Last Friday, on the 3rd anniversary of my brother’s death, I found myself alone in the woods, singing to a fallen tree.

I hadn’t intended to do this, or anything else to mark the day, even though I was keenly aware of it. But in the middle of our daily woods walk, my partner, Shel, turned around to hurry back to a meeting, and I continued on… to the rarely traveled old growth pine forest below the more popular trail that leads to the top of Mt. Holyoke, where three years ago, I’d sat by a large fallen tree and spent a few moments contemplating my brother’s life and death.

My brother, Danny, and I did not have an easy relationship, and he did not have an easy life. At 15 he had a schizophrenic breakdown and never fully recovered. The early years of his illness were rife with outbursts of often violent psychotic episodes at home, punctuated by short stays at locked institutions where they zombified him with thorazine. Later, as treatment for psychosis evolved, he became more functional, but never mastered the stress of holding a job or living on his own, even though he didn’t need 24-hour supervision and could travel alone to visit family. But these drugs took a toll on his physical health and by the time he died (from an imploded port whose repair surgery was delayed due to the COVID crisis) he was struggling with severe kidney disease.

One of the things we shared–from the time we were teenagers–was a love of singing. Danny didn’t have a particularly pleasant voice, or a strong ability to hold pitch, but if he knew that, he never let it bother him. And through the years, when the grandchildren were asked to perform on their musical instruments at family gatherings, Danny always wanted to sing a song.

So in memory of Danny, I sang a song to the same tree where I sat three years ago–Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend. Danny always liked the James Taylor version, and it’s been one of the songs I’ve been working on in my voice lessons, where I’ve discovered that while my higher range voice is still pretty weak and wispy (though slowly improving) my lower range is strong and getting even stronger.

In the cold and quiet January woods, I belted it out, even though through most of my life, I wouldn’t have considered Danny my friend–just an (often secret) albatross I had to deal with.

I’m forever grateful that a few years before he died, I decided that I needed to go through the process of forgiving him for several abusive incidents that had made me cringe with disgust and an underlying edge of fear every time I was around him. This process was not easy or quick. It involved exposing, through writing and talking to people, many details I preferred not to think about. But, in the last few years of his life I was able to feel more caring and compassion when I saw him.

Here’s a short poem I wrote about the process:

ABLUTION
           “To love is to chew; to forgive is to swallow”
                                                             —Mark Nepo

Two days before new year, and I have forgiven you,
let the thick glop between us dissolve
like a face in fade-to-black. To forgive
is not to swallow, but to spit, let the saliva glide
on the foam of a cool wave. Forgiveness is faith
in salt, in the movement of water against rocks
as they wear down to a black shine,
so slick you can slip right off—
turning your legs into mermaid tail,
your breathing lungs into gills. I have surrendered,
filled my bones with ocean. This forgiveness is cake.
It is love and I chew. It is cream with chocolate curls,
and it is green and clean, like a crisp, sharp leaf.
(Originally published in Dash, June 2021)

A few days ago, after my rendez-vous with the tree I came across this quote from Jacoby Ballard, from a series of journal prompts I’ve subscribed to from Kripalu Yoga Center on the theme of Choosing Love.

Feeling the emotions of grief, disappointment, betrayal, sadness, and anger are all prerequisites for forgiveness. If these emotions are not fully felt before one turns toward forgiveness, it can erode the process and compromise its authenticity.  

How true. It took a LONG time to confront the sadness and denial and face the grief head-on. But I’m glad I got through this before it was too late, thoroughly enough that I could now sing my heart out to a fallen tree.

Then, as in Jewish tradition, I found a rock to place in the spot where the tree had been uprooted and headed home.

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As a child on Thanksgiving, one of the things I most looked forward to–after the turkey, the stuffing, and the apple pie–was “The Argument.”

It was kind of like a sport. On one side would be my grandfather and Aunt Rita. On the other side would be just about everyone else: my parents, our close family friends: Bill & Jo, and–to the extent we could participate–my brothers and me.

Though the details of the news cycle changed over the late 60s and early 70s, the overlying arguments were always the same. Should we be in Vietnam? And did nuclear proliferation make any sense at all?

If I already have enough bombs to destroy the world a million times, I remember my mother arguing. There’s no reason I need enough bombs to destroy the world two million times–no matter what Russia does.

At this point my grandpa or Aunt Rita would launch in about the evils of Communism: Russia, Red China, world take-overs.

