In the Body of the World (13 page)

While this fire raged in me, some other alchemic dance that I could not even recognize was happening around me. It was MC cooking me soft-boiled eggs at 5:00 a.m. to calm my stomach, Amy who I hardly knew stopping by unexpectedly to rub my feet, Susan appearing in my hospital room, my son sleeping on my couch, Nico coming from Italy for an entire month and turning my loft into a summer ashram, Nico shaving my head with a pink Bic razor, Carole sending me weekly boxes of silky pajamas, Jennifer walking me through the dark nights of the infection, Donna spoonfeeding me soup in the wretched Sloan-Kettering, Stephen coming from Canada to take me to lunch and pretending I looked good when I was green, Michele coming on Sundays to keep me sober, Avi and Naomi showing up with pajamas and Bolivian quinoa, Cecile flying in for the weekend, Jane arriving with hippie jewelry from Woodstock, beloved Paula M finding her way to my hospital room for my birthday, Coco packing my suitcase the night before I went to see my mother, Purva scoring me pot, Judy—who I have known since I was
four—and her daughter, Molly, my goddaughter, tag teaming me on some of the roughest nights, Kim sending me daily poems that seemed to arrive at the exact moment I needed them, Paula Jo photographing me naked with bags, the Sri Lankan girls sending a box of homemade cards, Mark walking with me into meditations on death, Bassia making me borscht. It was Pat contacting Dr. Deb and getting me into the Mayo Clinic, Laura and Elizabeth making me laugh, Urv making me dal. It was Lu showing up regularly with DVDs, and Toast, it was Toast with the devotion of Kent in
King Lear
, who gently kept me engaged and fighting. Always there. Never wavering. Never complaining. This daily subtle, simple gathering of kindnesses, stretched out across the chemo days and months was, in fact, love. Love. Why hadn’t I known this was love?

I was always reaching for love, but it turns out love doesn’t involve reaching. I was always dreaming of the big love, the ultimate love, the love that would sweep me off my feet or “break open the hard shell of my lesser self” (Daisaku Ikeda). The love that would bring on my surrender. The love that would inspire me to give everything. As I lay there, it occurred to me that while I had been dreaming of this big love, this ultimate love, I had, without realizing it, been giving and receiving love for most of my life. As with the trees that were right in front of me, I had been unable to value what
sustained me, fed me, and gave me pleasure. And as with the trees, I was so busy waiting for and imagining and reaching and dreaming and preparing for this huge big love that I had totally missed the beauty and perfection of the soft-boiled eggs and Bolivian quinoa.

So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy—the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure.

I had always found the idea that we were meant to love only one person problematic. So forced. When I was younger, the word
monogamy
annoyed and terrified me. I refused to include it in my first and only marriage vows. I knew I was marrying a serial womanizer, so it seemed pointless, but also I was the one who had chosen a man who was incapable of fidelity. This relaxed something in me, took off the pressure. I was horrified at the idea of having sex with one person for the rest of
my life. Now I see my fear was not about sex. It was about being caught, determined, lined up. It was about being cornered in the love stall. It was about packaged love, couple love, dead-and-done-with-permanently-in-the-house-with-the-children love. About love that screamed isolation and church and control. That screamed, “Care about your own, protect your lot.” About parsed-out love and regulated love and prevented love.

I am not against two people loving each other, please understand—only the elevation of this love as the highest expression of love. Maybe love comes to some of us differently. Maybe we love our women friends as deeply or humanity as deeply. I am happy for those who find one person to satisfy their need to love. That has not been my story. I have not loved one man or one woman. In the same way I have not wanted MY child. I have loved. That energy that propelled me around the planet. I have loved some immediately and for a short time and others slowly and forever. I could not say that the men I ended up living with or sleeping with were more important loves. Those loves went on longer, in a more organized, committed, daily way. That was a good thing and not a good thing. Love is ever expanding and so it needs space, air, movement, freedom. I find I am much more loving when I have not made agreements about how I will love. It’s like
being forced to buy presents at Christmas—I do much better when I see something that reminds me of someone or when I feel a love rush and match it with a gift.

