Brother Sun, Sister Moon

A note to readers: One of my goals for this blog is to use it not only as a place to celebrate grandma and reflect on my own experience of sharing this last phase of life with Lil, but also as a place to stretch myself as a writer. To do that, I hope to write in a way that is as honest and authentic as possible, which means not always showing myself in the best light. Because I'm taking some risks, unfolding layers as I go along, I would ask that you read these posts in order so these reflections appear in context. Specifically, if you haven't yet read my post from Monday, September 21 ("Days of Awe: A Year on Republican Street"), I'd appreciate if you start there before reading here. Thanks.

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Jung says that every experience, every being, has a shadow side, and that more importantly, it is not from our proudest moments that we learn the most, but from our most hidden.

Caring for one another is one of the foundational values of our culture, one of the ways we most profoundly connect with each other, create a sense of meaning--even our very identities--and pass on or receive the wisdom and experience of generations  before us. So if these reflect the bright side of being a caregiver, where is the shadow?

For me, the shadow begins with the need to do caring as a way to matter. Like Lil, I am an oldest of many siblings, like Lil, I tend to almost automatically take on the role of offering care to others, and like Lil, I think it is possible that while we both value our siblings dearly, we also experience a perplexing distance from them.

Lil talks proudly and often of her family. She loves to list off her siblings, telling who is still living, and who is related to whom. But I wonder if there is more to her desire to be always listing. Maybe it is partly my own projection, but it seems to me that while there is real love in those accounts, there is something else as well.

Lil was so much older than many of her siblings, and left home so young, that in some ways they seem, in her stories, more like cousins or friends. Even when she talks of Mabel, there is a subtle mix of loving care and the slight pain of a distance born of their very different tracks in life. I think Mabel was a puzzle to grandma--where Lil was bold beyond her years, beyond her gender, beyond her era, Mabel, on the surface anyway, appears to have been the sister who took the more conventional path. Where grandma seems young even at a hundred and one, the Mabel in grandma's narratives seems shaded with age and loss even as a young woman. In recounting those days, grandma seems just a little perplexed at Mabel's reticence--timidity even--while at the same time, warmly fond of her nearest sister and compassionately grieved for Mabel's losses.

She spoke recently of Mabel's death, saying reflectively that she was glad that Mabel had gone first, "because she would have no one left now...she had no children, you know."

Then she began to speak of Mabel's life--how as a teenager, Mabel met a young man, a boy really, and became pregnant. "The boy's mother felt he would never be able to support both a wife and a baby, so she arranged for an abortion. It went all right, Lil recalls, but Mabel bled a lot, and she always felt that it was due to that covert abortion that she could never have children. "Mabel married that boy, but he was killed in war: "there was a war with Spain..." grandma trails off, knitting her brows.

Later Mabel married again. "I liked her husband very much--he was a very nice man" and again, Mabel's husband was killed in war. A coffin-sized flag in a dresser upstairs along with small military medals in velvet boxes bear mute witness to that second great loss.

"Mabel grieved so for that man, for a long time. And I did too--I mean, I was sad for my sister, but I was also sad myself because he was such a nice man and I missed him." With a tiny turn of surprise, I realize it is the first time I have heard grandma ever mention grieving anyone--and it is not her own husband, not even Mabel, but the husband Mabel lost in the Second World War, sweetly recalled more than half a century gone.

Somehow, I think I have the feeling that grandma is so resilient that grief slides right off her, that she can speak of Al's death as a sad event certainly, but not one in which I can detect any hoarded pain or residual loneliness. Simply as a phase, a stage--his time to leave a world from which he had already almost completely withdrawn--a model of the simple, quiet death she herself hopes for.

But here she is, the dusty sun of late summer stripping her legs through the blinds, staring off at a past I cannot see, at a distant remembered grief for a man I hardly remember hearing mentioned before I asked about the flag in the dresser. It seems for Lil to be a grief which has become almost comfortable, like the place in the green carpet by the kitchen door where the wool has worn away to the sissal bones beneath--a familiar, tender loss, worn smooth by time. Grief too, is a gift--a small treasure passed on unknowing. Now when I think of smiling Mabel, baubling a rubber frog to make Daniel and Mimosa laugh (and laugh and laugh...), there is a new edge of longing to her hunger for the bright eyes of children who could never be hers.

I wonder if, like Lil, I am sometimes mistaken for not grieving even when losses hit me deeply. It seems the face I show to Disa and to Daniel is one that, in a kind of overwhelmed retreat, mutes my pain, but reads as indifference to others. I know that like Lil, I have deeply ingrained in me the idea that doing is worthiness--it is not what you show but what you do that matters. But what happens when I don't know what to do? What then?

The center of Lil's meaning is on doing too. The social worker, on her visit last Monday, respectfully put out the question (realizing, I think, that she did not quite have the language for the question she wanted to ask): "What is your legacy? What do you want your family to remember you for?"

Lil seemed uncomfortable with the very question and looked away, casting about vaguely for a few minutes, and then began describing her family, hitting her stride with increasing pride--that she is the oldest and has seven siblings, and their names are...

For Lil, leaving a "legacy" is too grand I think. Even to say that "family" is her legacy is more than she would own, and besides, she wasn't so much describing her family as her role in it--how can "family" be a legacy when it is a verb, rather than a "thing" to leave? Family is not something you are, it is something you do, just like working hard--hard work, a core value to grandma's life if there ever was one, is not a means to an end, it is the end. No need to dig further than that for deeper meanings.

