Voices Great and Grandmotherly
Alt title: There and Back Again, A Southerner’s Tale
We bought a ripe watermelon half for 59 cents at the Kroger in my hometown of Lexington, Virginia, and then stood for a long while stupefied by the number of beers we could buy for so few dollars. We are really not in New York City anymore, Sam and I had to tell ourselves repeatedly, shake and (gently) slap our heads over. It’s been a few months now in the South. A real big boxing up and reorienting and resettling has happened.
We had a while in my loved little Georgia mountains where I watched Daddy kill a copperhead with an axe beside our family’s front fence. I had forgotten about those. Some days later I was hiking alone up past Drunken Springs Road, and I heard my dog Junie’s odd growling bark. I looked up to see her silhouetted by a big black bear about thirty feet away—I high-tailed it (with my cobweb stick waving around) high speed in the other direction hollering for Junie, and I ran and hollered and waved for a long heart-pumping while and never saw the bear again. It must have been a bored old grandpa bear mildly irritated by the very tiny deer-dog confronting it and the idiot human screaming just beyond. I had also forgotten my woodsy training: calmly, respectfully, slowly, back away from the scary black bears.
The mountains do not belong to me. You just don’t take on mountains the way you might cities. I feel like mountains listen, though, just as my family has done so well when I would say such silly things. My grandmother Embo said as she took to Atlanta down our gravel driveway: “Don’t do any work! Doug says you’re going through an existential phase, so just stay there!” A good motherly Embo tone, it poked fun at me while it worried about me. I am so far from New York it's a hazy busy memory now, a place already producing long yarns and spaghetti tangles in my mind. I’m glad so many writers have already wrought famously felt essays on this leaving-that-city topic. Thus I can skip it myself, but by God I have felt that Shift.
Key plot point: now we’re settling down in Nashville, Sam’s sweet home city! The celebrated neurology department at Vanderbilt will be caring for me, and we’ve planted ourselves at a walk-able distance from them doctors.
Looking back north some is worth the trek though, and here’s a long ramble for the loving listeners.
I had started back to work after surgery and found it impossible to keep hoping to work full time. My nocturnal seizures were not improving; my anti-seizure drug side effects were very… affecting. It was a mere touch of madness I hadn’t ever felt before, one of constant big life context that made Manhattan lights painfully glaring. Subway advertisements were offensively irrelevant. Little things were overwhelming. It gave me a deep fear and empathy for where madness, desperation, and depression can lead if left going on. I thought I just needed patience and perseverance at the time. But I wasn’t given enough to work with, my feelings a cyclical dark wreck.
And I did have some good news. June 1st, I had an MRI that said there was no discernable growth of the tumor—the surgery had not spurred on any quicker growth, and it really could have. Big relief! The “Wait and watch” plan could continue.
The other good news was stranger. I heard genetics is at the forefront of cancer research these days. My doctors suspected I had Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a genetic predisposition to certain cancers at a young age (a review for the interested: I’ve had osteosarcoma, Acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and now a diffuse astrocytoma, which all fell under the syndrome’s favorite cancers). We had already learned that my brain tumor was not caused by my previous therapies nor my previous tumors, so this was the next effort to discover why I was so curiously cancerous.
On the search for such cold genetic explanations, Dr. Elsa Reich was the warmest, oldest, most stylish geneticist I could have hoped for. I think she could have retired twenty years ago, but she probably did not consider it then, knowing how much there was to do. She is small and energetic, with a spritely spark, determination, almost mischief in her eyes. She seemed to deftly work with and around the medical system. She called us even through a suddenly personal leave for her while emails were maybe an irritating new technology to work with. She booted it up regardless.
“Your friend Sam seems like such a loving man. He is just lovely.” She called me as soon as the results were in, but started the conversation that way. With hesitation, she told me that I was negative for the presence of the mutation of the TP53 gene. Meaning, as far as they could tell, I did not have Li-Fraumeni syndrome.
“I’ll be honest with you, Sarah,” she said. “This is good news.” The way she framed it, though, I interpreted as “This is at least not bad news.” Her kindness and character ended up meaning more to me than those good news results. Because again, it was more a pursuit of personal explanation to us, not having much effect on my treatment plans. Otherwise, maybe a contribution to research for the distant future.
