Losing.

A few years ago, after a particularly disheartening loss in the ring, Mike Tyson told a New Yorker reporter something that struck me deeply. I wrote about it back when, and began using part of the quote as my signoff on my email account.


"Life is totally about losing everything."

I thought I'd lost a lot back then, in June of 2005. My father had died of a heart attack when I was 21, my older son was in remission from leukemia, my younger son just diagnosed with vasovagal syncope that caused him to drop to the floor, unconscious, eyes still open, his whole body spasming until he came to again. No idea what triggered it. My boys had lost their dad two years earlier, which was far harder on them than me, and I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the right way to help them mourn someone I couldn't bring myself to miss. Both my grandmothers died within five months of each other that year. My job had deteriorated into a particularly nasty place to be. I was trying to accept that life is like this, that really I was very lucky, that things could be worse. The usual.

Of course things are worse now. I don't cry all the way to work anymore, and I don't know if it's the psychopharmacopia I ingest daily, or if I'm starting to heal. Instead, I see the dead. They lose familiarity as they walk closer, become strangers walking to work instead of my grandmothers, my son, my father. My sister in law. My aunt. I hear my son call me now and then, and can't always find a rational explanation for what I've heard. I ask him to help me find things and there they are.

I can't tell you why this comforts me. My belief in any of this is in the same box with Shrödinger's cat, no paradox to me any more. It just is/n't. I can't tell you why it comforts me to see other mothers mourning their adult sons on the nightly news. I want to call them up and ask them how we do it. Even though part of me knows. The part that doesn't really want to keep walking but does.

I've been through the whole process of mourning before, I know what's happening when I feel it-- anger at everyone but especially whatever God is or isn't and everything human beings say about it, the event horizon of depression shrieking in my bones, the tugging, insistent limbic self that still bleats for my baby somewhere in the middle of my brain. Those fleeting, lucid Archimedean moments where it all makes sense and it's ok that this is how it all happened because this is how it happens, has always happened, and always will happen until the stars die. Knowing where I'm going and more or less where I will end up doesn't make this much easier. Just a little less like chaos. You see me walking to work and you think I'm fine. My family and friends don't see what's happening below the surface. Somewhere in me I am always looking for him and telling myself he is gone. I have mourned him before, as he grew, and grew away from me. Only now there isn't a rational way to reconcile. I understand why the irrational, now. As the months go by I find it harder and harder to explain what it is: how can I be parenting the dead? And yet I am. I just can't tell you how it works.

Chino

His real name isn't Chino at all it's, say, Henry Franz (ok, it's not this either, but something like this). He's half Mexican and half German, and its the narrow, dark eyes that earned him his nickname. He has five brothers. I've met most of them, and used to know them all by name. They would come into my bar and flirt, which is fine, and I gave them free drinks but only because their brother had saved my life and I figured it was a fair trade. Plus it wasn't really my booze to give, but Chino was also a fellow employee so I could write it off as comp. The bar had been someplace famous in the 60s and we were just making money off its reputation, but we had some great bands, and one of the first mosh pits, before there was even a word for it. The floor was marble and people made a little flump sound when they jumped off the stage chest first and no one in the crowd knew they were supposed to catch them.

Chino was my bouncer, and stone silent always, except for the lifesaving thing, where he actually asked me out loud which guy had pulled the knife on me before dragging the guy off. Later Chino brought me the knife, a six inch by half inch wide folding blade with a fake pearl handle. "He wont' be needing it," he said. Which I took as a little bravado. I still have it. I don't even look at it any more but it reminds me that at 21 I thought I was invincible and I wasn't at all. I still see it slicing through my ribs that night although it never got closer than about a foot away, thanks to Chino.

Chino and I didn't talk much, like I said. He would stand with his arms folded across this gladiator chest, looking much taller than his 5'7" (maybe less, he was shorter than me), his black ringlets tied in a 70s bandana (not the gang bandana style; picture Olivia Newton John in Let's Get Physical) and a black muscle shirt because it was the 70s. It was a good look for him, because of the high cheekbones and square jaw and brooding, Chino-eyed stare. He was such a softy.

I lost that job, because I went home for Christmas and um, let's call him Vinny, the manager wasn't happy about that. "We can't use you," he said when I called for hours in January. I was working at a better bar (famous artists instead of semifamous rock stars just out of SIR sessions) within a day or so, and I'd still see Chino's brothers, but never Chino.

I asked his brother Max (I think that's actually his real name, although he looked more like an alcoholic weightlifting housewife and wore striped spandex pants to prove it). And he told me Chino had been bad and "sent upstate." Crap.

Not till I'd gotten out of the bartending game altogether did I run into Chino again. He was strolling a baby through Union Square. Dude. Turns out he had been in college out by the Finger Lakes, not in jail. He'd gained some weight, lost some tension in his face, and met a nice drummer from I forget what band, but she was cute and the kid was too. I told him I still had the knife and he laughed, the way you'd laugh if I said, "I still have that photo of you with the lampshade hat."

