Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart

/7 Comments/in , , , , /by

LISTENING TO MOZART: POEMS OF ALZHEIMER’S, Esther Altshul Helfgott. Cave Moon Press,  2014

A more personal blogpost today. Instead of hinting about and writing around what’s going on, I want to simply admit that it has been one catastrophe after another here all year, more and more noticeable since our dog (my emotional support animal, it turns out) died in October.

My husband is not well, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he still wants to be in charge of the world, his and mine. As a result of his attempt to hold onto his independence, we’ve had EMT’s in our backyard, multiple Urgent Care visits, some good days (celebrate those!) and many days crammed overfull with anxiety (for me). The wheels of health care are turning very very slowly, and we don’t have a diagnosis for what’s going on. But now that 1) he’s not driving (and seems to have let that go), and 2) I have gotten our taxes done, I’ve calmed down quite a lot. That helps.

Before the steepest part of the dramatic arc took off, I attended a reading in Seattle and ran into an old friend, Seattle poet Esther Altshul Helfgott. Among many other accomplishments, Esther founded the “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” which meets monthly in Ballard and is now in its 35th year. I’ve known her for decades. As she has two books navigating Alzheimer’s disease with her husband, Abe, I told her what was going on at my house. She reached into her bag and took out a copy of this book. She also told me I needed a therapist and a support group.

Esther Altshul Helfgott, image from the Two Sylvias website

Listening to Mozart is, in the words of Michael Dylan Welch, “a bouquet of short poems [that radiate] the sharp and sad fragrance of loss.” They were written after Abe’s death, and reading them helped me imagine moving through the stages of grief I’ve been stuck in—anger and denial—and begin to break through to something else.

I don’t agree
with Bishop in One Art—
that loss
is no disaster
she means the opposite—
loss is all disaster

These tanka-like meditations are as much about acceptance as they are about loss, and they helped me to remember that someday this will be over, and I’ll have three daughters who have lost their father. They reminded me that some day I, too, will have to deal with his loss.

when I
awoke this morning
I thought your
funeral was today—
it was three years ago

The poems are about loss, but they are riddled with hope. As time moves on and the poems continue, Helfgott begins to put her life with Abe, and after Abe, into perspective. Cleaning house, going to the bookstore, walking her dog.

a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappear

What I’ve been working through is the realization that the man I married has been gone for a while, for long enough that I’ve found it difficult to remember that guy I held hands with, walked on beaches with, adopted three daughters with, stood on sidelines of countless soccer games with…the man who taught college English for 40 years, the man who retiled our kitchen, built a writing cabin for me in our back yard, built tables and beds…took care of every possible home repair. Up until a day or so ago, it seemed impossible to see that man as also this one. Withdrawn from me, secretive, never finishing a project, forgetting ingredients in favorite recipes, getting into one car accident after another…

And there’s also—my own bad attitude. I’ve been so …ticked off, not wanting to do this, that it blinded me. After all, I went through it with my mother (for almost 10 years!). It’s not fair!

But our daughters are still young. Or young-ish. They’re not going to step in and take over for me while I book a flight for elsewhere. If someone is going to pull this experience together and unite our family around it, that someone will have to be me. I think of all the compassion and caring I poured into our old dog. That’s what I’m going to have to summon now, for my husband.

Esther’s poems helped me begin the journey back to my right mind. These poems and many phone conversations with patient friends, and (finally) a therapist.

I have been waiting for my husband to say, “Oh, I see what’s going on, let’s talk about it.” Waiting for him to agree to be looked after, waiting for him to give me permission to pay the bills (which have been going unpaid). Waiting for him to help me—as he always did, back in the day—get through this hard thing. Meanwhile, I’ve had multiple people (including Esther, months ago) tell me that the partnership is over, “your husband is gone,” and now it’s my responsibility to make good choices for both of us. Obviously, I still have a lot to wrap my mind around.

And there’s that persistent part of me that wants to say—you go on ahead, I’ll write a poem about it!

The last poem in Listening to Mozart gives me hope that a much better frame of mind will come. All I have to do is stay on the path.

