Marrow (3 page)

What I learned from both transplants—the bone marrow transplant and the soul marrow transplant—is that the marrow of the
bones and the marrow of the self are quite similar. Deep in the center of the bones are stem cells that can keep another person alive, perhaps not forever, but for a time and, in the case of my sister, for what she called the best year of her life. Deep in the center of the self are the soul cells of who you really are. Dig for them, believe in them, and offer them to another person, and you can heal each other's hearts and keep love alive forever.

Here's one more thing I learned. You don't have to wait for a life-and-death situation to offer the marrow of yourself to another person. We can all do it, we can do it now, and there's a chance that the life of our human family does indeed depend on it.

And this is how I finally came to write a book about authenticity and love.

Throughout the book you will find snippets from my sister's journals—“field notes,” as she called them, from the varied layers of her life. Besides being a nurse, mother, farmer, baker, musician, and maple syrup producer, my Renaissance sister was also an artist and a writer. Her artwork evolved over the years into exceptional botanical pieces and prints that hang in people's homes all over the country. Her writing took the form of journals, hilarious letters and e-mails, illustrated children's books, and a memoir she dreamed of writing called
Lower Road
. She said there were enough things written about taking the higher road; she wanted to write about taking the lower road and finding higher ground the hard way. There was a long dirt road in her area with the actual name of Lower Road—a single lane that hugged a mountain and led into a hollow flanked on one side by marshes and ponds and on the other side by rusty trailers and old farmhouses. When she was a young visiting nurse, her work for the state of Vermont often took her to Lower Road. The book
Lower Road
was to be a chronicle of her relationship with her patients who lived there: the teenage mothers, the veterans with PTSD, the addicted, the abusive, the abused. The forgotten rural poor whom she cared for with a no-bullshit form of tenderness.

When Maggie's computer became her journal, she began e-mailing me entries: excerpts from the always changing
Lower Road
, field notes from the clinic she ran, funny stories about people she met at craft shows, joyful rants about her new home, about the wildness of the woods in springtime and the sweetness of the sugarhouse on dark cold nights when the maple sap ran. And when she got sick, her field notes came from the loneliness of her hospital bed and the window seat in her home. She wrote quickly, in run-on sentences, making up words, switching tenses all over the place. She never used capital letters and she bent grammar rules. She wrote like a hummingbird would write if it stayed still long enough to gather its thoughts and put them into words.

I had always planned to help Maggie craft a book out of her hummingbird words. She wanted me to, and that's why she sent me a whole mess of disorganized computer files. We began working on them when she was recovering from the transplant. But when her energy waned, I asked her how she would feel if I included some of her field notes in the book I was writing. I had been showing her early segments of my book, and she had a wistful appreciation for it—a sense of humor and also grief that she would not be around to see how it ended. Together we decided to include some of her words in my book, and so I scattered them throughout—a trail of Maggie's truth crisscrossing mine.

You are born into your family

and your family is born into you.

—ELIZABETH BERG

WHEN I WAS A KID,
telephones were stationary objects. Most houses had one, or at the most two of them—one bolted onto the kitchen wall and the other on a bedside table, rarely used. When I became a teenager, my friends got phones in their rooms. Princess phones, they were called, usually pink, with push buttons instead of a dial, and a long cord so you could walk around or lie in bed and chat under the covers. The princess phone never made an appearance in my family's home. My sisters and I were barely allowed to talk on the phone at all. Why would we need one of our own?

Phones became omnipresent later on. First, cordless phones made their debut, and then of course came the cell phone. The cell phone changed everything. But before there were cell phones, what changed my relationship with the telephone was becoming a parent. Having children turned a benign object—the phone—into a time bomb. When it rang, I worried, and often my worst-case scenarios came true: a failed test, a bloody nose, a broken arm. One of my sons got suspended from middle school for giving away answers to an exam. During high school, another son was pulled over for speeding and the cop discovered pot in his pocket. I remember where I was when those calls came in.

Things I never thought would happen also traveled through the airwaves and into the phone like little bombs.
Ring!
My father died.
Ring!
Colleague quit.
Ring, ring!
Trade Towers blown to bits. And
then there was the phone bomb from my sister at the wedding in Montana. On that day I learned to do something many people are born knowing and then spend years in therapy trying to unlearn: I went into denial. For a whole day. This was revolutionary for me, someone whose heart stays unreasonably open most of the time.

