Rachel Simon's Blog

I cut my engine in the church parking lot and looked around. Most of the spaces were taken, and I was glad. It was the one heartening detail I could imagine on this otherwise disheartening day.

I am not a very experienced funeral attendee. In fact, I’ve gone to fewer than a dozen funerals in my fifty years. But my impression has always been that, of the many ways we can count the measure of a life, one of the most obvious is the fullness of the church when the world is bidding us goodbye.

There are certainly exceptions, like when my step-grandfather died, and everyone he’d loved, aside from his family, had already passed away. But the woman whose funeral I’m here for was only forty-one, in the prime of her life, and until the cancer grew too debilitating, she had worked at a bank, supported a dance organization, enjoyed the company of family, spent time with her friends. I’d wondered if she’d meant as much to them as my colleagues, family, and friends meant to me, and I could see, as I got out of the car, that they had.

This was welcome news, because I had not known her. I was here because of my friendship with her father. He was an artist, and since I’d met him seven years ago, he’d been struggling to cope with the death of the youngest of his five children. Today he’d be burying the oldest.

I held up the obituary I’d printed from the newspaper. The picture at the top was the first I’d seen of her, and since she wasn’t smiling when it was taken, and the text included only a succinct resume of her life, I hadn’t gotten a sense of her personality. I am a reader of obituaries, so I know they often convey such praiseworthy traits as religious devotion, strong work ethic, or affection for golfing, but rarely does the sum of the self become apparent, and this time was no exception.

So it was meaningful to see that the lot was full. Every person I saw walking toward the church doors was another clue to the daughter I would never meet. There were the women with the lithe bodies of dancers, the woman in medical scrubs, the young couples. If only I could speak to each of them, I could come to know her better.

But I knew I would not disturb their private grieving. Everyone was young, their lives lying ahead. I remembered how I felt myself, when a college friend died when we were twenty. Just about every funeral is hard, but the funerals of the young are harder.

Especially for the parents. And especially for already-grieving parents.

When my friend called to tell me that his daughter was gone, his voice seemed dizzy with suffering. He’d lost the youngest child, a son, suddenly, in an act of violence by a stranger. I met my friend a few years later, when he read a book I wrote about my sister and, seeing in it a long struggle giving way to hope, asked if he could paint her portrait. In the months that followed, he worked from photographs, sent me sketches of his ideas, and finally invited me to meet him at an art opening. When I got there, he showed me a portrait of a handsome young man—his son, he told me—and then he explained the terrible circumstances of the boy’s death. Ever since, I stayed in touch, visiting my friend in his studio, meeting for coffee, writing letters. I met two of his remaining sons, though not his only daughter. There seemed to be no hurry. Lightning can’t strike twice, right?

Many people mill about the lobby of the church. I spot one of the sons I’ve met, and go over to him. Like his brothers, who I will see over the next hour, he is composed, soft-spoken, gently in charge, and acting in unison with his brothers. He greets me, then guides me through a series of framed photographs that are propped up on a table, introducing me to his family. Most faces are from long ago, with all five children smiling. I recognize the young faces of the two sons I know. My heart thumps at the faces of the two children who are gone.

Lightning, of course, can strike many times. My friend was himself diagnosed with cancer shortly before his daughter. They underwent treatment at the same time, the three sons taking time off from their jobs to shuttle father and sister to the doctors. The father recovered. The daughter did not.

When I learned that she had died, I called my husband. The funeral was a few hours away; I’d lose a day or two of work if I went. “Should I go?” I asked him. He said, “You know the pro’s. What are the con’s?” “There aren’t any con’s,” I said, and there was my answer.

You can shake your fists at the sky and ask how such things can happen. But as I lifted my eyes from the photos, I saw another son, with his wife. They were speaking to other guests, and the wife was very pregnant. “When’s the baby due?” the guests asked. “Today,” the wife answered.

I made my way to the chapel where the viewing was being held. My friend was there, and his face brightened when he saw me. We hugged and talked about his daughter and his health, as I’d expected. But he also told me he hadn’t been able to paint for weeks. He was afraid his pain was so great, he’d never be able to reach inside himself to find art again.

I didn’t tell him, “Of course you will.” I didn’t know that. I’m an artist, too, so I’m well aware of the elusiveness of creativity. I just held his hand and listened.

