Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty little children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crime scene, a day before, was a school. The medical examiner’s team begins its work through the night to make sure there are no mistakes, no shadow of doubt about the names of those children – 12 girls, eight boys – along with those of six women shot at close range by a 20 year-old man, whose name everyone now knows.
Later, a state trooper is assigned to each anguished family in close-knit Newtown, Connecticut, as they wait for confirmation of what they already know. And, stunned families all around the world will ask why . . .
Why?
We have been in this place before and again and again.
It was the morning of March 13, 1996, when the clocks stopped in the sleepy village of Dunblane, Scotland. Teacher, Gwen Mayor, was with her Primary One pupils – just 5 and 6 years old – in the assembly hall of Dunblane Primary School when the killing began. It was just another Wednesday morning in PE when a 43 year old manon a shooting rampage burst inside, shooting indiscriminately at teachers and children, before turning the gun on himself. His attack lasted three crazed, interminable minutes, during which Ms. Mayor did what teachers at Sandy Hook would do seventeen years later – everything they could to shield their students from the gunfire, to provide shelter from the storm.
There are still no words to help us find the way to explain to our children or to each other how a man could stroll into a school with four handguns and over 700 rounds of ammunition and begin shooting, the carnage coming to an end only after he turned the gun on himself. Seventeen years later, still no words, still no way to comprehend how a young man could kill his mother in her bed, then get in her car and drive to an elementary school where he would kill 20 little children and six adults, before killing himself. We know not why. We know only what was done and what was left behind and how it forever changed two tiny places, an ocean apart.
Watching from afar, I am struck by the noblest expressions of humanity that emerge from such tragedy; by the immeasurable kindness of those people Mr. Rogers calls “the helpers.”
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
We can all be helpers, as a heartbroken President Obama reminded us in the wake of the Newtown massacre, because “while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need, to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories, but also in ours.”
https://youtu.be/uhxjS1FO33c
Far from it all this morning, I am remembering again Dunblane and those little children who would be all grown up now with driving licenses and jobs, college degrees, marriages, mortgages, maybe children of their own. Like many of us, they would be planning for Christmas, hanging lights, trimming the tree, wrapping gifts, spending too much. But these will remain unfulfilled wishes for 16 children taken from us by a former Boy Scout leader with a pair of pliers, four handguns, and 700 rounds of ammunition. A man who slipped into their little school and opened fire.
“So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.” BILLY COLLINS
Several years ago, I enrolled in a college photography class with a friend. This was something I had been meaning to do for about thirty year but had never made time for it before a breast cancer diagnosis shifted my priorities. Until then, I had been very busy being busy, bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of professional, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, all the while wishing Tom Petty would show up on my doorstep one day and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.
A pleaser, I wanted to be the photography instructor’s favorite. I was off to a promising start – like me, she preferred Nikon over Canon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and to never miss a class even though I dreaded disappointing her, or even worse, boring her. And, she was often bored – to the point of openly bristling at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, subject in the center. What did we know of the rule of thirds? She would sigh and stress that there was no magic in great photography, that it was “just light.”
“It is just light, and you just need to find it.”
Trying to relate – and reminding myself that it was also about composition – I told myself that photography was “writing with light.” I wanted to learn how to do it and to one day take just one photograph of the variety Amyn Nasser admires – a magical, grand photograph:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that her students would create at least one grand moment – a moment of vision – in our often pedestrian pictures, my photography teacher assigned as homework over that Thanksgiving weekend, what she coined a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” It would require us to shoot from various angles, to shift our perspective – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . It would require ‘a good eye.’
So it was that I found myself on that Thanksgiving morning, wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, and pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I forget how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking – just thinking. I remember that it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Astral Weeks and Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl on another November evening more than a decade ago.
There, he mystifies those gathered before him the way he does when he seems younger than the grumpy old man he can appear to be. His rendition of Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended is immaculate as he teases out the song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” from the album of the same name described by legendary rock critic, Lester Bangs, on the tenth anniversary of its release:
Insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
Now, over fifty years since its release, people like me continue to find their own understandings of “Astral Weeks.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Gavin Edwards says it is “still the sweetest slice of mystery in Van Morrison’s catalog.” Naturally then, I serve it up every November, especially around Thanksgiving.
