break open by surprise

an excerpt from my book, “The Geography of Loss”

One October a few years ago, a woman named Jodi Cohen invited me to come read from Life is a Verb in Madison, Wisconsin.

I asked Jodi if she had any favorite stories in the book, because I wanted to include one of them in the reading I did there. “Yaron,” she said, “Yaron,” the story of a chance encounter that led to a lifelong friendship. It would be the first time I had ever read that story aloud, and while there is much to chuckle at in those pages, there is much that reveals my own pettiness in the face of his extraordinary beauty. As I read it in that beautiful bookstore in front of all those beautiful faces that had gathered there, I surprised myself by the intensity with which I broke down, at one point unsure if I could continue, turning to her for help. It was a moment that bonded us for life. Later, Jodi wrote to me:

There are these moments when we are revealed. There are these moments where our face powder and our deodorant and our hip red glasses and our clean counters and our eating salad one bite at a time all go flying out the window.

What I really want to say is that when people break, it happens by surprise.

So my friend Patti came to town to read from her book of stories about her life and living intentionally. But that doesn’t capture it. She wrote these stories for her daughters, her precious cargo. She wrote these stories as a way to say to them: here—this is what I know and learn and care about and want to leave for you. The crumbs to follow that lead from moment to moment, full of goodness and fiber.

We reveal ourselves in so many ways. When we are least prepared. When we are not looking. When we least expect it. That line, from that poem: “I told you, when people break, it happens by surprise.”

I look at people in line at the grocery store, buying lettuce, let’s say, and I think, “who is standing here with big sorrow right now?” When Don died all I could think about was that I wanted to make a kugel for the luncheon after the funeral. An apricot kugel. My heart was twisted and leaking all over my life. I was beyond heartbroken, stunned, sad, bewildered, in shock. I’d been awake for hours on end before and after he died. I was in the room when he took his last breath. I was out of my mind, literally. On another earth plane, a different dimension. Somewhere between the clouds and God and the ozone and dirt. The kugel became my sole purpose for living and being. I stumbled into the grocery store, chanting my list over and over under my breath: yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter.

And there I was. In line. With my items. Who would know, to look at me, what had just happened in the last 24 hours? Who would know from looking at the items in my red plastic basket that I’d been up close and intimate with death? That the night before, as the sun set and the baroque music stopped playing, as another Shabbat was taking place, that Don’s raspy breath got more and more spacious until Ruth leaned over, her ear to his chest, and said, ‘he’s gone.”

You never know where someone has been, where someone might be going.

We continue. We buy face powder at Walgreen’s, stopping to look at the pop culture magazines on the way out. We buy lunch from the co-op deli and sit outside to eat off the periwinkle blue plastic recyclable dishes. We check email. We take phone calls. We drive around the city, noticing store signs and how the leaves are like an autumnal kaleidoscope. We talk and laugh and talk and laugh. We listen. We drink each other in. We drink each other up.

This is so gorgeous it takes my breath away. As I stand, irritated in the Piggly Wiggly line, there is–no doubt–someone very near me who is speaking their litany inside their own head: yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter.

This is true of Democrats and it is true of Republicans and Libertarians and Independents and Hockey Moms and Socialists and Communists and transgender men and women and lesbians and vegans and high school jocks and small children and that mean old woman who yelled at me in the library parking lot yesterday and unlovable people, too. All of us have pain: yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter. Yellow flat noodles, apricot jam, dried apricots, eggs, cream cheese, ricotta cheese, butter.

Can we not walk more tenderly amongst those around us? Can we not allow ourselves to break?

Pride

Even rocks crack, I tell you,
and not because of age.
For years they lie on their backs
in the heat and the cold,
so many years,
it almost seems peaceful.
They don’t move, so the cracks stay hidden.
A kind of pride.
Years pass over them, waiting.
Whoever is going to shatter them
hasn’t come yet.
And so the moss flourishes, the seaweed swirls,
the seaweed pushes through and rolls back,
and it seems they are motionless.
Till a little seal comes to rub against the rocks,
comes and goes away.
And suddenly the stone is split.
I told you, when people break, it happens by surprise.

–Dahlia Ravikovitch

Embrace What Is: Allow yourself to break wide open.

(painting for The Geography of Loss by Christine Rhodes)