a navy wool sweater with her monogram, RAF, in the center and her omnipresent pearls stands near the top of a rolling green-brown hill. I can’t see the pennies in her loafers but I know they are there. She’s bearing her teeth with clenched jaws like she does in all photos – incapable of generating a friendly-looking smile if she says “cheese.” Her underbite gives the distinct impression of perpetual annoyance at the photographer.

In the foreground, I see Daddy’s long shadow. His legs balance, tree trunks planted in his two-feet under two-knees, under two-hips stance- perfected during his time on the USS Orriskany. I imagine he’s wearing Levi’s and an Aran fisherman’s sweater – his weekend uniform. His pre-Top-Gun Ray Ban aviator sunglasses are on top of his head. Daddy died young. It never occurred to me that this photographer’s error would later become emblematic of his presence in all of our lives – a shadow. The sun must be close to setting but my parents’ bodies indicate mid-afternoon – no fatigued slumping hinting that the autumn day is nearing its end. Even the dark fall blue of the sky is lightened and faded adding to the illusion of midday, nowhere near rest.

That’s how I remember them when they were together, always in mid-action. Mommy puts on diamond and emerald earrings while Daddy adjusts his green bow tie for the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick ball; Mommy leans back in her chair while Daddy drags on a Marlboro Red in mid-sentence; Mommy puts her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand while Daddy takes a slow sip of Remy Martin and smiles at her. When Daddy was home there was always music playing on the Hi-Fi – it was always silent when only Mommy was home. They reserved a certain silence just for each other, dancing to silent music and speaking silent languages only they could hear. I felt like an intruder or a spy whenever I watched them in these everyday moments. The normality of their interactions had the effect of heightening their intimacy. What does my marriage look like to our daughter?

Hyde Park, FDR’s house on the Hudson, sits atop a steep hill overlooking the Hudson River. It’s a museum and National Park but it still feels like a family home. Years later, well after Daddy died, Mommy and I drove up to Hyde Park and spent the day there. It’s her favorite house in the world. I can see how it impacted her own personal brand of Irish-Preppy interior design – a club chair covered in chintz perfectly at ease next to a country French arm chair, both angled around a slightly nicked wooden coffee table.

My mother is pregnant with me in the photo, but not showing. I marvel that she climbed that hill and then realize they probably started at the top. She started a stir in the extended family by deciding not to tell anyone she was pregnant with me until she was in her third trimester. She doesn’t like attention for what could be perceived as weakness.

My hand reaches down to my own newly pregnant belly. Was she afraid of things like spina bifida, trisomy 13, 18 or 21? Noonan’s syndrome, Turner syndrome, fragile X? Did they even tell anyone to fear things that happen 1 in 120,000 people? For now, these are my own secret worries. Will my teeth strain to grin in photos now?

My eyes trace the edge of the hill in the photo. After the nuchal translucency ultrasound, the tech did not smile at me. Rather, she said, “You can get dressed, the doctor will want to talk to you in his office.” Apparently, an enlarged sac of fluid behind a fetus’ neck could mean anything from no problems at all to a fatal birth defect. The renowned maternal-fetal medicine specialist, wearing reefs and a shark tooth necklace (these are the times I want to be back in New York with a slightly patronizing doctor wearing a tie and wingtips) asked, “Could be cardio-vascular. What runs in your family?”

“Well, umm.” Came out instead of, “My father died of a cerebral aneurysm complicated by smoking and Von Willebrand Disease.” My six-year-old daughter was sitting in the chair next to me because I couldn’t get a sitter. Her face looked like mine should have. I had to be brave and matter-of-fact for her sake. Thanks to modern genetic testing, we already knew that we’re having a boy. “Well, I guess we’ll schedule the amnio. Thank you for your time.”

As I walked out the door, Dr. Waiting-to-hit-Mavericks said, “Good luck.”

I place the photo on the table and ask my mother, “Was this at the FDR museum?”

“Yes. That was probably after the Holy Cross game at West Point. We took a lot of road trips that year. I was pregnant. It was nice to escape the city sometimes.”

“But you had that great apartment in The Village.”

“Yes, I did.”

“It was the Carter years, Kate. No one knew what the hell was next.”

She’s right though, “no one knew what the hell was next.” She probably expected a long happy life with my father. Instead, she was widowed at thirty-eight with a small freckle-faced eight year-old. If nothing else, it explains the reactionary political climate in her house. What the hell is next?

Is that her way of telling me as mothers we are always at a loss to know our children’s fate? We are hurling through space without at map, doing the best we can and nothing about parenting has really changed? Or, is she simply trying to avoid my tendency to over-analyze everything?

What I would give to be able to tell her that I am afraid of having a boy. I am afraid that he will have inherited some curse to die young – that I will love him and have to say good-bye too soon. No parent can imagine anything worse than something happening to his or her child. My fears for this boy extend beyond his nuchal translucency. What if I put a ticking time bomb in his brain? You can’t see that in a blood test, on an ultrasound screen, or even when he’s born with ten perfect fingers, ten nubby toes and electric blue eyes just like his sister.

All biological parents give their children DNA, that’s how the whole thing works. Yet I feel responsible for infusing his DNA with some unknown danger he never chose. Even worse, this risk marker could mean be nothing at all. How do I cling to the 80% chance that nothing is wrong instead of the 20% that something is indeed a problem? Why are genetic counselors allowed to call anything “normal?” My mother would tell me to stop “spinning.” She’d be correct but she never gave me the DNA that knows how to do that, as if such a thing exists.

That’s the full extent of our conversation. My mother isn’t one to reminisce. She has a way of ending her sentenced with a special kind of period – hers are extra final. No more discussion welcome here. Go do something productive with your time instead of noseying around my old photos.

Like my life and belly, she is in perpetual forward motion. Then again, according to physics – so is the Universe – expanding into infinity and rarely looking back at the dark matter trapped inside it and pushing it ever outward.

What will this new child see in photos of me? Huge sunglasses and an imperfect Us-Weekly pose? Will he know that I picture him with his older sister learning how to build a block tower on a sunlit afternoon, running while he laughs with mouth wide open? Will he know that all the knowledge we’ve gained since 1970’s, while miraculous has served only to make me more afraid for him? Will he know he is loved, even now when he resembles a microscopic round sea-horse swimming inside me? Perhaps it doesn’t matter because I know these things. For now, that’s all the assurance I can give.

EPILOGUE - 20 weeks later

John (Jack) Thomas Thome was born with 10 fingers and toes two weeks ago. We lived through an amnio, some concerns over my health, and a “very long” labor for a second child. He’s sliding right into our family of three and we are thrilled to have him here. Somehow, I know he knows he is loved. Welcome little one.

Ghosts and Citronella Candles - A Parenting Lesson from My Father

2015-10-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

When I was in the second grade, Halloween fell on a Saturday which meant that as a family, we could escape the city for the weekend for our cottage in Westhampton Beach. The best part of this was trick-or-treating with my best friends who lived next door. After that, we went to a party at the elementary school complete with apple bobbing, hanging marshmallows, and a terrifying haunted house courtesy of those larger than life sixth graders. My neighbors dressed as bunnies. I dressed as a bumble bee. Another friend was a “ballerina fairy.” Such was the simplicity of little girl costumes.

That was the last Halloween I spent with my father. He died that winter. I still remember his walking with my friends’ mother, keeping a safe distance and a close eye on the little girls collecting their pennies (yes, pennies), candy corn and pop corn balls at each neighbor’s house.

The ballerina fairy, who had been left in the care of my parents for the weekend, refused to wear a jacket over her costume. A litigator, my father knew better than to negotiate with a child. Without raising his voice, “Claire. Just. Put. The jacket. On.” Then he walked away. She hurumphed but put the jacket on. For some reason, this is one of my most vivid memories of his “parenting style.” It’s probably because I struggle with it. Perhaps I’d say, “Claire, the temperature is falling, put your coat on, please.” I would open the door for the inevitable, “I’m not cold.”

Jack Lowe parenting lesson #1 — Don’t open the door for discussion. We don’t negotiate about coats with seven-year-olds. Even years later, when something just had to be done (say snow boots with that Betsey Johnson miniskirt in high school), those of us who watched Claire’s coat battle would say, “Claire. Just. Put. The Jacket. On,” and dissolve into giggles.

Even then, I knew there were ghosts everywhere. Many houses on the street were already closed up for winter, haunted with the summer before, suspended in time until the days grew longer and the owners returned for another season. Ghosts hid in the unraked leaves crunching under our sneakers, in the tunnel underneath the giant rhododendron in the front yard, in the little red shed with the spider web covered windows out back. What I didn’t understand were that the ghosts, figments of my imagination, would persist and co-exist in my life as memory and dreams. When they used to hold just enough power for me to fear them, now they hold the power to ground me. They come when I least expect them, but most need them. Halloween holds magic for children — it’s different than other holidays because they invent it for themselves as they dress-up and decorate homes. They are the characters, not some abstraction in a red suit. This year, my own daughter will dress up as Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s been waiting for this for weeks. Our yard has a “friendly” ghost hanging from a tree that has the effect of scaring me every time I see it out of the corner of my eye.

This morning, as I went to wake six-year-old Ellie, the smell of her citronella shampoo took me back to that house. My mother lit the evenings eating on the porch with yellow citronella candles in metal buckets. I remember that Halloween and can only hope that she’ll remember this one some day. That smell is the ghost of that house and those days, just back for a brief visit. Happy Halloween!

5 Things I Wish You Knew About The Suicide Griever

2015-09-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Today is National Suicide Prevention Day. I lost a friend and father figure to suicide when I was twelve. In many ways, I believe that loss had more effect on me than the loss of my own father when I was eight. I can never speak for all the grieving or any of them. Either way, here are some things I wish people knew.