I sat alone through the service, wondering if he was finding comfort in the hymns and prayers, in the thoughts of everlasting life. I hoped he was, and tried to remember what he’d once told me he felt about religion. We’d discussed it over coffee—I could even remember the booth we were sitting in — but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to call up what he’d said about God, about faith, about what became of the soul after the last breath. He’d shared all that, yes, but at the time there seemed to be no hurry to commit his thoughts to memory.

So instead I looked around the church, and was struck, as I’d been in the parking lot, by how many people had come. And again, I thought about the measure of a life. If it can be counted by any number, then that might well be the number of people who care enough to see us off. But it might also be the number of dances danced, or times we laughed with friends. From what I could see, by any of these measures, this young woman had lived a rich life.

Maybe my friend would see this, and it would give him some comfort on this hardest of days.

Yet as the service drew to a close, and the pall bearers surrounded the casket to bear it down the aisle, I knew that comfort in this moment would do little to ease my friend’s suffering. I knew too that the number of people who were in this church meant less to him than the number of days his children had lived on this earth. I wished I could reverse everything that had happened, and give him the hundreds—the thousands—of days that hadn’t been given to them.

When the guests filed outside, and I saw him standing on the curb near the hearse, looking bewildered and fragile, I came up to him. The sun was beaming down onto us, and I gave him a huge hug. Behind him, I could see his three sons, who would, I knew, go through the rest of their lives with a bond that no one would break. Along with them was the pregnant wife, who would soon—maybe even later that same day—give birth to my friend’s first grandchild.

I closed my eyes, and as we tightened our hug, I thought about how, when the skies darken and the worries uproot everything in sight and lightning shoots down from the sky, none of us has the power to stand in the way of the bolt, catch it in our hands, and hurl it away. All we can do is stay together through the storm, holding each other’s hands, and hoping the sun will return.

How do we measure a life? I wondered this as my friend and I let go in the bright light of the April morning. Is it the number of people whose lives we’ve touched? I’d thought that, when I pulled into the lot. But now, as I looked into my friend’s face, I thought, The measure of a life cannot be counted with any numbers. We measure a life by the depth, the strength, the endurance of the love we give to others. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot of others, either. It can be the love we give to just one other, at a time when he really needs someone there.

I walked back out to the parking lot, looking at the other guests getting into their cars. Her life was short. But maybe she touched just one of these people at just the right moment. Even if her days were far too few, maybe her love was complete.

When my three siblings and I were kids, living with our mother, there were only a few activities we did outside the house as a family. We saw movies (usually at drive-ins), got ice-cream (usually at a local family restaurant), and went bowling.

We were champion commentators throughout a movie. Hence, the merits of drive-ins. (Being able to take the dog was a plus, too.)

We were champion devourers of ice-cream, as long as we each got our favorite flavors, which ranged from chocolate to coffee to black raspberry. Hence, that one local family restaurant.

But when it came to bowling, we were clods. The balls were heavy. We dropped them. They careened into the foul lanes. Occasionally we did hit pins, though only when guided by the hand of luck. Skill sat off on the sidelines.

I remember scores of 27. Once, one of us bowled a 1.

Not surprisingly, when we grew up, although we continued seeing movies (in theaters) and eating ice-cream (or less calorie-loaded cousins like sherbet), we left bowling behind. We were oafs. We were so inept that bowling was sheer comedy, an opportunity to laugh at ourselves as a family.

Many years after I had last fit my fingers into a bowling ball, I read the groundbreaking, data-packed book Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. You’ve probably heard of it, or its premise: American were once avidly involved in social groups, from organized gatherings like Rotary and bowling leagues to informal visits with friends. But increasingly we don’t join groups and don’t see friends. In other words, we figuratively, and sometimes literally, bowl alone.

Putnam provides many reasons for this decline, most of which we could name: more solitary attractions like TV and computers, changes in family structure and work commitments that ask more of our time, a suburban environment where large lawns separate neighbors and cars are required to reach nearby stores.

Bowling Alone made me think about why I don’t belong to any organized groups. Pretty much all the reasons Putnam gave applied to me at that time. In addition to living in car-oriented suburbs, I was single, childless, lived alone, and had multiple part-time jobs. I supported organizations with donations, but lacked the time—and maybe the necessary level of passion—to give them my presence. I did better with friends, but wondered if I’d ever become someone who joined.