I didn’t know
I was writing love poems
to you Abe—
I was just writing
and love came out

Esther is also the author of Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems (Cave Moon Press, 2013). You can learn more about her and her journey with Abe at the Jack Straw Cultural site, where she was a fellow in 2010 (be sure to listen to the interview), and, more recently, you can find her at this page at Two Sylvias.

 

Necessary Light

/6 Comments/in , , , , /by

It is Friday the 13th, probably too late in the day for this to post as 12/13/24, but that’s the date on which I am writing. I have been in a strange, estranged state of late. Not that I haven’t worked. At times I’ve worked obsessively. I made progress on the mystery novel, then I went back and began doing what I always do when I am anxious—rewriting pages that are already good enough.

I have not neglected my practice of writing a poem a week—as I’ve done every week since April of 2020—but the last few poems have felt like exercises. Nothing breaks out.

Rainy and windy days are especially difficult. Walking around the house, I find myself looking for where Pabu might be sleeping, find myself walking around a dog’s food dish and water dish, even though they are no longer there.

I rigorously avoid the news, then binge at 2 a.m. on political substack posts. I think it was Parker Palmer who said, “The mind awake at 2 a.m. is a deranged mind.” That would be my mind.

I decide to write down the titles of all the books I have opened and begun reading this late fall / early winter. I stop listing them when I get to 14.

Not all of this moody circling about is unrelieved. I have kept busy. Friends gift me their extra ticket to the Pacific Northwest Ballet Nutcracker. My daughter drags me to her K-4 school’s Christmas recital. An old friend says, “I’m blue, too, let’s go to the ocean.” (And, wow, does it help.) But I come home to the same difficulties I fled.

My husband has not been well. Nothing grave—just aging. And we’ve been bickering. I want him to slow down. He wants to keep doing everything he is accustomed to doing (installing a heavy door by himself, cleaning the roof of fir needles, driving after dark, etc.). I remind him that I, too, am aging, 68 (!). He cannot bully me to hold up my end of a door I do not have the strength to hold up. (He says, “You’re not aging! You’re young!”)

It has begun growing dark by 3:45, and I remind myself that I’ve always had difficulty this time of year.

I’ve been avoiding blogging—so much for my goal to do 52 blog reviews in 2024. (For this, I forgive myself.) On the 11th, which is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth, I thought it was time, and would take my mind off my mind. Well, I’ll do it on the 12th, I told myself yesterday. And now it is the 13th.

I read a friend’s substack. She sends me to a post on Radical Acceptance, which I badly need. I see that I’m behind in reading her posts—long, personal essays that ought to be collected in a book—and so I spend the afternoon reading all of her recent posts. I wish I could write something so personal, so dense with emotion and pathos and history. I wish I dared.

What exactly is it that I’m avoiding?

Two books I have been re-reading: Edward Hirsch’s splendid How to Read a Poem (Harcourt, 1999), and Patricia Fargnoli’s Necessary Light (Utah State Univ. Press, 1999). These, perhaps more than anything, help.

“Poetry puts us on the hook [Hirsch writes]—it makes us responsible for what we might otherwise evade in ourselves and in others. It gives us great access to ourselves.”

I wrote this passage into my journal on 16 November and didn’t add the page number. For the last hour, I’ve thumbed back and forth, back and forth through the pages and can’t find it. Plucking it from my journal, retyping it for you, offers a glimmer of understanding. I begin to imagine that I could write about what’s troubling me. It’s a first step.

Meanwhile, this poem from the luminous Patricia Fargnoli:

On Hearing of the Sudden Death of a Friend

The beach bristles with dead
and beautiful things:
slipper shells washed
full of sand,
broken blue mussels,
dried rockweed and kelp;
the sand itself, not the color
I think of when I say sand,
but specks: white finer
than salt, mica-shine,
dark brown,
pepper specks of black.
Beach plums line
the grassy path to the sea,
fuchsia and white,
full of show and radiance.
I’ve set a clam shell
on my writing table,
by the window
that looks over John’s Bay.
In slow-time here,
I am learning to look closely.
The shell has a tiny hole in it,
is limed white as bone.
When someone dies,
where does all
that energy go?
Where does thought go
and attention?
Where does radiance go?
Three sailboats, anchored,
are rocking.
One fishing skiff, white, far off,
motors away from me.

