Tides -- All Kinds

More questions from SisterCDR: 

2) In your journal, you touched us so deeply with the passing of your stepmother, and you seemed to handle that ultimate transition with so much grace.  Do you hold any ideas on death and dying that made that easier for you?

I don't think so.  It is what it is.  I do think that I have perhaps more of a sense of being present to and honoring the major passages of birth and death than most people I encounter.  In an ironic and frustrating way, I have often been accused of trying to "control" the circumstances of both because I have asked endless questions and sought to understand everything going on.  Control is usually the last thing on my mind, but I am one for active participation, and I think that people are so often intimidated by the significant events of their lives and by the experts involved in managing them that they are disconcerted when someone else starts questioning and planning.  For instance, I have no illusions about anyone being able to solve the problems presented by Stage IV lung cancer metastisized to the brain. But I believe that by avoiding the knowledge of that sad fact, my stepmother lost the opportunity to fully participate in her last great adventure here on earth.   

I suppose that it would only be fair to add that, having been through the sudden and completely unanticipated deaths of four family members, three of them in my most immediate family, at the ages of 28,1, 48, and 49, I am extremely cognizant of the utterly complete and permanent breach created by death, and so I do truly see death via illness as a privilege and opportunity.

3) Your daughter is heading off to a southern college which is bound to be quite different from New England.  How much do you feel that geography has shaped your character?  

I do wonder often what kind of effect the geography of her colleges years will have on my daughter.  I have always promoted the importance of going "away" -- the value to be found in experiencing other cultural approaches to life, the need for a deep physical connection to certain landscapes.  New Orleans and the backcountry of Louisiana both sound like they will offer endlessly rich opportunities -- and they will be hers, not mine or her father's or her brothers'.  She will continue to become herself in part because she will be in a place unfamilar to all of us and different from anyplace she, or any of us, have experienced.  

Although I didn't know it until my own children were in middle school working their way through their humanities course on colonial America, one line of my family is of Mayflower descendancy, with generational stopovers in Charlestown and on  Nantucket before heading west.  I spent my adolescence and very young adulthood in western Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and in Providence, and I am sure that deep inside me lies a Puritan soul turned toward worldly beauty, somewhat austere and marked by sea crossings, rocky New England soil, and Georgian architecture.   

Another set of ancestors came from Germany in the 1850s and purchased Ohio farmland, including a few acres which I still own, given to me as a wedding present by my grandfather, who treasured his connection to the land.  My childhood was spent on the farmland and in the woods of the midwest, so that green fields of August corn and yellow fields of October beans remind me of the innocent and carefree days of childhood.  In my case, those days lasted for only about seven years, but that was long enough for me to gain a sense of the warm and fertile earth and its potential to ground us, literally, in the stability and reasurrance of soil and seasons .  

It's also thanks to that grandfather, and my grandmother,  that I have spent a small portion of almost every year of my life on the Atlantic coast of Florida.  The Atlantic coast, as far as I am concerned, is the place worth making an effort to reach -- whether the rocky beaches of New England, the marshes of the southeast, or the vast expanses of white sand south of St. Augustine.  It's the in-betweenness of it:  completely covered by churning water at high tide and, six hours later, abandoned to a barrenness that reveals starfish and whelk and the occasional ray's egg pouch.  I suppose that in my own life I have always felt in-between: between family and loss, between success and failure, between longing and fulfillment.  I've never gotten things exactly right, and perhaps the coast represents the promise, always just out of grasp, that they will be ~  maybe when the tide comes in, or maybe when the tide goes out.