I felt guilty. Here I was, a voting, law-abiding citizen who always returned library books on time, held doors for strangers, and was consciously trying to be the good I wanted to see in the world. Yet for the most part, I was a lone bowler. Actually, I wasn’t a bowler. The thought of bowling gave me such feelings of incompetence that joining a league was out of the question.

The same, in its own way, applied to most other organized gatherings I could think of. I’d try to envision myself as an attendee and I’d imagine myself feeling socially clumsy. I was part of the problem, and I’d just have to accept that.

Then in 2001, I got married. My husband lived in an old, artsy, urban neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. It had narrow streets, generous porches, and a mix of ethnicities, ages, and sexual orientations, and pretty much everyone agreed that we were an actual community. Dog walkers, porch sitters, backyard gardeners would pause to chat, trading the news of their lives, commenting on the news of the day. Neighbors would help neighbors shovel snow and rake leaves. We would attend each other’s art openings, admire each other’s porch gardens. And the parties! Block parties, progressive dinners, backyard celebrations of seasons. I learned what it was like to belong.

And I realized that part of why I had, figuratively speaking, bowled alone was I hadn’t naturally found myself in a group that suited me. In this neighborhood, I could chat at the curb or drift into my house, attend parties or stay at home, make dear friends or keep it to acquaintances. I could do as much or as little as I wanted, the way I wanted. And so could everyone else. If our balls went into the gutter, no one cared.

It was luck, again, that guided my hand. Or may be it was something a little wiser than luck, because it gave me what I needed, and what would make me be the good I wanted in the world, without my even needing to try.

If you’d like to read about how this sense of community changed the course of my life, go to my most recent memoir. In hardback, it’s titled Building A Home With My Husband, and in the paperback, which comes out in May 2010, it’s titled The House On Teacher’s Lane. (Yes, it’s the same book, but with a different title and cover.)

You can also see my neighborhood in these two videos, both made by our neighborhood videographer, Tom Davis, whose professional name is TCDavis. The first one is from our block party this fall, and the second from the blizzard this winter. Both videos are about four minutes long, and give a good feel for the architecture, friendliness, and diversity of our community.

When I got married nine years ago, my husband Hal was deeply connected to Peach, a long-haired calico who had taken refuge in his city backyard several years earlier. Hal is a total softie when it comes to animals, and especially cats, and when he saw her, shivering and cowering beneath a bench in his tiny back yard, he was himself recovering from the loss of his previous cat, who’d been at his side for twenty-three years. So he began a campaign of luring this pitiful creature into the shelter of his warm apartment, and with several bowls of food spread out over a few days, he succeeded.

Soon she trusted Hal enough to let him clean her coat, at which point he discovered that she wasn’t the skinny, blackened tomcat she’d appeared to be, but a slender, gorgeous lady who walked with hips swiveling and paws turned out like a ballerina. He named her Peach, because her white and orange fur looked as luscious as peach and vanilla ice-cream. In no time at all, she’d become his constant companion, except for the moments when his attention strayed, and then she would sprawl seductively on the floor, belly up, gazing coquettishly toward his face until he happened to glance her way. The second his eyes met hers, she’d cross her front paws at the wrist, her final move to melt his heart. And it did; he’d drop to the floor and nuzzle her, and she’d make happy sounds in return.

When Hal asked me to marry him, I knew I’d also be marrying Peach. I too would come home to the ritualistic greeting, when she’d bound down the stairs, squealing with glee, spring up to the top of the sofa, and ready herself to get hoisted onto a shoulder. Then there would be the display of affection and attention-seeking she’d do for guests, when she’d place herself in the center of the action, and roll about with such abandon, Hal’s friends nicknamed her Roly-Poly. And I’d have to get used to the smart look in her eyes, which sometimes struck me as professorial, especially when she’d sit at the back door, head cocked, demanding with a glare that we let her into the yard.

I am not an easy sell with animals. I like them just fine, but for reasons I’ve never understood, I don’t open my heart for awhile. Somehow, I see them as just a cat, just a dog, until they assert their personality, repeatedly and insistently, and charm me into submission.

Peach began right away. To her credit, she didn’t resent my arrival. One of the many virtues of pets is their rather quick acceptance of new situations, and their efforts to make the best of whatever fate has handed them. Another is their ability to pick up on the overall emotion in the household. We were newlyweds, blissfully happy. And so, therefore, was she.

