'Til Death

Until lately, I never realized how much I am affected by "divorce culture" for lack of a better term.  My parents, grandparents, and stories of great-grandparents have a history of loving or at least constant marriages.  A few months ago I repeated that fateful line "til death do we part," the same line that I have heard so often, believing and trusting, and rarely actually see in the wider world that surrounds me and my marriage.

It's not that everyone I know is divorced--quite the opposite in fact.  But I know very few who are not in some way affected.
For the sake of my particular discussion, let's say that this pervasive presence of divorce comes from a cultural "attitude" that only seems to be growing.  I have spent my whole life hearing divorce, and even this attitude, preached against from the pulpit.  However, I rarely noticed the implications of this "attitude" in even my own thinking until my own recent vows.  I have watched my friends and family members pledge their lives to another for a number of years, but I don't remember hearing one of them utter a word about a vague and creeping sense of voluntary entrapment that I occasionally struggled (and still fight) with.

Please don't misunderstand me.  I would not part with my Ben for all the chocolate and coffee in the world, or even for a paying job.  But there is a mentality of flippancy that has secret power to inundate even the most moral lives and marriages (which I certainly do not claim for myself) unless we are intentional about noticing its impact.

Recently I have come across some powerful and touching articles.  One described a military widow who requested to sleep next to her husband's coffin for one last night rather than leave him truly alone.  Another was the story of a couple in their 80s who died holding hands in a hospital and were buried in a custom-built double-coffin, not even to be parted by death.  Yet another essay described a man who wrote a letter of faithfulness to his wife, dead two years. 

The problem: these articles are tweeted and shared on facebook maybe because they are encouraging but also because they are anomalies.  Today's "norm" is not life-long love and commitment beyond death.  Today's "til death do we part" seems to be until the roses die and one can afford another dress.

Yes, I exaggerate.  But I recently read another article about a man's life that mentioned his marriages in passing.  This article's main focus was his success as a published writer late in life, but his background of lauded artistic dissatisfaction included two marriages that each lasted less than one year.  Still being in what is probably considered the "honeymoon phase" myself, I might have found these short marriages incomprehensible if not for the cold and trivial statements as historic fact.

But if you have continued with me this far, we are probably both finding that I digress.  I believe I was saying that this attitude of divorce has affected my view of my own marriage on a surprising and disturbing level.  It seems that when I allow my thoughts to dwell too closely on the thought of "life" rather than "tomorrow" in terms of marriage, I sometimes find the deeper and usually repressed recesses of my mind paralyzed by fear.  I find that I am not left unscarred by a culture that says to date, love, and marry only one man is the exception and not the rule.  When I imagine "til death" my mind hits a mental wall and my thoughts scuttle back to the leftovers in the freezer or who needs the car tomorrow.  I admittedly struggle to imagine my marriage in old age, or even with children.  I can usually manage to envision our next move, and I can almost make it to thinking of married and in grad school, but to think in two unbroken lines braided together for years upon years is beyond my powers of cognizance.

But don't think, please, that I am dissatisfied or even lack an encouraging stability in the future of my marriage and my love.  It is something I have heard often and is one of those truths that is dismissed until it is lived: take marriage, like everything else, one week, one day, one hour at a time.  "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of it's own" (Matt. 6:34).

So break out those leftovers and make sure there's enough for two.  Finish that grocery list for your next week of sustenance.  Order next month's Netflix.  Look for that next apartment.  Buy furniture.  Take a walk and talk about your life for the next 24 hours because until death do we part, tomorrow together is what we can count on.

Falling Through Words

I have many excuses for many things. One of those things is my constant hesitancy to write--write fiction, write in my journal, even write emails. I want words to be perfect. I don't have time. (I have time to read War and Peace in three weeks but not to write). I have nothing to write about. Since I have excused myself from writing for the past six months with relative consistency, I am out of practice and therefore getting back into practice is a betrayal of this guilt of laziness. I never said that my excuses are valid or even make sense.

However, one justification that I rarely verbalize, but often feel, is simply fear--not the fear of having written that so often comes with letting others see your thoughts. Even when I think that no one will see my work, I fear the very process of writing and the feelings that come along with that action that I love, need, and carefully avoid.

When I allow myself to enter that "writing attitude," I automatically disengage myself from my "reality." Like most who consider themselves "writers" or even "artists," I feel disconnected from all of the "normal" people. When I am in story-mode, my senses are heightened. People are not parts of relationships but rather pieces of dialogue, character, or situation. Or worse, they are a stumbling-block to be quickly dealt with and passed over so I can get to the "real" stories that actually only exist inside my own head. Something is being developed and born through the thought and act of writing. Something is coming into my personal cognitive and emotional world that was not there before because I am figuring something out that, momentarily anyway, it seems no one else will ever realize or care about.

I have successfully excused and repressed those awkward stages before; but, when that sudden awareness comes upon me about what I am doing, a similar yet opposite terror remains. I murdered an idea. I could have let that story or essay out, that thought that was itching to get onto paper and into order, even if no one else ever saw it. I strangled a small part of my memory and what might have been a deeper understanding of the world or myself.

I often rediscover the truth of this give and take in autumn. Fall is a drowsy and dreamy season as the world sinks into hibernation. We are alert enough to take note of a sunny but frost-bitten morning. We unknowingly take in the leaves that drip with a cold moisture or burst with dry crunch in a way we have not seen since the last time the summer died. But also in autumn, we slow down while our more internal memories are stimulated.

For me, developing story is not so different from remembering. It is something that takes place within myself--people and events that I replay in my head and rework on the page until they make some sense of my own life or this world I inhabit. Perhaps writing sometimes does make me, as well as others, feel like a sort of ghost in our own world. But when that ghost can observe and think in order to understand and once again interact in a new and changed way, perhaps that fear of leaving momentarily is more than worth overcoming.

A Blessing

A couple of evenings ago my husband and I set out after my first long weekend of an audited class for a late birthday dinner, compliments of his father.  We set out upon the winding Kentucky road a little after 7:00.  Since our usual dinner plans start no later than 5pm, I had no idea that the trip would be such remarkable timing for an increasingly early autumn sunset.

I first noticed the clouds that had piled on the horizon in front of us leaving the open sky a clear blue after a wet morning.  These dark mounds were laced in pale pink against the azure and emerald of the coming evening.  When I couldn't find the sun, I remembered that our noses were pointed east and twisted around to find an even more stunning sight. 

Forgive me for touching upon the indescribable. 

The streaks of clouds in the west were tinged with one of the most brilliant fuchsias I have ever had the opportunity to behold.  The glowing sun lit the clouds so radiantly that the rest of the sky also blushed pink and orange.  Not only were these colors painted across the sky a rare sight to behold, but they hung softly over rolling fields squared over with wooden fences containing the majestic beauty of the ever-present equine herds.  I am accustomed to sunsets over fields of corn and forests of pines, but there was something so elevated in these elegant animals grazing in the last glow of the daylight.

This new sight brought to mind a favorite poem of mine as I again faced forward in my seat to gaze at the darkening fields lit by the glow now sinking behind us.  Truly, the picture in the poem has little in common with the scene I have described other than the horses and the evening.  However, the beautiful and inexplicable last few lines came somewhere from the recesses of my mind as I achingly longed for I-know-not-what.

Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

James Wright, A Blessing