So my tumor is hovering there, held up by unreason, unbearable absurdity, and I was stuck knowing our best approach is a wait and watch and wait, despite the best doctors, the best surgery, the best drugs. Summertime in that city and perhaps one faraway day, a dose of radiation. Who knows.
How could I actively heal myself from there? I was helpless to certain horrors—the toll of nighttime seizures, for just one thing. I needed a dose of acceptance, sure, some denial, yes. But I finally heard my personal Self-Help Book Voice say this in the appropriate tone: I needed to find the things I had power to change. And that power began in my mind. And I cringed the way I always cringe when Self-Help Book Voice is correct. I needed to arrange the voices in my head, no matter how drug-induced, like a kindly to-do list, and make some hard changes, and then sucker up to the sunny side like a Disney Tinkerbelle cartoon.
I was weighed down and tortured by the conflicting voices in my mind. They were not all my own familiar voices—they were second thoughts, third thoughts, untrustworthy voices, echoing phrases from doctors and studies that frustrated me. This wasn’t schizophrenia. This is the thing we all struggle with, right? Criticism and self-criticism and anxiety. Except on Steroids. Literally. Both ways. All the ways. There is Momentary Sleepiness to deal with and then there is Death. And at my age you really have to work it all with clever, dark words into a facebook status. And one of your Voices will say, “Hey now, add some levity.” And then another, “Stop with all the dumb Facebook.” And then Shakespeare says, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
And then we moved out of New York City and slept in my own bed. I took a risk of worse seizures and reduced the anti-seizure Keppra week by week until I heard my own warm voice again. I took in Sam’s and my parents’ high praises and we climbed around again on these boulders called Indian Rocks (see smiley rock below) just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I bummed around with Sam at his Sewanee Writer’s Conference job, and we saw old friends. I made it more habit to clear my head of hauntings. I sought out slowness and meditation. I tried to lean into the simplicity of single moments, draw them out, appreciate them.
I began to breathe easy in Virginia with my luxurious empty house time, my parents off being summer professors elsewhere. Perusing our books to escape myself, I picked up Embo’s book of letters from her mother Gertrude, a great grandmother I never met. It’s quite a tome to get sucked into, subtitled “Letters to Emily: In the decade of crisis, 1943-1953.” I immediately recognized Embo’s distinct style in Gertrude’s letters—the excitement in capitalized words, the details in telling a story, the humorous ones always woven right there next to the tragic ones. For instance, two weeks after Embo’s brother Oliver pulled through a car wreck with in 1949, Gertrude says this from a hospital room:
“Oliver began, unexpectedly (a miracle) to see through a little hole in the visual area. This was on Sunday. He could see O. On Monday he could see COM. And on Tuesday he could see COMIC. He says he is going to fool them yet—and cheat the surgeon.”
That is her voice in the midst of desperate hope, while her husband Douglas apparently begged her to be more pessimistic about the situation. I have always heard that Gertrude burned all of her daily diaries at the end of her life out of respect to her husband.
Yet she trusted Embo enough that these letters capture some of those conflicted voices I understand, different inner arguments from one day to the next. One voice comes and goes: “I have Douglas’ little gremlin parked in my ear—deafening at times, to where I can’t hear my own voice. He is 50 yrs. old, besides.” And her apologies always come around too, a half-joke self-aware melodrama: “I am heartily ashamed of having been lax in my letter so that you can complain that it was cryptic, ambiguous, and facetious. I lost my equilibrium and was careless, indulged in incoherent babbling to relieve my nerve. I have learned better manners and more poise . . .” Embo must have bound this book knowing that in a family of artists and writers, her mother’s voice was beautifully vital in her own mind, yet apparently almost silent in some of their social worlds, much less the writer’s world.
Both of my grandmothers have in fact made their mother’s letters into books to give to family. In Virginia I had the privilege to spend more time than usual with my grandmother on my Mama’s side, Avis, or for us, Ebisu. I get the sense Ebisu keeps being surprised at how she’s managed to make it healthily to 94 years old, yet still kind of frustrated that she can’t easily hear everything or travel everywhere. A very obvious wanderlust still fills her eyes at the mention of any trip. I think she gave me that.