Like all of us, I have several characters living within me—there's my vigilant rational self who lives in my head, my wild emotional self lodged in my heart, and a deeper self that some call the soul. That deeper self is always there, wiser than worry, vaster than fear, quick to see through the eyes of love. But the rational self is a bossy guy that crowds out the soul on a regular basis. Sometimes the rational self is right on the money, but often it is small-minded and tyrannical and it leads me into a cul-de-sac of overthinking. And my emotional self can spin out of control like a crazed dervish, throwing off sparks of joy and wonder, anger and despair. Round and round, I follow my mind and my emotions. The human experience is dizzying if we can't find the still point in the midst of the turning.

The still point is there. It is always there. I know it. I have found it again and again, even within the most turbulent whirlwinds. It may take me a while, but at least now I know there is a still point, and that the storm will pass and the center will hold. When I am in the grips of too much thinking, too much feeling, when I am frightened or ashamed, judgmental or paranoid, self-righteous or jealous, I know to wait, I know to pray, I know to trust. And sometimes, when there's just too much noise—when my emotions whip up a storm, or my overactive mind chatters like a jackhammer—patience and prayer don't cut it. That's when it can be helpful to take a brief denial time-out.

Which is what I did in Montana after receiving the phone bomb
from my sister. I locked up my emotional creature, turned off my repetitive mind, and went to the wedding without them. I mingled with the crowd; I oohed and aahed at the tent set in a wheat field under the big sky; I performed the ceremony as if I had done such a thing hundreds of times before. All the while, I kept the news of the phone bomb in some kind of top secret vault. Then, copying the behavior of partygoers throughout the ages, I downed several drinks at the reception so as to be able to make small talk and eat and dance. Denial! Where had you been all my life?

The next morning, I left the family behind and got on a plane. It was nearly empty. I had a row of seats all to myself—a good thing, because the minute I buckled the belt, my heart reopened on its own accord. I let the feelings come. I gave over the reins to my emotional self. She took off right away.

“Maggie's too young to die,” I cried. “This is so unfair.”

“There's no such thing as fair,” rational self interrupted, making a predictable comeback.

“Well, it's terrible nonetheless.” Now I was weeping. “She's in the middle of a divorce; she doesn't even have a home; her kids …”

Rational self was unmoved. “No such thing as terrible, either. It is what it is.”

Emotional self and rational self went on like this for a while until I tired of their either/or banter. I closed my eyes, and noticed that my shoulders were up around my ears. I dropped them down, softened my whole body, and breathed my way toward the still point until I could hear the voice of my soul.

And there she was, telling me the truth: “Have faith,” my soul said. “You'll see—your sister will grow from this; she'll rise to meet it. And you will too. You'll grieve and you'll learn, you'll rage and you'll worry, but through it all you will grow deeper and
deeper into the truth of who you really are. You will, Maggie will, all who travel with her will uncover surprising treasures because of this path her soul has chosen.” When soul speaks, there's really no arguing. Everyone else just shuts up and listens. The bigger story sparkles in the silence. What needs to be done is revealed. Mind and heart join hands and vow to work together.

For the rest of the plane ride I rested in the rare peace that the soul brings. It was as if I was being filled with fuel for the long journey ahead. I didn't know what would come. I didn't know how long a voyage I was embarking on. I didn't know that I would be brought all the way into the actual marrow of my bones, and deeper still into the holy marrow of my true self. I only knew to pray for the soul to be my guide.

The next day, driving from my home in New York to my sister in Vermont, worry and grief took over again. My heart filled with sadness. And not just for Maggie. Not just for the fearsome treatments she would have to go through and the unknown outcome and the ways in which nothing would ever again be the same for her. My heart also broke for us—for our family, for our story, for who we had always been and who I foolishly expected we would always be. “The girls,” my heart whimpered, holding on tight to my three sisters, to the configuration of my childhood, to my known place in the world. I cried the words aloud: “The four girls.”

“Oh, stop it,” my mind snapped, sounding quite like my mother.

I WAS BORN INTO
A
family of girls, the second of four daughters. My sisters and I were known as “the girls.” Or just “girls,” as in “Girls! Time for supper!” My mother yelled that line several thousand times over the years of mothering four daughters. We also heard this line a lot: “GIRLS. Stop bickering or I'll wallop you!” My father was famous for that one, threatening us with “wallops” as our family made its interminable car trips from New York to Vermont. My father's work as an advertising man who represented the ski industry took him—and therefore us—from his office in New York City to the mountains of Vermont all winter long. Why my parents insisted on bringing all four girls with them every weekend befuddles me to this day, but complain as we might, come Friday afternoon, we would cram ourselves into the station wagon for the four-hour drive north—vying for the window seats, cold and uncomfortable, tired and bored—until we finally fell asleep against each other.

