Rachel Simon's Blog

Family Network TV is a new internet TV channel founded by Susan Stephens, an energetic and visionary grandmother of a boy with cerebral palsy. The shows on Family Network TV focus on families who are living with disabilities, with the goal being to unite the special needs community worldwide. Susan Stephens, Vice President Tara Ecklund, and a team of fifty parent and sibling volunteers have poured their time and love into making this dream into a reality. Family Network TV made its internet debut at the end of February, 2011.

The Family Network TV show “What’s Happening” is hosted by fellow sibling and writer Mary McHugh. Mary recently interviewed me about the genesis of my upcoming novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, which will hit the stores on May 4, 2011, and asked me to give some behind-the-scenes insights into the writing process. Mary’s interview with me was conducted on Oovoo, an online video chat service, and posted soon after Family Network TV launched, on February 28, 2011.

To watch the fourteen-minute interview, click on the first video below.

And if you like this video and this format, I hope you’ll check out Family Network TV and see the many other programs they offer.

Here’s to a bright future, Susan, Tara, Mary, and all the people who make up Family Network TV! You have my gratitude and best wishes.

Philadelphia was bathing in thirty-four degree sunshine when my husband Hal dropped me at airport. I lugged my bags into the terminal, noting that they felt heavier than they usually do when I travel to give talks around the country. I could have chalked the weight up to faulty memory, as I hadn’t done a presentation since the season of short sleeves. My energy level was also a notch below robust, as I’d just fought off a minor case of the sniffles.

But memory and muscles were fine. My suitcases were stuffed like overburdened sleds because I was on my way to Fairbanks, Alaska. There, over the next five days, I would be doing three presentations related to my book Riding the Bus with My Sister. And a trip to Fairbanks in the wool-fleece-and-thermals month of December simply necessitates bulk.

I’d almost squealed with delight when the Fairbanks Resource Agency contacted me in the spring and asked me to speak at their annual gala in December. Although I’d spoken for many service providers that support adults with disabilities and had even done such talks in Anchorage six years ago, I’d never been as far north as Fairbanks. And I’d been to Anchorage in April, right after “breakup,” when the winter snow suddenly melts, and when sunrise is at six in the morning, sunset near ten at night. I was now heading into a land of subzero temperatures, where daylight would commence after ten in the morning and depart by two thirty in the afternoon.

I made my way to the gate for the first of my flights, remembering Hal’s reaction when I got the invitation.

“Are you kidding?” he’d said.

“It’ll be an adventure!”

“Fairbanks in December?”

“If Jack London could do it, so can I.”

He’d made a scrunched-up face that he hadn’t unscrunched in the months since.

To be fair, Hal’s reticence about this trip was not simply the result of him envisioning himself slogging through a wind-swept, snow-drifted, dark-as-sleep nowhere. It was more a result of him knowing me.

I am not just someone who gets cold. I am someone who often wears a jacket in the summer, and in the winter I wear coats even inside the house. I get a chill deep inside my chest, and once it starts, there seems little I can do to stop it. This isn’t just imagination: touch my hands during these episodes, as people inevitably do when I meet them at talks, and you’ll be grabbing onto an ice glove.

How, Hal and other caring friends wondered as the day for my trip neared, would I possibly endure the extremes of a place like Fairbanks? Which, we found out the night before he took me to the airport, can get as cold as seventy below? And where sunshine itself is powerless to induce warmth? “You’ll spend the rest of your life thawing after this,” he said.

But how could I say no? I would be seeing a faraway land close to the tip of the globe, where all that is familiar to me about light and dark, winter and summer, ordinary and extraordinary would become but a memory, and new rules of day, night, cold, time, and even the colors of the sky would take its place. How could I not take the opportunity to shake up all I know about my relationship to things so fundamental, I can barely imagine my consciousness without them?

Besides, I kept wondering: what kind of people actually live there?

I got my first answer to this question soon after I arrived at the gate. My flight, which was supposed to depart at 1:00 PM, was delayed until at least 3:00 PM. This one change would prevent me from making my second connection, and so I spent the start of my trip rescheduling all my subsequent flights. My original plan was for three flights that would last fourteen hours. Now I would be taking four flights lasting twenty-two hours. A test of mere stamina became a test of endurance.

This is what Alaskans live with, I understood as I hunkered down for my first, second, and third waits. Not just snow and ice and wind and midnight sun and daytime night – but the need to expect the unexpected. And all the patience and fortitude that might be required.

I can do this, I thought, hauling my carry-ons through the concourses at Chicago O’Hare and Seattle-Tacoma International and Ted Stevens Anchorage Airport. Each time my effort proved harder and more laborious, and soon I was cursing myself for not having crammed even more into my checked bag. But then I’d think about the thousands of intrepid individuals who made this journey before the age of flight. My pitiful twenty-two hours would bear little resemblance to the months, or years, of hardship they endured on rail, stagecoaches, horseback, and ships. I told myself to enjoy the luxury of dozing on a seat in an airport, with music and televisions blaring, and babies crying, and, in Seattle, a water fountain that blasted loud glug-glug sounds whenever it was used. Stop kvetching, I told myself. Be tough.

Fortunately I forgot that sometimes, when people made the trek to the Last Frontier, the duration and the physical demands were so great, they fell ill, or even worse. This could happen to the hardiest of souls. So it was quite possible it could also happen to a twenty-first century city girl from the Northeast.

Who’d just—she thought—gotten over the sniffles.

And whose final, fourth flight—the one she’d had to reschedule herself onto—required her to walk across the tarmac in twenty below, schlepping the unbearably leaden carry-ons, so sleep-deprived and so confused by the darkness and the snow that she almost walked in the wrong direction.

So by the time I landed in Fairbanks at 7:00 AM (11:00 AM to me), my fate was sealed. I thought I was just exhausted from the four thousand mile ordeal that took me from thirty-nine degrees latitude to sixty-four degrees latitude and from thirty degrees Fahrenheit to twenty-two below. But my exhaustion was actually a portend—and the proof that my curiosity, adventurousness, and Jack London admiration surpassed the current limits of my constitution.

But for the first day I gallivanted about, unaware that my immune system was about to shut down. I was tired but with such a brief period of sunlight, I wanted to see all I could. After all, I immediately realized that Fairbanks was not what Hal and I had envisioned, and I realized I wasn’t just in a land of cold and dark. I was also in a land of surprises.

For starters, this was not a windswept, snow-drifted, dark-as-sleep nowhere.

There was, in fact, no wind—there rarely is in Fairbanks, I learned. Nor were there snow drifts, because Fairbanks tends to be too cold for snow; the more common weather challenge is ice fog, which so impedes visibility that it’s one of the few conditions that might close schools for the day. The terrain was mostly flat, and I didn’t even see mountains in the distance.

This was not a nowhere, either. It was a place with four military bases, a large university, a museum that’s an architectural wonder, multi-lane roads that pass the same stores we have in Delaware, a population of over thirty thousand—and more people who’ve relocated there from all over the country than I can remember seeing anywhere else. In fact, I heard almost every kind of accent a person can hear in America.

And whether they came from New Jersey, Long Island, Minnesota, Phoenix, Colorado, or California, no one I met, and no one I saw, allowed the weather to inhibit them in the slightest. They went to jobs and stores and coffee shops and movies and everything you can think of just as much as anyone in a warmer climate.