Then I had two kids. He met them in the park when we'd run into each other, we'd make small talk, promise to get together and never do it. Then I lost track of him for awhile. Then a decade after that, I lost my older son.

Suddenly I run into Chino almost every other week, walking a little terrier. It's fate. I call him brah. He catches me crying on the way back from work, and just hugs me and lets me cry. His sister died of leukemia the year before, so he understands a little how it feels, how it never stops, how it shatters everything, even the weather. He's a masseur now, just got back from the West Coast, working with a famous star who did a movie that made him look and move half his age. (Chino made sure the guy could move the next morning at all.)

He looks happy, the stony quality completely gone. He looks like a papi chulo (I know, he's not Puerto Rican.) He tells me our old DJ is working at the cd store across the way. I still haven't gone in to see him. Not sure I want anyone to tell me how much older I look than I did 28 years ago, when we were all freshly minted rockaholics. Before anything had happened.

About my father

Astronaut Proxy

My father would have loved these times
who once loved pointing me
to the stars
he would have seen two comets
one a smear of ice;

the Perseids and Leonids
dissatisfied with heaven
catch fire, come to earth
wheeling past years;

gathered everything he could read
to follow Galileo, Pioneer...
Ulysses.

He would have would have
would have

All he sees now he sees
through my eyes
I take care to see everything
he would have
wanted that
how I show my son
how I show you
and show myself the heavens too

See how the shuttles fly
how they orbit
how they shatter
fall to earth as swans or stars

See how close Mars came to earth
how close then wheeled away but
he missed that too.

My father comes to me in dreams
bored sometimes, back for good
dissatisfied with heaven
fades with the dawn
but once
to nod in your direction and wink at me
as if to say,
“he's okay.”


Eden Park, Cincinnati 1967

a flock of third graders settles in the glade
it's the year of the locust-- giants in flight
their window pane wings
the ominous whirring
the gated mouth

We knew they ate nothing
after crawling from the dirt
some dead thing clutching a tree
burst open
to become something else entire
something wet and black
glistening, shuddering
in the pale sun,




then leaping away from its own corpse


Screaming girls
and squeamish boys.


I was my father's daughter.

I picked their empty bones
off the bark(their shrunken claws reluctantly give)
and stuck them to my sweater like brooches.


Now no one could touch me.


In Medias Res

When I was born
my father often told me, he hated the doctor
for whipping off my crib blanket
to show my parents I was a girl:
He should have had more respect for women.

I don't remember that of course
though I think I remember
my mothers knees dropping away
below me as I rose
aloft by my ankles
into the cold yellow world.

I remembered it for a long time, you know.
I just didn't realize that's what I'd seen.
Mostly other things (the curved top of old ice crusher, a cartoon whale's head) reminded me of a shape
that turned out to be the shape of the tops
of her bent knees past the edge of the world.

My father I remember first
sitting by while I fingered the piping of a chair
watching me pull myself up
with an astronaut's ecstatic focus
exploring this new world
where walking existed.

Years later the
baby whose genitalia he'd defended
would be crouched over him in a nightgown

pounding his heart
counting and begging
knowing that we wanted opposite ends
to our last moments alive together.
funny what comes out of our mouths
when we're not paying attention.

Later, the doctor took us in
to show us the body
his mouth gaping like any dead animal
it wasn't the animal I wanted.
We can only relight one candle
so many times.

Getting close to the six month mark.

I remember this point, after my dad died. Where the grief level you thought you'd left behind sneaks back up on you. You find yourself crying on the way to anywhere. Crying when you say goodbye to people after a dinner, or a chat, or an email. I think I have abandonment issues. And what worse abandonment is there than death? Last night I lay awake thinking about how much easier it is to be dead (like I have any idea. Maybe the afterlife has a tightly packed schedule).

It feels self indulgent to remember him. It won't really bring him back. It'll make me cry. Does he feel me missing him? Does he know? Or is there really nothing after life? In my fantasy afterlife we all reconnect. We all understand what happened in life, and forgive, and love each other without all the interference of earthly life and biochemical reactions and bad breeding. How is that any more or less likely than anyone else's?

People treat me like it never happened. I find that odd, and then I remember that to them, who didn't have their jagged lives hollowed out for them by deep volcanic forces (I am a geode, yes), things went back to neutral again after they said they were sorry for my loss. They have no idea that I am in flux. That I am on a different time, in a different world. They expect me to act like a normal person, but I've left normal way, way behind. (Some would argue I had done that long before, like maybe as a toddler, ask my mom.)