I don’t tell you about this loss because I can’t stand the look on your face when I do. Many people in the U.S. are very uncomfortable with death and mortality. When it comes to suicide, it’s even more pronounced. That flinch – you know the one I’m writing about – it says “Oh I’m so sorry,” and “Please don’t let that happen to me.” It also says, to me, “Didn’t you know?” Of course I didn’t (at least not at the time) and for that I am forever sorry.
My head knows it wasn’t my fault but my heart does not. Every time I think about the night he locked himself in that basement, I wonder if I hadn’t tried harder to open the door, blocked him as walked down the stairs, behaved better, whined less, showed my love more and a million other things if he’d be sitting across from me today. Clocks only turn in one direction and I don’t have that choice to make again. I have different choices.
Mental illnesses can be terminal. There are people walking around today with profound depression. We don’t understand and they aren’t getting the help they need. Their illness is as acute as someone with stage 4 liver cancer but we don’t think of their illness that way. When they die, we don’t think of them the same way as we do someone who died of stage 4 liver cancer. It is because we still blame the person even if we don’t mean to. This is wrong and we must change our thinking.
I can’t unsee certain things, but that doesn’t mean I am broken. The memory of his body being wheeled out in a black zippered bag, attached to a stretcher with yellow stretchy seat-belts, will forever haunt me. I saw it from my bedroom window. It bounced, without reverence, over the lawn into an ambulance in the driveway. It’s dark and horrible, but it’s always there. If I look like my mind is far away, it probably is. Even with that, I am able to live my life. Just because have a traumatic memory doesn’t mean I can’t live a happy, mentally healthy life.
Life with him was wonderful. When someone dies from suicide there in an underlying assumption that person was visibly depressed, possibly making bad choices, and hurting others around them. That’s not the case for me. My neighbor was capable of the greatest joy of anyone I’ve ever known save my six-year-old daughter. I never knew an adult who could play with such childlike enthusiasm and abandon. We played an elaborate game of tag. He was lizard-man. His long arms were his jaws snapping at us as we ran away to base squealing in delight/terror. I miss that and only hope that I can bring one tenth of his warmth to my own play with my daughter.

My neighbor loved us. I know that he did. I still love him and remember his capacity for joy, excellence, and compassion. He understood what it was like for me to have lost my father when I was eight because he did too. It took me a long time to realize how ill he was – to comprehend that he was a terminally ill man living his life right in front of me.

This year, I promise to ask the questions I am afraid to ask. I will not be shy if I think someone is struggling. It may not help, but it may stop one child from growing up without a dad, a father-figure neighbor, or always worrying that someone they love is going to die. I can do that. We all can.

Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are

2015-08-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

The radio played Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” I started to cry waiting for the red light to change. It’s been ten years to the day since the Friday night a group of us ate dinner at G.W. Fins, drank the champagne of beers out of plastic champagne trays (Miller Hi-Life for the uninitiated) at Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar before ending the night in the courtyard of Pat O’s. We teased our friend about having to go to the bank’s recovery center the next day. He worked in IT for the bank and always had a trip to Shreveport when there was a storm in the Gulf.

Have I changed since then? Perhaps. Defintely. Not at all. I have a new career, a child, lived in four more places, but I still can be the same person who drove out of New Orleans on the Saturday of August 28, 2005 with three days worth of clothes, my husband, my West highland terrier –Cole (for John Coltrane), and my wedding album in my overheating car.

I forgot my toothbrush. It's comforting now to know that I can survive anywhere with very little. Like thousands of other people, we drove to a hotel in Houston, thinking it would only be for a few nights. Unlike thousands of others, we were among the lucky ones. Our apartment was virtually undamaged and I had a job. The bank I worked for had a place for me at work by 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, figuring out how we should talk to our customers. We all thought we'd dodged a bullet. Then, I heard someone yell, "The levee's gone." I popped my little gopher head out of my cube and looked around. The two others from New Orleans popped up as well. This changed everything. No one was going home on Tuesday.

Because my husband and I lived just over the Parish line, we were allowed back into Jefferson Parish for one day to pick up things from our home. We stopped at the business banking center just outside the city to collect some files and my husband's car - parked three stories up for safety. We walked onto the dark floor and saw light coming from a corner office. "There's power!" I must have said.

"No. That's the sky." My husband answered.

I always go back to that moment when I underestimate life. "No. That's the sky." Life will throw at your more in a day than you could handle when you woke up. By the time you go to sleep, you're better for having had to look at whatever reality the day gave you. The sight of National Guard Tanks and troops on Clearview are my only understanding of what it must be like to live in an occupied territory. Nothing is real and nothing is yours. Everyone is afraid. Many of those men and women had families strewn across the country, lost homes themselves and yet there they were - saving their homeland. To this day, a nation owes them its gratitude. We drove back to Houston that afternoon and stayed until the end of December.

I moved away from New Orleans in June of 2006 for my husband’s schooling. It was the hardest move I’ve ever made. The last night in town, I ate dinner at Jacque’s Imo’s. Jack Leonardi came over to the table, “Ah, the last supper. We’ve had a lot of those,” he said as he scratched his beard. I choked back disappointment and regret. There isn’t a good word to describe what it feels like to leave New Orleans. People have tried. Louis Armstrong “Knows What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” Kermit Ruffins reminds us, “when you’re feeling down and out and there’s no way out, you get dropped off in New Orleans.” But how do I explain this to someone who hasn't’ lived there?

New Orleans is more than a place to me. It’s a Universe. The air in the city, that humid, muggy steam. It’s a ghost constantly touching your shoulders, sometimes suffocating you, sometimes tapping you just lightly enough to know it's there. There’s music everywhere. It sustains you. But what’s really different about New Orleans is the people. For me, it was the first time I found people I trusted enough to let myself be myself in public. It was probably the only time. It works there because the people I met didn’t simply identify with their work or their accomplishments, they identified with what made them happy – being in a great city, eating great food, listening to great music, and being together. It didn’t matter how much money you made or what car you drove. Somehow we were all in together.

I remember watching fireworks over the Mississippi River on New Year’s Eve 2005. We came back from Houston that morning darned if we weren’t to start the new year in the place we loved more than anywhere. With each boom, another exclamation point added itself to the rebirth of the place we’d seen take such trauma. The last six months I spent in New Orleans were among

the happiest in my life. I knew we were leaving and I felt guilty and sad about that but I also let myself say “Yes” to everything the city offered – every festival, every restaurant, every re-opening.

Our bank was acquired by a much larger national bank. We had great laughs when our new boss from far away called to ask me if everyone had the flu? “The Jazz Fest flu.” I replied. It was the local’s Thursday of Jazz Fest. Our office was empty. He was a good man but he’d never be one of us – the ones who stayed until Bruce Springsteen closed out the first weekend – the ones who didn’t waste time arguing about how to recognize Mardi Gras in a national company (it didn’t matter. No one was coming to work that day so policy was irrelevant) – the ones who cannot abide a sazaurac made with anything but Peychaud’s bitters – the ones who think that all anyone in heaven eats is Crawfish Monica. So even though, I miss that city that care forgot, I am lucky. My life is blessed with the ability to “Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are,” and to know exactly what that means.

Perhaps my greatest honor, was bringing my own child back to the place I love so much. She was four and thought Mardi Gras was a party the city put on just for her. It was my birthday so I told her, "No it's a party they put on just for me. And the whole world too." Many of my friends in Northen California raised an eyebrow, "You're taking your child to... Mardi Gras?" "Yes." I replied. New Orelans and Katrina taught me not to explain. Those who need an explanation will never understand and those who don't understand already. She sat atop her father's shoulders collecting throws, she saw the white tiger at the Audobon zoo, she played with the children of my dear friends and she learned to love a place much earlier than I ever did. How lucky she is that the city picked itself up and made a path out of the flood water?

An Apology To My Grieving Mother on Mother’s Day

2015-05-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Mommy,

I finally realized that we grew up with a similar but different struggle – I without a father from the age of eight and you without a mother from that same age. You go through every Mother’s Day not only as my mother, but also as a daughter looking out on the horizon wondering about your own. The word unfair is insufficient. While I was busy missing Daddy, you endured missing him without your own mother. It seems safe to guess that my own loneliness, overwhelming at times, is nothing compared to yours.

A couple of days ago, I called you for help with a parenting problem. That’s not true; I called to whine. My own daughter checkmated me when she used scotch tape to create a human-sized spider web during a time-out in her room. You spared me whatever judgment I deserved and just listened. That’s not something I’ve been very good at doing for you. Who did you call when I had a tantrum?

For over 35 years, you protected the bond between us even when I fought against it with ever fiber of my being. I want you to know that I understand why you hold on so tightly. I am sorry that you had to endure my pushing away from you like all children do when so many others left your life too early.

Perhaps I finally grew up the day you took me to Brooklyn. You showed me the house where your mother grew up, her family’s shop, and her high school. It is not lost on me that it’s the same one where you were a student teacher. At Holy Cross cemetery, as my feet crushed pure snow on my walk to our family plot, I expected to feel some intense emotion related to my own life. All I felt was sad for you and embarrassed for me. Sad because I never thought of you as being sad, but you must have been. Embarrassed because I never thought of how we share not only the hurt of losing Daddy but of being without a parent for most of our lives. I saw your strength but not your pain.

When you told me about the day your mother died, you said, “I remember sitting in a chair in the living room. The doctor walked out the front door. Our house was silent and dark. No one told the children. I knew my mother was dead. It was another time and adults behaved differently toward children.” You were alone with that knowledge. If I could change anything about your life it would be to go back to the moment and tell you that you will be loved in your life. You are loved.

I contrast that with that February morning the phone rang in our apartment. New York Hospital called to say that Daddy died. You hung up the phone, looked me in the eye, and said only the truth, “Daddy died. Now that it’s just you and me, that means that you are the person in the world I love more than anyone else.” After that, we laid in your bed for what seemed like hours. We respected each other’s silence, but we did it together.

I think of the many days we drove along the beach, together but silent. My favorite day was when I was in middle school. Somehow I managed to suspend being a thirteen-year-old girl and return to a semi-human state for an entire Sunday in early spring. You parked the blue Volvo at the deserted public beach.