I have been afraid to write about this or even to admit it to myself. This is the way I love. I have no idea where it will lead me. What I do know is that when I am with the women of the Congo, of Bukavu, of Shabunda, of Bunyakiri, of Goma, I know love. I love Jeanne and Alfonsine and Alisa, I love Christine and Dr. Mukwege. I love the women on Essence Road who walk with two-hundred-pound sacks tied to their foreheads. I love the women who sell charcoal and fish on the open road and who dress in starched panges, so colorful they bring on the morning. I love the way they move and shout out and weep in sorrow. This is the big love, the ultimate love. It has nothing to do with marriage or ownership or having or consuming. It is about showing up and not forgetting, about keeping promises, about giving everything and losing everything. No one is mine. No Dr. Mukwege. No Christine. No women. They will never be mine. They were not meant to be mine. The world has done that already—possessed the Congo and pillaged her and dominated her and robbed her of agency and destiny. That is not love. That is possession, occupation. Love is something else, something rising and contagious and surprising. It isn’t aware of
itself. It isn’t keeping track. It isn’t something you sign for. It’s endless and generous and enveloping. It’s in the drums, in the voices, in the bodies of the wounded made suddenly whole, by the music, by each other, dancing.

SCAN
MY MOTHER DIES

Lu has never spent the night before, but tonight she stays. Maybe it’s because James cannot be with me, and I am in the hard days of the fifth treatment—aches and nausea and sorrow. Maybe it’s because we had a conversation with our mother two days ago and she was speaking the language of the other world. There was a tenderness mingled in the muttering, but she was no longer speaking just to us. There were other beings, other spirits occupying her world. When we hung up we sensed that even Chris with her ability to fight off cancers and live with one lung, might not be able to wrestle her way back this time. Maybe Lu stayed that night because she and I were it—the family. My brother, Curtis, who had kindly surprised me and shown up at the Mayo, lived in Oklahoma. I had never really known him. He was the brilliant one, the seriously genius one. He read more books and knew more things than anyone
I’d ever met. He got an 800 on his physics SATS when he was seventeen and I am not sure he ever took a physics class. He had that kind of a mind. And he was too sensitive to have had a sadistic father.

Lu and I slept in the same bed. We went to sleep holding hands. At five the phone rang and our mother was dead. We sat on the bed in a half-sleep daze and we cried, a little, but it felt forced. We wanted to call her. To tell her. How strange. We wanted to call someone else. But who?

My mother’s body was sent to a crematorium. She had left exact instructions as to how and when her body was to be burned and how and when her ashes were to be scattered over her beloved Gulf of Mexico. We were not to be involved. There was to be no memorial, no funeral. This nontradition tradition had been passed on from my father. He had died, leaving us all grief stumps. He forbade any ritual or gathering that would indicate his passing. My mother and he never told me he was dying, even though he had lung cancer and faded slowly for months. When he finally passed, my mother waited for some time to let me know. And even then, there was nothing to do, no way to acknowledge or confirm he was gone, no way to process the grief or loss or come together as a family to determine a future. This was the final act of my father’s selfishness. He
despised people. He scorned the idea of anyone mourning him. Who would be good enough or smart enough for such a task? It never occurred to him that his funeral was not for him but for the people he was leaving. I remember flying to my parents’ apartment in Florida after he died. I had not spoken to either of them for years. I remember spending time in my father’s closet, sitting on the white carpeted floor, taking down his sweaters, his shirts, and his jackets and holding them. Putting them on. Inhaling them. His smell. Sweet, mean, and handsome. I remember raging at the mythology already being created by my family that he was an outstanding father and loving man.

I see now how, almost twenty years later, I have never really grieved his loss. He was there. Then he wasn’t. I never experienced it as a loss, more like an existential magic trick. He was a man who adored me, committed incest with me, then regularly tried to murder me. Then, gone.

My father left this world without a call or a wave or a touch. This was his final cruelty. The last thing he could control was how my mother would leave this world. So many years after his death, my mother was still under his spell. He haunted her.

After I told my mother that my father had molested me, she called me one night and said she was very worried.
She asked me what would happen if she met my father in the next life and he was angry that she believed me. What if he felt betrayed? I said if by chance she did run into him in the next world, she could send him to me. “Send him to me, Mom.” That’s what I said. “Send him to me.” This seemed to calm her down momentarily, but I have a feeling it continued to haunt her.