They did it all without the bulky clothes I’d schlepped across the country, preferring layers topped by sweatshirts or jackets when they were outside. And, when they were inside, a significant number of people wore t-shirts and short sleeves, even if the rooms were cool. How was this possible, I found myself asking over and over. To which the answer would inevitably be, “You just get used to it.”

I spent most of my first, still-healthy day with my escort, Eva Norwood, Community Development Director for Fairbanks Resource Agency. She picked me up at the airport, drove me to my hotel and then, over the course of the day, around Fairbanks. We rode in her trusty station wagon, fleece blankets on our laps, a horizontal crack across her windshield. “It’s impossible to avoid the cracks,” she said as we made our way along the snow-slicked roads—her car, with its studded snow tires, never skidding. “They cover the roads with gravel, and the little pebbles are always flying into your windshield. You can spend all winter repairing it, so I figured I’d just wait.”

Gravel-strewn roads and fleece blankets were just two ways people made their peace with driving in Fairbanks. In the interest of keeping their engines warm, they also leave parked cars running while they’re inside, as I discovered when Eva and I went to lunch at a packed Thai restaurant. They might even have upgraded their cars to include remote starters, which they have to reactivate every two hours. Those of more modest means can plug their cars into the engine block heaters that dot many, but not all, of the parking lots I saw.

The highlight of my tourist expeditions came that first afternoon, when Eva brought me to the Museum of the North. Located at the university, the striking building was designed to convey a sense of Alaska, with shapes and spaces evocative of alpine ridges, glaciers, and whales. The collection was equally stunning. One enormous room takes visitors through the five major areas of Alaska, each with its own history, animals, folk arts. Eva had once been a docent here, and by the end of my private tour, I had a vastly enriched appreciation for the state, and the resourcefulness of the people who’d inhabited it for millenia. Other rooms featured artwork by classic and contemporary Alaskan painters and sculptors. (At the end of this blog, I have additional photos I took while I was there.)

And then there was a room unlike anything I’ve experienced anywhere. Called “The Place Where You Go To Listen,” and created by composer John Luther Adams, it is a continuously changing sound and light art installation—with both the visual and the audio experiences derived from, as an article in the New Yorker once put it, “information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska…fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.” The sound on the day I visited hummed and tom-tommed, with harmonizing echoes like a choir in a cathedral; the colors were magenta shading into deep red. It differs at every visit, Eva told me; sometimes you hear the sun create more harmony, the moon make dapples of sound, and the Northern lights ring across the ceiling like bells. The room reminded me of my beloved light tunnel in the Detroit Airport, which I wrote about in The House On Teacher’s Lane. But this was a tiny space, and the sounds and lights weren’t pre-set; they were happening in real time, reflecting the current state of this corner of the planet. I could have stayed in there forever.

But the sun was setting, and as we emerged from the galleries in the museum and looked out the windows over Fairbanks, I learned that I needed to correct yet another misunderstanding. I’d thought of this part of Alaska as a place of extremes. Standing beside me at the window, though, Eva pointed out that it’s a place of subtleties.

At this time of year, the sun doesn’t rise, or set, in the way it does back in the Northeast. Instead, it stays low along the horizon. So the sky is a study in golds and pinks and pale blues—which then reflect on the snow. “We don’t have white snow here,” she told me. “You think it’s white until you really look and see it’s not.”

Later, when I went out for dinner with three other people affiliated with Fairbanks Resource Agency, I learned more about subtleties. “We don’t have real darkness here,” there told me. “You think it’s dark but it’s not.” I asked how that could be; when I looked out the window, it sure looked like my idea of night. “Yes,” they said, “but with the snow reflecting the stars and the moon, we don’t really have dark skies.” Not the way the skies can be dark in, say, rural Hawaii or Arizona, they added, where they sometimes spend the winter, and where the nights are so completely dark that they actually feel scared.

In Fairbanks, they added, they never feel scared. Rather, they feel at peace with nature—and embraced by everyone around them. “It’s one big family here,” they said. “If you see someone broken down on the road, you stop to help. That’s just the way it is.” They all moved here from the lower 48, and love Fairbanks so much, they never want to live anywhere else.

I went to bed that first night, amazed at how wrong I’d been about this place, and eager to learn so much more.

But by the next morning, my immune system had surrendered. I woke with a ferocious sore throat and thudding headache. I still hoped to get out to see other sites, to stand a chance of catching a glimpse of the aurora borealis, to meet new people and learn more surprises.

I did manage to have a few more conversations. During a marvelous dinner with Emily Ennis, Executive Director of FRA, I learned she entered the field decades ago by without training, family ties, or preconceptions; she just walked into a room of adults with disabilities in Fairbanks who needed to be occupied during the day, and instantly understood that they were full, whole individuals desirous of living meaningful lives. I also connected with a waitress in my hotel restaurant who was the sister of a woman with a disability, and who spoke tearfully about her sister’s transition from living in the state institution to a community setting. Politics also crept into some discussions. Yet even though folks in the lower 48 seem to think immediately about Sarah Palin when they hear the word “Alaska,” the people I met were less inclined to talk about her than about the recent, contentious Senate race, which Lisa Murkowski won over Joe Miller by a write-in vote.

I also managed to get through all three of my events—a book discussion, a visit to a writing class at the university, and the big, fancy gala dinner. I enjoyed all three, and I think I satisfied my audiences at each.

But my tourist expeditions were behind me.

So I spent the rest of my time in Alaska in my hotel room, savoring yet another unexpected aspect of this part of the world. In the dark and the quiet, it is easy to sleep. Your dreams rise and fall like whales, your thoughts beat steadily as the bells of the Northern lights, and your feelings ease through you as subtly as horizon light.

I am no Jack London. I would have made a frail pioneer.

But I’m hoping my host asks me back, and I’m told they probably will. I’ll be keeping my sense of adventure warm until then.

What do you do when you love someone deeply but have fallen totally out of sync with her – maybe to the point where this person, who you once got along with every day in every way, suddenly starts speaking coldly and harshly to you, rolling her eyes at so many activities you once enjoyed together, or even says those most painful words: “I hate you”?

And what do you do when this person is your own flesh and blood? Maybe even your teenage daughter?

As someone who does not have children of her own, I have been spared this all-too-familiar experience and all the associated pain. But as readers of my books and this blog know, my sister Beth, who has an intellectual disability, has the unusual lifestyle of riding city buses all day, every day, and in the interest of growing close to her after years of emotional distance, I rode the buses with her. I learned many lessons while sitting beside her on the bus, but one of the most important was this: If you want to recapture a closeness you once felt with a loved one, it’s extremely helpful to stop standing outside her world, casting judgment and grieving. Set aside all the criticism you have of her life and the hurt feelings you carry around. And, if she’ll give you permission, just enter her world.

This is the same conclusion that my friend, the writer Lauren Kessler, came to when her delightfully compatible and mutually respectful relationship with her twelve-year-old daughter Lizzie molted into constant conflict. The result is her latest book – which I recently read and got a great deal out of, My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, A Daughter, A Journey Through The Thicket of Adolescence.

Lizzie had been an easygoing child who loved riding bikes, going bowling, drinking hot chocolate, and doing art projects with Lauren. Then adolescence hit. Not only did Lizzie lose most of her interest in these activities, she began reacting to Lauren with loud sighs, testiness, accusatory glares, and dramatically rejecting gestures.