When we reached the top of the stairs, it started to rain. We stood on benches under the partial cover of a wooden lookout tower. After a few minutes, we stepped out into the rain, looked at the grey ocean, and let the rain and sea spray wash our ancient hurts.

Yesterday, it rained during my own daughter’s softball practice. Like you and I, all those years ago on the beach, she looked up at the sky, closed her eyes and let the water wash over her. When I felt the rain on my skin, I missed that day. I hope she'll never have the kind of pain I've known but if she doesn't she'll also never know the bond that such pain creates.

“My favorite smell is rain-air,” she said.

“Me too.” I said.

So after all this time I’ve spent thinking about the smells that remind me of Daddy, I didn’t realize who my favorite smell reminds me of. The smell of the air just as it starts to rain is the smell of my connection to you. It will always be my favorite. Happy Mother’s Day. I love you.

Love,
Kate

Did I Just Teach My Daughter to Blame the Victim?

2015-04-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

I love the expression, “It floored me.” That’s probably because parenting floors me. All the time. One moment my daughter floors me by saying the wisest thing I can imagine. The next she floors me again by following it with a stunningly childish refusal to eat (anything, ever). Or so it seems.

A few months ago, she floored me when she responded exactly as I imagine my father would have. She reminds me of the sense of right and fairness my father taught me. I have long since buried that sense under a cynical brand of pragmatism that doubles as a shield to any blow the world hands me.

About a boy in her class she said, “He pinches me when we line up and I don’t like that.”

“So what can you do about it? What choices do you have?”

“None.”

“None? You could step out of line. You can tell him to stop. Use your words.”

“Mommy, I tried using words. He doesn’t stop.”

“Why do you stand near him?”

“Well, I like to be at the front of the line. So does he.” A very clear picture of The US Congress immediately comes across my mind.

“Is being at the front of the line worth getting pinched? You could stand somewhere else.” When I was a child, this solution would have been obvious to me. The front is a battle not worth fighting.

“Mommy, that’s not fair. I should be allowed to stand anywhere in line without worrying about being pinched.” In her words, I heard echoes of my father, for whom the time and place for for justice were always right now and right here. At first, I worried that she will never manage in a world constantly demanding compromise.

What message am I sending her?

Should a woman have to worry about what she wears when she goes out, lest she ask to be raped? Should a woman endure catcalls on the sidewalk simply for walking? Should a woman fear walking under a street light with a blown bulb? Should a girl walk through a high school hallway wearing a backpack so her bra strap isn’t snapped? Should a child hand over her lunch money to a bully?

Anyone should be allowed to wear what they want to, when they want to, wherever they want to. Moreover, no woman should worry that someone will blame her if some harm befalls her when she does.

At five, Ellie knows that her safety in the world is a basic human right and expectation. I hope I never teach her that the victim should have or could have anticipated their treatment. What’s more terrifying is that I think I almost did.

Handling Grief In the Workplace

2015-03-27T12:38:00.002-07:00

This piece originally appeared on LinkedIN.

Today on LinkedIn, I clicked on a seemingly kind and lovely blog post one of my connections shared, “16 Signs You Have an Awesome Dad.” I did it because I don’t have an awesome dad. I had one. He died when I was eight. Innocuous posts like these can turn an average day into a flood of memories and emotion. Even thirty years later, little things hang around my world threatening to floor me at any moment. At work, most of the time you just have to breathe and move on. But that doesn't make it go away.

1 in 20 children lose a parent before adulthood. 800,000 Americans are widowed each year. Grieving people are everywhere, including at your workplace. Chances are you passed one in the hallway today. They don’t wear badges or signs. Often they won’t discuss this at work, ever. I know I certainly always avoided the topic.

So what does this have to do with your leadership and your EQ?

Everyone has something going on, including your best team members. Your highest performers rarely share life drama with managers. They simply “handle it” outside of work and move on. They aren’t the ones asking you for a box of Kleenex.

I was at an offsite where a dear friend and colleague received word that his father was dying. From that day, I remember the sun, the one particularly good speaker, and the gorgeous venue. Most of all, I remember my friend’s face when he thought no one was looking. After some prompting he left the offsite to be with his father. Luckily, some close colleagues encouraged him not to wait for an "appropriate exit time." Work could and should wait.

It left me wondering if the host of the offsite ever called him to offer support. I choose to believe so. When my friend came back to work, he picked up as if he’d been on vacation. He only shared with the few of us lucky enough to be considered his close friends. Those must have been some very lonely, difficult days. In that first year, every time someone talked about spending holidays with family or parents coming to visit, he was remembering that he was without.

The only way to help people through rough moments is to develop our Emotional Intelligence. Great people like Daniel Goleman, Travis Bradberry and Joshua Freedman are experts in this. One of the main competencies in the Six Seconds EQ model is to “Give Yourself.” And that’s precisely how to help the grieving at work.

How Do You Support Someone Who Isn’t Asking for Anything?

Use Your Non- Standard HR Data – Often, companies grant funeral leave and/or send flowers to funerals. Use this info. Reach out to the people who coordinate these programs and ask for notification when someone in your organization makes use of them. When the person returns, send them a note offering condolences and help. Even if the person never turns to you for help, they will always remember that you were thinking of them.
Include Grief Awareness in Manager Training – Like all people, managers deal directly with grieving employees. They may be afraid to say or do the wrong thing. If nothing else, remind them that their silence speaks louder than any awkward turn of phrase. Consider partnering with a local grief counseling organization for customized help crafting your training. Jeff Haden wrote a great piece about this for Inc.
Be Vulnerable - Remember that everyone, even the people who never complain, experience challenges outside of work. Share your own challenges as appropriate – teams need to see their leaders as being human. Just like they are. Sharing vulnerability is a great way to remain compassionate especially during stressful times.

How have you reached out to employees through rough times? Please share them in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

How I Learned to Ski: When the Fall the Saves You

2015-03-24T15:50:00.003-07:00

It's a gorgeous morning in Park City, UT. As with all new things, especially ones that involve falling down, skiing fills my chest with anxiety. I’m in my second series of ski lessons. From the flag where we adult learners line up, I can see my fearless five-year-old Ellie balancing on tiny pink and white skis. When we set-off she passes me in the “first timer’s” lift line. She’s laughing and falls down. The ski instructor grabs the handle on the back of the red vest they put on all the little skiers and pulls her back up to standing. My parka has no such handle yet I have a lot farther to fall. She has all her people to pick her up. Ever since my father died, I do not.

At the end of my lessons, my husband and father-in-law agree to ski down on a green run with me. It’s terrifying - not only might I fall and experience a broken bone or torn ACL, I could slow them down, or they could leave me behind, alone.

On the big lift, I breathe in and out. From my lips, puffs of air form small clouds which tempt me to move my glove off the safety bar to touch them. Below my skis, the tree line changes from bare birch branches, to evergreens, until there is only purple-white snow glistening as it melts in the overwarm March day. The impossibly blue sky deepens through the lens of my goggles. I congratulate myself on my ability to calm my fears, to be present in the moment, and to handle my instinct favoring panic. We reach the top of the lift. I slide down the ramp and glide to a safe stop. So far, so good.

“Why don’t you go and I’ll follow?” I am back in the state of mind that questions why anyone would find hurling themselves down the side of a mountain at 12 mph fun. Instead, I feel reckless and stupid.

“Six lessons, you can do this,” I tell myself. Pause and breathe again. In that moment, I stop and look to my right. The view from the top of the Earth is miraculous – I feel freedom. Now I understand, people do this for the chance to see the world through Zeus’ eyes.

“Just don’t leave me, ok?”

“Of course, not. We’ll just take our time,” My husband reassures me.

About six minutes into the run, my husband has taken a different turn. He’s gone. “And there it is,” I sigh.

My father-in-law stays a few yards ahead of me, I follow his tracks until a narrow part of the run where I fall forward trying to avoid two girls who couldn’t be a day older than Ellie. The snow sneaks into the space between my sleeve and my glove. Its cold burns the inside of my wrist enough to distract me. My brain pushes out the failure and humiliation trying to ignite my amygdala – no time for that now. I’m on my side in the middle of a ski run. All I can do is get up.

I recount the steps I learned:

Step one: Skis across the mountain.

Step two: Dig your poles into the mountain above you

Step three: Rise up and lean on your downhill ski.

Step four: Keep on keeping on

We reach an intersection on the mountain. One direction is blue and the other green. Somehow we end up on the blue. I see my father-in-law scoot over to the “Rest Area.” The pitch, as far as I’m concerned, is vertical. The first obscenity emerges from my mouth. It’s only 100 yards, right?

As soon as I make my slow, wide, round turn, my body betrays me and leans back. On my side, I am sliding down the mountain. Once I come to a complete stop, I look over to the rest area. My father-in-law has also disappeared from view

“Are you kidding me?” I say out loud. A passing man gives me a look as his impossibly small child zips past me.

I make it to the rest area. By now, I’ve lost control. Frustration lights her match igniting the lonely tinder in my veins. Tears run down my face. Where do I go? Whose tracks can I follow? What if I just can’t do this? How am I supposed to continue?

I head out across the steep slope with my skis almost perpendicular to the mountain. A snowboarder comes close behind me as I turn to the right again. My ski slips, I lean back from my fall and I am down again, flat on my back. I’ve moved no more than 15 yards form the previous fall. “So that’s how this is gonna’ be. Might as well get on with it.”

New instructions for getting up from a fall:

Step One: Breathe.

Step Two: Don’t cry. It won’t help you get out of this.

Step Three: Accept that you are all alone and they aren’t going to help you up. If tears fall anyway, return to Step 2.

Step Four: Breathe again. Decide to get up. Keep on keeping on.

I am up and down again in less than five seconds. Get Up, turn left, fall down. Get up, turn right, fall down. I repeat this at least four more times. Anger, fear, frustration, and abandonment overcome me. “How could they do this to me? They left me here, all by myself. By myself. I have to do this alone – again!” Luckily no one seems to notice that I’m literally talking to myself on the piste.

This is the loneliness of keep on keeping on. It never goes away. It comes back when you’re scared for life, miles from civilization. When you need your own sense of self-worth, when you need to know people love you, when you asked them above all else, “Please don’t leave me.”

They don’t know. They don’t understand what it means to be left behind. And you know they will always leave you. The worst thing that’s ever happened to you and people do it over and over again every single day. Even the ones who are supposed to love you – they forget and leave you by yourself, to find your own way down, even if it means rolling down a mountain and starting an avalanche. That is what it feels like to grieve.

I channel my anger and play the words I will say to them at the bottom of the mountain, in my mind “You are dead to me.” I charge all the way down the rest of the mountain, falling once or twice until I reach the slower, flatter slope at the end. The foam on my mask is soaked with tears. When I finally get to the bottom, I don’t see them.

Finally, I see my husband. “You left me. Then your dad left me. Then I fell. And I fell and I fell.”

“Where did you guys go? You must have turned the wrong way.”

Be careful of the words you imagine yourself saying. You may say them. “You’re dead to me.” He laughs until he sees my tears. How can you trust anyone when even the ones who know and love you leave you with your skis in the air, flat on your back on the side of a mountain?

The next day, in my lesson, I ski that same run with an instructor. When I fall, he tells me to get up and lean forward. Go with the feeling of falling. Use it to pull you down the mountain. Keep on keeping on. I don’t fall again. I carve my ski deeper into each turn. You can’t resist the fall – you have to embrace it.

Learning to ski is learning to live after someone you love, who was supposed to take care of you dies. Only you can trust yourself to finish the run. You have to lean toward the fall - it’s the only way down the mountain.

4 Steps To Be A Friend To A Grown-Up Member of the Dead Dads Club

2015-03-20T13:19:00.003-07:00

You’re waiting for your kids at pick-up time. Your parents are visiting from Akron for the weekend. You’ve prepped the spare bedroom, shoved toys into the closet, pulled out the “cute” sweater your mom sent a month ago that your daughter thinks is “so ugly it looks like a bug threw up on it.”

The mood of the day is that blend of excited and stressed that everyone who lives more than a time-zone away from their parents experiences when the family is coming to town. You start to chat up the other mom waiting for her kids. But it all goes wrong when she says, “Lilly doesn’t know her grandfather. My father died when I was a child.”

You had no idea, did you? That’s because your friend is a member of the Dead Dads (or Moms) Club. It’s the club for kids who lost a parent when they were a kids. She learned early not only that life changes faster than you can say, “stroke,” but also that people hate talking about death. They remember the face everyone gives them when they said they lost their Daddy. It’s not pity, it’s a split second flinch - as if having a death in the family is contagious, like MRSA. Instead of saying, “I’m so sorry ” and pretending your dentist just called to confirm your root canal, try empathy:

1. Acknowledge Her Experience – “That must be really hard for you.” You say “be” instead of “been” because she is still sad that her parent is not coming to visit this weekend and never will come to visit. That sadness never goes away. It was hard when she was a child too. But she needs support for the hard and sad now that’s still happening.

2. Ask Her Something – “I’d love to hear about him/her.” She wants to remember her Daddy because she’s afraid she’s the only one who does. She may look and sound emotional when she answers you. That’s because she's so touched that you care enough to listen for even a minute.

3. Thank Her – She’s so used to holding back her membership in the Dead Dads Club because she knows it makes people uncomfortable. When she was in school, she may have been the only one in the whole school with a dead parent. By telling you this, she’s sharing her vulnerability. She’s taking a risk and trusting you. Surely that’s something to be grateful for.

4. Don’t Forget – There will come an event, like “Grandparents and Special Friends Day” at school. She will be there wearing a huge smile. Her kids will be with the living grandparents, or not. This day is killing her. She is faking a smile while she shoves a lifetime of disappointment inside an imaginary the box under her ribs. Give her an extra smile or a hug. Take her out for a drink later. Don't get nervous when she orders a single malt, she can handle it - Dead Dads Club members need the burn.

What happens next? You have a friend for life. We members of the Dead Dads Club are a loyal lot. We expect very little of the world because the world already took so much from us. If you show us kindness, we’ll be there for you and we will want to be there for you good days and bad.

Chess and Checkers

2015-03-09T09:33:00.003-07:00

I snap a photo of Ellie in the midst of an open mouthed laugh, her inexplicably gold-blonde hair and blue eyes beaming joy across the room. Someone told me that parents aren’t happier than non-parents but only parents experience short bursts of sheer bliss. I am grateful and sad. Her grandfather would have been her biggest fan. After all, he was mine until he died on the morning after my eighth birthday.

Ellie grins. She’s wearing her chess tournament t-shirt over her clothes. At five, she still has that confidence I lost so long ago I can’t even remember what it felt like. It seems selfish to be jealous of my own child. Both her parents are here sharing the day that’s all hers. I’m terrified that I’ll die before she can really know me.

While Ellie was practicing for her first tournament with my husband, she lost countless games. 80% of the time, she reached a straight robot arm across the board and said, “Congratulations.” Her father said, “Good game. Play again?” But the rest of the time, games ended in truly spectacular displays of poor sportsmanship. Ellie would flip the board over, run crying and screaming from the board, slam her bedroom door, and wail. She’d flail for the longest ten minutes a parent can endure.

One of these times, after letting her cry just long enough to communicate that “we don’t behave like this,” I slipped into her room, sat on her purple rag rug and pulled her into the space created by my criss-cross-applesauced legs. She curled into a ball, letting me hold her like an infant until the wave of rage flowed out from her amygdala to her toes. The force of her feelings leaves me dumbfounded. As violent as her emotions are, she lets them flow. It’s petrifying to me who has spent well more than the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice required to master squashing emotional reactions.

I waited for her to quiet and then she asked the question she always asks when she’s a little embarrassed. She asked, “Can you tell me about a time you lost a game with your Daddy?”

“Sure. I was about your age and we were playing checkers. He always won at checkers. I got so mad, I crushed my own finger when I slammed the door. Unless I could calm down he wouldn’t play with me anymore.”

“Did you play again later?”

“I learned to calm down and we played again.”

“And your finger got better?”

“Yes, my finger got better.” I stifled a giggle.

“And then you won?”

“Well, no. You see my father was a very good checkers player. I never beat him.”

“Never?”

“Nope. Never.”

“Then he died?”

“Well, not right after a checkers game but, yes he died before I ever got good enough to beat him.”

Ellie stared at me. I wondered what was happening behind her azure gaze. She returned from her lizard brain. Instantly calm and in-charge, her hyper-sense of justice kicked-in.

“Mommy, that’s not fair.”

“No it isn’t. But life isn’t always fair, you just have to do the best you can with what you have.” Every time we talk about how life isn’t fair, I have to shove my own disappointment into the box under my sternum. That’s where I save my feelings for later. Without that box, I don't think I could survive these conversations. I have to be here for her, to be her mother. Feeling whatever comes over me or remembering anything that could awaken grief would be to fail her. It’s easier when we don’t talk. Teaching a child a lesson you never had the chance to finish learning is its own challenge. She gave me a fast hug and hopped to standing.

“Can I play against you? I think you might not be as good as Daddy.”

“Sure.” I hope she has a chance to beat me before I die. And just like that, I find myself sitting behind a chess board, playing black, losing to a five-year-old.

Memory is Unreliable, But People Shouldn’t Be: What Brian Williams et al. Means For Non-Fiction

2015-02-06T14:37:00.000-08:00

photo courtesy: NBC.com

Brian Williams conflates things that happened to him. The James Frey memoir A Million Little Pieces sent waves of fear into publishing houses across the country. Lena Dunham’s book turned a Republican named Barry into the same person as a rapist. What is it about these three stories that is so disturbing?

It's not only that we feel lied to. It's that the person telling the story pulled one over on us and at least partly got away with it. We believed them and now we stand here, feeling stupid for having been moved by the story in the first place. The job of any storyteller is to move the audience. However, it is not the job of a non-fiction storyteller to alter the story so that an otherwise uninteresting story now has sizzle, pathos or some other quality. The viewer and the reader are at a disadvantage. The quality of their emotional response and the validity of their experience comes into question. In short, we've been made to feel something that wasn’t real.

As a creative non-fiction writer, I am constantly dogged by the unreliability of my memory and by it’s astounding clarity. When I interview people, often to make sure I’m not “misremembering”, I often here things like, “But you were so young… I didn’t remember that until you said it…Yes, it was just like that.” Other times, I’m sure I have something wrong as soon as I’ve written it but I’m not sure the detail being wrong takes anything away from the emotional truth I am attempting to convey.

Memory is fickle. The word memory comes from the Greek myths. Mnemosyne was a Titan. She was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia and the mother of the muses. All science and art come from memory. But memories, like mothers, are imperfect. They try their best to convey the truth as our hearts and minds need them conveyed at the time. They hide from us when we need to forget.

So why the fuss? The fuss is because we expect truth from “true stories.” Moreover, the contract with the reader and viewer of non-fiction implies that the reporter and author are pulling back the curtain on something real. To discover otherwise is to discover that we are on the receiving end of a breached contract. In breaking the contract with the audience, the purveyors of memory manipulations destroy not only their own credibility but that of the genre as well. As a great writer said, “If you have to make it up, write fiction.”

Grief Healing: Voices of Experience: When Narrative Heals

2015-01-19T07:05:00.001-08:00

Grief Healing: Voices of Experience: When Narrative Heals

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

2014-12-31T16:32:00.001-08:00

I’m in the “New Year’s Eve Sucks” camp. It’s a night for either over-paying for a party or sitting home watching a top 100 list on the History Channel. Spoiler alert- the printing press is number 1. There was a time, though, when I was in the “New Year’s Eve Rocks” camp. It was New Year’s Eve 1985 and my father in his blue and white thick wool sweater, black hat and driving gloves synonymous with the enigma that was 1970’s fashion loaded my mother and me into a blue Mercedes s-class coupe to drive from our Brooklyn Heights brownstone to Skytop.