Years ago, Ebisu also bequeathed me an odd, elegant long necklace, a gold-plated dog tag with her mother’s name: Sarah B. Pick. Since then I have felt quite honored to be the namesake of a badass woman who was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967 on the tiny island of Truk in Micronesia, valued tremendously because she stayed on and taught and sewed all day while most of her fellow volunteers left. She wrote, “I am now the oldest volunteer they have. Guess I am somewhat of a freak.” She was 70 years old, unshakable and with a dry wit. She wrote home of an island life of practical banana leaves and impractical magic: “If anyone dies, the natives will never mention his name again, as it makes his ghost mad. When the students sign in at school, they will not say their fathers’ names as that is disrespectful.”
I could quote on about the strange and harsh conditions and how the Peace Corps’ orders were always ridiculously oblivious, but my great grandmother’s character was the ridiculous thing. She had mothered eight children on a dirt floor Oregon farm. Her second son, David, died of polio at age 5, “probably the saddest event in Sarah’s life.” Ebisu wrote, “She said later that she learned from that experience to keep herself from getting depressed, because her attitude affected the rest of the family.” That was on the brink of The Great Depression. She made a simple-sounding decision to ease the one in her mind.
She joined the Peace Corps all those years later mainly because her husband had died and her children all moved away, and she really just longed to keep helping someone as she always had. She threw off her life-long name “Bessie” that she hated, and she took on “Sarah” for the first time. So after she left those islands, the little farmer lady Sarah B. Pick was remembered: “By 1978 there were 12 babies named Sarah and one named Pick in Micronesia. She laughed when she told us about the babies, saying that she had not been very successful in teaching birth control.”
And a decade after that epilogue, I became another Sarah. Now I see a little better why people mourn the passing of the age of letters as something more than just an old habit or aesthetic choice. I see the personal fashioning of words for one single relationship and a specific ease to isolation that I assume still happens today to a Twitterer. Perhaps it helps not to think about your great granddaughter one day reading your emails, but hey, these tomes helped me anyway in my own crazy-brained state. Like the old fashioned (old-school trashy romance) epistolary novels, those letters capture the flame-like movement of a mind over time the way few other forms can.
Please, let’s move to greeting card form though—I’m living in the moment! And if this moment doesn’t work good, I pull out some better moments from this otherwise crash-and-burn summer. I’ve moved to Nashville with a toolbox of that kind of mechanical mindful earnest self-advice to keep me going.
These, I say, these will be some well-kept memories, the sweet corny ones. I will keep them glowing. One is when I was attending The Seldom Scene show alone at Lexington’s outdoor theater Lime Kiln and I ran into my old friend Elise and her tall Hansen family, who requested the song my family loves to constantly try themselves. And I was in that moment when they played it. Some wine, lots of mandolin, some humidity. And then I think, well--I oughta get a picture!-- and put it on Facebook! "And damn so what is it, big shot, nature girl, interrupter, that you want to project on that digital so-called world? " "That I can sometimes handle crowds, bluegrass and old friends, tall people, all at once these days? That it's progress from my alone-time Harlem fire escape?" "That like a grandma I'm slow and can't remember a freaking thing but I am still a fun fun fun lady?"
Nah: That I am a woman with a powerful mind. I choose that voice.
When the mind swings into depression, it’s a powerful swing. All that supports me can be quickly taken away when it suddenly seems feeble. But as Embo said, I’m going through that existential phase. Seeing the sunny side is a kind of powerful survivalism. My hope is made up of my ability to take on these dark changes, to keep getting through the few moments that hold no consolation at all. I will direct my anger at The System, bring out the Self Help Book voice when needed, put on an Explorer’s Hat when lost, and if I am haunted by anything in the middle of the night, I request my great grandmothers as my personal protective ghosts.
I’m not allowed to drive for now because of seizure stuff, but so far it gives me a new version of discovering my new Nashville by foot, passenger’s side and most luckily by Sam’s side, by his hometown love. MRI on Sunday. I’ll keep you up on all that.
Much love. And a Tate lunch:
