Starlings in Winter
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
—Mary Oliver*
It has been a strange year, piled on top of a terrible year, after another strange and terrible year, and one before that, and one before that. (I know this is not the first essay I’ve begun this way, but I reckon you’ll forgive me, plus it is not repetitive to the many new subscribers who followed me here from my essay in Slate** (welcome, welcome). Also, for what it’s worth, I am hoping it stops being true very very soon!)
Where was I? Oh yes. Given the strangeness and terribleness of the year so far, I came into the twelfth anniversary of my mom’s death unsure what to expect. With my defenses battered on all sides, would it thunder like a tidal wave over me, like grief in the early hours of loss, like twelve years had never passed at all? Or would it be gentle with me, like my mother incarnate, knowing how my sore heart cries out for balm?
The truth, as it often does, chose to thump down somewhere in the messy middle. I brimmed with sadness through the day, and grief leaked down my face and barked out of me in grumpy interactions with my girls. And on our annual June 25th pilgrimage to Great Falls National Park in Virginia, where my mom’s spirit most resides for me, I felt some foggy veil between myself and the vivid beauty around me. Also, I did not see a great blue heron, as I most always do, including the year one stood motionless close to me for ages as I watched, entranced. I had to be content with feeling my mom’s spirit in the native plants defiantly bursting through the invasives (microstegium everywhere!), and the ebony jewelwings, whose darting bodies are tiny but dazzling enough to warrant their regal name, and the just-ripening raspberries we risked poison ivy and ticks and bloody scratches to seek out amid the brambles, and the wild river swirling down the canyon. Not bad for a spirit, especially an ecologist’s spirit, but oh, I missed the herons.
Finally we paused near where we usually pause, to look out at the river and remember Grandma Joan. My girls sweetly participate in this ritual every year they are with me on June 25th, even though among them only Vee ever met her grandma, but far before her memories formed and stuck.
I read the Mary Oliver poem quoted above, and then Ash asked for a pause to write a poem before we all shared. When she was finished, she shyly read this wonder:
My Special Spirit
Your fiery glow
Feisty pride
I love you
I love you
Your kind words
Your vast detail
I love you
I love you
You take my breath away
In one sweep
Your deep observations
Of the world around
You make the world a
Better place even
When you’re not here
I love you
I love you
I love you grandma of mine
As we stood by the river, I was thinking that maybe my mom - who was tremendously loving but never let go of her sky-high expectations for the people in her orbit - might have been disappointed at how my life had unfolded in the years since her death: a divorce, a parade of jobs, my current sorry state of joblessness, etc. I knew that she never would have voiced any words of dissatisfaction, or carelessly deepened my depression with a stray barb, but she would have worried and worried and worried, and that worry would have lain heavy on my heart.
But then I thought about recent research about intergenerational trauma, and I thought, if trauma and pain and fear can pass down through the generations, then why not love and wonder and resilience? And I considered my maternal great-grandmother running terrified as a teen from the infamous Kishinev pogrom, but landing in America and building a family; and my maternal grandmother, helping her own trauma-wracked mother care for and raise my grandmother’s younger siblings; and my mother herself, fighting rampant sexism to build an eminent career as a scientist while raising four kids who never felt neglected or unloved for a single moment of the too-few years we had with her.
And then I turned that gaze on my own recent life, and I realized that all of the strength and resilience my girls and I have mustered through many many hard months, and all of the ways in which we have showered love on each other, and celebrated the world with all its awe and wonder even when the world feels spare and hard as flint - these are traits that have been encoded into our very cells by our family history (the past we know and the past that only our survival and successes hint at).
And so I put away my thoughts of disappointment and disapproval, and imagined instead the racing river flowing through the years and down the generations to fill me and fill my girls with everything we need to live lives as beautiful as my mother’s was. I still ache and thrum with grief and pain, but I am also
improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
*With gratitude to Ben, who sent me this poem I had not yet encountered, right when I needed it most.
**Rumor has it a professional troll with an inexplicably large following has published a critique of my Slate essay on his Substack. (He shall remain nameless, so that he drives traffic to my piece but not vice versa.) As if my daughter’s life was subject to rebuttal! I’m not sure what evil god has shaped faceless internet culture to make it a reasonable choice to question the lived experience of a child, but screw that god and his nonsense (and yes, he is definitely a dude). I refuse to worship at his temple.
I’m a post-Slate newby follower and I am grateful to be here. Your story (ies) could be mine, your words mimic what lies deep inside. Thank you for being vulnerable and for putting your world into print so others like myself can share this sacred space with you.
Ah, yes, censorship, the intellectual equivalent of fingers in the ears.