I have these two notebooks, journals I kept for Jesse and his brother in case I died before they got to know me as an adult. I didn't want them to go through what I did with my dad, not knowing who he was, what he really thought, no reminiscences, no anecdotes that change over time to reflect the changes in our relationship-- things you take for granted when your parent is there with you, things you may not realize you are missing. Perspective. And now Jesse is gone and will never read his. I struggle with this. I can't read it myself. Just thinking about it hurts. I don't know whether to give my younger son his now, before it's too late. Or add more to it.

I added one last entry to Jesse's. There's something profound about writing to the dead, knowing he will never open his book and read it, as the words flow from the pen. How do we do this? How do I do any of it. I'm at a loss to tell you more than this: I wake up in the morning because Jesse's brother exists. Because my present misery is less important than what he would feel losing me, too after Jesse and his father. That's my purpose in life, not to die on him. To set aside my grief a little and be his mother. If you're searching for more meaning than that, good luck to you.

Absolutely horrifying crap.

I was invited to a community meeting in lower Manhattan, for people who had lived and worked in the area before/during September 11th.

It was a smaller group than I expected, and judging from the comments, I could tell that a couple were lawyers, one was a scientist, another was either a doctor or other health-related expert, some were local residents, and some were representatives of perhaps local government, or some businesses, or maybe a union or two.

The trouble started when they hit item 3 on the agenda (formerly item 4 but they were doing me a favor), environmental issues. A sweet looking older lady stood up and told us that the week before, a fifteen foot steel pipe had fallen from the Deutsche Bank building, shot through the 6-inch thick concrete roof of the fire department next door, then crashed through the next floor, made a hard right and embedded itself in the wall. Two firefighters were injured, and the street she lived on was shut down. She couldn't get to her home without an orange hard hat (God help her if her hard hat were blue or white, I suppose).

"Guess what they did to fix the fire house roof," said a lawyer sitting next to me. "They put up a sidewalk shed."

"Yeah," said someone else, "because a piece of plywood is much stronger than six inches of reinforced concrete."

I was surprise that some of the attendees actually started to laugh.

"Can't we do anything about this?" said the lady, a little desperate.

"Right," (the lawyer) "The site's run by the Gambino crime family, what can you do?"

A guy who seemed to represent the workforce spoke up: "But there's a clause in their contract that forbids them to engage in mafia dealings on the premises!" (more laughter, as he showed us the clause that shows the Gambino (Safeway) subsidiary, Gault, is barred from acting like Gambinos.) "LMCCC even has pictures of the site on their Web page, showing the violations, like they're proud of it!" (holds up pictures. More laughter.) [note: the photos he was showing us were off the web site as of the middle of last week.]

"Well, can't we get the board to fire them?" (More laughter)

"The board is full of their friends!"

"Then we should get the governor and mayor to fire the board!" (more laughter)

"They appointed everyone on the board. Look, as (name left out) said last time, if you want to hire a contractor in this city, you're either going to get a firm with an Italian last name, or a big national firm-- like Halliburton!" (rest of audience laughs even harder.)

"well," says the defeated sounding lady, "Would OSHA help us?" (Pandemonium. She shuts up.)

The labor guy says, "I've personally looked at what's now thousands of pages of data on that building, and according to every test that's been done, there are no hazardous materials in the site." (Astonishment. Everyone here knows that there were bones and body parts being found in there on a daily basis, that the roof had been torn apart by the collapse of the trade center, and that all the airborne pollutants (asbestos, silica dust, human dust, smoke, jet fuel and so on) had rained down into the place just like the rest of the area.)

Now it's my turn to get up. I tell them my son's story, briefly, and refer them to the resolution they had just drafted, regarding PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) in the WTC plume, you know, carcinogens. Even if there's no causal relationship, I tell them, if there's an uptrend in responders, there's going to be a similar uptrend in residents, and that means people will need to be educated about the symptoms. A week's delay can mean life or death with APL.

The lawyer stands up and gives a rousing, self-aggrandizing speech urging political action to force the state to do autopsies on everyone who dies in the downtown area, to find out who had undiagnosed leukemia. An aging neighbor with an oxygen line in his nostrils agrees and argues for an ACTUP style response. The lawyer says, "And our slogan should be "Don't bury the evidence!" And the old man says, "bodies are dropping!!"

Jesus. I'm sitting right next to you, assholes.

All I wanted was to encourage community groups to educate the people in their neighborhoods about the symptoms of leukemia, to get tested early and often, to save lives and to make sure that the recorded incidence of leukemias is as accurate as possible, to help us with government funding and education. All I wanted was to protect other families from losing their Jesses. What I got was an ugly picture of what happens when dozens of well meaning folks have been banging their heads against a brick wall for six years. What choice do they have? I don't know that I can do what they're doing.

The very next day, Community Board One passed a vote of confidence in the demolition process at Deutsche Bank. What the hell?