I have been reflecting recently on the way we all become our roles. Perhaps it is part of our very human hunger to belong, to matter; perhaps our individualistic Western culture has swung too far on the pendulum of autonomy at peril of ignoring ways in which we are all deeply interconnected. But while finding meaning in our roles is profoundly important, it has its pitfalls too.

I wonder, for example, how much of my glowing descriptions of life with grandma arise not just from the very best in me, but also from a hidden and silent longing to matter, hoarded in my soul, dusky and wet, like heaps of last year's leaves--a longing which always seeks and is never sated, which lurches either on or back, but rarely listens, burying self doubt in the virtue of constant doing.

Is this current role I fill--this caregiver-mother-wife-student-daughter-granddaughter--the furthest extreme of the "good girl" persona I have so often used to shield myself from projected judgment? Oh, yes, I know rationally that I am not what I produce, what I accomplish, and most of me does know I matter--that I deserve to be loved and included just for who I am. Most of me even believes that.

But there is at least a part of me that seems to believe I can buy off the demons of doubt on the installment plan--small change from the bank of little-m martyrdom. It is the part of me that questions how pure are my intentions really, in this endeavor? That wonders if, beneath all the very honest care, the deep admiration and appreciation I feel for Lil, the shadow side of me hopes I have found at last the foolproof way to win approval and belonging in this family--unassailable even by my own cunning inner critic.

I'd laugh off those uncertainties as overly-dramatic fancies, but on the very day I wrote in this blog about grandma thanking us for living with her, she introduced me to the social worker with these words: "This is my grand daughter--well, I call her my grand daughter--she isn't really."

My fears of not belonging are very real.

And no amount of reasoning from the 40-year-old psychologist-in-training who seems to have written my CV can convince me that hearing that hitch in grandma's introduction doesn't stab through, in an instant, to a naked primal hunger to be wanted, to be seen, to be valid.

I could soothe myself and assure myself I do belong, that I am a "real" grand daughter. That would be the easy answer, the flip response, but the thing is--both are true: I both am and am not Lil's grand daughter. I both belong and do not belong here in this house, in this unexpected intersection of the end of grandma's life and the middle of mine, in this odd convocation of family devotion and personal path: I am not grandma's blood descendant, and though there are many ways I come very legitimately to be living in this place at this time, to ignore the contradictions of belonging does disservice to more than just myself....

It is my sense that every one of us siblings has, in our own way, been gnawed at by this core fear of being not wanted. I think back to being seven and eight years old, to the wrangles I had with Rohina (and less often, Mimosa). As we adjusted to each other as sisters, I tried jealously and spitefully to prove that my absent father was better than their grandmother--attempting impotently to erase my loss and magnify their impostor status in our house. I think about how, despite how well we get along as adult siblings now, we still subtly feel the ways in which others are favored over us (even though as adults, we know we should not care, but we do--that we may see unfairness where it does not exist, but still we feel it--those fears linger).

We all wrestle with this shadow. I think about Stefan, so much at the tail end of our pack, with his very different experience of older parents, striving to follow a creative path so divergent from typical expectations. I think about Daniel, and how I wish I knew how to be closer to him, to connect, to understand, and how I feel always clumsy and halting in that effort, pressured even more now by the unknown deadline of his illness. I think about Davin carving out an identity as a musician--as an adult--very much alone, through a journey of blood, sweat, and tears which I don't think any of us really much realized at the time, let alone understood. I think about Mimosa visiting as always the outsider sister to the houses Rohina and I shared battling our sibling struggles from shared bunk beds to the high school bus, now raising a child far away from his American cousins. And I think about the way Tana has lived always as an only child, seeing our big tribe from even farther outside, so generous in her gifts and hospitality, and I can only imagine that she may have felt a similar longing.

And finally, I think of grandma Lil, and her funny, ambivalent way of speaking of Mabel--both with deep care and slight bafflement--and how, though she has kept in touch with her siblings, they too were far flung and living separate lives. Lil was the first to leave home, one of the most fiercely independent, and the only one single at the time their mother needed a home for her last stage of life.

And it begins to dawn on me--perhaps when grandma qualifies that I am not really her granddaughter, it is she who is wondering if she really belongs here--here in my care, dependent on a younger woman connected only through a convoluted chain of re-marriage and step-relation. Could it be that she wonders why I would want to be here, why it matters to me so much, why I feel a family connection she is not sure I would have reason to feel? Perhaps she too wonders if she is really deserving of inclusion, of care, just as I do.

It may be, I reflect, that the disquieting resonance of the qualifier in grandma's introduction is as much about her wondering as it is about my own.

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I am coming to the conclusion, this summer I have turned forty, that though we live our lives under the illusion that we will someday outgrow our fears and longings, we never really do. And, here at the threshold of what Jung calls the second half of life, I begin to wonder why I even hope to.

It is my hope and my longing that keep me reaching out to you all, despite the clumsiness of my words, despite the rawness of the experience, despite my own self-consciousness. It is my hope and my longing that connect me to Lil and Lil to me in our convergent journeys. And it is my hope and my longing that weigh in the balance against my fears in finding the courage to face my shadows and metabolize my past.