Lauren was stunned and confused. Then she became frightened, since her relationship with her own mother had deteriorated when Lauren was a teenager and never recovered.

But Lauren isn’t just a loving mother. She’s also an insightful and fearless nonfiction writer. In fact, I first met her through the pages of one of her books, Dancing With Rose (retitled Finding Life In The Land of Alzheimer’s for the paperback). Lauren’s mother had recently passed away from Alzheimer’s, and in the interest of coming to terms with that never-healed relationship, Lauren took a job at an assisted living facility. In the course of learning about the last world her mother knew, Lauren also grew close to several of the residents. That book is as informative about the daily life in such a facility (and I say this as someone who’s regularly in one as part of my hospice work) as it is moving about Lauren’s personal journey.

Having learned from that book what I learned from my memoir about my sister Beth, Lauren decided that the way to gain some understanding of Lizzie was to enter her world. But this time she wouldn’t get a job. She’d just ask Lizzie if she could shadow her life. It is a credit to Lizzie’s bighearted personality, and to the endurance of their love for each other, that Lizzie said yes. And it is a sign of Lauren’s courage, and faith in her ability to see truths that might trouble her, that Lauren then accompanied Lizzie everywhere.

The mother joined the daughter in the social minefield that is junior high. She observed teen dynamics, adolescent friendships, and her daughter, as they went from class to class, walked down the hallways, attended lunch and band. As time went on, Lauren went to sleepaway camp, volunteer activities, job internships, athletic events, and even a sex ed session at school. Along the way, she acknowledged her own emotions, which sometimes veered into dismay or annoyance, other times rose to pleasant surprise and even admiration. Sometimes Lauren managed to keep her thoughts to herself, and other times, to her chagrin, she didn’t. She also re-examined why her own relationship with her mother froze in time – and re-committed herself to not repeating that unfortunate history.

Lauren chronicles this mix of anthropology, journalism, relationship deconstruction, and introspection in her book – and she does so in a way that is honest, informative, humorous, and moving. It’s also a good story, which starts with Lauren and Lizzie being totally at odds with each other, and it ends with them coming back together, now in a stronger relationship.

I was drawn to My Teenage Werewolf because of my affection for Lauren’s last book, but I’m writing about this well-written book here for two reasons. One is because I enjoyed how much I learned – on so many levels.

The other reason is that we live in a world where, when relationships grow difficult or even break apart, so few of us know what to do. We might ask friends, but they’re so often groping for an answer themselves, struggling as they are with their own questions about how to deal with their parent, sibling, child, or friend. We might turn to therapists, too, and sometimes they do offer insights, or provide the gentle guidance, to help us take some kind of step toward healing – though not necessarily toward understanding, accepting, and actively, while keeping the person in our life, repairing. And of course we live in a time of high drama, where adversarial relationships are all too often viewed as acceptable.

So I think it’s important that, whenever we encounter something that has facilitated our sense of compassion and understanding, we let others know – and perhaps all the more so when that compassion and understanding is directed toward our own flesh and blood.

So I’m sharing this book with you because it seems possible that you too might be in a struggle like this with someone you love, and need just the inspiration that this book offers. It will remind you, as it reminded me, not to fight back or reject or run away.

Run toward.

This is a story about how everyone deserves love.

First, please meet my mother. For the past two decades, she’s lived in Florida with her husband, and both are retired. Every spring for the last few years, they’ve driven the thousand miles north to Pennsylvania, where he grew up and they met long ago. They travel in a mobile home, which they then park in a campground for the entire summer. The campground is a few hours from where I live.

This is my mother’s husband. He does all the driving because a few years ago, my mother became too forgetful to cook a meal, much less drive a car, and was eventually diagnosed with senile dementia. She still lives at home, and he’s her caregiver.

They love each other very much and are each other’s constant companion and best friend. They’ve been married for almost thirty years.

I see them as much as I can when they’ stay up north. My mother still knows who everyone is and can carry on a conversation for short periods, but she has large and ever-growing gaps in her memories. It’s hard knowing that any visit I have with her might be the last time she remembers who I am.

Until a year and a half ago, my mother and her husband doted on their pet cockatiels, Lemon and Pumpkin, who were also each other’s constant companion and romantic partner. Their feathered bond lasted for a gloriously happy twenty years, all of which they spent with my mother and her husband. Then, suddenly, Lem passed away. Pumpkin pined away for months, and then he died, too.

My mother and her husband were bereft. They loved these birds so much, they’d long ago stopped using airplanes when they traveled, as they disliked having the birds out of their sight. That’s why they got the motor home, which gave them the ability to drive across the country as a foursome, the birds happily entertaining the humans from their cage, the humans adoringly catering to the birds’ every need. They’d even hired an artist to paint a picture of Lem and Pumpkin on the side of the motor home. At some point, my mother’s husband bought a special box for a double coffin, saving it until the time came so they could be laid to rest in style – and together.

The silence was overwhelming after their beloved birds were gone. There was no one to sing along with the radio, or to dance in the cage, or to display his or her feathers. No one whistled back when my mother said, “Good morning.”

I am a hospice volunteer and spend a lot of time in an assisted living facility, where many of the residents have Alzheimer’s. I see that while some people have regular visitors, others have none, and although I can’t detect a difference in the progression of their condition, I’ve come to suspect that loneliness encourages insecurity, neediness, fear, even desperation. Everyone, regardless of the state of their cognitive abilities, needs to know they’re loved – and needs to have the opportunity to love another back. Whether or not it makes us live longer, I cannot say; but it deepens and enriches every moment that we’re here.

This summer, my mother and her husband came up north in July, planning their return drive to Florida for mid-September. I visited several times, and told them I’d come back one final time a few days before they were scheduled to leave.

But an interesting thing happened a week before that last visit. I went to get my hair cut.

This is Michele. She lives twenty minutes from me and has a sunny room in the back of her house where she cuts hair. She has a warm and caring personality, and always does a great job with my curly mop.

It’s very peaceful in Michele’s haircutting room. She’s the sole employee, and at most I encounter only one other customer, though often it’s just Michele and me. The atmosphere is easy and informal, and, because her family sometimes stops in to say hello, I’ve gotten to know her daughters, husband, and pets. Right now she has two dogs but for a while she had a bird, too. The bird passed away, but she retained a fondness for feathered creatures.

In early September, when I went to Michele’s for my haircut, I opened her back door and, to my surprise, saw a new bird. It was a cockatiel, no less, who was instantly eager to say hello.

“Who’s this?” I asked, walking up to the cage.

“That’s Rudy,” Michele said.

Rudy, who’d already been bouncing around the cage trying to get closer to me, grew even more alert at the sound of his name. Full of energy and blessed with an insistent friendliness, he was instantly likable.

“Where did Rudy come from?” I asked, not taking my eyes off him.

“One of my other customers. He’s only three years old, and her family has grown so much that they recently realized they have too many children to pay enough attention to Rudy. She mentioned that she was thinking of putting him on Craig’s List, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll take him.’ I hated the thought of him being on Craig’s List.’”

I did, too. Rudy was clearly smart and engaged, and his personality instantly struck me as larger than life. It was terrible to think of him ending up with someone who paid the highest bid, and who might not love him as much as, well, as much as he deserves. And everyone deserves to be loved.