—Patricia Fargnoli, Necessary Light

all photos by Bethany Reid

Election Day

/6 Comments/in , , /by

I know I have been strangely silent about the U. S. election — in this venue at least. My family of origin used to be decent, working-class Republicans. Something I didn’t even know until I discovered how much my father admired Ronald Reagan. Now they are die-hard MAGA Republicans. It hurts my heart. If I say anything, they think I’m crazy. So I silence myself. In truth, I silenced my little bleeding liberal heart a lot as a child. I’m good at it. Not that they don’t love me, or that I don’t love them.

I remember my brother-in-law once telling me, “If you would only listen to Rush Limbaugh, then you would understand.” Well, if you would read The New Yorker, or The Nation, or freaking Time Magazine, YOU would get it. No, I don’t say that (not out loud). Instead I hang out with my tribe (poets), and watch Kamala’s Tik-Tok channel (or whatever it is) with my daughters.

And I feel really, really anxious. To make matters worse, two weeks ago my old dog died. I really wish he were here.

Pabu in his Halloween costume, a couple years back

How do I deal with election-anxiety? I get up early and sit at my desk, scribbling in a notebook (although he always lay at my feet and I miss having him there), and that makes me feel better. I read poetry, and that makes me feel better. (Though I used to read poems aloud to him.) I go for long, long walks with Pabu’s collar in my pocket, and that makes me feel a little better

I didn’t mean to say all of that. But, for once, I won’t erase what I’m thinking. I’ll just leave it out there.

In the Substack world, several people have today posted this poem by Alison Luterman. I found myself wanting to read it to my friends, and then — aha! — I thought of you. I copied this from Robert Reich, by the way.

I used to tell my students, if we all thought alike, we’d be robots or under some kind of mind control — in movies and novels, that’s always a dystopia. So, read widely, expose yourself to diverse cultures and ideas and voices. Make up your own mind. Be human.

And don’t forget to read poems.

HOLDING VIGIL

My cousin asks if I can describe this moment,
the heaviness of it, like sitting outside
the operating room while someone you love
is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs
eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine
which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise,
waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out
in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down
to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels
as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about
is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat
asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are.
I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity,
the fact that we are all waiting in the same
hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support,
and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up?
Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil,
as families do, and bringing each other coffee
from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it
while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral,
which is also what happens at times like these,
and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment,
heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand,
in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep
of human history, a soap bubble, because empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization,
your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator,
and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about
when she wakes at three in the morning,
cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing,
it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day
and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food,
cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies,
and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls
and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer,
the icebergs for the love of God—every single
blessed being on the face of this earth
is holding its breath in this moment,
and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin,
then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it
we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.

— Alison Luterman

Random thoughts about daughters

/3 Comments/in , , , /by

Alternate title: the writer with children. This started out as one sort of reflection, and turned into another.

My older two daughters turn 31 today, which I find completely unbelievable. Their baby sister turns 25 in 10 days.

I was never a young mom. I was 37 when we adopted Annie and Pearl, and 43 when Emma came along.

Thinking about it, I’ve always been a late bloomer. Which is why, at age 37, I was in graduate school, post-classes, pre-exams. I was also teaching one class each quarter, which paid my tuition and a stipend.

Maybe my friends should have warned me that I’d lost my mind. Instead everyone was astonished and supportive. I’m immensely grateful.

But I did kind of lose my mind, or at least my way. I spent the first six months avoiding my graduate work and being a crap teacher, too. I got away with it for a while, until I didn’t. One memorable (ugh) quarter, I was so wrung out and sleep-deprived that I had the absolute worst student evaluations of my life. It was humiliating. I wanted to hide under a rock until it all went away.

Instead, because of that class, I completely overhauled my strategy. Or strategies. Because of the brutal honesty of those students, I learned to be all in when I was prepping for teaching, when reading their papers, and — especially — while in the classroom or in conference with them.

