The cover from my current journal, made with a postcard of Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”–my personal icon of mourning.

I am coming to the realization that I have two functional weeks a month. Otherwise the pain level is too severe. I can’t write well when I’m this foggy.

For awhile there, for a beautiful hopeful season, I was in better remission and I had most of the month free and clear. But now, it’s back to just two weeks. If it gets worse, if it gets to be more than this, I’ll have to fly home and see my super special Dr. Woo-Woo and get back on top of this. You all have to hold me accountable to this okay? If I’m out of it more than two weeks a month you have to say, “Rachelle, it’s worth the money. Fly home. Spend a week or two on Dr. Lewis’ treatment table.”

Chronic pain is such a complex creature. It is a large part of your life, but it is not your life. It is a big part of you, but it is not who you are. Living within those paradoxical realities is challenging, perhaps as challenging as figuring out the physical bits and pieces of it–the medicines and the food allergies and the exercise and sleep needs and all the more attainable nuts and bolt-ness of it all.

I’ve wanted to write something about this for while. Something like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament of a Son which not a self-help book, but the author’s story about the death of his son. The telling itself though, is helpful. The telling itself is the companionship for the journey.

In the beautiful children’s book Frida, the author says “she turned her pain into something beautiful.” I’d like to do that. I’d like to tell true things – stories that are also helpful.

I don’t know why I always leap to the idea of a book, when clearly articles and essays are my most natural length. (I just get so distracted by sparkly things, and without a real deadline I skip from project to project. This is not a boon to my agent.) At any rate, maybe an article would be more reasonable here….maybe something for The Sun. I have a couple little bits that might turn into something. This one for instance, or this artsy bit here, or here. Or maybe these more practical stories. And then there is what I wrote this morning, based on an image that came to me while I was doing Shavasana on the living room floor:

I offer this pain to you on a gilt platter.
No, held aloft in a silver bowl.
I give it to you coiled, or swirling and boiling.
A dark depth. An oily surface.

What will you do then,
with this pain that drains from the trinity of my eyes and the bridge of my nose?
What will you make of this dark offering?

Play us out Sister Alanis.

Have you noticed that your children leave you at every age and stage? When they stop nursing. When they can crawl into the next room while you are folding laundry. That first bright, merciful day of Kindergarten. The night they’d rather read Harry Potter by themselves than have you read it out loud because they can read it faster. When they hit the age where they can make thier own toast and eat breakfast on their own. …. I thought the leaving thing only knocked the wind out of you when reached the infamous “empty nest” stage. But really, it happens all along the way. I didn’t realize there would be so many passages that leave you breathless, trying to mourn and celebrate in one burning moment.

…….

Leaving Souren has been a little bit like a death. I hate to be so melodramatic, given that there are so many things going on in the world that are ever-so-much harder and more devastating. Leaving your semi-adopted teenager in the States in order to go gallivanting around Europe with your two adorable blood children and a handsome husband—this barely makes a mark on the ‘hardships’ meter. Still, it’s hard, to take a child into your heart and then to say goodbye.

I know, of course, that there is the telephone and internet, and even old fashioned snail mail. But if you’ve ever known, or met, or even grazed shoulders with a teenage boy, you should realize that communication is not, generally speaking, their strong suite.

I knew, when we left, that most communication with Souren would be over. And I’m trying to not put my happiness under his text messaging thumbs. You simply cannot let a teenager take the wheel of your happiness. That’s even more daft than letting them drive your car on prom night.

But at night, when those nasty little buggers come to get me, I am mournful, and I re-think the wisdom of being so nonchalant about grafting a child who is not my own, so firmly onto my family tree. In those dark moments, I write maudlin poetry on the pages of my notebook. (The emotions of my days and nights are so different, sometimes I am left wondering, which is more me?) Though the pain in these overwrought words are real, I have to ask myself, would I hesitate to love this way again…to love this way still? When we are paying attention to the true and the questions, these are the things that come up. These are the ponderings that make up the reality of whom we are and who we are to be. So of course, the answer must always be, ‘amen.’

——

loss is a wolf at the throat,
there, at the front of the neck
where all you cannot swallow
lies exposed and unprotected

the ache and the tear of it,
the way you bleed unchecked

this is what it is
to take another’s child,
graft him deep into your veins.

i cannot recommend it,
this unchecked rushing of the blood
when the graft does not take,
when the bloodline is severed.

even birthing blood ceases with the hours,
after the placenta tears.

but what of that wound
of which nature has no counterpart?
does this blood then run without clot,
without ebbing,
leaving in its wake
more than the womb as hollow?

is it enough
this story,
this ideal,
this wistful thing—

the teacher speaking soft in the garden,
mouthing my name,
warm-blooded and real.

when I grow tired of picking,
sorting fact from fiction,
lies like stones among the lentils,
truths as yellow bulbs among the rocks,

when I tire of this painstaking plucking

i hold instead,
one smooth egg
one round stone
one child, with chocolate on her mouth and songs on her tongue.

he is wisen, comes the lisp
he is wisen indeed!

tell me true things, i whisper,
my face held close,
warm against her neck.

she sings to me
an edict, a lullaby,
ubi caritas, maman,
ubi caritas et amor
ubi caritas, deus ibi est.

where there is charity, there is love
where there is love
there god is.

enough, i think,
to hold this egg
this stone
this child
enough, to say ‘amen.’

Today the grey arrived at Copenhagen, like a shade snapped down over a window. It brought this prose/poem with it.

__________________________________________________________

This is a place for melancholy songs

The sea stretches
long and grey and even
the seabirds alone on their rocks,
each an island unto themselves.

I feel I am trying
to memorize the landscape,
embed it rebar-deep within the ground of my knowing
until it feels familiar, like home
or at least,
until it makes firm the quicksand of foreign soil
so my children won’t feel the shifting
so they can land firm off the horse.

At home, our wisteria is two years young.
She stretches her thin tips
to finger the bare edges of her over-long trellis.

Here, the wisteria is old
like wisdom, she climbs easily up
two, three, four stories
protecting those who dwell inside
from the wearing winds of age
and change

Only one house stands out
amongst the others,
not for its beauty but
but for its size,
its inappropriate smoothness,
the monstrous heave of its bulk.

Echoing its neighbors, yet
the unbroken stucco,
the brazen two car garage
the freestanding ball hoop lying tipped behind the automatic gate
screams of young money.

The Land Rover drives by,
far to wide for these cobbled streets,
enters the third door I had not seen
which opens by unseen hand
with a whir and a click.
This, too much of the future
on a shore inhabited for five thousand years.