Skytop is a family resort in the Poconos. Its charm comes from tall granite walls, an ice skating rink and cabins lining a woodsy road from the main House. It’s the kind of place where a friendly yellow-blonde lady serves enormous mugs of hot chocolate covered in marshmallow fluff to unsupervised children and children actually play ping pong.

We drove to Skytop in the morning. I was so excited to see open fields of clean snow, I pressed my small hand against the window every few minutes wondering when it would get colder. Once we arrived we learned that there was too much ice to ski. Instead, my father trudged up the steepest hill that serves as the 13^th hole of the golf course in summer slamming his boots into the ice to make footprints I could anchor myself into. It was impossible to keep up with his long stride but he waited for me at the top. He sat down on the ice, in his Levis and his sweater, leaned back, put his hands into the air and let out a howling “Whhheeee,” as he slid down the hill. I sat down at the top of the ice, gave myself a little push and followed him flat on my back unable to sit I slid so quickly. At the bottom, he lay on the ground doubled over laughing. Daddy could always make me laugh, despite my non-existent sense of humor. While we probably only went down a few more times, in my memory, we spent the entire day sliding down a hill of ice screaming and laughing. Daddy was one of those adults who laughed like a child.

I love looking at the photos from that trip. They all came from the Kodak disc camera that Santa Claus bought for me that year. There are pictures of my mother and father on a hay ride through frozen woods (how he convinced my mother to do that is a mystery that went with him to the grave), of a man playing piano in the lobby, of my Bride Barbie and her dog, of Daddy in the indoor pool, of Daddy wearing red long johns, and of Daddy sliding down the mountain on his backside, his hands in the air and his enormous grin.

Tonight, in California, after I clink a champagne flute while watching the Times Square Ball drop at 9:00 p.m., I’ll look away as I bite my lip trying not to cry when I hear Auld Lang Syne. Then, I’ll peek at my sleeping daughter. She’s the same age I was when we first went to Skytop. She’ll make a puffy little yawn and roll over in the same way Daddy used to. It will make me smile. Maybe New Year’s Eve doesn’t have to suck.

Children's Grief Awareness Day #CGADHOPE

2014-11-20T09:41:00.003-08:00

Today is a day for children who will always feel a little bit alone to feel a tiny bit less so. 76% of children who lost a parent surveyed say they think about the person at least once a day. It can happen at anytime, anywhere. Anything can trigger missing someone - the weather, the sky, a joke, a song, a radio commercial. Grieving kids learn quickly it's not appropriate to say this out loud whenever they remember. It's alienating. So they let it sit on them. Sometimes it's a happy memory. Other times, it crushes their ribs and they can't even breathe.

Unlike people, grief never dies. It becomes a part of ourselves. We are entitled to honor that feeling and, in turn, ourselves. That's why I'm wearing blue today. It's ok to tell a grieving child that you know they are grieving. They may even be pleasantly surprised. After loved ones die, the world keeps turning even if it should have stopped. Taking a moment to recognize that is true empathy.

I am inspired and in awe of the work of the National Alliance for Grieving Children. Even if it's just your jeans, put on something blue today.

Driving Home

2014-11-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

I've been toying with a Prologue for the book for a few weeks. After the careful help of this semester's Creative Non-Fiction class at Stanford, I have an essay, but it's not the prologue yet...

November 2013

The sky turns night in layers. First the white skirt covers the foothills. The orange-pink layer hides behind its mother. Then, the light and dark blue layers lean back, smoking cigarettes. As my Volvo pushes into the brisk pre-Thanksgiving evening, the yellow moon shines, “I am ill and sad. I see you, I see you not.”

Before I let myself sing, “I see the moon and the moon sees me,” the track turns on the CD to Kath Bloom. She warbles, “There’s a wind that blows in from the North and it says that lovin’ takes course. Come here. Come here.” Crooning melody slides around me, and then it punches my spine. I cough, closing my eyes just long enough not to kill on the 280.

My father and I listened to music all the time. I still do. Songs have a way of delivering my mind into memories the way that smells do. I think back to our apartment on East End Avenue and a Sunday afternoon listening to the discordant pounding of keys on a piano and Lotte Leyna singing, “Pirate Jenny.” It could be any or all Sunday afternoons when I am six or seven. My flat-ended nose presses against the dirty glass while I watch barges slide up and down the East River. Containers full of iron, oil and nameless goods push upstream, all pulled by the tiny, powerful red and black McAlister tugboats. Before I can cover my ears, Leyna asks the terrifying question, “Kill them now, or later?” Even then, I somehow knew that losing people was inevitable.

Daddy died the day after my eighth birthday. He was 44, a New York trial attorney with an appreciation for abstract art, Bertolt Brecht, steak, Jaguars, Remy Martin, Marlboro Reds, New York, my mother, my sister, and me. There isn’t a day when I don’t feel his absence. Would he be proud of me? Did he like other ice cream flavors besides Hagen Daaz peach? Am I living up to his expectations? What would he think of Mitch McConnell? Would I make him happy? Would he come with me to see a David Sedaris reading? Would he and my mother still be married? Would my daughter remind him of me? At sunset, it’s worse. When someone dies, you never stop waiting for him to come home at the end of the day.

I stop at the end of the exit ramp. Instead of heading home, I make the sharp right heading higher into the foothills. His absence floats in the car as the music drives me deeper into memory. The stars are silent but their light seems to sway with each bar of music. Sound and light are waves. They move until they hit something and have to change. Do memories move until they hit something and we forget?

Today is one of the worst days. These are days when I imagine him next to me in the passenger seat and watch the tiny hairs on my forearms lift up into the empty pocket of air around me where he should be. I don’t see dead people. I know I carry them into the world just the same.

As I climb higher into the hills, the road narrows and branches creep out into the street. Their twisty fingernails tap my windows and doors, ticking and scratching. I press the gas even harder. As the gear shifts, my body lurches forward.

I pull over. The seatbelt across my chest cradles the rock sitting on top of my heart. Tonight, it is a smooth river stone, perfect for skipping. My mind wanders again.

I remember standing at the shore at Orient Point. Daddy stands to my left, his Minolta around his neck, blocking my view of the black and white lighthouse protecting the fishing boats from the harbor. “Take your time, find a good smooth one. It should be flat, but not too big – you want one that’ll fly.”

“Like this?”

“No thinner. Try this one.”

I hurl the stone into Long Island Sound. It plunks into the water. The wind on the water turns the ripples’ concentric rings into rhombuses and parallelograms. I pause for a beat, willing the stone to bob up and skip across the brown salt water. Nothing. I find another stone, this one blubs down from the surface faster than the first.

Distracted, I look to my right. The Cross Sound Ferry Service parking lot bustles with departing day-trippers from New England. Their wood-paneled Ford station wagons are loaded with pumpkins, Indian corn, and wine from the North Fork wineries. They’ll serve up harvest supper in Connecticut tomorrow night. The cars load in an order only understood by frequent ferry travelers – weight distribution trumping first come, first served. A man in a red Mercedes complains to a sturdy dockhand who ignores him, waving on a large purple van. “Daddy, he has bad manners.”

“Worry about your own manners.” He raises only one eyebrow. I turn and play with my own eyebrows, holding one down with my index finger, unable to replicate the gesture.

While we’ve watched this Saturday afternoon dance roll on, the sun has moved. Orange and purple-gray clouds hint at evening and the half moon appears white in the eastern sky. One or two stars poke through the blueness. Daddy takes out his camera. He grumbles, “Bloody slow shutter.” Then, he laughs, “Got it.” The ferry honks three times as the 5:40 Cape Henlopen departs for New London.

“Time to go. Skipping stones is an important skill. You can’t be a kid of you can’t skip stones.”

“Daddy, that’s silly, I can’t skip and I’m a kid.”

He laughs at me and with me, “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go home. Mommy will be worried out of her mind.” I failed stone skipping. How else I have I failed?

Everyday, I work hard in a glass room with a speakerphone. I love my clients and hope they love me. Yet, I still feel like I’m waiting. I press my head onto the steering wheel. My teeth chatter. I grind my molars to stop the movement. My throat won’t swallow. After a few seconds, my diaphragm gives up and spurts out the air I’d held in. “Who are you?” I ask. In the hills, no one hears me.

I feel unfinished.I put the car back on the road and drive back toward my house. A hot salty tear threatens to blur my vision, sending me careening off the snaking road into a ravine with dried brush and horses. One of the reasons I hate crying has nothing to do with losing control, fearing vulnerability, or being told that no one likes a cry baby. It’s that the physical sensation of crying is horrible. My body heats up. I feel claustrophobic in my own skin. I begin to sweat. This is not polite glowing. A salty stream of sweat stings my invariably slightly sunburned neck, creeping down my chest, where it becomes cold; forcing me to notice that it’s reached my navel. Under my black black suit jacket, a pink monogrammed Brooks Brothers blouse sticks to my back. My “rosy” face becomes purple and the whites of my eyes turn pinkish red. From my nose, hot, clear, liquid runs into my mouth. My pocket pack of Kleenex is buried at the bottom of a not-quite-ostentatious black Prada handbag in the backseat. It is all utterly out of reach.

I remember a clear October day. Mommy is at home packing up the summerhouse. We walk out onto the sand, take off our Reebok sneakers and white tube socks, roll up our jeans, pull up our hoods to block the wind, and run. We run in endless lines of tire tracks left on the sand. Daddy is ahead of me, running toward the jetties, now visible only out in the water. As he runs, his body shrinks and shrinks until, he dissolves into the mist. I panic. Before tears stream from my eyes, I will my legs, scratching against my rolled up Osh-Kosh jeans, to push through the sand as my feet sink further with each step. “Daddy!”