Sitting in Phoenix in the shade of trees that do not grow in Belfast, I could not be further from Cyprus Avenue which boasts over 85 trees sprouting from wide cement pavements to providing light and shade. Pine, maple, sycamore, lime, beech . . . Once upon a time, this avenue would have been a place beyond Van Morrison’s station as a working class boy from Hynford Street:
Cyprus Avenue was a place where there’s a lot of wealth. It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.
Eventually, the avenue of trees would belong to him. It would belong to all of us. For his 70th birthday, Van Morrison would play a concert on Cyprus Avenue, and pilgrims would come from all over the globe to experience it, to share his ‘sense of wonder.’
In the spirit of the holiday season, I could maybe say that it was the Thanksgiving holiday that had something to do with my moment of transcendence as I gazed at those pink blossoms shimmering above me. That would not be true. The celebration of America’s most significant holiday does not come naturally to me, even after over thirty years here. Christmas is still the holiday that warms me, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
With apologies to members of my American family joining us for Christmas, we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
No, it wasn’t thoughts of Thanksgiving that took me where I went that November afternoon in a green space in downtown Phoenix. It was ayearning. Looking up, losing track of time and place, I could find my footing again, knowing full well I would lose it – and rediscover it – again and again. And, fearless, I was grateful for it.
We end the set with what has become one of our songs. I make a joke about how I only sing in C. My love knows that’s not true, but he humors me because he knows I panic if he says it’s in A minor. Without saying it aloud, I remind him not to sing my verse. You know the one, the one about most Novembers and why they make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C” – a sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – for anyone who is sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it; it is a song for November.
Eight years ago, on a too-bright November morning, I was diagnosed with Stage II invasive breast cancer. I am loathe to declare the November date a “cancerversary,” one of those cheery-sounding sniglets used to mark milestones in cancer country. The scars on this body that carries me from one moment to the next are daily and unavoidable reminders of that Halloween morning when I discovered the lump and the afternoon thereafter when an earnest young doctor, a stranger, delivered my diagnosis. For cancer patients, there are plenty of these milestones – the date of a surgery undertaken to remove tumors or breasts or pieces of a lung; the completion of radiation or chemotherapy; the momentous day, five years after diagnosis, when a kindly oncologist will make the pronouncement of NED – No Evidence of Disease; and the day we dread most – discovery of metastasis.
Maybe it’s because there are no right words to respond to cancer, that we invent others to minimize and manage its havoc, to shelter us from it or make us smile through the illusion of it even as it terrifies us. And, make no mistake; we are terrified.
Me with Sherman Alexie
Filed away is an imperative from novelist, Sherman Alexie who once told an audience of writers that they “must share the scariest things about their lives.” Intrigued, I bought a ticket to hear him speak at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, bearing in mind advice he had given elsewhere: “Don’t lose the sense of awe you feel whenever you meet one of your favorite writers. However, don’t confuse any writer’s talent with his or her worth as a human being. Those two qualities are not necessarily related.” Accompanying me was my daughter, at the time a junior high student immersed in the words and drawings of Alexi’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. ALong with everyone else, we laughed conspiratorially as he shared what were surely the scariest things about his early years on the Spokane Indian Reserve. Describing his father’s booze of choice,”Squodka” – a mix of Squirt soda and vodka – Alexie’s cheery nonchalance belied, I imagine, the anguish of a young boy confronting the reality of an alcoholic father who would disappear for days at a time. He knows, I know, that alcoholism on the rez is no laughing matter.
Nor is cancer. It is a serious disease deserving of serious words, but we do a lousy job of talking about it in a way that conveys its reality or leads us to knowing what causes it or how to prevent it. So we rely on codes invented to keep this scariest of things at a safe distance. Code is acceptable in the cancer conversation and not just in the pink stuff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – “save the boobies” fare. “Mastectomy,” code for “amputation,” causes me to wonder if I were an amputee in the “traditional” sense, if I would ever refer to the day I lost a limb as my “ampuversary.” I think not.