And so she did win me over. It happened in our first week of marriage, when Hal was giving her her nightly brushie. All he had to do was hold up the brush and she’d hurtle onto the bed and catapult herself over to her special brushie chair. Oh, and then the rolling and dive-bombing and chin-marking of every available surface! Oh, and then the sound of ecstasy: rrruh! It was unbridled delight in life, the same as I was feeling. She won me over because she was herself—and also because she was me.

Soon, with the two of us inventing terms of endearment for our fuzzheaded entertainer, Peach became Peachie.

Then Miss Peachie Pie.

Then Miss Peach E. Pie.

And Cleopatra.

And Meopatra.

And, finally, Miss Marilyn Meow.

But they tick to a different clock, pets. Their hearts beat faster, drumming them more quickly through life. Though I don’t see animals as inherently wiser than humans, I do admire their lack of self-consciousness, capacity for forgiveness, assertiveness with affection. It is as if they, with their shorter life spans, somehow know the pointlessness of grudges. Why not just wait right outside the bathroom door in the morning, going Wah wah wah, even if the night before we were too caught up in our own distresses—a call from a hurting friend, problems at work—to do her brushie? Why not jump on the bed for her nightly kneading dance, even if we’d yelled at her ten minutes ago for sneaking onto the kitchen counter to steal a slice of cheese?

Yes, their clocks tick faster—but they reset faster, too. We’re the ones who know life is too short, but they’re the ones who act like it is.

Her decline began slowly. We didn’t know her age when she met Hal—the vet said a year, but it could have been more. So we couldn’t say, “Oh, now she’s twelve, so let’s start looking for middle-aged milestones.” The changes just happened. There were the losses: less running around, less roly-poly, less variety in her vocabulary. There were the mores: more sleep, longer sleep, deeper sleep. There were the unwelcome newcomers: the drop in weight, the urinating at doorways, the howling, the throwing up.

Then began the visits to the vet. After many rounds, he diagnosed her with hyperthyroidism, a condition that afflicts many older cats (though no one is sure why), and prescribed the one medication used to treat it. She wouldn’t swallow the pill. We got pill pockets. She did swallow, but threw up more. The vet sent us to a compounding pharmacy, which reformulated the medication as a tuna-tasting liquid. She wouldn’t let it into her mouth. The compounding pharmacy turned the liquid into a gel we rubbed into her ears. Her ears turned red, the fur fell off her face, and she slept, slept, slept.

I volunteer for hospice. One of the things I was taught in training is that, at the end of life, cure ceases to be the focus. Instead, the effort goes toward palliative care: making the individual comfortable, maintaining a good quality of life.

We took her off the medication. Her ears healed, her facial fur grew back. She woke up.

But the decline didn’t stop. Her weight dropped even more. The howling grew weak, the peeing grew constant.

No more roly-poly. No ritual greeting. No coquettish displays.

During what turned out to be the last snowstorm of this winter, when she couldn’t hold down dinner, I said, “I don’t think she’ll make it until next fall.” Hal, petting her, said, “We can’t know. Why even think about it?”

So we still do the brushie, and she still loves it, in a scaled down way. Sometimes she still does her nightly kneading dance, but not often. When days are cold, she curls up next to a hot water bottle, too thin to warm herself on her own.

The sorrow of watching her decline is made worse by the fear of losing the gifts she’s given us. The laughter, the readiness to drop to the floor and play, the appreciation of her stunning beauty. But more than all of that is the treasuring of the now. If there is only the now, there is no need for hard feelings. If there is only the now, there is no need to be shy about asking for love. Because of Peach, and the other pets we have loved, we see how to revere just one day, one hour, one minute. The minutes will go on after losing her. But how we wish we could grab time, hug it to our chests, and never let go.

So with every day that remains, I hear her in a whole new day. Yes, she still says rrruh! when the brush comes out. And some mornings, she still stands outside the bathroom door and says, in her new, more feeble voice, Weh.

But I now hear the word she and all cats say, the one she’s been saying all along. The one we nicknamed her after.

It is not just the mantra of cats. It is, I now think, the sound of consciousness beating.

Me now. Me now. Me now.