He’s right there in front of me, but I can’t see him obscured by mist, sun and blowing sand. I reach into the mist, running faster with my arms open, until he runs back to scoop me up into his arms. The smell of a damp un-dyed Irish wool Aran Fisherman’s sweater mixes with cologne and Marlboro smoke to capture the sound of a voice I can no longer recall.

When I was seven, Daddy and I shared a notebook. He bought it for me to write notes for a school project about a Winslow Homer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It became something else entirely. I remember sitting in the back seat of our silver Volvo, the one Daddy said made a part of his soul die every time he drove it, in front of St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village. Mommy is inside visiting 87-year-old Aunt Katherine and her broken hip. She’ll only be a minute.

“Daddy, write me a letter.”

“A letter?”

“Yes, a letter. Here, use my notebook.”

“Why?”

“I just want you to write me something. So I don’t forget.”

“Ok.” He exhales and I pass the small beige wire-bound notebook between the two front seats. He reaches back, also grabbing the well-chewed pencil placed on top of the notebook. His fingers rub the bite marks but he says nothing to admonish me.

I wait patiently while Willie Nelson sings “City of New Orleans,” on the radio. I sing along, “Good morning America, how are you? Dontcha’ know me, I’m you’re native son?”

He hands me back the notebook. I read his note out loud.

Dear Kate,

This is a letter about my favorites.

My favorite color is blue.

My favorite food is steak.

My favorite car is Jaguar.

My favorite people are you, Mommy and Tracy.

Love,

Daddy

Does anyone need to know any more than that about her father? Probably not. But, it’s not only knowing him that I crave. I still miss him every day and know that there are probably only three or four other people on Earth who think of him at least once every single day. The world has her own people to miss every day.
The Volvo turns onto my street, up a short curvy hill. The neighbors’ houses are dark and their shades drawn. The only light on the street comes from my headlights pointing towards my night. I don’t know this native son at all. Am I still loved?

I pull into the grainy clay parking spot in front of my house and see the porch light is off. Yellow light from the living room lamp pokes through the cracks in the plantation shutters. I turn off the music. My shoulders fold together as I exhale, my head presses back into the headrest. And then it comes again, that delicious pain – the absence I know so well.

Once I turn off the ignition and step out into the evening air, I close the door to the almost black car, and lean back onto it. The engine’s vibration whizzes into my spinal column. I remember to breathe in and out and forget to worry about my clothes. My eyes trace the black silhouette of redwoods, up the trunks, past the triangle branches to the point where they become the night sky. I am far from anywhere. There are no sounds. Crickets are asleep. There is little light save the stars. I’ve always found it curious that there aren’t fireflies West of the Rockies. Their absence, albeit appropriate for a November night, adds to the otherness of this place, halfway up a foothill, on its way to somewhere else. What am I doing here?

Children whose parents die are half-child, half adult. It starts when someone lies to you. For me, the lie was that my father would get better. I was seven and I knew. I don't know how I knew, I just did. They were thirty-seven and they didn't. Or, so I thought at the time. At the time, I thought they were naive or even dumb. A few years later, I thought they were liars. Now, at their age, I realize that they weren't lying to me, they were lying to themselves. The lies we tell ourselves are the most dangerous. And I am the greatest of liars. The time has come to ask the questions, I’ve feared.

Who would we be today? Would we even know each other if I saw him passing on a sidewalk? Would he say that I lived well? He’d say that I was incomplete. I will learn from his siblings, his friends, his co-workers, my mother.

Each interview will begin with, “What was he like?” To a one, they will be responsive, kind and helpful. As much as I wish to know more about my father, finding out more about him will leave me unsatisfied. That is because I want him to know me. That remains impossible.

I look up. The sky above me is covered with stars; my eyes trace the dusty edges of the Milky Way. I see stars above me that shone a billion years ago. What does that say about time? The past is literally with me. What does that say about memory? The images in my mind are merely chemical reactions. I can’t bring myself to go inside. The night air and the illusion of time and truth sit with me a little longer.

If Only vs. Thank You

2014-10-22T13:42:00.001-07:00

This post also appears on LinkedIn.

"Just say Thank You, Gilbert!" - What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Jeff Haden shared a piece he wrote for INC. His claim is that no one is rich and no one is happy. He asked people who most us would consider rich and possibly happy if they thought of themselves that way. None of them did. I have a suspicion that most of these people "forget their thank yous,” as my five-year-old daughter puts it.
Instead of looking for people who should be happy and rich, the people Jeff may wish to interview are people who are grateful. Gratitude reminds us of the good in our world. This is the good that surrounds us and the good we create – by choice.
What I noticed the people all had in common was that they were thinking about the next thing, or what they didn't have. I call this “If Only” syndrome. “If Only” are toxic words for the human spirit. "If Only" kills happiness by making us feel powerless and forced to make choices. Those aren't choices; they are self-blackmail.
“Thank You” to others, yourself and whatever higher power you may believe in is like a growth hormone for happiness. "Thank You" inspires us to do more good works and to help others. When we help others, we feel better and richer and happier. And so on until we’re not a nation on anti-depressants. "Thank You" makes the workplace and the world better. It even drives up employee engagement scores.
So here’s my request:
For five days, when you wake up, say “Thank You” for 3 things. Don’t think too hard – you’d be surprised how easy this is. The thank you can be directed at whomever or whatever you wish. Then, have your children do it. It changes your day.
I’ll start:

Thank you for the amazing feeling of sun on my shoulders.
Thank you for my healthy family.
Thank you for time to do what I love.

Let me know how it goes. Respond here with some of your own gratitude or on twitter with #thankyoufor.
Thank you for reading.

photo credit:http://lanebloodcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/thank-you.jpg

Think you chose your career? Better Make Sure

2014-10-21T12:34:00.002-07:00

This post also appears on LinkedIn

My husband worked for a leader who started an all-staff by saying that he only wanted people on his team who were, "there by choice." I've always loved that idea - it gave me power. Whenever I had a rough day at the office, I would remind myself, "I am here by choice, when that isn't true anymore, I will leave." But, I was afraid of this power, so I stayed.

So many of us follow paths carved out for us by the expectations of our families, our superiors and ourselves. This path is dangerous because it masquerades as a "a choice." I chose a certain college, a certain career, a certain brand of shoes, a spouse. Life is the sum total of the choices you make, or so I was often told.

In reality, for many of us, life is the result of the choices we didn't make. We took the easy, socially acceptable (not to mention lucrative) path that was offered, but we never took the extra step. The extra step would be to look at what choices aren't explicitly on the table - and conceive of and consider them. Know the whole decision set.

We ask ourselves questions like, "Does this get me to the next step? What will this job/path teach me?" These are valid an important questions but they leave out, "Is this going to make me happy? Will my life, right now, be better for having taken this road?" Too often, the answer is "No." Our collective Puritan work ethic tells us, "pain now, gain later." It is a powerful force.

That is how I found myself, sitting in a beautiful office, at an amazing company, surrounded by crazy-smart people, doing exciting and meaningful work, looking at a picture of my beautiful family, asking myself, "Why does this still feel like it's fake, like I'm waiting for something? I have everything I ever wanted. I chose this." Scratch that. I had everything I thought I should want and it chose me.

So, I sat down and imagined my dream day. It was so clear, yet I was afraid. From the time I was in second grade, I wanted to be a writer. I had to be a writer. Even in my years as an industry consultant, I wrote late at night in hotel rooms. I wrote short stories, bad poetry, short plays, anonymous blogs and memoir. It came so easily. I needed it.

My dream day was to get up in the morning, take my daughter school and not rush the entire morning. Then, I would exercise. After that, I would write and write. I would eat lunch and go for walks. I would visit museums and remember why Edward Hopper paintings can make me cry in public. I would pick up my daughter from school. We would have unstructured time. I would make real dinners. I would sing my daughter to sleep. When the day was over, I would sip single malt scotch while talking and laughing on the couch with my husband.

I took a deep breath. I said, "I choose to be somewhere else. This is not my choice anymore. I want to use my time in another way. My life is now and my time is more valuable to me than to anyone else." When I resigned from my job a few weeks later, I was actually choosing for the first time in my life. Now my life looks exactly like my dream life, minus the cooking.

When my father died at 44, he had undergone an operation with a very low success rate, but he chose life. One of my father's partners told me that he chose his family. He didn't linger at the office in the evenings to shoot the breeze. He didn't invent work for himself to make himself seem important. He rushed back from business trips on late night flights. He rose to spend Saturdays with my sister and me exploring New York City. It makes so sad to think that I didn't realize the lesson he'd taught me. Happiness doesn't come out of nowhere, you have to help it along and make space for it with the choices you make about your time.

If you were to truly chose your life (not a future life, but right now, this very second) what changes would you make? It takes courage to look freedom in the eye and use it. Only when we use our courage to truly choose for ourselves can we know what it means to be free.

Special Thanks to @MikeGamson of LinkedIn for making me really think about what it means to choose.

Freedom is Useless without Courage

2014-10-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

Life is a collection of moments. In some moments we transcend. Our ears hear our daughter's hysterical laughter of childhood, our mouths taste a Chateau Coutet Sauterne for the first time, our eyes see the sky turning blue-pink and we believe in God, if just for a second. These are the moments that make us alive, yet we tend to forget them almost as quickly as we experience them.

There are other moments. In those moments, we are humbled. Our hands wrap Toyotas around telephone poles, our mouths snap an insult at the person across the room, our lizard brains confuse a child who won't put on her flipping socks and shoes already with a cougar about to pounce. In short, we lose control.

Where does true control over the moment, or of life come from?

I think of interview from a few weeks ago. About my father, the person said, "He was honest. He didn't tolerate fools. If he thought you were an idiot, he told you you were an idiot." There's a kind of confidence implied by someone not only unwilling to suffer fools but also willing to tell the fool that they are, in fact, a fool. This is not something I can do, yet. I still have time.

