Gare de Lyon, Paris

I am going back to Annonay for the second time in three days. I am going to see Tante Monique, she is in the hospital. Tante is French for aunt, she is my mother’s 85-year-old sister. (One of the effects of my mom’s decision to have children at the non-traditional age of 43 is that many of our relatives are older, much older. The question of mortality – with its attendant non-negotiables of sickness, old age and death – has been more present for my sister and I than many of our friends growing up, friends whose mothers had children in their 20s. But this choice of my mother – to have children “later” – is one that I celebrate, one that I am emulating. Before my mom became a mother, she lived on three continents, participated in United Nations peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, learned different languages by living in their countries, bought fabulous clothes hand-made for her by various designers. All these amazing experiences informed her mothering. Her parenting techniques have always been unique and exceptional. Unfortunately, my sister and I perceived them – with our desperate desires of just fitting-in while growing up in America – as insane and inexplicable. But with the modicum of hard-won objectivity we have gained through our mutual therapies and experiences, we realize now that we would not trade our childhoods for anything).

This journey back to Annonay from Paris is a multi-stepped affair; one that is a sequence of metro-train-bus-taxi, ending with a walk across the bridge of the River Deume. Although exhausting, I appreciate the intricacy of this itinerary since it affords me the opportunity to compose myself. This is the aunt who would organize elaborate, month-long summer road trips, zooming us through France every year. Thanks to her indefatigable, truck-driver instincts, we criss-crossed the roads of France – staying in the smallest hotels in the obscurest villages, stopping at oyster museums and strawberry festivals along the way. As we reminisced in her hospital room, she reminds me that during a visit to the cathedral in Bourges when I was 12, I told her I wanted to get married there. I had totally forgotten, both the cathedral and that I had ever said that. But it is thanks to her profound curiosity and energy for always, always learning that I even have a link to France, that I have an understanding of this part of my genetic inheritance.

One of my favorite links with her is linguistic – (she has always done this for us, but she has stepped up the intensity once I told her of my decision to come live in Paris) – she is always cataloging French idioms and expressions. She meticulously types up lists of French expressions with their etymologies, meanings and translations. She always says, rightfully so, that these are the hardest parts of a language to learn – the obscure phrase which operates with a delicate alchemy of pop culture, history and French collective memory. Understanding them, she tells me, will lend me cultural currency and legitimacy. I have to enter fully into the language, she tells me, not to be content to rest at French’s threshold. Thanks to her lists, I can nod empathetically when someone complains about a hair being in the soup or feet in the plate – or laugh appropriately when someone refers to the worm in the cauliflower. Even this past Sunday, when the doctor came by her hospital room, he mentioned the need to see events à l’optique. In answer to my confused face, she said gently “I will add that to your list, don’t worry.”

During my telephone call to her Sunday night – letting her know that I had arrived safely in Paris – she apologizes for being too weak to type up the latest list she is working on. But she tells me that to view events à l’optique is to remember the relevant, to understand what is most important. It is thanks to her that I am slowly learning to live my life this way.

spring equinox

Paris is beginning to spring. Eight more days to make it official, of course, but this morning has that brightness that makes the miracle of tulips and jonquils seem inevitable. There is nothing like watching the seasons turn over each other to make you feel at home in your newly adopted city.

It makes me think of Persephone – that goddess of spring, of returns, of reunions. Persephone, whose kidnapping by Hades (the god of the underworld) caused her mother, Demeter (the goddess of the earth and its harvests), to grieve so desperately that the earth slid into the quiet of winter. Not knowing where her daughter was being held hostage, Demeter journeyed the earth, searching for her everywhere with Hecate (the goddess of the crossroads). The earth waited in its winter. In response to the people’s hunger and cold, Zeus forced Hades to release Persephone. But before handing her over to Hermes (the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them) who had come to guide her back to earth, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds. Hades had stipulated that Persephone would be released only if she had not eaten anything during her ordeal. The four seeds she did eat obligated her to return to the underworld for four months of each year. When Persephone finally did return to earth, spring marked the end of Demeter’s grieving.

Persephone’s story – with its attendant explanations of the cyclical nature of love and grief – sounds a resonance with the potential for transformations with which spring seduces us each year.

visitations and progressions: bloomington, indiana lake lemon

Today, on my last day in Indiana, Akiko and I went Sunday driving. We went to Lake Lemon, where we had gone several summers before. The lake was still frozen over in the center, although its icy edges were disappearing because of the progression towards spring. Akiko said: “Nature is moving forward to spring – that means that this is the time that we must also move forward to the next stage of our life.” We have not yet figured out what that next stage is going to be, but it was breakthrough enough to know that we have to have movement forward.

Grief can lull us into a stasis, a frozen silence, when confronted with the enormity of loss. It is an almost-impossible effort to enunciate its effects – to verbalize how specifically it fills the void of what was sundered. In his essay “The Poet,” Ralph W. Emerson writes that the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. To metamorphize grief into elegy, to revolutionize loss into value, is to know how to navigate tenderly, with respectful care, these icy floats upon which we need to sit for a while before we can even think of being lured back to the shore – where, as Elizabeth Bishop writes – “love will unexpectedly appear over & over again.”

Detroit International Airport

It is snowing tonight in Detroit, where I fly in for my connecting flight to Indianapolis. I left Paris this morning in order to come to Indiana to be with Akiko. She has recently returned to Indiana from Japan, where her mother just passed away. I am arriving as a pilgrim of grief, knowing that the gesture of my movement here might be the main thing I am accomplishing. I am led more by love than by reason, knowing that I have nothing more concrete than presence to offer.

During the plane’s descent bringing me closer back to home, I recognize the efficient anonymity of the hotel clusters which sprout around all American airports with the speedy tenacity of mold. From the distance the sky affords, these many Marriot Inns and Motor Lodges look about as substantial as Lego villages. With the plane descending into the familiar American landscape, I feel the downward pull of grief.

The journey of grieving and its signposts are familiar. Years ago, I took a Greyhound bus from Winter Park, Florida to Lost Valley, Oregon. Up till this point, the geography of the country had been mostly abstract for me. I saw the states fly by in the square patches of color from the bus window: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California… By focusing on the details of landscape alone, I was trying to still the hollow echoes of my first relationship dissolving, devolving into nothing more mundane than love disappearing. My decision to cover the entire width of the nation by bus was my attempt physicalize the magnitude of the pain I felt. While tinged with a tad of the dramatic and the hysteric, it was the only way that I could enunciate my grief. I found comfort in the name of my Greyhound destination: Lost Valley. It was a writer’s commune in Oregon where I decided to live for a while, staying in a cabin in exchange for cultivation of the organic zucchini patch.

With the death of her mother, another color is added to the spectrum of similarities between Akiko and I. When my father died, I was two years old. I was unable to verbalize my own experience of grief; I did not have the vocabulary to grasp what had happened to him. Since then, in a way, I have been lugging behind me the body of my father, covered in a shrouded silence. While I have no answers for Akiko, I am comforted by her questions. As we retrace all the familiar steps of our shared life in Bloomington, I cling with a certainty that it is the distance I have covered which will address a love so deep that I could not otherwise name.

In the meantime, I am stringing together my epiphanies like so many Christmas lights, pinpoints of illumination against a larger darkness.