I said, “You know, my mother and her husband had two wonderful birds who passed away. I think they’d love Rudy.”

Michele said, “He’s a very nice bird.”

I said, “I feel strange asking this, but…I’m going to be seeing them in a few days. Can I tell them about him?”

“Sure.”

Michele then cut my hair. And right after I left to go home, her daughter, who’d been listening to us from the living room, said to Michele, “I think Rachel really wants that bird for her mother.”

A few days later, I drove to see my mother and her husband, as planned.

And after we’d gotten caught up, I told them about Rudy. “He looks just like Pumpkin,” I said. “He’s bursting with affection. If Michele was willing to part with him, would you want to take him in?”

My mother immediately teared up. “Yes,” she said.

Her husband said, “Oh, three years is a really good age. And it would be so great to have another bird. And we still have all the food and toys and everything we need. But would she really let Rudy go?”

“Rudy sounds wonderful,” my mother said, gushing.

I said, “How about if I call Michele and get her thoughts?”

Right then and there, I dialed Michele. She laughed because she’d been thinking I’d get in touch. Then she checked with her family, and moments later, she called back. “Yes, your mother and her husband can have Rudy,” she said. “We like him, but we haven’t bonded yet. And we know that we’ll treat him like a prince – but they’ll treat him like a king.”

So a few days later, I went to see my mother and her husband one more time, and led them in my car to Michele’s house.

My husband Hal, who also wanted to meet Rudy, was waiting for us. Michele greeted us all warmly. Then we went into her haircutting room, where Rudy awaited.

Hal was immediately taken by Rudy.

Michele brought him out of his cage.

And my mother gave him a kiss.

We carried Rudy outside, set him in the car for the ride back to the campground, and hugged each other goodbye.

Moments later, they drove off with their beautiful new companion. As always, I felt sad, not knowing what state my mother might be in when I see her again. Yet I also felt I’d done a good thing.

A few days later, when they were halfway to Florida, my mother’s husband called. “This is a magnificent bird!” he said. “He’s so friendly. He gets on our shoulders and nuzzles our faces. Your mother sings to him and he sings back. They’re already getting totally attached. We totally love him.”

I could imagine my mother in the background, Rudy on her shoulder as she cooed to him. I don’t know how much longer my mother will remember who I am. But because of one family’s need for help, one hair dresser’s generous spirit, one customer’s luck in scheduling a haircut just when she did, and one bird bursting with affection, I do know that every minute that my mother – and her husband and Rudy – have left on this earth, they will know that they’re loved, and that they will have someone else to love back.

For two separate but intertwined reasons, this is a momentous week.

First, my husband Hal and I celebrate our ninth anniversary. But the number nine is deceiving. Even if we were traditionalists, which we’re not, we’d feel obliged to skip the pottery and willow gifts nine-year spouses showered upon each other in earlier eras and instead bestow the silver wreaths that commemorated twenty-five years, or the pearls of thirty. That’s because our marriage came about only after one of the most ridiculous courtships in history—thirteen years of living together, followed by a heartrending break-up, proceeding into six years in the emotional desert, tiptoeing into several months of reconnection, friendship, and a new romance, and culminating in a walk in our wedding finery to stand before the justice of the peace.

So our anniversaries are as much triumphs over our past as toasts to our future. And when you have to add nineteen years of past to the official number that marks your present, traditional gifts come to seem absurd.

“Then what are you giving each other?” people ask.

Every year so far in our marriage, I’ve downplayed the answer. We’ll just be going for a nice walk somewhere, I’ll say, or out to dinner. While this response is true, it’s far from complete. I rarely feel comfortable offering the complete answer, especially when this half-answer is met with disappointed looks. It seems that, for many people, even those who are also disinclined to be traditionalists, they expect significant expenditures of money: a vacation to the Bahamas, a trip to a Broadway show, an attractive bauble I could wear on my wrist. Grand, costly gestures to prove—what? That we’ve survived a trek through the terrain of nine calendars? That we’ve kept the flag of commitment we planted nine years ago from shredding? That, despite the tornadoes out in the distance, we’re still partners on this wagon, and we’re continuing forward together?

I hope the pottery, jewelry, and willow industries will forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think couples need expensive gifts to prove these things. Particularly not if, on the journey to and through matrimony, they were lucky enough to discover an even more valuable gift. A gift that comes from error and misjudgment, reflection and reappraisal, effort and resolve. A gift that doesn’t fit into a Tiffany box or require a Caribbean beach, and was harder to earn than money. The gift of really trying to understand not what love is supposed to be, but what it really is.

This gift is the more complete answer to “What are you giving each other?” Yet to talk about it would take a deeply honest conversation that might stretch for a few hours. Such candid disclosures rarely have a place in casual exchanges about anniversaries, or marriages, or any kind of relationship, romantic or otherwise. So for the most part, we keep those answers to ourselves.

Unless, if you’re like me, you like to write—and you especially like to write books.

This brings me to the second reason that this is a momentous week.

A few years ago, I found myself writing about my lengthy, hilly, potholed road to marrying Hal. I hadn’t planned to do so; not only had I already published one memoir, about my relationship with my sister Beth, but Hal and I were embarking on a major renovation of our hundred-year-old row house. And even though he’s an architect and was going to oversee the project, I knew we were in for far too much turmoil to accommodate the writing of a book. Yet when I sat down to write some short stories, my pen appeared to have other ideas in mind: a chronicle of the renovation that was also about what I’d thought love was supposed to be, and how I shifted into learning what love really is. As we progressed from the decision to renovate to Hal’s plans to the demolition and wiring and wallboard and paint, the entire project revealed itself to be a grand analogy for the repairs we made in our relationship—and that I’d made, over the years, with others. These repairs included familiar concepts that are far more formidable to employ, and sustain, than I’d imagined, such as forgiveness for misjudgment, compassion for histories, and respect for differences. They also included an awe about all there is to learn, and see, and live, and an appreciation for the single moment, with one individual, when you realize you’ve met a kindred spirit.

And that book, The House On Teacher’s Lane: A Memoir of Home, Healing, and Love’s Hardest Questions, is coming out this week.

I should clarify something. The House On Teacher’s Lane is not the first time this book has appeared in the world. Like my relationship with Hal, it had a first incarnation, when it was released in hardback a year ago. Also like that relationship, where we were known as boyfriend and girlfriend rather than life partners, this book was originally known by another name, Building A Home With My Husband. But now, with the book being released in paperback, its new name is more in keeping with the truths it shares, which are less about the material world of hammers and wiring, and more about the inner world of emotions and realizations.

These are the complete truths I haven’t told people when they’ve asked what I’m giving Hal for our anniversary. But by happy coincidence, this year, for our ninth anniversary, I can answer. What I try to give him on that day is what I wrote in that book. And actually, it’s what I try to give him every day—and all the other people I love, too.

Because I am not sitting with you right now, talking for hours over cups of tea, but because I would like to share some of the truths I wrote about in The House On Teacher’s Lane, I’m ending this entry with an except from the book. Occurring early on in the story, after I’ve reluctantly agreed to renovate the house, and Hal has begun drawing the plans, it’s when I first begin to confront the question of just what love really is.

You can also learn more about The House On Teacher’s Lane, or order a copy, by clicking here.