Despite his threats, my father only came close to walloping one of us once, in all his years of being outnumbered and exasperated by “the girls.” I cannot remember what drove him to attempt to deliver on his threat. I do remember, as do my sisters, the scene: Something I have done to provoke my father has caused him to chase me up the stairs of our house, swinging at my behind with my mother's purse. My sisters run after us, laughing. My mother stands at the bottom of the stairs, helplessly yelling, “Girls! Girls!” By the time my father
catches up to me, he has lost his steam. He drops my mother's purse, throws up his hands, and, mumbling something about “the girls,” stomps back down the stairs and escapes outside.

An advantage to having siblings is that the pressure is off any one child to live up to all the dreams of the parents. It's nearly impossible for one kid to do it all—to be well behaved
and
courageous, bookish
and
athletic, cooperative
and
original. And so siblings fill in for each other. But there's a disadvantage as well. Without advance agreement, siblings are assigned a role that can brand one for life. Show a tendency in one direction, and that becomes who you have to be all the time. This one's the saint, and that one's the rebel. This one will go far; that one will stay close. It can take a lifetime to escape the narrow boundaries of a fixed family identity.

This was certainly the case in my family. Where one of us was thin and athletic (my older sister), the other (me) was chubby and introspective. Where one excelled in school (me), another brought home bad grades (again, older sister). Where one stood up to our father's authority (me), my younger sisters were the quieter ones, the identified pleasers, intent on keeping the peace. And so we settled into those roles, hearing and telling stories about each other, branding ourselves and dragging those branded selves into the rest of our lives.

There were constant reminders—expressed or implied—of the characters we were to play on the family stage. My mother wouldn't allow me to take ballet lessons because I was not as “coordinated” as my sisters. She would drop off two of them at the little dance school taught by a teenager down the street, and then explain to me I couldn't go because my body was “anatomically incorrect” for ballet, but that shouldn't bother me because I was smart. She'd shame my older sister for her poor school habits, even as she gig
gled with her about my knock-knees and the way I looked in a bathing suit. Maggie, my younger sister, was the “good” one—the well-behaved girl, the one my mother could depend on. And our shy littlest sister was Daddy's favorite, overrun by her big sisters, forever locked into being the baby.

Like the pantheon of gods and goddesses in Greek mythology, siblings take on archetypal roles—roles that solidify one's sense of self long after childhood is over. In our pantheon, I was the bossy one, the agitator—“the princess,” they called me. Somehow I got it in my mind, even as a little girl, to challenge my father's power. It struck me as outrageous that in a family of women, my father got to call the shots. I wondered why my mother deferred to him even though she seemed more astute, and was certainly as educated and worldly. But these were the 1950s and '60s, and although my mother had graduated college with honors, my father established the family values, determined how we spent our time, and, when he was around, enforced what we did and didn't talk about.

The fact that we were four little girls didn't stop my father from including us in his adventurous activities, most of which were inspired by his time spent in the army, in the 10th Mountain Division—the ski troops—during World War II. It's not that he felt girls should have the same opportunities as boys. Rather, he didn't seem to notice we were girls. Or maybe he did and just preferred not to accept the fact that all of his offspring were female. We certainly were never asked if we wanted to join his regiment. It was just assumed.

In retrospect, I am grateful to my father for dragging us along on treks up New Hampshire's Mount Washington, with our heavy downhill skis strapped to our backs, or for insisting we trudge for miles to find a spot on a Long Island beach where we could escape the lifeguards and swim in the dangerous surf. We were never told
we couldn't do something because of our gender. But all of us, including my mother, were ridiculed if we acted “like a girl.” Small talk, gossip, worry, idleness, vanity—these were all signs of feminine weakness, according to my father, and if we demonstrated those behaviors, we risked his scorn. My mother metabolized and enforced the official policy: work hard, be strong, keep busy.

My parents were typical of many Americans raised in the “Greatest Generation.” The Depression and the war molded their characters. They were vigorous, frugal, and civic-minded people who rarely complained. In their day, self-reflection was a waste of time and psychotherapy was for crazy people. And parenting? It was not yet a verb. People had children, fed and clothed them, sent them to school, made them do chores, and pretty much that was it. Sure, some parents took their kids to Little League or piano lessons, but mostly they left us alone. We played in our suburban neighborhood without adult supervision, helmets, or sunscreen. Rarely did my mother help us with homework, even though she was a high school English teacher who cared intensely about education. It was our task to excel, not hers.

My sisters and I spent an enormous amount of our childhood together, more so than many siblings. We competed not so much for our parents' approval, but more for each other's. We were constant and creative playmates, but we also were competitive and adversarial. As we grew up and became women, we grew further apart in some ways and stayed deeply connected in others. But always, just below the surface, unexplored and unexpressed, were those roles we had assumed in the family, those stories we had been told and believed, those conclusions we had come to about each other and ourselves.