The truth is that in the mythology of cancer, medical euphemisms abound. Myself, I have bandied about “lumpectomy” as though it is the thing we do to remove an inconsequential wart. In reality, it is a partial amputation. When I was first diagnosed, I presumed a lumpectomy was in the cards for me. As a word, it didn’t pack much of a punch, so it didn’t frighten me. Then I met the surgeon who pointed out that my cancer was not amenable to lumpectomy given its proximity to the nipple and the fact that I was not endowed with large breasts. Essentially, she didn’t have enough to work with; therefore, the surgery to remove my breast and reconstruct it would be trickier than the “simple” lumpectomy I had anticipated. As her meticulous notes would later confirm, “dissection was very difficult given the very small circumareolar incision used for the skin-sparing mastectomy.” It would require additional time and effort, not to mention skill and patience. So she recommended – and I nodded sagely as though I knew what she was talking about – a skin-sparing mastectomy which entailed removing only the skin of the nipple, areola, and the original biopsy scar to create an opening – a small opening – through which she would remove the breast tissue. Duly spared – spared, no less – the skin would then accommodate a reconstruction using my own tissue. Simple.
Perusing the details of my surgery, you would be forgiven for dismissing the removal of a breast as painless. At times it sounds regal, befitting a fanfare of trumpets for that climactic moment when my breast tissue was “elevated off the pectoralis and delivered from the wound.”
While three surgeons operated on me, my then-alive husband and our girl waited in a waiting room where a set of paintings of the desert at dusk hung on the walls. It would have been about ten o’clock in the morning when my surgeon came out to find my weary, tiny family leaning on each other , waiting for the announcement she would later document, that “the frozen section was negative for metastatic disease.” There were no abnormal nodes and no further dissection was necessary. Celebrating, she and my husband performed a silent high-five in the hospital hallway. Three hours later, having removed all the cancer she could see, she went about her day, leaving me in the capable hands of two highly sought after plastic surgeons, one being one of the best in Phoenix, the other a master of DIEP flap reconstruction, who had flown in the previous evening from Texas. When I eventually emerged from the ICU, high on Dilaudid, they say I told the young nurse on duty to pretend I was Madonna. Before I went home, she shampooed my hair.
In surgery, they worked on me for the next six hours, and two days later released me back to my life. Eight years later, I am told I look just like myself. You would never know, unless you asked to see, or I summoned the courage to show you, that I really don’t look like myself. Not my original self. Hidden under my clothes, is a trivial but nonetheless relocated belly button, its circumference now dotted with tiny white scars. Below it, a thin crooked scar, faded to white, stretches from hip to hip, with ‘dog-eared’ reminders on either end where JP drains pulled excess bloody fluid for several days after the surgery. I have a right breast too. Sort of. It is in the shape of a breast, impressively so, now that all the post-surgical swelling and discoloration has gone. Its skin is the same, spared by the mastectomy that removed its cancerous tissue through a very small incision around the areola also removed with its nipple.
As a rule, I tend not to dwell on the macabre, but I sometimes find myself obsessing about my old right breast, now a mastectomy specimen preserved in a container of formaldehyde solution. It weighed 294 grams, “the words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.'”
Contemplating all that has happened in the past eight years – the cancer, the plunge into widowhood two Novembers later, the shift in priorities – I hear my mother say, in the parlance of home, that I have “come through the mill.” Lest I wallow too much, somebody will always be there to point out that things could be worse.
One evening, shortly after the death of my husband, I bumped into a former colleague. He hadn’t seen me for a few years but had still kept up with my professional exploits. Standing in the produce department at Safeway, he tendered his condolences and then wondered aloud if I had ever read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Of course I have. Several times. I know great chunks of it by heart. It is an exquisite study of loss that blows open my heart. And then he said to me, “Well, at least your daughter didn’t die.”
At least your daughter didn’t die.
