Down the rabbit hole of memory

Lunch with other writers who are coming of age

When I joined with 3 other older women writers for lunch, I should have expected the subject I don’t want to talk about would come up first.

I want companionship on this late-life, coming-of-aging time of turning the dross of life into golden stories. Each of these women is masterful in this. They can identify themselves in the comments below if they choose. For now, imagine sitting down with Barbara Kingsolver, and Terry Tempest Williams. If that doesn’t ring, just imagine me, Michelle, and Oprah. Or conjure Judy Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren. Sally, Linda and Ann are that good.

Four Bad-ass women of a certain age

Among the four of us, we live on three islands in Puget Sound, so it took 3 ferries to arrive at the same time at the same table on the Seattle waterfront. It was during a relatively mild heat wave. As older women, I noticed, we had no trouble negotiating with staff the get seated at the table with the best shade.

Though they didn’t all know one another, we quickly sank into conversation.

Baby and wedding pictures

Then, it happened. As it always does when perfectly normal gray hairs circle up: the presentation of children and grandchildren. Weddings and funerals. Summer reunions by the lake. Caretaking duties now that he/she is in cognitive decline, is ill.

I sit mute. I have none of that. I did not go down any normal family track. I was childless by choice. Instead of children, I have 2 books, a podcast, a movement, a blog and a wide assortment of survival skills.  Now, without grandchildren, I have you, a scattering of subscriber-companions I chat with weekly. I’ve only been to 3 weddings in my whole life, one of them my own to my college sweetheart (which withered in 5 years). I’ve been to one funeral - that of my father who, in despair, killed himself.

Of course, I had a family…

You don’t get here without one. I could recite the loneliness, suicide, mental illness and on and on, despite the great privilege of being born with a silver-plated spoon in my mouth. So yes, I had a family, but not the family I needed to be plump with self-worth, and saddled up emotionally to go forth from of school and start a life.

I remember when my father asphyxiated himself in his car in the garage of our suburban home. I was kept from his body by a circle of men, shuffled to the edge of the swirling scene of people crying and bringing food. Eventually I went upstairs to tell my feelings into the soft ears of my dog, Topper. My friend Brooke took me to her house, and we sat up late into the night making sense of things. My mother later chastised me. Why didn’t you come to me?

So, I left that family. It was like I’d been given a paper and crayons to draw my family, and I drew a few stick figures, no one touching anyone, crumpled the paper and tossed it in the trash.

I wanted a clean sheet of paper to draw a better family.

But it was not clean. It was not new. It was the same dynamics in new outfits, sometimes just birthday suites.

Having a tenuous foundation in life, I fell in with some other rebels. We all believed we were building the new future through us and “all that stuff from the past” was just, you know, illusion. It was an exciting life, radical, challenging, and, ultimately, stunningly successful through writing and publishing a best selling book. It was also a time of loss, depression, confusion - so much so that my I lost my footing. It was like being carried by a tide into deep water, and paddling hard for shore. It took a decade to touch bottom and feel ‘me’ again, moving forward. When people ask me about those years of brilliance and pain, I can only say, “It was complicated.”

So imagine that I drew stick figures of the 10 central characters, with dozens of others in the background, probably many naked, that I called family for so many years.

I crumpled that paper, threw it in the trash and pulled out a blank one and started another new life.

In this life, I live by myself in a village by the sea.

I go through the awkwardness of starting life over at 60, single but with a dowry of public recognition. I’d built a bridge of friendships to these village people over many years of meeting at conferences and doing projects together. I felt I’d finally met my people, and moved in next door. This life, and these stories, feel like mine.

So, on that sunny deck, with the shade umbrella just right and ferries honking in and out of the harbor, I was mute with these friends as we looked at pictures of grandchildren and of a wedding. Indeed, every picture was worthy of amazement, but underneath my admiration, a great sadness welled up. If I had revealed that, I feared revealing too much of the whole story of the family I actually did make, a weave of ideals, transgressions, brilliance, self-silencing, and the grit to go on.

I have now come through the anguish of what I lost in those years. It’s been like psychic surgery through dreams and inner work, excising from my innards a ganglion of shame, wrapped in confusion, wrapped in guilt, wrapped in anger, wrapped in embarrassment, wrapped in nostalgia for the life I could have had but didn’t, wrapped in “nothing to see here”. At a soul level, I now see, I’m actually not so different from other people with a complex past.

You can go home again, but it’s not the same

Last year I realized what I’d done to my blood family by running away. I dug into the trash, smoothed out the crumpled picture and started the long process of repair.

I’d been out of touch with my brother and sister for many years. I’d missed their lives. I’d missed marriages and children. I’d missed struggles with addiction and climbing back out. I was off finding god, perhaps, or transcendence, perhaps, or a brave new world for humanity, in general. I’d been in touch occasionally, but never let them touch my heart.

Then, at the beginning of 2023, realizing I was in the last part of my life, not the middle, my walls crumbled. I saw what I had done. Skipping right over guilt to sorrow. I was sorrow-full, the heartbroken heart of the child I was for whom my brother was my only solace. I wanted my brother back. I wanted brotherly love and comfort.

I wrote with an apology and an appeal. Thank God, my brother held no resentment anymore, he only wanted his sister back too. I asked if we could have a zoom call so I could see him and he me. After so many years, there he was, warm, funny and, well, brotherly. When I popped up on his screen he said, “Hello gorgeous,” and off we went.

Repair with my sister was easier. We’d befriended one another through our struggles with our family’s genetic melancholia and mania, but I still had to warm up my heart with her, share my mistakes and just be sisters.

I’ve even repaired the relationship with the husband I lost. Such a joy. The love with him wasn’t a mistake I made, it was a beautiful friendship lost.

I am, of course, smack dab in the middle of this story of reconciling with my past.

Reclaiming what was never, really, lost

Here is a family picture taken when I went back east to see my sister and brother and try to weave myself back into our family. This photo makes my heart swell. This is what I could have brought out with my women writer friends on that warm Seattle afternoon, had I not stumbled over the embarrassment of the middle family.

Now is the time to go to the waste basket, uncrumple the picture of that wild, prideful, cultish and idealistic family, aspiring like Icarus to the sun. That past is healing. Eventually I will be able to tell those stories with as much delight as my friends told of babies, sons, daughters, and marriages.

This is the core task of coming of aging, weaving all the strands - the bright ones and the wan shadowy ones - into the shroud I’ll be wrapped in when I rest in peace.

For me, the dark results of my wildness has made this task much harder - or perhaps not. Perhaps people with kids and grandkids have many unresolved losses themselves. Indeed, one of my companions in that lunch stumbled into telling us what she’d told no one.

The past isn’t shameful. It’s the past.

And it’s a treasure if you let it be.

One thing I do know. Kindness is essential to do this work of bringing all the you’s of you home.