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How hard I used to focus on the ways Hal and I differed. He spoke slowly. My words came out like a ticker-tape machine. He had a handful of friends, I, a cast of thousands. He did yoga, I power-walked. He stayed up late, I fell asleep early.

None of these differences truly irked me, but that could not be said of the effort he put into composing music. This would seem to be less a difference than similarity, since I devoted so much energy to writing. But Hal’s compositions were influenced by such non-mainstream performers as Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow, Ornette Coleman, and Gong, and my listening preferences were the Beatles and silence. Also, he rarely finished his pieces. I’d sit at my desk, losing my concentration as his snippets drifted into my study—and I’d steam. Why create atonal music when he was equally fond of melody? How could this man live with himself if he didn’t finish things? And: if we have such fundamental disparities, how could this be true love?

True love—that was the crux of the matter. The couples at college who were so in sync, they’d dance at parties with their eyes closed. John and Yoko, who shared dreams of peace and iconoclasm. Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall. As for my true love? I knew just who he was. An unwritten but very exacting list.

It was a list of my own tastes and traits (well, the good ones), as well as specific physical attributes, and early in my love life, one boyfriend had satisfied most of it, assuming I overlooked his determination to never love me. Yet I believed a perfect fit merely awaited discovery. So even though Hal’s looks were strikingly aligned with my fantasy, even though all my friends thought him a man of fine character, even though he made me feel cherished, a few checks were missing on my list. Therefore, how could he possibly be The One?

Only during the six years of our breakup did I start wondering if my idea of love was just a teensy bit askew. Actually, I came to feel horrified with myself. The couples I’d known in college, I remembered, had all gone down in flames. Yoko threw John out of the house. Movie couples often resulted from matches made in adultery.

I hadn’t wanted a man. I’d wanted a mirage.

Ashamed at having duped myself for my entire life, terrified that I was thirty-six, I decided that I had to approach love as an apprentice. Only this time, I’d look at couples I knew firsthand.

Initially, I looked to my parents, who’d created rewarding marriages with other partners. But how? My mother lived in Florida with her third husband, and I was feeling too foolish to ask them about love over the phone. My father and his second wife lived a few hours from me, but I felt just as awkward querying them.

The big breakthrough happened on a simple phone call. I was speaking with a friend, Harriet, who was still devoted to her husband Vic of forty years, as was he to her. In the background I heard piano music. I knew Vic owned many recordings of jazz greats, so I asked Harriet, “Who’s Vic playing?” She said, “That is Vic. He’s taken piano lessons for years.” I’d never known this, and I asked, “Do you like what he plays?” She laughed. “I like jazz okay, but he’s terrible.” I gasped. Then I asked, “Doesn’t that bother you?” “Why should it?” she said. “It makes him happy. That’s what matters to me.”

Of course. My mother didn’t garden all day like her husband, nor did he read mysteries like her. My father spent his days reading The New York Times, his wife sewing. But both couples encouraged their partner’s differences.

So when Hal reached for my hand on the third floor of his house and I embraced the second incarnation of our relationship, I decided to adopt Harriet’s perspective. The effect was instant. No longer did I judge Hal’s enthusiasms by whether I shared them or had them on my list, but by whether, in his opinion, they made his life more worth living. How quickly my life doubled then. How easily we got along.

Now, feeling able to give and receive the love I’d craved all those years before, I understand why Hal’s architectural plans are unleashing ideas inside me. Architecture is a blend—of form and function, solids and voids, scale and proportion, weight and mass—and love is a blend, too. Of two people’s pasts and presents, similarities and differences, flaws and strengths, respect and forgiveness. It too is a design, ever-evolving. Especially if you can admit you could be wrong.

Excerpt from The House On Teacher’s Lane: A Memoir Of Home, Healing, and Love’s Hardest Questions, which is being released by Plume on May 25, 2010. Available in bookstores everywhere, or through these links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Indiebound.

Last Wednesday, two weeks before my sister Beth’s fiftieth birthday, my phone rang. I saw her name on the caller ID and was baffled. It was only nine thirty in the morning, and she rarely takes her lunch break so early. I snatched up the phone, expecting her usual, sing-songy “Hi, Sis. Thiz Chatty Beth.”

Instead she said, “My side hurts.” Her voice had a gasping, panicky tone, as if she was holding back tears.

I sat up at my desk, on full alert. This is the opening to a call you do not want to get from someone you love, and especially not someone who needs a little more help to get through life. My sister Beth has an intellectual disability, and although she’s confident and self-reliant, has a boyfriend and an apartment of her own, and has carved out a very social life riding buses all day, every day, I know I need to help when she needs me.

I’ve always known that. She’s eleven months younger than I am. On her birthday we’ll be twins for the next month.

I kept my voice calm. “Does it hurt a lot?” I said.
,
“A lot. And I’ve been throwing up all morning.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“My aide’s coming to take me to the doctor.” She pushed the words out through what were obviously volleys of pain. “At ten.”

“Do you want me to come to you?” Beth lives a couple of hours away, even if I broke speed limits all the way there.

“You don’t have to. She’s taking me.”

“Maybe you should go to the hospital.”

“I’m going to the doctor!”

“Will you call me as soon as she sees you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to stay on the phone until your aide gets there?”

“She’s gonna call so we can’t.”

“Then tell her to call me, okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, and she hung up.

I sat there, my heart pounding. I have no medical training, but these sounded like serious symptoms. I wanted to do right by her, but she didn’t tell me to come. My friends with kids have told me about calls like these, when their daughter or son phones in the midst of a crisis, not knowing what was happening, wanting to connect but not wanting their parents’ help, and maybe living too far away for help to come galloping immediately there anyway. My friends have told me about the fear, the feelings of powerlessness, the time-stopping descent into hell of not knowing how bad this might be.

Having a sibling with a disability is not like having a child. For one thing, Beth has always been there; unlike parents, I knew no Before.

For another, everywhere you look, a substantial number of the adults you’ll see are parents, so, as singular as your problems with your child might be, you can take comfort in knowing that you’re far from alone. But special siblings, far less common, might know few, if any, others like themselves, so the sense of aloneness, of having to figure it out on your own, of having no one except a handful of other siblings who truly understand, can be profound.

There are many other distinctions between having a child and being a sibling to someone like Beth, but the one I have the opportunity to notice most often is that sometimes Beth wants to me to do the things a parent might do, like pay for her meals when we go out, attend meetings with her aides, answer questions she’s too embarrassed to ask anyone else. But other times she wants me to be only a sofa-sharing companion while watching DVDs, a supermarket chauffeur who lets her buttons get pushed, an engaged listener to endless bus-related gossip, a tireless back scratcher who expects to get teased for eating soy yogurt, agrees to watch Shark’s Tale for the thirtieth time, notices that each toenail is painted a different color, and knows not to step on the purple rug—i.e., she wants me to be a sister.

Being the sibling of a person with special needs means being a shape-shifter. Which is why, when she didn’t ask me to come meet her at the doctor’s, I didn’t just don my parent cape, jump in my car, and fly up to see her. I stayed dressed as an ordinary sister and waited by the phone at home.

Years ago, I struggled with just about every aspect of our relationship. Then I rode the buses with her, and came to terms with many things about her, about myself, about the unique nature of the special sibling relationship. I recounted my experiences in a book, Riding The Bus With My Sister, which became a movie. But my story with Beth has, of course, continued after the last page and the final credits. That’s the real difference between being a sibling of someone like Beth and being a parent. The lifelong worry of After.