Much of the time, I was all in with my daughters, too. Some of my best memories are of lying on the floor with them while they played, taking them for walks, blowing bubbles on the front porch, reading books. Going to see their grandparents. In time, I figured out how to do a version of parallel play, and while they were busy doing their thing, I veered off into my own books.

Because of my daughters, I completely restructured my Ph.D. I chose advisors who were parents (two of them women who had children while in graduate school). I was in 19th century American literature studies; the centerpiece of my dissertation was Nathaniel Hawthorne, but other chapters included two women authors who remained childless, a woman author who abandoned her children, and a woman author whose only child died young. Realizing this, I added an introductory chapter on Anne Bradstreet — if AB could get up early in the morning, given her eight children, “stealing the hours from household duties,” and write, then surely I, with my paltry two, could get up early and write. For years a version of “shehad8” was my computer password.

When did I write? I have a vivid memory of sitting in an outdoor cafe with two babies asleep in the stroller beside me while I worked on my Bradstreet chapter. I discovered that if I took them for a drive they would fall asleep and I could pull the car over and write. Early mornings were best. 4:30-6:00 — after which it was time to shower, dress, and race to the park-n-ride. (Riding the bus to the U district gave me an extra half hour of prep time.) Around then, I was awarded a 2/3 adjunct position, contingent on finishing my dissertation. This persuaded my husband (always freaked out about money) that we could put the girls in part-time daycare.

It wasn’t as efficient as I’m making it sound. I was a complete nut for taking photographs and scrapbooking (for a relatively short time, I promise you) — and writing about my daughters. I documented their every step. I signed the girls up for a twin study about language; I wrote an article about it for Twins magazine. I wrote about our adoption for Roots & Wings. I read every book I could find about twins, about parenting very young children, etc.

I’m getting things all muddled and in the wrong order. The summer the girls turned two, I remember I was so behind in my studies that I had to “read” — I am using the term loosely — one book on 19th century American literature each day. I would take the girls into the back yard where we had a little inflatable wading pool with a whale spout and they would leap in and out of the pool, squealing, while I frantically skimmed pages and jotted notes.

I started my full-time, tenure-track job the year Annie and Pearl began kindergarten. The following June, we adopted Emma. (At that point, friends did tell me I had lost my mind. They weren’t wrong.)

Maybe I need to write a “real” essay about all of this. Maybe I can stop scribbling for now.

It was a wild ride — I didn’t even get to the teenage years, did I? I’m sometimes upset that my daughters turned out so “different” from me, their values, their passions — not a poem in sight! I have been known to threaten moving to a stone cottage on the west coast of Ireland and throwing away my cell phone. But they keep coming around, they keep talking to me, and I keep being (unreasonably) happy when they do. I spoke with my pastor recently about some upsetting thing or other, and he recommended that I read You and Your Adult Child. He was reading it, he disclosed, “And it’s helping.” Finding other parents (writers, especially) has turned out to be crucial. 

This morning I decided to reread Rose Cook’s poems (I’m lending the book to a friend). And I found this poem:

On Bringing Up Girls

Aren’t you going to clip her wings?
they said, That’s usual for a girl her age, isn’t it? 
We said we didn’t want to clip her wings
and they watched our little daughter grow
bright and strong, then they said

Aren’t you going to tie her feet? That’s 
advisable for young girl, isn’t it? 
We said we didn’t want to tie her feet,
so they saw a young woman growing
clear and brave. Before they could say anything else
we said, Now it is time to teach her to fly. 
They fell back.

They are teaching her to fly, they repeated,
teaching her to fly.
How wonderful, murmured their daughters,
and how interesting. 

— Rose Cook, from Notes from a Bright Field (Cultured Llama Publishing, 2013)

I once read this little meme — the girls were probably 12, 12, and 6 — that went, “If humans had wings, we’d consider flying to be exercise and never do it.” I read this aloud, and my daughter Pearl turned to me with wide eyes and said, “If I had wings, I would fly!”

And — in their way — I’m sure they do.