Stay here, me, I think every night, looking at her, and Hal, and everyone I love. Stay here now. Let me come inside the house, and now roll around the floor, and make themselves at home forever.

Neither my brother nor I are currently working at jobs. Since I write books and give talks to make my living, I am self-employed, a situation that suits me well. My brother, though, is a lawyer who has always worked for others, and he would like to keep it that way. However, over the past year, he’s found himself caught up in the unemployment crisis.

First, the company where he’d long been an in-house attorney underwent a merger and eliminated many positions, including his. Then he found a part-time position for another company, but in this economy they didn’t have enough work coming in to keep him occupied and let him go. So he’s been searching for a job. He tries to be methodical about checking the appropriate job sites, but, like many people in his shoes, sometimes the scarcity of job opportunities is highly dispiriting.

I want to help.  It’s in my nature, not just because I too have experienced the numb despair of being between jobs, or wondering whether the famine of my feast-or-famine writer’s life was going to end, but because I’ve seen so many friends struggle over the last few years.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any jobs to offer him.

But I do have something else.  Me.

I make my own schedule, so I’m able to call him up whenever I want and suggest we go out and do something. Usually he says yes, since just getting out of his apartment can boost his morale. The things we do are minor – we make deposits at the bank, mail things at the post office, run off copies at Staples, go for coffee.

But even these small outings, which we can do at our own pace, without the stress of a time sheet to fill, seem helpful. They give us the chance to talk, and regardless of whether the topics are mundane or significant, based in the present or the past, cover our personal lives or current events, I think they give him the sense that this time is only a pause in his life, and that there is so much more to him than a job.

There are things you want to do when people you love are hurting.  You want to make everything right – get them the perfect job, or romantic partner, or therapist, or medication.  But my outings with my brother are reminding me that there is something else you can do.  You can just be with that person.  Your presence, alone shows him you care, and that he matters in the world.

Now it is spring, and he’s told me that the beauty of the season is helping, too. So on our last visit, rather than just run errands, we went out to a local park, and as we walked through a patch of cherry blossoms, and I snapped these pictures, I asked if I could put them on this blog. He said yes, and when I asked what I should say when I posted them, he smiled and replied, “Tell people that this is your brother, whiling away an unemployed afternoon.”

It is a hard time for him, and so many millions of others. But I am glad that, even though I have no job to give him, he’s letting me be there. So in honor of all the people like him out there, and any self-employed person in a period of famine, here are a few moments of springtime glory.

I married later in life. I was forty-one, and it was my first (and so far only) marriage. In my earlier years, I’d had all kinds of negative ideas about marriage. Who knows whether these ideas came from the aftermath of my parents’ divorce (at least an 8 on the Domestic Horror Show Richter Scale) or the sight of so many severely unhealthy marriages in film, TV, and real life. But my image of marriage was that it was constricting, stultifying, and ultimately doomed. By the time I got married, however, I saw it as joy-filled, comforting, and life-brightening.

I’ve talked over the years with many people who didn’t marry – or didn’t marry successfully – until later in life, and pretty much everyone agreed that their later marriage was worth the wait. They were more mature, less apt to look to a spouse to complete them, more accepting of the other person’s shortcomings, less interested in comparing the partner to an ideal, and, in general, more inclined to love consciously.

I’ve asked myself why this happened to so many of us, and I think it was because we all became more interested in the other person’s character than we’d been when we were younger. In those days, qualities like charm and sex appeal and friends’ opinions weighed more heavily than whether the person had integrity, exercised good judgment, had the capacity to feel compassion, and prized others not for what they could give, but for the depths and breadths of their personalities. At the same time, in my and my friends’ younger incarnations, we didn’t tend to cultivate those qualities in ourselves. We were more focused on other things, like ambition, social approval, and finding clever approaches to shedding our birth families, unsatisfying jobs, pitiful living situations, and under-developed selves.

Granted, I’ve certainly met people who married wisely when they were young. From what I can tell, they were either lucky or had their heads screwed on better than most of us.

But for the rest of us, there are the youthful missteps, and then, if we’re lucky, or our heads finally get screwed on right, we find it: the person of character who has the ability to love another person of character, too.

This is what I wish I had understood when I was younger:

You think you want someone to love you, and you do. But you also want someone you respect, and who respects you.

How I wish I’d known that long ago.

How glad I am that I know it now.