the moment of leaving.
I'm participating in a 31-day blogging challenge called reverb10, responding to writing prompts that are designed to elicit reflections on 2010, and hopes for 2011. You can find out more about it here. I am challenging myself to respond to each prompt in 15 minutes or less.
Today's challenge: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
Moment.
2010 was a year of leavings. Deaths, transitions, moving out into the world, loss and change. Moments in which standing on the edge of loss heightened my aliveness. Two moments stand out:
NINA. I stayed by her bed for three days as she died. The sides of the metal hospital bed were finally pulled up, to keep her in, to keep her safe. The metal slats of the window blinds clicked together and then against the pane of the glass in the air conditioning that kept her room cold, cold. The night before she sank into death, she had even lost the ability to write, our last form of communication. And around ten o'clock that evening, she needed me, she needed something, she needed. And I couldn't tell what. By that time, I had been there so long, and so long near her, that I smelled like her. I had become her hands for so long, I knew them like my own. Her hair was matted against the back of her head, and she looked panicked that night, for hours. The sound of the oxygen machine, its ceaseless rhythm, sank into a rhythm with my own breath, or mine sank into a rhythm with that of the machine. The nurses knew. They knew things I could never know, about how her body was shutting down. I thought she would survive. Surely she would.
For five hours that night, Nina was alive again, strong and ferocious and manic. Struggling to tell me something, her arms stretched straight up into the sky toward the ceiling pockmarked with tiny holes, her eyes so wide, looking past me and through me. She was wailing and looking up, like a pilgrim who has had a vision. This went on for hours, and I got used to it. It stopped scaring me. "Nina," I whispered to her, leaning down to her ear, "I feel like I'm failing you at this important moment. I know you are trying to tell me something, and I don't know what." She moved her arms to her heart, over and over again. Suddenly, without any warning, she opened her arms again and grabbed me toward her, pulling me up and over the bed rails with a strength long since gone from her arms, but now back. She held me the tightest I have ever been held, my torso on top of hers, the bottom half of my body dangling over the metal rail. She held me.
EMMA. In August, we took our oldest daughter, Emma to college for her freshman year, out into the world without us for the first time, forever changing our relationship to her. There is no judgment implied in that statement. Change is change is transition is difference is change. I knew when we left her on that huge campus that bright afternoon that her relationship to us would be enhanced, altered, somehow different forever after. The sky was deep blue. We had moved clothing and shoes and bedding to the ninth floor, we had taken her to orientation for the marching band, we had eaten together, and now it was time. John, Tess, and I stood still under a large tree as she walked away from us, sure and unsure at the same time. As she reached the end of the walkway, she turned once to look; we waved. Then Emma turned back around and turned the corner of a building, disappearing in a moment, in the sun.