The sentence hung in the space between us for too long. I don’t remember what I said. Something perhaps. Probably nothing. I know I scrambled internally to excuse him as someone who had never lost anyone that mattered much to him. I know I also hated him.
At least your daughter didn’t die.
No. She is right here. Just 21 years old and beautiful, tough without being hard, unmoored without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a Dairy Queen, since demolished, on Fridays after school. She learned to drive his Jeep without him and she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma without his cheers ringing in her ears. He would have liked that they used the Talking Heads for the graduation processional – “This Must Be the Place.” He would have tapped his feet and winked at me and brushed away a tear, because by then, he would have grown sentimental – all the more if he’d had any inkling of the milestones on her horizon. She would earn her first paycheck without the ready winks and smiles that had always encouraged her to keep being great at being herself regardless of the bullshit that comes with a part-time job in retail. In spite of her trouble with math, she is navigating her way through the degree program that will allow her to one day work with teenagers who are lost without their parents. She is lovely, reminding me sometimes of the kind of bird that only flies in a faraway place. Exotic. Rare. Endangered.
On one of the anniversaries of his death that November morning when we were far from our home, she told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm.
At least my daughter didn’t die.
I still don’t have the words to hand to the man who asked me about Joan Didion’s book. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t remember if I’d said Goodbye to my husband, if he’d heard me say it before my cellphone died the way it always does because I never remember to charge it. I wanted to tell him the last conversation our little family had was a transatlantic phone call – my daughter and I on top of the Titanic museum in a foggy Belfast, my husband in our Phoenix living room, all of us unaware it would be the last time we talked and laughed together. I didn’t. Instead, I reminded myself of Lou Reed reminding me of magic and loss and of Sherman Alexie lighting up the Heard Museum with a coping strategy for those times when we despair at the lack of compassion in the world. Remember, he had said, “the world gave us Hitler – but it also gave us Springsteen.”
The world gave us Bruce Springsteen.
And Prince. And Dolores O’Riordan. And Tom Petty. And Donald Trump. And Steve Earle, sorry for all the lonely nights he put her through, for not remembering if he said goodbye. And all the people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. We just have to find the sweet spot in which to live and die.
Magical thinking . . .
How shall I mark this day?
I will climb again to the summit of Piestewa Peak in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It has been almost a year since I stood there, arms akimbo, high up and far away. I have missed it up there, looking down and romanticizing the sprawl glittering below me. I think I’ll go back and wonder the way I do up there about Wordsworth when he first stopped to consider the view. It’s ’emotion recollected in tranquility. ‘ It’s just an illusion.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
Edgar came into our lives early one October morning. I vividly recall our first encounter. He was standing in the center lane of a street already busy with Monday morning traffic. My daughter and I had just left the gym, and she noticed him before I did, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the car, jumping out, and flailing wildly at the oncoming traffic which she successfully brought to a momentary standstill. Within seconds, she had scooped up the tiny Chihuahua that trembled in the widening beam of the headlights before him, named him Edgar – an homage to Mr. Poe – and announced that he would be moving in with us.
In spite of having just run several miles on a treadmill, I had still not had coffee and was neither alert nor ready for a Monday let alone a Chihuahua. In the back of my mind, I planned to post a few “Found Dog” signs around the neighborhood, sure that by the end of the day “Edgar” would be back where he belonged, answering to whatever name someone else had given him.
Sophie almost convinced me to let her stay home from school that day, so she could be with “her” new dog. Shaking and scared, submissive and sweet, his little ribs were as noticeable as the heart shaped markings on his coat. Sophie was vexed and without saying it, I knew she knew that based on our experience with Molly, a beautiful brindle, some years back, a new dog was probably not in the cards. On the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, we had rescued Molly in the Christmas of 2008. She adored me, and the feeling was mutual. Molly was elegant and affectionate and knew how to be retired. She wanted to lounge around the house all day, but she did not want to do it alone.