I think the difference was that my father took a leap towards happiness when he met my mother and they started their family. He abandoned the expectations of his family, his church, and himself. He hurt others in the process.

Still, he gave himself the chance for the life he wanted. He chose the life that would make him happy. Once you risk who you and everyone else thinks you are, you begin to let go of what other people think of you. You are free from their expectations (and perhaps your own) to find your own life, in your own way, in your own time.

When I started to write this year, I took a leap towards a life I've always wanted but was simply too afraid to try. Fear governed me.

Back in the corporate world, whenever anyone asked me what I would do when I had enough money, I’d answer, “Move to New Orleans. Buy a B and B in the Garden District and write all afternoon.” Sometimes the B and B was in Quogue, NY. Over the years, I gave up saying that. “I’d be right where I am.” With that one cowardly lie, masquerading as a positive attitude, I reduced myself to living a life I didn't really want to live. The reason I felt like an imposter was not that I believed I was incompetent, it was that I really wanted to be somewhere else entirely.

The girl looking for approval and safety reminded me that I should want to be on that path. For another day, I would wait for that moment when what I want and what I should want become one and the same. And then, I took my own leap toward the life I've always wanted.

Freedom is useless without courage. It took me so long to hear that message, I just wish I'd listened earlier. Then again, the best lessons are often learned the hard way.

The Perils of Augustine, Rousseau, Proust and A Fault In Our Stars - all in one week

2014-10-06T16:00:00.001-07:00

Last night, I gave into the temptation to wallow. Brian and I watched, The Fault in Our Stars. From the first few minutes in, I found myself shocked at how different the experience of a camera, as a narrator, would make the entire story. My favorite device the author uses is a book within a book, where the characters encounter the phrase, “Pain demands to be felt.” What could be more true? Perhaps, the corollary that “Love demands to be given?”

When I read the book, on a transcontinental SFO to JFK United flight, I didn’t shed a single tear. Although I prefer to pretend otherwise, books and movies make me cry. I have been known to be the really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B (more than once). What makes me different than the typical really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B is that I am reading something Stiglitz wrote about income inequality and remain happily married.

There I sat, on my blue sofa, in a ratty t-shirt, shocked when the tears streamed down my face. I discovered one of the reasons I hate crying has nothing to do with losing control, fearing vulnerability, or being told that no one likes a cry baby. It’s that the physical sensation of crying is horrible.

My body heats up. I feel claustrophobic in my own skin. I sweat. This is not polite glowing. A salty stream of sweat stings my invariably slightly sunburned neck, creeping down my chest, where it becomes cold, forcing me to notice that its reached my navel. My “rosy” face becomes purple and the whites of my eyes turn pinkish red. To complete the image, my nose runs a hot, clear, liquid and I never have a tissue.

The reaction I was having was not to watching two star crossed lovers, but to knowing that people die leaving things unfinished. All those meals never eaten, songs left unsung, chances to choose kindness missed, sunsets unwatched, babies' laughter unheard. Yet, if we are there and eat those meals, sing those songs, watch the sunsets and make the babies laugh, we bring the lost along with us. We never stop loving people when they die. That is our privilege - to live with their love. That remains. And it gives us hope.

My apologies, I re-read Augustine, Proust and Rousseau for a class over the past week – this can’t continue much longer. I can barely stand myself. God, forgive us our pretentiousness, we know not the boredom it causes.

Listening to Gabriel's Oboe

2014-09-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

Today I listened to Gabriel's Oboe over and over. It’s the theme from the film, The Mission. When I made my confirmation, it was required viewing. Rarely does a film pack so many questions into one story. My mother and father saw it the theater. She recalls the two of them walking New York’s streets for hours afterwards. Neither of them had words for it. Instead, they walked in saturated silence.

The story is of a Spanish mission that thrived in the Amazon during Colonial times. It’s success threatened authorities both governmental and clerical. The powerful never falter in their desire to squash the truly free. It is their greatest fear. When it comes time to defend the mission, two priests fight alongside the native people. One fights by sword, the other by prayer. For both of them, the truly good sought fairness in all things, opening themselves to criticism and ostracism in their quest for right. Often, the free, possessing a power of a different nature, fail. Neither man survived.

I can’t imagine the film without it’s score. Music tells the story through dense emotions, those we never named. It’s record filled our Upper East Side Apartment for weeks. The opening mimics the first sound after the quiet heard at sunrise. It floats as more instruments join, each creating a different chill and charge. Then, the chorus perfects the pieces, coming just shy of exploding and destroying it. Nuance at its most raw. The build up reminds me of the promise tomorrow brings when today feels wasted. But no effort is ever wasted, no kindness to small to matter. Daddy taught me this. Mommy perfected it.

Music makes visceral memory. Bow over string transports me through time even more than the smell of the beach. At times, I believed I could smell my father on a wave of sound. When something amazing plays, I still do. Sound wraps around my shoulders. It rests against my back and squeezes my ribs. When I look up, no one is there.

My father’s best friend, Peter, said it best. “We went to a Irish bar on the East Side – a dark, smoky place. We drank and listened to Irish War ballads, not quite like Tommy Clancy. It was the most moving experience I ever had in my life. I’ve searched for years to find that music.” To search is to know you still love.

Before Ellie was born, Brian and I traveled to South East Asia. In Hoi An, a beach town in Vietnam, I woke up before dawn. I sat outside with a camera and watched the world wake up. Fishermen put out to sea in round, wicker boats. A mother held her baby in her lap. They clapped together. The quiet was perfect. It is in quiet that we build connections with another.

These images and moments are so complete unto themselves; they seem impossible in worlds of noise and glowing screens. But it was this world of moments and images that I inhabited with Daddy. Our time was uninterrupted. When we were together, we belonged in a world entirely of our own making. Only recently did I learn that I can go there whenever I wish, but the ticket is always round-trip and I travel there alone.

Being of the sea and the surf

2014-07-16T09:52:00.004-07:00

The metal arm of my beach chair clunks against my back. It's one millimeter from painful. White sand sticks to the sweaty skin on the back of my calves. Only the breeze from the waves cuts through the 97% humid Long Island summer air. Behind the haze, the sun burns longing to reveal a clear periwinkle sky. It’s a perfect day. It's a day I've seen hundreds of times before, but it never ceases to save me.

I drop the chair and my enormous canvas bag filled with towels, books, sunscreen and the remnants of my daughter's late afternoon snack from yesterday. I remove my obscenely over-priced red coral beaded tunic to reveal an ultra-conservative black skirted swimsuit. My chair squeaks as it unfolds with a little extra push. I flop down onto the chair and open my father's mid-shipman's log. That's why I'm here - to discover someone I lost or never knew. Me.

Whenever I felt awful growing up, the beach was salvation. After anyone died, I found freedom here. My mother brought me here when I couldn't look at other children with their fathers at a camp barbecue. I sat on the roof of a surfboard shack in the 30 degree wind until I could feel nothing else when my high school boyfriend and I finally called it quits. It’s like leaving the planet for a little while. No one can touch you.

To find escape, you walk down a long white path of wooden boards through a field of beach grass. Behind you is a beach club with shouting children, a frigid swimming pool and the smell of fat burning on a grill. Ahead of you is white sand, grey-green-blue-ocean and a fuzzy horizon line - the edge of the world. Even though it’s only about 500 steps to the breaking waves, it feels like miles. Once you’re there, in your beach chair, under a blue and white umbrella, reading and re-reading sea-spray damp pages of your book through sunglasses dirtied by fingerprints absorbing fog, you are somewhere else. Alone and comfortably lonely. Here, for just a little while, you are free of everything behind you, free to inhale whatever emotion sits on your chest. There is no judgment, just being.

Daddy and I came to the beach even in the off-season. I remember a clear October day. Mommy was probably stuck packing up the summer house. We went out onto the sand, took off our Reebok sneakers and white tube socks, rolled up our jeans, pulled up our hoods to block the wind, and ran. We ran in endless lines of tire tracks left on the sand. He was ahead of me, running toward the jetties, which are now visible only out in the water. As he ran, his body shrunk and shrunk until, he dissolved into the mist. I panicked. As tears streamed from my eyes, I willed my legs, scratching against my rolled up Osh-Kosh jeans to push through the sand as my feet sank further with each step.

“Daddy!”

He was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t see him obscured by mist, sun and sand blowing in the wind. I reached into the mist, running faster with my arms open, until he ran back to scoop me up into his arms. Even then, I knew that loss was the inevitable outcome of life.

That’s why I’m here, back in this small town on the Atlantic Ocean. I've come and gone, moved from the green woods of the mid-Atlantic, to the jungle heat and bugs of the Deep South, to the face-splitting cold of the Midwest, to the twilight-at-noon-light of Northern California. But, it is only here, where the surf burns my ankles from the cold, that I am not running away. For as long as I can remember, I felt like a story lived inside me, hidden and unwritten. That story is who I am, who I am meant to be, and how I enter the world.

As I read through his Midshipman's log, five yards from the breaking surf, I know that this is finally real. As I see Ellie, learning to be of the beach and sea, I am finally sure I’ve saved a part of him and carried him into the world for as long as she and I live.

When I Discover that I Am Loved

2014-06-18T17:18:00.002-07:00

So here I sit, trying to find people who remember anything at all about my father. It’s been almost thirty years since he died and even longer since many of them saw him. To a one, they have been gracious, kind, and responsive.

Some comments and traits are universal – wry and dry sense of humor, ethical, big smile, very smart.

Others are more specific – a federal judge said that in all his years on the bench he’d never seen a better summation than one my father made in the US Attorney’s Office. That would have been about forty years ago. Of his brilliance, I have no doubt.

Another person said, “He had a sense of humor. Maybe it was a Catholic sense of humor. It certainly wasn’t a Jewish one. But, because of that, he was someone I could talk to.” I've clearly been away from New York far too long to understand what the difference between a Catholic and Jewish sense of humor is. If someone, years from now, remembers me as someone with a ready sense of humor and being someone they could talk to, I’ll have managed quite something in this life.

