NO SEPARATION

When a new acquaintance and I found that we shared a close mutual friend, I expressed my awe that our common bond was fewer than the proverbial “six degrees of separation.” That’s when he said something I knew was true: “There is no separation.” 

      While we may not always be made aware of our connections, as I was in that moment, certainly each of us in our lifetime will experience at least one occurrence of synchronicity—call it coincidence, mystery or miracle that cannot be traced to cause and effect logic. We are not only connected through our common humanity, but also through an undeniable link to all things animate and inanimate. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell sang back in the day, “billion-year-old carbon.”

     I have become connected to a young woman who lived almost two hundred years ago. We certainly have no common ancestry, no documentation that links us in an association of any kind, yet I was led to her in a kind of butterfly effect or chaos theory, which suggests that random small changes can have large effects.

    When I first set eyes upon the little New England town of Rockport, Massachusetts, a dream-seed was planted in me to live there. I returned year after year as the seed took root, then sprouted on one of those visits on a lovely spring morning in May. Walking past a quaint B & B, I noticed a hand-painted sign on the front gate: "Built by Caleb Norwood with pirate gold found at Gully Point." Not long after, I moved to Rockport and decided to explore whether the gold discovery was true or no. My research at the Sandy Bay Historical Society and libraries led me to a diary kept by Caleb Norwood’s granddaughter—the young Susannah Norwood Torrey, who had lived in that house, now a B & B, in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Moss Design by Susannah

 

From Susannah's Album of Botanical Specimens

Susannah's Identification of Botanicals

    In her eloquent musings, she spoke of her love of mosses, on stone, on forest floors and in the sea, collected them on excursions into the woods, meadows and shores, then pressed them into designs on paper. She writes of her treks into nature for the mosses and for her one precious requirement: solitude.

    She describes her experience of the ever-expanding circles of life: from the practicalities of home and hearth, to meeting her husband to be, Soloman to the loss of their child, William, before his first birthday, and always came back to the transcendent beauty and mystery she found, living as she did, at the edge of the earth in view of the expanse of sea and sky.

     Though her diary recorded only a brief part of her life, I was slowly, but inexorably drawn in. The chaos theory suggests both randomness and unity, and maybe best describes how I was led to feel that there is no separation from Susannah. I understood her thoughts, felt her feelings and imagined her experience—her soul speaking to itself, but also unwittingly to others, like me, who might one day serendipitously come across her journal (as I had) on the dusty shelf where it had lain undiscovered.
     Without a conscious thought or plan, I was compelled to write—to tell that brief part of her story, if not to the world, then at least to her own “native home,” Cape Ann and to honor her life and times. First, my curiosity directed me to explore the rumor of discovery of gold, which led me to Susannah’s journal of musings that seemed to be my own. I then wrote Moss on Stone, a tribute to Susannah I have here in reviewing her life—in an afterlife, with excerpts from her diary, expanded upon through my imagination and intuition.

      I have even come to wonder at times: Could I be Susannah reincarnated? At least, I am deeply connected to her because “there is no separation.” I awoke one early morning to the cry of a child and almost started from my bed in response—only a moment it was until I became aware that it was a dream—or was it a memory? 
     My kitchen window in Rockport, where I now live part of the year, looks out on the house where Susannah wrote in her garret overlooking Sandy Bay. I can see the yard where the garden she describes must have been. I envision her there—dark-eyed beauty in white walking among the tall grass and sentinel outcrops of granite down to the sea. While I feel connected to her in a particular way, I must also ask: Am I, are we not all, connected in unseen, unfelt ways at every moment?

    Neither stars nor stones, neither atoms nor waves, but their belonging together, their interaction, the relation of all things to one another constitutes the universe. No cell could exist alone, all bodies are interdependent, affect and serve one another…even rocks…are full of unappreciated kindness, when their strength holds up a wall. (Heschel 188)

    
     We have only to pause—by our own volition, or by chance, by the opening left in us through pain, loneliness or grief to become aware that: There is no separaton.

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Man Is Not Alone. Farrar, Straus and Geroux. 1951.