Molly & Me (Xmas 2008)
Ultimately, we had to surrender Molly to the Arizona Greyhound Rescue. Her separation anxiety had grown so severe, she just couldn’t stay in the house by herself. I was heart-broken the day I returned her to the man who would place her in a foster family where someone would be home all day as well as another greyhound to keep her company. Life with Molly – although brief – had helped seal the deal as far as future pets were concerned. We would be a one-cat family.
No more dogs.
No way.
But there were tell-tale signs that this little Chihuahua was making his way into my husband’s heart. “Surely someone is missing this little guy terribly,” he said. He bought dog food. He drove around the neighborhood, posting “Found Dog” signs and looking for “Lost Dog” signs, hoping to make some family’s day by returning their dog. Every morning, he perused the newspaper and Craigslist to see if someone in Phoenix had lost a cute little Chihuahua. He took Edgar to the Humane Society where he was informed that while they didn’t take lost dogs, they would check for a microchip. No chip. No collar. No clue that he belonged to someone. They estimated “Edgar” at about seven years old, determined that he hadn’t been neutered or cared for. He had ghastly breath and worse teeth. He was malnourished and dirty. He weighed three pounds. Barely.
Within three weeks, it was clear that nobody was looking for this little dog, who in spite of having four perfectly good legs, expected to be carried everywhere. Dutifully, we all obliged. He gained weight. He stopped trembling. He slept in our daughter’s arms every night. He scampered towards us when we called “Edgar,” and soon we were all in love with him, as poet Mary Oliver writes,
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?
Edgar was ours.
About a month later, my daughter and I left Edgar and the cat with my husband so we could take a trip back home to Northern Ireland to visit my parents. I remember that Friday clearly. On another continent, in another time zone, I had been keeping my fingers crossed that a friend would come through with tickets for the free concert Van Morrison was giving at the Waterfront Hall after being granted the Freedom of the City of Belfast. But I was distracted – repeatedly – by thoughts of foreboding, by the unexpected sound of my own voice as my phone-calls home went straight to voice-mail. Worried, I did what I always do when I have “a bad feeling,” I sent a text to my best friend, Amanda (the original BFF) to ask if she would drive to my house to check on things.
I have a flair for the dramatic and, conventional wisdom be damned, I sweat the small stuff. The devil is in the tiniest of details after all. I make mountains out of molehills which sometimes works when I can produce a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But this? This was the second most significant detail of my adult life, wrapped up in a persistent phrase that travelled via text from Castledawson to Chandler at 12:25PM Mountain Standard Time:
“Trying to be calm, but afraid he is hurt or dead.”
I was on the phone with her as she walked to my front door, as she looked through the bay window to see little Edgar looking back at her, still and silent, knowing what we had yet to discover, waiting for her to find the keys under the doormat, to come on in and call my husband’s name three times before finding his lifeless body on the bed, hoping he was just resting but knowing he was gone.
He was gone.
Gone.
Six years on, in the quiet of an early morning, when I am reflecting on all that has transpired, I find myself wanting to be reassured that as his fragile heart stopped working Ken’s last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
Sophie tells me that these days, every day without her dad begins not with sorrow and dread, but with Edgar licking her face and making her smile – ready, always ready to help her get ready to walk out into the world.
Edgar’s not doing too well today. Shortly after we rescued him, he had to have 15 teeth removed due to his life on the streets and his poor diet. Remember that ghastly breath? Now, due to genetic predispositions and his past dental issues, his remaining teeth are rotting at the root and causing him pain. The only solution that will bring him relief is to fully remove the last of his teeth through oral surgery. Of course Sophie wants to give him the care he needs and is hoping that if he has ever brought a smile to your face, you might consider a donation.
To raise the $1,000 fee for the procedure, she has created stickers featuring her rendering of her soon-to-be-toothless best buddy with all proceeds going towards the cost of his surgery.
So, gentle reader, if you have a fiver to spare, I hope you’ll consider helping her out. Now a full-time college-student with a part-time job and medical bills of her own, Sophie wants to raise the funds for Edgar’s surgery and pre-surgery blood work/aftercare by working extra hours and this fundraiser.
