sea, sea puede

I don’t understand the death thing. Really don’t. When I was a child, I knew in the surety and wisdom of childhood that it was all okay — that what was connected couldn’t come unconnected; what was blended was always blended.

From labor with my first child, I suffered a disconnect. The labor went wrong — actually, the epidural went the wrong way, towards my heart, which would have produced a rather unintended result had not the nurse anesthesiologist (to whom I have great gratitude) picked up on my complaints that things felt as they should not. It was a horrible experience, simultaneous with the most incredible experience: the arrival of my daughter, whom I had heard in my mind since I was a teen. There she was. And there I almost was not.

The disconnect was not from Ciara, so much the realization of my dreams, but from my surety in the constancy and eternity of the world. Other concurrent events also catalyzed this disconnect; I lost my footing. Time in the scientific sphere, where nothing is true that cannot be seen (note: this is not how science must be, but too often how science is argued); time with those close to me whose concepts of eternity, or lack thereof, tore at mine; too much time trying to be comprehensible to “professional society” and adequately perfectionistic… all these things unfooted me in the moment of dying, and I came out empty of surety, scared.

I came out less able to hear the world beyond the intimacy of my close reality.

Forwarding time… It has been a hard several last years, physically, emotionally. I have lost people that mattered deeply to me. We found my grandmother (literally) only to have her dissolve from life days later. I have loved intensely only to lose ones I loved. I was shattered by my father’s near death this fall.

And I have been brought along death’s boundary by people I have loved. This is perhaps the strangest part. You can argue — why not? — that it is my psyche talking to itself, consoling itself. But I have been walked to the edge of death by those I could not in any rational sense know were dying.

It is sometimes difficult to parse apart the living from the dead. And perhaps that is the point I am supposed to be comprehending?

The internet is a marvelous tool. I can be inspired and brought to joy or worry by friends from Malaysia, Australia, Toronto — people I have never seen except in jpgs, people whose words I only know on the screen or page. These friends are real, lively.

But so are the friends whom we call dead. I can hear their mp3s, I can see their photos, I can read their words. I can even still encounter new facets of them in shared friends. How is this different than anyone who is not in the same room with me at this moment — how do I know who is still alive?

And more than that, I feel my friends and family. I sleep and dream them — and they know they are dead and I know they are dead, and yet they still *are*. They do not act like reflections of my expectations, and I do not always understand what they are doing; they are still their own people, living their own lives. In my mind. I feel the heat of their hands on my skin; I feel the tangibility of their presence. If they are still as tangible as any flesh, if they are still warm in my mind, what is death?

Some will argue these are my memories’ impressions; I remember sensation and recreate it. They exist only in my own mind. And in each of our minds who remember them.

And this could be true. But if it is, it is just as true that when I touch you tomorrow, you are there and not there; you are there because I feel you, and not there if I don’t? Except in your mind, where you are there because you can feel yourself.

I am still less sure, more scared, more grieved than I was as a child. But the more I know people who die and who are still so warm and alive, the more I think either I am a madwoman, we are all madfolk… or maybe we simply aren’t hearing the rest of the world, beyond the immediate intimacies of the reality we can see.

I still hear them, the weight of their breath, feel their palms on my skin, smell them in the air. They take up space. So I kiss them — you — all back. And I am glad all of you — dead or living, but warm somehow — are here in the intimacy of my senses.

‘Isn’t the forest beautiful?” said Stella. “Look at these big old trees.”
“Are they older than Grandma?” asked Sam.
“Almost,” said Stella. “They must be a hundred years old.”
“Is that why their skin is so wrinkled?” asked Sam.
“That’s not skin,” said Stella. “That’s bark.”
“Grandma’s bark is much softer,” said Sam. “Especially on her cheeks.”
- from Stella - Fairy of the Forest by Marie-Louise Gay

My Grandma’s bark is much softer too. I’ve never touched anything quite like it before. It’s not simply that I adore my grandmother; this summer, neither of my children could resist petting her hands, as if she were a kitty or a horse.

At the age of eighty-eight, Grandma’s skin seems to have reached a similar luminous quality to that of a baby’s. Her mind has lost none of its agility (it’s still faster than mine), but her skin seems to have lost all stress, and become something slightly magical.

It seems to be a very happy zen-like skin. I hope that anything in my body has learned to be that happy and zen by eighty-eight!

Bryn drumming - 11/27/08, Arcata

Ciara - Pensively playing dress up, Ann Arbor

My mother, Deborah Drescher, has become a quilt artist in her early mid-century. She had done some handwork in her thirties, following with machine embroidery in her forties. In the last decade, she has fused a very tight paper piecing style with a vibrant color sense and exuberant machine embroidery. In September, I shot these close ups.