When I was a kid, After meant after our parents passed away. I knew, as did my brother and other sister, that we were expected to step in and be there for Beth after they were gone. As a child, I just accepted this as a fact of my life, but by my college years I’d come to dread it. How would I know what to do? What if we weren’t getting along, as was the case then? Why wasn’t I free to live my own life without this responsibility?

Then Beth entered the world of adult services, and we were lucky enough to find an agency that treated her well. They got her an apartment when she didn’t like the group home. They gave her good training in independent life skills. They hired aides who often stayed with Beth for years. With their support, I no longer had the worries I’d had about After. I could choose to be there After, but it wasn’t a requirement.

I chose to be there.

And then I started to realize there was another kind of After.

What happens After one of us begins to lose the vigor and health we’ve both enjoyed through our half century together? I hate to say this, but I’ve always hoped she would lose it first, so I could—if she wanted—accompany her to doctor appointments and keep her company if she grew weak. Yet she’s always seemed so robust, so unstoppable; even with a cold, even in a blizzard, nothing will keep her off the buses. What will it be like to watch the decline of the willful, energetic, Croc-addicted, Winnie-the-Pooh-adoring, always-in-my-life force of nature known as Chatty Beth? (She was Cool Beth for a long time, but switched to Chatty Beth when a new, favorite bus driver was amused by her talkative ways.)

I haven’t wanted to think about it. Not only can’t I imagine her not being there, always eager for a visit, a call, a letter, and money to buy her ice-cream. But I’ve known siblings who’ve lost their Beths, and have told me that the absence and grief is made all the harder by people who just don’t get it. One friend told me that, soon after her sister’s funeral, people said to her, “You must be so relieved.” She wasn’t relieved at all; without her sister, she felt forlorn, and given that kind of reaction, she felt abandoned.

It’s ironic. Being a sibling of a person with a disability means always feeling connected to someone else. Yet because of the way our society thinks of that someone else, it also means feeling far apart from others.

Fortunately, because of my book, there are hundreds of thousands of people who do think about Beth. Many of them are also siblings, or parents, of people with disabilities. Or they have disabilities themselves. And they know her life is worth as much as any other life, and would never dream of saying, “You must be so relieved.”

Yet there I sat, after she’d hung up, feeling all alone. I wasn’t at her side as she hurried to the doctor. I wasn’t speeding down the highway to meet her at the hospital.

Only later did I learn that I wasn’t alone at all. When the day had begun, and she’d insisted on getting on the bus despite the pain in her side, her bus drivers took stock of the situation. When she began to throw up, they urged her to go home, call her aide, see the doctor. When her aide came, they rushed to the doctor. When the doctor saw her, she sent them to the emergency room. When Beth called her boyfriend from the hospital, he rode his bike right there.

I learned most of this a few hours later, when another one of Beth’s aides began calling me with updates. Over and over she called, as every little piece of news developed. That’s when I found out that Beth had many people who’d been ready to help out. That’s when I found out that, after an early suspicion of diverticulitis and the discovery of an excess of white blood cells, and then a CAT scan, an IV, and morphine for her pain, her aide and her boyfriend stayed by her side. She wasn’t alone.

And, because of the kindness of her friends on the buses, and the professionalism of the people who work at her agency, and the devotion of her boyfriend, neither was I. I might have been sitting alone at home, holding my breath. But I was one of many who encircled her, waiting for the answer, hoping for the best.

Finally, at seven o’clock, she called. This time there was excitement in her voice. They were releasing her, she said, and she couldn’t wait to get home. Her aide got on the line and explained that Beth had had a kidney stone, which she’d passed while she was in the hospital. She was also found to have a slight case of pneumonia. Oh no, I thought, imagining her blasting onto the buses the next morning. But then I learned that, when Beth called a bus driver to tell her, she was told she simply had to stay home the next day and fill the prescription the hospital gave her and take it easy and that was that. And so, Beth told me, she would.

I went to see Beth a few days later. She seemed a little lower in energy than she often does, though I’m not sure if that was because of the pneumonia. In fact, one of her drivers said to me, while I was there, that maybe it was a misdiagnosis, because, after her one day off, Beth had gotten back on the buses and ridden with her usual gusto. The downshift I saw in her energy was probably more related to her having fallen over an uneven sidewalk when she went out to get the prescription filled. She’d hit her forehead and gashed her knee, which still hurt. I felt a surge of worry, then learned that she’d applied Neosporin and bandages.

“How did you know to do that?” I asked.

“A driver told me.”

So as of today, it seems we’ve pulled through. There will be other times ahead, I know that. And maybe the next one will hit me instead of her. But right now, when I think about the Afters that will come, I know she won’t be alone—so I won’t be, either. Some people just get it. They might not be siblings, or even parents. But whoever they are, they know what matters. They know not to step on the purple rug. They know not to ignore the many-colored toenails. They know not to toss around words like “relieved.”

I stood on our front porch, waiting for the vet to arrive. It was a chilly Saturday evening in May, though the wind gusted like November, sweeping old leaves up into the air and down the street, twirling them out of my sight.

Inside the house, our cat Peach lay on the kitchen floor, where she had lain for much of the last day. My husband Hal sat beside her, stroking her fur, cooing consoling words. She was fifteen, and her long-haired, calico coat was as beautiful as ever. But her plume of a tail, once a flagpole of merriment as she bustled down the stairs to greet us hello, stretched flat on the floorboards, and her eyes, which had gazed into Hal’s so many times with a look of unconditional adoration, stared out into nowhere, unfocused.

We didn’t want to believe her time had arrived. Yet even as we hoped the vet would say recovery was still within grasp, even though we knew she wanted to hold onto her life, we knew she would not revive.

Her decline had begun a few years ago. That’s when our cheerful chatterbox with the insistent friendliness and fill-up-a-house personality, whose dainty ballerina turnout, combined with a sashaying gait, made us call her Miss Marilyn Meow, added some new and unwelcome behaviors to her repertoire. She howled loudly, peed outside her cat box, drank water constantly, lost lots of weight, and ran about until she collapsed into the deepest of sleeps.

After many visits to Dr. Coogan, the softspoken veterinarian who, it turned out, every pet lover in our neighborhood called their own, we learned she had hyperthyroidism. Increasingly common in cats, with unknown causes, hyperthyroidism will ultimately lead to kidney failure. There is only one medication that might help, and we tried it in pills, pill pockets, liquid, and a gel we applied to her ears. But it made her sleep all the time, or throw up, or have allergic reactions. So about half a year ago, in the fall, we decided to take her off the meds, and let what would hapen happen.

The wind rushed down our street with a force I hadn’t seen since around the time we made that decision. It tipped potted plants onto their sides and spilled out the dirt. It snapped strong young branches off trees.

Hal came up beside me, and put his arm around my shoulder.

He glanced at the trees on our street, their leaves chattering in the gusts. “Such a windy day,” he said. “Somehow it seems appropriate.”

The graph of Peach’s health had been sloping down for months, but it was gradual. The bottom seemed far away.