LETTING GO

January 2, 2019 

11 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF MY MOTHER'S PASSING ON JANUARY 2, 2008 (MY 60th BIRTHDAY)

It was fall when my mother came home for good. She had been at rehab centers for over a month, recovering from a broken hip. There was not much more to be done. Regaining the strength and mobility she needed to recover was not going to happen. Physical therapy only exacerbated her COPD--a vicious circle of pain and breathlessness.

     She had been in the most recent rehab only two weeks, but called me every evening, asking me to come to take her home. The center was clean, with good care, but a rather dull and depressing environment. Most of the patients there were suffering from dementia. My mother was 88, but had all of her wits about her, so there was nothing social or uplifting about her stay there. She watched as other patients were wheeled down to gather around the front desk, most babbling incoherently. She found a way to cope, at least during the day.

     When I would go to visit her, she would be in her "escape spot," a small garden patio outside, where she sat in a wheel chair, away from the reality that had become her life. Under the trees, she could listen to the birds and enjoy the fresh air. I remember thinking that, in the last few months, my mother had begun to look old for the first time. She had always looked younger than she was and at least feigned a positive outlook on life. She would appear well put together when she went out—hair colored, lipstick on, hair in place, nails painted, dressed beautifully in her classic choice of clothes. Now, with her injury and illness, she had other more pressing considerations, as everything else faded into the background. Her hair was grey and her body frail.  

     When she saw me, she would be upbeat, but the sadness came through, despite her efforts. Maybe she sensed, as I began to, that she was not going to fully recover from this recent setback, and the end was near, if not of her life, then the quality of her life. My sisters and I also feigned positivity, assuring her she would be home soon and recover, never discussing or hinting what we all may have been feeling deep down.

     I regret not having tried to give her the opportunity to bring any such thoughts to expression. Considering the many ways we tend to deny or trivialize the dire circumstances of our lives, my mother may not even have been able to articulate what I now imagine she must have felt deeply or at least intuited. How alone and desperate she must have felt, which those evening phone calls revealed.

     When she was discharged, I was happy to make that final visit to bring her home. She was waiting on the patio with her bag—almost unrecognizable in her frailty. 
     She died less than three months later in decline or what Hospice called “failure to thrive.” Various health factors, the main one being COPD, would not allow her to build herself back up with the kind of PT necessary to do so, without compromising her breathing each session. She was happy to be back home after the rehabs and assisted living before that with my father, who remained behind there with Altzheimer's, another reason affirming how much things had fallen apart. My older sister was able to be with her full-time, and made sure Mom was able to enjoy life at home as much as possible, though in need of constant care and in pain most of the time, but still with her habit--as most women learn--to make sure no one else sees the reality, especailly our children.
     When her time came, she drifted off to sleep on New Year's Day evening, and took her final breath in the early morning of January 2, 2008 (my 60th birthday). There was a surreal mood around the profound experience of accompanying our mother--a felt blessing that I and my two sisters could be with her all through the night--midwives guiding her birth into the spirit world.

    The hardest thing later that morning was standing by while she was taken from her home out of our lives forever. Our younger son Seth stood beside me as I sobbed and turned into his arms, he accompanying me own in grief. 

     Many months later, on a crisp September morning while on my way to work, l impulsively turned at the road to the nursing facility my mother had been in at the same time last year. I drove down the long driveway to the building and went around to the back garden area—where my mother used to sit. For one split instant, I somehow expected to see her there! It was startling to have my mind slip into that moment of magical thinking. I stopped and gazed at the spot where she used to be, would have been (and still was fixed there in my memory) that time I first realized she was failing. I did not linger, but circled round and began a slow drive out in a heightened state of awareness. 

     Tall trees lined either side of the drive against a clear blue autumn sky. The woodland across the way was still, bright with early morning sun slanting through a stand of birch trees. Then, a strong breeze swept through them, and a golden shower of leaves cascaded and swirled down all around, falling to the earth below.  

     It was a poignant moment--for a final goodbye, a bittersweet solace to experience grief and a letting go through the beauty of the silent trees acquiescing to the winds of change—letting down their burden in brilliant light, under a cloudless blue heaven.