I funeral hopped for weeks after my mother died, searching for a way to grieve. I went to the funerals of my friends’ parents and threw myself into their sorrow. I watched sad movies. I envied friends who were destroyed when their mothers died. I asked them to describe it to me. I took notes. I wanted to feel like something had been ripped out from under me. What I felt instead was longing: longing for grief, longing for loss, longing for it all to have meant something. I felt cold. A friend called to ask me how I was doing and I said, “It’s day six of chemo, I’m exhausted, my stomach hurts, and my mother died.” I said, it in one breath, just like that. My stomach hurts and my mother died. This numbness went on for weeks. Lu and I planned some lame rituals that never really came to be. She would call the crematorium from time to time to find out the status of my mother’s ashes. They told her they were waiting for a few more urns to join hers so they could do one big boat trip out to sea. I imagined my mother’s
urn on a shelf all alone. I imagined her in something like a stockroom. I imagined the urns had handwritten labels, like jam. I wondered if there was some kind of religious person that went out on the boat. I wondered if he or she read the labels on each urn so they knew each name. I wondered if, as they tossed the ashes into the air (I’m sure they had the perfect way of doing this so the ashes didn’t fly into their faces and hair), they called out her name. “We let you go now, Chris. We return you to the sea, to your beloved Gulf of Mexico. We leave you to rest with the dolphins and the crabs and the whales that you loved so well.” One day, weeks later, they called to say her ashes would be tossed in the morning.

I remember one of the last walks I took with my mother to the beach. She was so frail, skin and bones, but even then she was still glamorous, dressed in bright white cropped pants and a turquoise shirt that accentuated her green eyes. She wore a straw hat that kept blowing off. I chased it for her. She held on to my arm as the gulf washed over our feet. We had the same feet and even the same red nail polish on our toes. She pulled at my arm, which was something she would do sometimes when we walked. It was as if she were trying to take me in another direction—perhaps in a direction she herself had always wanted to move, a place where she might have lived another life, one that
wasn’t determined by her fear of poverty or her desperate need to be fathered and safe. A friend of mine once told my mother that my father had four children, my brother, my sister, me, and her. He owned and controlled us all. I had felt this pull of her arm in mine on the beach all my life. This pull to save her even though on the surface she had no desire or willingness to be saved. This pull to give voice to what was mute and passive in her. This pull to live the life my mother had not lived. Now she was ashes. The pull was gone. And so was the boat with her urn. An overcast day. Loud seagulls circling. The water choppy. She wouldn’t let me be there, but I am. I hold her ashes to the wind. I pause and say a silent prayer. Mom, go now, please, go, fly fly, fly.

About a month after my mother died, during my last chemo treatment, I went to New Orleans for the performance of a play,
Swimming Upstream
, written by a group of extraordinary women: writers, singers, Mardi Gras queens, actors, and social workers. It was the fifth anniversary of Katrina and we were preparing for a performance and a tour of the show. The women were so kind and found me a huge, comfy chair where I could sit and direct the play without spinning from the chemo. During rehearsal, Michaela, an extraordinary vocalist and a huge spirit, asked me if she could give me a healing. I was in need of healing.

Toast is with me and we arrive at Michaela’s new house on an inviting street in New Orleans. The morning is gentle and sweet light is falling through her curtains. Michaela is busy preparing, mixing ingredients in a huge bowl in the kitchen. I am nervous, feeling vulnerable from the arduous and endless churning of the chemo, from my unwieldy bag, from being out in the world, and from the unfelt grief that renders me totally unpredictable. Michaela is concocting me something with flowers to make it beautiful, and honey to sweeten it. I ask her what is in the water. She says the Gulf of Mexico. The women begin to arrive. Carol B, heart of New Orleans, the Harriet Tubman of Katrina, Karen Kai, whose wounds make fire, Troi whose voice comes from all over her body, and Asali, whose word rhythms are cosmically inspired. The women and Toast surround me as Michaela lays me down on her lap. She cradles my bald head and begins to sing. I am finally a baby. She begins to gently caress my head with the water, with the gulf, with the flowers and the honey. And as she washes my head, she sings and the other women join her. I hear Toast’s gorgeous, unmistakable voice. As Michaela washes my naked head, I realize this water holds the best and the worst of us. The greed, and the recklessness that led to the drilling explosion, and all the lies that got told before and after. It’s the gulf that I swam in at the age of sixteen reciting T. S. Eliot’s “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The gulf where both my parents died, their last gaze directed out on that horizon. It’s the gulf, the wide hole, between my mother and me. The gulf dividing tribes, families, continents, and colors. The gulf washing over my head, melting in Michaela’s lap, suddenly indistinguishable from my salty tears.