Only two nights ago had we reached the steep drop down. We didn’t realize it at first, because she and our other cat, Zeebee, had spent the day romping and sleeping in our small backyard, and in the neighbors’ yards across our side alley. When dusk fell, Zeebee came in easily, but for awhile we couldn’t find Peach. Then we located her, perched on the edge of a neighbor’s tiny fish pond. Since her illness, she’d drunk water from this pond. That night, she wasn’t drinking.

A few hours later, at four in the morning, she woke us with a plaintive cry. We found her in the bathroom, a place where she rarely ventured, and after we brought her to bed to comfort her, she climbed out, made her way downstairs, and laid beside her water bowl. I’d heard that’s one of those bad signs, so we tried a trick we knew of giving her ice cubes and encouraging her to lick. She didn’t lick.

At sunrise, Hal called Dr. Coogan. He’s the kind of old-styled vet who’s cut from a cloth rarely made anymore: he has a gentle, caring demeanor, sees patients the day they need help, and understands that animals have the capacity to enter the souls of those who love them. He told Hal to bring Peach in, where we learned she was severely dehydrated. For a few hours he gave her fluids, then released her. But when Hal brought her home and set her carrier case on the floor, she didn’t move. We urged her out, and saw her legs were wobbling. She laid on her side on the floor. Hal sat in a chair and brought her to his lap. “This isn’t looking good,” we said.

That was Friday. Now it was Saturday. The journey through Friday night had been a march into dread. Will things somehow turn around? When should we call the doctor again? How can we go on without our mirth-making, dustball-producing, quilt-kneading Miss Peachie Pie?

We didn’t sleep, thinking instead about how, when Hal was single fifteen years ago, he found a shriveled, lonely, quivering cat in his backyard in another city. She had a collar but no tags, and somehow, for reasons we would never know, had gotten separated from her home, and taken refuge under a concrete bench outside Hal’s back door. He’d recently said goodbye to his first feline soulmate, Woody, who’d also had hyperthyroidism, and died at age twenty-three. So his house was empty and his heart was ready, and when he lured this lost, pathetic looking creature into his warm kitchen, she moved into his life as well.

She found him, and a paradise beyond any she could have ever dreamed of—shelter and food and rugs and beds and warm laundry and nightly brushie and nuzzly-cuddly-giggly-fur-addicted-nickname-minting-cat-dancing companions—became hers.

There were intrusions in her paradise. Moves to a few new residences, with all the accompanying changes in routines. The arrival of a black and white stray, Zeebee, who Hal insisted we take in a few years ago.

But mostly Peach had a gloriously happy existence. And she repaid us by winning over the hearts of everyone—friend, neighbor, even new wife—who encountered her. They called her “Mouthy” for her talkativeness. Everyone marveled at how she’d speak whenever you waved your arms near her, like the electronic instrument of the theramin. Neighbors discovered her boldly exploring their houses when their back doors were open. They saw her appear on their back porches whenever they were barbecuing, snatching up any morsel that fell from a fork, earning her yet another nickname, The Hamburglar.

Her eyes were smart. She knew her name. When we learned that Delaware had declared our state dessert to be the peach pie, we laughed and said, “It’s true.”

Dr. Coogan circled our block twice before he was sure he was at the right address. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t an older, white van, the kind families take for long vacations. I wasn’t expecting him to get out in shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. For a moment I wasn’t even sure it was him, except that when he got out, he held a cardboard cat carrier and a leather medical bag—the kind I’d seen only in old television shows, when small town doctors paid house calls.

Who pays house calls anymore? Certainly not doctors. Probably not vets.

Yet when Hal called during Dr. Coogan’s office hours Saturday morning, saying Peach had shown no improvement, and in fact hadn’t been able to hold the fluids she’d received the day before, Dr. Coogan said we didn’t have to make any decisions just then. Yes, his office closed at noon on Saturday, but here was his home number. We could call whenever we needed him over the weekend. Hal asked if there was a chance Peach could come back. Dr. Coogan said it was remote. But, he added, we could wait and see. And if the time came when we felt decisive—and, he emphasized, emotionally ready—he’d come.

So Saturday we sat vigil, waiting and seeing. We began on the kitchen floor. But the morning was sunny and warm, and, aside from being in Hal’s arms, the thing Peach liked most in the world was being in our backyard.

With great care, we carried her outside and set her on the grass. She laid limp. Hal brought out his guitar and serenaded her. She sat up. We called neighbors who loved her. Susan, who’d named her “Mouthy,” came over and stroked her coat. Jen, whose yard backs onto ours and who often found Peach on her porch, said Peach felt like her cat, too. Kelly and Dave expressed sympathy over our shared fence. Hal’s parents called. My father called.

But there was a moment in the midst of all the goodbyes when hope returned. Peach’s favorite place in our yard was the Japanese maple tree, under which she would sleep for hours. And after several hours outside when the most she could do was raise her head, she somehow roused herself to stagger across the yard, jump up and over the foot-high slate border of our garden, and collapse beneath the branches of her tree. There she slept in her beloved spot, and we thought, How was that possible? Maybe she was coming back!

The winds came up then. The branches started snapping.

She crawled out from the tree but could walk no more. “I think she wants to go in,” Hal said.

We brought her to the sofa. I knew the decision had to be Hal’s—he was her true love, and she his second feline soulmate. I was her breakfast feeder and daytime playmate. But I was not the center of her universe.

Hal said, “Let’s wait until tomorrow morning.”

I waited fifteen minutes, and I said, “Why?”

He leaned over and pressed his face into her fur and mumbled their secret language, the one they’d shared since he rescued her from the concrete bench. He had waited a few hours too long when Woody died, and had watched the poor animal suffer in his last breaths. He didn’t want that to happen again. Yet it was clear Peach still loved life. And he—and I—loved her life, too.

Then he lifted his head. “I’m calling Dr. Coogan.”

Dr. Coogan came into our living room. “We’re still wondering,” I said, since I knew Hal could not. “Let me see her walk,” Dr. Coogan said, and when Hal set Peach on the floor, she just settled right where she was.

He said, “Her breathing is labored. She has no more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours left, and they won’t be easy ones. I think your decision is the right one.”

So we brought her to the coffee table and held on. And he explained everything before he did it, and was kind and gentle. And the life left her quickly and easily, because she was already so close. And he closed her eyes, and we placed her in a box. “Now I’ll leave you to your grieving,” he said, and he left. And we cried.

The next morning was cold and the wind was still autumn-strong. Hal dug the grave in the backyard, in a spot close to Peach’s tree. We cried and cried and set the box within. Then he covered it with dirt.

We’d thought of getting a marker of some kind. But then we realized that, sitting across the yard was a very large rock, left over from several tons of stone we used, not long ago, to build a stone wall in our yard. The rock was calico-colored, we suddenly realized, and so Hal carried it to the covered grave and set it on top. “Should we say anything on it?” I asked. We both knew the answer, and as we held each other, crying, we also laughed. “State dessert,” we said, looking down. “The Peach Pie.”

The house is quiet now, and Zeebee is just beginning to search for her friend. We cannot tell her Peach is gone. But just a few moments ago we saw her sitting on the back steps, staring out to the rock.

We look too. The wind still hadn’t settled down, and we’re waiting for May to warm up again. We know we were lucky. Hal had fifteen years with one of the greatest cats of all time, and I had nine. We were given many months, even years, to adjust to her decline. We had the presence of mind to make a decision before her suffering began. She said goodbye to her friends. She spent a final afternoon under her favorite tree. She had a veterinarian who was exactly what a veterinarian should be.