What I haven't heard are stories about what it was like to be his close friend. Almost everyone said that they knew him but were tangentially involved in his life. It’s hard for me to picture him as someone on the edges.

Then again, that’s how I’ve lived my entire life. I have a very small circle of very close friends. I tend to be invited to many things where the host is the only person I know.

I wonder if he was lonely. How could it be possible that someone with so much to give had so few people who claim to have been close to him?

Then it occurs to me – he was close to me. All those wonderful Saturdays wandering around New York City, suffering an assault with Barbie dolls that day on the beach, driving me in the car with him to pick up my sister, lighting a barbecue grill, playing Chutes and Ladders with me when I had pneumonia, listening to me read The Billy Goat's Gruff - easy reader edition three hundred times when I was learning to read. He wasn't with his "friends." He was with me. By choice. I was loved.

He wrote me a letter once. I still have it.

Dear Kate,

This is a letter about my favorites.

My favorite color is blue.

My favorite food is steak.

My favorite car is Jaguar.

My favorite people are you, Mommy and Tracy.

Love,

Daddy

Does anyone need to know any more than that about their parents? Probably not. But, it’s not only knowing him that I crave. I still miss him every day and know that there are probably only three or four other people on Earth who think of him at least once every single day. But the world has her own people to miss every day.

So for today, I'll remember to tell Brian and Ellie they are my favorite people in the world. They are. With them, I am most myself and never lonely. We don't need thousands of adoring fans when we have people who are our home.

When You See What They Are Missing

2014-06-09T15:21:00.003-07:00

One of the less convenient facts about grief is that it shows up whether it’s an appropriate time to be sad and nostalgic, or not. For me, it usually is not. Last weekend, we went to the wedding of two dear friends. My husband was a groomsman and my daughter, the flower girl. The weddings of good friends are always fun because even the people you haven’t met are friends by the very fact that they are special to such special people.

As we sat in a beautiful late spring Connecticut garden, I watched long afternoon sunbeams light the perfect bride and her father walking up a small aisle constructed of white folding chairs. She smiled. He beamed. I walked up the aisle at my wedding with a family friend.

Luckily, I was too busy watching to make sure my five-year-old flower girl wasn’t causing havoc during the ceremony to actually feel how I feel about that.

At some point during most weddings, the bride dances with her father. It nearly kills me. Every. Single. Time. Before it does, and some kind person at my table makes the "I feel so sorry for you" face, I spare us both and sneak off to the guestbook or the bar. Most torture and martyrdom carry no reward for the bravest face. This time, Ellie followed me. “Mommy you look sad.” She hugged me and I changed my face as I’ve done so many times.

I remember dancing with Daddy. We danced on Saturday nights at the New York Athletic Club, in the eleventh floor dining room. The ceiling-high windows look out over Central Park and the rest of New York City glows around the darkened rectangle where during the day, the children of the city climb rocks, slide down them on their backsides, occasionally discover New York wildlife (rats with feet and rats with wings – pigeons), and race our horses on the carousel.

One night, I wore a red taffeta dress with a white lace collar, white lace anklets, and black patent leather shoes without a strap. In an act of sheer lunacy over the love of his tiny daughter (or total ignorance of what children's shoes should cost), he special-ordered those shoes from Italy because my feet were too small to wear strapless shoes like my friends. My mother could do nothing but roll her eyes and click her tongue. Even I know to pick my battles, most of the time.

The band played some big band hit that I can’t remember. He took me by the hand onto the dance floor. Once on the shimmery dance floor, he held each of my hands in his with my arms reaching up high and long towards him. First we swung our arms back and forth. Then he spun me around and around again. Everything else in the room blurred together. His blonde-red hair, knowing eyes and gigantic grin sharpened so much that I can still see them now if I close my eyes. Finally, he reached under my arms and lifted me up. As he spun around, my feet flew out into a wide arc much to my delight and much to the horror of the older couple perfunctorily fox trotting next us.

Later at the wedding, I stood at our table, gulping water before chasing down a sugar-shocked flower girl once again. Holding my breath, I watched my husband take my daughter by the hand and lead her to the dance floor. He held both her hands and swung them back and forth. He picked her up and dipped her so her hands touched the floor. She squealed with delight-bordering-on-terror, came up and leaned back again for another dip. What a lucky girl! He'll never have then chance to...

I bit my bottom lip, carefully wiped a tear from my right eye, and prayed, “Please don’t let him die. She deserves more than this moment. Please don’t let him die.”

Justice and Juxtaposition

2014-05-20T15:55:00.002-07:00

I can’t remember who told me my father was a freedom rider. This maybe apocryphal memory, something I’m never comfortable with. What I am sure of is that my father was a man of high ideals. He earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science, in the early 1960’s, at the College of The Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. This is a Jesuit Undergraduate liberal arts institution founded by a Catholic bishop who wanted Irish Catholic boys to receive the educations denied them at protestant leaning Ivy League institutions. Years later, I accepted my degree from the very same college on the hill, but with less courage and more cynicism.

The Jesuit educational tradition seeks to answer one question, “How then shall we live?” The simple, succinct, and, impossible answer is as “men and women for others.” Add to it, the Jesuit motto, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,” and you have the recipe for a life of action. Then again, without the inclination towards this ethos, it’s unlikely that anyone would end up at Holy Cross in the first place. It’s easy to dismiss all of this in light of the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, European Imperialism in Latin America and a host of other ills, but we would be remiss to understate the power of those ideas. Modern Jesuit theology is decidedly liberal, preferential to the poor, and justice-seeking.

One Sunday per year in the Roman Catholic calendar is devoted to vocation. Vocation Sunday can be a dreadful guilt-inducing, pleading, and occasionally pathetic affair where Roman Catholics pray for boys wiling to enter the priesthood. I’ve always felt that this understanding of a call is at best narrow and limiting and at worst exclusionary and alienating. Vocation is not yielding. It is the battle cry of the soul’s voice commanding us to use the totality of our gifts, to become who we are meant to be, and to speak out on behalf of those whose calls are silenced by institutions and history. It was to this vocation my father responded that Sunday many years ago.

On vocation Sunday, 1984, I sat between my older sister and father, on an unforgiving black wooden pew inside the dimly lit Catholic Church of St. Charles Borromeo in Brooklyn Heights, NY. Inside my head, I played office, as only a five-year-old going on forty can. I colored the pages of the bulletin with Mommy’s black ballpoint pen, buzzed my secretary over an imaginary intercom, and checked my appointment book that doubled as a hymnal.

Daddy tapped my shoulder. “Get up. We’re going.” He stood straight up in the middle of Fr. Michael’s homily. He looked at Mommy, “Do whatever you want.”

Aghast, I looked over at my silent mother until my father pulled my hand to stand me up. He pushed up the unoiled kneeler creating a deliberate loud creak and bang. Fr. Michael looked up from the lectern, coughed, and stared. Holding both our hands, Daddy walked my sister and me down the center aisle of the church, through the vestibule and out into Sydney Place’s warm Sunday air. The entire walk home, he breathed loud, puffs of air through his nose. With each puff out, his belt banged against his belly. His lean, long legs and fast, furious footsteps forced us into an outright run to keep up with him. Once back at our house, he unlocked the front door, looked at both of our faces without smiling, and said, “Go play.”

About thirty minutes later, after mass ended, my mother walked into the house, accompanied by a stooping, quivering, Fr. Michael. This was not to be missed. I sat half-way up the long staircase leading to the first landing, hidden by the shadows of the next flight of stairs. Whenever I wanted to eavesdrop, this was my place. My mother scurried into the kitchen and turned on the sink. Pans and plates banged, mostly for show. Our housekeeper, Anna, did the dishes.

Back in the front hallway, my father faced the door and Father Michael. The two tall towers stood about two yards apart, staring into awkwardness and the brown carpet runner rather than at each other. Father Michael took off his wire glasses, blew on the lenses, and rubbed them on his black shirt. The white of his collar was the only part of him not hidden by shadows.
“Jack, is everything all right?” Fr. Michael had a calm voice and measured temper that I equated with tall people, including my father.

“Yes. Now, everything is.” He raised his eyebrows like did when he expected us to know we were being reprimanded without his saying a word. We always knew. Silence can be more powerful than a scream.

“I saw you leave during my homily. You can imagine my concern when a member of my parish council walks out in the middle of mass. I take it the girls are not sick?”

“No. The Church is.”

“Come again?”

“Fr. Michael, I’ve been a member of this community for years now and I’ve never known you to fall for the bullshit, but to peddle it? I won’t have my girls sit and listen to it. Nor will I for that matter.”

“Mr. Lowe?”

“If the Church needs leaders, priests, and bishops as desperately as you claim it does, and I have two perfectly capable, beautiful and brilliant girls who can’t have that job simply because they are female, I do not entertain sympathy for the Church’s current lack of qualified candidates. You and I both know that the Church took issue with property rights in the middle ages and carries on a tradition of sexism to this day. Do not insult my intelligence by forcing me to listen to the importance of encouraging our sons to reach their potential. Moreover, under no circumstance will I allow my daughters to hear that they can’t have the important roles because they are girls. Besides, by the time they are old enough to decide, the Church may have woken up from its medieval hangover. If the Church wants a savior, it should wise up to the idea she may very well show up in female form. Thank you for coming to make sure we are all well. Good afternoon.”

Fr. Michael nodded, pivoted, turned the brass knob on the vestibule door, walked through it, closed it, and slipped out of our house with a happy spring I didn’t expect to see. Was he happy the meeting was over, or was he happy his friend reminded him why they were friends in the first place?

“Kate, I know you’re up there.” Daddy shouted. “Unless you come down here, I’m going to assume you understand. When we are a part of a group and the group is wrong, the worst thing we can do is sit and watch. Being silent when you see something wrong may be worse than what you see in the first place.” I waited a full minute before slinking up the stairs to my sister and our Barbies.