No one was ever declared the winner or loser in these yearly arguments. It was just something we did before getting out the poker chips–where there would be winners and losers, but only for chips so it didn’t matter. And I don’t remember any real antipathy expressed against those who held a different opinion. No cutting remarks about “owning the liberals,” or accusations of racism, ignorance, or “wokeness.”

My grandfather was one of the kindest, most generous people I knew. So was Aunt Rita, a devout Catholic and an active member of the Republican Party for decades. She sent us all so many cards with checks in them, my father joked that she was running a foundation. And on a Thanksgiving Day several years later when my brother ratted me out for sleeping with my college boyfriend after I confronted him about stealing the cash in my jewelry box and everyone else reacted with stony shocked silence, it was Aunt Rita who took me aside, pressed a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, and told me that whatever people did in loving relationships was just fine.

So, of course, I’m thinking about all of this as we head into this year’s Thanksgiving. I’ve already had moments of drama and trauma with some extended family that have left me feeling far less generous and forgiving than Aunt Rita–or any of us–were during those long-ago arguments. And I’m personally not in a place to take the Pollyanna route and conclude with some cliché about how we need to love everyone, regardless of their ideology. No matter how well-meaning and caring some people might be in their personal lives, I can’t get past their enabling a leader who has built his whole campaign on hatred of others.

Yet, this doesn’t excuse those of us on “the blue team” from dismissing their concerns, or deriding them as human beings, no matter how “wrong” we might think they are. So this gets at the conundrum: how do we keep ourselves, those we love, and those groups of people whom we may not know but still care about, safe from the augmented rhetoric that has been fomented to target them.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that as a fiction writer I’ve had to infiltrate the minds of some characters who are about as different from me as possible. And I’ve had to make them fully developed, with fears, aspirations, prejudices, dreams, secret fantasies. A standard concept in character development is that the reader only sees the part of the iceberg above the water, but in order to make the character and their motivations authentic, the writer has to know and fully understand everything underneath.

So, maybe part of the problem, regardless of which “side” one might be on, is that people aren’t seeing anything more than the tip of the iceberg.

What would it be like to treat the uncle who drives you crazy as an exercise in character development. There are many great lists of questions you can ask yourself about your character in order to understand him better, and hopefully gain some compassion so that if you were to write him in a scene, whether people liked him or not, there’d be something about him that would make your readers care.

And a braver step, if you happen to be sharing a Thanksgiving table, what would it be like to ask your uncle to do the same exercise for someone from a targeted group–a trans teenager, or a woman from Central America whose husband has just been killed by gangs and is now fleeing for her life.

As Arlo says, if just 50 people a day….maybe it’s a movement…

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Thanksgiving staple–my cranberry upside down cake. Photo by Shel Horowitz

It’s Friday evening and I haven’t written a blog post all week. I can give a typical round of “a very busy ‘to-do’ list,” or “dog-ate-my-homework” excuses, but the real reason is that I haven’t been motivated. Usually, once an idea starts tickling me, it’s no problem to sit down and write, but that didn’t happen this week.

And despite my lack of creative zing, I had to write a poem every day, or, at least, a few lines dressed up as a poem for 30 Poems in November. That was about all I could corral my writer mind into doing.

In fact, earlier today when I suddenly made a rare decision that it was time to tackle the mound of homeless papers that hadn’t found their way to my file cabinet–a task that would involve emptying the file cabinet of papers that no longer needed to be there–I completely forgot that I was about to blow my streak of blogging 34 weeks in a row.

So now I’m writing against a deadline, plodding along even though my heart isn’t in it.  Sometimes, when The Muse is AWOL, plodding is where it’s at. Every novel or long CNF work I’ve written would have never been completed if I hadn’t sucked in my breath and resolved to plod my way through, even on days I had no motivation.

I know my lack of motivation right now comes from being shell-shocked by the election results and the shock-and-awe tactics of bad and worse news coming down the pipeline quicker than I can respond to it. Likely I’m not the only one who’s overwhelmed by the onslaught of news stories, emails, and newsletter posts urging me to take some sort of action: calls to listen to, more articles to read, phone calls to make–all of which feel crucial and important.

But there are far more actions than I could possibly do.

So I plod along, careful to prioritize the things I’ve already committed to, like working with my immigration justice group to help build a wider coalition in our community, and writing calls-to-action for Rogan’s List, a very useful way of keeping on top of the news and plugging in where you can.

But even these things feel like very small steps to address the morass–like trying to fend off a big wave with a small flick of my hand.

How not to drown?

The only way I know is to make sure I take time for the self-care I need and keep on plodding. One action, one poem, one blog post at a time.

And to remember the story of The Hare and The Tortoise. How the tortoise won.

Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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