But as much as we wish it would, luck doesn’t balance out loss.

We miss her so, and we always will.

Every wedding is a lacework of stories.

The threads are long and delicate, having survived the hopes and disappointments of previous romances, the fierce friendships of youth, the familial realizations of adolescence, the giddy playmates of childhood, the dependent clasping of infancy. But they don’t stop at birth; every wedding extends far back in time, to relatives known and unknown, whose choices—visiting a particular matchmaker, moving to a new part of the world, taking up a certain line of work—set the course of the bride and groom’s lives. Every wedding, too, encompasses the dreams and disillusionments of the guests who come to the day hoping the happiness they’ve found, or for which they’re still searching, has come to the couple before them.

All these stories come together on a wedding day, and even though no one in the room knows all of them, we see the interweaving occur in front of our eyes, making something beautiful that has never existed before—and, if all goes according to plan, that will never fray or fade.

This is what I thought last week, when I was the matron of honor at my older sister’s wedding.

I didn’t think it on the plane ride from Delaware to Phoenix. My husband Hal and I were caught up in the logistics of seating assignments and arrival times, the pleasures of a layover in my favorite airport, the discomforts of turbulence (for me) and a migraine (for him). Nor did I think it in the two days we had before the wedding, when, having recovered from the flight, we took walks through the sunny valley, trying to remember the names of the plant life we were passing, wondering what words the locals use to describe the brown mountains.

I only began to think about it at the dinner for a dozen friends and family, held the evening before the wedding, when the conversation turned to what advice, if any, each couple at the table would give the almost-newlyweds.

“Forgiveness is important,” one couple said, giving each other knowing glances.

“Remembering that the goal of any argument is win-win, not lose-win,” added someone else.

“Having the ability to laugh at yourself,” said another.

I looked around the table, and understood that we were hearing conclusions reached after long, complicated stories, just like what happened with Hal and me. Then one person recalled how hard the early years of their marriage had been, after their two spools of stories netted together, and they discovered many glitches and snags.

Hal and I discovered the same thing when we laced our lives together. But in our history, that was before we took our vows, in the thirteen years (yes, you read that right) when we lived together. In fact, our imperfect union led us to break up, and only after six years had passed—six years when we each went through many changes—did we come back together and get married. Talk about a lacework of stories when we stood before the justice of the peace!

Our path to marriage was unique, though what couple’s isn’t? Certainly not the people sitting around me at the table. Certainly not my sister and her fiancé.

But none of this really hit me until the ceremony itself.

It was to be a modest gathering, held on the covered terrace of an Italian restaurant, with forty guests. Perhaps because the bride was fifty-two and the groom sixty-one, or perhaps because they prize their network of friends more than ostentation, the flowers, photography, and cake were to be handled by people they’ve laughed, cried, and yardsaled with for years. Hal was given the task of pressing the buttons on the iPod. An acquaintance from my sister’s spiritual group would be administering the vows.

A few hours before the big moment, we met for a rehearsal. Then the bridal party of four drove back to the hotel and got ready.

The bride’s dress, which was sleek, sleeveless, and violet, had been purchased at Ross Dress for Less. The dress for the matron of honor (me), a loose emerald silk two-piece, was sewn by our stepmother. The other two women in the bridal party—the groom’s grown daughter and six-year-old granddaughter—wore blue and purple, respectively, their dresses from Victoria’s Secret and JC Penney.

My sister produced a box with a bouquet for her and me. She placed a wreath of lavender flowers on the granddaughter’s head.

Then we drove back to the restaurant, and parked, as planned, in the back. After two days of wind and cool temperatures, the evening was breezeless and warm. We lined up, hidden behind a corner, the sun not yet set, the guests taking their places on the terrace.

Hal pressed the first song on the iPod. The groom’s favorite musical group is the Carpenters, so the first song was one of theirs, “I Just Fall In Love Again.” As the bridal party stood waiting for our cue, the second song, I imagined the groom and his best man doing the same, on the opposite side of the terrace. In the spirit of colorful frivolity, they both wore purple shirts. The groom also wore a tie chain with the icon of his engineering honor society. An engineer by education, he’s now a defense systems analyst. He was trim and fit in his suit, and his dark hair was neat as always.

Then Hal began the second song. This was by the bride’s favorite group, the Beatles, a preference I happen to share, and as “In My Life” drifted softly over the terrace, I poked my head out of hiding.

There was the woman performing the ceremony, taking her place in the designated alcove on the terrace.

Then came the groom, smiling right at me, walking with his best man.

Then came me, walking toward them, bouquet in hand, cameras flashing beyond the corner of my eye.

And then my almost-brother-in-law’s face lit up. I turned around, and there was my sister, looking more beautiful than I’d ever seen her.

Accompanied by the groom’s daughter and granddaughter, she came to the alcove. The three of us stepped aside. The best man stepped aside. The song came to its end.

And then, after a brief preliminary by the woman running the nuptials, my sister and her almost-husband produced sheets of paper on which they’d written their own vows.

I’d of course known many of my sister’s life threads, but that’s when I remember some of his. His first marriage, which hadn’t gone well, resulted in the daughter beside me. His second marriage, filled with love and respect, ended tragically, when his forty-four-year-old wife died suddenly of a stroke. He then grieved. He tried to date but nothing clicked. He moved to Phoenix to be closer to his newly married daughter and her future children. He settled in, buying a nice house, working at a job that suited his talents.

Then one day after eight years had passed, dearly wanting to talk to his wife once more, he contacted a psychic he’d seen portrayed on television, Allison DuBois. They set up a phone call, then talked for a long time. Most importantly, she impressed upon him that his wife wanted him to have the courage to move on with his life and to be happy again. His wife wanted him to find somebody new. The call left him ready to embrace the next chapter of his life.

Only a month later, my sister paid a regular visit to her financial advisor, a woman, assisted by her daughter, who she’d seen for years. My sister had begun working with the advisor after her divorce from her first husband. She’d told the advisor stories of the men she’d seen since: nice men lacking in ambition, including, for the most part, careers.

After the session ended and my sister left the office, the financial advisor started to think about another client, a defense systems analyst, who was scheduled to come in the following week. She went into see her daughter. “I think these two clients would enjoy each other’s company,” the advisor said. “What do you think?” The daughter immediately said, “I think so, too.”

So the financial advisor played matchmaker.

And my sister met the good man she’d been wanting so long.

And the defense systems analyst met the partner he’d been craving.

And romance enveloped their lives.

The vows complete, my sister and her groom turned to the guests. I turned too, and saw forty smiling faces, forty clapping pairs of hands, forty sets of stories. I watched everyone, and thought of all the histories I knew, and the many I didn’t, and how each of us hoped for this couple to have the best of all we’d ever had, and none of the worst.

Then I saw Hal rising from the iPod with tears in his eyes. Our gazes locked, and the moment froze with it. All of us together, in our messy jumble of losses and dreams, pasts and presents, lessons mastered and lessons just begun. Witnessing love’s needle stitching order into our lives. The glitches might come, the snags might appear. But maybe not. Maybe everything will stay just as it was right then: a beautiful mesh, a perfect design, a delicate lace that’s impervious and strong because at last these lives are woven together.

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.